"It stood in my beans and sorted them," says Oswin Verhaegen, who was wringing out a dishcloth at his yard pump when it came. "Straight pods to the left, crooked to the right. Nobody asked it to." The alien of Nevelkamp comes down in a seed-shaped husk the size of a hay wagon, clear as pond ice, and settles into a bean row without snapping a stalk. I reached the farm that morning from Eelderwijk, six miles by the dike road. The dogs were already under the cart. The hens had stopped mid-scratch. Around the husk the beans lay flat in a ring nine paces across, every leaf rimed white though the sun stood high and hot.
It steps out after an hour. It is eight feet from crown to heel, thin as a gate post, slate gray, with a smooth egg of a head and black eyes that have no lids, each ringed in pale gold. Its hands hang to the knee, seven fingers apiece. It lays one palm flat on the pump handle, the gatepost, the barn door and Oswin's left boot, and moves on. At the horse trough it kneels and drinks the water down in about twelve minutes. Apples left on the kitchen sill are hollow by evening, skins whole, light as wasp paper. Before it turns back to the husk it lays its palm against my walking stick, and that is all. By night the stick is a thumb's breadth short at the ferrule. So is the gatepost.
Nobody in Nevelkamp lends it anything, not a bucket, not a spoon. Ottilie Brandt did once, out of plain manners, and handed over her rake. It came back with the tines straightened and evenly spaced and the handle a thumb shorter. She has not forgiven it. Her rake was fine, she says, and she says so at every church supper, to anyone seated near the potatoes.
At dusk it returns to the husk and stays inside for months. I came back in October. The ring had grown to eleven paces. The husk, clear in spring, had gone the white of a boiled egg, and the beans, which Oswin plants in thirty-eight rows, stood in forty-one, each row sorted by the curve of its pods. Fence posts along the lane have been recut a thumb taller than the rails call for. Carpenters from Eelderwijk now measure Nevelkamp jobs twice and add the thumb without being asked. The instruction there is given flatly, to children and carters alike: cut every board a thumb long, keep the trough full, and put nothing in its hands.
- Classification
- Aberration, sky-fallen measurer
- Habitat
- Farmland around its landing husk
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- 8 ft tall, hands to the knee
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Lowland polders and bean country
- Binomial
- Stellicola mensor
- Diet
- Standing water and fruit sweetness
- Temperament
- Methodical, indifferent, faintly fussy