Stone

Chapter 42 – The School

The next morning Stone woke up and remembered to go to the other house to use the boy’s bathroom. If nothing else, this morning rush would encourage him to get a new school built. His breakfast was ready for him when he got back to the kitchen, and he ate it slowly, watching the kitchen staff doling out oatmeal to the morning students.

After he finished, and carried his dishes to the sink, he managed to get a quick kiss from his wife, with her classroom full of students oohing and aahing at the kiss. He then left the house. Kalo had a class this morning, so Stone walked alone into town. The pawnshop was open, and he entered, browsing for a full hour before approaching the clerk.

“I understand you have a good sextant in here,” he asked the man.

“We have several,” the clerk replied. “They range from an older mate’s model up to a captain’s sextant that came in from a retired gentleman just a few months ago. It will not be cheap, but it is of highest quality.”

Stone choked when the man quoted a price as he handed the brass piece carefully to the big man. The captain had told Stone what the shop had given him for the instrument, so Stone had that advantage in bargaining, and when the first quote came in at three times the amount the pawnbroker paid, he answered with a bid just over what the pawn had been.

They dickered for a while, and when Stone’s offer of 50% more than the pawn price was refused, Stone asked to see the other models. The broker brought out five other units, ranging from a slightly beat-up bronze mate’s model to several that were nearly as nice as the captain’s.

“Tell you what,” Stone said. “I will buy all six and I will pay you five gold. I know you paid 18 silver for the captain’s sextant, because he told me so himself. I don’t know what the others are worth, but I’m sure it was less than four gold. Take the offer or I will leave and seek my tools in Lakeport.”

The pawnbroker only hesitated a moment. Five gold was a good week in sales, and he was making it in a day. And he was making a good profit on all the pieces. But he was a greedy man, and countered with “Five gold and 8 silvers.”

Stone turned and walked away. As he put his hand on the door handle, the broker shouted out: “Wait. I can do five gold. Let’s do the paperwork.”

“Five gold and you deliver them to the new Kithren school by the end of the day,” Stone insisted. “With an adult delivery person. I don’t want some kid kicking the box along the street.”

Stone continued down to the docks to check out progress on the ship, which looked exactly like it did the day before, in spite of a dozen men working away at various tasks. The big man decided he would have to limit his visits to one a week, so progress could be more easily noted.

On his walk back to the school he saw two wagons of cuttings from the oak glade come through: one with logs too small for the ship but fine for firewood, and the other piled high with branches and trimmings. The first went into the lane between the school buildings, and the other went to the field where trimmings were being left for the poor folk to get free wood.

At home Cass made him his lunch, another wonderful BLT: this one with all six slices of bacon. Jason rubbed his wrist where the spoon hit him when he tried to filch a slice. As Stone ate the wonderful sandwich, he saw that Jason was getting one with four slices of meat. Cass adored the young boy, and made sure he was well fed. Kalosun came into the kitchen after his class for his sandwich, which had different vegetables on it: a Kithren version. The two men and the boy headed out, and went down to the lot were the oak trimmings were being dumped. The lot was going to be the site for the school. It was town land, and Stone would have to buy it for the school, but the men wanted to see if it would be suitable first.

A tall, slender Kithren man with a ring of white hair around his ears and none on top was pacing up and down the lot when the three got there, just as the men were dumping the last load of branches.

“That is Keenmoon,” Kalo said. “He is one of the better Kithren builders in town. I checked out the last three houses he built and they are all excellent work.”

“Kalosun my friend,” the man said as he approached. “Who is your tall white friend?”

“This is Stone, or the Captain,” Kalo said. “His wife runs the new school, and he is planning to build a new building for it.”

“Bless you sir,” the man said, enthusiastically shaking Stone’s hand. “It is a great thing for the young people in the town. I have no children of my own, but my neighbors and my brothers all have children in the school.”

