Me and Mr. Bell (8 page)

Chapter 14

I
got back to the house just after my brother and sister came home from school. I had to bring the horses to the barn, go back to the field for the wheelbarrow and return Mr. McLeary's rope and pulleys. He wasn't in the barn, so I just hung everything up where it had been before. It was a lot easier to carry everything down the hill than it was to carry it up. But I was dead tired now and my shoulders were sore from the rope. When I stepped in the back door, my mother stood in the middle of the kitchen and stared at me. She looked me up and down. “You're full of mud. And your school clothes! And you weren't in school. Where were you?” She was angry.

I stared at the floor. “In the field.”

“You were in the field?”

“Yes, Ma'am.”

“What were you doing in the field?”

“Moving that stone.”

She crossed her arms and stared hard at me, but her face looked more disappointed now than angry. “Eddie. Why didn't you go to school? Why would you spend the day out in the field trying to move a stone that can't be moved? Don't you want to learn? Don't you want to try? You can't give up.” Her face softened. “My boy, you don't want to stop going to school.”

“I'm not giving up. I just wanted to help Dad.”

“Eddie, some things in life are just the way they are. You can't do anything about them. That stone is one of them. You just have to accept it.”

“I moved it.”

My mother looked even more disappointed now. She lowered her voice until it was almost a whisper. “Don't lie to me.”

“I'm not lying!”

“You're lying,” said my brother. My sister rolled her eyes and went upstairs. Now my mother was almost begging. “Eddie. Please don't lie to me. Your father said that that stone was impossible to move. I saw it myself. There is no way on earth you could move it by yourself.”

“I did. I used the horses, and I borrowed rope and pulleys from Mr. McLeary.”

“You're lying,” said my brother.

My mother just stood and stared at me with her hand in front of her mouth. She was trying to make up her mind. “You did?”

“I did.”

“You're ly—”

“Be quiet, Joey!” said my mother. She reached for her coat and scarf. “Okay then, show me.”

My brother grabbed his jacket.

“No, Joey. You stay here,” said my mother.

“But—”

“Stay here! We'll be right back.”

I grabbed two cookies and followed my mother out the door. It was getting colder, and I was tired and hungry. I had missed lunch. I just wanted to eat a big meal, have a bath and climb into my warm bed. But I was excited, too.

We reached the top of the field and looked down at the woods. You could see the stone sitting there, looking very out of place. “I'll show you how I did it,” I said, and started down the hill. But my mother stopped at the top and just stared with her hands on her hips. “No. I don't need to see how you did it. I can see it. That's enough.” Then she threw me a strange look, but I had no idea what it meant. She turned around and started back toward the house. I hurried to keep up. “Can I have a bath?”

My mother laughed nervously. “Yes, my son, you can have a bath. I'd say you've earned a bath today.” She turned and looked at me. “But tomorrow you'll go to school.”

“Yes, I will. I promise.”

After dinner, I was so tired that I went to bed early and fell asleep instantly. Some time after dark, I woke to find my father standing in my room, holding a candle. At first I thought I was dreaming, but I wasn't. When he saw me raise my head, he came over and sat on the side of the bed. He had never done that before. He started talking. But he sounded different, as if he were telling me a story. “I met Mr. McLeary today on my way home from the woods. He was coming from the blacksmith. He surprised me by asking me why I needed his rope and pulleys today. I asked him what he was talking about. Then he told me that you came and carried them home. I tell you, I was pretty angry at you then. Angry that you lied to him. Then I got to the house and was about to come up and shake you out of bed, but your mother told me that you had removed that stone from the field. Well, I didn't believe her. For fifteen years I've been married to your mother, and that's the very first time I didn't believe something she said. I had to see it for myself. So I did. I went out to the field. And I saw it. Under the light of the moon, I saw the big hole in the field, and I saw the stone sitting over by the trees. You just plucked that stone out of the field like it was a blueberry.”

My father paused. He had never spoken to me for so long before. I didn't know what to say, so I just listened. He continued. “You did the work of three men today. Three men! You've got a mighty powerful will, my son.” In the light of the candle I saw him nod his head up and down. “I learned something else today,” he said. “I learned that you're smart. You're not just smart; you're as sharp as a razor. I had no idea before, but I know it now.”

“I'm not smart in some ways.”

“Well, everybody's not smart in some ways. I know that myself. But how did you know how to use the pulleys like that?”

“I looked it up in a book. It's called
Applied Mathematics
.”

My father laughed. “You don't say. But how did you read it?”

