Me and Mr. Bell

by Philip Roy

  Chapter 16

  Every day, I carried the applied mathematics book home from school, lay on my bed and studied it, then brought it back in the morning. I wasn’t learning how to write essays, but I sure was learning a lot about applied mathematics. Besides ropes and pulleys, there were triangles, arches, domes, levers, wedges, screws and ramps. A triangle was just a simple shape with three sides, but it was incredibly strong. In the book, there were pictures of famous temples, buildings and even bridges made out of triangles. Ever since ancient Greece, people have been building with them.

  An arch was just a curved shape, like a bow when it was bent. The book showed pictures of bridges built with enormous arches. Some of the arches were made of stone, some of metal and some of wood. The metal and wooden ones were created with hundreds of small triangles. These were called trestle bridges. That was a word that I had to look up.

  If you cut a hollow ball in two, the top half makes a dome. Domes were used for really big churches and important buildings. In the book, there was a picture of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and the Capitol in Washington. As fancy as these buildings were, they were created out of simple shapes that were discovered in ancient Greece. And that was applied mathematics. For me, that was the most interesting thing in the world.

  Archimedes created tools out of levers, screws, wedges and ramps. If you put a really long screw, as thick as your arm, inside a tube, you could make a water pump. By pumping a lever at the top, you could spin the screw inside the tube, and water would get pulled up from the bottom to the top. This gave people the power to pull water out of the ground. A picture in the book showed people in the desert, their bodies and faces wrapped with cloth, feeding water to their camels from a pump.

  Another picture showed men cutting down a giant tree with axes. The head of an axe was just a wedge with a really sharp edge. The handle was a lever. A wedge was really just a thin triangle on its side. So was an inclined plane. An inclined plane was a ramp. A ramp let you carry something uphill a little at a time instead of lifting it straight up. For fun, I bet three of my friends that I could lift them over my head all together. They laughed at me. Then I made them squeeze into the wheelbarrow together, and I pushed them up the hill until we were higher than we were before. They said that I cheated. I smiled and said that that’s what the laws of applied mathematics let you do – cheat nature. Then they made faces at me and said that I was learning too much.

  But to understand the book, the pictures weren’t enough. I had to borrow my father’s dictionary every night and look up words. I still wasn’t reading; I was just looking up words and guessing. Then, one night, when I came down to get the dictionary, my father was writing letters. I didn’t want to bother him, so I stood in the room and waited for him to say something. But he never did. So I quietly went to the bookshelf and pulled the book down. He never said a word. A little while later, I brought it back. He never raised his head. Later still, I was lying in bed, trying to sleep. But a word I had seen was bugging me. I kept seeing it, but couldn’t figure out what it meant. I rolled over and over and told myself to forget about it. I would look it up tomorrow. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t sleep, because I kept trying to guess what the word meant. Finally I thought maybe my father was finished writing letters, so I snuck downstairs. He was still there! This time, he raised his head, looked over his glasses and frowned at me. “What do you want?”

  “I’m sorry, Sir. I need to look up a word.”

  “Again?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What’s the word?”

  I looked down at the piece of paper where I had copied out the word. “R-e-n-a-i-s-s-a-n-c-e .”

  My father pulled off his glasses, put his pen down, stood up and stretched his back like a cat. He reached for the dictionary and held it out toward me. “Keep it in your room,” he said. I’ll know where to find it when I need it.”

  I crossed the room and took it from him. “Thank you, Sir.”

  He just stared at me and nodded his head. He didn’t like to talk when he was writing letters.

  —

  By the end of the fall, I had learned quite a bit about math, but had kind of given up trying to learn to write. I had looked up lots and lots of words and was getting faster at finding them in the dictionary. But when I did look up a word, it seemed to go out of my head just as fast as it went in. I didn’t know why that was. Why couldn’t I remember them? I didn’t know how anyone could, there were so many! Math was easier because once you learned how to add and subtract numbers up to ten, you could add and subtract anything, with a little practice. But who could remember the rules of spelling and all the exceptions and how to spell the words in the first place?

