Me and Mr. Bell (6 page)

Chapter 10

W
hen I came home, my father was sitting at his desk. Once a week, he sat down and wrote letters to people far away. We had cousins in Halifax and Boston and distant relatives who lived in Scotland, though I had never met any of them. My father grew very serious when he prepared himself to write. He lit four candles, moved his books off his desk, sat up straight and just stared at the floor for a long time. No one ever interrupted him then, not even my mother. There was a special feeling in the house when he was writing to people far away.

When I came in, my mother hushed me to be quiet and pointed to a plate of food left on the table. With her eyes she questioned why I was late for dinner. I made a face to show I was sorry and mouthed the words, “I took a really long walk,” which was true. I didn't want to tell her I had been to the Bells' house. Mouthing the words reminded me of speaking to Helen Keller. What an amazing day it had been.

My brother was sitting at the table, writing letters and trying to look like my father, even though he had nobody to write to. He looked up at me and raised his finger to his mouth to tell me to be quiet. I threw him a look that said “smarten up.” He dropped his head and kept writing. I knew that one day he would write as well as my father. Practice makes perfect.

Upstairs, my sister was lying in bed reading a book. She was always reading. She raised her head when I went past her door. “Where were you?”

“Nowhere.”

“You were gone a long time.”

“I know. I like to take long walks.”

“Walking can't be
that
interesting.”

“It is to me.”

“You should read more.”

“I will.”

“When?”

“I don't know, I just will.”

In my room, I sat on my bed, opened up the paper Helen Keller had given me and started to study it. There were fifteen words on the page. The last one was
tough
, and it was messier than the others because she had written it on her lap, standing up. I wondered if she had included it as a kind of joke, because learning was tough for both of us. She was definitely somebody who liked to joke and laugh and have fun. But she also probably worked harder than anybody else in the world.
She
was tough.

I stared at the words. They looked blurry to me, like the ridges of bark on an old chestnut tree. They were just shapes, like that. But when I stared longer and looked more closely, I saw the
g
and
h
in each of them. Since I knew that the last word was
tough,
I decided to learn it first. Now I saw that, strangely, there was no
f
in it. I said it out loud. Yes, there was definitely an
f
sound. Did she make a mistake?

I got up, went down the hall and poked my head into my sister's room. She didn't raise her head out of her book. “What do you want?”

“How do you spell
tough
?”

“
T-
o-u
-
g-h
.” She spelled it and didn't even have to stop reading.

“Isn't there an
f
in it?”

“No.”

“How come?”

“Because they didn't put one in.”

“Then why do we say it that way?”

“Because that's how it sounds.”

That didn't make any sense. I sighed. “Okay. Thank you.”

“You're welcome.”

I went back to my room and wrote out
tough
ten times. Then I looked for
fight
. I wanted to see if it had an
f
. Because it sounded like it did. Yes, it did. But the
g
and
h
in
fight
sounded different than they did in
tough
. In fact, they didn't sound at all. Maybe that was an exception to the rule. But what was the rule?

I went back to my sister's room.

“What now?”

“Is
tough
an exception to the rule?”

“What rule?”

“I don't know. Is it an exception to any rule?”

“No.”

Now I was completely confused.

“Why are you still standing there?”

I took a deep breath. “Do you know why
fight
has an
f
and
tough
doesn't?”

She lifted her head out of her book, thought about it for a second then dropped her head again. “Nope.”

“Then how are you supposed to remember?”

“I don't know. You just do. Do you remember how old you are?”

“Yes. But I can remember numbers. It's spelling I can't remember.”

My sister looked at me, made a shrug with her face then dropped her head back into her book again. I returned to my room.

How were you supposed to remember how to spell words if there were no rules that you could trust or if there were exceptions to every rule, like Mr. Bell said? And how could you remember which one was the rule and which one was the exception? Wouldn't it be like trying to remember what every single leaf looked like on a tree? I wished somebody would agree with me that that was impossible. But nobody else seemed to care about it. Everybody else could spell.

I opened up my scribbler, wrote out the word
tough
ten more times, then
fight
ten times. I didn't know why
fight
wasn't just spelled
f-i-t
. Wouldn't that make more sense? If this were math, it would make more sense. That's what I liked about math. There were rules and no exceptions to the rules. I turned and stared at the window. If you had to learn to spell every single word by itself, then I was in big trouble, because I could never do that. And I didn't know how anybody else could. But they did. My sister did. My father did. My friends did. Even my brother was learning to. So why couldn't I? I looked down at the list that I had promised to learn, and I felt sick in my stomach.

The next day was Sunday and we had to go to church. I didn't mind going but hated having to dress up. I had one suit that used to be too big but now was too small. I had to wear it anyway. My wrists stuck out of the sleeves unless I pulled my shoulders up, which was uncomfortable if I did it for long. The pants didn't cover my socks and didn't even come close to my shoes. My mother said that I couldn't go to church unless I was dressed up, and I
had
to go to church. Once we were there, I folded my arms the way my father did, and that hid the shortness of my sleeves.

