Me and Mr. Bell (3 page)

Chapter 4

O
ne time, a calf was born blind in the barn. I remembered it. As soon as it took a breath of air, it died. My mother clicked her tongue and said that it was one of nature's mistakes. My father stared at it with confusion and frustration. He tied a rope around its legs and used a horse to drag it out to the woods. The mother followed it out. I never knew that nature could make mistakes; I thought it was perfect. It was something I was going to ask Mr. Bell if I ever got the chance to meet him again.

How could anyone live if they couldn't see
and
couldn't hear? It made me so curious I took a candle and went into the barn, rubbed the candle wax between my fingers until it was soft and stuck it into my ears. Then I covered my eyes with two rags and tied a belt around my head to hold them tight. Now I couldn't hear or see. What a strange feeling it was. The first thing I noticed was that I could smell the hay better. I took a couple of steps and felt the floor beneath my feet. You could still tell a lot of things by touching and smelling. I started moving forward slowly with my hands stuck out straight, careful not to trip over anything. But I knew the barn really well, so it wasn't the same as being deaf and blind in a strange place.

I was thinking of going somewhere else when my foot hit something, and I fell forward and hit the floor really hard. It scared me because I couldn't see myself falling, and it felt as if the floor had jumped up and hit me. I got to my knees and felt around. I had tripped over the broom handle. Suddenly, I felt a tug at my shoulder. Someone was beside me. It must have been my brother. “What do you want?” I said, but couldn't hear his answer and couldn't tell how loud I was talking. He tugged harder. “Smarten up!” I said. Then I got an idea. I reached out and felt for his face. I wanted to place my fingers over his mouth and feel what he was saying. But he slapped my arm away roughly and ripped the belt and rags from my head. It wasn't my brother; it was my father.

“What happened, Eddie? Who did this to you? Did your friends tie you up?”

“No, Sir.”

“Then who tied a belt around your head?”

“I did.”

He stared at me, trying to understand. How could I explain to him what I was doing? I didn't know, but figured I'd better try. “I was trying to find out what it was like to be deaf and blind, like Helen Keller.”

I wondered if he was going to get angry. He didn't. His face softened and so did his voice. “My son, you are going to need all the brains you've got. Do you hear me? Don't make your life more difficult than it is by taking away your sight and hearing. I know who Helen Keller is, and I don't imagine she's anybody you'd want to be. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, Sir.”

He looked me sternly in the eye. “Do you understand me, Eddie?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Good then. Carry the sledgehammer down to Mr. McLeary, will you?”

“Okay.”

“And … sweep the barn afterward, okay?”

“Okay.”

The barn didn't need sweeping. He just didn't know what else to say to me. I didn't mind. I was glad he was trusting me with an errand again, even if it was just carrying a sledgehammer down the hill. I picked up the hammer and went out of the barn.

I once heard my mother say that Mr. McLeary was not burdened with common sense. I didn't know what she meant by that when she said it, but eventually I figured it out. Like other men in our community, including my father, Mr. McLeary had taken to smoking a pipe because Mr. Bell smoked a pipe, so people figured it must make you smarter. Some of the older farmers already smoked a pipe, and I never heard anyone say that they were smarter.

I watched Mr. McLeary lighting his pipe outside his house on my way to school one morning but didn't think he was doing it right. He raised his eyebrows at me the way he always did now because I was a learning cripple, but I noticed a whole pile of burnt matches on the ground by his feet. From the way he was puffing his cheeks, I was pretty sure he was blowing into his pipe instead of sucking on it. Then, later in the morning, we smelled smoke at school. Everyone ran outside and saw a dark cloud over the McLeary farm. On the way home, I saw that a whole corner of his hayfield was burnt. A handful of farmers were there, drinking tea and eating cookies that Mrs. McLeary had made for them for putting out the fire. Everyone was saying how smart Mr. McLeary had been to alert the other farmers before the fire had reached his house and how clever he had been to discover it so quickly in the first place. No one knew how the fire could have started, but Mrs. McLeary said it must have been a freak of nature. The very next day, I saw Mr. McLeary lighting his pipe at the well. As he took a deep breath, he coughed, and the pipe slipped out of his mouth. He swung at it as if he were trying to catch a ball but missed, and the pipe fell down the well. Then he saw me and raised his eyebrows again, but the look on his face was the look of a frightened cow.

