Down to Earth

by Betty Culley

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2021 by Betty Culley

  Cover art copyright © 2021 by Robert Frank Hunter

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Crown Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Crown and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! rhcbooks.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Culley, Betty, author.

  Title: Down to earth / Betty Culley.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Crown Books for Young Readers, [2021] | Audience: Ages 8-12. | Audience: Grades 4-6. | Summary: Ten-year-old aspiring geologist Henry Bower investigates the meteorite that crash lands in the hayfield, discovering a rock that will change his family, his town, and even himself.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020050620 (print) | LCCN 2020050621 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-593-17573-6 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-0-593-17574-3 (library binding) | ISBN 978-0-593-17575-0 (ebook)

  Subjects: CYAC: Meteorites—Fiction. | Family life—Fiction. | Dowsing—Fiction. | Change—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.C832 Dow 2021 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.C832 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9780593175750

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  FOR MY DAUGHTER, RACHEL

  The pointed end of a forked stick is believed to point toward the ground when it passes over water.

  —The World Book Encyclopedia: Volume D

  WHEN I WAS FIVE, I watched my father saw a Y-shaped twig off my great-grandfather’s hundred-year-old apple tree. I waited to see if he would cut any other letters. There were branches that would make good L’s and I’s and a curved J just right for my best friend, James. I wondered if Dad would saw off three branches and tie them together to make the H for my name—Henry.

  Now I’m one hundred percent older than I was then, and when Dad circles the tree his grandfather planted on Bower Hill Road, I know he’s not looking for letters. He’s searching for the perfect forked stick for dowsing. He doesn’t dowse for buried metal or gemstones. My dad, Harlan Bower, is a water dowser, and he uses his stick to find veins of water deep underground.

  It doesn’t have to be apple wood. It can be pear or willow. But if I ever try to dowse for real, I want my first branch to come from my great-grandfather’s tree.

  Having an H name like my father doesn’t make me a dowser.

  Being a Bower doesn’t make me a dowser.

  Living on Bower Hill Road, with its underground springs and good-tasting well water, doesn’t make me a dowser.

  My great-grandfather and grandfather could find fresh water trapped beneath hard granite rock.

  Sixty-six-point-sixty-six percent of my grandfather’s sons are dowsers.

  My father: 33.33 percent

  Uncle Lincoln: 33.33 percent

  Uncle Braggy: 0 percent

  My grandfather, my father, and Uncle Lincoln all discovered their water dowser talents when they were ten. I already read about dowsing in the D encyclopedia. It tells what it is, but not why some people can do it and other people can’t.

  My father taught me how to dig a hole with straight sides and how to put rubble rocks in the middle of my stone walls so they can shift with the frost.

  But when I asked him how to dowse, he said it’s not something you can teach, it just happens.

  I asked which was more important, the stick or the person that held it, and he said both.

  I asked if it was easier to dowse for water on a rainy day, and he said he’d never thought about that.

  The apple tree has a black gash on the trunk where lightning hit it. No one saw the lightning strike, and the tree kept growing. No one teaches a tree to find water. Its taproot goes straight down into the earth, the same direction my father’s dowsing stick bends when it finds water.

  The day I turned ten, I went up the hill and stood under my great-grandfather’s tree. It was late August and there were so many apples they pulled the branches down around me. I touched the gash where lightning marked the tree. When I looked up, all I could see were Y’s. Big Y’s, little Y’s, straight and crooked, too many to count. I traced the straightest Y with my finger, but I didn’t break it off the tree.

  This perfect Y is at the very end of a branch that grows toward Nana’s front porch. It will be an easy one to find again if Dad asks me to dowse for a well. Then I’ll finally learn whether my great-grandfather’s abilities were passed down to me or not.

  If I could have chosen to be a dowser for my tenth birthday present, I would have, but I know Dad would say it’s not something anyone else can give you.

  Dowsing (water witching or water divining) is probably as old as man’s need for water. It is an “art” certain people have which enables them to find underground sources of water.

  —Joseph Baum, The Beginner’s Handbook of Dowsing: The Ancient Art of Divining Underground Water Sources

  BEFORE WE HEAD OUT into the icy field, James breaks a branch off a wild cherry tree for his dowsing stick. I pull my little sister, Birdie, behind us on her red sled. It’s so cold out the snow that falls is gritty like sand and won’t stick. It’s the kind my father calls dry snow.

