Down to Earth

by Betty Culley

  —Alex Bevan and John de Laeter, Meteorites: A Journey Through Space and Time

  I WAIT FOR JAMES to come on the school bus. When his father, Wendell, works the evening shift at the paper mill, James stays with us. Birdie is visiting Nana up at Bower One.

  James goes to the brick school on Main Street in Lowington. I’ve never ridden the yellow school bus that passes me and Mom on our walks. It barrels past our house, collecting all the children in Lowington except me.

  Once when I was little and Mom and I were in the supermarket, Mrs. Stockford from Bog Road peered down at me and asked, “Now, why aren’t YOU in school, little man?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t know what to say. When we got home I asked Mom if she forgot I was supposed to go to school.

  “No,” she said, kneeling down to look me in the eye, “you can learn whatever you want right here at home. What do you want to study?”

  The answer came to me all by itself. “I want to break open rocks and see what’s inside. And I want to dig holes.”

  So Mom found me plastic goggles and a sledgehammer. The sledgehammer was heavy, but it wasn’t long before I could lift the hammer and split a rock open in one blow. Dad gave me a short shovel and let me dig in the front yard. Deep down in my holes I found dirt-covered rocks, spotted newts, salamanders, and bits of clay.

  Every year after that, when fall came, Mom asked me, “Home or school?” I didn’t know if there was a right or wrong answer. This year it was close. Maybe fifty-five percent home and forty-five percent school. But there could only be one answer.

  While I wait for James, I look in the M and the R volumes, reading about the biggest rocks that fell to Earth. Braggy got the set of red-and-black encyclopedias at a farm auction when I was six. He bid on a box of carpentry tools and in the bottom under the tools were the encyclopedias.

  “You read these, Henry,” Braggy said, laughing, when he gave them to me, “and you’ll know everything there is to know. Then you can tell ME.”

  I knew he was joking, but I wondered if maybe it was true.

  What I find in the encyclopedias makes me worried. One gigantic meteorite was loaded onto a boat, sailed across an ocean, and put in a museum. Another was secretly dragged through the woods on a homemade wagon so the man could claim it fell on his land. Pieces of the biggest meteorite in the world were cut off by people to make metal tools out of the iron rock. I learn that no matter how big or special a meteorite is, someone always wants to take it or chip it.

  When I hear the bus coming down the hill, I run out to meet James.

  “How was school?” I ask him.

  “Good. How was home?”

  “VERY good. I have something to show you up in the field. A secret.”

  “You found a mammoth tusk up there?” James guesses.

  “No.”

  “The other antler?”

  “No, no tusks or antlers.”

  I lead the way up the hill as fast as I can. The icy crust is gone and the snow is soft. James is good at keeping secrets. He didn’t tell anyone about the groundhog hole we found near Braggy’s shed last summer. We both liked the long tunnels the groundhog dug with no tools but its body, even if it chewed Mom’s sunflower seedlings down to their roots.

  “Hey, my sneakers are all wet.” James lifts his foot to show me.

  “Sorry about that,” I say. “Do you want to wear my boots?”

  “That’s okay. The snow’s not mushy like this around our trailer.”

  The R encyclopedia didn’t have anything about a rock that melts snow or turns grass green in the winter.

  “You can dry your sneakers by the stove when we get back,” I say.

  “What is that giant THING?” James shouts when the big rock comes into sight. “It’s HUGE! Where did it come from? Did it roll down from the top of the hill? Did you find it by dowsing?”

  “It came from the sky,” I say.

  “How do you know that?” James turns to me.

  “I saw it fall.”

  The crater is filled with water now. The heavy meteorite looks like it’s floating in a swamp of its own creation. The winds gusting around the rock are blowing warm air instead of cold.

  James walks around the meteorite the way I did the first time.

  “Wow! I never saw a rock like this. Not even in Braggy’s gravel pit. You found the best thing ever!”

  “I saw a picture of a really big meteorite called the Ahnighito in the M encyclopedia,” I tell James. “It fell in Greenland and it has a shape sort of like this one. The people who lived there called it the Tent.”

  “It does look kind of like a tent. Maybe you could go see that one sometime.”

  “It’s not in Greenland anymore,” I explain. “In the M encyclopedia it says when Admiral Peary found out about it, he moved it across the ice and into a boat, sailed it across the ocean, and sold it to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City for forty thousand dollars.”

  “Forty thousand dollars! For a rock. No wonder you want to keep it a secret,” James says.

  That’s not why I want to keep it secret.

  I don’t want it taken from the place where it fell.

  I don’t want it chipped or cut.

  I didn’t read anything about a meteorite being made into a replica, but I wouldn’t want that to happen, either.

  But I know I can’t keep it secret for long.

  Even if Birdie doesn’t tell, in the spring Mom goes into the woods to put out taps and buckets for maple sugaring. Her path to the woods goes right by the rock.

  In the summer, Dad hays the field in a neat square, but now there’s a big rock in the corner of it. What if the field is too wet to drive on when the grass is ready to cut and the tractor gets stuck?