“I didn't really read it. I just looked at the pictures. But I did look up some words in the dictionary.” I just remembered I had forgotten to return his dictionary. “I borrowed your dictionary, Sir. I'm sorry I forgot to return it.”

My father was quiet for awhile. I wondered what he was thinking. “Well, from now on, I would appreciate it if you would return my dictionary after you have used it. Do we understand each other?”

“Yes, Sir. I will. Thank you.”

“Good then. You'd better get some sleep. You've got school in the morning.”

“Yes, Sir.”

He went to the door then stopped. “Eddie?”

“Yes, Sir?”

“Mr. McLeary said that he intends to make his sides the same now, too. What the heck is he talking about?”

“I don't know. I think he got mixed up about something.”

“Yeah, I figured as much. Okay. Goodnight, my son.”

“Goodnight, Sir.”

I rolled over and felt a wave of happiness rush through me. This time I believed it would last.

Chapter 15

O
ver the fall, my father and I removed stones from the field. None of them was as big as the first one, but some were close. We only worked in the field on Saturdays, when I was out of school and my father could spare the time from other things he had to do. There were a lot of smaller stones that we just collected in the wheelbarrow. It was a long-term project. We had to stop when the ground started to freeze and planned to continue in the spring. My father did not expect to plow the field until the next fall.

This was a special time for me. I really enjoyed working with my father. It made me feel closer to him, even though we didn't talk much.

Things went very differently in school. We started learning to write essays. We only had to write one page, but that was pretty much impossible for me. Some of the other students thought it was fun, especially the girls, and they couldn't wait to show off their essays. Miss Lawrence told us to try to think of something we would like to write about, jot down some ideas, then try to form our ideas into sentences. Afterward, we would collect our sentences into paragraphs. Three paragraphs would make an essay. That didn't sound so hard to anybody else, but, really, I might as well have tried to fly to the moon.

First, I couldn't think of what to write about, and I just sat there, staring out the window while the other students were busy working. Eventually I decided to write about Helen Keller. So I tried to jot down ideas. But I didn't know how to spell the words. And I couldn't use the dictionary to look up the words because I didn't know how to spell the words in the first place. Because my topic was Helen Keller, and because I respected her so much, I tried my very hardest. I thought of words in my head and how they sounded, then did my best to write them down. By the time two of the girls had already finished their essays, all I had written down was six words:
def
,
blin
,
deturmint
,
brav
,
alon
,
intelajinz
. Miss Lawrence asked to see my work. I didn't want to show it to her. But she said that I had to let her see it, so I did. Some of my friends tried to look over her shoulder, but I told them to sit down, and I really meant it. I watched Miss Lawrence's face as she stared at my paper. She stared for a long time and looked confused, as if I had written a really long paper or something. Then she went to the bookshelf, took down the book I had borrowed before and carried it to my desk. She smiled like she was trying to be very nice. “Eddie. Why don't you look at this book while the other students write their essays?”

“Okay, Miss Lawrence.” That suited me just fine. And that was the end of my attempt to write essays.

—

I hadn't seen Mr. Bell for a long time. One afternoon in the late fall, when I was out walking along the lake, I walked all the way to the woods of Beinn Bhreagh before I even realized I was there. I was so lost in a daydream. I was dreaming of a machine that was made of hundreds and hundreds of pulleys, with ropes spinning around and around inside of it. When the machine was attached to giant shovels, it could dig out mountains or dig deep trenches for canals in a single afternoon. If the machine was put on a large barge, it could raise sunken ships from the bottom of the sea. I wondered if Mr. Bell ever thought of a machine like that.

Since I was already so close, I thought maybe I would go up the lane to the Bell house and say hello. I hadn't been invited, but everyone there was so friendly, I was sure they wouldn't mind if I just stopped by to say hello.

But there was no one around when I climbed the steps of the porch. And it felt so different now. It was getting dark soon, and it was cold. I knocked on the door and waited a long time for a maid to answer it. It was the maid who had given me the cookie. She stuck her head outside nervously and told me that the Bells had gone to Washington, to their other home. I said thank you, turned around and walked away.

As I went back down the path, I passed the laboratory. It was closed up and dark inside. There was no one anywhere. Then, I noticed a small shed that had a light on inside it and smoke coming out of a pipe in the roof. I had never noticed this shed before, because I had always been staring at the laboratory. It was just a small shed. Maybe it was where one of the men who worked for Mr. Bell stayed. Maybe it was one of the men who looked after his sheep. Mr. Bell kept a lot of sheep. He bred them. He was trying to create a brand of “super sheep.” I had heard that he drowned a sheep once and then brought it back to life with a special invention. I wondered if that was true.

