Me and Mr. Bell Page 6

  I dug and dug without knowing how much time had passed. My belly growled. Then I saw a dark figure at the top of the hill. It came down the hill in the rain, carrying a basket. It was my mother. She was talking to me, but I couldn’t hear her until she came close. “Where’s your father?” Her face was twisted up in confusion at finding me by myself.

  “He took the plow to the blacksmith. It has a crack in it.”

  “And left you alone to work in the rain?”

  “He told me to shovel around this stone.”

  She looked down at the stone and frowned angrily. I think it was the angriest I had ever seen her. “Hurry up and finish so you can come home. You’ll get sick if you stay out in this. Here. Eat this.”

  “Okay.”

  She handed me the basket but couldn’t take her eyes away from the stone, as if it were some strange creature we had discovered in the ground. She shook her head. “This is a man’s job. Eat quickly before the rain turns it to mush on you.”

  “Thank you.”

  She turned and went up the hill. I opened the basket and found a thick sandwich with butter and jam. There was a jar of milk, too. I turned my back to the rain and ate as quickly as I could and drank the milk. My hands were blistered, but it was probably the best milk and sandwich I had ever tasted. My mother had used lots of butter and jam. She wasn’t famous like the Bells or Helen Keller, but she was just as nice. I liked that she had called this man’s work. I dropped my head and got back to shovelling.

  I didn’t know how long I had been at it. With the rain falling and the wind howling, I just kept my eyes fixed on each side of the stone as I kicked the spade into the ground and pulled the mud away. Finally, I saw that I had worked my way completely around the stone. Now I was in a hole up to my waist, and the water was at my knees. The rain fell clean but turned to mud the second it landed in the hole. I climbed out, stood up and stared at the uncovered stone. It was as big as a cow! I turned to pick up the basket and saw my father’s boots. He was standing right behind me. He scared me because I didn’t know he was there. He wasn’t looking at me; he was staring at the stone with a kind of frightened look on his face, as if we had found a monster. He narrowed his eyes, glared at the stone and spoke softly.

  “Well, your mother was right. I must have been crazy to think I could plow this field. I may be master of this farm, but that stone is master of this field. That was decent work, Eddie. You can return to school now if you want to. Thank you.” My father turned around and walked back toward the house. He didn’t wait for me.

  Chapter 12

  I should have gone to school. But my father said I could return if I wanted to. That meant that I didn’t have to. There was something else I wanted to do more.

  Instead of returning to the house, I went into the barn. It was nice and dry. I went into the room where my father kept chains, rope and pulleys. There were several chains, three pulleys and lots of rope. I had never used the pulleys before, but had watched my father use them to lift heavy things in the barn. As I stood and stared at the equipment for a long time, I tried to form a plan in my mind. I wanted to move the stone all by myself but didn’t know enough about it. I needed more information, and I figured I knew where to find it. But it would have to wait until tomorrow.

  In the morning, I left for school before my brother and sister were ready. Miss Lawrence was sitting at her desk when I came in. “Good morning, Eddie. You’re here early. What brings you to school early?”

  “Hello, Miss Lawrence. I need to look up something in a book.”

  “Do you? Well, aren’t you smart?” She didn’t sound like she believed me. “And what book would that be?”

  I looked up at the bookshelf. “That one. Applied Mathematics.”

  She looked up. “That one? That book is too hard, Eddie. You don’t want that one.”

  “May I see it?”

  “No. It’s too…. Look, I’ll show you.” She went to the bookshelf, reached up and pulled the book down from the shelf. Balls of dust came with it. She handed it to me and then she sneezed.

  I put the book down on a desk – it was really heavy! I opened it up, flipped through the pages and saw lots of pictures of people building things with blocks and triangles and carrying heavy weights on wheels and lifting things with ropes and pulleys. Miss Lawrence read the whole title out loud. “Fundamentals of Applied Mathematics. Eddie, I don’t think this is the book you want to look at. I think you want to try something a whole lot simpler.”