  James holds the Y-shaped branch the way my father and Uncle Lincoln do when they dowse—palms up, each hand holding an end of the V, elbows at his sides, the end of the Y pointing out in front of him.

  “What should I dowse for, Henry?” James asks me. “A mammoth tusk like the one we saw in the museum?”

  “How about Dad’s good hammer? He lost it at the top
of the field when he was fixing the tractor last summer.”

  “Then I’ll dowse in that direction.” James’s eyes are the clear blue of the sky reflected in the ice, and his blond hair sticks out from under his wool hat.

  “Keek keek keek.” A small hawk glides overhead.

  “Keek keek,” Birdie calls back. Birdie is only two, but she can make a cry just like a hawk.

  “Keek keek keek,” the hawk screeches again, and flies off into the thick woods at the edge of the field.

  “I think I see something!” James yells, running ahead with his branch. “Look! A deer antler! My best find yet!” He holds up the antler. “I bet this would sell fast on the yard sale table.”

  James brings over the antler, and Birdie and I touch the hard, bony points.

  Then Birdie starts wiggling her legs in the sled.

  “Slide down,” she says.

  “Can you say ‘Push my sled, Henry’?”

  I try to get Birdie to say more than two words at a time and to say my name in the sentence.

  “SLIDE NOW,” Birdie tells me.

  I start her sled with a gentle push, and as it picks up speed, Birdie puts her arms out like wings. The dry snow makes the sled squeak.

  “You’re going fast, Birdie. Hold on to the sides!” I shout. “Steer toward the hay bales!”

  Dad puts hay bales at the bottom of the hill to stop our sleds so we don’t slide out into the road. I watch Birdie zoom down the hill, the red of her mittens two bright spots moving in the air.

  “I DO!” Birdie shouts back.

  She doesn’t steer with her hands, but she leans her body from side to side, like a hawk in the air.

  “Here, Henry.” James gives me his dowsing stick. “You take it. You’re the real dowser. I’m gonna go up in the woods and see if I can knock down some pinecones for your mom to start fires with.”

  He’s sure I’m a dowser even though I haven’t dowsed for real. The last time I went with Dad on a well-drilling job, I offered to try dowsing. When I said that, Dad stood still for a second, staring at me, and answered, Lincoln could use a hand digging the drainage ditch. Which didn’t make sense, because you don’t dig the ditch until you find the spot to drill. And you don’t find the spot to drill until you dowse for it.

  I think he didn’t want to watch me try and try and not be able to do it. Or hear what people in town would say when they heard what happened: Too bad that Bower boy can’t dowse like his father.

  James runs across the ice, as excited about getting pinecones for Mom as he was about finding the antler. I once heard my father say it was wonderful how James gave one hundred percent to whatever he was doing. Especially since he almost drowned with his mother when he was Birdie’s age.

  I stared at my father when he said that, not because of what he said about James’s mother. Everyone in Lowington knows she died throwing James to safety on Eagle Lake when her snowmobile broke through thin ice. But because I thought maybe that was where I got my percent thinking from.

  Like here out in our field, I’m twenty percent wondering if dowsers are born with special hearing or smell senses that help them find water. I’ve only got seven more months, until I turn eleven, to figure out what makes someone a dowser. I’m thinking when I get back home, I’ll look in the encyclopedias my uncle Braggy gave me. Which volume would I look in? S for sense or H for hearing or W for water? Or maybe the Lowington library has a book about it. Before I know it, I am forty percent thinking about James and Birdie, and sixty percent thinking about the way dowsers find things.

  “And me? How many percent for me?” I wanted to know when Dad said one hundred percent about James.

  “You?” My father looked at me then like he was seeing me for the first time. I have my father’s straight black hair and long legs like all the Bowers except Uncle Braggy, and Birdie and I both have my mother’s mossy eyes. Mom calls them mossy because they’re the greenish brown, brownish green of the moss that grows on our stone walls.

  “You are one hundred percent Henry,” he said.

  Which is not exactly an answer. Who else could I be?

  Birdie’s sled bumps into a hay bale right before the road, and I hold James’s dowsing stick out the way I’ve seen my father and Uncle Lincoln do a hundred times. Then a strange thing happens there on the frozen hill. For a second, I think I feel the forked branch pull upward toward the sky instead of down the way my father’s dowsing stick moves, but I can’t be sure if it’s the branch moving or my cold hands shaking.

  If you are a dowser and you pass over an underground water supply, the end of the stick will suddenly be pulled downward to a vertical position.

