Down to Earth

by Betty Culley

  The big rock lies in its swampy crater. The ground near it is spongy and the stream starts just below, gushing out of the ground in waves. It looks like someone turned on a huge faucet deep underground.

  Mom walks around and around the rock, studying it from all sides. She touches it gently with the tips of her fingers.

  “What a beautiful thing you are, come from so far away,” she says to the meteorite.

  “I’ve never seen rock like this.” Dad runs his hand over the shiny black surface. “I wonder if the bottom of it broke through into the aquifer. The water below it is pumping out like a vein of water from a flowing artesian well. The rock might be made of some kind of metal. But these things”—my father puts a finger in the rough, grooved thumbprints the way I did—“look like some kind of stone.”

  The M encyclopedia tells what scientists find when they cut pieces off different meteorites and test them.

  iron

  nickel

  magnetite

  cobalt

  carbon

  olivine crystals

  feldspar

  black glass

  trapped air

  oxygen

  extraterrestrial dust

  Extraterrestrial dust means that some meteorites have dust in them from the beginnings of the earliest stars.

  Stardust.

  I already said out loud in the microphone what I needed to say about the stone, so I stand there watching everyone look at the big rock.

  “Some people have all the luck,” Mr. Ronnie says.

  “Yeah, they’re lucky it didn’t fall on their house!”

  “When you put it on the news, call it the Bower meteorite,” James says to the newswoman, “ ’cause my friend Henry Bower found it on Bower Hill Road.”

  “I wonder what it weighs.”

  “It’s really hard.” A girl kicks at the stone and cries out, “Ow, it hurt me.”

  I don’t like that she kicks the meteorite, but I don’t want her to hurt herself, either.

  “It would take a big excavator to move that thing.”

  “Or a crane.”

  “I don’t think it’s going anywhere soon.”

  “How can a rock cause a flood, even if it’s from space?”

  “It has a funny smell. I never heard of a rock that smelled.”

  “It smells like the inside of my greenhouse.” A woman sniffs the big rock.

  “I saw on TV that a meteorite caused the dinosaurs to go extinct. I’m gonna check on my pigs when I get home.”

  “How do you know it’s a meteorite?” Priscilla, our town clerk, asks me. “Maybe you saw fireworks someone set off and came out here and found a rock. Plenty of big rocks around.”

  I take the round refrigerator magnet out of my coat pocket and hold it in my open hand. The magnet jumps out of my hand and sticks to the side of the stone.

  “Whoa!” the camerawoman yells. “I didn’t catch that on tape. Can you do it again?”

  I’m as surprised as she is. Last night I read that most meteorites contain iron and that a magnet will stick to them. I wanted to test it on the big rock, but I didn’t expect the magnet to fly out of my hand like that!

  I’m reaching for the magnet when I sense that something is wrong. I haven’t heard from Braggy since we reached the big rock. He isn’t giving everyone his opinion about the flying magnet or the giant meteorite or Dad’s artesian well theory. For once, there’s not one word from him.

  Braggy stands downhill from the meteorite, hands on his hips, staring silently out toward the gushing water. When I go down where he’s standing, I see what the helicopter must have seen—water slowly spreading sideways in the direction of our house.

  “I guess I’m smarter than I thought, building a three-story house,” Braggy says, but he doesn’t sound glad about it.

  The helicopter circles back up the hill and a loudspeaker booms out,

  “EVACUATION ORDER. EVACUATE TO HIGHER GROUND.”

  “Birdie, honey.” Mom lifts Birdie into her arms. “We’re going up to Nana’s house. What do you want to take from home to Nana’s?”

  “Take ME.”

  “Yes, of course we’ll take you. But what else?”

  “Doughnuts,” Birdie says, showing Mom the few doughnut crumbs left in her hand.

  “Henry, James,” Dad shouts to us over the sound of the helicopter, “this is the plan. We move as fast as we can to the back door of the house. You have ten minutes to take whatever you want that you can carry. And I do mean ten minutes. I wouldn’t be surprised if the cellar is already flooding. Then we exit through the back door up to Nana’s house.”

