Me and Mr. Bell Read online

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “And why in Heaven’s name did he tie you up?” My father was breathing heavily through his nose now.

  “To keep me from using my left hand to write.”

  “Do you use your left hand to write?”

  “I like to. It feels better. Helen Keller does it, too.”

  “Let me see your hand.”

  I raised my hand. My father squeezed his fingers underneath the twine and tore it off like it was nothing. “Turn around.” I turned around and he ripped the twine from my belt loop. “Is your teacher still at school?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay, Eddie. You go in and get yourself a bite to eat. I’ll look after this.” He put his hand on my chin and looked into my eyes. “It’s not a perfect world, my son. There are all kinds of problems for everybody every day. That’s just the way it is. But let me tell you something: don’t ever let anybody lay a hand on you like that again. Nobody has the right to touch you without your permission. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Good. And something else: use the hand that God gave you to use, and don’t let anybody tell you any different. If God saw fit to make your left hand stronger than your right, then so be it. Who on earth can say different?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Okay then.”

  My father let go of my chin, took a deep breath and started down the hill toward the school. I watched him go. I was sure glad I wasn’t Miss Lawrence right now. I wished I could have followed him down the hill and peeked through the window when he spoke to her, but I knew I’d better not.

  The next day, Miss Lawrence was extra nice to me but seemed a little nervous. When I opened the math book and continued writing the letter to Mr. Bell, she smiled at me but never came over to look. She told me to ask her if I needed any help, but I got the feeling she was hoping I wouldn’t ask. And I didn’t.

  It surprised me how much better my writing was with my left hand. My left hand was steadier and more confident. It didn’t help me to spell, but it sure looked better when I was done.

  It was still messier than the other students’ work though, mostly because I kept making mistakes and having to erase them. Why were words not written the way they sounded? Why were some written the way they sounded and others not? Why couldn’t they all be the same? Why was the word hurry spelled with a u and the word worry spelled with an o when they sounded exactly the same? And how were we supposed to remember that? It was crazy! I knew that we were supposed to memorize all the words in the English language, but it seemed to me that that was about the same as memorizing all the rocks on the beach, and that was impossible for anybody!

  Still, I knew that the other kids in my school were learning how to spell all the words and learning how to read and write, and I wasn’t. Maybe I could have accepted that, maybe, but I really wanted to write back to Mr. Bell, especially since I had finally figured out Zeno’s paradox, and I wanted to tell him that.

  Chapter 19

  I tried to explain Zeno’s paradox to my mother first, but she couldn’t understand it, and she got frustrated and finally asked me to stop talking. Then I tried my sister, but she couldn’t get it and said that I was making it all up and that it was just silly. I asked Miss Lawrence if she wanted to hear it, but she just smiled at me and said, “No, thank you, but I’m sure it is just wonderful.”

  So I tried my father. I waited until he had finished his supper and was sitting in his chair, smoking his pipe. I came into the room, cleared my throat and waited until he looked at me.

  “Yes?”

  “Excuse me, Sir. Do you think I could explain Zeno’s paradox to you to see if I am making any sense?”

  “You want to explain it to me?”

  “I want to write in my letter to Mr. Bell that I understand it. I think I do, I just want to make sure.”

  My father held his pipe with one hand, folded his arms and smiled. “Go ahead.”

  “Okay. It goes like this. Achilles was a great warrior. And he could run faster than anybody else. Then one day, he raced against a tortoise. The tortoise was slow, but it always went the same speed. Achilles was so sure he would win the race that he gave the tortoise a head start. When the tortoise was halfway to the finish line, Achilles started running. When he got to the halfway point, the tortoise had moved only a short distance. So Achilles ran that short distance. But when he got there, the tortoise had moved a shorter distance. It was very short, but even so, the tortoise had moved. So Achilles ran that shorter distance. But when he got there, the tortoise had moved again, a tiny distance. When Achilles ran that tiny distance, the tortoise had gone further. And so, no matter how many times Achilles chased after the tortoise, he could never catch him because the tortoise was always moving and Achilles was always catching up. So the tortoise won the race, even though Achilles was faster. And that’s why it’s a paradox, because both things can’t be true, but they are.”

  I stopped and waited for my father to say something. He had listened very closely and was nodding his head. “Yup. I get it. I mean, I think I get it. Steady wins the race. Isn’t that the darndest thing? It doesn’t make sense, but it does. And that’s what you call a paradox, is it?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  My father sat back in his chair, took a deep puff from his pipe and let the smoke out. He almost looked like Mr. Bell behind the smoke. “Maybe … maybe before you send that letter, you might want me to take a look at it, would you?”

  “That would be great! Thank you.”

  “Okay then.”

  I turned to go.

  “Eddie?”

  “Yes, Sir?”

  “I don’t think you’re cut out to be just a farmer. I think you’re meant for something more than that.”

  I smiled. I thought so, too.

  —

  I never worked so hard in all my life as I worked on that letter to Mr. Bell. It was only two pages, double-spaced, but I worked on it every day at school and every night for the rest of the term. Then, when school ended for the Christmas holiday, I kept at it every day. I wrote the letter out seven times, and three times I brought it to my father, and he corrected it for me. But then, the day I finished it, something terrible happened. I discovered that I had lost the book Mr. Bell had given me.

