by Betty Culley
“It sounds like you never met a rock you didn’t like! Remember, Henry,” Mrs. Kay says, “when the snow finally melts, I want to stop by and see how your stone wall is coming along.”
Birdie and I carry our books outside and look for Mom. She’s across the street past Mr. Ronnie’s Picker Palace, her cloth collecting bag over her shoulder. A long braid hangs down her back, tied at the end with a piece of Birdie’s kite string. Mom’s hair is the same color as the red fox we see at the edge of the field. Her pants are tucked into her winter boots. Mr. Ronnie stands in the doorway of his store, watching her with a frown on his face. He’s a big man with more white than black in his mustache and short beard.
“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Or should I say, one WOMAN’s trash is another man’s treasure.” Mr. Ronnie shakes his finger at Mom.
Does he think Mom is finding better things along the road than the ones he has in the Picker Palace? I’ve been in his store and it’s so crowded I don’t think he’d have room for much more. Mom and I sell the things we find on a card table at the bottom of our driveway, but it’s not like Mr. Ronnie’s secondhand store. We don’t tell people what to pay. They take what they want and put whatever money they think it’s worth in the wooden Honor Box.
Mom knows the wet places in the woods where fiddleheads grow and sells them on the table in the spring. I put special rocks out for sale. Rocks that are smooth as duck eggs or shaped like hearts are good sellers. And one summer visitor told me she would buy as many flat rocks as I could find but they had to be at least a foot wide.
“Me and my son have a business to run, you know,” Mr. Ronnie grumbles, loud enough so I can hear it in front of the library.
Mom stops and looks back at him, like he’s speaking a language she doesn’t know. Then she waves and smiles at him. “Hi there, Mr. Ronnie, nice day,” she says.
Mr. Ronnie looks puzzled, as if now he can’t understand what she’s saying. He shakes his head and goes into the Picker Palace. The door slams behind him.
I hold Birdie’s hand and we cross the road to see what’s in the bag. “What did you find? Anything good for the table?”
Mom holds the bag open. There’s a long bolt with a washer and a nut on the end. It has hardly any rust on it.
“It was lying on top of the snowbank,” Mom says.
“I wonder what it came off,” I say.
“Big red,” Birdie tells Mom, hugging her book with both arms.
“Two books. Second-to-top shelf.” I show Mom my books.
“Hizzz hizzzz.” Birdie looks up at the winter sky.
“Is there a bird up there?” I ask her. Sometimes Birdie hears birds before we see them.
“No. Hizzz,” she repeats, but I don’t see anything.
When I’m ready for bed that night, I take my homeschool notebook and a pencil out of my nightstand drawer. Every year on my birthday Mom gives me a new notebook with my name and age written on the front in black marker.
How do animals find watering holes? Do they see the reflection of the water in the sky or do they smell it from miles away?
Can you train your nose to smell water the way dogs learn to track people’s scents?
What makes the dowsing stick move to the water?
My room is right across from the kitchen. I hear the thuds of my father stoking the stove with heavy chunks of firewood. The bang of the damper when he closes down the stove. The running of water in the kitchen. This last sound gets me out of bed.
I realize every night my father pours himself a glass of water, drinks it, then pours another and carries it down to his and Mom’s bedroom. A grown man’s body is sixty percent water. I wonder, if you drink more water, does the percent increase? If you have more water in your body, does it help you dowse?
When the kitchen is empty, I go in and run myself a glass of water and drink it. Then I pour myself another glass of water and set it on my nightstand next to my pillow. I bring my nose right to the edge of the glass and sniff, but I don’t smell anything.
I fall asleep thinking about the water that feeds our wells on the hill. The top of Bower Hill Road is the highest point in town, and the house at the top is Nana’s.
The next house down from Nana’s is Uncle Lincoln’s, my father’s older brother. Lincoln has never wanted to live anywhere but here on the hill where he was born. He’s pretty quiet, but if a neighbor has trouble, Lincoln is the first person they go to for help. The tall house down from that is Uncle Braggy’s, the middle brother.
