The Rock in the Canola

The combine hit it at four in the afternoon on a Wednesday and Walt knew, from the sound, that it wasn't a normal rock. Normal rocks in that field were known. He'd been pulling them for forty years and his father before him, and they went in the pile at the corner by the slough and they were grey and flat and boring. This one was black. It was the size of a football and it was heavier than a thing that size should be, and when he picked it up, which took both hands and a grunt, the sun caught it and it had a skin on it, a dull dark glaze like something had been burned. He put it in the truck. He didn't say anything at supper. He put it on the workbench in the shop and looked at it for a few evenings with a beer, and on the Saturday he took a magnet off the fridge and held it to the rock and the magnet stuck. "Huh," he said. His daughter Jess, who was home from Saskatoon for the harvest, found him out there. "What's that?" "Rock." "That's not a rock, Dad." "I know it's not a rock." She took photos and sent them to somebody she knew from university who sent them to somebody else, and by the Tuesday there was an email from a woman at the university with the word "meteorite" in it and a request to come and look, and Walt read it twice and said, "Well, I'm not driving it to Saskatoon." They came to him. Two of them, in a university car, in November, when the field was under a foot of snow. A woman about Jess's age with a case of equipment and an older man who did not stop smiling from the moment he saw the thing on the workbench. "May I?" he said, and Walt said sure, and the man put on gloves and picked it up and turned it over and made a sound Walt had only ever heard from people looking at newborns. "Fusion crust," he said. "Beautiful fusion crust. Look at the regmaglypts."

"The what?" "The thumbprints. See? Like someone pressed their thumbs into clay. That's the air doing that, coming in. It was molten on the outside for about ten seconds." Walt looked at the thumbprints. He'd noticed them. He hadn't had a word. They weighed it. They took a little piece off with a saw for the lab, apologising the whole time, and Walt said it was fine, it was a rock, but he watched the saw closer than he'd have admitted. The woman filled in a form with a GPS coordinate for the field and asked him when he'd found it and whether he'd seen anything in the sky in the weeks before. "I'm on a combine twelve hours a day. I don't look up." "Fair." Over squares in the kitchen the older man explained where it had likely come from, and Walt listened, and understood about a third, and the third he understood was: older than the earth. Older than the sun, some of it, some of the grains inside. Sitting in space for four and a half billion years and then coming down in his canola. "So what happens to it?" said Ruth, his wife, who had been quiet. "That's up to you. It's yours. It landed on your land. We'd love to have it, of course. The university. It'd be studied, catalogued, it'd have your name on it in the database if you wanted. Or you can keep it. Or sell it. Collectors pay a lot." "How much?" He said a number. Ruth put her coffee down. Walt looked out the window at the field under the snow. Forty years. His father before him. A rock pile at the corner by the slough. "What would you call it?" he said. "In the database." "The nearest named place. So, the town." "Not the farm?" The man smiled. "We could put the farm." Walt nodded slowly. He didn't say yes. He didn't say no. He cut himself another square and ate it looking at the rock on the table, black and heavy and older than everything, and Ruth watched him and knew what he'd decided before he did.