  I didn’t know how it could have happened. I had kept it with me all the time and was so careful with it. My mother helped me search the house from top to bottom, but we never found it. The only thing I could think was that I must have dropped it on my way home from school, and it got covered in snow. I went out and spent a whole day raking the snow all the way down the hill but never found it. That made me very sad. My mother said that maybe it would show up in the spring. Well, it might, but what would it look like then?

  And then, on Christmas Eve, I got it back in the strangest way.

  My mother sent me down to the McLearys’ with a sugar pie for Christmas. I carried the pie all the way down the hill through the snow and walked across the porch and knocked on the door. Mrs. McLeary came to the door and greeted me. “Well, if it isn’t the neighbours! And if it isn’t the neighbours carrying a sweet-smelling pie!” Mrs. McLeary lifted the pie out of my arms. “Won’t you be a dear, Eddie, and run into the barn and tell Mr. McLeary to come to the house?”

  “Yes, Mrs. McLeary.”

  I went to the barn. All of Mr. McLeary’s cows were inside the barn, and it was nice and warm. But I didn’t see Mr. McLeary. I looked everywhere, but he wasn’t there. Then I thought I heard him sighing up in the hayloft. I climbed the ladder and looked. There he was. He was sitting on a bale of hay, with a lantern, and he was staring at something in his hands. It was my book!

  “Hello, Mr. McLeary!” I called. “Merry Christmas!”

  “Huh? What? Oh. Merry Christmas. What are you doing here?”

&
nbsp; “Mrs. McLeary told me to tell you to come to the house.”

  “She did, did she? Okay. All right then. I’ll do that then.” He dropped his head into the book again and didn’t move. I didn’t know what to do or say. I took a deep breath. “Um … that’s my book.”

  Mr. McLeary raised his head and stared over at me. He just stared with a tired and kind of sad look. I waited for him to speak. “It’s your book, is it?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked down at the book again. Then he looked back at me. “Will you read it to me?”

  It was probably the strangest thing I ever did, but I sat on the hay and told Mr. McLeary the story of Zeno’s paradox. I didn’t read it to him; I just told it to him, but I made it sound like a story, and I didn’t think he knew the difference. If he did, he didn’t say anything. He listened very carefully to every word, and when I was finished, he asked me to read it again, quickly, before he had to go into the house. So I did. When I finished, he stood up, raised his head high and pulled on his suspenders. “My, that’s a great story! Isn’t it somethin’ what you can find inside a little book like that? I never had anybody read me a story before.”

  “Really? Never?”

  He shook his head. “Nope. But you made that little book come alive. It’s just like magic, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  Mr. McLeary smiled and frowned at the same time. We climbed down from the loft. At the barn door, he pulled on his coat and cap and looked down his nose at me. His eyes were shiny. “What I wouldn’t give to have a brain like yours,” he said. Then he lifted his cap. “Merry Christmas to you, young Eddie.”

  “Merry Christmas, Mr. McLeary.”

  I wandered slowly back up the hill. The snow fell on my face and melted. It was one of those times when it would snow all night, I could just tell. In the morning, everything would be hidden under blankets of white. I loved it when it snowed on Christmas Day.

  My mother was standing over a pot on the stove when I came in. She loved it when it snowed like this, too. She threw me a happy look while I hung up my jacket and pulled off my boots. I bet she smiled a lot at Christmas when she was a girl.

  “You found your book?”

  “Mr. McLeary had it.”

  “He did? Did he find it?”

  “Yes. I think he wanted to keep it.”

  “Well, I can understand that; it’s a pretty book.”

  I pulled off my socks, hung them behind the stove to dry, came around the stove and stood beside my mother in my bare feet. I stared into the pot she was stirring. The house was filled with the smell of mincemeat. “Did you know that Mr. McLeary can’t read?”

  “He can’t? Well, that doesn’t surprise me. Lots of people can’t read. We aren’t born knowing how to read, you know.” My mother grinned. She was in a really good mood. “It’s not like with birds, born knowing how to fly.”

  I thought about that while I watched her stir the mincemeat. “Most people would rather fly than read,” I said, without taking my eyes from the pot. The spices in the mincemeat were tickling my nose.

  “Oh, I don’t know; I bet if you asked all the people in the world whether they’d rather learn to fly or learn to read, I bet most of them would choose to read.”

  “I wouldn’t. I’d choose to fly.”

  My mother dipped a wooden spoon into the mincemeat, pulled it out and gave it to me. She looked serious for a second, then went back to smiling. “Maybe that’s the problem, Eddie.”

  I thought about it while I licked the spoon. No, that wasn’t the problem. I knew I wanted to learn to read, but reading would always be a struggle for me. Birds made flying look effortless.