  Since it fell, my thoughts are ninety percent about the big rock. Everything else is squeezed into the remaining ten percent. It feels like the rock—and me—are waiting for something to happen, but I don’t know what that something is.

  The first meteorite fall for which written records exist is the Ensisheim meteorite, which fell on the village of Ensisheim (now in the Alsace region of France) in 1492. A large fireball was observed and, after a large explosion…caused much fright and excitement amongst the local people.

  —Caroline Smith, Sara Russell, and Gretchen Benedix, Meteorites

  AT BREAKFAST the next morning, my father flips ployes, the buckwheat pancakes we all love, on the hot cast-iron griddle. Birdie sits in her high chair with Lilygirl.

  “Eat, Lilygirl.” Birdie holds the duck under one arm and offers her a piece of a ploye.

  Uncle Braggy comes to the door and sticks his head in.

  “The wind blew the smell of coffee and ployes into my bedroom window and woke me right up,” Braggy tells us, coming in and settling himself down at the table next to me. My father puts out an extra plate and fork for him. Braggy has black hair like my father and Uncle Lincoln and me, but his is curly instead of straight, and when he stands next to his tall brothers, the top of his head only comes up to their shoulders.

  “I think the wind blows down the hill, not up, Braggy,” I say.

  “The wind out there’s blowing every which way this morning, Henry. If it gets any stronger, I might have to tie myself down! But I didn’t just come for breakfast. I want to show you what’s in the paper today.”

  “Is there a new winner of the Boston Post Cane?” I ask him. The oldest person in town gets a real ebony-and-gold cane. Braggy wants to be the oldest person in town one day and be presented with the cane at a special ceremony and get his picture in the paper.

  “No, it’s still Isadora True. One hundred and one. But look at this!”

  Braggy holds up the newspaper and I read the word in big letters:

  FIREBALL

  “There was a bright streak of light seen over this part of
northern Maine night before last. A space rock broke up in the air,” Braggy announces.

  I drop my fork on the floor. Mom pours maple syrup on Birdie’s ployes and passes the jar to me. Dad watches the ployes cook with his spatula ready. I’m thinking this would be the time to say what I saw—to tell my family about the stone, to share the secret. Then Braggy holds up the paper again.

  “A collector is offering a reward to anyone who finds a piece of it. They’re paying a thousand dollars. For a piece as big as that dinner plate.” Braggy points to the plate of ployes in the middle of the table. “I’m also guessing whoever finds it is gonna get their picture on the front page of the paper.”

  “A thousand dollars? What would you do with a thousand dollars, Braggy?” Dad asks him.

  “I’d buy myself a windmill so I could make my own electricity when the wind blows. They have ones so tall they’d catch the wind going down and up the hill. I’d rig a pulley from the woodshed to the house so all I’d have to do is press a button and my firewood would be delivered right to the stove.”

  “Don’t go counting that money yet, Braggy. Northern Maine is a big place,” my father says. “Finding a piece of rock that size would be like finding a needle in a haystack. Pieces could have fallen deep in the woods.”

  “Or in the river,” Mom adds.

  “I know that, and I have a plan,” Braggy tells us. “I’m going to drive up and down the roads after dark and look for something that glows.”

  “I’m not sure rocks from space glow in the dark, Braggy. They’re bright when they come through into the atmosphere because they get heated up,” I say, then add, because he looks so excited about his plan, “but if they did glow, that would be a great idea.”

  “What would you do with the reward money?” I ask my mother.

  “I don’t know, Henry. We could use some of it to take a trip down to Boston to see the big science museum there.”

  “What would you do with the reward?” I ask my father.

  “Guess I’d save it for a rainy day,” my father answers.

  “That’s right,” Braggy says, laughing, “and if you forgot your umbrella, you could go out and buy one for every day of the year!”

  “Speaking of winds and the weather,” my father says, “have you noticed what’s happening out in the hayfield?”

  Uh-oh, I think.

  My father stretches his head toward the kitchen window, where you can see a small part of the field. Only my room off the kitchen has a full view.

  “What’s happening?” I hold my breath, waiting for his answer.

  “Nearly all the snow is gone off the hayfield just about overnight. Never seen it this early.”

  I let my breath out. It doesn’t surprise me that my father is the first one to notice something unusual happening in the field. Does his forked stick of apple wood or do his dowsing hands let him know there’s a shift in the underground water on Bower Hill Road?

  “Could be the culvert is clogged up with leaves, not letting the field drain,” Mom suggests.

  Culverts, the corrugated steel tubes set under roads and driveways all through town, direct the rain and melting snow away from places where people need to walk and drive. Mom and I find cans and bottles and people’s lost mittens in the culverts. I used to crawl in the culverts, but now I’m too big to do that, so I use a stick to drag out what I can’t reach.

  “Still very early for snowmelt,” Dad says again.

  “Big hat,” Birdie says, spreading her arms wide, her fingers sticky with maple syrup. One hand holds Lilygirl.

  “Birdie!” I turn my chair to look Birdie right in the eyes, staring hard to get her attention and remind her, without words, about our secret. Especially now that I know about the reward.

  Birdie’s mossy eyes are more green than brown when she laughs. She looks right back at me, and I can’t tell if it means she will keep the secret or tell it.

