Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away

by Richard Brautigan

  Yes, and I remember:

  So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away

  Dust ... American ... Dust

  Finished with the undertaker's daughter and still carrying my sack of beer bottles, I'm halfway to the pond now where the people will arrive soon and start taking their furniture off the truck and setting up their highly original house beside the pond.

  Childhood thoughts of early death continue to unravel in my mind, perhaps unpeel is a better and more accurate way of looking at it, like peeling an onion into a smaller and smaller circle with tears growing in my eyes until the onion is no more, all peeled away and I stop crying.

  About five years after I left the dream-like address of an apartment beside a funeral parlor, I was living someplace else. World War II wasn't quite over. It was hanging on by the skin of its teeth, but you could feel that the end was very near.

  For all practical purposes the War was over except that people were still getting killed every day and they would continue to get killed every day until the War was actually over.

  The days were running out for the Japanese Empire as the days of my childhood were running out, and every step I took was a step that brought me nearer to that February 17th, 1948, orchard where my childhood would fall apart just like some old Roman ruins of a childhood, so we just sat around: the Japanese Empire and my childhood listening to each other breathing away the end.

  The new place where I was living was two addresses away from, and approaching, the pond. The next address would take me a hundred miles to live in a dingy yellow apartment where the most important and expensive tube in the radio burnt out and we were too poor to afford another one, so at night our little Welfare family just sat around and looked at one another until it was time to go to bed.

  There are no words to describe how important a radio was in those days.

  The next address after the radioless apartment would be the auto court and out the front door of the cabin on the way to my beloved pond and its fishing furniture.

  Meanwhile: Let's go back the two addresses and I'll tell a story of dead toys and silence. The new someplace I was living looked like an old house that rented for twenty-five dollars a month. Thank you, Welfare! We lived there long enough for the seasons to come and go once.

  There were walnut trees in the front yard. There were apple and cherry trees in the back yard, which also contained a large building that was part garage, storage place and woodshed.

  We didn't need the garage because we were too poor to own a car, but we were rich enough to use the woodshed. My mother cooked on a wood stove and we used wood to heat the house.

  I always hated to chop wood.

  The place also had a lot of lawn that needed to be mowed and I always hated to do that, too. In the spring we put in a garden, which I worked at with great hesitation. I was inbetween stepfathers at the time, so my mother did most of the work in the garden.

  Let's face it: I was a kid who didn't like to do his chores. I tried to keep as much space between me and work as I could. I don't think I was lazy because I did a lot of other things, but they were always the things that I wanted to do, and I tried not to compromise my values.

  I always liked old people, so I spent as much time with them as I could. They fascinated me like spiders, which I had a great deal of affection toward also. I could spend an hour with a spider web and be quite contented, but show me some weeds that needed pulling from the garden and I would exit a long large sigh like a billboard of desperation.

  Late in the spring of 1945, a new kid moved into the house next door to "ours." He was older than me and really a good kid. He was the kind of kid other kids looked up to and wanted to be friends with.

  I think he was twelve and he was a boy scout and shortly after moving in next door, he got a paper route because he had a bicycle and was ambitious. He was preparing himself for a positive life of accomplishment.

  The bicycle looked brand-new even though it was prewar because he took such good care of it. I was not to have a bicycle until a couple of years later and my bicycle always looked shitty because I didn't care about its appearance. My bicycle started off by being blue but afterwhile it was so dirty that you couldn't tell what color it was and most people probably didn't care to begin with. The color of a kid's bicycle would not rank very high if you were to make a list of things people are interested in.

  The boy next door always kept his clothes neat. With my clothes, half-the-time you didn't know if I was putting them on or taking them off. They were somewhere in the middle of coming and going simultaneously.

  His parents really loved him.

  I could tell by the way they talked to him.

  My mother just barely tolerated my existence. She could take me or leave me. Once in a while she would go through short periods of intense affection toward me. It would always make me quite nervous and I was glad when she went back to just tolerating my existence.

  You must pardon this cartoon-like Oedipus interlude because my relationship with my mother is not the point of this story.

  The boy, being older than I, created the relationship between us. Older kids define the role younger kids act in their friendships.

  He became a sort of abstract older brother to me. He was always kind and understanding to me, but he created the distance between us. I would like to have seen him a couple of times a day, but we saw each other three or four times a week. This was his choosing. He controlled the amount of time we shared.

  I didn't feel bad about it except that sometimes I wished I were older. Maybe that would have made a difference, probably not. Our interests were not that similar. He was interested in hard work and the satisfaction and products gained from it.

