Me and Mr. Bell (11 page)

Chapter 20

I
t 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.

We will come down to the lake to watch it fly. Some people say it won't fly, but I know that it will. I wish that Helen Keller could see it fly, too. I still find it hard to read and write, but I will never give up. I wrote this letter out seven times. My father helped me. It is cold here now and the fields are all covered with snow. Thank you again for writing to me and sending me such a wonderful book. It is my favourite thing.

Yours truly,

Eddie MacDonald

My writing wasn't smooth and flowing like my father's writing. It wasn't tall and straight like Helen Keller's writing. It was somewhere in between. Part of me couldn't believe that I had written it at all. But I had. I brought it downstairs and handed it to my father.

“Thank you,” he said. And that was all that he said.

For Christmas dinner we had turkey, potatoes, dumplings, carrots, turnip, beets, radishes, peas, stuffing, cranberry sauce, bread and gravy. For dessert we had apple and mincemeat and sugar pies. I ate until my belly was full, and then I ate until it was sore. I crawled upstairs, fell on my bed and listened to the snow tapping on the window like grasshoppers. The words of my letter drifted through my head. I could see each word clearly. I had memorized them all without even trying to because I had worked so hard on them. It really was like memorizing the shape of every leaf on a tree. But it was just one little tree. There was a whole gigantic forest around it.

Chapter 21

N
ow it was January 1909. Everyone was saying that the world was going to change so much we wouldn't even recognize it anymore. It seemed to me they said that every year. But now, automobiles were going to be everywhere because the Ford Motor Company was making one that everybody could afford. It was called the Model T. There would be so many of them on the roads we wouldn't even need horses anymore. I found that kind of hard to believe. Where would all the horses go? When I asked my father if we could afford a Model T automobile, he just laughed. “Don't believe everything you read in the newspapers,” he said.

Well, I never read it; I just heard it.

In school, everything was pretty much the same. We started learning fractions in math. Some of the older students knew them already, but most of us were learning them for the first time. While Miss Lawrence explained what a fraction was, I stared at the pictures in the book, because that was the easiest way for me to learn. One picture showed a pie cut in six pieces. Another picture showed two pieces of the pie, and beside it was the fraction 2/6. Another picture showed four pieces, and the fraction 4/6. That looked pretty simple. If you added the two pieces to the four pieces, you got six pieces, which was the whole pie. In fractions, that meant: 2/6 + 4/6 = 6/6, and that seemed pretty clear to me. And that's all that fractions were.

It got more complicated a few days later when we had to add fractions that had different bottom numbers, like 2/6 + 3/7. I struggled with that for a while, but eventually I got it. And I was the first one who did. Then we learned how to multiply fractions. I found that even easier. For me, math was like a puzzle that you had to figure out, like Zeno's paradox. It was almost a kind of game. And it had rules that stayed the same and weren't full of exceptions. It made sense to me.

But it didn't make a lot of sense to some of my friends. And it didn't make
any
sense at all to Jimmy Chisholm. I saw him wrestling with it in his head, and his eyes went up and down a lot, and his face got redder and redder, and he started to puff out his cheeks as if he was going to blow up. I saw him write the numbers down in his scribbler then erase them. He wrote them again then erased them again. Then he stared out the window and looked like he wished he was somewhere else. Boy, I knew that feeling. Finally Miss Lawrence told me to go and sit beside Jimmy and help him with his fractions. So I did.

After math, we had reading. I went from helping somebody else and feeling smart to not even participating. Miss Lawrence always left me alone to do my own work now. I could use my left hand if I wanted to, and I could look at whatever I wanted. She didn't care. And now that she wasn't reading about ancient Greece anymore but something really boring, I stopped paying attention when she was reading out loud.

