Leaving Harwich

Chapter 3

Stepping Off the Edge





Just like Will, I never felt beneath anyone, either. I did see when I arrived at Harwich that some of my classmates were more boys than men, but I guessed that the explanation was that I had the benefit of growing up on a farm, where adult work is more a part of everyone’s life, regardless of age. So there was a period when I first got to Harwich when I stood back and tried to understand the youngsters around me. I came to the conclusion that old people are no smarter than kids. They just have more experience.
I don’t think the guy driving the Porsche is any smarter than I am. But he may know more, so I’ll just listen. It will be hard. He is asking me questions already as he steps on the gas and sprays gravel getting back on Route 7.
“What you going to Rutland for,” he asks.
I’ve thought about the answer all day. I knew I had to have it ready.
“My older sister lives there,” I say, and I leave it at that.
“What’s her name? Maybe I know her.”
I’m not prepared for this question, but it’s easy enough to answer.
“Linda,” I say. It’s about now that I notice there is some kind of odd radio mounted in the dash with a small screen where numbers flash rapidly. It’s some kind of scanner, but the volume is turned down so I can hardly hear it.
“Does she have a last name?” He looks over to me, smiling in a funny way I don’t really like.
“Clarke,” I say. That’s really her name. Linda Clarke. And she’s a nurse, but she works at the hospital in Barre, not Rutland, so I’ll have to be careful with my answers. I’d better change the subject.
“Nice car, Sir. What year is it?”
“I bought it new last year. You ever driven a Porsche?” He steps on the gas hard as he says this, shifts down and passes three cars even though the headlights of oncoming traffic is up ahead on this two-lane highway. I feel myself pressed back into the seat. Then the Porsche darts back into our lane, like a roller coaster car yanked sideways by the rails. He doesn’t wait for me to answer before he throws out another question. “What do you drive?”
I guess he hasn’t figured out my age if he thinks I drive anything. I’d better answer straight so I don’t dig myself a hole of lies.
“Right now, only farm equipment. I don’t have any wheels right now.” I notice that we are doing 75 miles an hour in a 50 mile-an-hour zone.
“So you’re a farmer, huh?” he asks, glancing over at me, looking me up and down casually. “You have your own farm or work for someone else?”
“I work the family farm,” I say, trying to keep it honest but short. I’m not feeling comfortable with Mr. Ponytail. I notice that he has a gold watch on his wrist with diamonds in the face. He also has a diamond stud in his right ear. His face is clean-shaven. There are deep creases that cut his face from beside his nostrils down below the corners of his mouth. His lips are thin, and when he talks, the right side of his mouth opens more than the left, almost as if he were sneering. His eyes may be blue or may be gray, I can’t tell in this light. His voice is a bit high for a man his age, almost squeaky.
“I’m guessing you’re eighteen, maybe nineteen,” Mr. Ponytail says. “Am I right?”
“You’re close,” I say.
“You going to college while you’re farming?” he asks, easing off the gas and slowing closer to the speed limit as he glances in the rear view mirror.
“Not yet,” I say. He appears content with that answer, and his thoughts seem to drift away. In the silence, with the Porsche’s engine humming quietly behind us, my own thoughts turn inward, too.

