by Betty Culley
My hands shake as I kneel down next to him. Cold air blows into the room through the broken window. There’s a brick next to James’s head with a piece of paper attached to it by a rubber band.
Birdie runs to him, screaming, “JAMES IS HURT BAD, HENRY! MAMA, COME.”
James opens his eyes for a second and looks up at Birdie.
“You did it, Birdie. You said a whole sentence. And you said both of our names.”
I pull the piece of paper, smeared with James’s blood, off the brick, read the words on it, and stuff it down into my pants pocket.
My whole body is shaking now. James closes his eyes and doesn’t move. His head lies in a circle of his own blood. I can’t tell if he’s breathing.
I’m frozen in place and everything happens around me.
I see Mom run full speed to the kitchen, then rush over to James. She presses a dish towel to the back of his head. Her face is next to his and she’s whispering to him. Dad is on the phone giving directions. Then he lifts Birdie off the glass-covered floor and takes her down to Nana’s room. He runs back and I hear him call James’s father at the mill.
For the second time this week, a helicopter lands on Bower Hill Road, but this helicopter is here to take James to the hospital.
“Is he alive?” I ask the man and woman who kneel down to tend to James.
“Yes, he is.” The woman wraps James’s head with bandages. “But he took a big blow to the head. So it might be a while before he wakes up.”
“You’re sitting on glass,” the man says to me, “and you’re in our way. We need to move James to the stretcher.”
“I don’t know if I can get up. I can’t feel my legs. Did you know blood is ninety-two percent water, but how can that be? This blood is so red,” I hear myself saying.
“Ma’am,” the man says to Mom, “this boy is in shock. He’s not making sense. Can you help me lift him up and get him a blanket? He’s shivering all over.”
Mom and the helicopter man move me to Nana’s recliner and cover me with a blanket. They roll James out the door on a bed with wheels. He’ll fly in a helicopter and not even know it.
Dad brings me a cup of coffee and holds it to my lips.
“James is in good hands, Henry. There’s not much more we can do right now. Take a sip.”
I do, and it’s so sweet it tastes like he dumped Nana’s whole sugar bowl in it.
“How is Birdie? Did she step on the glass?”
“She’s fine. Nana is looking after her,” Dad says.
By the time I’ve drunk twenty-five percent of the coffee, I stop shaking. When I finish fifty percent of it, I can feel my legs again. This time it’s me sitting in one place and Mom is hurrying around the room.
She cleans James’s blood off the floor and searches for pieces of window glass with a flashlight. There’s glass everywhere, blown far into the room, under chairs and in the cracks between the old pine floorboards. There are long, thin shards like daggers and tiny specks that catch the glow of the flashlight.
“The brick,” I tell Mom, pointing to where James lay.
It looks like one of the chimney bricks that washed up next to the water where our house flooded.
Dad is outside boarding up the broken window with a piece of plywood when the policewoman comes. She’s as tall as Dad and has hair the color of a hay bale. A mix of yellow and brown twisted in a knot on the back of her head. She looks very young, like the photographs of James’s mother holding him when he was a baby.
She picks up the brick with plastic gloves and puts it in a plastic bag.
After she talks to Mom and Dad, she pulls a chair up to the recliner where I’m sitting and takes out a small pad and pen. She taps the pen on the pad. Rap rap rap.
“Henry, my name is Charlotte Rose and I need to ask you some questions. First, did you hear or see anything before this happened?”
I think about the night the meteorite landed in the field. How I’d first heard a rustling sound and woke up and saw the flash of light. When the brick came through the window, there was no warning at all.
“No.”
“Did you look out the window afterwards?”
“No.”
The policewoman is writing things down on her pad. I don’t know if she’s writing my answers. No. No.
“Did you hear a car or anyone walking around outside?”
“No.” I try to read her notes from the recliner to see if she wrote a third no on her little pad, but her hand is in the way.
“Did anyone else see the brick come through the window?”
“My little sister, Birdie, was there. She called Mom. James had his back to the window.”
“I see.” The policewoman writes down something else. Then, for the second time today, I’m handed a business card.
“Here’s my card, Henry. If you remember anything else, just call me at this number. I’m sorry about your friend.”
Charlotte Rose stands and shakes Mom’s and Dad’s hands.
“We’ll get to the bottom of this. We take acts of violence very seriously,” she tells them before she leaves.
When I put the business card in my pocket, I feel the note I took off the brick.
I pull it out and open it up. It’s smeared with James’s blood.
I read the note again.
I stare so hard at the big blocky words that when I look up at the ceiling of the room, I can see the black letters shaping themselves on Nana’s white-painted ceiling.
GIVE US BACK OUR WATER
I know the note was written to me.
It was my picture in the paper next to the big rock that brought the water. I didn’t even care about the reward money, as long as the meteorite was safe.
Which makes it one hundred percent my fault that James, whose mother died throwing him to safety on the ice of Eagle Lake, was hurt by a brick carrying a message meant for me. James, who stayed my best friend even though he went to school and I didn’t.
