Me and Mr. Bell Read online

  Me & Mr. Bell

  by Philip Roy

  Me & Mr. Bell

  by Philip Roy

  Cape Breton University Press

  Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada

  Copyright © 2013 Philip Roy

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, places and events depicted are used fictitiously or are products of the author’s imagination.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Cape Breton University Press recognizes fair dealing exceptions under Access Copyright. Responsibility for the opinions, research and the permissions obtained for this publication rests with the author.

  Cape Breton University Press recognizes the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Block Grant program, and the Province of Nova Scotia, through the Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage, for our publishing program. Mr. Roy would also like to acknowledge Arts Nova Scotia for including him in its Grants for Individuals program.

  We are pleased to work in partnership with these bodies to develop and promote our cultural resources.

  Main cover image: Courtesy of the Beaton Institute

  Cover layout: Cathy MacLean Design, Chéticamp, NS

  Layout: Mike Hunter, Port Hawkesbury and Sydney, NS

  eBook development: WildElement.ca

  First printed in Canada

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Roy, Philip, 1960-, author

  Me & Mr. Bell : a novel / Philip Roy.

  ISBN 978-1-927492-55-0 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978-1-927492-56-7 (web pdf.)

  ISBN 978-1-927492-57-4 (epub.)

  ISBN 978-1-927492-58-1 (mobi.)

  1. Bell, Alexander Graham, 1847-1922--Juvenile fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS8635.O91144M45 2013 jC813'.6 C2013-903768-3

  Cape Breton University Press

  PO Box 5300, Sydney, Nova Scotia, B1P 6L2 Canada

  For Jacob Gibbons-Cook, who inspired me with his compassion and integrity.

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks to Marianne Ward for her excellent editorial work on this book, and thanks to Mike Hunter for overseeing the whole project. I am blessed to have the daily support and inspiration of my wife, Leila (and furry Fritzi); my wonderful kids, Julia, Peter, Thomas (and partner, Lydia), and Julian; my sister, Angela; my darling mother, Ellen; and closest friends, Chris, Natasha and Chiara. And thanks to Jake, to whom this book is dedicated.

  Chapter 1

  It was spring 1908. I had just turned ten. The world famous inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, was returning to Baddeck on the steamer. My father, who said that Mr. Bell was the smartest man alive, told me to run down the hill to the McLeary farm with a message. Mr. McLeary would give me a message to carry back. This was an important task, my father said. Could he trust me with it?

  I thought it over. All I had to do was hold the message in my hand and run down the hill, cross a field and run down another hill until I reached the McLeary farm, about half a mile away. Then I would run back. That didn’t sound too hard, so I said yes. My father sat down and wrote out the message very carefully, folded it and handed it to me. Then he held my arm and looked me in the eye. “You can do this, Eddie, can you?”

  I could tell how important it was to my father by the feel of his hand on my arm. It was the first time he had ever asked me to carry a message to someone. I nodded my head obediently.

  “Can you?” he asked again to be sure.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Good then. Off you go.”

  I went out the door and ran down the hill.

  The McLeary house sat between our house and the lake. It looked like a matchbox from far away. When you came closer, it spread out like open drawers in a bureau. Mr. McLeary built it himself a few years ago, but he put it halfway up the hill instead of on top of it, and the rain ran down the hill and pooled around the house. So he dug a ditch behind the house to draw the water away. But he steered the ditch into the field where he kept his cows, and the extra water turned the field into such a mucky mess that the cows slipped and fell, and one of them broke its leg and he had to kill it before he wanted to. Then he had to build a fence to keep the cows in one part of the field. Every time I saw him out in his field, he was cursing the cows and cursing the hill and the rain and the sky.

  My boots beat like a drum when I walked across the porch. Mrs. McLeary met me at the door. “Hello there, young Eddie. What brings you down here all by yourself? Did your mom send you for sugar?”

  Mrs. McLeary was nice enough, but she never seemed to be really paying attention.

  “No, Mrs. McLeary. My father sent me. He told me to give this to Mr. McLeary.” I showed her the note.

  “John! There’s a message for you from Donald MacDonald.”

  Mr. McLeary came into the kitchen. He was a big man and his face was always red. He had never spoken to me before. “A message for me, is there?”

  “It’s from Donald MacDonald.”

  I could tell from her voice that that was supposed to mean something, but I didn’t know what it was. Mr. McLeary looked down at me with eyes that reminded me of a cow. They were big, fat and worried. “Well? Where is it?”

  I raised my arm. He took the message out of my hand and crushed my fingers when he did it. He opened the paper and frowned hard and squinted. “What does it say?”

  I swallowed hard. I didn’t know what it said; I only knew it was about Mr. Bell. Mrs. McLeary peeked over his shoulder. “Ah, he’s askin’ about Mr. Bell. When he’s comin’.”

  “When he’s comin’?”

