“You’re gonna need one if you intend to go down that way.”

“Oh no,” I say. “It can’t be that bad.”

“Come take a look. We saw it when we came over the hill.” Mrs. Stockford shakes her head. “It’s that bad.”

I follow her onto the road. I hear the water before I see it. It isn’t the rapids of the Saint John River or ocean waves crashing on the rocky coast. This is a quieter, steadier noise that sounds like rain.

Down from Bower Four, past where the people are standing, is the land for my house when I’m older, the field below the field where the big rock sits. Bower Five, which I will now need a boat to reach.

When we get closer, I see that the road past our house is gone. Churning water courses down our sliding hill and across the road in a stream so wide I can’t even see where it ends. It’s water unlike any I’ve seen before. Not muddy at all, it runs a clear blue, but there are also swirling currents of green and yellow.

“Stand back, kids,” a woman who lives across from James warns some small children who walk toward the water.

“We don’t know how deep it is.”

“Or how fast it’s running.”

“Weird color.”

“Is it blue or green? Or maybe yellow?”

“Strange.”

“Isn’t this all Bower land out here?” Mr. Ronnie’s son, Dwayne, points up the hill, then down the hill, saying the two words together. Bowerland. The way he says it makes Bowerland sound like a bad thing. He wears wire-rimmed glasses like Mr. Ronnie, and a big dog with short black-and-white hair sits by his side. When he waves his hand in the air, the dog looks up.

“Always has been,” Mrs. Stockford says.

“Shouldn’t we call someone?”

“The sheriff should set up a barricade.”

“It’s going to break up the road,” Perley Gaucher warns the crowd. He owns the town store on Main Street, and his daughter, Fiona, is in James’s class. She once bought a heart-shaped rose quartz rock from the yard sale table, and I noticed that in the sun the freckles on her face looked like constellations.

“HAHA.” I hear Uncle Braggy’s voice. “And then the town will be buying my gravel and sand to fix it.”

“Not exactly,” Mr. Gaucher says. “The town will be after your baby brother for diverting his runoff onto a town road.”

“Runoff! Something more than runoff is going on here.”

“Where’s it coming from?” a little girl asks, but no one seems to hear her.