Standing there in the sudden heat of the night air, blinking against the afterimpressions of those bursts of flame in the sky, we couldn’t have known that more than two hundred years later the opening salvo of a new revolutionary war had been fired.

And that my brother and I would find ourselves on the front lines.

The rains continued through the night, pounding the earth, turning our roofs into waterfalls. At the edge of town, Hogan’s Creek overflowed its banks, drowning the Widow Latrell’s snow peas until minnows swam shimmering figure eights through the vines.

Since McCafferty’s farm was on higher ground, his crops weren’t deluged. Narrow, bright green shoots poked up from the moist soil of his fallow field, thickening into stalks by the third day. At the top of each was a small bud encased in a leafy sheath. McCafferty lifted his trucker’s cap to scratch his head at them, vowing to borrow Charles Franklin’s undercutter to tear those strange-looking weeds from his land, but Franklin was not a generous man, and besides, there was corn to harvest, and so it waited another day and then another.

The rains finally stopped, but the stalks kept growing. The townsfolk went to check out the crazy growths rising from the soil where the meteorites had blazed deep into the ground. Patrick and I even stopped by one day after school to join the gawkers. By the end of the workweek, the stalks were taller than Hank himself. On the seventh day they towered over ten feet.

And then they died.

Just like that, they turned brittle and brown. The pods, which had grown to the size of corncobs, seemed to wither.

Some of the neighbors stood around, spitting tobacco into the dirt and saying it was indeed the damnedest thing, but there was nothing to do until McCafferty finished his harvest and tamped down his pride enough to ask Franklin for the loan of that undercutter.

McCafferty was at the bottle that night again after dinner. I can picture the scene like I was there—him in his rickety rocker on his rickety porch, the cool night filled with the sweet-rot smell of old wood. He had put his true love in the ground three summers ago, and you could see the grief in the creases of his face. His newer, younger wife fought like hell with his two kids, turning his house into a battleground, and he hid in the fields by day and in the bars by night. On this night he was rocking and sipping, letting a sweet bourbon burn away memories of his dear departed Lucille, when over the sound of the nightly bedtime squabble upstairs he heard a faint popping noise.