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.

The day I turned ten, I went up the hill and stood under my great-grandfather’s tree. It was late August and there were so many apples they pulled the branches down around me. I touched the gash where lightning marked the tree. When I looked up, all I could see were Y’s. Big Y’s, little Y’s, straight and crooked, too many to count. I traced the straightest Y with my finger, but I didn’t break it off the tree.

This perfect Y is at the very end of a branch that grows toward Nana’s front porch. It will be an easy one to find again if Dad asks me to dowse for a well. Then I’ll finally learn whether my great-grandfather’s abilities were passed down to me or not.

If I could have chosen to be a dowser for my tenth birthday present, I would have, but I know Dad would say it’s not something anyone else can give you.

Chapter 2

Dowsing (water witching or water divining) is probably as old as man’s need for water. It is an “art” certain people have which enables them to find underground sources of water.

—Joseph Baum, The Beginner’s Handbook of Dowsing: The Ancient Art of Divining Underground Water Sources

BEFORE WE HEAD OUT into the icy field, James breaks a branch off a wild cherry tree for his dowsing stick. I pull my little sister, Birdie, behind us on her red sled. It’s so cold out the snow that falls is gritty like sand and won’t stick. It’s the kind my father calls dry snow.

James holds the Y-shaped branch the way my father and Uncle Lincoln do when they dowse—palms up, each hand holding an end of the V, elbows at his sides, the end of the Y pointing out in front of him.

“What should I dowse for, Henry?” James asks me. “A mammoth tusk like the one we saw in the museum?”

“How about Dad’s good hammer? He lost it at the top of the field when he was fixing the tractor last summer.”

“Then I’ll dowse in that direction.” James’s eyes are the clear blue of the sky reflected in the ice, and his blond hair sticks out from under his wool hat.

“Keek keek keek.” A small hawk glides overhead.

“Keek keek,” Birdie calls back. Birdie is only two, but she can make a cry just like a hawk.

“Keek keek keek,” the hawk screeches again, and flies off into the thick woods at the edge of the field.

“I think I see something!” James yells, running ahead with his branch. “Look! A deer antler! My best find yet!” He holds up the antler. “I bet this would sell fast on the yard sale table.”

James brings over the antler, and Birdie and I touch the hard, bony points.

Then Birdie starts wiggling her legs in the sled.

“Slide down,” she says.

“Can you say ‘Push my sled, Henry’?”

I try to get Birdie to say more than two words at a time and to say my name in the sentence.

“SLIDE NOW,” Birdie tells me.

I start her sled with a gentle push, and as it picks up speed, Birdie puts her arms out like wings. The dry snow makes the sled squeak.

“You’re going fast, Birdie. Hold on to the sides!” I shout. “Steer toward the hay bales!”

Dad puts hay bales at the bottom of the hill to stop our sleds so we don’t slide out into the road. I watch Birdie zoom down the hill, the red of her mittens two bright spots moving in the air.

“I DO!” Birdie shouts back.

She doesn’t steer with her hands, but she leans her body from side to side, like a hawk in the air.

“Here, Henry.” James gives me his dowsing stick. “You take it. You’re the real dowser. I’m gonna go up in the woods and see if I can knock down some pinecones for your mom to start fires with.”

He’s sure I’m a dowser even though I haven’t dowsed for real. The last time I went with Dad on a well-drilling job, I offered to try dowsing. When I said that, Dad stood still for a second, staring at me, and answered, Lincoln could use a hand digging the drainage ditch. Which didn’t make sense, because you don’t dig the ditch until you find the spot to drill. And you don’t find the spot to drill until you dowse for it.

I think he didn’t want to watch me try and try and not be able to do it. Or hear what people in town would say when they heard what happened: Too bad that Bower boy can’t dowse like his father.

James runs across the ice, as excited about getting pinecones for Mom as he was about finding the antler. I once heard my father say it was wonderful how James gave one hundred percent to whatever he was doing. Especially since he almost drowned with his mother when he was Birdie’s age.

I stared at my father when he said that, not because of what he said about James’s mother. Everyone in Lowington knows she died throwing James to safety on Eagle Lake when her snowmobile broke through thin ice. But because I thought maybe that was where I got my percent thinking from.

Like here out in our field, I’m twenty percent wondering if dowsers are born with special hearing or smell senses that help them find water. I’ve only got seven more months, until I turn eleven, to figure out what makes someone a dowser. I’m thinking when I get back home, I’ll look in the encyclopedias my uncle Braggy gave me. Which volume would I look in? S for sense or H for hearing or W for water? Or maybe the Lowington library has a book about it. Before I know it, I am forty percent thinking about James and Birdie, and sixty percent thinking about the way dowsers find things.

“And me? How many percent for me?” I wanted to know when Dad said one hundred percent about James.

“You?” My father looked at me then like he was seeing me for the first time. I have my father’s straight black hair and long legs like all the Bowers except Uncle Braggy, and Birdie and I both have my mother’s mossy eyes. Mom calls them mossy because they’re the greenish brown, brownish green of the moss that grows on our stone walls.