I went to the door and stopped. I could smell tobacco smoke. Should I knock? But what would I say to one of the workers? And he wouldn't know me and would wonder what I was doing on the Bells' property. So I decided not to. I turned around and continued down the path. A few seconds later, I heard my name.

“Eddie?”

I turned around. There was Mr. Bell, standing in the doorway of the little shed, smoking his pipe. He made a wide sweeping movement with his arm. “Come on in, lad.”

“Hello, Mr. Bell.”

“I thought I heard a step outside,” said Mr. Bell. “Though I didn't know if I actually heard it or imagined it. I think maybe I intuited it.”

“What does that mean, Sir?”

“Intuition? It means I sensed you were there before I knew it. It's like having an inner knowledge.” He smiled at me beneath his bushy eyebrows and pipe smoke.

“Your maid told me you had all gone to Washington, Sir.”

He sucked on his pipe and looked apologetic. “Well, yes, we did. But then I came back. Mary is on strict orders not to tell anyone that I'm here.”

“Oh.” I wondered why.

“So I could be left alone and get some work done.” Mr. Bell answered as if he had read my mind.

“I won't stay, Sir. I don't want—”

“No! Stay! Sit. It's nice to see you, Eddie. That's the irony of it – I complain bitterly for not having enough solitude to just sit and think. Then, the moment I've got lots of it, I start missing company. Here. Take a handful.” He passed me a jar of candy. I opened the top and took two pieces out. It was hard maple candy. It was really good.

“Take more!”

“Thank you, Sir.” I took one more. I was actually really hungry.

“What brings you out on this dark, chilly afternoon, my lad?” Mr. Bell opened a pot-bellied stove and shoved a piece of wood inside. The flames were already high. He shut the top with the hook and sat back down. He was wearing a heavy wool blanket across his legs. It was the same blanket I had seen his father wearing.

“I was just walking, Sir. And thinking.”

He nodded as if agreeing with me. “And where did your thoughts take you today?”

The nice thing about Mr. Bell was that if he asked you something, it was because he really wanted to know. And he would take you seriously, no matter how simple your own thoughts might be. I told him about the machine I had been imagining. As I spoke, his eyes lit up, and he listened with great interest, so much so that I even wondered if he thought it might be a good idea. But when I finished, he pulled his pipe from his mouth and gave a stern criticism of the idea, just the way he had spoken to Mr. McCurdy. But even though he pointed out its complete lack of being practical and forever removed the fantasy from my head in one quick stroke; the way he spoke to me, so seriously, made me feel very smart. I think maybe that was the smartest I had ever felt.

“It's brilliant. But it's a couple of hundred years too late. Once we harnessed steam, Eddie, we delegated pulleys to the barn and the pier. Now we're burning gas and oil. And I venture to say, before long, we'll have electric engines and solar-powered engines and wind engines and saltwater engines. The pulley is a mighty tool, but it's no match for the power we can generate with a single engine.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“It's a darn good idea, but it's two hundred years too late.” He smoked thoughtfully. He was still thinking about it. I sat and sucked on one of the candies and stared at the stove. It was cosy in the little shed. It made me smile to think that this was the office of the smartest man in the world.

“And how goes the reading and writing battle?”

I almost blurted out, “Terrible! It's a complete failure!” But I caught myself. Mr. Bell wouldn't respect that. He was not someone who gave up. “It's a challenge, Sir.”

“It's good to be challenged.”

“Yes, Sir. Have you ever been challenged?” I couldn't imagine it.

He broke into such a big smile he couldn't keep his pipe in his mouth. He had to catch it with his hand. “The question should be, when have I
not
been challenged.” He leaned forward, opened the little stove, tapped his pipe above it and emptied it. He closed the stove, sat back in his chair, reached for a wire on his desk and started cleaning his pipe. “A day doesn't go by that I don't wake to a challenge, my dear lad. If you were to measure a man's success by how many of his projects he has successfully completed, then you would have to consider me one of the worst failures the world has ever seen.”

“But—”

“I can count my successes on these fingers.” He held up his fingers. His pipe was stuck between them. “Those notebooks are
full
of my projects.” He nodded toward a stack of notebooks on his desk. “And I've got more notebooks than I can count. All filled with projects.” He leaned forward and started filling his pipe with fresh tobacco. “I'll be known as the inventor of the telephone long after I am gone. But Lord knows, nobody will ever know the wondrous inventions that have flown between these two ears. The telephone was just one of them. Albeit, a good one.” He sat back, lit his pipe and stared at me as the smoke spread out from the end of it. For a few wonderful moments, we just sat in silence. I would remember those moments for the rest of my life.