  I nodded now that I knew what it was about.

  Mr. McLeary looked at me as if I was the one who had written the message. “He’s comin’ tonight!”

  “He knows he comin’ tonight, John,” said Mrs. McLeary. “He wants to know what time he’s comin’.”

  Mr. McLeary frowned even more. “He’s comin’ at eight! Tell him he’s comin’ at eight.”

  “You’d better write it down, John. The lad might not remember it right.”

  Mr. McLeary held his breath and turned a shade of purple. “What’s to remember? He’s comin’ at eight!”

  “Write it down, John.”

  “Ah, lordy!”

  He fumbled around in his overalls until he found a short pencil, then handed it to me. “Here! Write this down. He’s comin’ at eight!”

  I stared up at him. Did he mean for me to write it?

  “Write it!” he barked at me. “He’s comin’ at eight!”

  He pulled at his suspenders and turned away. Mrs. McLeary was busy in the kitchen. I felt awkward standing there by myself.

&n
bsp; “Did your mom send you for sugar, Eddie?”

  I turned and looked over at her. Mrs. McLeary was kneading dough for bread, and her head was down. She had already asked me that, and I had answered her. I didn’t know if I should answer again. “No, Mrs. McLeary, my father—”

  “Oh, that’s right. Did you write it down?”

  “Not yet, Mrs. McLeary.”

  I held the paper in my left hand and the pencil in my right. I would rather have used my left hand to write because my left hand was better at everything, but I couldn’t. You weren’t allowed to write with your left hand. You could hold things with it, carry things with it, eat and comb your hair with it, but not write with it. I didn’t know why.

  On the paper, my father’s handwriting looked beautiful, like waves in the lake when it’s windy and the water curls a million times the same way, except every now and then there was a fancy shape, as if a seal had stuck its head out of the water, spun around in a somersault and dove back down. The look of my father’s handwriting made me feel proud of him.

  I knew Mr. Bell was coming at eight, so I figured I wouldn’t have to write out the whole sentence. I could just write the word eight. But for some reason I had a really hard time remembering how to spell words. In my head, it was as clear as could be. I just thought of the number eight and I knew what it was – eight cows, eight trees, eight apples, eight people – eight was exactly eight, and I knew that as perfectly as I knew anything. The problem was when I tried to write it down. Something got in the way in my mind, and I felt confused and had to concentrate really hard for the simplest thing. I didn’t know why that was, and I never told anybody. I avoided writing as much as possible.

  But I did remember something important about the number eight that we had learned in school, that it didn’t have the letter a in it, even though it sounded like it did. It had an e. I always thought that was strange. I also knew it had a t in it. So, I put those letters down. But I wasn’t sure what else went in it. Something told me there was an h too, so I made an h. But I always confused h with n because they looked the same to me the way my teacher wrote them, except that one of them had a longer stick than the other. I just couldn’t remember which one.

  “Are you done?” said Mrs. McLeary. “Your father will be waitin’ on you. You’d better scoot.”

  “Okay.”

  I handed the pencil to Mrs. McLeary, went out the door and ran back up the hill. My father was waiting. He took the note from my hand, read it and stared at me. “You gave it to Mr. McLeary, did you?”

  I nodded.

  “And this is all he gave you back?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Well, he’s a man of few words, isn’t he?”

  I just stared at my father. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to explain everything the way it happened at the McLeary house.

  “Okay then, Eddie. Thank you. Sweep the barn before dark, will you?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  I went into the barn, picked up the broom and started sweeping. I enjoyed sweeping the barn clean. It gave me a feeling of satisfaction. I was feeling especially happy this night because I had run an errand for my father successfully. It made me feel smart.

  It didn’t last long.

  Chapter 2

  The steamer arrived shortly before eight. A small crowd of locals gathered to welcome Mr. Bell back. They clapped when he stepped onto the dock, and shook his hand and wished him well. My father was not there. He arrived half an hour before ten, when the dock was in darkness and no one else was there. He waited for an hour, staring across the water for any sign of the boat. Then he came home, kicked the post of my bed and woke me up. I had never seen him so angry before. I hardly even recognized him. He waved the message in his hand as if it were on fire. “How could you be so stupid?”

  I didn’t know what to do. For a second I wondered if he was going to hit me. He had never hit me before, but some of my friends had been hit by their fathers. Maybe this was the first time it would happen to me. I lay still while he stared at me, his eyes wild with frustration and anger. I didn’t understand why it was so important to meet the steamer, and I couldn’t stand the way he was staring at me. It seemed like he was trying to make up his mind about something. He looked so disappointed.

  It was the way he had looked when it rained all through the month of July the year before, when the hay was ruined. He dropped his head and shook it from side to side, like a horse that didn’t want to wear the bridle. Suddenly I wished he would hit me instead of staring at me like that, because it felt like he didn’t recognize me, as if I wasn’t even his son anymore. I couldn’t stand it. Then he left the room. A shiver went up my spine, and I pulled the covers tight around me. I didn’t understand what had just happened; I just knew that it was bad.