After Braggy’s house there’s a hedgerow of trees and then our big field. The fourth and last Bower house is ours. If you drive back up to the top of the hill and go down the other side, you pass the Bower gravel pit, granite quarry, and cemetery. Braggy’s wife is buried in the family cemetery. Braggy’s stone is next to hers, with his name and birth date already carved on it. If you keep going, you get to Bog Road. James and his father, Wendell, live on Bog Road.
Bower One, Bower Two, Bower Three, and Bower Four, I think of them, with our house and land being Bower Four. Past our house, at the bottom of the hill, where the road takes a curve toward town, are Bower Five and Bower Six, the land and fields for my house and Birdie’s when we grow up.
And under all of them, enough water that none of our wells have ever gone dry.
Suddenly, as if a voice is calling to me, I’m woken by a rustling and hissing noise.
Hizzz. Hizzzz.
It’s like the sound Birdie made when she pointed toward the sky outside the library, and I remember the way the dowsing stick pointed upward instead of down.
I open my bedroom window, which faces the field.
HIZZZ. HIZZZZ.
I’m in my boots and out the front door. It’s very cold and still, no wind blowing in my face. The sky is full of shooting stars and they’re brighter than any I’ve ever seen before, but the hemlock trees around the house block part of my view.
I notice Dad’s extension ladder leaning against the roof, for when he needs to break up ice dams or clean the chimney. It’s an easy climb onto the roof of the house. I stand on the ridgepole, as high off the ground as I’ve ever been. I can see in every direction. The crackling gets louder and louder and there’s a huge boom. Suddenly an explosion of light fills the whole sky overhead, and a dark shape arcs down onto the top of the field.
Then, except for the moon, the sky is dark. I blink once, twice, and it’s still there—a shadow on the frozen white.
My hands sting from the cold and I scramble down the roof and back into the house. I open the damper on the stove, throw in a stick of kindling and a bigger piece of wood, and rub my hands together as the fire heats up.
I know scientists aren’t sure if there’s an end to the universe. I read that you can travel at the speed of light forever without reaching an edge of it. But when I was balanced on top of the roof watching the light burst over me, it felt real, how big the universe is.
“Henry?” Mom comes into the hallway in her long winter nightgown. Did she hear the front door open or close? “Are you feeling okay?”
“Yes, I just put more wood in the stove.”
She points to the crescent of moon in the kitchen window.
“It’s waning.”
This is when I could say what I saw in the sky and what I think crashed onto the field. Mom would find Dad’s headlamp and go outside with me.
But I don’t want to say anything until I find out for sure myself.
“See if you can go back to sleep. It’s still dark out.” She yawns.
“I will.”
Mom says darkness comes for a reason—to show us when to rest. I go into my room, but I can’t sleep.
There’s a picture I remember from my M encyclopedia. I turn to the page that shows a meteor bursting through the atmosphere on its way down to Earth. It looks just like the explosion of light
I saw from the roof.
Underneath, it says:
Meteors rarely blaze for more than a few seconds.
Meteors that reach Earth before burning up are meteorites.
Meteorites are rocks from space, the rarest rocks, and I’ve never seen or touched one in my whole life.
When a fireball suddenly appears (and there’s never any warning) it is such an astonishing moment that most people are spellbound.
—O. Richard Norton, Rocks from Space
BIRDIE COMES INTO my room and wakes me up, pulling her red sled behind her. In her other hand she holds her yellow stuffed duck, Lilygirl. At night Birdie sleeps with Lilygirl on her crib mattress in Mom and Dad’s room down the hall.
“Mama sleep,” Birdie tells me. “Dad sleep.”
Maybe what fell from the sky came to Birdie, who cares more than the rest of us what’s up there past the weather vane spinning in the wind. Birdie gets her name from the first words she spoke. “Me Birdie,” she said, pointing at a flock of geese flying south before winter. Their honking was loud and sad at the same time.