“You are one hundred percent Henry,” he said.

Which is not exactly an answer. Who else could I be?

Birdie’s sled bumps into a hay bale right before the road, and I hold James’s dowsing stick out the way I’ve seen my father and Uncle Lincoln do a hundred times. Then a strange thing happens there on the frozen hill. For a second, I think I feel the forked branch pull upward toward the sky instead of down the way my father’s dowsing stick moves, but I can’t be sure if it’s the branch moving or my cold hands shaking.

Chapter 3

If you are a dowser and you pass over an underground water supply, the end of the stick will suddenly be pulled downward to a vertical position.

—Joseph Baum, The Beginner’s Handbook of Dowsing

OUR TOWN LIBRARY has two books about dowsing and one book about water. The brick building covered with vines is next to James’s school on Main Street in Lowington. The shelves go right up to the ceiling, and a metal ladder slides back and forth on a track. Mrs. Kay, the librarian, lets me climb for my books.

“Red book.” Birdie points to a book with red leather binding halfway up the wall. “Climb up.”

There’s a section in the corner of the library with children’s books that are easy to reach, but Birdie picks her books by their color or their size. She likes the biggest ones or the ones with red covers, and especially books that are big and red.

Mrs. Kay lets Birdie climb the ladder, too, as long as I’m behind her, although I don’t think Birdie really needs my help. She’s never been afraid of heights. Once she began walking, instead of digging for rocks like me or looking for things on the ground like Mom, Birdie surprised everyone by turning her face to the sky.

“Got it.” Birdie pulls the red book off the shelf and climbs back down with one hand on the ladder and one hand holding the book. She puts it on Mrs. Kay’s desk. Mrs. Kay is not much taller than I am, and when she sits behind the big wooden desk, she looks even smaller.

“The Arabian Nights! Good choice, Birdie.” Mrs. Kay stamps the inside and pushes it back across the desk to Birdie.

“Red,” Birdie says with a big smile.

“You know, Birdie, you can take out more than one book. There are new books on the table there.” Mrs. Kay points to the children’s area, the way she does every week, even though we all know Birdie only wants one book and she wants to climb the ladder to get it. For the first time, it occurs to me that there’s always a red book sticking out from a shelf that’s low enough for Birdie to see but still high enough to climb to.

“Big red,” Birdie says.

Then she points to the calendar on Mrs. Kay’s desk. It’s the kind where you tear off each day when it’s done.

“Two candle,” Birdie says.

“Yes!” I say. Birdie is right. The calendar says 2-4-2002, and Birdie had a wax candle in the shape of a 2 on her last birthday cake.

I find my books on the second shelf down from the ceiling. I don’t think Mrs. Kay is surprised to see the titles, because she nods at the books, then nods at me, the son of Harlan Bower, part owner of Bower Brothers Northern Maine Well-Drilling Service.

“I hope they serve you well, Henry BOWER.” She says my last name louder than my first, as if I need a reminder that I come from the well-drilling, dowsing Bower family.

“Thank you,” I say. I like Mrs. Kay and I like that she’s a librarian whose name is also a letter of the alphabet.

“You’re welcome. You probably know your grandfather dowsed and drilled the town well for this library and the school and most of Main Street.”

“I do. Were you there when the well was drilled?” I ask Mrs. Kay.

“Yes, I was. They hit a gusher at fifty feet.”

“Did you hear anything?”

“The drilling rig is loud, of course. And everyone cheered when they hit water.”

“I mean, did you hear anything when my grandfather was dowsing? Or see anything different? Or smell anything funny?”

Our neighbors in Lowington say my grandfather and my father and Lincoln call to the water and it answers back. I’ve never heard them call, unless it was words spoken so low I couldn’t hear them.

“I don’t believe I did, Henry, but I wasn’t paying that much attention. I know your grandfather cut an apple branch to dowse with from a tree out in back of the library. Maybe these books here”—Mrs. Kay points to the books I’m holding—“will help you.”

“I hope so,” I say.

“You know, I tell folks the homeschooled boy in Lowington takes more books out of the library than anyone else.”

“You count them?” I ask her, surprised.

“I don’t have to. You’re my best customer.”

She reaches under the desk and puts a rock down in front of me, the way she does every week that I come to the library.

I look closely. I pick it up and feel its weight in my hand, and I bring it to my nose to smell if there’s any hint of the dirt it came from. It’s an easy one.

“Milky quartz,” I say. “Where did you find it?”

Mrs. Kay looks a little embarrassed.

“Right in my driveway. The plow truck kicked up some rocks.”

If I’d had the chance to name it, I would have called it cloudy quartz because the color of the rock reminds me of the clouds that fill the sky before it rains.

“I never asked you before, Henry. Do you have a favorite kind of rock?”

“I like rocks with mica in them, and rocks with quartz stripes. Rectangular rocks are good for building stone walls. And I like the big glacial erratics in Braggy’s woods. Dad says the glacier left them.”