  In the morning, my father pretended not to see me. He walked right by me as if I wasn’t even there. I turned to my mother, and she looked like she was trying to make up her mind about something, too. After my father went to the barn, she told me to sit at the table and gave me a pencil and a piece of paper. “You’re a smart boy, Eddie, I know you are. Now, I want you to write out the word eight.”

  “Write it?”

  She smiled, but I could see that she was frustrated.

  “Now, why would you ask me that? I just told you. Aren’t you listening?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay then, write it out.”

  I stared at the paper and the pencil.

  “Pick it up,” she said.

  I picked up the pencil, but couldn’t remember how to hold it for writing; I was too upset. I felt like I was going to cry.

  “Write it, Eddie. Write the word. I know you can.”

  I stared at my mother’s hands. They were always wrinkled after she did the washing. And when they weren’t wrinkled, they were dry and had thin cracks that sometimes bled. Her hands were so strong. My father’s hands were strong, but so were my mother’s. I wondered if she would understand that I couldn’t remember how to hold the pencil. She was the only one who might.

  “Write it, Eddie!”

  I looked up at her. My lips were shaking, and I was doing everything not to cry.

  “I can’t.”

  She frowned. “What do you mean, you can’t? Of course you can. Don’t be stubborn, Eddie. It’s not a good way to be. You’ve been to school a long time now; I know you can write the word eight. It’s not that hard.”

  “I can’t remember….” My voice was breaking.

  “Oh, come on now, don’t be silly. Put the pencil against the paper and write it. It’s just a simple word, Eddie. Don’t be stubborn. Everyone can write the word eight.”

  She was right. Everyone could write that word. It was simple. It had to be. I pressed the pencil against the paper and pushed it up. It made a mark, but I couldn’t remember where to take it next, and I just drew a line that looked like a tree with only one branch. My mother leaned over my shoulder and looked at what I had done. She stared at the page as if she were staring at a loaf of bread that didn’t rise, that came out of the oven like a block of wood. Then she stood up straight and took a deep breath the way she did at church when the priest was finally finished talking, and we could go home. “Lord Almighty, your father was right.”

  After that, my family treated me differently. My older sister and younger brother took the trouble to show me how to write, and each thought that if only they showed me how, I would be able to do it, like them. I thought so, too. But I couldn’t. And they got frustrated. Then my sister explained that it was just as if I had a lame leg or something like that. I was a learning cripple. That’s how I should look at it. My brother said that I was just being stubborn, because that’s what he heard my mother say. Then my mother said that there were lots of farmers who couldn’t read or write, so I needn’t worry; I could always be a farmer
or work for a farmer, but I probably couldn’t be anything else. I wondered if I would be happy being a farmer. I wouldn’t mind, I guessed. Most people were farmers. But there was a small nagging feeling inside of me – what if I didn’t want to be a farmer? What if I wanted to be something else? What would I do then? Luckily, I didn’t have to worry about that yet; I was only ten.

  My family talked to me differently, too. They slowed down when they spoke and explained things more carefully than they needed to. At first, I thought it was silly, but I quickly got used to it. We all did. Sometimes they would get impatient trying to explain something, especially my brother, and I would have to finish it for him, but we all got used to the idea that I was a learning cripple and never questioned it anymore. My father still expected me to do my chores, but he never asked me to run an errand for him again, and he started teaching my younger brother things that he didn’t teach me.

  My father didn’t believe as my mother did, that a farmer didn’t need to read and write. He thought that the most important thing a man could do was to read about the world and become smart, whether he was a farmer or a fisherman or a priest. And he took great pride in the fact that the smartest man in the world lived in our community, just a few miles away, even though he had never met him. Why he gave up on me so quickly, I never knew. I had never thought of my father as someone to give up easily.

  The thing that bothered me the most was when my mother came to the school and explained to the teacher, in front of all of my friends, that I had a problem with learning and that the teacher shouldn’t expect as much from me anymore, because it wasn’t fair to me. The teacher nodded her head as if she knew all about it and never even said a word to me. She told my mother that she had known there was something wrong all along but never said anything about it, because she was just waiting for me to catch up.

  My friends pretended nothing was different when we were outside of school, but in class they made funny faces and rolled their eyes at me. And I didn’t like that the boys who were never as smart as me before suddenly thought they were smarter. I still got bored in class waiting for them to understand math, and I stared out the window when the teacher was explaining things to them that I already understood. They still asked me questions about how things worked when we were outside in the field. But in the classroom they could write things that I couldn’t, and that seemed to be the most important thing. And they liked to come and show me their work and tell me that I should do it just like them. In my mind, I knew I was smarter. But I couldn’t show it.