I’ve been alive for one hundred percent of Birdie’s life, and she’s only been alive for twenty percent of mine, but I feel like there was never a time I didn’t know her.
I’m always doing the math in my head. When I’m twenty, Birdie will be twelve. When I’m fifty, Birdie will be forty-two. The longer we both live, the greater the percent of my life I’ll have known her. When I’m ninety-nine and Birdie is ninety-one, I’ll have known her ninety-one-point-nine-one percent of my life.
Sometimes I think Birdie is lucky because she has eight more years where she doesn’t have to worry about being a dowser or not. She can just play with Lilygirl and sled and watch for birds and swing on Nana’s swing.
“Mom and Dad will be awake soon. Want to go see something in the field?” I ask her.
“Slide down,” Birdie says.
“Sure. But I want to show you something first.”
Birdie puts Lilygirl in her high chair.
“Be good,” she tells her.
I get dressed and help Birdie into her coat and boots. Her winter coat is as red as a cardinal’s and she rides on my back, my arms circling her skinny legs as I tromp toward the place where the dark shape came to rest during the night.
We walk past the garden covered in snow and ice, past the empty clothesline, past the blackberry patch into the wide, sloping field that goes from the old stone wall bordering it at the top down sharply to the road. The same field where James found the antler and Birdie sledded.
Something in the top corner of the field, below the hedgerow between our land and Braggy’s, looks like a giant boulder. It’s twice as tall as I am and wider on the bottom than on its flat top. It’s black and in the sun its surface shines like colored glass.
I stand still, staring at the rock that’s so big I can’t see past it. I remember the way my dowsing stick pulled upward yesterday. Did the rock also come to me? Before I fell asleep last night, I read more about meteors and meteorites. I hoped the shadow I saw on the snow would be a space rock, maybe the size of the ones in my stone wall. I imagined picking it up and studying it. I didn’t imagine anything this size!
“GO, Henry.” Birdie wiggles her legs up and down.
There’s a shallow crater around the rock that makes it look like a giant upside-down teacup sitting in a huge egg-shaped saucer. Outside the crater is a jagged circle of melted snow, and the blades of grass near it are bright green. Even though it’s so cold out my face stings, the snow outside the crater is slushy under my boots.
“Hat,” Birdie chirps in my right ear. “Hat, hat, hat.”
The rock does have the shape of a hat—an enormous shiny-looking hat. As we get closer, I see that the surface is not as smooth as it looked from a distance. It has indentations on it that look like thumbprints. There are also specks of something as silver as the blade of my father’s sharpened axe.
“Touch.” Birdie pokes my chin. “Touch hat.”
When I don’t move, she pokes me harder.
My father’s nickname for Birdie is the Boss. “What does the Boss think about that?” he’ll ask Birdie. If there aren’t any people around to boss, Birdie tries to catch the dragonflies that crisscross the yard in the summer, or she calls to the big green luna moths to land on her finger.
“TOUCH!” Birdie shouts in my right ear. I let her down and we approach the giant boulder together.
I kneel down in the hollow that is the crater and touch the rock where it meets the ground. It’s very hard. I try to scrape off the shiny metal specks with a fingernail, but nothing happens. I press my thumbs into the rounded pits and run my hands down the ridges that can’t be smoothed out and the creases that can’t be straightened.
Careful not to let Birdie see, I lick it with the tip of my tongue. It has no taste I recognize. Maybe ashes, maybe very old wood. The metal is smooth, with a warmth that surprises me on this very cold day.
There’s a smell that comes to me from down there at the bottom of the rock. I’ve smelled it every year for ten years. Spring. But this time it’s two months early.
Birdie has both hands on the rock, as high up as she can reach. She pushes. Then pushes harder.
She backs up to where the hard-packed winter snow meets the new slush in the crater and runs at the rock with her arms out. There’s not even the tiniest bit of movement. It’s as if the rock has grown roots or legs that are locked into the earth. It won’t topple over the way people do when she runs at them.
