The Labors of Hercules Beal by Schmidt Gary D

Author:Schmidt, Gary D. [Schmidt, Gary D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Young Adult, Childrens, Contemporary
ISBN: 9780358659631
Amazon: 0358659639
Goodreads: 62120709
Publisher: Clarion Books
Published: 2023-05-23T07:00:00+00:00

9

The Cretan Bull

IT WAS A LONG TIME before we saw the sun again after Christmas morning, and it got so gloomy that Elly and I decided to go to the library to read instead of walking the beach. Elly read Wuthering Heights, which she said was the most ethereal book ever written. I’m not really sure what ethereal even means, but how can a book that you have to keep a family chart for to figure out who’s who be ethereal? When I asked her that, she said I was just being a jerkface.

“Because I don’t like books that need a family chart?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

Elly shrugged. “At least you’re a cute jerkface. You’re lucky to have that going for you.”

Then she went back to ethereal Wuthering Heights.

So I moved on to Charles Anthon’s A Classical Dictionary: Containing an Account of the Principal Proper Names Mentioned in Ancient Authors and Intended to Elucidate All the Important Points Connected with the Geography, History, Biography, Mythology, and Fine Arts of the Greeks and Romans, Together with an Account of Coins, Weights, and Measures with Tabular Values of the Same. Here’s what it said about Hercules the Myth’s seventh Labor: When Asterion, the king of Crete, dies, Minos claims the throne—and to prove his claim, Minos argues that the gods will answer any of his prayers—and to prove this, he prays for a bull from the bottom of the sea and promises to sacrifice that bull back to Poseidon. Praying for a bull from the bottom of the sea seems to me to disqualify him from any respectable position in government, but in fact, Poseidon sends a bull through the waves, and he is so beautiful that Minos cannot bear to sacrifice him. So he puts that bull in his own herd and offers another bull to the god. Poseidon is now angry at Minos, and so Minos releases the bull, who runs wild around Crete, and to make things worse, Poseidon makes Minos’s wife, Pasiphaë, fall in love with it. We’re not even going to talk about that.

Hercules’s seventh Labor is to capture the wild bull, which turns out to be surprisingly easy: he ropes him, puts him in a boat, and brings him back to Eurystheus. But after he shows the bull to the king, Hercules turns him loose, and he once again begins to run wild.

My father would have said that this does not represent perfect planning. Elly said that this proves that Hercules the Myth was obviously a jerkface—and not ethereal.

So anyway, like I said, after Christmas the clouds clamped down over the Cape, thick and low and dark gray. But they waited to drop their snow until the first day of school in January. And again on the second day. And the third day. And the fourth day.

Since he had to drive in it, you can imagine how happy Mr. Moby was about all that snow.

According to Elly, every morning when they got on the bus, Mr. Moby would be hunched

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