Not wanting to waste any time, Piper quickly shimmied down the tree trunk and immediately set about formulating a plan.
The very next morning Piper woke up before the rooster crowed. The sky was just beginning to glow in the east as she eased her way out of bed. Pushing open her window, she was able to slide across the ledge until her feet hit the shingles. From there it was hard work to crawl up to the ridgepole. She stayed on her hands and knees and moved slowly.
The roof was slick with dew. Just one wrong move and quick as a flash she’d slide right off. She kicked her long, white nightgown away to stop it from tripping up her feet.
It was when Piper had climbed to the very top of the roof and was balancing on the ridgepole that she realized exactly how scared she was. To be precise, she was terrified. All of a sudden Piper knew that there was a big difference between planning something and actually doing it. The roof was steep and high, and below it the ground was as hard as a rock. If things went wrong, she was going to get hurt, and hurt badly. Piper’s breath caught in her throat and for a moment she couldn’t breathe at all.
Her thoughts came fast and furious then. What if I can’t fly? What if I smack the ground with my head? Maybe my brains will spill out all over the place and then I ain’t never gonna leave the farm and make a friend. Maybe it’s best I hightail it back to bed and forget the whole notion.
Now perhaps it was because Piper didn’t yet believe in a right way or a wrong way of doing things, and so for her, all things were still possible. Or maybe it’s because the itch deep inside Piper that no one, least of all herself, could get at was itching so much it was going to drive her crazy. Or it could have been the same reason that Piper was able to float—which is to say, no one really knows. Whatever reason it was, Piper stayed on that roof and didn’t go back to bed. Instead she raised her arms up at her sides like an airplane and placed one foot in front of the other. With fear, courage, and anticipation all mixing together in her stomach, she began to walk the ridgepole of her house.
Just below where Piper walked, Betty McCloud woke with a start. She had heard something, that much was certain.
“Mr. McCloud,” she hissed. Joe didn’t stir.
“Mr. McCloud!” This time Betty punctuated her words with a sharply placed elbow to Joe’s ribs and his eyes flew open. “There’s someone on our rouf!”
“What’s that?” Joe mumbled, half awake.
“The rouf! Someone’s on our rouf!” Betty pointed upward and Joe heard a scuffling sound above his head.
With each step Piper took, she picked up speed, until she was running down the ridgepole and fast approaching the place where there was only sky and no roof left.
“Like the birds I will fly.” Piper imagined the baby robins.
And then there was only one step left to take. Piper took it, thrusting herself with abandon into the morning air.
It was the cows grazing in the field that were the only ones to see Piper’s trajectory. What they saw was a small girl in a long, white nightgown jumping off of the roof and into the sky.
For one blissful moment she hung in the air, like an angel.
Then, just as quickly, the moment passed and that same young girl fell headfirst, like a freight train, toward the ground below.
The cows had never seen a human do such a thing before and they watched in moo-less astonishment. Not much ever changed on the farm and even cows can do with a bit of excitement.
Just as Piper approached the first bedroom window, it flew open and Joe, his twelve-gauge shotgun in hand, poked his head out. Joe was completely prepared to deal with a mischievous raccoon or that sassy brown squirrel trying to nest in the roof again. He was even ready to tangle with one of the pesky Carlton boys out rabble-rousing. A young girl hurtling through the air in an attempt to fly, however, was completely outside Joe McCloud’s repertoire of possible eventualities.
“Ahhhhhhh!” Piper screamed as she screwed her eyes tightly shut.
“What the . . . ???”
Joe’s eyes bulged at the sight of Piper plummeting at him. He threw himself backwards to avoid a head-on collision and ended up tripping on Betty, who was lurking fearfully behind him. His long legs tangled around themselves and he was sent sprawling onto the bedroom floor, which was a good thing too, because he placed himself in the perfect spot to cushion Betty’s fall a moment later. So positioned, they did not see Piper falling past their window.
In three seconds Piper was going to hit the ground headfirst. It was going to hurt . . . a lot.
Now, three seconds isn’t a long time. You can count to three faster than you can read this. Try it. See.