I drink the rest of the too-sweet coffee. I can’t fix broken glass or do anything to make James better, but when it’s light out tomorrow, I’m going to find a way to give back the water.
The patch of red on a sandhill’s head is red skin. Adult sandhills can be 4 to 5 feet tall.
—Lynn M. Stone, Sandhill Cranes
IN THE MORNING, it’s sunny out, but the plywood covering the broken window makes it dark downstairs. One of Nana’s rag rugs covers the spot where James fell.
“How’s James?” I ask Mom.
“Wendell called this morning. James isn’t awake yet. They cleaned up the blood on the outside of his head and gave him ten stitches. But there’s also bleeding inside his head.”
“When do they think he’ll wake up?”
“They don’t know.”
“If James wakes up, can you come get me?”
“Of course I will.” Mom gives me a hug. The note in my pocket crinkles when she hugs me, but she doesn’t seem to notice.
“Birdie, do you want to go see the big rock?” I ask her.
“James is all gone?”
“Just until he gets better,” I answer.
Birdie takes my hand.
“Go see big hat.”
“Wow, Birdie! You’re saying lots of long sentences now!”
“Like you do, Henry.” Birdie nods.
Birdie spots the sandhill cranes before I do. Two cranes are flying over the water, wide wings flapping, their long legs stretched out behind them.
“Wahahahahahah wahahahahahah.” Birdie sings a bugle call that sounds exactly like the cranes.
“Rahahahaha rahahahaha rahahahaha,” the birds call back.
“Big birds talking to me,” Birdie says.
“HENRY. BIRDIE. COME SEE MY NEW SIGN,” Braggy yells out to us.
He’s down by the moving water, standi
ng in front of a wooden door propped against a tree. At the top of the door there are words written in orange paint.
ENDANGERED
SANDHILL CRANES
DO NOT DISTURB
Underneath the words, there’s a life-sized painting of a sandhill crane. The crane is standing in the water, but its wings are stretched out like it’s getting ready to fly. Braggy must have mixed colors to make the gray of the crane, because his hands are spotted black and white.
“How did you do that, Braggy? It looks just like the cranes. I didn’t know you could draw.”
“NEITHER DID I!” Braggy chuckles. “Not till I tried it.”
“Where did you get the door, and how did you get it here? It looks really heavy.”
“I took it right off my old toolshed and loaded it into the bucket of the tractor.”
“Do the red hat,” Birdie tells him.
“Okay, Boss,” Braggy says, “I’ll be right back,” and he runs up the hill to the shed next to his house. He comes back with an old can of red barn paint, stirs his brush in it, and then lifts Birdie up so she can put the red on the top of the crane’s head.
We all stand back and admire it. Braggy has red paint in his hair and splotches of gray paint on his boots.
“It’s a very big sign, Braggy,” I say.
“Not just that, Henry. Notice anything else?”
“The words are big, too?”
“Yes, but see the baling twine screwed into the bottom? I ran it all the way up to my house and connected it to a big cowbell. If anyone tries to move the sign, the bell will ring, and I’ll know.”
“Wow! That’s a neat idea.”
“The game warden hopes the cranes stay and nest here. I guess there’s not many places in Maine you see sandhill cranes. Their babies are called colts. Just like horses!”
“I didn’t know that. Maybe it’s because they have long legs,” I say.
“The game warden was very impressed with my sign. I told him his sign was too small and I’d make one myself. When James wakes up, you tell him I’ve got something BIG to show him.”
Braggy says “when” and not “if.” That makes two new things I learn about Braggy—he’s an artist and an optimist.
“James will really like your painting. Are you going to sign your name on it, Braggy? I think that’s what artists do.”
“Good idea, Henry,” Braggy says. “I don’t want anyone else taking credit for it.”
With the brush covered in red paint, he signs his name on the bottom.
Bragdon Bower
When the crane colts are born, they’ll see the meteorite, the fast-running stream, the flooded fields, and Braggy’s big door painting.
I don’t have my notebook with me, but when Birdie and I get to the meteorite, I think of the questions I would write in it.
What makes you so hard?
Does your inside look the same as your outside?
How much do you weigh?
Is this place starting to feel like home?
Birdie is standing on one leg in the shallow water near the meteorite. Her other leg is tucked up behind her.
“What are you doing, Birdie?” I ask her.
She points to the flooded field. There’s a sandhill crane standing very still on one foot.
“Oh, I see.”
I gently touch the big rock the way I did when I first saw it, running my fingers over the silver specks and the thumbprints. The rainbow water Miles Morgan talked about hasn’t completely faded—there are still faint flashes of green and yellow in the rushing stream below us.
I feel the little stone move in my pocket, as if it’s being pulled toward the meteorite.
“I like the water and the cranes. I hope you’re happy here,” I say to the meteorite.
When Birdie and I get back to Nana’s, I get the note and Charlotte Rose’s card out of my pocket. I take a deep breath and make the call.
