The Fourth Life of Sean Donoghue by Trish Hanan (children's books read aloud .txt) 📕

but what I was worried about was that it might explode when I cut into it,” he told him. Ryan looked nervous.
“If you had shared that with me, I could have backed up,” he snapped. Sean laughed. He put the crystal he had just cut into the little box and replaced it the light and then put the light back together. Then he looked at his grandson.
“Now if these are energy crystals, this glow light will work and we Donoghue will become the richest men on the planet,” he said. Ryan sighed.
“Then turn the damned thing on, I’m not going to live forever,” he teased. Sean flipped the switch and the light came on. They both grinned and clapped their hands together softly.
“Where did you find them?” Ryan asked.
“There’s a cave behind the waterfall,” Sean whispered. Ryan grinned.
“What is it about you and caves?” he asked him. “Everywhere you go; you find a cave that’s filled with something good. A Fairie Cave, a gold mine, an emerald mine, another gold mine and now a purple crystal mine. Granddad, you are the luckiest bastard I know,” Ryan declared. Sean took his hand and kissed it.
“Ah, lad, I’ve had you in my life for the past seventy-five years, I can’t be any luckier than that,” he told him and Ryan nodded. Sean walked him to bed and tucked him in. Kissing him on the forehead he wished him sweet dreams.
“I love you, Ryan Donoghue,” he whispered.
“I love you too, Granddad,” Ryan whispered.
The next day it snowed and everyone stayed inside because it was a heavy snow. Sean played with his son and then played cards with his grandsons and when everyone had lied down for a nap he took apart the glow light to see how the little box and the crystal actually worked. He saw that when you flipped the switch it caused these little wires to come down and touch the crystal. The little wires weren’t made of gold or silver these he knew. And they weren’t lead, pewter or steel, they were reddish. He compared them with several items around the house and determined that they were either copper or bronze. So he melted copper and bronze down and rolled it into thin wires and compared them to the wires of the light and determined they were definitely copper. Then it was time to clean the table for dinner and the whole afternoon had gotten away from him.
Danny and Ryan were very interested in his experiments and he cleaned off his desk and continued them after dinner. The brothers helped him as he took apart the light to reveal more copper wires leading up the little bulb that went from the energy crystal to the bulb itself.
“Let me get this straight,” Danny said, almost to himself. “The copper wire touches the crystal and feeds the energy from the crystal through the wire to the bulb which lights up when you flip the switch.” Ryan and Sean nodded.
“That’s very clever,” Danny exclaimed.
“And very simple,” Sean announced. He proposed that tomorrow they take apart something else to see how it worked. The two brothers seemed very interested in that. Sean decided to invited some of his men too and move the experiments out to the barn.
Julie thought the men very silly.
“Why do you want to take apart everything?” she asked him as they got ready for bed. Sean grinned at her.
“Because if we see how everything works, then we can maybe invent some things of our own,” he explained. She laughed.
“What kinds of things do you want to invent?” she teased him. Sean shrugged.
“Ah, lass, I don’t know, maybe something to help us plow the fields better, I don’t know, but we won’t know until we try,” he said and she shrugged.
“Well, if it makes you happy and keeps you from getting bored this winter, you boys go and have your fun,” she said and curled up and went to sleep. Sean decided to read for a while.
The next morning after breakfast he gathered Lonnie, Todd, Young Sean and the two brothers in the back end of the barn which they cleaned out and put in two big plank tables. On it Sean placed a toaster, a coffeemaker, an ice cream maker, a table clock and one of his precious new heaters. They all looked shocked at the last one.
“You’re not going to take apart the heater are you, Granddad?” Todd asked with disbelief. The others seemed to agree with him. Sean shrugged.
“How are going to figure out how it works if we don’t take it apart?” he asked them. They didn’t have a good answer for that so he showed them the light first.
“So that’s how it works,” Young Sean muttered as Sean touched the wires to the crystal over and over. The other lads smiled.
“Very clever people the Ennish,” Todd remarked. Sean smiled.
“Well, we built the cannon, so we can be clever too,” he informed them and they all grinned.
The first thing they took apart was the toaster and they first took of its cover and Sean pulled the little lever down and they watched the little coils get red and hot and figured out quickly how that worked.
“No wonder it always looks like a little fire in my toaster, it’s the coils getting hot,” Lonnie exclaimed and they all laughed.