“Thank you,” Stone said. “Do you think this lot will work for the building we propose? This is what we were thinking of.” Stone pulled out the sketch Rayla had made of the building.

“Yes. Yes. Yes. We can do this. And this. That room: the kitchen? It would be better over here to keep the chimney close to the main heating file for the big room. So many small rooms: I guess they are classrooms?”

“Yes,” Stone said. “And they aren’t that small: 40 foot by 60 foot.”

“Small compared to the great room. And curved, as the sun God prefers. What is the use of the big room? There will have to be a post through the center.”

“It will be for sports periods, especially in the rains, and for assemblies when all the students are gathered together, like on the first day of school, and graduations.”

“I see. Can I take this sketch? I will draw up a proper plan and provide you with a cost estimate.”

“Certainly,” Stone said. “When can your men start work?”

“We could start work today. For the first month we will have to harvest pine timbers from the woods around here. Nothing will happen on this site for a month or so, other than piling up the logs. But you don’t own the land. And are you willing to pay an advance to get started soon?”

“Yes. If we don’t get the land, we will build elsewhere,” Stone said, handing a slip of paper to Keenmoon. “This is a check. If you take it to the jeweler on Lake Street at First, he will issue you 500 gold. Is that enough to get you started? When you need more, just ask.”

The man looked impressed. “I will send men out to seek suitable trees tomorrow. If you can have the land issue settled in a week, then we can start hauling logs in.”

Stone wanted to mimic his attempt at only going once a week to the shipyard with the school. It did work for the shipyard, but the school seemed to need constant attention.

The next night he went to the town council meeting and made a generous offer to the town to purchase the school site, and said offer was accepted immediately, although the deal took another week to finalize. The following night was the first night school, with Rayla starting by spending an hour on the ten students who attended. Eight of these were students that Kalo and Stone had invited, and they were paid sixpence a night: going to school was to be their regular job. The other two were just students who had heard that there was an adult school, and Rayla was too softhearted to turn them away. The lesson only lasted an hour, and then the captain arrived and took his eight out to study the night skies. As promised, he was neat and sober, and was astonished when Stone paid him a silver just to point out the constellations to his students. Five silver a week was only slightly less than he had earned as a captain on the whaler.

Soon after the crew had left, the builder arrived with his updated plan for the school. Three crews of men were already in the pine groves, felling timbers, and another was in the marshes, gathering reeds to be used to thatch the roof. The building was not to be finished until the end of the year, but a huge number of reeds would be required, and they could not be harvested in winter.

Rayla was thrilled with the plan for the school, but as a woman she insisted on making changes. About half of the ones she made were accepted, and the builder explained why the others could not work. She also mapped out the playground areas: there were three, with the youngest students in one, the middle students in another, and the oldest in the third and largest.

She even mapped out where the play equipment would go, thinking back to the schoolyards of her youth, with slides, swings and teeter-totters. Stone chimed in here, sketching out some of the newer equipment from his time, like playsystems and simple merry-go-rounds. He even plotted in a basketball court, and rued that there was not enough room for a baseball diamond.

Rayla decided to use one of the art classes for the senior students to have them sketch out playground ideas that would interest them.

Of course this meant that Stone had to use the next day to find woodworkers and smiths who could build these devices, which turned out to take three days, since each artisan had to spend time to understand what was needed. Even something as simple as swings were an unheard of concept in the town, and needed sketches and explanations. Kithren swings existed, and the art students had suggested these, but these were simply a rope hung from a tree limb, with a short branch tied to the end for the swinger to stand on, holding the rope. The artisans had trouble at first envisioning a swing with two ropes and a board to sit on. In the end, Rayla wanted both types, with the Kithren type only in the older playground.

Soon it was time to go back to see the ship, and after a week Stone could now pick out the large amount of work that had been done on it. The shipwright told him that in a week, he would be able to actually explore on board. Of course when he announced that at supper, Rayla, Jason and Emily insisted on going. Stone decided it would be a family outing, and Sissy would go as well. Sissy had finished the curtains on the family house, and was now working on the schoolhouse. Then she planned on sewing sheets for the family beds, which only had the ones Rayla had bought when equipping the house. She later realized that spares were needed for laundry days, and Sissy was happy to have the work.