  I kept flipping through the pages until I saw the pictures I was looking for. I didn’t know how to spell pulleys, but I knew what they looked like.

  “Eddie. I—”

  “I found it!” I flipped through a few more pages.

  “Eddie.”

  “I’m … just….”

  “Eddie. This book is too old for you. Eddie?”

  “Here it is. I found it, Miss Lawrence.”

  She looked at me with her disbelieving look.

  “May I borrow this book, Miss Lawrence, just for a couple of days? I promise to bring it back.”

  “No, Eddie, this book is simply too difficult for you. I am sorry.”

  She picked up the book and started putting it back.

  “It’s for my father.”

  “For your father?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh. Well, why didn’t you say so? Here you go. Don’t forget to bring it back.”

  “I won’t. Oh, and I can’t come to school tomorrow. I have to help my father.”

  Miss Lawrence nodded her head, and now she wore her believing look. I felt a little guilty for not explaining everything, but I really was helping my father, and so I wasn’t actually lying.

  After school, I waited until my brother and sister left before I carried the book home. I took it to the barn and put it on a bench behind some rope. Then I went into the house, changed my clothes and sat down at the kitchen table for cookies and milk. My brother knew I was up to something and watched me closely and followed me out to the barn when I went to do my chores. But he got bored standing around watching me sweep and clean up after the horses. And I reminded him he was supposed to clean the chicken coop. Finally he left, and I could open the book in privacy. I might have shared my plan with him if he didn’t keep correcting me all the time. It made me not want to be around him at all. I also didn’t want him to tell anyone what I was planning to do.

  I opened the book and found the pages with pictures of pulleys. There were arrows that pointed in the direction of a man pulling on a rope and a large box rising off the ground. There were pictures of simple pulleys and more complicated ones. The pictures were good at showing you how to set up the ropes. Then there were arrows in many different directions, and it was a little confusing. But the more I stared at the pictures, the better I understood. There were words too, but of course I couldn’t make sense of the words. Did that matter? If the pictures showed me what to do, wasn’t that enough? But I wasn’t sure. Not knowing what the words meant made me a little nervous. What if they explained something really important that the pictures didn’t show? I wished I could learn what the words said before I started.

  After dinner, I tried to sneak the book up to my room, but my sister saw it. “What’s that, an atlas?”

  “No, it’s a math book.”

  “It doesn’t look like a math book; it’s too big.”

  “It’s applied math.”

  “You must be kidding.”

  “I’m not. I like math.”

  “Eddie, when I said you should read more, I meant real books, not math books.”

  “This is a real book.”

  “No, it isn’t.” My sister made a face and dropped her head into her book. I went to my room, lay on my bed and opened the book. On the top of the page, I saw the word Archimedes. What was that? I wanted to kn
ow, so I poked my head into my sister’s room. “Do you know what A-r-c-h-i-m-e-d-e-s means?”

  “I think it’s a place.”

  “I don’t think that’s right. Do you have a dictionary?”

  “I don’t need a dictionary.”

  Then I remembered that my father had a dictionary. He kept it on the bookshelf with his other books – his prized possessions. No one ever touched his books but him. But maybe I could just borrow his dictionary for a couple of hours and be really careful with it, and nobody would notice. So I did. I went downstairs quietly, pulled the dictionary off the shelf, shoved it under my sweater and went back up to my room.

  The nice thing about dictionaries was that everything was put in order with the alphabet, and it didn’t matter how slow you were; if you were patient enough you could find whatever word you wanted. It took me a long time to find Archimedes, but there it was. “Archimedes. Ancient Greek mathematician. Born in 287 BC.” Great. What did that mean? Well, I recognized the math part of mathematician. Then I looked up ancient and learned that it meant old. I knew that BC meant Before Christ, which meant it was a really long time ago. I stared at the word born and tried to say it. Suddenly, I knew what Archimedes was. It wasn’t a thing, it was a person. It was the guy who had invented the laws for pulleys and other things. He was the guy that Miss Lawrence was reading about in school. Yay! I had figured it out. I went back to the math book and studied the pictures. Now I was happy.