But I
was
learning to read and write something, sort of. Every day, I opened up
Zeno's Paradox
and read the first few sentences. “Zeno was a philosopher in ancient Greece….” I wasn't actually reading though, I was just learning the words and memorizing them. I would say them in my head over and over and write them down. And every day I added at least one more sentence. At least I felt I was doing something like the other students. And I
was
learning, even though it was terribly, terribly slow. Maybe it would always be that slow, I didn't know. But I wouldn't stop. Helen Keller would always be blind and deaf, and that wouldn't stop her. So why should I stop? I wouldn't.

—

I knew that Mr. Bell was coming back in the winter. And Douglas McCurdy was bringing his flying machine and was planning to fly it over the lake. The flying machine was called the
Silver Dart
. Mr. Bell had already invited me to come and watch. And I wouldn't miss that for the world. But January passed and no one came. What a long month it was! Day after day, I waited for news of their return, but they never came. And every day in school I studied fractions and memorized the little book until I could read the whole first chapter from memory. And every day I stared out the window and wondered when the
Silver Dart
would come to Baddeck. It was starting to feel like it never would.

Then one morning near the end of February, in the dead of winter, when everything was frozen and it was even too cold to snow, Miss Lawrence told us that we were going to have a special visitor. I thought, “Rats, the Inspector is coming
again
?” He wasn't supposed to come so soon. Sure enough, in the middle of the morning, there was a knock on the door. Miss Lawrence's face turned beet red. She started fixing her hair, straightening her dress and she raised her finger to her mouth to signal for us to be silent. And we were. She went to the door, opened it and in stepped Mr. Bell.

His face looked redder and his hair whiter than last I had seen him. He also looked taller and rounder. He took off his cap, nodded to Miss Lawrence and shook her hand. Standing next to him, Miss Lawrence looked really small.

“Class,” said Miss Lawrence. She was a little nervous. “We have a very special visitor today. This is Mr. Alexander Graham Bell.”

Mr. Bell took out a handkerchief, blew his nose and said, “Good morning, class!”

Nobody said anything. Everyone just stared until Miss Lawrence said, “Class?”

“Good morning, Mr. Bell.”

“I think I have a friend in this class,” said Mr. Bell, and he stared over the heads of the students until he saw me. He winked at me. “Yes, there he is. Eddie! Come up and say hello.”

I climbed out of my seat with my book and went to the front of the class. Mr. Bell held out his hand. “Hello, my dear friend. I see you've got the book I sent you.”

“Yes, Sir.” I shook Mr. Bell's hand. He patted my shoulder with his other hand. I knew my friends were staring at me, but I didn't look at them.

“How is the reading and writing coming along? You certainly sent me a good letter. Have you been reading this book?”

I took a deep breath. “Yes, Sir. It hasn't been going too badly. But it's a lot of work.”

He smiled and nodded. “Yes, yes, of course it is. But you're doing it.”

“Yes, Sir. I memorized the first chapter.”

Mr. Bell raised his eyebrows and stood up straighter. He was really surprised. “You did?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Well, I don't know about the rest of you, but I sure would like to hear that. Will you read it to us, Eddie?”

I looked at Miss Lawrence. Her face was still red. She smiled awkwardly and nodded her head.

“Okay.” And so I did. The first chapter was only four pages, so it didn't take too long. Since I knew it by memory, I didn't have to look at the words. But I did anyway, so that it looked like I was reading. Maybe you could say that I
was
reading, in a way. But if everyone worked this hard to read, it really would take a couple of years to get through a whole book. I guess my brother was right about that.

When I finished, Mr. Bell clapped. Then everyone else clapped. Miss Lawrence clapped too, though she had a confused look on her face. She looked surprised that I had read so well, but maybe a little angry because she probably thought I had been pretending I couldn't read. I would try to explain it to her later.

“That was marvellous, my boy! Marvellous!” Mr. Bell looked at the class. “Wasn't that splendid?”

Everyone clapped again. Then Mr. Bell said that they would be flying the
Silver Dart
on the lake next Tuesday, and he invited everyone to come down and watch. He thanked Miss Lawrence for the welcome, said goodbye to the class, patted me on the back, winked and went out. I went back to my seat. I felt about ten feet tall.