Chapter 9
East Meets West



I confess that I’m a little nervous as I push open the front door of the diner and look up and down the street. There is no Porsche in sight, though, so I step out onto the sidewalk, my chest swelled with pride, a matador entering the bull ring, a NASCAR driver sitting in the pole position just before the start. Jen has lifted my spirits, validated my cause. If she admires me, I can’t question myself. She makes my backbone stronger.
But like the matador and the race car driver, I don’t yet see the end of my challenge, just the beginning. In fact, to advance at all, I have to choose my destination – New York or Boston. I can’t really proceed from where I am – the crossroads in Rutland – until I know where I’m going.
I guess the big question is where do I want to get, ultimately. If I look ahead far enough, I want to be right back here, on a Vermont dairy farm, running it, doing all the things it takes to make the farm work, both right now and in the future.
A farm is like a little world of its own. The inhabitants are you – the farmer – and your herd of cows. Our cows are Holsteins, the most common milk cows in Vermont. They have big black patches of coarse hair growing on a background of white. Holsteins give more milk than any other common breed. That’s the good thing. The not-so-good thing is that the fat content in their milk – the cream –is lower than on some other breeds.
The trick for the dairy farmer like Dad, if he is going to be successful, is to have cows whose production is high – about 35 quarts a day is good – but whose fat content also is in the high range.
We have a herd of one hundred and ten cows, which is middle-sized for a local dairy farm. At any one time, we have about forty-five cows that are producing milk. A cow has to get pregnant and then have her calf before her milk starts to flow. Then she produces milk for about eight months to a year before she begins to dry up. The only way she will give more milk is for her to get pregnant again.
There’s a lot more to it than that. But the key to being a great dairy farmer like Dad is how you manage the statistics. Like Dad says, you have to have the same enthusiasm for bovine data as a baseball nut has for his statistics. Dad has that information in his head from studying all of the cows and bulls in New England and New York State. He is always calculating which bulls and cows will have calves that can produce huge quantities of milk while still achieving a high fat content.
Dad has taught me everything he knows. It only makes sense that I will take that knowledge into the future. I know he and Mom will be proud of me when I have my own dairy farm just like they have.
So I don’t need Harwich. I need money to buy a farm, one that some day I can add to theirs, and I need to start making that money as soon as possible. I don’t need to know about literature – although I do enjoy reading the books in my English Lit class. That’s why I brought along in my pack the 628 pages of the novel Of Human Bondage, which I started this afternoon in the library in Burlington.
I like school well enough. I always did fine back in the Northeast Kingdom, where now I’d be in the regional high school. Like I told Jen, it’s the expectations that weigh down on me at Harwich. Some times I feel like I’m in a pot on the stove – one of Mom’s big cast iron pots, with a heavy lid on it. The heat under the pot is constant and the water is boiling but the lid is heavy and keeps in the steam and the pressure keeps building. If Mom and Dad suggested I move back home, the lid would be removed and the pressure would disappear.
But that wasn’t going to happen. And every time I got a grade that was something less than perfect, it was like the flames had been turned up under the pot.
I was supposed to run cross country this fall. I decided in the summer that if my grades weren’t straight As – which they have never been at Harwich – I couldn’t afford to join the cross country team.
The coach, Mr. Ellis, stopped me in the hall a couple of days after I returned to Harwich. I remember it was a rainy day, a little raw for September, and I was in the big barn, the administration building, because I had to fill out some forms.
“Benoit,” he said. “Practice starts this afternoon. See you there.”
It was like an order, all business. Mr. Ellis is a big man, big and old, with gray hair above his ears and dark hair on the backs of his fingers, which are thick as the nipples on a cow’s udder. I don’t think he could run to town and back. He has a huge belly, and his whole head is red, from his collar up, like he’s about to explode. He walks tilted back, I guess to balance his stomach. His shoes are very large and his hair, the part that isn’t gray, is sandy and curly although not too long. I guess you would say he is imposing. I was at the gym that afternoon.
Mr. Ellis never gives you a chance to question what you’re doing. “Everybody outside,” he said when the last boy arrived. “We’re going to run the mountain to see who still has it.”
Running the mountain meant climbing a dirt road that leads up the hill from Harwich Academy, then turning off on a trail that loops through the forest of Mt. Mitchell, a solitary knob north of town. The trail circles the knob, crossing its wooded peak at one point. Then you run back down the road to the school. The whole loop is eight miles. It is no way to start your training, but it sure does weed out the kids who have taken the summer off from running.
Even though I had been mulling the idea of quitting Harwich – not all that seriously, but the germ of the idea was there – I had put in some miles on the dirt roads near the farm almost every day after working, except when we were haying – harvesting the alfalfa to feed it to the cows – because that work often lasted well after dark. So I was in shape to run the mountain. My goal was to make the freshman ski team in November, and running was a big part of training for that team.
After running the mountain, I got back to Harwich in the lead group. Mr. Ellis was standing at the gym entrance, a stop watch in his hand. When we saw him, everyone sprinted toward the door. I got there second. He smiled at us and then pointed to me.
“Benoit almost won, and he’s only a freshman,” he told the others. “You guys have a lot of work to do.”
That little victory kept me going until the end of September, when the first round of tests came. By then, I was placing high in our cross country meets, and Mr. Ellis was using my results to insult the rest of the team members. It was an uncomfortable position to be in for me. My friends seemed to back away from me a bit. And some of the upper classmen were actually rude. For the first time, I heard them call me Canuck, an ethnic slur against French Canadians.
The first test results were posted on the last Friday in September, just three weeks ago. The leaves in the forest had begun to turn their autumn colors. Yellows and oranges were mixed in with the still-green leaves and the woods looked like carrots, corn and peas heaped on a plate. I was going home that afternoon, so after my last class, I went to the barn to see how I’d done.
There, for everyone to see, were my grades on separate sheets for each course. My only A was in English Lit. The rest were Bs except for one. In social studies, I had a C.
The next week, on Monday, I didn’t go to cross country practice. I had made up my mind and had quit. Mr. Ellis found me on Tuesday between classes. He was scowling, his curly, bushy eyebrows down over his eyes like awnings on a storefront. I blamed my slipping grades.
“Nonsense,” he said. “You have a solid B average.”
There was something about his choice of words – nonsense, just the word Uncle Steve had used to dismiss my unhappiness with Harwich.
The coach stood in front of me like a towering wall, big and immovable. It made no sense to argue with him. But at that moment, I thought about what Grandpa Maurice had said at the picnic.
“At some point . . . you will make such decisions for your self.”