  I studied for a long time and had to look up more words in the dictionary, and that took forever and was exhausting, but by the time I went to sleep, I was pretty sure I understood how pulleys worked. For every pulley you added to a rope that was pulling something heavy, your work was cut in half. If you wanted to lift a stone that was twice as heavy, you had to run your rope through another pulley. You could lift something really heavy if you wanted to. In fact, you could probably lift a house off the ground if you used enough pulleys and rope that was strong enough.

  But there were a couple of problems. First, every time you added a pulley, you had to use twice as much rope. Second, even though the pulleys turned on little wheels that made everything smooth, the more pulleys you used, the more friction there was against the rope. And that was dangerous. I had to look up the word friction. But even then I didn’t understand it. That’s what took me the longest. The pictures showed sharp lines coming from the pulleys and a danger sign and an arrow pointing to the word friction. But I was so tired when I looked it up, and frustrated and impatient. And I couldn’t figure out what it meant. So I stuck my head into my sister’s room and asked her what it meant. She took my arm and rubbed it really fast, until it got hot and sore and I had to pull it away. Then she looked up at me. “That’s friction. Now go to bed.”

  Now I understood. If there was too much friction, or rubbing, the rope would get too hot and break.

  If it weren’t for the pictures, I wouldn’t have understood any of it. But I did. And now I felt ready to try it. Except I needed more pulleys and rope. And the only place where I knew I could get more was down the hill, from Mr. McLeary.

  Chapter 13

  Studying books was way more work than digging around a stone in a field. I was so tired I fell asleep with my clothes on. And that’s how I woke up in the morning. And I was late for school. My mother called up from the kitchen. “Hurry up, Eddie! You’re late! Your brother and sister already left.”

  I climbed out of bed a bit confused because I wasn’t completely awake yet. I came downstairs, washed my face and sat at the table for porridge. My mother looked at me with a worried face. “What’s with you lately, Eddie? You’ve been acting strange.”

  “I have?”

  “You have. It’s not like you to sleep in. Yesterday, you went to school early. Today, you can’t get out of bed. Hurry up and get going.”

  “Yes, Ma’am. Do you know where Dad is working today?”

  “Your father is cutting firewood today. He won’t be back until dark. Hurry up now. I’ve never seen you so slow.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.” I gobbled up my porridge, grabbed my jacket and boots and went down the hill to the McLeary farm.

  I found Mr. McLeary in his barn, walking behind the cow trough with a pail in his hand. He looked confused to see me there. He frowned with deep lines in his forehead, and his eyebrows went up, then came down, then went up again. “What are you doin’ here?”

  “Hello, Mr. McLeary. My father wants to know if he can borrow your rope and pulleys for just one day.”

  Mr. McLeary’s eyes opened wide. “My rope and pulleys? Does he? Well, I don’t see why not. I won’t be using my rope and pulleys today. What does he need them for?”

  I didn’t want to tell him why I needed them. “He just needs them for one day. I’ll bring them back tomorrow first thing.”

  He stared at me with his head tilted back, as if he were trying to stand up taller. He was already pretty tall. “I won’t be using them today,” he said. “Are you gonna carry them up the hill by yourself?”

  I nodded my head. “Yes.”

  He started into a room at the front of the barn. I followed him in. “What did you say he needs them for?”

  “Uh … he needs to make both sides equivalent.” I knew from math that equivalent meant equal.

  “He needs to make … oh, there you go, that’s your father’s fancy way of talkin’. What the heck does that mean?”

  “I think it means both sides are supposed to be the same.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I knew that. Yes, well, one of these days I might have to borrow your father’s rope and pulleys and make both of my sides the same too.”

