A Northern Light(30)

"Sorry," I said, feeling like a hopeless case.

Weaver looked up at the sky. He sighed and shook his head. Then, all of a sudden, he snapped his fingers and smiled. "Remember your word of the day?" he asked me, writing monochromatic the dirt.

"Yes," I said. "It means of one color. Or it can describe a person who's color-blind. But what does that have to do with algebra?"

"Say you didn't have a dictionary, but you knew prefixes, suffixes, and roots. Same way you know the value of numbers. How would you get at the meaning of a word?"

"Well, you'd look at the pieces. Mono, a prefix for 'single' from the Greek word monos. And chroma, for 'color,' also from the Greek. The /Vat the end would tell you it's an adjective. Then you'd blend all the pieces into one to get the meaning."

"Exactly! Algebra's the same, Matt. You blend all the pieces into one to get the meaning, which in this case is a number, not a word. You combine your knowns with your unknowns, your numbers with your Xs and Ys, one by one, until you have all your values. Then you add them or subtract them or whatever the equation tells you to do, and then you have your final value, the meaning"

He wrote out another equation, and I began to see what he was talking about. "Solve it," he said, handing me the stick. I stumbled a bit with the first one and he had to help me, but by the time he'd written out three more, I'd gotten the idea well enough so that I wouldn't be completely lost when I sat down to do my lessons that night.

"Just keep at it. You'll get it," he told me. "I know you will."

I shook my head, thinking about Barnard and how badly I wanted to go there. "I don't know why I should," I said. "There's no point."

"Don't say that, Matt. Did you ask your aunt? She give you anything?"

"A lecture."

"Did you tell your pa yet?"

"No."

"Why don't you tell him? Maybe he'd let you go. Maybe he'd even help you."

"Not a chance, Weaver," I said.

"Maybe you can earn the money picking berries over the summer."

I thought of all the buckets of berries I would need to pick and sighed.

We started walking again. We were halfway to Eagle Bay on our way home from school. My sisters were a good ways ahead of us, walking with the Higby girls. The Loomises were a little farther up, playing kick the can with Ralph Simms and Mike Bouchard. The Hubbard kids were behind us. Miss Wilcox kept them after sometimes. "For remedial work," she always said. But Weaver and I often stayed after to study with her, and we knew that she gave them sandwiches. Jim and Will didn't know it, though, since they never stayed after, so that was one less thing they could torment them over.

As we rounded the last bend in the road before Eagle Bay, we saw the afternoon train pull into the station. It was bound for Raquette Lake, but it wouldn't depart for another thirty minutes or so. It was still only April, but some tourists and camp owners were already coming and it took a little while to unload them and their belongings—as well as the mail, any stray lumberjacks on their way back into the woods, and groceries and coal for the hotels.

"There's Lincoln and my mamma," Weaver said, before the massive locomotive pulled in, blocking out most of the station and the people near it. "Let's see if she's finished up, Matt. Maybe we can get a ride."

We crossed the tracks and walked to the station, a plain plank affair. It was nowhere near as grand as the ones in Raquette Lake or Old Forge, which have restaurants in them, but it had its own stationmaster and a stove for the colder months and benches and a proper window with bars, where travelers bought their tickets. We threaded our way among the tourists and the conductors and Mr. Pulling, the stationmaster, and some workmen bound for one of the hotels.

Weavers mamma was next to the station, selling chicken and biscuits and pie. Lincoln, her hinny, was hitched to the Smiths' cart, facing away from the train, so that Weaver's mamma could more easily get at her wares. Lincoln was a patient animal. Pleasant would never have stood so quietly. But hinnies, which are bred from a female donkey and a male horse, are more tractable than mules, which are bred from a male donkey and a female horse.

"Need some help, Mamma?" Weaver asked.

"Oh yes, honey!" she said. Her face lit up like a lamp at the sight of her son. It always did, even if she'd just seen him ten minutes ago. Weaver's mamma has a first name, of course. It is Aleeta. And strangers call her Mrs. Smith. But everyone around Eagle Bay calls her Weavers mamma, for that's what she is. More than anything else.

"Hello, Mattie, darlin'," she said to me in her soft drawl.

I greeted her and she handed me a biscuit. She wore a blue calico dress and an apron she'd made from a flour sack. A bit of calico, the same as her dress, was wrapped around her braids and knotted at the back of her head. She was handsome like her son. Her face was strong and her skin was smooth, with hardly a line in it. Her eyes were kind, but they didn't match her young face. They had an ancient look to them, as if she'd seen most everything there was to see in this world and would be surprised by nothing.

"See that lady waving from the window, Weaver? Take this to her," she said, handing him a bundle wrapped in a sheet of newspaper. She made another bundle. "That's for the engineer, Mattie. Hand it up to him, honey." I shoved the rest of my biscuit into my mouth, put my books down in her cart, and took the bundle. I walked to the front of the train, not liking the chumpf chumpf noises it made or its sharp coal smell or the big whuffs of steam that came billowing out from under it.