The largest of the cows, the one with a black patch across its right eye, let out a moooo in spite of himself. If it was possible to understand cow mooing, it’s quite likely he was trying to warn Piper.
Piper’s eyes were squeezed shut and her face twisted in certain anticipation of the coming impact.
She was not more than a heartbeat away from eating dirt when the miraculous happened. Like a plane in an air show, Piper grazed the ground in a death-defying loop that changed her course by a hundred and eighty degrees and turned her face from the ground to the sky. She sailed upward with the unexpected thrust and precision of an F-22 Raptor.
With her eyes clenched shut, Piper continued to brace for an impact that never came.
“Cockle-doodle-doo,” the rooster crowed.
It wasn’t until Piper was touching the blue and gold of the rising sun—and the mist of a cloud doused her face with a fine, cool tickle—that she allowed herself a tiny peek through her right eye. The vision she caught out of it was so surprising and strange that she closed it tightly again. She tried the view from her other eye and it proved to only mirror her first glimpse. Slowly, very slowly, she opened both eyes.
Oh, but what a world she saw!
The green fields rolled out in every direction and glistening streams cut through some of them. The clouds disappeared into mist the closer she flew toward them and the breeze lifted her higher.
Piper dipped and dived, twirled and whirled in a sky that was every color from white to blue to orange to pink.
“Wheeeeee,” Piper gleefully screamed.
“I can FLY,” she called out to the morning sun. “I CAN FLY!”
In the farmhouse below, Joe and Betty unsteadily rose to their feet. Gripping the edge of the windowsill, they peered out and caught their first glimpse of a little girl in a white nightgown flying through the air.
And at long last there was no doubt in either of their minds that their daughter, Piper McCloud, did not do things as they had always been done.
For once Betty could think of nothing to say. Instead, she watched Piper fly back and forth until the world began to spin and black dots appeared before her eyes, and she sank down to the floor in a dead faint.
CHAPTER TWO
IF THE good Lord wanted folks to fly, then he’d have gone and given ’em wings. That’s what.” Betty paced back and forth in the parlor like a wet hen with a bad case of lice. Dazed and sick with worry, Joe merely shook his head or nodded in agreement to whatever it was she said.
Piper had fantasized about her parents being jubilant. In reality, she’d have been satisfied with happy. At that moment she was even willing to settle for not mad. “But . . . din’t ya see? I. CAN. FLY.” She emphasized each word, just in case there was confusion on anyone’s part as to what had just transpired.
“That flying ain’t normal. It ain’t natural. Lord above, if the new minister were to see ya, there’s no tellin’ the things he’d preach at us.”
“But—”
“And when Millie Mae gets to gossiping about this . . . heaven protect us! You don’t see other youngens gadding about in the sky, do ya?”
“But I don’t gets to see no other youngens ’cause you won’t let me,” Piper argued, finally getting a word in.
“Watch your lip, little missy. I din’t raise a child to sass me ba
ck,” Betty warned. “And I kin tell ya they don’t fly. And neither should you. It’s just plain wrong.”
“But—”
“It ain’t the way of things.” Betty clutched her nightclothes about her, fuming. “You listenin’ to me, Piper McCloud?”
“But Ma . . .” Joy was busting out of the place inside Piper that not more than a day before had been a terrible itch. “Maybe there’s a reason for it. Something special. Like the way you says the Lord works in mysterious ways and—”
“Don’t you take the Lord’s name in vain.”
“But I—”
“Piper, my mind’s made up and there ain’t no changing it or arguing around it. There ain’t no earthly cause for a youngen to be meddling about up in the sky. I’m putting my foot down.” Betty wagged her index figure at Piper in utter seriousness. “No more flying and that’s all there is to it. Ya hear?”
“But—” Piper was promptly silenced by the grim determination in Betty’s eyes. This is just plum crazy, Piper fumed inwardly. They might as well have asked her to stop breathing air as to expect her to turn her back on the wonders of flying. The fact of the matter is, the minute you get a mouthful of blue sky dancing across your taste buds there’s no keeping you from it. No matter how much trouble you’ll be getting yourself into.