  “Okay.”

  Mr. McLeary handed me a large coil of rope, pulled three pulleys off the wall and dropped them by my feet. I bent down and tried to pick everything up, but it was too heavy and awkward.

  “Here! Do it like this.” He lifted the rope over my head so it would hang over one of my shoulders. It was heavy. “Here!” He handed me one pulley laid flat, then put the other two on top of it. “Carry them like that.”

  With my arms stretched all the way down I could just fit the three pulleys in my arms with my chin resting on top of the pile. It was a lot to carry, but at least it was balanced now. “Thank you, Mr. McLeary. I’ll bring it all back tomorrow.”

  He nodded his head. “Tell your father I said hello.”

  “I will. Bye.” I went out of the barn and started up the hill. I had to stop three times to rest. Without taking the pulleys out of my arms, I knelt down and rested with my hands on the ground, then got up again. When I reached the farm, I went around the yard and into the barn from the back door. It was so nice to put the pulleys down and peel the rope from around my neck. I took my father’s rope, chains, pulleys and spade and piled everything into the wheelbarrow, then went out the back door and down to the rocky field. It was lucky my father would be away all day.

  When I reached the stone, I saw that the hole I had dug all around it was completely filled in with water. That didn’t surprise me. I went back to the barn for the horses and a bucket. I threw a harness on each horse and led them together out the back of the barn and down to the field. They were happy to come. It wasn’t raining and the air was fresh and cool.

  While the horses watched, I filled the bucket with muddy water dozens of times until the hole was empty. Next came the difficult part. I had to shovel a narrow tunnel underneath the stone so that I could pass a chain through. I needed to wrap the chains all around the stone so that they wouldn’t come off when the horses started to pull. It was a lot of work and harder than I thought it would be, but eventually the two tunnels I dug from each side met at the middle. I shoved a chain in and pushed it through with the spade. Then I climbed down on the other side and pulled it up. Now I was covered in mud. That didn’t matter; I was just so determined to make this work.

 
Once the chains were wrapped around the stone and linked together, I pushed the wheelbarrow over to the woods. This was the really tricky part. I had to choose five very strong trees where I could tie the pulleys. Each horse would pull one rope, and each rope would pass through three pulleys. But the two middle pulleys would be on the same tree. Between the pulleys, the ropes would make a shape like the letter W. One rope wouldn’t be strong enough to pull the stone. It would break for sure. But two horses pulling two ropes through six pulleys should be strong enough. It was really strong rope.

  It was lucky I had borrowed Mr. McLeary’s rope because it was a long way to the first tree and I had to tie ropes together to make them long enough. I just hoped that the knots where I tied them wouldn’t have to go through the pulleys, because they wouldn’t fit.

  I chose trees that were the same distance from the horses and the stone, on both sides, then tied the pulleys to them with chains and rope. When the pulleys were all in place, I went back to the stone and stared at the whole set up. It kind of scared me because the stone was so big and I was afraid that all I was going to do was break the ropes. Then I thought that maybe I could make it easier by shovelling the ground in front of the stone so that it would be like a ramp. Then the stone would slide out of the hole instead of having to be plucked out like a chestnut out of its shell. So I started digging again as fast as I could. Now I was really tired. But I wanted to make sure I was done before my sister and brother came home from school and told my mother I hadn’t been there today.

  Finally it was time to fit the ropes through the pulleys. I did the right side first. It took three pieces of rope tied together to reach the horses. Then I did the left side. It took only two pieces of Mr. McLeary’s rope because it was longer. Then I moved the horses apart, tied two shorter ropes to their leads and tied the pulley ropes to the two harnesses on their backs. The field was wet, and the horses would have to pull uphill, but we were ready. I went back to the stone and took one last look. I wondered how long it had sat in this field. Probably millions of years. “Please work,” I whispered, then went to the front of the horses, picked up the leads, pulled on them and called to the horses. “Come! Come! Come! Come!”