Dedication

FOR MY DAUGHTER, RACHEL

Chapter 1

The pointed end of a forked stick is believed to point toward the ground when it passes over water.

—The World Book Encyclopedia: Volume D

WHEN I WAS FIVE, I watched my father saw a Y-shaped twig off my great-grandfather’s hundred-year-old apple tree. I waited to see if he would cut any other letters. There were branches that would make good L’s and I’s and a curved J just right for my best friend, James. I wondered if Dad would saw off three branches and tie them together to make the H for my name—Henry.

Now I’m one hundred percent older than I was then, and when Dad circles the tree his grandfather planted on Bower Hill Road, I know he’s not looking for letters. He’s searching for the perfect forked stick for dowsing. He doesn’t dowse for buried metal or gemstones. My dad, Harlan Bower, is a water dowser, and he uses his stick to find veins of water deep underground.

It doesn’t have to be apple wood. It can be pear or willow. But if I ever try to dowse for real, I want my first branch to come from my great-grandfather’s tree.

Having an H name like my father doesn’t make me a dowser.

Being a Bower doesn’t make me a dowser.

Living on Bower Hill Road, with its underground springs and good-tasting well water, doesn’t make me a dowser.

My great-grandfather and grandfather could find fresh water trapped beneath hard granite rock.

Sixty-six-point-sixty-six percent of my grandfather’s sons are dowsers.

My father: 33.33 percent

Uncle Lincoln: 33.33 percent

Uncle Braggy: 0 percent

My grandfather, my father, and Uncle Lincoln all discovered their water dowser talents when they were ten. I already read about dowsing in the D encyclopedia. It tells what it is, but not why some people can do it and other people can’t.

My father taught me how to dig a hole with straight sides and how to put rubble rocks in the middle of my stone walls so they can shift with the frost.

But when I asked him how to dowse, he said it’s not something you can teach, it just happens.

I asked which was more important, the stick or the person that held it, and he said both.

I asked if it was easier to dowse for water on a rainy day, and he said he’d never thought about that.

The apple tree has a black gash on the trunk where lightning hit it. No one saw the lightning strike, and the tree kept growing. No one teaches a tree to find water. Its taproot goes straight down into the earth, the same direction my father’s dowsing stick bends when it finds water.