SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

"Thank you," I said.

"How are you gonna get the stuff home?"

I hadn’t thought about it. It didn’t even occur to me. I had some space in my backpack but that wasn’t nearly enough.

"Wait here a moment," Paul said.

When he came back a few minutes later, he was wearing his jacket and held his car keys in his hand. "I’ll drive you. There are a few eight-foot, one-inch pipes outside as well."

We left the store. He turned the sign to closed and locked the door. I helped him load the piping onto the truck and we drove off.

"Are you doing okay in school?" he asked.

"Yes."

"You were always a good student. Your dad told me. He said that one day you’d be an engineer and build large and beautiful things. But for that you’ll have to stay a good student. I know these are tough times and if you can’t stand it at home or somethin', you’re always welcome to do your homework in the store."

"Thanks," I replied. I smiled at him briefly. He was wiping his face the whole ride to my house. I didn’t say anything, didn’t know what to say. When we got there, we unloaded the parts and leaned everything along the outside wall of the barn. When he left and drove past the house, my stepmother talked to him for a few minutes. Then he drove off. My stepmom waved to me. I waved back. She disappeared into the house.

When we had dinner that night, my stepmother asked me if I wanted to earn some extra money doing minor chores at Mr. McGuiness’s store. He could use a hand. My eyes must have lit up at that moment because my stepmom smiled at me for the first time in a while. I’m sure she didn’t know what to do with me other than to tell me not to set the shop on fire when using the welding equipment. I’m sure she was glad I would have some supervision in the afternoons.

I started at Paul’s store a few days later. We agreed on minimum wage. I thought it was more than fair. I wasn’t officially old enough to work but he said he’d give me cash every week. I had a few more costly items on my list, including the battery, the magnets, and the 50 Amp wire. Paul told me that he could help me with the wire and the connectors and would give them to me at wholesale.

From then on, every day after school, I walked straight to Paul’s store. I was able to do most of my homework during homeroom and worked from three to six in the afternoon. Afterward, I went home, ate, and went straight out to the shop. During that time, around the beginning of December, I began to build the chassis. The galvanized pipes needed to be cut to length and welded together according to the drawings. It was difficult without a second person there but I made a contraption with a few sandbags from outside to hold the pipes in place while I welded them together. I made good progress and after a week, I was mostly done.

Then I realized something: Were I to leave the machine in this part of the shop—and assuming that I’d successfully travel back in time—I would end up right on top of the belt sander. There was no place in the shop where I could position the machine without creating chaos the moment I landed. I would have to move it to a place where it wouldn’t bother anybody. Behind the barn, and accessible through a door, there was a storage area. It was freezing cold in there but there was enough space to fit the machine without having to disturb anything. I decided to build the individual components in the main shop and put everything together next door. But the chassis was already bigger than the relatively narrow door. I’d have to go outside through the double doors and around back to the sliding door of the storage area.

The other problem was the weight of the individual parts. The rotor, once the magnets were attached, would probably be really heavy. The same for the chassis. I needed something to help move the components. I found a palette that seemed mostly intact, and a rusty, beat-up shopping cart in one corner of the storage room. I took the wheels off and mounted them onto the palette. The wheels were rusty but sufficient.

That Friday evening, I moved the chassis onto the palette. It was barely big enough to hold it. On Saturday morning, I worked at the store and went home with seventy-two dollars and fifty cents and a 50 Amp wire. Paul had subtracted the seventy-eight dollars for the wire, purchased at wholesale price, from the one-hundred and fifty dollars and fifty cents I had made during that week. The seventy-two dollars and fifty cents wasn’t enough for either the battery or the magnets. It would probably take me an additional three weeks to come up with the money. That would put the completion date right before Christmas. I thought about asking my stepmom if she’d order the magnets for me in exchange for the money. But I decided to wait until I actually had the money in hand. The battery I could get at the car parts store in town.

If the chassis was fairly easy to weld together, the centrifugal rotor was a different story. The instructions talked about forging a three-dimensional blade, not unlike a fan blade, out of the plate I had found in the drawer. I had never done anything like it. I was afraid I would burn out the material and render it useless. The magnets were to be placed along a semi-circular shape that was open at the top. The fan blade would then be centered inside the magnets. "If done correctly, the magnets should hold the blade in place without any further assistance," it said in the instructions. If done correctly. I began to doubt my ability to do this. The chassis was crude work. I had welded pipes together many times before. But this wasn’t a task for an apprentice. It needed the hand of a master. Someone like my dad.

For the next few days, I couldn’t make myself light the forge and begin. Instead, I sat in the shop unable to do anything. I wasn’t ready. I shouldn’t have started. I simply couldn’t do it. Even Paul noticed my change of mood and asked me a few times if everything was all right. I nodded each time, certain he wasn’t able to help me.

"You know, your dad thought very highly of you," he said one day while we moved bags of salt from the back to a spot near the front door of the store. "And I don’t mean only as a person. He spoke highly of you as an apprentice. Her heart is in the right place, he said. She can figure anything out. The more challenging, the better for her."

"He must not have known what I can or cannot do," I replied.

"Do you really believe that?" Paul asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Do you think it likely that a master blacksmith of nearly forty years does not know what his apprentice can or cannot do? Or is it more likely that he knows precisely what your limitations are and how to overcome them?"

I wanted to say, "Yes, it is likely. And not only is it likely, it’s true. He doesn’t know my limitations. Only I know them." But I didn’t say anything, mostly because I didn’t want to offend Paul, knowing of his deep friendship with my father.

"A master only becomes one through the very mastering of what he was not able to master before. Otherwise anyone can call himself that. The taller the task, the further the learning carries you."

When he placed the last bag of salt onto the stack of other bags next to the door, he stretched his back and wiped his hands on his pants. "If your dad thought you could do it, I’m sure you can. Whether it’s easy or not, doesn’t matter, does it? His confidence in you should be enough to erase the doubt in your heart."

Paul sent me home two hours early that day. He assured me at the door that I would still get paid for the time. I went home, emptied the dishwasher, and helped my stepmom put away groceries.

"So what are you doing out there in the shop every day?" she asked.