An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [55]
And the swine jumped over the cliff.
And the voice cried, Samuel, Samuel. And the wakened boy Samuel answered, Here am I. And at last he said, Speak.
Hear O Israel, the Lord is one.
And Peter said, I know him not; I know him not; I know him not. And the rich young ruler said, What must I do? And the woman wiped his feet with her hair. And he said, Who touched me?
And he said, Verily, verily, verily, verily; life is not a dream. Let this cup pass from me. If it be thy will, of course, only if it be thy will.
I GOT MY ROCK COLLECTION from our grandparents’ paper boy. He handed it to me in three heavy grocery bags; he said he had no time for a rock collection. Amy and I visited Oma and Company every Friday; while Mary cooked dinner, I roamed their solemn neighborhood, where our family would, as it happened, soon live ourselves. The indigenous children kept mum inside their stone houses; the paper boy—having pedaled his thick black bike, plus rocks, up from an Italian neighborhood down the hill—was the only sign of life.
The paper boy got the rock collection from a solitary old man named Downey, who until recently had lived just up the street from my grandparents. Mr. Downey had collected the rocks from all over. He had given them to the paper boy, in the grocery bags, explaining that he knew no one else. Then he had died. The paper boy, who was kind but very busy, did not remember the names of any of the rocks except the stalactites; he recalled, not helpfully, that Mr. Downey had found them in a cave. The stalactites were sorry-looking at their broken ends: sharp, yellow, and hollow, like fallen deciduous teeth.
Now I had these rocks. They were yellow, green, blue, and red. Most were the size of half-bricks. One small white wafer had blue stone stars. Some were knobby, some grainy, some slick. There was a shining brown mineral the color of shoe polish; its cubed crystals made a scratchy chunk. There was a rusty cluster of petrified roses. There was a frozen froth of platinum bubbles. It was a safe bet all these rocks had names.
From the Homewood Library’s children’s books I could learn only the vaguest, overamazed stories of “the earth’s crust,” which didn’t interest me. What were all these yellow and blue rocks in my room, and why did I never find any rocks so various and sharp? From library adult books I got the true dope, and it was a long story, which involved me in a project less like bird-watching or stamp collecting than like life in a forensic laboratory. The books taught me to identify the rocks. They also lent me a vision of things, and informed me about a bizarre set of people.
You got Frederick H. Pough’s Field Guide to Rocks and Minerals. Using this and other books, you identified your rocks one by one, keying them out as you key out plants with Gray’s Manual, through a series of diagnostic tests.
You determined, for instance, where your rock fit on Mohs’ scale of hardness. Mr. Mohs (Herr Mohs, actually) had devised a series of homespun tests for rock hardness, much as Mr. Beaufort had dreamed up homespun tests for wind force. Does smoke rise straight from the chimney? The wind is not blowing. Is your house falling over? It’s blowing force ten. Number one on Mohs’ scale was soft rock, to wit, talc. Can you crumble it in your fingers? It’s soft. What you have there is talcum powder. Can it scratch a fingernail, a copper penny, a pane of glass, and a knife blade? It’s quartz. You can scratch quartz with topaz, ruby, and diamond. If it makes your diamond saw clog, it’s a meteorite.
You subjected your rocks to scratch tests. You procured a piece of bathroom tile (always, in the books, hexagonal, such as you find in old New York bathrooms and nowhere else) and stroked your rock across its unglazed underside. What color was the streak?
Yellow pyrite drew a black streak, black limonite drew a yellow