Betty and Joe accepted Piper’s stunned silence as agreement. “Sure as anything you’d get attacked by some rabid bird. It ain’t no place for a youngen up there.” Betty sniffed, considering the matter closed.
And so Piper meekly nodded her head and let her folks believe what they wanted. First chance she got, though, she rushed off to the back field where no one would see her. Shaking with anticipation, she scrambled atop a boulder jutting from the side of the hill and threw herself off it and . . . landed on her backside. HARD.
“Owwww.”
Getting up, she dusted herself off and did it again. Wouldn’t you know it but it happened a second time. Piper couldn’t have been stuck tighter to the ground than if her feet had been glued to it. Not that she let that stop her from trying for one single minute.
Piper jumped. And fell. And jumped. And fell. That was how Piper spent her first day of practice.
It was discouraging to say the least, but it taught Piper a valuable lesson—flying doesn’t come easy, even if you’re a natural-born floater. Raw talent only gets you so far in this old world and the rest is a whole lot of practice, persistence, and perspiration. She got lucky on her first jump. Beginner’s luck. But from there on out, Piper fought tooth and nail to get herself back up into the sky and to be a real, honest-to-goodness flier.
Days and weeks passed by and Piper continued to practice every single day with little or no success. She often wished that she had someone to teach her instead of having to figure it all out herself. Each mistake cost her a bruise or a bump, and her body was fast becoming a black-and-blue testament to her many trials and errors.
Lesson one, as Piper soon discovered, was: Never think about the ground. Ever. The second she even considered the possibility that she might fall, she fell and some part of her body was hitting some part of the earth. The sky was her goal, and she trained her mind to think of nothing else.
As soon as Piper mastered the whole thinking part, she was able to get back up into the sky, and that was when she stumbled across lesson two: You can fly without having to actually jump off of anything. The first step in achieving this, as Piper learned, was to stand perfectly still and close her eyes. Then with all her might, she’d think:
I’m as light as a cloud, as free as a bird.
I’m part of the sky and I can fly.
(But the trick to it was that she’d think that and nothing else and then hold the thought for a long, long time. Try it, it’s a lot harder than you might think.)
Then her whole body would get relaxed and this tingling sensation would start pumping right out of her heart and spread like wildfire through every place in her body, until she was almost burning up with all of the tingling, and that was when her feet would rise up off of the ground and she’d be flying.
Two weeks after she started practicing, Piper was finally able to get into the sky and stay there. It happened on a Tuesday.
Piper was hot from standing in the field under a blistering sun and focusing with every ounce of her being. “Dang it all,” she muttered after a third failed attempt at lifting off.
Taking her position again, she stood very, very still and thought only one thought with all of her might. Tingling began to fill her body. And then she thought the thought harder—I’m part of the sky and I can fly. The tingling grew and grew and that was when her feet left the ground. I’m as light as a cloud, as free as a bird. She rose higher and higher. The farther she went, the lighter she felt, and still she clung to the thought. At forty feet into the air, higher than she’d ever gone, she stopped.
“I’m a flier,” she whispered and felt a strong sense of relief and pride. It felt so natural to be in a sky full of clouds and have birds flying past. Like a homecoming. She also noticed that flying up high made all of the things she left behind on the ground seem not as important. They were so small, after all, and the sky was so big.
Swooping over the summer crops of corn, wheat, oats, and barley, she dipped down low and picked stalks as she passed. Over Clothespin Creek she watched the fish swimming way deep down at the bottom, something you can’t see when your feet are stuck in soil. And there was so much more for her to see, but before she knew it, it was the dinner hour and time to land.
From that moment on, the sky was no longer the limit. In the days that followed, Piper got to see the world for the first time, or at least the world of Lowland County. She saw Mr. Stanovislak selling white lightning from a still hidden in the woods, Jessie Jake kissing Beth Belle (his best friend’s girl) behind his cowshed, and old maid Gertie Gun dramatically reading dime-store romance novels aloud in her pumpkin patch.