Birdie changes tactics and reaches her arms as far as she can in both directions and gives its hard, blocky surface a hug. She lays her head on the big boulder and looks up toward the sky.
I crawl around the rock on my hands and knees, soaking my jeans. All the sides are the same bluish black, but some have more silvery veins, and some are more dimpled than others. I wish I had seen the bottom of the rock before it landed. Is it the same color? Is it bumpy or smooth? I’m also curious how far the bottom of the rock sank into the earth.
Birdie presses herself against the big glassy rock. The melted snow in the crater almost reaches the tops of her red rubber boots now. Maybe the Boss, always looking above, recognizes the rock, because she acts like they’re already friends.
I want to say something to the big rock myself, to welcome it the way my parents make visitors, even strangers, feel at home. Then I remember what my mother says when she finds a mushroom or fern she can’t identify.
“I don’t know your name, but I’m glad to meet you,” I say to the big rock.
“Name BIRDIE.” Birdie laughs.
I laugh, too, when she says that.
“I meant the rock, not you, Birdie. I know your name.”
My hand rests on the hard surface of the stone. I breathe in the spring smell. And I think about my trip to the museum and what happened to the twelve-thousand-year-old woolly mammoth tusk. If you can even call something a tusk if it doesn’t have one single particle of the real tusk in it.
I press one finger to my lips. “The rock here. This is our secret. Can you say ‘I’ll keep the secret, Henry’?”
“Tell James,” Birdie says.
“Okay, we’ll show James when he gets out of school. Won’t he be excited when he sees it? But don’t tell anyone else.”
Birdie reaches out and puts her finger on my lips the way I did.
“Big hat,” she says.
Birdie is shivering, and my legs are cold in my wet jeans. I’m suddenly hungry for the breakfast I forgot to have.
“Let’s get home where it’s warm and dry off and have something to eat,” I tell her.
On the walk home, I think about how old the stone might be and if it was traveling toward us when Bower Hill Road was still covered by a glacier.
The mammoth lived during the Ice Age. Nana watched Birdie
while my mother took me and James to the Maine State Museum to see the tusk for my tenth birthday last year. It was a very long drive, two hundred and forty-five miles south, which is seventy-five percent of the whole length of Maine and thirty percent farther than anywhere else I’d ever been.
After Mom paid for us to get in, I hurried past the displays about sardine packing and ice harvesting straight to the mammoth exhibit. But when I got there, the sign underneath the tusk said:
REPLICA
The volunteer at the museum explained that when the tusk was tested to see how old it was, and to make a mold of it, it was destroyed in the process. He said the replica was even more accurate than the original one had been. He pointed to a mammoth tooth that was real.
The tooth and the replica both hung on a wall behind glass. I got as close to the glass as I could, but there was no way to tell by looking what the tooth felt or smelled like. And I knew the replica wouldn’t have the muddy smell from the pond where the real tusk was found.
The volunteer was very proud of the replica. I thanked him for explaining about the tusk and told him how far we’d come to see it.
James liked seeing the replica and the tooth. He loved the steam locomotive, the three-story waterwheel, and the stuffed seabirds on the pretend beach. Mom spent a long time looking at the hull fragment from a wooden ship that ran aground after a midnight collision with another boat. The fragment was bigger than my uncle Lincoln’s whole house.
On our way out, we got postcards at the museum gift shop. I picked one that showed the real tusk in the ground where it was found. During the long drive home, I studied the postcard of the tusk they’d used to make the replica and thought about the real mammoth tooth, which was bigger than my head.
I didn’t know then that I’d get to see and touch something much, much older than the tusk. A rock in our hayfield that could be even older than the sun.
The Inuits revealed to Robert E. Peary, the famous American explorer, the locations of three of the meteorites. The Inuits called the masses Ahnighito or Tent (31 tons), Woman (3 tons) and Dog (0.4 tons).
