The Last Notebook of Leonardo

by B. B. Wurge

  “Don’t be too sure, Dad,” I said. I didn’t want him to get his hopes up too high. Now that we were in the cave, and I saw the rubble and sticks and dirt and leaves here and there, and the snow piled on the floor where the wind had left it, and no sign that anyone had ever been here before, I thought that Noma was probably right. It was just a regular cave. I looked around the walls, but I didn’t see anything like initials, or any carving or cave painting. I wasn’t very hopeful. But Dad was bounding up and down in excitement, his eyes wide open and his hair flying around.

  “Come on!” he said. “Quick! Into the cave! Don’t fall down any holes! Don’t trip! Be careful! Hurry! Stay together! Don’t get lost!” Shouting whatever came into his head, he bounded toward the shadows at the back of the cave.

  The front entrance narrowed to a kind of passage that led into the cliff, slanting very slightly upward. I had never been in a cave before, and I was excited to explore it. But we had hardly gone anywhere, only about fifty feet, when the passageway ended. There was no more cave. No other caverns. The wall was solid, carved into funny twisty shapes by water. It glittered in the beams of our flashlights. There was no sign of a cave-in that might have blocked off an inner chamber. No, the cave simply ran out. We had found the end of it.

  My dad stood dumbfounded. He had stopped bouncing and was perfectly still, looking at the back wall, his eyes stretched wide open and all the excitement gone from his face. I felt sorry for him. There wasn’t any ornithopter. If anyone had ever been in this cave, there was no trace left. I shined the beam of my flashlight around the stone face, from side to side and top to bottom, looking for any carving. I thought that da Vinci, being an artist, might have carved a face or a foot or something. But no, there was nothing. Only a few small holes in the wall. I walked around peering into those holes, shining my flashlight into them, but they were nothing more than shallow pits. The largest one was about the size of an oven. It was a hollow spot where a big rock must have fallen out of the wall. There was still a fragment of rock lying inside it about the size of a bread loaf.

  I reached into the hollow to pick up the rock fragment. When I touched it, it wasn’t as cold or hard as I expected. It seemed spongy to me. I lifted it, and a load of gray dust fell off it and billowed up into the air, making me choke and cough. When I got my breath back, I said, “Dad, look, what is it? It’s not a rock. It’s too square.”

  Dad came back to life. He unfroze all of a sudden and hurried over to me. “Jem, be careful, don’t drop it! Let’s take it out where we can see it better.”

  I carried it out to the front porch of the cave. We sat on the stone floor, all three of us, and I set the mysterious thing gingerly down between us.

  “It might be a mummified snake,” Noma said.

  Dad poked it gently with his finger. I could see his finger trembling from excitement. “It was made by somebody,” he said in a hushed voice. “It’s a package wrapped up in leather. Look at the stitches.” He brushed at it, cleaning off more grit and dust, revealing a row of thick brown stitches.

  “ You’re right, Dad,” I said. “It’s our Christmas present. Go ahead, open it.”

  He lifted it carefully and turned it over in his hands a few times. “It’s almost a shame to cut it open. I’m afraid I’ll harm it. But with a little care. . . .” He picked at the stitches with his large yellow fingernails and tore them open one by one. Then he began to pull open the loosened edge. The leather wrapping was stiff and did not come off easily. I could see that it was incredibly old. Finally he unwrapped the object and held it out for us to see. It was a notebook. It was bound in black leather and had no title or name on the front.

  Dad set it down on the floor and slowly, gently, lifted the front cover. It opened quite easily. It seemed to have been perfectly preserved inside of its wrapper.

  The first page was a blank and yellowing sheet of paper. The second page was crammed full of charcoal sketches and writing, and even I could see that it had been drawn by Leonardo. His style was unmistakable. I saw an eagle, and an otter, and some Indians, and some trees, and a canoe, and a hut made out of reeds, all drawn perfectly, sketched so that they looked even more real, somehow, than a photo would have done. You could imagine the actual things. Curled all around the drawings was his strange crabbed up handwriting.

  Dad stared at the page for a long time. We all did. Then he said in a choked voice, “You found it Jem. You found it.”

