So we bought a house. Much angst and suffering. We scratched up the money, but just barely. We peered deep into the eyes of the vulture-like real estate lady and signed. We learned about escrows and mortgages and points and the Brethren of the Closing, all asking for small fortunes to ensure that the Iroquois wouldn't take the land from under our (read: the bank's) investment.
We handled all that without getting divorced. We did the packing and the moving and met the termite guy and the plumber and the gravel man and the tree guy. We met the neighbors and the garbage men, the mailman and the alarm guy.
The first bright and sunny morning of our new suburban adventure, I rolled out the bright red mower that the previous owner had left me. It looked brand new, still sparkling around the manifold. I rolled its chassis onto the lawn and pulled the rope a few times, just for practice. The lawn needed no mowing today, anyway. It looked very nice all by itself. I went inside to eat my lunch.
Then the doorbell rang. Wife N. answered the door, and after a few murmurs with whoever it was, she called to me.
A small man, as dessicated as a piece of beef jerky and about as thin, stood on the step, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. His eyes were like stainless steel, his skin was the color of tobacco. He wore a soiled cap and blackened pigskin gloves, holding the burnished handle of a heavy rake in one hand. Wife N. skittered away. I swallowed hard. "Y-yes?" I managed.
He slowly reached for his cigarette and flicked it into the rhodadendron bush. "I'm the gardener."
"We don't have a gardener. We just moved here. The other people moved away," I explained helpfully.
The gardener pulled back his lips in a kind of reptilian facsimile of a smile, showing his sharpened yellow teeth. He spit out a bit of tobacco and licked his lips.
"I'm the gardener," he said, as if he hadn't just said it.
"Yes, I'm sure you are the gardener, it's just that you're not our gardener, because we just moved here and...." I trailed off into an eminently reasonable tale of how we came to be living on this street on this day, all the while feeling his dead eyes drilling right through me to the faux Cotswald oak door behind.
"Mister," he said slowly. "I'm the gardener."
He looked up and down the quiet street. "I mow this lawn," he said. "I mow that lawn. And the lawn across the street. Mrs. Tagliali on the corner, I mow her lawn. Mr. Schmetterer, I mowed his lawn, until he died." I wondered what killed Mr. Schmetterer. Can coercive raking result in death?
"Uh, uh, um, what..." I replied, channelling my inner Daniel Webster. "I thought I'd, uh, do it myself, actually."
The gardener swung the rake gently to and fro. "Do it yourself? That could be very hard work," he said slowly. How does one recognize menacing behavior in gardeners? He continued with his pitch coldly. "I mow, and rake the leaves in the fall, and spread the fertilizer and the lime. This lawn, that lawn, across the street, up the block, everywhere around here. No do-it-yourself around here. Do-it-yourself could get you a heart attack."
He fished into his shirt pocket and came up with another cigarette. Unfiltered. "Sometimes they try to do-it-themselves. Things happen. Lose an eye, a finger, who knows what could happen." He gestured over to the fire-engine red mower at the garage door. "The blade can be very, very sharp." He lit his cigarette and snuffed the match with his glove.
An open-backed truck was parked at the curb. Half a dozen muscular men with tools and shovels, gas-powered leaf blowers and-for all I knew-anti-aircraft guns, stood around, arms crossed. How long would it take six men with shovels to dismember the rookie homeowner? Can you put body parts through a wood chipper? I mused on my life as mulch.
The gardener waited as I reflected on the wisdom of doing-it-myself. I looked at the gardening batallion in the street. I glanced at the new mower by the garage. Shiny red, never been used. And never would be.
"You know, we could use a gardener," I said, displaying the wisdom of the ages.
The gardener smiled his reptilian smile. A fly buzzed past us in the warming air. His tongue flicked out of his mouth and caught it faster than I could see....read more blogs
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