“It sounds like you never met a rock you didn’t like! Remember, Henry,” Mrs. Kay says, “when the snow finally melts, I want to stop by and see how your stone wall is coming along.”

Birdie and I carry our books outside and look for Mom. She’s across the street past Mr. Ronnie’s Picker Palace, her cloth collecting bag over her shoulder. A long braid hangs down her back, tied at the end with a piece of Birdie’s kite string. Mom’s hair is the same color as the red fox we see at the edge of the field. Her pants are tucked into her winter boots. Mr. Ronnie stands in the doorway of his store, watching her with a frown on his face. He’s a big man with more white than black in his mustache and short beard.

“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Or should I say, one WOMAN’s trash is another man’s treasure.” Mr. Ronnie shakes his finger at Mom.

Does he think Mom is finding better things along the road than the ones he has in the Picker Palace? I’ve been in his store and it’s so crowded I don’t think he’d have room for much more. Mom and I sell the things we find on a card table at the bottom of our driveway, but it’s not like Mr. Ronnie’s secondhand store. We don’t tell people what to pay. They take what they want and put whatever money they think it’s worth in the wooden Honor Box.

Mom knows the wet places in the woods where fiddleheads grow and sells them on the table in the spring. I put special rocks out for sale. Rocks that are smooth as duck eggs or shaped like hearts are good sellers. And one summer visitor told me she would buy as many flat rocks as I could find but they had to be at least a foot wide.

“Me and my son have a business to run, you know,” Mr. Ronnie grumbles, loud enough so I can hear it in front of the library.

Mom stops and looks back at him, like he’s speaking a language she doesn’t know. Then she waves and smiles at him. “Hi there, Mr. Ronnie, nice day,” she says.

Mr. Ronnie looks puzzled, as if now he can’t understand what she’s saying. He shakes his head and goes into the Picker Palace. The door slams behind him.

I hold Birdie’s hand and we cross the road to see what’s in the bag. “What did you find? Anything good for the table?”

Mom holds the bag open. There’s a long bolt with a washer and a nut on the end. It has hardly any rust on it.

“It was lying on top of the snowbank,” Mom says.

“I wonder what it came off,” I say.

“Big red,” Birdie tells Mom, hugging her book with both arms.

“Two books. Second-to-top shelf.” I show Mom my books.

“Hizzz hizzzz.” Birdie looks up at the winter sky.

“Is there a bird up there?” I ask her. Sometimes Birdie hears birds before we see them.

“No. Hizzz,” she repeats, but I don’t see anything.

When I’m ready for bed that night, I take my homeschool notebook and a pencil out of my nightstand drawer. Every year on my birthday Mom gives me a new notebook with my name and age written on the front in black marker.

How do animals find watering holes? Do they see the reflection of the water in the sky or do they smell it from miles away?

Can you train your nose to smell water the way dogs learn to track people’s scents?

What makes the dowsing stick move to the water?

My room is right across from the kitchen. I hear the thuds of my father stoking the stove with heavy chunks of firewood. The bang of the damper when he closes down the stove. The running of water in the kitchen. This last sound gets me out of bed.

I realize every night my father pours himself a glass of water, drinks it, then pours another and carries it down to his and Mom’s bedroom. A grown man’s body is sixty percent water. I wonder, if you drink more water, does the percent increase? If you have more water in your body, does it help you dowse?

When the kitchen is empty, I go in and run myself a glass of water and drink it. Then I pour myself another glass of water and set it on my nightstand next to my pillow. I bring my nose right to the edge of the glass and sniff, but I don’t smell anything.

I fall asleep thinking about the water that feeds our wells on the hill. The top of Bower Hill Road is the highest point in town, and the house at the top is Nana’s.

The next house down from Nana’s is Uncle Lincoln’s, my father’s older brother. Lincoln has never wanted to live anywhere but here on the hill where he was born. He’s pretty quiet, but if a neighbor has trouble, Lincoln is the first person they go to for help. The tall house down from that is Uncle Braggy’s, the middle brother.

After Braggy’s house there’s a hedgerow of trees and then our big field. The fourth and last Bower house is ours. If you drive back up to the top of the hill and go down the other side, you pass the Bower gravel pit, granite quarry, and cemetery. Braggy’s wife is buried in the family cemetery. Braggy’s stone is next to hers, with his name and birth date already carved on it. If you keep going, you get to Bog Road. James and his father, Wendell, live on Bog Road.

Bower One, Bower Two, Bower Three, and Bower Four, I think of them, with our house and land being Bower Four. Past our house, at the bottom of the hill, where the road takes a curve toward town, are Bower Five and Bower Six, the land and fields for my house and Birdie’s when we grow up.

And under all of them, enough water that none of our wells have ever gone dry.

Suddenly, as if a voice is calling to me, I’m woken by a rustling and hissing noise.

Hizzz. Hizzzz.

It’s like the sound Birdie made when she pointed toward the sky outside the library, and I remember the way the dowsing stick pointed upward instead of down.

I open my bedroom window, which faces the field.

HIZZZ. HIZZZZ.

The Story Continues on BooksBarbecue!

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