  “What about the meteorite?” I ask.

  The big stone from the sky sits there unchanged and unbothered by the noise of the helicopter or the crowd. Snowflakes melt on its shiny black surface, and water continues tumbling down the hill below it.

  “I don’t think it’s going anywhere,” Dad says.

  What I’m really asking is if I’ll be able to get back to the meteorite again, but I’m not sure Dad can answer that question.

  When we get to the house, I look around my room. What should I take in the ten minutes my father gave us? The glass of water I poured last night is still on my nightstand, and my bed is unmade because I left in a hurry this morning.

  I drink the water in the glass. Then I pull my covers up on the bed and smooth them out. The only things that are not mine to lose are the book about dowsing and the book about water from the Lowington library. I put them in my backpack and add my homeschool notebook and pencil.

  “Five minutes,” my father calls out.

  I open the top drawer of my dresser and stuff as many pairs of socks as I can fit in my backpack. Nana has a shelf on her cookstove that’s good for rising bread and warming up socks.

  I check my room again and grab one more thing—my pillow. Whenever my father comes back from an overnight trip to drill a well in another county, he always says there’s nothing like putting your head on your own pillow at night.

  James runs past my room. “I got Birdie’s blanket,” he calls out to me.

  When James says that about Birdie’s quilt, I remember Lilygirl. Birdie wasn’t carrying her this morning. I hurry into Mom and Dad’s room. Lilygirl isn’t on Birdie’s crib mattress. I run into the kitchen and she’s not in Birdie’s high chair. She’s not in the living room, either.

  “Two minutes,” Dad hollers.

  He’s standing by the cellar door wearing his tool belt and holding Mom’s egg carton of tomato seeds. I hear water trickling into the basement, and the big rock’s smell fills the house.

  “Dad. I looked all over and I can’t find Lilygirl.”

  Dad hesitates a moment and looks quickly around the house. Lilygirl is nowhere to be seen.

  “We can’t wait. We need to go. It’s time, James,” he calls out.

  James runs into the kitchen with a big black plastic bag. It’s so heavy he’s dragging it across the floor. Dad opens the back door for us to leave. He grips the metal doorknob for a few extra seconds before he closes it behind us.

  Meteorites, and their parent planets, are the most likely sources of the Earth’s water.

  —Astrobiology Magazine

  WHEN WE GET to the top of the hill, Birdie has the happiest face in Nana’s house. She’s in the living room swinging herself in the kid swing Nana had bolted to the rafters. Its chains and wooden seat hang almost to the floor so Birdie can get in and out of it herself. The house smells like the tapioca Nana is stirring on the cookstove.

  Some of Nana’s fingers are bent sideways and her knuckles are puffed up and red. She used to pull dandelions in the spring and can the greens the way her own mother did, but now it hurts her too much to do it. On the dresser in her room, Nana has a framed photo of her and her mother in the field n
ext to the river where they picked dandelions. Once, I told Nana she looked the same in the picture as she did now and she kissed my cheek. It’s true, though. Her hair is short and white instead of brown and long, but her face is the same, and she’s not much taller than she was then.

  “Nice swinging, Birdie,” I say. I hold my backpack in one hand and my pillow in the other, not sure where to put them.

  “Go high,” she says, pumping her legs up and down, up and down.

  James is the next-happiest person. He carefully sets down the heavy plastic bag in the middle of the living room rug.

  “Guess what?” he says. “I brought something for everyone from the house. Isn’t that great?”

  I see exactly what Dad meant about James’s one hundred percent. James has his head and arms practically inside the bag. The first thing he pulls out is for Mom.

  “Here. For when you make ployes. I found it in your cupboard.” He gives Mom a glass jar of her maple syrup.

  “Thank you, James.” She holds the jar carefully in two hands, as if the amber-colored syrup is liquid gold.