  But people did. Even the students in my school did. Some of the girls went around rhyming off the rules of spelling like it was a game. And we had spelling contests, and some of the girls never made a single mistake. I just sat and watched. The other kids in my school were all learning how to write essays. I had given up.

  I didn’t know what kind of job I would have when I grew up, but I knew it wouldn’t have writing in it. I knew I could be a farmer if I wanted to, although I was pretty sure now that I didn’t want to. I knew I would enjoy working with machines, and maybe I could do that without learning to write.

  But I wasn’t learning how to read, either, and that bothered me. I was just looking up words and guessing. And there had to be pictures. If there weren’t pictures, I was lost.

  But then something happened that changed my mind about giving up.

  On the day we had our first real snowstorm of the season, my father had gone to town to buy some supplies and go to the post office. It was lightly snowing when he left, and the fields were still brown. By the time he came home, the fields, the house and the barn were covered in snow. Everything was white, even the sun.

  My father came to the door, shook the snow from his clothes and banged his boots together before coming into the kitchen. He was red in the face and his eyebrows were wet with melting snow. But he just stood in front of everyone with a funny look on his face. “I went to mail some letters today,” he said. “Then the postman asked me if I knew a Master Edward MacDonald. He said he couldn’t think of who that was. He said it was important, too, because it was coming from Alexander Graham Bell, all the way from Washington. Well, it took me a minute or two to figure it out. But I did. ‘That’s my son,’ I said.” My father reached into his bag, handed me the package and shook his head with wonder. “It’s for you, Eddie, from Alexander Graham Bell.”

  Chapter 17

  The package was wrapped in soft brown paper and tied with white string. I carefully untied the string and unfolded the paper because I wanted to keep them. Inside I found a small book and a letter. The book had an orange cloth cover with a picture of a turtle and a warrior on it. My father said that it wasn’t a turtle; it was a tortoise. The letters on the front of the book spelled Zeno’s Paradox. I asked my father to read the letter out loud so that we could all hear it right away. He stood in the middle of the kitchen, held the letter out in front of him and read with his most serious voice.

  My Dear Eddie,

  I happened upon this small volume on a table in the Smithsonian Institute the other day and instantly thought of you. It seems to me there is nothing quite so fine as a good paradox to keep the mind as sharp as a chisel. Many is the day I have tramped through field and forest trying to solve this very riddle. Here, now, it is your turn.

  Mr. McCurdy has built his flying machine. He will bring it to Baddeck in the winter and we will try it out on the ice. I hope you will come down to the lake to watch the flight.

  Good luck to you with your writing, my young friend! Mrs. Bell and Miss Keller send their warmest regards.

  Yours in friendship and the pursuit of learning,

  Alexander G. Bell

  No one said anything when
my father finished. Everyone was thinking. My mother was smiling, and her eyes were wet. My father handed the letter back to me. “It’s yours,” he said. “You own it.”

  “Have you met Helen Keller, too?” asked my mother.

  I nodded.

  “And Mrs. Bell?”

  I nodded again.

  My mother’s smile spread wider. I passed the book to everyone to let them look at it.

  “Do you want me to read it to you?” said my sister.

  I thought about it. “No, thanks. I’m going to read it by myself. I’ll use the dictionary.”

  “That’ll take a couple ’a years,” said my brother under his breath.

  “You mind your own business, Joseph!” said my father, and gave my brother a stern look.

  “Yes, Sir.” My brother dropped his head like a guilty dog.

  I carried the book upstairs, lifted the dictionary off my desk and lay down on the bed. Before I began to read anything, I just explored the book inside and out. It was soft in my hands, like driftwood that had washed up on the lake. It was small and thin, and there weren’t many pages, yet it felt like the nicest book in the world. Then I noticed a message written by hand inside the cover. “For Eddie, a gifted young philosopher. Here’s to a life of discovery! – Alexander G Bell.” I had to look up the words philosopher and discovery, but I understood.