She saw other things too: a young fawn delicately taking its first drink from a clear stream; a big brown bear scratching his back against a rock so rigorously that the rock actually rolled away and down a hill; and at the top of an oak tree, the biggest beehive she’d ever seen. Five nasty stings later, she decided not to fly by that particular oak tree again.
Unwittingly, Piper was also responsible for the religious conversion of old man Jessup. While working on his roof, he caught a fleeting glimpse of Piper flying past and instantly mistook her for an angel sent by his recently departed wife. Without delay, the old man, who’d sworn never to set foot in church again, got down on his knees, confessed all of his sins, and, to the astonishment of all, didn’t miss church once from that day on. The new minister thanked God. Piper thanked her lucky stars that old man Jessup wasn’t wearing his glasses.
Piper was very careful not to fritter away all of her time sightseeing. She considered herself a serious flier, not a tourist, and set an ambitious learning schedule, which included landing practice, ascent and descent, velocity control, and hovering. Unfortunately, Piper was not a particularly fast learner and there was much more error than trial to her flying.
“Piper, you ain’t yerself these days.” Betty abruptly passed a bowl of string beans to Piper, rousing her from her exhaustion. It had been a hard day of flying and Piper had yet to touch her dinner. Looking up, she noticed that both her ma and pa were watching her with concern.
“Ever since that morning when we catch you . . . well, since it happened, it’s like you been walking ’bout the place like you was whipped. If you ain’t at your studies or your chores, you’re off somewheres that we can’t find you and you’re getting so thin you’ll fade right away ’fore our very eyes.” Betty couldn’t help but notice of late that the child wasn’t herself anymore, and was shocked to find the house empty and too quiet without Piper’s endless questions and unexpected floating. It was like the spark had gone right out of Piper, and Betty feared her spirit had been crushed.
“I’m sorry, M
a.” Truth be told, it took up Piper’s energy learning how to fly, and her body hurt from the bruises that had piled up on top of her bruises. Most nights she’d fall asleep at the dinner table before she even touched her food.
“Your pa and I got to talking some,” Betty continued, “and seeing how you ain’t as high-spirited as you was and it’s getting so we can hardly recognize you, we was figuring it was high time we all attended the Fourth of July picnic. We reckoned it’d be just the thing to raise your spirits up some.”
“A picnic?” Piper was more shocked than a turkey on Thanksgiving. “I get to go to the picnic next week too, Ma? You mean with all the other kids?”
“Well, don’t get all out of control on me now. But you can, if you continue to behave yourself like the good Lord would want.”
Piper almost shot up off of the ground like a rocket and did pinwheels in the air while yelling, “Yeee-hawww” at the top of her lungs like a crazed chicken (but didn’t) and from that moment on battled a frenzied ecstasy inside her chest.
For the next week Piper thought nonstop about the picnic. P-I-C-N-I-C, she spelled it in her mind. Or sometimes she’d do it backwards, C-I-N-C-I-P. When she wasn’t thinking about it, she was peppering her mother with questions.
“Will there be other youngens at the picnic?”
“Likely so.”
“Think they’ll wanna play with me?”
“Don’t see why not.”
“Reckon we can stay for the fireworks?”
“For pity’s sakes, hold your tongue, child.”
Which Piper sincerely tried to do, but failed miserably at.
CHAPTER THREE
“WILL YOU be my friend, Piper?” Sally Sue asked hopefully.
And Piper smiled.
It was the perfect end to a perfect picnic. They’d shared ice cream and Sally Sue had told Piper her worst secret (that she’d snuck her mother’s lip rouge and wore it to school) and Piper had told Sally Sue her biggest dream (to fly around the world). Sally Sue had shown Piper how to do a jig and they’d danced under the trees and giggled until their stomachs hurt. When the fireworks came, they lay on the cool grass and watched them explode in the night sky. And that was when Sally Sue became Piper’s friend. Later they would become best friends, would be maids of honor at each other’s weddings. They’d live next door to each other and their children would play together. Best friends for life. That’s how it was going to be.