Next came the coffeemaker and that had coils that got red hot also. The tricky part to that was how they got the water to leave the bottom of the reservoir to flow down the grounds. Then Sean slapped his head.
“The water comes to a boil and flows right over it, lads,” he exclaimed and they all went, “Ah.” And laughed some more.
The ice cream maker was the most interesting because it had things called gears that fitted together and spun around to make the paddle spin around really fast to mix the milk and ingredients together. And there was the cooling element that got really cold when the wires touched it that encircled the pot at the bottom. But the gears that spun the paddle really fascinated Sean. He couldn’t get enough of watching them spin around and around.
Finally they came to the heater and it was more of the same hot coils and cooling coils and a nice motor with gears that spun the fan around to blow the hot air or and cool air into the room. Tearing apart the machines became a fascinating thing to do and a lot of the men of the valley came into Sean’s workshop as they began to call it to watch the gears spin round or the coils get hot over and over again.
“You know we might be able to invent something that could help us plow,” Sean suggested one day late in December when the original six were sitting around watching the gears spin round.
“What do you mean, Granddad?” Young Sean asked playing with his son Tommy who was two and cute as hell. They had part of the room separated for the wee ones to play in. Sean took out some paper and a pencil and started to draw. The others bent over to watch.
“We could make a little wheel like this with little claws on them like this to tear up the soil just like the plows do only better,” he drew what he meant and they all nodded. Tommy reached for the pencil so Young Sean put him in the play area with the toys. The child reached for some soldiers and played. Sean continued.
“We could put the wheels in a box like this and put a motor on top that would hold the crystal, or better yet, we could build a bigger box and put in a dozen wheels that would tear up more soil at one time,” he drew another drawing. They all nodded. Then Sean frowned.
“What we would need would be something really big like a wagon that we could sit on that we could steer but small enough that we could turn the corners,” he said and drew a bigger box with a seat that sort of looked like a coffin with four wheels and a seat in the front. Young Sean grinned.
“I thought we were plowing, Granddad, not dying,” he retorted and they all laughed. Sean ruffled his hair.
“Well, maybe shorted and fatter then,” he said and drew another picture. They all liked this one better.
“How would you get it to run and how would you steer it?” Lonnie asked with a big frown on his face. Sean frowned too.
“It would be easy to get the wheels for digging up the dirt to move, just put on a motor like the paddle motor for the ice cream maker,” he informed them and they nodded, they could all see that. But how to get the whole thing to move, that was the hard thing.
“You could put a motor on the big wheels to make them go around to make it move,” Ryan suggested and Sean looked at him with surprise. The old man grinned.
“I’m old, Granddad, I’m not dead yet,” he chortled. Sean grinned and ruffled his hair too.
“Maybe not all the wheels,” he decided. “We don’t want it to go too fast, maybe just the back wheels and we’ll steer it with the front wheels. Put them on a rotating separate axle so that they move differently than the back.” Everyone grinned. Then Todd groaned.
“How are we going to get all the crystals for all of this, they cost a fortune and even you don’t have that kind of coin, Granddad,” he told him. Everyone frowned except for Sean and Ryan who both grinned. The others looked at them strangely.
“No, I don’t, grandson; but what I do happen to have is a purple energy crystal mine,” Sean informed them with a sly smile. Ryan laughed. They all looked surprised and then laughed.
“Where on earth did you find one of those?” Young Sean asked; his eyes alight with curiosity. Sean grinned.
“Behind the waterfall, left tunnel, two turns left, but the whole cave could be full of them for all I know,” he said and they all patted him on the back. Danny laughed.
“What are we going to make these things out of and what are we going to call them?” he demanded to know. Sean shrugged.
“I was thinking steel and I have no clue, grandson, no idea,” he said.
For the rest of the winter they worked on the design of their mechanical plow as they were calling it. They decided that the first four rows of claws would tear up the earth while the second two rows would start churning them into rows and the last two sets would actually form rows with a nice little furrow down the middle in which to drop the seeds.
And that got them working on an attachment to hook on the end when you were finished tearing up the earth, you had to make at least two trips with the plow to get the dirt ready. Then you put the attachment on which deposited the seeds and turned the dirt over them. This would be done on the second trip. This made them all very excited. Planting a field of crops while sitting down,