Honestly Ben Page 10

  “So the cars are people. Got it.”

  “Yeah. It’s weird. But I like to make up stories in my head, I guess.”

  “I think that’s cool,” I said.

  He laughed. “Yes. Ben Carver, king of the baseball team, thinks my nerdy car-town thing is cool.”

  “Captain,” I corrected. “And, well. What kind of stories?”

  He went over to his desk and picked up a purple car that looked like maybe an old Chevy with those exaggerated fins. “So this is Martin. He’s, like, me, I guess. He’s a detective. And sometimes he’ll just watch. He might see two car-people at the bank, and then those cars speed off and it’s a robbery. He has to, like, figure out who did it.”

  “Have you ever written these stories down?”

  He shook his head.

  “You should.”

  He seemed to contemplate this. “Maybe I will.”

  “Cool. I’m just looking for a study break. Have this horrible calc test coming and I’m not ready.”

  “You?” he said. “You’re always ready for everything.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Not exactly.”

  “Do you know about the keys?”

  “The keys?”

  “Shit. Well, you’re not a narc, right?”

  “No, not a narc.”

  “Tommy Mendenhall has all the answer keys to quizzes and tests in most courses. Not Mr. Bisbee in earth science; he changes things up. Also Ms. Patrick in history, I hear.”

  “Oh,” I said, folding my arms in front of my chest. I’d heard about this. It was a tradition at Natick. Every year, a senior inherited the answer keys that had been assembled by students over the years. It had never meant much to me; if other people wanted to cheat, it was none of my business.

  Albie studied me. “You’re cool with it, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Not my thing, but I don’t care.” Even if I wanted to cheat, I wasn’t sure how a person would do it in calculus. Ms. Dyson would probably ask us to show our work, so just knowing the correct multiple-choice answer would mean nothing.

  “You don’t need the help, clearly,” he said.

  “Actually, BC calc is killing me. Literally, it’s reaching around my neck and strangling me.”

  “Ms. Dyson?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m pretty sure Ms. Dyson does the same tests and quizzes every year. Ask Tommy.”

  I shook my head. “Nah,” I said. “Not for me.”

  “Sure,” Albie said. “Well. My town beckons.”

  I saluted him and headed back to my room, my heart pounding in my chest. The cheating didn’t sit right with me, but as usual I was too much of a wimp to voice my opinion.

  Out in the hallway, I ran into Mendenhall.

  “Hey, I was hoping to catch you,” he said.

  “Oh.” I leaned against the wall, and he leaned in toward me in a way that made me want a buffer of about a foot. Maybe two.

  “Listen,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about the whole captain thing. I think you’re in over your head. You look back at the captains the last few years, and it’s always someone outgoing who is in the center of things. That’s not you.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest.

  “I think you should try to be more social, maybe. You’re too quiet, and the thing is, at the end of the day, this is my senior year. I want to win. And for us to do that, we need a captain who can do the job, get us united and fired up. You hear me?”

  I nodded.

  He laughed. “You really are reserved, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I don’t say everything that comes to mind.” And you should be glad I don’t.

  “And that’s cool. I mean, there are definitely good things about being the strong, silent type. You’re not annoying, and that’s good. And you’re a good player. You can probably teach the others some stuff.”

  “Thanks.”

  He raised his chin like a king who had deigned to compliment a peasant.

  “The crap about no initiation stuff is dumb, in my opinion. If that’s what you want, fine. But you still probably need me if you want to motivate the guys. You don’t have their ear yet. What if I help you there?”

  “Sure,” I said. “That would be good.”

  He smiled. “You’re a good guy, Carver. Let’s try to make this work, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Back in my room, I tried to shake off the feeling that I was about to get bulldozed by Mendenhall. I looked in the mirror, and I focused on my arms. They were big and thick. I was no wilting flower. Yet I’d just allowed him to talk down to me with no pushback. Would I stand up to him if he really tried to take my role away from me?