I carried the sledgehammer down the hill. Mr. McLeary was standing in his field with a tired look on his face. It had rained a lot. His fence was leaning over. His cows kept sliding into it when they came in and out of the field. I saw his sledgehammer in the mud and it had a broken handle. He must have hit the fence posts too hard trying to drive them deeper into the ground. He looked really tired when he saw the sledgehammer in my arms. He wouldn't even look me in the face. I stared at the cow path. It was stirred into brown soup. Cows will follow the same path no matter what. Suddenly, I got an idea. “Fill it with stones,” I said. I just blurted it out because he looked so desperate and didn't know what to do.

Mr. McLeary glared at me. “What?”

“Fill the path with stones. It'll give the cows something to walk on.”

He made a face as if I had just said the dumbest thing in the world. Then he turned and stared at the path. Then he turned and stared at his hayfield, where there were huge piles of stones on the sides. He stuck out his arm, and I passed him the sledgehammer. It was so heavy I had to use two arms just to hold it, but he took it in one hand as if it didn't weigh anything at all.

“Thank your daddy,” he said roughly.

“Okay.” I turned around and walked away. I waited to hear the sound of the sledgehammer crashing into a post, but it never came. The next morning, on my way to school, I saw Mr. McLeary pushing a wheelbarrow full of stones into the field. I think he saw me, but he pretended he didn't. By the end of the week, he had created a wide stone lane across his field. It looked really good. His cows came in and out without slipping. I heard my mother and father talk about it. They thought he had been clever. On my way to school, I saw Mr. McLeary standing on the lane, looking proud of the stone path. He still raised his eyebrows at me.

Chapter 5

M
iss Lawrence had brown hair and brown eyes and every day she wore the same brown dress, brown shoes and brown coat to school. She came inside, unbuttoned her coat, hung it up on the coat rack, took a handkerchief out of her pocket and squeezed it into her sleeve. And it stayed there all day and never fell out. The only change she ever made was once she sewed a patch over a hole in her coat. At first the patch was darker brown than the rest of her coat, but by the end of the year it was the same colour.

We studied math first thing every morning. I liked math. I found it easy when the exercises were read out loud and I could do them in my head. Most of my friends were the opposite; they couldn't do it in their heads – they needed to see it written down on the page. Sometimes they would ask for my help, if they were really stuck. They would tell me the question out loud, and I would give them the answer. But no one gave me credit for being smart, because I couldn't read the questions.

After math we had reading, which was usually pretty boring. Miss Lawrence always stood perfectly still in front of the class while she read to us. Sometimes I imagined that she was a talking tree. I daydreamed
a lot
in school. I couldn't help it. My mind liked to wander.

Then one day, Miss Lawrence opened a new book, and everything changed for me. She started to read about ancient Greece. I didn't know why, but everything about ancient Greece interested me. My friends thought it was boring, but I couldn't get enough of it. It became the most interesting thing I ever learned in school.

In ancient Greece, it was always hot and sunny. People would sit around on hills, in the daytime or at night, where it was always warm, and ask interesting questions and tell great stories. The ocean was green, or blue, and sparkled with flecks of gold. There were olive trees, orange trees, lemon trees and cherry trees. There were pink mountains with golden temples on top and dry, dusty plains that stretched forever and sun-baked beaches where the sand shone like gold and probably had gold in it.

There were gods and goddesses, like Apollo and Athena, and heroes like Hercules, Achilles and Odysseus. There were rulers, like Alexander the Great, and philosophers who walked around outside and asked important questions, like Plato, Aristotle and Socrates. There were writers, like Homer, who was blind, and mathematicians, like Archimedes.

Of all of them, the one who fascinated me the most was Archimedes, because he invented tools that gave the power of a hundred men to just one person. Even to a boy. And you didn't have to be a god or a ruler or a hero. You could be an ordinary person. While my friends yawned and rolled their eyes, I listened to every word Miss Lawrence read as if it carried magic power. Because it did.

But then, Miss Lawrence passed the book around and made everyone read a little bit of what she had just read, and that just about ruined it for me. Nobody could read it as well as she did. Nobody could say the names right. And when it was my turn, I couldn't read it at all and had to fake it, which was what I always did at reading time – I tried really hard to remember what she had read, then sort of made it up. And no one cared because no one was paying that much attention in the first place, and nobody expected me to get it right. When
we
read it, it took the magic right out of it.

The first day that Miss Lawrence read from the book, I asked if I could stay in for lunch and look at it by myself, but she said no, go outside and play. The second day, she just stared at me, looked kind of frustrated, but said, okay, read for a little while, then go outside. I said thank you. I didn't actually want to read the book; I just wanted to look at the pictures.