**


I was finishing my breakfast one morning two-and-a-half years ago and Mom was at the sink, washing dishes, when Dad came into the kitchen and sat down at the table across from me. At first, he didn’t say anything. He brushed some crumbs off the red-and-white checked vinyl tablecloth and into his hand, then deposited them back on the table in a small pile. He had just finished the morning milking. Normally, he takes a nap until about nine o’clock, since he starts his day at quarter to four. Before the nap, he often makes himself a slice of wheat toast on which he melts some butter, and he eats the toast with his second cup of coffee of the morning. The toaster is on the table, and this morning, the loaf of store bread was there, too. After a minute or two, he put a slice in the toaster, and then he looked at me and smiled.
“Mom and I have an idea we’d like you to think about,” he said.
Mom turned from the sink and she smiled, too.
“We think it would be a great thing for you, now that you are almost a teenager, to get a real education at a fine, new school,” Dad said. “Have you ever thought about what it would be like to go to Harwich?”
Harwich is about twenty miles south of the farm. There aren’t any local kids who go there, but we all know about it. The Harwich teams play our teams in some sports. The ski team competes against the locals. That’s one way I had met some of the Harwich kids. You’re not supposed to pass judgment on other people, but some times you can’t help it. I thought the Harwich boys were snobs. They all had the best equipment, the latest fashion in ski clothes and they didn’t mix much with the rest of us on the mountain. They also did very well in the races.
Yes, I had thought about what it would be like at Harwich. I didn’t see much point in it, particularly when you were born on a farm and your last name was Benoit. I knew that when cars were headed for Harwich, they all had out-of-state license plates. And when the results of our athletic meets were reported in the Free Press, I noticed that all the Harwich names were from your usual assortment of English and Scandanavian families. They made you think of blond hair and blue eyes. There were no brown-eyed French Canadians that I ever heard of attending Harwich.
“Sure,” I said, not looking directly at Dad but concentrating fiercely on finishing my cereal.
“Good, then you probably know that Harwich is one of the top-rated prep schools academically,” Dad said, picking up his sales pitch with the same enthusiasm that fills him when he’s talking about the special Holstein cow he just bred to a prize bull.
Dad’s business isn’t just selling milk, although the big truck with the stainless steel tank stops by every afternoon and takes on the couple hundred gallons that we’ve milked that day. He always says you can’t be just a farmer to succeed nowadays. You have to be a salesman, an investor, a mechanic. He’s teaching me all of that and I’m teaching myself, too. I look at every car and truck magazine I can to learn mechanics, just as an example.
His big business is in breeding his herd. He keeps track of the cows and bulls all over New England like some people – Claude, the barber, for example – follow baseball and football statistics. Dad can tell you how much milk each of hundreds of cows spills out in a year, and he can tell you which bulls are their fathers. So in the end, when he breeds a cow, he can pretty much promise that its calf will also be a big milk producer, and other farmers have come to rely on Dad for the calves that will improve their herd. He gets a good price for his calves.
I didn’t respond to Dad’s comment about Harwich, pretending I was rushing breakfast to make the school bus, so he went on.
“What the boys at Harwich get,” he said, pulling his chair closer to the table and leaning forward on his elbows, “isn’t just academics. They get an understanding of the larger world out there, something you would never get if you stuck around here for high school.”
Mom came over to the table, drying her hands on a dish towel – I remember the scene clearly more than two years later – and settled down sideways in the chair beside me.
“What do you think, Michael?” she asked.
I was trapped, like a butterfly with a pin through its thorax. I could see in their eyes how much it would mean to them for me to agree to go to Harwich.
“You can be honest with us,” Dad said. “We know what we’re suggesting is a big change, and change can be hard.”
“Really, Michael, what are your thoughts?” Mom prodded.
I hesitated, but I had some pretty specific thoughts racing through my brain and I couldn’t hold them back.
“I want to be a dairy farmer,” I said finally. “I’m not sure Harwich would make me a better one.”
“Dang!” Dad said, his smile broadening. “I told you we shouldn’t be showing him the good life too much, Mother!”
A wave of relief washed over me. They’re not serious, I thought.
I was wrong.
If there’s one thing you learn growing up on a farm, it is that every member of the family has a duty to making the whole operation work. You start by sweeping out the barn. It’s not make-work. It is work that needs to be done, and you – small as you are – are capable. Then you learn to milk the cows, to carry in the feed, shovel the manure and so on, until when you’re as grown as I, you know pretty much everything it takes to keep the cows healthy and the milk flowing.
So Dad and Mom had arrived at the point in the selling of Harwich Academy that it was time to suggest that my duty, at age 12, was to assume the burden – not the pleasure but the responsibility – of going away to school.
“The world is changing quickly,” Mom said, scooting her chair closer to me. “Everything you need to know to be a good farmer you won’t find in the hundred and eighty acres you live on.”
“No one in the Benoit family has ever been to college,” Dad said, not pushing Mom out of the conversation but meshing his words with hers like the teeth of one gear fitting between the teeth of another. “You should be the first, and the best way to do that is to get a head start at a place like Harwich. If you are going to be a good farmer – if you are going to succeed at any thing in life – you will need what they will show you.”
I could feel a weight settling on me, like when you’re holding a 50 pound sack of feed for the cows and someone lays another sack on top of it. You stagger a bit before you are balanced, before you can walk.
“We hope you will think about Harwich,” Mom said, reaching over and patting my left shoulder gently. Dad took a bite of his now-cool toast and nodded.
“You’re a bright young man,” he said. “Give it some time to settle in.”

