Looks Over(Gives Light Series) by Rose Christo

over the summer finally emerged from the ground.
     
    Suddenly the reservation was teeming with life.  The farmers set up tables and stalls out on the country lane and loaded them up with kale and carrots and radishes and leeks.  Families went out to the farmland with baskets for picking scallions and potatoes and blankets to sit on and spent the whole day chatting with their friends.  Women plucked the fat, round apples off of the trees and lit pieces of charcoal to lull the bees into sleeping and husk the honeycombs from their hives.  Aubrey threw open his family's farm gates and rolled enormous pumpkins out of the patch and onto the road and his two older brothers, Reuben and Isaac, brought out the fresh cheese and the fresh cream from the milkshed and started making cake.  The old women shook their turtleshell rattles and the old men sang to the Great Mystery of the universe, the heart and soul of the living planet, and the children danced a harvest dance in looping, dizzying circles.  I laughed to see Joseph Little Hawk, eager and dazed, spinning in the wrong direction.
     
    Granny and Dad walked among the pumpkin crop--Granny, hard to please, couldn't decide which one she wanted--and Aubrey puffed and wheezed, catching his breath, leaning against the gate.  Aubrey's three-year-old niece, Serafine, stood clasping his hand, her thumb in her mouth. 
     
    "They were a lot lighter going into the ground than they were coming out of it," Aubrey noted dolefully.
     
    I laughed again and clapped him on the shoulder.
     
    On the other side of the gate stood Mr. and Mrs. Takes Flight.  From her Coke bottle glasses to her humble, boisterous face, Mrs. Takes Flight couldn't have looked more like Aubrey if she were thirty years younger and male.  Mr. Takes Flight, wan and waxy-faced, leaned heavily on his wife's shoulder, his smile feeble.
     
    Concerned, I nudged Aubrey.  I nodded toward his dad.
     
    "Ah..."  Aubrey trailed off, discomfited.  "At least he's getting his pacemaker soon.  That should help..."
     
    "Hello," Annie said pleasantly, tugging Lila along by her hand.  To her credit, Lila resisted.  "What are we talking about?"
     
    "Annie!"  Annie's effect on Aubrey was instantaneous; he lit up like a Christmas tree.  "I put some apples aside for you--here--and a cake--well, it's not as good as yours--"
     
    Annie was starting to blush.  I took it as a sign to give them some privacy.  I stole Lila's hand--not that Annie noticed--and we walked away from the gates to watch the harvest dancers down the lane.
     
    We sat on the grass beneath an apple tree and Lila sighed.
     
    "I wish I were pretty."
     
    I looked at her in surprise.  I'd never heard her say anything like that before.
     
    I tapped her arm to get her attention.  You're the prettiest girl on the entire reservation , I signed.
     
    "Not like Mary Gives Light.  She's the coolest."
     
    I watched Mary prance around the harvest dancers in flamboyant circles.  When she laughed, it was radiant and dark.  I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but it's true.  The rest of her body didn't match her Lilith-like countenance; she was so skinny, it was almost grotesque.  Frail and brittle, with what I thought was self-neglect, her clavicle and scapulas and every bump in her spine showed through her paper-thin skin.  Still, if you looked solely at her devilish grin, you couldn't see the ruin.  I guess that was why Lila thought she was pretty.  She chased Rafael, took his hands, and tried to get him to dance with her.  Clumsy, startled, and protesting furiously, he stumbled after her.
     
    I tapped Lila a second time.  I think you're the coolest.
     
    Lila gave me a wobbly smile that reminded me, for one winding moment, of my dad.  "That's why I keep you around," she said.
     
    Annie came to my house that evening and baked a pumpkin pie with Granny.  Dad sat at the kitchen table and carved an oddly cunning face into the pumpkin's empty shell.