by Philip Roy
Mr. Bell raised just one eyebrow. He stared hard at the model but didn’t say anything yet.
“It’s similar to what the Wright brothers have on their plane,” said Mr. McCurdy.
Mr. Bell took the pipe from his mouth. “Yes, but we haven’t seen it fly.” Then he looked at Mr. Baldwin. “What do you think, Casey?”
Mr. Baldwin shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. I’d love to see it built full size. It’s pretty slick.”
Then Mr. Bell looked at me. “And what do you think, Eddie?”
I was so surprised that he asked me. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to agree with Mr. Bell, but Mr. McCurdy looked so hopeful that I wanted to agree with him, too. “I don’t know, either. I guess I think that if I were up in the air in a machine, I’d like to know that I could come back down safely. But I think it looks pretty slick, too.”
Mr. Bell had a big smile on his face. “Looks like it’s two against two, Dougie.”
Mr. McCurdy sighed. He reached over, picked up the model and brought it closer to Mr. Bell. With one hand he made the movement of the wind flowing toward the flying machine. “The air comes like this. It strikes the wings here, and the lift is quick and easy, like this.” He raised the model up. “Then, when you want to turn, you just bank, like this, and around you come.”
Now Mr. Bell looked more serious. “The tetrahedral cell, Dougie. That’s the way to make the wings strong, yet keep them light.”
Mr. McCurdy sighed again. This time, I got the feeling he was biting his tongue.
“The cell is too busy a design for flight, Sir,” said Mr. Baldwin. “It’s got terrific strength for any application on land, and endless possibilities, but it’s cumbersome in the air, I think.”
Mr. McCurdy nodded his head to agree. I was surprised to hear them disagree with Mr. Bell. I didn’t think that anyone would. Mr. Bell raised his eyebrows again and looked at me, but I couldn’t say anything because I didn’t know what a tetrahedral cell was. So I shrugged.
“Looks like I’m outvoted,” said Mr. Bell. He kept staring at the model.
“Let me build it,” said Mr. McCurdy, “then you’ll see.”
Mr. Bell nodded. “Yes, yes, build it, of course. Let’s see what it looks like.”
Now Mr. McCurdy was smiling.
“You build it, Doug, and I’ll fly it,” said Mr. Baldwin.
Mr. McCurdy made a face just like one of my friends would. It was friendly, but it meant no. Mr. Bell moved to the other side of the laboratory, and I followed him. He started to flip through some of his notepads, looking for something. It was getting dark outside the windows. It was time for me to go home. Mr. Bell tilted his head toward Mr. McCurdy, who was still standing beside the model with Mr. Baldwin. “Dougie first came here when he was a boy, Eddie, just like you. Look at him now. He’s an inventor in his own right.” Mr. Bell stared at me beneath his bushy white eyebrows.
“Tell me, Eddie. Have you decided which has been more useful to you, your successes or your failures?”
I was surprised that he remembered to ask me that. “Yes, Sir.”
“And which would that be?” He squinted until his eyes were almost shut. I could tell that he really wanted to know. But how could I explain that I didn’t really have any successes yet? The most successful I ever felt was standing here right now, in this room, with him and Casey Baldwin and Douglas McCurdy. But I wasn’t going to say that.
“My failures.”
“And why is that?”
“Because they make me work harder. And working harder makes me feel stronger.” That was true.
Mr. Bell nodded thoughtfully. “Indeed.” From the look on his face I figured he was going to say something serious.
“I must warn you about exceptions, Eddie.”
“Exceptions?”
“To the rule. For every rule, we have exceptions. It’s the darndest thing, but it seems to be part of nature, too. Take the rule that Helen just shared with you: i before e except after c.”
I didn’t realize he had been listening the whole time. “Yes, Sir?”
“It’s a good rule,” he said. “It works most of the time. But how do you spell eight?”
I closed my eyes and concentrated. I wanted to spell it right. “E-i-g-h-t.”
“Right you are! And so, which comes first, i or e?”
“E, Sir.”
He took a puff from his pipe. The smoke made a cloud in front of his face. He squinted and looked through it at me to see if I understood. I nodded my head.
“The good thing about exceptions,” he said, “is that they keep us on our guard. They keep us sharp. And that is surely a good thing.” Then he winked. “Good day to you, dear lad.” He slapped me on the back, turned and went back to the other men.
“Good day, Mr. Bell.”
“Good day, Eddie,” said Mr. Baldwin and Mr. McCurdy. They raised their heads, waved and dropped them again. They were anxious to keep discussing the model. I would be, too, if I were them. I wondered how long it would take Mr. McCurdy to build the real flying machine.
“Good day,” I said, and went out the door. I closed it carefully. As I walked away, I could hear Mr. McCurdy’s voice as he continued trying to convince Mr. Bell of the flat wings. I went to the end of the path, around the little cove and back across the beach. It was really dark now. I was late for supper.
Chapter 10
When 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?