  “This is for you.” James shows Birdie her baby quilt. It’s forty red and white squares all sewn together. Twenty red and twenty white. I know because I used to count them. It was my baby quilt Nana made before her fingers got too sore to sew. I gave it to Birdie when she was born. There are five long rows of eight squares. In the middle of each red square Nana sewed a white heart, and in the middle of the white squares there’s a red heart.

  “You funny,” Birdie says, laughing to see him with her quilt.

  “And look what else I remembered.”

  James reaches deep into the bag and brings out five toothbrushes, all different colors. The fifth one is the one Mom keeps for James when he stays overnight.

  The next thing James takes out of the bag is small enough to fit in his hand. He gives it to Dad, who studies it carefully, as if he hasn’t seen it before.

  “Isn’t that your father’s compass?” Nana asks Dad.

  “I saw it on your dresser and I remembered you said your father gave it to you,” James explains to my father.

  Dad looks like he wants to say something to James, but no words come out of his mouth.

  Next, James takes out the wooden Honor Box with the slit on top to put money in.

  Mom is sitting on the couch, and James puts it on her lap.

  “We only had ten minutes. I snuck out the front door and ran down the driveway to get it for you.”

  Like Dad, Mom is silent as she stands and sets the Honor Box on the mantel over the fireplace.

  “The last thing is for you, Henry,” James says. “I saw it open on the couch and I thought you might want it.”

  James takes the M volume of The World Book Encyclopedia out of the bag.

  “Thank you,” I say, hugging the heavy book the same way Birdie hugs her big and red books from the library.

  * * *

  —

  It’s much later in the day, after supper, when the side door opens and Uncle Lincoln comes in. He has black hair like me, and his ears stick out from the sides of his head. I used to want ears like Lincoln’s, because I thought they would give me special hearing powers. I wanted to hear grubs eating grass, voles tunneling under the snow, and sap running in the trees.

  “Hi, Mom,” Lincoln says to Nana.

  “What brings you here, Lincoln? Any news?”

  There’s a pause and we all wait to hear what Lincoln has to say. It takes time for Lincoln to get his words out. I think he’s like me, deciding say it, don’t say it, say it, don’t say it. Dad says Lincoln has always chosen his words carefully.

  “The town well is drying up, and other wells, too.”

  We wait again, because we know there’s more coming. That’s how Lincoln talks. One thought at a time.

  “I’m getting calls people are running sludgy water from their faucets.”

  We’re all as quiet as Lincoln then, except for the creaking of the chains on Birdie’s swing. We know about the hardships that come with dry wells. Dad and Lincoln get the calls from people whose shallow-dug wells go dry in the summer and they have no water to flush toilets or take baths with, no water to put out fires, no water for cows and horses, chickens and goats and sheep. There are also people who have no wells at all and have to haul water from springs or from their neighbors’ houses.

  “Some of those calls are hot-tempered” is the last thing Lincoln says before he leaves.

  Dad stands by the window and pulls back the curtain. The National Guard is setting up a line of floodlights along the road. Braggy’s bulldozer is parked near the edge of the water.

  “Harlan,” Nana says to Dad, “the way you’re looking out the window reminds me of when you were a little boy watching to see how much snow was falling during a blizzard. You’d be the last one to bed, staying up until it was too dark or the snow was swirling too hard to see.”

  “I guess I did,” Dad admits. “I remember some pretty big storms.”

  “What about me? What did I do when I was little?” I ask Nana.

  “When you were a baby, Henry, what you liked best was rocks. Your mom would bring you here for a visit and set you in the shade under your great-grandfather’s apple tree. You’d sit right there and put pebbles in your mouth. You never swallowed a one. Then you’d spit them out, all wet and shiny, and pile them up like miniature rain-washed stone walls.”

  “I don’t remember that,” I say, but I guess it’s true.

  “Tell ME.” Birdie comes up behind me with her quilt. I didn’t realize she was listening to the stories.

