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  “Don’t climb without your shoes on,” she admonished over her shoulder as she zipped around the garage and disappeared, ferrying away the evidence that would have gotten me spanked.

  After that, I carried only dry things up to my perch, special things I knew wouldn’t break if they fell: my Bible, which I didn’t open; and my diary, which I unlocked before starting upward, slipping the key under the cool hand of a rock, for safety.

  By the end of July, I mastered climbing every cottonwood except one. The fattest and tallest stood alone on the opposite side of the driveway, its lowest branch far above my reach and its bark void of footholds. When I wrestled a boulder in from the sloping field, rolled it into place, and leaped straight up off the rock with my fingers open, I managed only to bloody my fingertips as they grazed the branch and to twang my ankle on the hard ground below.

  Thwarted, I gave up on the last tree. Earthbound for two weeks with my swollen ankle and a driving summer rain that pelted the roof and windows, I stayed indoors, imprisoned. On the last Saturday of August, when I finally was able to lace up my sneaker and head back outside, the summer was all but gone. On the way to my old favorite scarred tree I caught sight of something new on the lone, fat cottonwood that stood by itself, silent and stubborn—the one I’d despaired of ever scaling. I stood and stared. There, marching up the trunk, was a set of wooden stepping stones, each secured by a single nail. Like a wonder of nature, they had sprouted overnight. The first was the height of my kneecap, and the last one nailed far above my head, where the tree’s branch forked from the trunk and arched into the sky.

  Where had they come from? I peered over to the front door of my house as if it had the answer, squinting in the hot light. No one was there. Shyly, I reached out and touched the block at my eye level. It was just the size of my grip and, when I tugged, it held fast. Lifting my right knee, I planted my sneaker on the lowest step and bore down hard, and then I shimmied upward, hand over hand, easily arriving at the platform of the branch, christening this final tree, my last frontier. Broader and more solid than any of the others, this branch benched me on its back comfortably, and I sat, swinging my feet and scribbling in my diary. August 23. Up in the clouds. Want to live here forever. Signed, Monkeybird.

  Later, after my mother’s call for supper and my climb down from the clouds, I dawdled in the doorway to the living room. My father sat in his wing-backed chair, reading the paper, and didn’t look up as I sauntered in and perched on the edge of the couch.

  “Daddy?”

  The paper crumpled and dipped below his chin and his face appeared.

  “I climbed the big tree out there.”

  He folded the paper into his lap and looked over his glasses at me.

  “You did.”

  “Yes.”

  “The last time I looked that branch was too high for you.”

  “Nope,” I giggled.

  “Huh,” he grunted, dropping the corners of his mouth. “How ’bout that.”

  Pleased, I turned and ran down the hall to the bathroom and washed my hands for supper.

  I’m not certain when my father first saw me struggling with that cottonwood. Perhaps the day I missed the branch and twisted my ankle, or the two Saturdays before, when I’d stood at its base, puzzled, staring up at its branches reaching to the sky. I don’t know when he resolved to help me; perhaps when he saw me slump away from the tree with my bag of crackers and my book, defeated. As was his custom, he observed things from afar, rarely commenting on the goings on in our family.

  Not until years later, after we had moved away from the cottonwoods, would I fully know why those nailed wooden steps meant so much to me. In a home like ours, I rarely felt seen, except when being punished. I couldn’t have explained it then, but I knew my father had seen me. He was not an effusive man, but with the trauma in our family, the anguish of my mother—her sadness and headaches—he had closed off even further, numbing himself to stay strong. I was not aware of his sorrow then. Not until I became an adult would I learn that he had cried over Roddy. Through what must have been the fog of his disappointment and worry about both my brother and my mother, he noticed my quest and sense of failure. He must have known what was at stake. My climbing that summer was more than a childish desire to turn into a monkey or a bird. It was the first flight above my family’s pervasive sense of sorrow; the beginning of a lifelong quest to turn from what had happened to our family and run, and climb, and fly—what a lot of children do when they wake up in a family they don’t understand and cannot change.