  We spent most of the day up in that cave. Nobody wanted to leave. It was a beautiful place, and very comfortable, especially on the front porch in the sunlight. Noma had brought lunch for us, muffins and turkey sandwiches for me and her, and a large pile of carrots and asparagus for Dad. But Dad didn’t eat very much. He was too excited. He didn’t want the direct sunlight to harm the notebook, so he sat in the gloom about twenty feet into the cave to decipher it. If he had had his mirror and Italian-English dictionary, he would have made faster progress. But he did okay. Every now and then he’d read out to us something that he had just translated, while Noma and I sat in the sun and ate our lunches. I tossed some muffin crumbs over the ledge for the birds. Some of those birds zipped past and snatched the crumbs right out of the air. Noma said they were swifts, and were the most acrobatic of birds. She sipped a special Indian tea out of a thermos. She let me taste it, but it was too bitter for me.

  “Listen to this,” Dad said. “ ‘If anyone should find my hiding place, know that I have gone immeasurably farther. Farewell.’ ”

  “And listen to this,” Dad said later. “‘I have come to appreciate the wise and peaceful folk who live here. I will miss them. But I must move on.’ Jem, he didn’t stay in the area. This is amazing. It’s fantastic. He went on another journey. We’ll have to figure out where. Remember, we swore to find his final resting place. It’s no good stopping the search here. Oh, this is fun! He left a clue for us!”

  “Dad,” I said, “maybe he was about to die.”

  “Jem! Don’t be so morbid!” Dad said, shooting me a reproachful look.

  Noma shook her head and took a sip of tea. “I think,” she said quietly to me, “you’re probably right. But your dad is very clever. I wouldn’t discount his opinion. This morning I would never have guessed we’d find a treasure like that notebook. But there it is.”

  About an hour later, after Noma and I had finished our lunch and were sitting peacefully watching the world beneath us, Dad gave a long, low whistle. I hadn’t known that he could, with an orangutan’s lips. “My God!” he said. “Jem! Noma! Come and look. You and your morbid view of the thing, Jem. This is where he went. This is the somewhere else.”

  Noma and I came to look. Dad held open the book and we crouched beside him. The page was covered with technical diagrams of an invention, but I didn’t know what it was meant to be. It looked like a wagon, or a car, full of gears and levers and other strange devices. Everything was labeled, but I couldn’t read the handwriting.

  “ What does it say, Dad?” I asked.

  “Ah, Jem, I should have expected it. Come to think of it, I did expect it. The man was a genius. It’s a nuclear powered spaceship. Don’t you see?”

  “A what?” I said.

  “Oh dear,” Noma said. “ That seems most unlikely.”

  “Of course it’s unlikely,” Dad said. “ The whole point of an imagination is to do something unlikely. That’s what Leonardo was all about: imagination. The next fifty pages are full of technical plans. He spells out exactly where he means to land on the moon. Don’t you understand? He built a spaceship and went moonside. That’s his final resting place. That’s where his last notebook is.” Dad put down the book and stared at me.

  “Dad,” I said, “are you saying—”

  “Of course I am.”

  “But do you mean—”

  “Yes.”

  “You want to—”

  “Who wouldn’t? We have the plans, don’t we?”

  da Vinci’s nuclear-powered spaceship drawi
ng.

  13

  That is how we began our great ambitious adventure of building a spaceship and flying to the moon. Leonardo’s plans were so neatly drawn and logically explained that Dad had no trouble understanding them. Our only difficulty was to find the necessary material.

  The evening that we came down from the cave, Noma seemed quiet. At first I thought she must be feeling nostalgic and remembering all the times in her youth that she had tried to get into the cave. But it turned out that she was carefully thinking over an idea.

  “Carl,” she said at dinner. We ate together in our tent, because it was the only place that all three of us could get in the door. “And Jem. I’ve seen a lot of things today I never thought were possible. I’ve met a talking ape. I’ve seen the inside of my special cave, and I didn’t think I would reach it in my lifetime. And I’ve seen a lost notebook of Leonardo da Vinci. My head is in a whirl right now and I’m beginning to think that anything is possible. I’m old, but I’d love to see the moon. And what have I got to lose? If you promise to take me with you, I’ll let you use anything in my barn. Maybe some of the old equipment will help. If you take me with you,” she added, “I might remember to bring lunch and a flashlight.”

