by Doug Draper
On race day, Rachel’s den showed up with the biggest, best-looking chariot. All the other cub scouts gathered around, making comments about the chariot’s impressive size and design. The other two dens had used old bicycle parts to build chariots that looked more like wheelchairs—and were half the size of Al’s creation.
With race-time soon approaching, Rachel’s den members pulled the massive chariot toward the starting line and a few of them immediately began complaining about the weight. Their grumbling increased when leaving the parking lot and traveling over the race course—the softball field behind the church. The dens would race in the outfield, traveling about 250 feet over uneven, thick grass. The soft, bumpy surface made it much more difficult to pull the chariot than when it had been on the hard, flat parking lot.
Joe told everyone to “shut up” as soon as the grumbling began. “Just pull the chariot and save your breath. I don’t want to hear any more griping.”
He knew that his father would be upset if he heard complaints about his masterpiece. The grumblers toned it down, but they still whispered about the difficulty of pulling the chariot. They all desperately wanted to win the race and now it seemed impossible as they struggled to even make it to the starting line.
After a couple of minutes, they arrived at the line and paused there to listen to the pack leader go on and on about the glory days of Rome and the emperor’s favorite sport of chariot racing. The long speech helped Rachel’s den because it gave the cubs a chance to catch their breath. For Ben, the rest period didn’t matter. As the smallest member of the den, the team had designated him to be the required rider. He would sit on the chariot while the rest of the team pulled it.
To start the race, the pack leader stood at the finish line, holding a red scarf while the chariot pullers leaned forward ready to run. When he dropped the scarf, the three teams took off. While the other two sprinted ahead, Rachel’s den moved forward at a slow trot. From the beginning, a tight gap developed between first and second place and it stayed that way through the end. And while the winners celebrated, Rachel’s den still had about half the course to cover.
When it became clear that his team would finish far behind the others, Ben jumped out of the chariot to push it. Joe, guardian of the rules, glared at him and shouted, “Get back in. We’re going to finish this without cheating.”
That was Joe. He worried about “cheating” while pulling a chariot with stolen wheels. Joe would whack him if he didn’t obey, so Ben jumped back into the chariot and watched his team slowly trudge over the finish line. The last-place cubs dropped to the grass more out of discouragement than fatigue and refused to be consoled by their parents who applauded their “good try.”
A few of the parents joked that the chariot would have been more suitable for building the pyramids of Egypt than racing. Ben didn’t laugh. The race had been a serious matter to him and he hated to lose.
The winners jumped up and down when the pack leader announced their first-place finish in “world-record time.” They received blue ribbons. The second-place team members won red ribbons for a heroic effort. Rachel’s cubs left with white ribbons for having the most authentic design.
“You guys just weren’t strong enough to pull this beauty,” Al growled to the discouraged cubs as they hauled the huge chariot to his truck. “You should have trained for the race instead of sitting around like lazy bums while I did all the work.”
The lecture didn’t bother Ben. He had suffered tougher reprimands from his father. While he took it as merely another slap in the face, Al’s harsh words and angry tone disturbed one of the younger cubs. He started to cry and darted away from the group, heading for his parents.
Joe jumped in to prevent a mass exodus. “Hey, guys, we’ll do better next time. Let’s get our chariot in the truck and be glad we won the award for best design.”
Even though Joe often bossed Ben around and thumped him for being too loud or messy, Ben admired him and felt proud of his big brother. He also wanted to be proud of his father and didn’t like it when other people viewed him negatively. The chariot race became one of those days when people whispered about him being a “total jerk.” He found it easy to agree with them, but he wished it wasn’t true. He wanted to love and respect his father.
CHAPTER 24
The chariot returned to the place where it came from—the junk pile behind the barn. Ben helped his father dump it there after the race and, about a month later, noticed that one of the wheels had been ripped off and used to reinforce the back wall of the pig pen. His father must have placed it there to keep the pigs from escaping. They had learned to lean on the pen’s walls to dislodge the boards and create paths to freedom.
As he often did that summer, Ben rushed through his chores and then settled into a comfortable place on top of a broken hay bale, with his head on a pillow made of empty grain sacks. His bare feet hung over the end of a hay bale where the rising sun warmed them. In his hands, Ben held his latest book from the Alma Public Library—a biography about the explorer and frontiersman Kit Carson.
After reading the first two chapters, Ben heard Duke, his family’s dog, barking. He set his book aside and stood up to see what the fuss was about. He spotted his friend George Oaks approaching.
“Duke, knock it off!” Ben shouted, which Duke interpreted as “Come, let’s play!” Duke ran to Ben’s resting spot in the barn with a broad smile and his tongue hanging out. The large dog, a German Shepherd and Siberian Husky mix, looked more like a wolf than a dog and often acted like a wild animal, running off into the mountains for days at a time. When he finally came home, Duke reeked of dead animals, skunks, and sagebrush. He usually came back starving, which Rachel joked was his sole motivation for returning. Duke wanted food from his family and that’s it.
Shouting at Duke alerted George that Ben was in the barn and he walked toward it.
