High Skies. Tracy Daugherty

      “[This place] throws a man face to face with nature stripped of all distracting elements—no mountains, no trees, no beautiful views, though its very simplicity is more than beauty. It overwhelms. To stay here, a man must face himself.”

      —John Howard Griffin,

      Land of the High Sky

      1.

      The first dust storm that spring coincided with the onset of my mother’s migraines. Early in the morning, that Friday, she grimaced while she stood at the stove scrambling eggs for our breakfast, and a little later while she packed peanut butter sandwiches and apple slices into clunky lunch pails for my sister and me to take to school. By 8:30, when my father was pulling on his suit jacket and preparing to leave for his job at the independent oil and gas outfit he worked for, she was complaining of a shimmering blue aura flitting at the edges of her eyesight, making her nauseous. The sun was too bright through the kitchen window, she said. It blinded her, though the rays were finely filtered through the leaves of the spunky little pecan tree our father had planted in the backyard just last year. She could barely stand. She propped herself upright by hanging on to the greasy corner of the stove. My father dropped his jacket onto a kitchen chair and moved to help her into the bedroom. Neither of my parents were big or tall, but my mother had never looked so bird-like, trembling, curled within the circle of my father’s slender arms. She hadn’t done her face and hair yet that morning; her cheeks were the color of the milk I’d spilled on the table earlier while fixing my cereal, and her uncombed hair resembled the checkered maze of the crossword puzzle in the newspaper, lines and angles branching off in all directions.

      My father settled her into their bed, still warm and unmade from the night before. Bent over her, his arms gyrating swiftly to arrange the pillows and the sheet just so, he echoed the grace of the professional golfers he liked to watch on the weekends on our brand new Crosley television, their bodies in perfect fluid motion to get the ball down the fairway. He closed the yellow curtains on the small window above the bedside bureau. The curtains were gauzy and sheer; a little sunshine still penetrated the square room, casting a creamy wedge of light onto the green cotton quilt at the foot of the bed. My mother closed her eyes, covered her mouth, and turned her head away on the pillow. Dad told me to run to the bathroom, wet a washcloth with warm water, wring it out, and bring it to him. Gently, he placed the washcloth across my mother’s eyes.

      “Joe, you gotta get the kids to school,” she mumbled. The words barely made it out of her mouth, as though something sticky kept her lips from opening fully.

      “None of us are going anywhere,” Dad said. “Just stay quiet, all right?”

      She moaned softly for a few minutes. Her temples were “pounding,” she slurred. Dad held her hand. When it seemed she’d fallen asleep, he whispered to my sister and me to sit with her. He’d be right back. He was going to the kitchen to phone Dr. Edwards. I was ten years old, eager each day for opportunities to prove I was a responsible young adult, but now, left to care for my mother, whom I’d never seen remotely stricken, I felt utterly inadequate for the moment. I tried to push my panic into my stomach and squelch it there at the bottom. All this did was force a cramped tension aping hunger. I wished I could tear into my lunchbox and devour everything in it right then and there. My sister was three years younger than I was. If she felt fear, she didn’t show it. She sat calmly on the side of the bed humming the Disney theme. Disney was her favorite new show on the one clear channel we got on the Crosley. As sunlight shifted through the curtains, it caught her curly red hair. Her head appeared to spark into flame. My

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