  “Wow!” Dad said, a whole potato shooting out of his mouth and thudding into the wall of the tent. I had to duck or it would have given me a black eye. “Noma! Are you kidding? I could build six space-ships out of that material. That’s all I need. I think I saw a small forge in the back room. I can use it to shape the metal. And I saw plenty of tools lying around. I better read up on those plans. Oh boy, this will be fun.”

  The next day my dad and I worked in the barn, organizing the junk into piles so that Dad could find whatever he was looking for. I spent the afternoon sanding the rust off of the tools while Dad sat in the shade of a tree and studied the notebook. Sanding tools is a sweaty job. It’s not easy, and my arms were sore and my fingers turned orange, and my face was soon covered with rust stains from accidentally touching myself with my fingers. But I didn’t mind. I knew that my dad would end up doing most of the work, and I wanted to get in as much as I could while I had the chance. By the end of the day, I had a pile of shiny clean screwdrivers and pliers and saws and things like that.

  For about three days, Dad did nothing more than read that notebook. He was thoughtful and quiet. He held the book every moment of the day. Sometimes he sat on a rock with his back against the side of the barn, sometimes he sat in our tent reading by candle light, and several times I saw him asleep at night with it gripped in his hands. He always put a sheet of plastic wrap over the open page so that he wouldn’t speckle it with food that flew out of his mouth as he chewed. He didn’t pay a lot of attention to his meals, and the only reason why he ate at all was because Noma and I kept piling a supply of cabbages and lettuces next to him. He would reach out absently, pick up a head of lettuce, and pop it in his mouth while his eyes never left the notebook. He mumbled to himself constantly, and if I asked him a question he might answer in some very peculiar way. Once I asked him if there was anything Noma and I could buy for him, since we were going to drive to the town. And he said, “Yes, Jem, I think you’re right, it is a forward operating flank mechanism. Thank you.”

  Then, one day, Dad looked up from the notebook and said, “Jem! Where are you? Where’d you go?”

  “Right here, Dad,” I said. I came out of the barn where I had been neatening up, putting some old tires in a stack in the corner.

  “It’s time, Jem,” he said. “I think I can build it. It’s not hard at all. Quick! You pack our belongings, and tell Noma to pack hers, and I’ll start building the spaceship. Let’s see who’s done first.”

  He didn’t need to consult the notebook anymore; he had memorized every detail of it, and handed it to me to pack up with our belongings. Then he ran into the barn and seemed to turn into a flying windmill of arms and legs. I’ve already described how handy and, I suppose, footy, my dad could be in setting up our tent. It amazed me the first time I ever saw it. But that was nothing compared to now. He bounded from the front room of the barn to the middle room, where the goats had been kept, to the back room where the pails of goat milk used to be. It was filled up with neatly organized piles of farm implements, and he grabbed from this pile and snatched from that pile, and seemed to do six things at the same time. I saw him once unscrewing a part from an old tractor engine with his right hand, lifting a box of rivets with his left foot, sawing through a pipe with his left hand, and hopping around on his right foot, all at the same time, in a kind of a blur. His eyes seemed to pop out of his head, and he panted as if he was racing time. He set up a forge, which was a furnace where he could heat up metal and hammer it into different shapes. He melted together one of the blades from a circular saw, a pickaxe, a statue of George Washington, and the pendulum from a grandfather clock. I don’t know what that particular part was for, but it sure looked strange.

  He put our wagon in the middle of the barn. It seemed to make up the main body of the spaceship. Then he added to it. He welded on walls and struts and all kinds of gizmos. He used the arctic survival quilt and the explorer snow boots in the construction. He piled on engine parts and gears and loops of wire and the windows of an old car until the thing was an amazing jumble, all the metal parts melted crazily together, with a satellite dish stuck on top.

  I spent the afternoon standing in the barn door watching my dad work, and now and then Noma came over and stood next to me so that she could watch too. It was a treat to see.