  I couldn’t have said it even to myself, but my heart knew. When my father chose and trimmed pieces of wood thick enough for my fingers and toes, and, when I wasn’t looking, eyed the trunk and hammered each rung into place, he offered me his hand.

  Chapter 7

  Among the Dead

  Not long after I ran down the aisle that Sunday and accepted Christ as my savior, I was zigzagging with my best friend, Lily, through the maze of marble and granite slabs checkering her front yard. Lily was ten years old, like me, and also small, with slender birdlike features and a zest that would one day win her a state beauty crown. She and her large Baptist family lived in the middle of Fort Logan National Cemetery in the southwest corner of Denver County. Their small, white clapboard house, bursting at the seams with six children and two parents, doubled as an office for her father. As cemetery sexton, he oversaw the business of proper military burials and caring for 160 acres of land marked for eternal sleep.

  I didn’t know then that only soldiers rested beneath my flying feet, or that the herd of headstones stretching away from us in three directions tapped out a rhythm of war dating back a hundred years. To me, this was like any cemetery, jumbled with all kinds of death and diseases, and anyone lying here was a Baptist, so, pleasantly, they’d all made it into heaven.

  “Stop,” I shouted, thrusting myself against a dark gravestone. Pressing into the cold granite, I leaned forward and puffed.

  Lily halted, trotting backward and hitching her flank up on the other corner of the stone. Together, we wheezed in the soft warm air. From where I propped, I could look out across an acre of open ground, newly cleared and tenderly planted. A downy green brushed the land clear to the top of the hill. That area wasn’t cordoned off, but we were forbidden to go there. Deep and gaping holes in the ground waited for new bodies, and if we came too close we could slip over the sides. A backhoe, miniatured in the distance, hunched near a pile of tarped dirt, and I saw, not far from its quiet blade, a new crop of crisp white headstones. I’d counted four the last time I was here, a mere week ago. Now, there were seven more, eleven in all: simple and unadorned, each chiseled with a single cross.

  “What are those new ones?” I asked. “Over there.”

  Lily, still breathy, didn’t lift her chin or look to where I was pointing.

  “They’re from the war,” she said, exhaling on the word.

  A flare of alarm licked around in my chest. There was a war? Where? I couldn’t fathom that there was a smoldering in another part of the world, a vague skirmish in a murky place I’d not yet heard of. Within three years, Vietnam would flare into a hot white roar, and body counts would bloat into the thousands, engulfing all of Fort Logan’s open ground. But here, in the older, sleepy part of the cemetery, death felt as outdated and benign as the stones.

  In part, I felt protected from death. I believed what my parents had taught me: Jesus held the tickets to everlasting life and now that I was baptized, I had one in my hand. I felt invincible and at the same time a little baffled. If it was so simple to get into heaven, why didn’t God just let everybody know? And why were we Baptists the only ones in the know?

  “Come on!” Lily snapped up and pushed away, zapped with new energy. I sprang off the stone, dashing after her down the main promenade. Paved wide enough for hearses and caissons, it felt like a raceway. If there were any tragedies, they lay fathoms below us, and in the sharp outlines of bright midday, I
could run safely among the dead and go untouched.

  “Do Catholics go to heaven?” I shouted to the back of Lily’s sweater, which flapped and twirled like a scarlet cape. We were still in our Sunday best, our hard-soled heels churning on the pavement, crinoline and dotted Swiss swirling around our knees as we sped past thick slices of mottled marble.

  I often seized the moment when I was with Lily, peppering her with questions in a ravenous way. I was starved for understanding and to make sense of life’s rules. So little of it made sense to me. I knew as a Baptist that not everyone was going to heaven, and from what I could tell, Catholics were getting themselves kicked straight down to hell.

  “Nope, not going to heaven!” Lily shouted, veering onto the grass and waving me to follow. A few feet more and she whipped her head sideways, flinging the sins of Catholics over her shoulders. “Idol worship!” she shouted over her left shoulder. Then over the right: “Praying to Mary!”

  On her heels, I curved in and out of gloomy shadows and called out, “But aren’t they baptized?”

  “We-e-e-e-ll, it doesn’t count. It’s just a sprinkle,” she said, lifting her palms up as if to say, what are they thinking?