  One time I’d stood up for myself with the other athletes. It was during soccer in the fall. Some kids were making homophobic comments aimed at Rafe before he came out, and I shut that down in a hurry. It had felt good. Where was the line? How far would I be pushed before I pressed back?

  I sat down at my desk, opened my calculus book, and stared at the symbols. Every time I found my eyes glazing over, I powered through, reminding myself that I was a Pappas Award winner and a Carver, and doing poorly in BC calculus wasn’t an option for either role. I started pounding Gatorade around 2:30 so I could keep my eyes open, and at 5 A.M., when I finally figured out how to use the fundamental theorem to evaluate definite integrals, I collapsed in my bed, setting my alarm for 7 A.M. so that I wouldn’t sleep through breakfast or my test.

  Lying there in a half coma, I wondered how I was going to keep this up. How many more sleepless nights would calculus cause me? I was pretty sure I’d do well on the test, but my nerves were shot.

  I drove home to Alton the final weekend in January because it was my mom’s birthday. When I got there Friday night, my mom and dad welcomed me in their typical understated-but-loving way. Mom’s first words were, “I made cookies,” and then, once I’d taken my jacket off, set my bag down, and taken one, she came over and gave me a big kiss. Dad said, “You look taller.”

  Luke was in our bedroom, lying on top of the comforter in gym shorts, despite the fact that it was below freezing out and my dad doesn’t believe in using heating oil. He was playing his Game Boy per usual.

  “What up?” he said, and I could swear his voice had gotten lower in the six weeks I’d been away.

  “Yo,” I responded.

  “You missed Mom getting into trouble,” he said.

  I sat down on my bed and took off my boots. “What?”

  He looked up and turned off his game. “This hippie-dippy woman talked her into selling all sorts of crap at the store. Dad said no way. Said the lady is banned from the store. Mom started crying.”

  “What?” I asked. In all my life, I’d never seen my mom cry. I’d never heard of it either. In the Carver family, tears are relegated to the something fell on me category.

  “It was wicked crazy,” he said.

  “Did you talk to her?”

  He shrugged. “And say what?”

  He had a point. Luke was probably not the most comforting person in the county.

  As I unpacked my bag, he updated me on some things.

  “I got people to stop calling her Bulldozer,” he said, and I remembered the girl he’d told me about when we went for our swimming lesson over winter break.

  “That’s cool. Do you guys talk?”

  He shrugged and picked up his game again.

  “What was her name again?”

  “Julie.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said, and I knew that was probably the end of the conversation. And it was. I pulled out a book and Luke kept playing his video game. No one spoke again until Luke said, “G’night, brother,” after I’d turned off the lights, and I said back, “G’night.”

  I dreamt that Mendenhall was cornering me in my dad’s barn and telling me how to do farm work. Even as I was in the dream, I realized that my father and Mendenhall had merged into one extremely judgmental person, and I wondered
if I’d ever make either of them happy.

  The next morning, I woke to a sharp chill in my forearms, and I quickly pulled them under the flannel blanket to warm them up. I could hear the wind hissing and whipping through the bare trees outside. Negative ten at the most. Windchill probably around minus forty. Luke was sleeping with two bare legs exposed on top of his down blanket, and I shook my head and smiled to myself. Doesn’t matter if it’s fifty degrees or twenty below—Luke’s never chilly.

  I lay there in the comfort of my own warm cocoon thinking about hypothermia. I’ve read accounts of people trying to scale Mount Kilimanjaro, where it’s so cold at the top that their body temperature drops several degrees, and as it does so, a strange calm comes over them, like the total absence of heat is actually warm. In reality it’s their organs shutting down, but it doesn’t feel like that.

  Bryce told me once that Tibetan monks practice a type of meditation that allows them to raise their core temperature. They do it by envisioning flames at the base of their spine. I wondered if I could do that, so I tried it. It was tough to imagine the flames and not allow other thoughts to get in the way. Perhaps, I thought, Tibetan monks practice this, and don’t just try it once on a frigid New Hampshire day for five seconds, fail miserably, and then drop it.

