CHAPTER ONE
I am what folks in the mountains refer to as a found-ling, what the Cherokee call oo-da-ni-ya-da, an orphan. Uncle Felix was the one who found me. He was setting up his Harmony Box on the rise that last warm night of August when it happened.
For forty years, my uncle Felix has been trying to capture the sound planets make when they move by one another in space. He follows the theories of Pythagoras, who lived more than two thousand years ago and called this sound the harmony of the spheres. This is the music Felix listens for on a little black metal box he invented himself.
On clear nights, Felix sets up his Harmony Box, puts on his headset and sits on the rise until dawn. He searches for lost stars and comets with no names, and occasionally, if he's lucky, he comes home with at least one good recording of the wind through the trees.
On that particular August evening, Felix had also brought along his telescope to watch the Perseid meteor showers, which occur every year about that time. Felix said the sky was clear and filled with shooting stars, and as he was gazing up at the northern sky, one bright star fell and crashed to earth straight through the roof of my aunt Nettie Mae's chicken coop. Nettie Mae has had Rhode Island Reds and Black Austrolorps in that coop, but she'd never had a star before.
Felix found that star quite remarkable, but not as remarkable as what was lying beside it, naked and crowing louder than a rooster. And that was my first introduction to Felix McGillicuddy fifteen years ago.
From that moment on, Uncle Felix and Aunt Nettie Mae have raised me as their own. Felix is convinced I am a star child and insisted at first on naming me Arcturus, as that was the constellation he most accurately figures I must have fallen from. But Nettie Mae disagreed. She said no child, star or otherwise, should have to lug a name as heavy as Arcturus through life, so they came to a compromise.
They settled on Harmony for Felix's great passion and McClean for Nettie Mae's people, who have lived in these mountains for four generations. A name from both heaven and earth, they agreed, would keep me well grounded in the world.
Since I turned fourteen last August, however, I have felt less than grounded in the world. There is a restlessness inside me--a feeling I'm getting too big for my life. Growing right out of my skin. In fact, if I could zip myself open and step out, I would. In a second, I would.
I have been noticing things about myself lately that are . . . well . . . surprising, to say the least. I'm able to lay all the silverware on the table, for instance, and then think about where I want the forks and spoons and knives to go, and they just move beside the plates or onto a napkin. All I have to do is think about what I want and it happens. It's amazing in one way and scary in another.
So far, our cat, Fellini, is the only one who knows my secret. One afternoon shortly after my birthday, Fellini witnessed me making a fire in the fireplace without any matches. I was cold and too lazy to get up and make a fire myself, so I just sat in front of the pile of dry wood and thought of combustion. Within a minute the wood was smoking; within two minutes there was a roaring fire in the grate. Fellini hid under the bed and didn't come out for two days. She still refuses to sit on my lap. Nettie Mae thinks Fellini must have gotten into a patch of catnip, because she's never seen her act so peculiar.
I can't bring myself to tell Nettie Mae or Felix the truth about my new abilities, because I don't know what the truth is yet. I know what they'd do if they did find out, though. Nettie Mae would whip up a tea of oat straw and hops to settle my nerves, and Felix would say that he's been right all along and I am merely displaying the qualities of a star child. "Harmony," he'd say. "You are a gift from the stars. Who would expect anything different from you?" Then he would proceed to turn me into his new scientific project, and I'd end up spending the next year of my life sitting in his studio with electrodes pressed to my temples.
I don't want to be someone's scientific project or the subject of gossip, as I have been for years. I've already spent most of my life trying to live down the events of my birth as it is. I don't want to start all over again trying to convince people I'm not strange.
The truth is I actually find the whole thing kind of fascinating, if not bewildering. It's like holding a little seedling in my hand and hoping one day it will come to something, like a flower or a tomato plant or a tree. I'm just not ready to put that seedling in the ground yet and risk someone stepping on it. I want to hold it to myself awhile longer until I know what it's all about.
Besides, Felix and Nettie Mae have more important things to do than worry about how many spoons I can move or fires I can make with my mind. There's too much work to do on our farm as it is. Cutting wood and feeding chickens. Keeping the roof from leaking. Nettie Mae is both doctor and midwife. Her days are spent preparing herbal remedies and tending to sick folk. Felix has his inventions. I have my studies. And then there are the trees. We all have to take care of the trees.
Nettie Mae, Felix and I live in the very northeastern corner of Tennessee in the Hamlin Mountains on the edge of the national forest.
From the Hardcover edition.Continues...
Excerpted from Harmony by Rita Murphy Copyright © 2004 by Rita Murphy. Excerpted by permission.
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