  I was incredulous. Even I knew you had to be dunked all the way under water or you weren’t getting past the Pearly Gates.

  “You mean they’re all damned?” I trilled after her.

  She slowed so I could catch up and then shrugged her shoulders up and down, up and down, staring at me bug-eyed and paying no attention to where her feet were going. Giggles bubbled up from my throat, escaping into the air as she twisted frontward and pulled out in front of me.

  We rounded the corner plot and headed toward the distant shade of a shaggy willow. The toe of my shoe clipped her heel and we both slammed down, skidding on our bellies, skirts and petticoats whirling around our lopping legs. Rolling over onto my bottom, I sat up, calves splayed, a dirty green smear of grave grass etched across the white belly of my blouse. Blades lay flattened in a chaotic swath across the grassy plot, as if each of us had landed a prop plane.

  I knew Mama would chide me when she saw my dirty blouse, but for the moment I didn’t care. This is why I craved coming here: Lily and her siblings indulged in abandon and hilarity, and Mr. and Mrs. Sparler burst out laughing at their children. That never happened in my family.

  At the farthest edge of the graveyard, just short of the brick outbuilding full of digging tools and machinery, we sprawled and caught our breath. Towering nearby, higher than the flat roof and reaching all the way to the branches of an overhanging elm, was a mountain of soil.

  “What’s all that?” I asked, squinting and shielding my eyes.

  Lily followed my finger pointing to the mound. “Oh,” she said, shrugging, “that’s the leftovers.”

  “Leftovers?” I thought of refrigerated gravy and old chicken thighs.

  She sighed, rolling onto her back. “From the graves,” she said.

  “How come it’s sitting out here? Why don’t they put it back in?”

  “It can’t all fit back in, silly. There’s a coffin in there.”

  I sat for a moment staring at the enormous pile. It had a special name in the graveyard world: spoils. Though I didn’t know the word, I knew that pile was more than a pile. It was a mound of death. I imagined scaling the crumbly sides, wondering if I could make it to the top before sinking into its soft folds, the clods plugging my mouth.

  A shudder went through me. Death felt closer and larger and more permanent, and, even though I had been baptized and given a sure spot in heaven, it frightened me. I peeled my eyes away from the pile and read the name incised in marble behind Lily’s back. “Colonel Robert Burien,” it read. “Died with honor, 1943.” An uneasy awareness came over me. A person lay right beneath me. His gravestone had sculpted grooves and a lilting curve to the top. Right in the center, gazing down at me and draped in hooded folds, was the Virgin Mary, mother of God. Her palms were open and beseeching, as if she were asking for a hug.

  “Oh my stars,” I said, a tiny choked sound, “he was a Catholic!”

  Lily looked up. She was picking grass out of her hair, and her brow was scrunched into a little peak above her nose, both corners of her mouth dropped into a fish-lipped frown.

  “So?” she said.

  “Is he still burning?” I asked, not wanting the answer. Maybe I’d gotten some part wrong; maybe he hadn’t gone to hell. He was a hero, after all. In some deep place I smelled a schism. How could God burn a hero?

  Lily’s eyes wrinkled as she looked at me. Then, she blew out her cheeks, a little wheezing noise, and shifted her eyes away. Lifting her gaze slowly to the sky, she raised her palms, higher and higher, and, just as she tipped backward, her legs flying into the air, she chimed, nonsensically:

  “Bori-yori-yoring?”

  I squealed and collapsed backward onto the tickly grass, my feet flying in the air, like Lily’s. Side by side, we laughed and rocked, our cotton petticoats flapping like white flags. To anyone watching we were irreverent hooligans, worthy of a scolding and a stinging switch or two, rather than what we were: two little girls in an open-hearted moment of admitting how hopeless and baffling death was to us, no matter how many times we asked the sky for answers.

  We went on like this until, suddenly, out of nowhere, a loud voice bounced off the tombstone into my ear.

  “How dare thee!”

  It was a deep voice, oddly muffled, as if coming from behind a wall. I jack-knifed up to a sitting position, twisting around to stare at Lily. For all my laughter, I knew I was taking liberties: running in my dress clothes, flopping around on the ground, not keeping my legs together, all vaguely attached to whether I was a good, clean girl, and worthy of heaven. Now, someone had caught us.