  “You?” I say. “I remember when you were a baby, Birdie. Your face was very red. And you screamed really loud. Then I held you up to the window so you could see the sky, and you stopped crying. Can you say ‘Henry showed me the sky’?”

  “I scream,” Birdie says, and she seems satisfied with her story. She goes and lies down on the couch in the living room and covers herself with her quilt. Then she gets up again.

  “Get Lilygirl,” she tells us.

  Dad and I look at each other.

  “I checked the house but I couldn’t find her. Where is Lilygirl?” I ask Birdie.

  “Sleeping,” Birdie says.

  “I looked in your bed, Birdie. She wasn’t there.”

  “Mama bed,” Birdie explains.

  “I didn’t look in your bed,” I tell Dad. “Can we run back and check?”

  “No, it’s getting dark. Birdie,” Dad says to her. “We’ll get Lilygirl tomorrow.”

  “NO. NOW!” Birdie starts to cry, big tears running down her face, her mouth wide open. Watching her cry for Lilygirl gives me a sick feeling in my stomach. Why didn’t I think to look under Mom and Dad’s covers?

  Mom wraps Birdie’s quilt around her and picks her up. She pats her back and sings to her, one song after another, until Birdie’s eyes close and her head falls on Mom’s shoulder.

  “What do you think is going to happen?” I ask Dad. “Water is a force to be reckoned with—that’s what you always say, right?”

  “Yes.” My father lets the curtain close. “And until this water finds its own level, there is nothing we can do but wait.”

  “If the meteorite broke through into an aquifer, like you said, how much water is there in an aquifer?”

  “I don’t know. They’re huge storehouses of water. That water could have been underground for thousands and thousands of years.”

  “If the basement floods, will we have to sell the meteorite to fix the water damage? A museum in New York City once paid forty thousand dollars for a really big meteorite like ours.”

  “You don’t say! That much? I’m not sure what kind of work the house will need, Henry,” my father answers.

  I feel seventy-five percent glad I told Dad how much money the meteorite could be worth, but also twe
nty-five percent sorry it might make him feel different about the stone. Then I remember something that happened last summer.

  “You know that man from Massachusetts who wanted to buy the old granite foundation stones on Nana’s land to decorate his wife’s flower garden? Nana said your great-grandfather cut and quarried the granite and built the foundation with his own hands. She said some things aren’t for sale. Remember?”

  My father reaches his hand out to the curtain again, then pulls it back. If I had to guess, he’s eighty percent thinking about the water and our house and twenty percent thinking about everything else. I try to get his attention.

  “You wouldn’t sell the compass your father gave you on the yard sale table.”

  Dad takes the brass compass with its leather strap out of his pocket and holds it up in front of him.

  “That’s true, I wouldn’t,” he agrees.

  “There you are, Henry!” James runs into the kitchen. “Your mom called my dad and he was asked to pick up a night shift, so he said I could stay over and take the bus from here in the morning. I helped her make the beds upstairs. Do you want to stay in the room your father and Braggy used to share? There’s two beds in there.”

  “Okay,” I tell James.

  “We should all get what sleep we can,” Dad says.

  “Are you going to drink your water?” I ask him.

  “What?”

  “The glass of water you drink every night, and the one you take to bed?”

  “Sure, Henry.”

  Dad doesn’t move to the sink, so I pour water into the canning jars Nana uses for glasses. I give him one jar, and he drinks it down. I drink mine, too. And I fill both our jars again.

  “Good night, Dad,” I say.

  “Good night, Henry,” he answers, but doesn’t move away from the window.

  Nana sleeps downstairs in a room off the living room, where she doesn’t have so many stairs to climb, but the farmhouse has a second floor with two bedrooms. The room my father and Braggy shared has a window that faces down the hill in the direction of the water. It also has a wooden desk and two dressers.

  “They’re setting up more lights.” James has his forehead on the window glass. “Don’t you wish we could get a ride in the helicopter and see what it looks like from way up high?”