**

Mr. Ponytail breaks the silence first.
“Say, I have an idea,” he says in that squeaky voice of his. “Let’s get some beer for the ride down to Rutland. What do you think?”
I must have just stammered. The suggestion came at me on a blind side, like a hand you didn’t see reaching for the ball just when you’re set to shoot a basket. But I’ve finally found my voice.
“I’m not much for beer,” I say.
“Haven’t tried it yet? Too bitter for you?”
“No, it’s just that . . .”
“Hey, you probably haven’t had the good stuff. There’s a liquor store a mile up the road. I’ll pull in there and get us a case. You’ll see. It’ll be fun.”
I should have said right then that I was only fourteen. That sure would have stopped him in his tracks. But I didn’t think of it. In deciding to break away from Harwich, I had never considered that I’d find myself in this situation. Now I am thinking desperately of a way to respond that won’t reveal the truth that I’ve been conveniently hiding. But my brain is locked shut.
And now the gravel is crunching under the Porsche’s tires and the beams of the headlight are lost as they swing in under two big white fluorescent lamps that arc out over a small parking lot, where a couple of cars are pulled up near a glass storefront with neon signs for several brands of beer. We have been traveling into the farmland south of Burlington, but just now we are pulling to a stop in a small strip mall. The liquor store is at one end – the near end heading south – and beside it are a Laundromat, a pizza shop, both open, and a beauty salon that is closed.
“You stay in the car,” Mr. Ponytail says. “They shouldn’t see you inside the store. Might want to card you. Oh, and if you get out of the car, it has this fancy alarm that will go off. So just stay put and I’ll be right back.”
So he’s saying I’m a prisoner. No way do I want to be in this Porsche when he returns with a case of beer. If I’m here, I just know the trouble will really begin. I watch him get out and, after shutting the door, click his key fob, causing the headlights to flash against the store front and something to beep under the hood. As he pushes through the glass door into the store, I notice that he is wearing loafers with no socks. Pretty odd, I think, even as my brain is racing.
If I open the door to make a break, he tells me an alarm will sound. I can see him going toward the back of the store. There is a man in denim overalls and a plaid shirt at the checkout counter. Mr. Ponytail disappears behind him.
This is my only chance. I look to the left and to the right. It looks like I can dash from the Porsche to the right side of the liquor store and run behind it. The alternative might be to try to get into the pizza shop. But if there are no customers, Ponytail might find me there and force me back into his car.
I’m losing time. Make a decision, Benoit!
I’ll go for the back of the store, just run like blazes.
My left hand has the backpack straps. I’m hooking my right hand fingers into the door handle – it’s shaped like a clam shell – and my right shoulder is against the door. I have to bang it hard and go, like blasting through a slalom gate on skis, if I’m going to get out of here before the alarm brings him running out of the store.
Okay! Go! The door flies open. Everything is quiet, no alarm. The jerk lied! Lied to keep me trapped! I could tell he was bad news. But I’m still running and cutting behind the liquor store. I have to dodge around a big, green Dumpster. There’s a lot of light here beside the store. But now it’s dark out back, just a small bare light bulb over an unmarked back door.
Gotta keep going, though. He’ll be looking for me if he took the pains to try to trap me in the Porsche. There are no trees to hide in back here, so I’ll keep going. All the rest of the stores have no lights out back. But there is a big mound of dirt, a berm, between the pavement back here and the fields beyond. The berm goes all the way around the strip mall. I can crouch behind it and hide there until he leaves.
The smell of dirt and trash. I breath it in, lying flat on my stomach in the dark. This is not part of what I imagined when I thought of leaving Harwich.