  There were some pictures inside the book – old men with beards, like Mr. Bell, but they were dressed in clothing from thousands of years ago. There was a drawing of a horse and birds and fish. There was a drawing of a warrior and a tortoise, the same ones on the cover. It looked like they were racing. That was funny. Then there was a picture of another old man sitting on a step, deep in thought. Under the picture was the word Zeno and the dates, 490-430 BC. I looked up Zeno and found out that he was a Greek philosopher. Even though I had already looked up the word philosopher, I had to do it again. It was someone who studied the meaning of life and a whole bunch of other things that I didn’t bother looking up. I was pretty sure I knew what it meant; a philosopher was somebody who studied a lot. I didn’t know why Mr. Bell had called me a philosopher. He must have been joking. What I needed to do next was look up the word paradox.

  Well, I looked it up, but I didn’t understand it at all. To understand the word paradox, I had to look up another word: contradiction. The dictionary said contradiction was a statement that made another statement not true. So I had to look up statement. A statement was just when you said something. If I said, “It’s raining,” that was a statement. Then, if my brother said, “No, it’s not,” he was making a contradiction to my statement. It took me a long time to understand that, but I finally did. But then, the dictionary said that a paradox was when a contradiction was also true. It was true and it wasn’t true at the same time. That’s the part I couldn’t understand. How could something be true and not true at the same time? Then the dictionary gave an example – Zeno’s paradox. Great. Now I was back where I started. And now I was too exhausted to do anything but go to sleep.

  The next day was Saturday. It started snowing again in the afternoon. We weren’t going to the field anymore, so after my chores I went up to my room, got cosy on my bed and opened the book. I spent the rest of the day in my room studying that little book, trying to figure out what the heck was going on. All I knew by the end of the day was that a warrior called Achilles was in a race with a tortoise, and it looked like the tortoise had won. But that didn’t make any sense to me whatsoever, and I went to bed frustrated.

  On Sunday, after church, I studied the book for the rest of the day but didn’t get a whole lot further. Achilles was faster than the tortoise, but he couldn’t beat him in a race. Why not? It just didn’t make any sense. Before bed, I went to my father and asked him if he knew what a paradox was. He was sitting in his chair, reading a book. He raised his head, took off his glasses and stared at me. He said he wasn’t sure, but he thought it was a riddle that was difficult to solve. I asked him if he had heard of Zeno’s paradox before, and he said no. Then he asked me if I had started writing back to Mr. Bell yet. I was surprised. “Do I have to write him back?”

  “Of course!”

  “But … I don’t know what to say.”

  My father put his glasses back on, dropped his head into his book and spoke without looking at me. “The smartest man in the world took the time to write you a letter, my son. I think you’d better get busy thinking of something to write back, don’t you?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  The next day, I started writing a letter to Mr. Bell while the other students were writing essays. I didn’t want anyone to know what I was doing so I opened the math book and put a sheet of paper inside it. I was trying so hard to think of what to say and to keep it a secret that I didn’t even realize I had written Deer Mr. Bell with my left hand! It didn’t look so bad, either. But I had used my left hand, just like Helen Keller. Then I noticed Miss Lawrence standing right behind me. “That’s a good start, Eddie,” she said, “but it’s spelled D-e-a-r. A d-e-e-r is what runs in the woods. And you must use your right hand when you write, just like everyone else. Those are the rules.”

  “Okay, Miss Lawrence.”

  “Here!” She reached down, took the pencil out of my left hand and pushed it into my right. I didn’t like that, and I didn’t feel like writing anymore. But I remembered what my father had said – Mr. Bell had taken the time to write to me, shouldn’t I take the time to write to him? And I wanted to, I just didn’t know what to say. Then I thought of something. “Miss Lawrence?”

