'Careful! Careful!' Father cautioned. 'Here, let me.' I moved back, nursing my blistered fingers. Father fumbled with the bundle and suddenly it ripped from one end to the other and he pulled out, like an ear of earn from its shuck, the twisting body of a person! 'He's badly burned,' said Father. 'Face and hands. Help me lift him.' I helped Father get the body into his arms. He staggered and straightened. 'Go tell your mother to brew up all the tea we have in the house- strong!' I raced for the house, calling to Mama as soon as I saw her anxious face, 'Father's all right! I'm all right! But we found someone burned! Father says to brew up all our tea-strong!' Mama disappeared into the cabin and I heard the clatter of stove lids. I hurried back to Father and hovered anxiously as he laid his burden down on the little front porch, Carefully we peeled off the burned clothes until finally we had the body stripped down and put into an old nightshirt of Father's. The fire hadn't got to his legs nor to his body, but his left shoulder was charred-and his face! And arms! A tight cap thing that crumpled to flakes in our hands had saved most of his hair. Father's mouth tightened. 'His eyes,' he said. 'His eyes.' 'Is he dead?' I whispered. Then I had my answer as one blackened hand lifted and wavered. I took it carefully in mine, my blisters drawing as I closed my fingers. The blackened head rolled and the mouth opened soundlessly and closed again, the face twisting with pain. We worked over the boy-maybe some older than I-all afternoon. I brought silty half bucket after half bucket of water from the dipping place and strained it through muslin to get the silt out. We washed the boy until we located all his burns and flooded the places with strong cold tea and put tea packs across the worst ones. Mama worked along with us until the burden of the baby made her breathless and she had to stop. She had given Merry a piece of bread and put her out in the little porch-side pen when we brought the boy in. Merry was crying now, her face dabbled with dirt, her bread rubbed in the sand. Mama gathered her up with an effort and smiled wearily at me over her head, 'I'd better let her cry a little more, than her face will be wet enough for me to wash it clean!' I guess I got enough tea on my hands working with the boy that my own burns weren't too bad. Blisters had formed and broken, but I only needed my right thumb and forefinger bandaged with strips from an old petticoat of Mama's. We left Mama with the boy, now clean and quiet on my cot, his face hidden under the wet packs, and went slowly down the path I had run so many times through the afternoon. We took our buckets on past the dipping place where a palm-sized puddle was all that was left of the water and retraced our steps to where the fire had been. 'A meteor?' I asked, looking across the ashy ground. 'I always thought they came only at night.' 'You haven't thought the matter over or you'd realize that night and day has nothing to do with meteors,' said Father. 'Is meteor the correct term?' 'How funny that that fellow happened to be at the exact place at the exact time the piece of the meteor hit here,' I said, putting Father's question away for future reference. ''Odd' is a better word,' Father corrected. 'Where did the boy come from?' I let my eyes sweep the whole wide horizon before us. No one on foot and alone could ever have made it from any where! Where had he come from? Up out of the ground? Down out of the sky? 'I guess he rode in on the meteor,' I said, and grinned at the idea. Father blinked at me, but didn't return my smile. 'There's what set the fire,' he said. We plopped through feathery ashes toward a black lump of something. 'Maybe we could send it to a museum,' I suggested as we neared it. 'Most meteors burn up before they hit the ground.' Father pushed the chunk with his foot. Flame flared briefly from under it as it rocked, and a clump of grass charred, the tips of the blades twisting and curling as they shriveled. 'Still hot,' said Father, hunkering down on his heels beside it. He thumped it with a piece of rock. It clanged. 'Metal!' His eyebrows raised. 'Hollow!' Carefully we probed with sticks from the hillside and thumped with rocks to keep our hands from the heat. We sat back and looked at each other. I felt a stir of something like fear inside me. 'It's-it's been made!' I said. 'It's a long metal pipe or something! And I'll bet he was inside it! But how could he have been? How could he get so high in the sky as to come down like that? And if this little thing has been made, what was the big thing it came from?' 'I'll go get water,' said Father, getting up and lifting the buckets. 'Don't burn yourself any more.' I prodded the blackened metal. 'Out of the sky,' I said aloud. 'As high and as fast as a meteor to get that hot. What was he doing up there?' My stick rocked the metal hulk and it rolled again. The split ends spread as it turned and a small square metal thing fell out into the ashes. I scraped it to one side and cautiously lifted it. The soot on it blackened my bandages and my palms. It looked like a box and was of a size that my two hands could hold. I looked at it, then suddenly overwhelmed and seared by the thought of roaring meteors and empty space and billowing grass fires, I scratched a hasty hole against a rock, shoved the box in, and stamped the earth over it. Then I went to meet Father and take one of the dripping buckets from him. We didn't look back at the crumpled metal thing behind us. Father could hardly believe his eyes when he checked the boy's burns next morning. 'They're healing already! he said to Mama. 'Look!' I crowded closer to see, too, almost spilling the olive oil we were using on him. I looked at the boy's left wrist where I remembered a big, raw oozing place just where the cuff of his clothes had ended. The wrist was dry now and covered with the faint pink of new skin. 'But his face,' said Mama. 'His poor face and his eyes!' She turned away, blinking tears, and reached for a cup of water. 'He must have lots of liquids,' she said, matter-of-factly. 'But if he's unconscious-' I clutched at my few lessons in home care of the sick. Father lifted the boy's head and shoulders carefully, but even his care wasn't gentle enough. The boy moaned and murmured something. Father held the cup to his blistered mouth and tipped the water to the dry lips. There was a moment's pause, then the water was gulped eagerly and the boy murmured something again. 'More?' asked Father clearly. 'More?' The face rolled to him, then away, and there was no answer. 'He'll need much care for a while,' Father said to Mama as they anointed his burns and put on fresh bandages. 'Do you think you can manage under the circumstances?' Mama nodded. 'With Barney to help with the lifting.' 'Sure I'll help,' I said. Then to Father, 'Should I have said meteorite?' He nodded gravely. Then he said, 'There are other planets.' And left me to digest that one! Father was spending his days digging for water in the river bottom. He had located one fair-sized pool that so far was keeping our livestock watered. We could still find drinking water for us up Sometime Creek. But the blue shimmer Of the sky got more and more like heated metal. Heat was like a hand, pressing everything under the sky down into the powdery dead ground. The boy was soon sitting up and eating a little of the little we had. But still no word from him, not a sound, even when we changed the dressings on his deeply charred left shoulder, or when the scabs across his left cheek cracked across and bled. Then, one day, when all of us had been out of the cabin, straining our eyes prayerfully at the faint shadow of a cloud I thought I had seen over the distant Coronas, we came back, disheartened, to find the boy sitting in Mama's rocker by the window. But we had to carry him hack to the cot. His feet seemed to have forgotten how to make steps. Father looked down at him lying quietly on the cot. 'If he can make it to the window, he can begin to take care of his own needs. Mother is overburdened as it is.' So I was supposed to explain to him that there would be no more basin for his use, hut that the chamberpot under the cot was for him! How do you explain to someone who can't see and doesn't talk and that you're not at all sure even hears you? I told Father I felt like a mother cat training a kitten. 'Come on, fellow,' I said to him, glad we had the cabin to ourselves. I tugged at his unscarred right arm and urged him until, his breath catching between clenched teeth, he sat up and swung his feet over the cot edge. His hand went out to me and touched my cheek. His bandaged face turned to me and his hand faltered. Then quickly he traced my features-my eyes, my nose, my ears, across my head, and down to my shoulders. Then he sighed a