  My father takes off his brim hat and sets it on Birdie’s head.

  “Big enough for you, Boss?” He laughs and gets up from the table.

  “Touch hat,” Birdie says.

  “Go right ahead,” my father says on his way outside.

  I’m glad Birdie only says two words at once, but I realize it’s just a matter of time before my father goes out in the field to investigate why spring has come to Bower Four before anywhere else in town.

  Braggy takes the last ploye with his fingers and uses it to wipe up the rest of the maple syrup on his plate.

  “Braggy,” I ask him, “are you thirsty? Do you want a glass of water?”

  “I haven’t finished my coffee yet.” He holds up his mug.

  “Do you like water? Dad drinks a glass of water every night before he goes to bed. Do you?”

  “Sure, Henry, I LOVE water—especially for putting out fires.” Braggy thumps his leg and laughs at his own joke.

  Another answer that’s not exactly an answer. Though Braggy’s jokes make everyone laugh.

  I pick up the newspaper Braggy brought and read the article about the reward. Everything he told us is true.

  One thousand dollars for a small piece of the fireball that landed in Northern Maine.

  If someone would pay that much money for a piece the size of a plate, what would the big rock up in the field be worth?

  A museum paid forty thousand dollars for the Ahnighito meteorite.

  More money than me and Mom could ever make at the yard sale table.

  Meteorites are naturally of the greatest scientific interest and value since they are the only samples of material from beyond the Earth-Moon System which can be studied and analyzed in the laboratory.

  —Robert Burnham, Jr., Burnham’s Celestial Handbook

  LATER IN THE DAY, when Birdie is up at Bower One with Nana, I visit the meteorite by myself.

  “Okay if I sit on you?” I ask.

  The surface ridges and thumbprints make it easy to get a toehold in the glassy outer crust and climb up. I sit on the flat top of the giant stone and write in my homeschool notebook.

  Where did you come from?

  Why did you leave?

  Do you miss the place you came from?

  Was it dark where you were or were there stars to light up the sky?

  Was it ice-cold or was it so hot that it melted your metal?

  Was it noisy or quiet?

  Did you break off from a bigger rock?

  How old are you?

  Why are you melting the snow?

  It’s like sitting on a rock island with a moat around it.

  Did you ever see a bigger sun than our sun?

  Did you steer yourself to land here or was it by accident?

  How far into the ground are you?

  If my father tried to drill through you, would you break?

  Or would the drill break?

  The meteorite is the new sun in my universe, the very center of everything, and I’m like its Earth.

  If the rest of my family were planets, Birdie would be Mercury, the smallest planet, and Mom would be Venus, the second planet, shrouded in clouds. Dad would be Mars, the fourth and only planet besides Earth with liquid water on its surface. James would be the moon, Earth’s closest companion. Even if Earth and the moon are traveling at different speeds, they always keep each other in sight.

  Braggy would want to be Jupiter, the biggest planet. I feel bad that he’s going to drive around looking for a glow-in-the-dark rock, when the big stone is right here in our field.

  The snow is all gone from the field, and the ground is soggy. When I get back to the house, I hang my socks and jeans on the drying rack in front of the wood stove. Even my body is damp, and my feet smell like Nana’s dirt floor cellar after a rain.

  While my clothes dry, I sit barefoot at the kitchen table in my pajama pants, looking at the M volume of
The World Book Encyclopedia. I read about the biggest meteorite discovery ever—the sixty-six-ton Hoba meteorite that fell in Africa. It was discovered by a farmer when he was plowing his field with an ox.

  A car honks outside, and one, two, then three cars pull into our driveway. It’s more cars than ever stopped at the same time on our road.

  “Wow! Table rush! Three cars at once,” I call out to Mom, who’s planting tomato seeds in cardboard egg cartons. “I’ll go see what they want.”

  The things we have on the yard sale table now are a striped scarf, a clay flowerpot, a metal rake, an old map, and two heart-shaped rocks.

  Once in a while people have a twenty-dollar bill and want change, like the table is the town store. One time a man wanted to know how much for EVERYTHING on the table, and the TABLE, too. Mom says you can learn a lot about people by the way they react to the Honor Box.

  The cars all start honking. One after the other.

  HONK HONK HONNNNKKK

  I rush to pull my wet jeans over my pajama pants, step barefoot into my boots, and run out the door.

  There are five cars now—parked every which way in the driveway and along the road. Some people left their engines running and doors open, as if they were in too big a hurry to turn off their cars and close their doors. Most of the people are running down the road.

  “What’s going on?” I call out. “Is there a moose blocking the way?”

  “The road’s flooded.”

  “Road’s impassable.”

  “Looks like a river down there.”

  “Your daddy drill for water in the middle of the road, did he?” Mr. Stockford asks me. He walks slowly, a cane in one hand. Mrs. Stockford holds his other arm.

  “No, sir, he did not,” I answer.

  “I hear Harlan is going to repaint the sign on his drilling rig to say Bower Brothers and Son,” Mr. Stockford says.

  My breath catches in my throat. Could it be true? Dad is so sure I’m a dowser that he’s repainting the sign?