  —Joseph Baum, The Beginner’s Handbook of Dowsing

  OUR TOWN LIBRARY has two books about dowsing and one book about water. The brick building covered with vines is next to James’s school on Main Street in Lowington. The shelves go right up to the ceiling, and a metal ladder slides back and forth on a track. Mrs. Kay, the librarian, lets me climb for my books.

  “Red book.” Birdie points to a book with red leather binding halfway up the wall. “Climb up.”

  There’s a section in the corner of the library with children’s books that are easy to reach, but Birdie picks her books by their color or their size. She likes the biggest ones or the ones with red covers, and especially books that are big and red.

  Mrs. Kay lets Birdie climb the ladder, too, as long as I’m behind her, although I don’t think Birdie really needs my help. She’s never been afraid of heights. Once she began walking, instead of digging for rocks like me or looking for things on the ground like Mom, Birdie surprised everyone by turning her face to the sky.

  “Got it.” Birdie pulls the red book off the shelf and climbs back down with one hand on the ladder and one hand holding the book. She puts it on Mrs. Kay’s desk. Mrs. Kay is not much taller than I am, and when she sits behind the big wooden desk, she looks even smaller.

  “The Arabian Nights! Good choice, Birdie.” Mrs. Kay stamps the inside and pushes it back across the desk to Birdie.

  “Red,” Birdie says with a big smile.

  “You know, Birdie, you can take out more than one book. There are new books on the table there.” Mrs. Kay points to the children’s area, the way she does every week, even though we all know Birdie only wants one book and she wants to climb the ladder to get it. For the first time, it occurs to me that there’s always a red book sticking out from a shelf that’s low enough for Birdie to see but still high enough to climb to.

  “Big red,” Birdie says.

  Then she points to the calendar on Mrs. Kay’s desk. It’s the kind where you tear off each day when it’s done.

  “Two candle,” Birdie says.

  “Yes!” I say. Birdie is right. The calendar says 2-4-2002, and Birdie had a wax candle in the shape of a 2 on her last birthday cake.

  I find my books on the second shelf down from the ceiling. I don’t think Mrs. Kay is surprised to see the titles, because she nods at the books, then nods at me, the son of Harlan Bower, part owner of Bower Brothers Northern Maine Well-Drilling Service.

  “I hope they serve you well, Henry BOWER.” She says my last name louder than my first, as if I need a reminder that I come from the well-drilling, dowsing Bower family.

  “Thank you,” I say. I like Mrs. Kay and I like that she’s a librarian whose name is also a letter of the alphabet.

  “You’re welcome. You probably know your grandfather dowsed and drilled the town well for this library and the school and most of Main Street.”

  “I do. Were you there when the well was drilled?” I ask Mrs. Kay.

  “Yes, I was. They hit a gusher at fifty feet.”

  “Did you hear anything?”

  “The drilling rig is loud, of course. And everyone cheered when they hit water.”

  “I mean, did you hear anything whe
n my grandfather was dowsing? Or see anything different? Or smell anything funny?”

  Our neighbors in Lowington say my grandfather and my father and Lincoln call to the water and it answers back. I’ve never heard them call, unless it was words spoken so low I couldn’t hear them.

  “I don’t believe I did, Henry, but I wasn’t paying that much attention. I know your grandfather cut an apple branch to dowse with from a tree out in back of the library. Maybe these books here”—Mrs. Kay points to the books I’m holding—“will help you.”

  “I hope so,” I say.

  “You know, I tell folks the homeschooled boy in Lowington takes more books out of the library than anyone else.”

  “You count them?” I ask her, surprised.

  “I don’t have to. You’re my best customer.”

  She reaches under the desk and puts a rock down in front of me, the way she does every week that I come to the library.

  I look closely. I pick it up and feel its weight in my hand, and I bring it to my nose to smell if there’s any hint of the dirt it came from. It’s an easy one.

  “Milky quartz,” I say. “Where did you find it?”

  Mrs. Kay looks a little embarrassed.

  “Right in my driveway. The plow truck kicked up some rocks.”

  If I’d had the chance to name it, I would have called it cloudy quartz because the color of the rock reminds me of the clouds that fill the sky before it rains.

  “I never asked you before, Henry. Do you have a favorite kind of rock?”

  “I like rocks with mica in them, and rocks with quartz stripes. Rectangular rocks are good for building stone walls. And I like the big glacial erratics in Braggy’s woods. Dad says the glacier left them.”