  I watched out the window as my dad, in just a sweater and a hat, walked his lanky body over to the barn, with our goat, Becky, following close behind. Cows don’t care it’s winter, and neither do I, he used to say. I swear there’s some truth to the fact that heredity makes some people immune to cold, because nothing seems to chill my dad. He comes from generations of Czech farmers who don’t bitch about the weather; they may talk about it endlessly, but they never complain.

  While Luke stayed in bed, I bundled up to go out to the barn. Farm work was not my forte, but I could help clean the barn stalls and spend some time with my dad.

  The morning air Popsicled my teeth. I stuck my gloved hands deep into the pockets of my ratty old brown down jacket. “Hey,” I said, entering the barn, my breath a white mist that barely traveled six inches before freezing. My lungs ached.

  “Benny,” my dad said. He was on his knees in the stall with one of the cows, milking away. Clamp base, squeeze down, alternate hands.

  I grabbed the pitchfork and shovel and went into another stall, where Becky lay on a bed of hay. The floor was littered with chicken shit, hay, and what looked like a half-eaten cantaloupe. The ceiling was just six feet high, so I had to bend over as I shoveled up the debris. The sharp smell of frozen manure assaulted my nostrils.

  There was an utter absence of sound on our farm in the winter. Because my dad didn’t believe in using anything other than wood for heat, there was no buzz of electricity, or hiss of oil or coal. I let the silence envelop us for a while, and I kept up my shoveling, feeling warmer by the second.

  And then it gets too quiet, sometimes.

  “Cold today,” I said, when it got there for me. About six minutes, maybe seven.

  “Yup,” said Dad. The cow he was milking moaned a bit.

  Silence again beyond the sound of milk squirting into the red bucket.

  “You got enough warm clothes down there at school?”

  “Yes. Thanks.” I swept the debris into a small pile, and we worked some more in silence.

  “It was actually pretty warm in Natick before I left,” I said.

  “How warm?” my dad said.

  “Forties. Maybe forty-five?”

  “You don’t say,” he said.

  “Yep. It was pretty warm.”

  No more words. I stepped into the stall where my dad was, carefully navigating the frozen mud, to sweep up some manure.

  “Doing better with the schoolwork,” I said, and it was like he didn’t hear me. He just kept milking. “I also met a girl,” I added. He didn’t say anything to that either, so I concentrated on sweeping, and we worked like that until the cows were milked and the barn was as clean as it was going to get.

  I loved my dad, but why did I even bother trying to squeeze conversation out of him? It was like squeezing warmth out of an ice cube. I’d come to a frozen barn to get warm. That never works. Even if you get so close to freezing that it feels warm, it’s just a mirage; it’s hypothermia. And then you die.

  While Dad sized up the job I did on the barn and did a little additional sweeping in Becky’s stall, I walked toward our farm store, my eyes so dry I figured I might never be able to blink again. Inside, I was hit with the warm smell of chocolate and mint.

  “Mmm,” I said.

  My mother was at the stove in the store’s small kitchen area, pouring boiling water into a cup of cocoa. She smiled at me. “Want one?”

  “Happy birthday! And sure. That’d be perfect,” I said.

  The store was connected to the front of our house, but it had a separate entrance for customers. Mom spent most of her time running the store, selling jams and produce, and during the summers, when I wasn’t in the fields with Dad, I’d help her too. Dad tended to count on me for tasks that used muscle, and Luke for things that involved farm skills; mine were, as my dad loved to tease me, not exactly Future Farmers of America level.

  I sat on a stool next to Mom’s. She reached over and put a gentle hand on my bicep and squeezed.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Sure.”

  “Luke said something.”

  She cringed. “He shouldn’t of done that. Don’t matter.”

  “Mom,” I said. “Tell me. What happened?”

  “Your father said his piece. Don’t matter to get into it now.”

  “Who was this person? C’mon. Tell me.”

