by Betty Culley
“It’s heavy for a stone this small,” I say.
“I suspect it contains a high percentage of metal. The Hoba meteorite, for instance, the heaviest one we know, is made up of eighty-four percent iron and sixteen percent nickel.”
Dad leans over the table to get a better look at the stone. I hold it out for Mom to see, too. She strokes it with one finger. I bring the stone up to my nose, but it doesn’t smell like the stone in our field. Maybe the stone lost its smell over the years.
“What else is the stone from your collection made of? And where did you get it?” I ask the curator.
“There you are, Henry. Very good questions. To answer your first question, I believe it contains elements so rare they have not been identified yet. I call it the water rock.”
“What does that mean? None of the rock books in our library have anything about a water rock.”
The curator sits back in his chair and clasps his hands.
“Perhaps one day there will be such a book. Perhaps you, Henry Bower, will write that book. To answer your second question, as to how this stone came into my possession, I must share a tale of young Miles Morgan. Would you all be interested to hear it?” the curator asks us.
“Yes, we would,” I say, and Mom and Dad and Nana wait quietly for the curator to speak. Birdie swings on her swing, the red tie going up and down.
“Growing up in Nottingham, I was a sickly child; the doctor said I did not have a strong constitution. I was thin, not like I am now”—Dr. Morgan pats his round stomach and the tight belt over it—“and I coughed in the night. Consequently, I was kept out of school quite often, and left on my own during the day, whilst my parents worked. I occupied myself by reading and looking out the window onto our crowded street. One fateful morning I heard a loud rumble of noise overhead, and a small stone broke through our parlor window and landed on the floor in front of me.”
I feel the stone’s shape in my hand.
“A meteorite from a fireball?” I guess.
“You are absolutely correct. One and the same. I attribute the entire trajectory of my life to that moment.”
Dr. Morgan pauses and looks around the room. He enjoys telling his story a lot more than I liked telling my secret into the microphone.
“What happened after it came through your window?” I ask.
“For one, I could not convince my parents that it was not I who had broken that pane. Even showing them the culprit”—Dr. Morgan points to the stone in the bag—“did not persuade them. I was, after all, only a ten-year-old boy at the time, with no advanced degrees in geology.”
The curator gets up from his chair, as if his story is too big to be told sitting in one place.
“Then things happened, things that have still not been explained. Nottingham’s water supply doubled overnight. There was so much water pressure that it filled bathtubs and ran out of faucets on its own. It gushed out of fire hydrants onto the streets. The river Trent overflowed into parks and playgrounds. You can imagine how the children of Nottingham liked that! What eclipsed that event, for my parents, was that I got well. My cough vanished, I put on weight, and I was able to run and play without catching my breath.”
The curator holds his arms out to the sides, then pats his cheeks to show us how healthy he is now.
“No other pieces of my water rock were found. My guess is that a large fall, the mother of my fragment, embedded itself somewhere deep in Nottingham’s grassy heathland.”
“There in Nottingham, England, where you grew up, the stone came, and then the water. But then the flooding stopped, right? How long did it take? And what made it stop?” I ask.
My parents hold their breath, too, waiting for the curator’s answer.
“Yes, the flooding did cease. The precise timetable is unclear to me. However, new tributaries formed that flowed into the river Trent and that remain to this day. The water carved its own path through the moorlands and through city streets as well, which are still underwater, like the mythical Atlantis.”
“Why can’t you figure out what it’s made of?”
Dr. Morgan takes a newspaper clipping out of his briefcase and holds it up for us to see. There’s a photograph of me standing next to the big rock with my hand stretched out.
“When this article was brought to my attention, I had to use my magnifying glass to see what many may not have noticed. Is that not a magnet in your hand, Henry?”
Which is not exactly an answer to my question. It’s a question to my question.
“Yes, I wanted to show how the magnet was attracted to the rock. To prove that it was a meteorite.”
“That’s when I knew I would be paying a call on a fellow scientist.”
I shake my head. “I’m not a scientist. I’m only ten years old.”
“I beg to differ. Now, I was hoping it might be an opportune time for me to pay my respects to this stone of yours, Henry. One visitor greeting another, one might say.”
Fusion crusts on freshly fallen meteorites vary enormously. Often smooth, crusts can also be decorated with spattered droplets, or strings and rivulets of molten material. Rounded pits and depressions resembling thumb prints in a ball of clay are found on the surfaces of many meteorites.
—Alex Bevan and John de Laeter, Meteorites: A Journey Through Space and Time
DAD SQUINTS out the window at the thermometer nailed to a porch post.
“Please take my coat, hat, and winter boots for the walk,” Dad says to Miles Morgan. “It’s twenty-eight degrees out there and the wind is blowing.”
The curator opens his briefcase again, takes out a thin silver camera, and puts it in his inside jacket pocket.
“No thank you, Mr. Bower, though I do appreciate your kind offer of winter apparel. However, I wish to go as I am”—and again the curator holds his arms out to his sides—“when I pay my respects to the stone in question. Will the young lady who fancies red be accompanying us?” the curator asks Birdie.