Some of the pictures showed pulleys, wheels, ropes, ramps and arrows pointing in every direction. One picture showed a small man lifting a heavy stone block off the ground just by pulling down on a rope. There were pictures of old men and their names, but I couldn't tell who was who, except that the man next to the pulleys was probably Archimedes. All of the men were old and had white beards, just like Mr. Bell. He would fit in perfectly. At the top of the diagrams of pulleys were two long words. When I gave Miss Lawrence back the book, I asked her what they said.

“Applied Mathematics.”

“What does it mean?”

She frowned at me and sighed. “Why are you so interested in that, Eddie? It means when you use mathematics to move things around.” She picked up the pointer, reached up and stabbed a book on the top shelf of the bookcase. “That's
Applied Mathematics
. But it's way over your head, Eddie. It's too hard for most people to understand.”

“Does it have pictures in it?”

“I don't know. I've never opened the book.”

“Thank you, Miss Lawrence.” That's what I thought. Applied mathematics was a kind of magic that let you move heavy things around as if they weighed nothing. It was a kind of magic that was real. Who wouldn't be interested in that?

I stared at the big book on the shelf and wondered if it had pictures in it. It bothered me so much that I couldn't read. And it didn't make sense. Why would I be so good at math but so terrible at reading and writing? I thought about it all the way home from school. At home, I took my school book, scribbler and pencil, sat on my bed and decided to teach myself how to read and write. If Helen Keller could learn to write, then so could I. First I would teach myself how to write numbers, then other things after that. The number I wanted to start with was
eight
.

I opened my school book, found the numbers list and copied out the word
eight
. It had five letters. That seemed easy enough. I copied the word exactly as it was in the book. Then I turned to another page in my scribbler and wrote it out ten times. Then I compared my writing with the word in the book. I couldn't believe it – I had spelled it wrong six times! Six times, I wrote
eihgt
instead of
eight
. They looked the same to me. It was only when I went from letter to letter with the pencil that I saw the difference.

Okay, I thought, I'll try it again. So I did. This time, I got it wrong only twice. That was better, but I still couldn't believe I had spelled it wrong at all. And it was tiring. It was easier to run all the way across the field and back than it was to write out a number twenty times. At least writing the letters down so many times made me feel confident that I would remember the difference now between
h
and
n
–
h
had a long stick and
n
had a short one, like in the word
no
.

Next I practised writing the number
one
. As I stared at it, I wondered why it didn't start with a
w
. Shouldn't it? It sounded like it did. I said the word slowly and carefully. Yes, it definitely sounded like a
w
. But there wasn't a
w
in the word. Why did we have a
w
if we didn't always use it? That didn't make sense at all. But
one
only had three letters and was fairly easy to remember. I got it right every time. And that felt good.

I moved on to the number
two
. Words were just shapes, like trees or horses or barns, except that if you added a few pieces of wood to a barn or took a few pieces away, it was still a barn. You wouldn't mistake it for a tree or a horse. And if you took a branch away from a tree or a leg away from a horse, you would still know it was a tree and a horse. You wouldn't think it was a barn. But if you made even the tiniest change to a word, it wasn't the same word anymore. It became something else. I had already learned that the hard way.

As I stared at the word
two
, I saw something I couldn't believe. It had a
w
in it! But you didn't pronounce it. Now this was crazy. Why would one word be missing the letter that you spoke and the next word be using it when you didn't speak it? I didn't know who invented our language, but this seemed pretty stupid to me. How were you supposed to remember that?

After practising just three words, I was exhausted. I wanted some fresh air, so I went outside, crossed the yard and climbed the fence behind the barn. I picked up some rocks and threw them at the fence post. This was something I was good at, and it felt good. After I threw about twenty-five rocks and hit the post sixteen or seventeen times, I went back in the house. But just before I did, I took a sharp rock and scratched the word
eight
into the wall of the barn. It was a word I would never forget.

Back inside my room, I sat down and stared at the number
three
. I had a nagging feeling inside. Had I put the
g
and
h
in the right order on the barn? I thought I had but wasn't sure. I sat on my bed and tried to continue studying, but it was bugging me so much I couldn't concentrate. I had to know. So I took my school book outside to compare. As I stared at the back of the barn, then looked into the book, I saw that the word scratched into the wood was spelled wrong. I stared at it for a long time. It felt as if someone, somewhere, or maybe the whole world even, was trying to tell me something. And what they were trying to tell me was that it was hopeless; it really was.