  “Yes, Eddie?”

  “Do you know what Zeno’s paradox is?”

  “Zeno’s paradox? Well … a paradox is a kind of riddle, I think. But I don’t think Zeno is a word. ”

  “Oh. Okay. Thank you, Miss Lawrence.”

  “You’re welcome, Eddie.”

  I sat in my seat, stared out the window and thought. I knew that Zeno was a word. But Miss Lawrence didn’t. That made me think that maybe she wasn’t as smart as I had thought she was. And maybe, just maybe, she was wrong about using my left hand. If Mr. Bell had told me to use my right hand to write, then I would have trusted him and used it. If Helen Keller told me, I would have. They were both very smart and very nice, and I trusted them. But Helen Keller used her left hand herself. So why couldn’t I? After thinking about it for a while, I decided to use my left hand when nobody was looking.

  Chapter 18

  In December, the School Inspector visited our class. He visited once a year. We always knew he was coming because Miss Lawrence would say, “Today, class, we’ll have a special visitor.” She always said it as if it was a good thing. But it wasn’t. The Inspector was really boring and very bossy. But everyone treated him as if he were the king.

  He came in the late morning, as he always did, and said all the same things he always said, although I wasn’t really paying attention. I was staring out the window and daydreaming. After he finished talking, Miss Lawrence told us to get back to work. So I did. Then she and the Inspector had a conversation in whispers. A little while later, I was startled to see the Inspector standing right beside me, looking down at me with a fake smile on his face. He was holding a piece of twine. “Hello, Eddie MacDonald,” he said.

  “Hello, Mr. Inspector.”

  “Let me see your left hand.” He said it like an order. I stuck out my left hand. “This is just the thing you need,” he said. “This has cured plenty of left-handers, I promise you.” He tied one end of the twine around my wrist tightly, pulled my left hand behind my back and tied the other end of the twine to the belt loop on the back of my pants. It was uncomfortable. I really didn’t like it.

  “There you go. Now, when you feel the urge to write with your left hand … you won’t!” Then he slapped me on the back of my neck three times. It wasn’t a pat, it was a slap. And it hurt. It made me angry. I felt like
kicking him. I was also fighting back tears but didn’t want anyone to see me cry. He had tied me up as if I were an animal. Then the bell rang. “Good day to you, children!” said the Inspector, and he went out the door.

  I went outside with the other students for lunch break but could hardly hold myself back from crying. I started walking home. I didn’t care if I was allowed to or not.

  Jimmy Chisholm ran up to me. He had his jackknife in his hand. He cut the twine and freed my arm. “That was stupid,” he said. “Just plain stupid.”

  I looked Jimmy in the eye and saw that he really felt bad for me. “Thank you, Jimmy,” I said, and turned and went home.

  My father was coming from the barn when I came up the hill. He smiled when he saw me. He didn’t do that too often. Then he noticed that I had been upset, and he came closer to me. I wiped my eyes and tried to hide it from him, but he could tell that I had cried on my way home. I hated crying. It made me feel weak. I think I was just so tired from trying so hard to learn and not getting anywhere, even though I knew I had no right to complain when other people had it worse, like Helen Keller or Frankie MacIsaac.

  “What’s the matter?” my father said.

  I shrugged. “Nothing, Sir. I’m fine.”

  “You're home at lunch. Tough morning at school?”

  “I guess so.” I shrugged again.

  “Well, with a will like yours, you’ll wear them down, Eddie. Don’t let anybody stand in your way.”

  “No, Sir.” I raised my hand to wipe my cheek, and my father noticed the twine tied around my wrist. He looked a little alarmed.

  “What’s that?”

  “Um … a piece of twine.”

  “I know it’s twine. What’s it doing there?”

  “The Inspector tied it there. He tied my hand behind my back.”

  “He what?” My father choked on his own words, and I never saw his face get so red so quickly before. “He tied your hand behind your back? And your teacher let him?”