“Hey!” George shouted, waving at Ben who waved back and returned the “Hey.”
“What are you doing?” George asked as he approached Ben’s spot in the barn.
“Reading a book,” Ben said while petting Duke.
“Why? School’s out.”
“You should know by now that I like to read.”
“Yeah, but it’s the summer. We should be doing something fun. Have you finished your morning chores?”
“Yep, I took care of them and now have the rest of the day off because my parents are at work. What gets you out of the house today?”
“My ma told me to leave. She had cleaning to do and griped that I was in the way,” George said while Duke greeted the farm’s visitor by licking his hands.
“Man, you’re lucky. When my mom wants to clean the house, she makes a list of all the chores and then writes my name next to things for me to do and says that if I don’t work, then I don’t eat.”
“That’s awful. I’d starve if I lived here.”
“No, my dad would knock some sense into you with a few shots to the head and a strong kick in the butt,” Ben said, demonstrating how his father would deliver the blows. “Then, you’d be willing to work—or he’d kill you before you starved.”
George frowned, looking around to see if anyone might be listening to their conversation, and then changed the subject. “So, what book are you reading?”
“It’s a biography about Kit Carson,” Ben said, showing George the book. “He explored the Rocky Mountains and fought in the Mexican-American War and Civil War.”
“Why would you want to read that?”
“My mom told me that I should start reading biographies because they would show me the kind of person I need to be if I want to be successful. There’s a whole section of these books in the library. I’ve already read biographies about Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Marie Curie, and Wilbur and Orville Wright. And I liked them.”
“That sounds boring to me. I’d rather read comic books, especially Archie.”
“That’s because you don’t know what you’re
talking about. The only thing Archie does is hang out at the malt shop with Jughead, Betty, and Veronica. And Archie isn’t even real. But Kit Carson—a real person—explored places that only Indians had ever seen and fought in great battles. How can you call that boring?”
“Uh, you’re starting to sound like my teacher. Are we going to talk about books all day or do something fun?”
Ben thought about the question for a few seconds, wanting to continue reading, but he looked at George’s spindly legs and the pleading look in his eyes and decided to take his friend on a tough hike. After placing the book in his bedroom and filling a couple of canteens with water, Ben led George away from his daily world of TV and comics to the raw beauty of the steep mountain behind them. And Duke followed, panting and looking from one side of the trail to the other as they started climbing the foothills.
While hiking, Ben told George about other explorers he had read about—Jim Bridger, Jedediah Smith, and Peter Skene Ogden—and how they would start at the mouth of a river and then go upstream to the headwaters. They filled in gaps on maps with the records of their journeys.
“I’ve never heard of any of those guys,” George said.
“Well, I’ve also read about Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. I’m sure you’ve heard of them.”
“Yeah, Davy Crockett—king of the wild frontier! I’ve seen him on TV.”
“When I grow up, that’s what I want to be—a great explorer like Davy Crockett and the others I’ve read about.”
“That’s not possible. Everything has already been discovered. You’ll probably end up being a mechanic like your pa.”
“No! I told my mom that I want to be an explorer and she thinks it’s a great idea. She showed me a magazine at the library called National Geographic and said that I could explore the world and then write magazine articles about what I found.”
As he often did on these hikes, Duke suddenly shot off the trail and the boys caught glimpses of him charging through the scrub oak in pursuit of a mule deer that had been nearby.
“Look at Duke go!” George shouted.
“Yeah, but he’ll never catch that deer unless it’s wounded or sick. Duke won’t quit trying, though. I bet he doesn’t come home until morning when he’s hungry for breakfast. I hope he stays away from the porcupines this time.”
Duke had returned from one of his recent mountain trips with his mouth full of porcupine quills. Some of them shot through the roof of his mouth and protruded a couple of inches above his nose. The quills caused him to yelp in pain and made it impossible for him to eat. While Joe and Ben held Duke, Al attempted to pull the quills out, but the pain kept Duke from cooperating and a veterinarian had to finish the job.
“Where are we going?” George asked.
“I found a cliff that gives you a view of the town and everything all the way to Utah Lake. It’s a tough climb, though.”
“I’ll be able to make it if we stop for a few breaks,” George said, expressing his need early because he knew Ben would rather hike until exhaustion forced him to stop.
When the boys reached the cliff with the long-range view, they sat near the edge, sipping lukewarm water from their canteens and chatting about the distant scenery.
“I can see why you like hiking,” George said, leaning back to watch a large, white cloud drift slowly above through the blue sky. “It’s pretty up here.”
“It is, but I want to see more,” Ben said with a sweeping gesture toward the western horizon. “I want to explore places most people can’t even find on a map—places in New Zealand, Norway, Argentina, and Kenya. Even if every inch of the world has already been explored, I haven’t seen it and I want to go there.”
Relaxing on the mountainside, Ben imagined himself following in the footsteps of famous explorers and reaching bright horizons—far from the shadowy world where he lived.