“Want to go to the big rock?” I translate for Birdie.
Birdie flies out of her swing in an instant, landing on the floor with both feet. She pulls on her own hat and steps into her red boots. Mom helps Birdie into her coat and lets her leave the top button open so she can feel the tie Dr. Morgan gave her.
“All gone,” Birdie tells Dr. Morgan. “Swam away.”
Mom and Dad and I look at each other.
“All gone,” Birdie sings this time. “All gone.”
“Are you coming with us, too?” I ask my parents.
“I think I’ll lie down for a bit.” Mom yawns, even though she didn’t wake up that long ago.
“I’m bringing food down to the National Guard and checking on the town well,” Dad says.
I lead the way to the meteorite again, but this time it’s just me and Miles Morgan and Birdie. She runs ahead, filling her pockets with pebbles.
“That’s my uncle Lincoln’s house.” I point to Bower Two as we pass the small cedar-shingled building. “He’s the oldest brother. And the three-story house below it is Uncle Braggy’s.”
“That is a rather tall house for this locale. Though I myself reside on the seventeenth floor.”
“SEVENTEENTH FLOOR!” I’m so surprised I stop in my tracks, trying to imagine how high into the sky seventeen floors would take me.
“That is quite commonplace in Manhattan. Building up is a practical solution for limited space. I do have a small balcony with a very fine view of Central Park, but it doesn’t compare with the natural beauty you have here.”
“Don’t tell Braggy about the seventeenth floor. He thinks he lives in the highest house.”
“My lips are sealed.” The curator holds one finger up to his mouth.
We get to the place where our house was. I can’t see the top of the chimney anymore. The only sign that our house was ever there are the bricks and roof sh
ingles washed up next to the water. There isn’t any more wood or pieces of the house in the water. They must have washed away. If I could see to the bottom of the stream, would there be all the things that sank down, too heavy to float? Spoons, forks, knives, Dad’s cast-iron skillet, the rest of my encyclopedias, the metal ash bucket, our big oak kitchen table?
I’m not holding my breath, but it feels like I am. All the air is trapped in my chest and can’t get out. I cough to see if it will help, and it does, a little. Dr. Morgan doesn’t seem to notice. He hasn’t looked away from the water since we stopped here.
I make a list in my head of the animals I’ve seen lose their homes.
1. Ants, when I’ve dug into their holes by accident
2. A robin’s nest blown down during a thunderstorm
3. A spider who built its web in the woodshed doorway
Spiders go right to work making new webs, but Mom told me robins sometimes move into an empty nest. I don’t know about us. Can we be happy like a robin in a new nest, or are we like the ants I disturbed, going in circles trying to find a way back into their broken tunnels?
I point to the middle of the glittery stream.
“That’s where our house used to be. Right there. My father was going to build a porch on in the spring. So Mom could cook down the sap even when it rained.”
“All gone,” Birdie sings out again, throwing one pebble after another into the water. “Swam away. All gone. Swam away.”
“That’s right, Birdie, our house is gone,” I say. I think she might also be talking about Lilygirl, but I don’t want to remind her of her lost duck.
“All gone.” She doesn’t sing the words this time but says them very seriously.
Dr. Morgan stares at the water that covers our house, and the swirls of green and yellow currents.
“I’m sorry, Henry, that you lost your childhood home. I left mine by choice and I still miss it. But this”—the curator gets right up to the edge of the water—“this is a sight I haven’t seen in fifty years. In Nottingham, they dubbed it rainbow water. There were those who claimed it was a fabrication and those who saw the colors clearly. In the midst of the arguments, the colors vanished, never to be seen again. I speculate that the minerals that made the colors were diluted over time.”
“What colors were there?”
“Yellows and greens, as well as flashes of red.”
“My friend James says it’s good we have a stream now. He wants us to build a raft.”
“Your mate James is certainly an optimist.”
I never heard the word “optimist” used about anyone before. I like that there’s a word to explain James’s one hundred percent.
“My bedroom faced out toward the big field. When I heard the strange noise, I went up on the roof. That’s where I was when the rock landed. Dr. Morgan, what did the other scientists say when you told them about the water rock?”
“That’s a tale I have not told before, but I will tell you. Once, many years ago, I received a prestigious award for my study of meteorites from Mars. I stood at the podium where I was presented the award and began the acceptance speech I had prepared. I held up that stone you now have in your pocket and recounted the childhood tale I told you and your family. Then I went on to say that I believed that, just as a magnet attracts another magnet, there might be meteorites with a composition that attracts water, perhaps from a planet in a distant galaxy. And when that meteorite gets within Earth’s orbit, it is attracted to large bodies of underground fresh water.”
“Like what we have here under Bower Hill. And what did they say when you told them that?” I ask the curator, leading him in the direction of the big rock. Birdie runs ahead of us.
“They laughed, Henry. Oh, did they laugh. They thought I was being humorous. In fact, they laughed so long and hard I never did finish my speech. Afterwards, when I left the podium with my award, they slapped me on the back and pronounced me Water Man and told me not to forget to put the stone back in the road where I got it on the way in.”
