Lifting the Sky Read Free

McCloud put his own big calloused hands under hers and lifted them almost to his face so he could see them real close-up. I thought maybe he was going to read her fortune, he studied them so hard. Finally he turned her hands over and looked just as carefully at the backs of them. No rings, no watch. Lots of scratches from barbed wire. By then I knew she was thinking she’d have been better off saying some words, but it was too late.
    â€œYeah,” he said, giving her back her hands. “You do.” And he looked into her eyes.
    I don’t know if my mom would be considered pretty, maybe not. She’s kind of skinny but real strong and her arms have muscles that ripple almost like a man’s—although because it was spring and still cold she had on her old navy-blue coat with feathers sticking out all thisway and that where it’d been torn by barbed wire, so you couldn’t really tell she had muscles. She doesn’t do anything with her long, dark hair, so it’s usually in her eyes, but she has eyes the color of a stormy sea, the kind of eyes that if you do look right into them you might find yourself drowning, they take you down so deep.
    Mr. McCloud coughed and surfaced and said, “Sure looks like you can handle a shovel and do fence work. Can you caretake? Know a thing or two about calving?”
    She gave him a look like, “What do you think?”
    â€œWell, okay,” he said. “I like girl-help. Females are usually gentler with the animals and a darn sight more careful with things in general and they don’t say they know how to do something when they really don’t. Last hired man I had around here didn’t know the hind end of a cow from its front. Plus he got the tractor stuck for six weeks in a swamp. I thought it’d sink clear down to China.” He glanced at Stew Pot, who’d jumped out of the cab and was now proudly perched on the tarp that covered the gypsy load in the back of our muddy truck. Then he turned and looked at me, sizing me up.
    I was standing there trying hard not to think of the tractor plowing its way through the earth and popping up in China, and wearing such a silly grin he must’ve thought I was a happy camper. My dark reddish brown hair was all scrunched up under my blue baseball cap and sometimes I can almost pass for a boy till I open my mouth. I’m kind of substandard runt-sized for my age, so I stretched upreal tall trying to look at least thirteen—which I was, almost. I puffed up my chest, not that it did any good. It’ll probably be aeons before I’m not flat as Kansas.
    Mr. McCloud nodded at me and I nodded back but kept quiet.
    â€œYou know,” he said, turning to my mom, “it’s a forty-five-minute trip back down that road you came up. You’d have to get your kid”—he glanced at me—“your young lady, down to catch the school bus. It’s another hour to the school. No easy way around that. We haven’t had a youngster on this place since I don’t know when. Don’t know how that’d work out.”
    My mom could’ve told him that by great good luck and fortune I was going to finish up the school year by mail, but she just stood there and said nothing, so I did.
    â€œI’m homeschooled,” I piped up, giving him the biggest smile ever. Behind my back I crossed all my fingers.
    Mr. McCloud’s eyebrows lifted. He looked from me to my mom and then to Stew Pot in back of the truck. He was silent for a long moment, as if weighing the situation. “This place has been left to the hired hands to handle for the past several years,” he went on. “There are some heifers about to calve, and the fences and ditches are in pretty bad shape. But we’re short of hands at the moment. I live on another place, mostly, on our main ranch off the reservation, about forty-five miles due east of here. I get out here only once in a while to