CHAPTER 25
For fifth grade, Ben returned to Alma Elementary School with muted optimism. He thought the bullies might leave him alone as they had at the end of the past school year. And it happened most of the time. His classmates usually obeyed the hands-off policy, but Ben remained on the fringe of social circles. Trying to fit in led to the year’s most memorable event.
His teacher, Mrs. Wright, taught music daily, using a piano shared with two other classrooms. After the lesson, four boys from her class took the large upright piano to the third-grade classroom. The heavy piano could be easily moved because it had wheels like small tires that rolled smoothly on the school’s tile floors.
Pushing it became an honor, and each year the teacher selected four strong, trustworthy boys for the task. As the smallest boy in the class, Ben didn’t make the prestigious piano squad, getting assigned to taking out the trash instead. Each afternoon, he carried the classroom’s metal wastepaper basket to a large dumpster outside the school.
Ben enjoyed trash duty and didn’t ask to be reassigned, but his path took him down the same hall as the piano squad. Daily, he watched the squad members make their trek and thought it looked fun.
“Hey, can I push the piano with you?” he asked one day when the squad sped by.
“No,” said Ted Goodwin, squad captain. “You’re not strong enough.”
“I’m stronger than I look. At home, I push a full wheelbarrow of cow manure uphill almost every day. Pushing a piano would be easier.”
Ted didn’t believe him. Determined to show the squad members that he could do it, Ben repeated his request the next day.
Ted surprised Ben by responding with a new idea. “Jump on the back and we’ll give you a ride.”
Ben decided to go for it. He jogged alongside the moving piano, set the wastebasket on top of it, and then stepped on the board at the bottom and back of the piano. He leaned over the top of the piano and held on to the front, becoming a passenger without the squad having to stop for the boarding process.
The squad showed off by picking up the pace to a slow jog while sailing down the hall to the third-grade classroom. Before reaching their destination, Ben pointed at the hallway that would take him to the school’s rear entrance.
“That’s where I need to get off,” he said, expecting them to stop.
“Hold on,” Ted said. “We’ll take you there.”
Ted and the boy next to him turned the piano so that it started heading toward the rear entrance, but the boys behind the piano kept pushing ahead at the same brisk pace. The squad’s lack of experience in making a high-speed turn caused the piano to tip over.
Normally, a falling piano would have made a loud crash, but it fell on Ben and his body cushioned the fall. Because he used his hands to save the wastepaper basket from hitting the floor, Ben provided no resistance to the falling piano. His chest absorbed its full weight, expelling the air from his lungs.
After recovering from the shock of what happened, Ted and his squad frantically lifted the heavy wooden monster off Ben and back onto its wheels. Getting the weight off made it possible for Ben to start breathing again, but he couldn’t do it. He remained flat on his back, still holding the wastepaper basket and feeling a surge of panic. A dozen tense seconds passed while he fruitlessly tried to take a breath. Ted rescued him. He grabbed the basket out of Ben’s hands and helped him sit up.
“Try to take deep breaths, not short ones,” Ted said calmly. “It’s like in football when you get the air knocked out of you. You need to take deep breaths.”
Even though Ben had never played football and didn’t know what Ted meant, he trusted him, and the technique worked. He soon started breathing again and the fear of suffocating faded. Ben flexed his legs and, to his amazement, found that they hadn’t been shattered.
“Are you ready to stand up?” Ted asked.
“Sure,” Ben said and slowly rose to his feet with Ted providing some of the lift. The movement confirmed the good news that his legs were intact, but it also warned him of major problems elsewhere.
Ben’s back and ribs screamed in pain, especi
ally when he tried to continue taking deep breaths. The pain made any breathing difficult, so he returned to short, shallow breaths to ease the impact. Being mindful of his duty, he bent over to pick up the wastepaper basket and uttered a slight groaning sound when pain waves shot up his back.
“Are you OK?” Ted asked.
“I’m fine. Thanks for the ride, guys.”
The piano squad watched Ben as he slowly walked to the school’s rear entrance with the basket in his arms.
“Hey, let’s keep this to ourselves,” Ted said. “We don’t want to get chewed out by Mrs. Wright. OK?”
Ben turned to the squad and gave them a thumbs-up sign.
They all nodded and flashed nervous smiles before resuming their trip to the third-grade classroom. When Ben raised his left hand to open the school’s back door, the pain caused him to hold his breath and grimace. The same thing happened when lifting the basket to eye level and emptying it into the bin. After making that move, he noticed a blood spot on his shirt.
Ben pulled his shirt away from his body and saw a four-inch-wide red stripe across his chest where the piano had scraped his flesh. Blood oozed from the wound in several places. Ben made a detour to the boy’s bathroom where he used toilet paper to cover the torn flesh. He wanted to keep his blood from exposing the secret he shared with the piano squad.
The toilet paper trick worked, and Ben made it through the rest of the day without Mrs. Wright saying anything about the piano being tipped over in the hallway. The fall apparently didn’t damage the piano because Mrs. Dugmore, the third-grade teacher, made no complaints. And to keep the secret, Ben concentrated on not frowning or flinching despite frequent, agonizing spasms exploding in his back and across his ribcage.