  Lily grabbed my arm and pressed a forefinger across her lips, waving her other hand for me to follow. I crouched in a bent scurry behind her, over to a towering stone fat enough to hide us both. Lily stretched high, while I squatted low, our stacked heads cautiously peeking around the stone, like two blond owls.

  “Blaaah!” A figure lunged toward us, grunting and snarling from behind a wobbly mask. Bulging from the center of its rubbery forehead was a single bloodshot eyeball.

  “Cut it out, Billy,” Lily screeched, darting away from her brother’s stiff-legged stomping. She glanced back at me, delighted.

  “Rrrrarrrr,” Billy bellowed. “Ye sinners!” At fourteen, he was nearly as tall as a man. His two long arms flailed about as he clomped one way and then the other, his enormous hands clutching fistfuls of tangled branches and vines, as if he’d just torn a path through the swamp.

  “Whoever he touches goes straight to hell!” cried Lily, taking off.

  This was what I adored: unabashed flailing, screaming, heart-stopping fright, which dissolved into laughter—things I never got at home. I knew what I needed, though I didn’t know why. Mirth was something I craved. With Lily, I could throw off the sorrow that pervaded my life, the stiffness of my family, the imperative for me to be an obedient, compliant child. When I visited her house, I lived inside a family I wanted: the Sparlers were messy and noisy, and had a zaniness that overjoyed and soothed me. With them, misbehaving wasn’t about sin but about grabbing hold of being alive.

  I ran, zooming around Billy Cyclops, just to catch his eye. I heard his “Huh?” and then his roar as he started after me. Picking up speed, I headed right for the outbuilding and that big mountain of spoils. At its base, I didn’t stop, but launched right up the side, churning my legs like pistons, faster than the soft earth could swallow me. In seconds, I’d not only arrived at the top but vaulted off its summit, grasping the lowest branch of an overhanging elm and swinging up to land in its saddle.

  Below me, Billy was getting nowhere, high stepping and struggling to back out of the dirt pile before he sank to his thighs.

  “Dagnabbit!” he muttered, pulling off his mask and stumbling backward until he was on flat ground. He glanced up at me a
nd said, “Rarrrr,” like a big kitten. Then he brushed off his pants and loped away.

  From my lookout, the eleven new gravestones were only tiny pinpricks of light. I could see all the way to the house, where Lily was looping around and speeding back toward me, and Mrs. Sparler was hollering out the front door, calling us in to supper.

  It wouldn’t be long before my mother drove up and I’d have to go back home, back to my life with my brother and the gloom. But not yet. Inhaling, I felt the breath in my body—the Here and Now of it. I knew I was alive and in another moment, as we gathered around the table for supper, scampering in from all parts of the house and yard, holding hands and saying grace and then passing milk and mashed potatoes, it would feel like forgiveness for tearing across graves, for leaping over stones, for giving in to abandon. For laughing at all.

  Chapter 8

  Put ’em Up, Boys

  Before the year ended, Lily vanished from my life. She went away with her family to a higher-paying cemetery in hot, dusty Texas. Texas was like the moon to me: unthinkably far away and barren—a vast open plain riddled with cracks and parched weeds, and trampled with a lot of weary cows groaning and moving toward silly-named towns like Amarillo. I couldn’t imagine Lily being there, nor could I understand how to go on without her.

  The first Sunday without Lily I slumped in my scratchy dress, head propped on one hand, my mouth dry and quiet. My gaze flitted around the Sunday school room like a bird trying to keep twiggy feet from sticking to icy surfaces: the bare cinderblock wall, the worn piano, and finally, the aluminum window sill. Outside, gusty squalls shifted around the church yard, brushing bald spots into the snow and flinging ice grains onto the sidewalk.

  Mrs. Desmond cleared her throat with a two-syllable “uh-hum,” delivered like the swish-swat of a broom. My gaze yanked from the window to the front of the room where she pursed her lips.

  “It’s a glorious day for the Lord. Now, Margie, stand up and try that again, in a big voice.”