  It wasn’t like me to push her. Maybe it was things at school, the way I was beginning to realize that unlike my family, I liked conversation. Sometimes I could be in a humdrum mood and talk to Hannah on the phone, and when I was done, I’d feel like a different person. Or with Rafe, I’d buzz for hours after we talked, playing back different parts of the conversation. I didn’t need constant talking like some people, but some, I was beginning to learn, I really liked.

  Mom took a deep breath. “Her name is Hazel.”

  “Okay. Who is Hazel?”

  Mom’s eyes lit up. Her eyes never did that.

  “Unusual-looking woman. Hair down to her behind.” She laughed a bit and shook her head. “Figured she was one of the summer people. Came to the store one day and … So friendly. You know I don’t like to get involved with that type. The ones who spend summers at the lake and have fancy leather pocketbooks. They change everything.”

  “You sound like Dad.”

  She shot me a parental look that said to me, He’s your father. Don’t talk about your father that way. As long as I could remember, I’d get that look anytime I brought up anything negative about Dad, like it was a reflex. I knew Mom felt most of the same things I did about Dad from the Your father thinks comments she would make about various things that bugged her but she went along with anyway.

  Your father thinks we should stop processing chickens for summer folks until they pay. I told him we can’t treat ’em different than the others, but you know your father.

  Your father thinks I ought to keep the store open ’til after the fireworks in case someone wants a lemonade. That would mean 5 A.M. to midnight, but you know your father.

  “She kept coming, every day. One day I had a cold. Must have been mid-September? I was blowing my nose all over heckfire, and she said she had something would fix me right up. Ran out to her truck and came back with a bottle of cough syrup, it looked like. Helped herself to the kitchen and came back with a tablespoon. She said, ‘Two spoonfuls of this and you’ll be good as new.’ It was purple and sweet. ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  “She said elderberry syrup. Explained she was an herbalist, and that she could cure Ebola if she had to. Told me that the body knows how to heal itself and we just need the cures that are already in nature. You know me, Benny. I thought it was all a bunc
h of hooey. But darned if I didn’t feel better the next day! And she came in that next day and she didn’t even ask; she knew I’d be better! We really became friends. When’s the last time I had a friend?”

  The last part she asked herself, and I studied her, thinking the same thing. It was almost like I’d never thought of my mom as a real person. She had never seemed to need a friend. She had Dad, and while they didn’t talk much, they didn’t seem to need much either. He ran the fields and the business; she ran the store. If she needed a couple chickens, she’d tell him to process them. If a beef order came in, she’d say so. Words didn’t log or hay or feed or milk.

  “Hazel would visit and we’d just gab away. One day your father came in and I introduced them. I don’t know what I was thinking. Of course he thought she was weird. She is weird, Benny, I have to say. But I liked her. And she taught me so much about herbs! A couple times she took me to her place and showed me the tinctures she was making for this friend or that. Not a business, but she said she was thinking it could be. And I thought: What if we sold them at the store?”

  She was talking now almost like I wasn’t there. Passionate in a way I’d never heard before from my mom.

  “I knew the answer. But also, it’s not like the store is so busy that I couldn’t dry some burdock root and wild sarsaparilla. And I put some yellow dock root in vinegar in a bottle, and I left it for six weeks, and every day Hazel would tell me what it could do for people when it was ready, and I tell you, Benny, I got excited! I couldn’t wait to try it.

  “I knew what your father would say. Asked me was I crazy. Told me herbs was hippie-dippy stuff, and did we want to lose all our customers. Folks don’t like new stuff like that, he said. And Benny, I thought, ‘Some folks don’t, some folks do.’ But I didn’t say nothing, of course.

  “So I did try the yellow dock root.” She smiled at the memory. “I harvested it in early December. Cooked it up and it tasted as bitter as tonic water and citrus peels combined. But darned if my stomach trouble didn’t clear up just like that! Got a little more in the back. Don’t tell your father. Just for me. Not selling it or nothin’.”