The visit to the ship came soon enough, and the shipwright led them through the lower decks, which were dark and closed in, so a builder with a torch accompanied them. On the upper decks the shipwright mapped out the various rooms: a galley for cooking, the captain’s quarters, the mate’s quarters, and even a stall for Doug.

That was when Rayla noted that there were no plans for the quarters for the family. The shipbuilder immediately sketched out a space next to the captain, moving the mate’s quarters and the galley to the aft. Rayla sketched out a large room for Stone and her, and a smaller cabin for the kids, who would sleep in triple-decker bunks, which thrilled them all.

Over the next two months work was underway in many different directions. Timbers piled up in the schoolyard, once Stone received the deed, as well as a large plat reserved for the reeds for the thatching. The ship neared completion, and on his latest visit Stone viewed the sails. The jibs were all wrong: the sailmakers could not conceive of triangular sails, and had insisted on rectangles. They were sent back, with corrected sails to be delivered before the launch date. Finally, the artisans doing the playground equipment started to deliver sample pieces, which were erected in the front of the current school buildings. The result was that students not in class spent most of their time on the slides and swings when not in class.

Finally things started to come together. To Stone’s amazement both the erection of the first timbers for the school was planned on the day the ship was being launched. When Stone told the shipwright of the conflict, the man offered to delay the launch by a week: it would give him time to mount the jibs, which had arrived at the last minute.

Almost all the students attended the first week of the work on the school. Rayla was in no mood to teach when her new baby was starting to be built. And the rest of the teachers and the students also wanted to watch. Rayla decided that seeing how construction worked was a good learning experience: after all, some of the boys in the class might wind up in construction. But by the end of the first week, with 22 timbers now in place, the students were getting bored, and classes were resumed, with a weekly trip to the site to see progress for an hour, and then back to class.

The night school went well. Rayla assigned other teachers to the non-sailors, and they met once a week, with 21 adults now learned to read, write and do numbers. The sailors met five times a week, with the men doing an hour with Rayla on reading and writing, and then going off to the captain, often with the sextants, other time just reading the stars. Rayla had taught them the basics of numbers and money, but the captain was teaching the more complex mathematics of navigation and sailing.

The men learned well. Kalo and Stone had only selected men who seemed smart, and all of them took well to Rayla’s class: surpassing the younger students who had started weeks ahead of them. They had an incentive. There were three mate’s positions promised to the best of the students, with three more master’s positions. The other two men were promised senior crew positions, and would move up if any of their superiors were ill or injured.

On the second class it was clear that one student was ahead of the others: he had no day job, so he spent the day reviewing what he had learned. Within days the others had duplicated his actions: no one wanted to be left behind. After all, they were earning money going to school: they decided that it was smart to concentrate on it.

Two days before the launch of the ship the rest of the crew arrived, and started to learn their ropes, raising and lowering sails and undertaking all the other tasks needed that could be done while the ship was still in dry dock. Luckily these days were calm, and all sails could be raised. Even so, the light wind caused the ship to tilt to one side until the captain ordered the mainsail dropped.

One of the students spent a half-day working with the jib sails, and finally figured them out. They could funnel the wind into the square sails and this allowed the ship to tack at a wider range. His work earned him the position of first mate, and second mate was chosen at the end of the day, based on his ability to get the men working for him. The second day saw the third mate and the masters named. The sailors moved onto the boat the first day.

Finally the shipwright announced that the gates would be opened and the basin flooded over night. Again Rayla cancelled classes, and students were allowed to come to see the ship take float the next day. Most attended, as well as most of the students from the other school, but they had to skip classes.