Diamond is the hardest known natural substance on Earth. Ancient people knew no way to cut it!
—Christine Petersen, Diamonds
“I THINK YOU need to start at the beginning.” The policewoman, Charlotte Rose, is back at Nana’s house five minutes after I call the number on her card. She taps her pen on the kitchen table and studies the note with James’s dried blood on it.
GIVE US BACK OUR WATER
Mom walks past the note, but I can’t tell if she sees it or not.
“First the meteorite landed. Then it started flooding the field. Then our house washed away—”
The policewoman interrupts.
“I got that part already. How about you start with this note here.”
“It came in on the brick that hit James. It was tied to it with a rubber band.”
She writes very quickly on her pad.
“I can’t find the rubber band. Maybe it got swept up with the glass.”
“Let’s skip the rubber band, Henry. Then what happened?”
“I took the note because I knew it was for me.”
“Yes, I know you took the note. And why did you think it was for you? I don’t see your name on it.” Charlotte Rose taps the note. Rap. Rap.
“I was the one who saw the meteorite fall. And the meteorite flooded the road, and then the town wells went dry.”
“Those facts are true, but I still don’t see why that makes the note directed at you. You didn’t make the meteorite fall here, did you?”
I don’t think Charlotte Rose has room on her little pad for me to explain how my dowsing stick pointed upward or how Birdie heard a hizzzz sound in the sky the night before the stone fell.
“I kept it secret and I made Birdie and James keep it secret, too. I didn’t care about the reward. And I yelled at Mr. Ronnie to stop when he tried to chisel off a piece. He didn’t know it was harder than a ten on the Mohs scale. He said people were mad because we’re water witchers and we’d be sorry.”
“What?” Charlotte Rose puts down her pen.
“The Mohs scale measures hardness—” I start to explain when the policewoman interrupts me again.
“Mr. Ronnie of the Picker Palace threatened you?”
“No, he just said we’d be sorry. Mom says ‘sorry’ can mean many things. He thinks the rock is evil.”
The policewoman grabs her head with both hands.
“You’re one hundred percent sure you heard Mr. Ronnie say your family would be sorry?”
I’ve never been asked a percent question before. What if I was only ninety-five percent sure of something? What would that mean?
Charlotte Rose taps her fingers on the table in front of me.
“Henry? Did you hear him say that or not?”
“Yes, I heard him say that. One hundred percent,” I answer.
“Thank you. Is that it, or do you want to keep my card in case you think of anything else?”
“No, I told you everything.”
She leans toward me.
“Are you thinking of going into police work, Henry?”
“No, I think I might study science. Or help my father and Lincoln and Braggy. Are you going to write that down?” I point to the pad.
“No. I think I’ve got all the information I need for now. How’s your friend James?”
“He’s still not awake.”
The policewoman stands up.
“I’m going to take a ride by the Picker Palace.”
“Will Mr. Ronnie go to jail?” I ask.
“I don’t know what Mr. Ronnie has done, only what he’s said. That’s what I intend to find out.”
She puts the note in a plastic bag and takes it with her.
I feel instantly lighter with the note gone. A piece of paper doesn’t weigh very much, but it made me feel like I was walking on Jupiter. Because of Jupiter’s gravity, I’d weigh two hundred a
nd thirty-six percent more there. That would make me two hundred and twelve pounds instead of ninety.
Mom is watering her tomato seeds in their egg carton. She drips the water over her fingers into the soil a few drops at a time so she doesn’t wash the seeds away. I’m glad Dad thought to bring them, because watching Mom makes me feel like I’m home again.
“I’m going to see Lincoln,” I tell her.
“Yes.” She says the one word like she already knows what I’m planning to do.
Are you a dowser? You will never know until you try.
—Joseph Baum, The Beginner’s Handbook of Dowsing
UNCLE LINCOLN’S HOUSE is as low and small as Braggy’s is big and high. My grandfather helped him build it when Lincoln turned eighteen. Only one story—I can see into the whole house through the front-door window: kitchen, living room, bedroom, and a bathroom with a claw-foot tub like the one we used to have. Lincoln isn’t inside, but there are cracking noises coming from the woodshed behind the house.
He’s splitting kindling on a big stump. When he sees me, he sets the splitting axe down.
“How’s James doing?”
“He’s still not awake,” I say.
We’re both quiet then, thinking our own thoughts about James.
“Lincoln, can I ask you something?”
“Of course.” He moves the wood off and sits on the splitting stump. I notice there are a few gray strands in his hair. I don’t remember seeing them there before.
“Is there a way to tell if you’re a water dowser?” I ask him. “Dad said it just happens.”
He looks hard at me, and I wait.
“Well, it happens between you and the dowsing stick when you hold it in your hands. I think about the water.” Lincoln scratches his head.
“I don’t know about your father, but I feel the pull in my wrists right before the branch bends. It feels like my hands and arms are extensions of the branch. Did you ask your dad?”