I was sitting there, between my mother and my brother, when all of a sudden somebody yelled out, “Where's the Pope?” Then there was laughter – something you never heard in church. Everyone turned around and saw Frankie MacIsaac standing up, until his mother and father pulled him back down in his seat. Frankie was twenty years old, but acted like a child. He had an accident on the farm when he was little, and now he would always be like a child. People said that he was simple. When I turned back in my seat, I saw my father staring at me. It made me uncomfortable. I wished I knew what he was thinking. Then when we were leaving, Frankie saw me and grabbed the arm of my jacket. “Hi, Eddie!” he said.

“Hi, Frankie.”

“Hi, Eddie! Hi!” He seemed awfully anxious to talk to me. I glanced at my father. He was frowning and shaking his head at me. I turned away from Frankie and followed my father out the door.

That night, I had a disturbing dream. I was sitting on a fence along a road. Frankie was sitting beside me, and we were staring at the road where people were walking by. The people were all dressed up for church, but we weren't. I wanted to leave, but Frankie wanted to stay. “I think I'm going to go now, Frankie,” I said.

“We should stay here, Eddie.”

“No, I don't want to stay here, I want to go.”

“But we can't go, Eddie.”

“Why not?”

“Because we don't have any legs, Eddie! We don't have any legs!” And he started to laugh as if he were crazy. I looked down and saw that he was right, we didn't have any legs.

I woke to the sound of the back door slamming. It slammed so hard it shook the house. It must have been the wind. Then, I heard my father talking loudly with my mother. I wondered what was going on. I jumped up, got dressed and went down to the kitchen. My mother was sitting at the table with her arms folded. My mother didn't sit down very often. She looked upset. My father was standing in the doorway with a spade in his hand. When he saw me, he said, “Grab your jacket and boots.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“He hasn't had his breakfast yet, Donald.”

“We won't be long.”

My mother sighed heavily. “He needs to go to school.”

My father looked at my mother, and his face softened a bit. He looked sorry. “He needs to learn skills that he can use, Mary. That's what he needs. He needs that more than school.”

Chapter 11

I
grabbed my jacket, pulled on my boots and followed my father out the door. My mother shoved a cookie into my hand. My father carried the spade and took long strides. I had to run to keep up. He never said a word to me all the way to the field. I ate the cookie quickly in case he did. The wind was blowing hard, and it was wet but not really raining yet. The field was on the back side of the hill, behind the house and on the other side of our best field, where the hill sloped down toward the woods. It wasn't deep, but it was wide. It was like a bald spot in the back of our farm. A useless piece of land. And that bothered my father.

The field rolled gently down to the woodlot, where the trees stuck up like a dark wall. The wind was pushing the first row of trees back and forth as if there were a giant stomping around in there. In spite of its being useless, I always liked this field. It seemed kind of hidden to me, like a secret. But it couldn't be plowed. The stones in it were too big. And they were too big to move.

I was surprised to see the horses there, standing side by side, attached to the plow. Their heads were dropped in the wind. I knew they wished they were in the barn. They didn't like storms. I was shocked to see that three or four rows of the field had been plowed. My father must have started in the middle of the night. Why was he trying to plow this field all of a sudden? At a glance, I could see that the rows weren't straight. He had worked his way around the stones. It must have been very hard. I followed him down to the horses. They turned and looked nervously at him. Then they rocked their heads when they saw me. They hoped I would take them to the barn.

I saw a crack on the blade of the plow. It had run straight into a stone, but you couldn't see the stone at all. My father held out the spade to me. “I want you to dig around it. I want to see exactly how big it is. I'll take the plow to the blacksmith, see if he can fix it.”

“Yes, Sir.” I looked at the horses. They were watching us nervously. “What about the horses?”

“The horses are fine.”

My father unhooked the plow and wheeled it away. The wind wailed in the woods like a witch. The horses dropped their heads. My father yelled from halfway up the field. “Take the horses to the barn!”

“Yes, Sir!”

I stuck the spade into the ground, picked up the lead and pulled the horses around. They shook their necks and came gladly. I looked across the hill where my father was disappearing with the plow. The sun was coming up, but we would not see it today.

I returned the horses to the barn and gave them some feed. Three cats were sleeping in the corner of the stall. They raised their heads when we came in but didn't move. That told me the warm weather was over for sure. The horses didn't mind the cats, and the cats liked the heat of the stall in the winter.

Back outside, it started to rain. The wind blew it into my face and it stung a little. I dropped my head and returned to the field. I would have liked some breakfast but figured I'd better dig around the stone first, before my father came back. Even though the sun was up now, the field was still dark. The trees were swaying back and forth. The rain was coming down in sheets, and I was completely soaked. I picked up the spade and started to dig. I didn't know what skill I was supposed to learn that was new; I already knew how to dig. At least with the rain, the ground was soft.

The stone was less than a foot under the ground. I shovelled the earth away from the top of it and searched for its edges. Every time I thought I found an edge, I hit more of the stone a little deeper. It was enormous! I kept shovelling. My dream came back to me. What an awful feeling to have no legs. But why was Frankie in my dream? Where I removed earth, the rain washed the stone smooth, black and shiny. It sat in the ground like a gigantic black potato that had turned to stone. As the rain pounded on my back, I kept at it. Why did my father think it was okay for me to miss school? Did he think I couldn't learn? Did he think I was like Frankie MacIsaac?

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.