  Around six o’clock, when the sun was down and the barn was so filled up with shadows that Dad couldn’t work anymore, he took hold of the wagon handle and wheeled the contraption outside.

  “There!” he said.

  “You sure did a lot, Dad,” I said. “How much longer before it’s done?”

  “It is done,” he said. “Can’t you see? Now you can put all our belongings inside, and we’ll set off tonight.”

  “Um, . . .” I said. I hadn’t packed anything.

  “Carl,” Noma said, “what does it run on?”

  “Good gracious!” Dad shouted, leaping up in the air and slapping his hand onto his furry forehead. “I forgot the fuel! It needs nuclear fuel, of course. I didn’t find any in the barn. Do you have any in the house?”

  “I’m sorry,” Noma said. “I don’t keep any nuclear fuel.”

  “You don’t?” Dad said, outraged. “Why not?! Old Spork used to keep a barrel of it in his kitchen under the sink. Now what are we going to do?”

  “Um, Dad,” I said, “how exactly did Leonardo get his nuclear fuel?”

  “He mined it, of course. What do you think? When he saw glowing rocks, that’s what gave him the idea of building a spaceship. Genius, I tell you. But it’ll take us months to mine enough, even if we can find the right place to dig. And we’d need a permit.”

  “What about glow-in-the-dark clocks?” I said.

  “I have one of those,” Noma said. “You’re of course welcome to use it.”

  “Glow in the dark . . . glow in the. . . .” Dad paused and thought for a moment. “If we get enough of them,” he said, “and scrape off the radium into the fuel tank, it would work, of course. But we’d need a darn lot of them.”

  Since we couldn’t think of any other solution, we decided that Noma and I would drive through the nearby towns and buy all the glow-in-the-dark clocks we could find. Dad would stay behind with the spaceship. Noma said that he aught to concentrate on fine-tuning the mechanism. But the real reason was to avoid a stir if he showed up in town. It was simpler to leave him behind. Besides, I don’t think he enjoyed riding in a car. It was too cramped for him.

  For the next few days, Noma and I drove through Ipskunk, which was about a two-hundred-house town, and Grand Skid, which was a small city, and Uppington, and Skaggton, and about a dozen other towns. Every time we passed a likely store, I would jump out and investigate. Noma preferred to sit in the car resting her knees. We
found out, of course, that any regular store that sold clocks didn’t have any glow-in-the-dark models with radium. All they had were plug-in digital clocks. Only antique stores and auction houses had the clocks that we wanted. Sometimes I would find eleven or twelve in one store, and sometimes just one. Luckily they weren’t expensive. At the end of each day we’d come home with the back seat of the car clattering with old clocks. Then in the evening we would pry open the front of each clock and scrape the glowing green stuff into a cup, and Dad would pour the cup into the fuel tank, which was a steel gas tank from a tractor. After about three days Dad said that we had enough. He stuck a twig into the fuel tank to see how full it was, and when he was satisfied he screwed the cover back on. He said that a little bit of nuclear fuel would get us a long way, and since we were only going to the moon and hopefully back again, we didn’t need a full tank. We were ready to launch.

  It was the last day of December, and Noma suggested that we wait until midnight. Our launch would be our New Year’s celebration. We would be like a firecracker shooting up into the air. I hoped we wouldn’t explode.

  Toward the moon.

  14

  We climbed through the hatch into the interior. It was surprisingly comfortable. Dad had put an old car seat in the wagon, and up front, for the driver, a reclining chair with a footrest. It was a big wagon, so we had a lot of room, even with Dad in there with us. We had a Styrofoam ice chest packed with cold chicken and egg salad. Under the seat we had a few sacks of potatoes for Dad, and we had some gallon jugs of water for all of us. We had a lot of other stuff in a trunk strapped on the roof, such as Dad’s two boxes of papers and a stack of books and some extra clothes, but we couldn’t get to the trunk without going outside the ship, which didn’t seem likely in space. Maybe it would be possible once we reached the moon. According to Dad, space was very cold, but he had insulated the spaceship with the arctic survival quilt, and so we should be okay. Leonardo had suggested goose feathers, but probably our way was better.