Stone was up at six a.m. on launch day, and sat in the office as the waters slowly rose. At that time the water was still several feet below the hull, but when Rayla and her charges arrived, the ship was a full foot into the water. It was noon when the shipwright had his men pull away the scaffolding, and the ship dropped and floated on its own. Men rowed out to the vessel, and joined the crew who had already been scouring the ship for leaks. There were many, but one at a time they were repaired as the ship floated higher and higher in the basin.

The shipwright stopped the sailors from manning the bilge pumps: he wanted water in the hull to help the wood swell and tighten the seams. The sailors were less than pleased with the idea: to them water was something that belonged on outside of the ship.

“Is that Jason,” Rayla screeched as she noticed a small figure in one of the boats going out to the ship. She was in the office, while all her teachers and students had been watching from a nearby dune.

“I think so,” Stone said. “He looks like he is doing well.” The boy was scrambling up the rope ladders thrown off the side of the ship, actually climbing faster than the shipbuilders.

“Get him off. That can’t be safe!” his mother yelled.

“I hope it is,” Stone said. “That is going to be our home before too long.”

“Where is he? I can’t see him!” Rayla screeched.

“There,” Stone pointed. “He is climbing the mast ropes.”

Rayla stood and started to tug Stone: a pointless task since she weighed only a fraction of what he did. But the big man knew who was the boss in the relationship and stood up, ducking out the door as she tugged. They went down to the edge of the basin, and saw the shipwright, directing the few men still on shore.

“Any more boats going across,” Stone said. “Our boy is out there and the missus would like a word with him.”

“Certainly,” the man said, ordering four men to go to the very boat Jason had been on. A single man had rowed it back when his mates, and the boy, had climbed aboard.

Rayla squealed a little when Stone lifted her on the boat, and again when Stone got on, with his weight causing the boat to sink to near the gunwales under his weight. The four workers slowly made way to the ladders hanging down. Stone lifted Rayla. Another squeal as she grabbed the ladder.

“I’ll be right behind you,” Stone said, finally stepping onto the ladder, to the relief of the crew, who had seen water slosh over the sides as the boat teetered about as Stone stood and moved about. When he stepped onto the ladder, the waterline dropped a foot but the ropes stretched, causing another squeal from Rayla. But the boat rose and was in no more danger of swamping.

Stone and Rayla mounted the ladder much slower than Jason had, but eventually reached the railing of the ship, where two sailors helped Rayle onto the deck, which was now pitching a bit as it was fully afloat. Stone boarded unassisted.

“Jason! You come down,” Rayla screamed but her voice didn’t seem to carry into the sails, which were flapping in the light breeze. Jason was next to a sailor, who seemed to be showing him the ropes and what each one did to control the sails.

“Stone. Call down your son. Your voice is stronger than mine,” Rayla said.

“But not strong enough, I expect,” the first mate said. He took a whistle from his neck and blew a shrill note. Everyone in the rigging glanced at him, including Jason, who saw his red-faced mother waving and calling out. He realized that he had to go back down, and scrambled down the ladder he had climbed up on. It was faster than he had gone up, putting his foot on every third rung on the way down, terrifying Rayla even more.

“What were you thinking?” she said as she grabbed his shoulder after he landed on the deck. “You could have been hurt up there. I don’t want you up there again.”

“But I like it,” Jason said. “The sailors told me what to do. It is safe. Look at all of them up there. I want to be a sailor too.”

“No!” his mother said. “You are too young.”

“Actually madam,” the first mate said respectfully. “I don’t think the captain had a cabin boy yet. There are usually one or two, and they tend to start at age 10.”

“I am 10, Momma. I’ll be 11 soon. Please!” His mother was not paying attention, glaring at the Mate.

“Not on the first trip,” Stone said, and the boy’s shoulders sagged. “We will talk about it for later trips. They will be making safe coastal trips up to Lakeport for a couple years. Maybe later.”

Jason smiled again. Later was better than never. But now it was Stone who Rayla was attempting to destroy with her heat vision.