  Chapter 20

  It was crowded in church on Christmas Day. I didn’t mind going to church on Christmas, because the church was decorated, smelled nice and there was a special energy in the air. Everyone wore so much clothing and squeezed into the pews so tightly, it was toasty warm, which was a lot better than sitting in a cold church. And even though the mass was longer on Christmas, and I had to fight to stay awake, I didn’t mind. Afterwards, there was a reception with cookies, cakes and sweet drinks. Everyone stood around smiling, chatting and having a bite of something sweet.

  Usually I stood with my mother, brother and sister, while my father stood with the men and talked. Just for a while. Then we all went home together. But this year, for the very first time, my father tugged on my coat sleeve and pulled me along with him. My brother tried to follow, but my father told him to stay. I raised my head and smiled at my brother, and he made a face at me like a pig.

  As we approached the other men, I heard a man say Mr. Bell’s name, and my ears perked up.

  “They’re gonna fly it over the ice,” said the man. The other men’s eyebrows were raised as if he had said they were going to fly it to the moon.

  “Well, he’s not gonna fly it, Joe. It’s the young McCurdy who’ll fly it. Bell doesn’t do the flying; he just does the thinking.”

  The other men laughed.

  “It’ll never get into the air,” said another man. He sounded like he really knew what he was talking about. I wondered if he did.

  “Not in the cold anyway,” said a third.

  “Cold’s got nothin’ to do with it. It’s not a kite, Bill. We’re talking an engine here and a whole lot ’a weight, not to mention a man on board. It’s going to carry a man, you know.”

  The first man shook his head. “Ah, I can’t see it happening. I can’t see it getting off the ground. Look what happened when they flew that big kite this time last year. Did you see it?”

  “I saw it. Big as a barn.”

  The other men nodded their heads.

  “It crashed.”

  “The bigger you build it, the harder it’ll fall.”

  The men laughed again. My father didn’t.

  “Nearly killed a man,” said one of them.

  “I dunno. Seems to me the man’s inventing days are behind him, don’t you think? Seems like a heck of a lot of expensive experiments for nothing. I mean, it’s his money. It’s his business.”

  “If we were meant to fly, don’t you think we would have been given wings?” said the first man. “What do you think, Donald?”

  All the other men turned to look at my father. My father took the pipe from his mouth, stared at the ground and thought for a second. The other men waited. “I honestly don’t know. But I’ll tell you one thing: I’ll be out on the ice to watch.”

  “Me too.”

  “Yes, I wouldn’t miss that.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  On the way home, I walked close to my father. We went quietly for awhile, but I was wishing he would say something. Finally I couldn’t keep it to myself any longer. “I think it will fly,” I said.

  My father didn’t answer right away. He was staring across the snowy fields. Then he said something that I never expected to hear him say. “Wouldn’t it be something though? I always dreamt of flying, myself.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded but didn’t say anything more. He didn’t speak again on the way home. He just stared across the fields. I kept wondering what he was thinking. When we came into the house and pulled off all our winter clothes and hung them up, and my mother and sister got busy with our Christmas dinner, I couldn’t help but ask my father one more question. It was bugging me too much. “Do you think Mr. Bell’s inventing days are behind him, Sir?”

  My father stood in the kitchen and stared at me. I knew he was wanting to go into the parlour, sit in his chair with his pipe, read the paper and be left alone. Talking with people once a week in church was more than enough company for him. But he answered me just as thoughtfully as he had answered the men at church. “I wouldn’t think so, Eddie. There’s no reason to think that inventing is a young man’s game. Seems to
me a man might grow smarter as he grows older, if he keeps his mind sharp. Of course, I’ve never met the man. But you have. I figure you’d be a better judge of that than me.” He paused. “Your letter is done, is it?”

  “Yes, Sir.” I liked his answer.

  “Bring it to me then. I’ll address an envelope for you, and we’ll mail it first day the post is open.”

  “Okay. Thank you, Sir.”

  I went upstairs to get the letter. As I passed my sister’s room, I saw her holding a doll that she had dressed in silk clothes she had made herself. The silk had come from Mr. Bell’s giant kite that crashed the year before. It had been made with thousands of squares of fine red silk. When it smashed, the silk floated to the beach, where people picked it up and took it home. My sister made doll dresses out of it.

  I stared at the doll. For a second, I wondered if maybe the man at church had been right. Was Mr. Bell too old now? Was he just making expensive mistakes? But then I had another thought: who would I rather trust, Mr. Bell or the men at church? That was easy.

  In my room, I looked over the letter. As I stared at the words scratched onto the paper with a pencil, I thought of how much harder it had been to create than it had been to pull the stones from the field. It didn’t look like it should be so hard, but it was. It didn’t surprise me that so many people never learned to read and write, like Mr. McLeary. What was amazing to me was that so many people did.

  While snow slowly covered the window from the outside, I read my letter for the last time.

  Dear Mr. Bell,

  Thank you for sending me a letter and a book. It was the first time I ever received a package in the mail. The book is wonderful. At first, it was too hard to understand Zeno’s paradox, but now I understand it. I also learned more about Archimedes and his laws of applied mathematics.

  We used pulleys to remove big stones from our field.

  We are all very excited that you and Mr. McCurdy are bringing a flying machine back to Baddeck.