I am Gideon: Chapter #21

The Computator

Fidel was a man of his word.  Nothing was mentioned, and I was left alone to do my work.  That does not mean I was left alone.  I awoke one morning and realized I was being urinated on – someone seeing how high he could pee.  I found horse manure in my soup and humanure in my boots.  I gritted my teeth and went about my work, and when the others saw they couldn’t get a rise out of me, after a couple of weeks they gave up and left me alone.  Period.  I made no effort to make friends, and they made no effort to befriend me.

One afternoon as I was trundling jump components to one of the arenas, I saw Fidel coming my way with something bundled in his arms.  It wasn’t large, but it was apparently heavy, because he was puffing with the uphill climb.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

He nodded.  I held out my arms and he dropped whatever it was into them.  “An old educational computator,” he said, pulling up his shirt to wipe his sweating face.

“Is it broken?” I asked. It certainly wasn’t heavy, but Fidel was a portly and unexercised fellow.

“It sure as kraa won’t work,” he muttered.  “Got no use for it anyway. May just need a new part, I dunno. Used to belong to my brother’s daughter and it ended up here.”

And educational computator. I’d heard of such things.  They taught you to read and write! “What are you going to do with it?”

“Throw it in that pile of scrap outside the farrier’s shed,” he said, pointing that direction. I guess he saw the look on my face because he grinned and added, “If you can fix it, you can have it.  Give you something to do in the evenings besides hide from the others.” He turned away laughing and hurried down the hill, hailing a woman carrying groceries into the main house.

I had a computator!  I felt like the whole world was at my fingertips.  If I could breathe life into it, I could learn to read and write! The thrill of that thought gave me goosebumps.  I trotted back up the hill and into the hay barn.  It was wrapped in an old horse blanket.  I set it down and unwrapped it.  It was magnificent.  It was the galaxy in a box.  It spread its arms to me and invited me to learn.  I re-wrapped it and hid it behind some hay bales in a pile of clean straw.

I visited it every evening after that.  I walked down toward the river and then doubled back through the trees to make sure nobody followed me.  I unwrapped it, and touched it and polished it and talked to it.  There were letters on it that I couldn’t read and numbers that meant nothing, but I clung to the hope that it would magically spring to life and make me into a new and better incarnation of myself.

I got out my two books and chanted the songs under my breath and followed along with my finger.  I practiced the shape of letters and picked out all the ones that were the same, and I pretended that I was teaching the horses to read and said lessons out loud to them.  “This is a B.  It sounds like this.  Say it after me.  B.” They were tolerant if not impressed, and so I passed my evenings in study and quiet conversation.

I spent my days cleaning stalls, polishing tack, setting up and taking down jumps and restacking the hay as new hay came in.  It was hard work, but I enjoyed it well enough.  I spent my evenings with my computator and my books, and pretended that I was making progress, but I knew – I was all that I would ever be.  I was the boy with the brands and the dead computator.

Photo by Hollis.