“They didn’t understand.”
“No, they did not. And because I felt humiliated and disappointed at the reception of my speech, I never again spoke about my water rock theory.”
“But you’re a scientist. Why didn’t you test the meteorite and prove it to them?”
Dr. Morgan doesn’t answer, because just then the big rock comes into view, and he stands very still gazing at it.
“What a magnificent specimen, your stone from the sky.”
Water bubbles out of the ground around us. Birdie runs to the rock, her red coat billowing out in the wind. Dr. Miles Morgan kneels down, cups both hands together, fills them with water, and tips his hands into his open mouth.
Then he stands, takes the camera out of his pocket, and snaps photographs as he observes the big rock. He steps back to take a picture of the whole rock in its crater and then moves in to take close-ups of the surface of the stone. He talks to himself.
“Fusion crust.”
“Regmaglypts.”
“Impact crater.”
“Metallic flakes.”
“Is it as big as the Ahnighito at the museum?” I ask Dr. Morgan.
“It is substantially bigger.”
When the curator says our rock is bigger, I understand for the first time the way Braggy must feel when he finds out something he has is larger or taller than someone else’s.
As I get closer to the big rock, the little stone in my pocket moves. I make a fist around it and take it out. When I uncurl my fingers, for the second time in a week something jumps from my hand to the rock. The movement of the small pebble is faster and stronger than the magnet. Almost as soon as my hand opens, it’s gone.
Dr. Morgan touches the little stone where it landed on the side of the rock.
“Get up.” Birdie tries to climb onto the big rock. I give her a lift onto the flat part at the top.
“To answer your question, Henry—if I had tried to analyze the composition of my stone, I would have had to grind it up to test in our machines, and break it apart to send pieces to other scientists to corroborate my results. In effect, destroy the stone that came through my window and somehow restored me to health. That is what scientists do, which perhaps makes me not such an exemplary scientist.”
“You are exemplary.” I’m not exactly sure what the word means, but I know it describes Miles Morgan. “You didn’t want a replica of your stone. You wanted to keep the real one. And you would never do this. See the scratches Mr. Ronnie made with his chisel?” I show the curator the marks close to the bottom of the meteorite.
“Not to worry, Henry. I highly doubt they are scratches. See…” Dr. Morgan dips his crisp white pocket handkerchief into the water around the rock and wipes off the silver streaks. There are no scratches.
“Those were merely pieces of Mr. Ronnie’s chisel that the rock wore off,” the curator explains.
“Wow! How did you know the marks would come off?”
“That, Henry, is a question I am not proud to answer. When I was a lad, I borrowed my mother’s favorite ring, without her permission, I must admit. I scraped the little diamond in it across my stone. The only mark that was made was etched right through her diamond, and diamond, as you may know, is a ten on the Mohs hardness scale, much harder than Mr. Ronnie’s chisel.”
“So no one could chisel off a piece of the stone to get the reward, even if they tried?”
“That is correct. Not with any ordinary implements. However, since that first experiment with my mother’s ring, there is one other I’ve been sorely tempted to perform.”
“What’s that?” I ask.
“My team has access to a piece of equipment called a mass spectrometer. We take a sample of a meteorite and vaporize it in the device. It is a complicated process, but it enables us to date the meteorites.”
“Yo
u can figure out how old they are?”
“Yes, and I’ve always suspected that the water rock may be older than our solar system. But again, due to the small size of the stone, I might be able to date it at the cost of its annihilation.”
“BIG BIRDS.” Birdie points at the flooded field. I look where she’s facing but don’t see any birds.
“BRAGGY.” Birdie points in the other direction.
“Birdie, what are you doing up there? ROCKin’ and rollin’?” Braggy booms.
“No, Braggy,” Birdie says from her perch on top of the rock. “BIG BIRDS.”
“I came down to say hello to the man from New York City they were all talking about up on the hill. You’ve come a long way. How far is New York City from here?” Braggy asks Dr. Morgan.
“Approximately six hundred and ten miles,” the curator answers.
Miles Morgan’s thin dress pants are wet from kneeling by the water, and his shiny leather shoes are muddy. A gold button on his jacket dangles by a thread.
“I’ve been to Florida,” Braggy continues. “Everglades City. One thousand nine hundred fifty miles. Approximately. My son lives down there. He never liked the cold. I don’t mind the cold—or the heat. He wants me to come in the winter but I go in the summer. That’s when you get TRIPLE-digit temperatures. Have you ever been to Florida?”
“Yes, I once observed a shuttle launch at Cape Canaveral. But that is not as far south as the Everglades. Very pleased to meet you. Your nephew remarked on your lofty residence.”
“It’s the only three-story house in Lowington. And I’m thinking of adding a widow’s walk on the roof, now that I have a water view.” Braggy studies Miles Morgan. “You’re sure dressed like you’re from Florida, and you’ve come a long way to see a rock. What do you think? Is Henry’s boulder the real thing?”