  I liked to look at spider webs and listen to old people talk about the days when Teddy Roosevelt was President and watching members of the Grand Army of the Republic marching down the street in ever decreasing numbers toward the Twentieth Century.

  You don't get the same material success from listening to old people talk as you do from having a paper route. I was always a good listener.

  The boy kept his bicycle on the front porch if there was any chance of it raining but if the weather was good, he parked it under the long, drooping branches of a Queen Anne cherry tree.

  The day the boy was killed in an automobile accident, the bicycle was parked under the cherry tree. It rained that same night. If he'd still been alive, he would have taken the bicycle and put it on the front porch. His parents were in the accident but they had not even suffered a scratch.

  They came home by themselves just about twilight.

  They were driving the same car the boy had been killed in that afternoon. It had been hardly damaged at all in the accident. The chances of anyone being killed in that accident were easily 1 in a 1,000,000. It was the type of accident that it's even rare to get injured in.

  The boy was dead.

  His parents got out of the car.

  The entire neighborhood was watching them. Everybody knew what had happened because it was on the radio.

  Some people looked out furtively from behind curtains and others just walked out on the front porch and stood there gawking.

  I was in the branches of an apple tree when they drove up. I was about twenty feet above the ground. I had climbed the tree because I didn't know what else to do. I was sitting up there thinking about the boy being dead. Earlier I had gone into the woodshed and cried for a long time. I sat on the chopping block and cried my eyes out.

  I wasn't crying any more when they drove up and got out of their car. Accidentally concealed, I was very close to them and I knew that they couldn't see me. I was in a deep green section of the tree that was like a room and a window formed in the leaves and I looked through the window at them getting out of the car.

  She got out first.

  Then he got out.

  She closed her door but he didn't close his.

  He stood there beside the open door of the car, not
moving.

  They just stood on opposite sides of the car, staring at their house. They didn't say anything and then he slowly closed his car door and they went into the house.

  They turned on one light in the front room. They left the rest of the house dark. One of our neighbors, a very kindly woman, left her house across the street and came over and knocked on their front door.

  They were very slow to answer.

  "Can I help?" the woman said.

  "No," the boy's mother said.

  "I don't know what to say," the woman said.

  "I know," the boy's mother said.

  "If you need any help, I'm right across the street," the woman said.

  "Thank you," the boy's mother said. "I think we'll just get some sleep. We're tired."

  Everybody in the neighborhood had been watching this. Nobody else came over that night. A few moments later the one light in the house went out.

  I climbed very slowly down from the apple tree.

  It rained that night.

  The bicycle got wet.

  The next morning the boy's father took the wet bicycle from underneath the long fruit-lush branches of the Queen Anne cherry tree and put it in the house.

  They moved at the end of the month.

  The neighbors watched silently. Nobody came over to say good-bye, not even the woman who had visited them the night their son had been killed. I looked over at her house but she wasn't watching. She was nowhere in sight.

  When they moved, they didn't have the bicycle. It was not loaded on the moving van. I guess they must have gotten rid of it when I wasn't looking.

  The house was dark and vacant for what seemed like an eternity, but it was only a week. The new tenants were very cheerful and friendly. They were too cheerful and friendly. They held weekend beer parties and the driveway and the parking in front of their house overflowed with cars like a waterfall of pre-World War II metal.

  The cars had the uneasiness of a dirty joke that is not funny, but perhaps it was only my imagination. Why shouldn't people have a good time? The War was almost over. We were tired of it. Sometimes I would climb up in the apple tree and quietly weep:

  So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away

  Dust ... American ... Dust

  The last stop on the way to the pond was that yellow dingy Welfare apartment where the most expensive tube in the radio burnt out, leaving us with silent nights far distant from Christmas carols.

  The apartment also had a gas stove in the kitchen.

  We were all terrified of gas, especially my mother. She had a mind like a gray library filled with gas-leak death stories.

  It was a stove that you had to light with a match and we were scared to death of it. Every meal was a nightmare with my mother having to build up her courage to cook. We usually had dinner around six, but with that gas stove, dinner arrived on the table as late as midnight.

  Every meal was an exhausting experience that left us all completely drained right down to the bone where our marrow turned to dust caught in the vise of gas.

  The worst it ever got was when my mother couldn't emotionally handle cooking any more and for one week, we had cornflakes for breakfast and the rest of the time we ate sandwiches.

  We of course had no money and this was where Welfare had stashed us away. We lived there for three months and the radio was broken the entire time, so we just sat around in silence, waiting for the gas to get us.

  My mother would wake up three or four times every night and check the stove for gas leaks. I was going to school at the time and I would ask the other kids what was happening on the radio.

  They could hardly believe that I was not listening to the radio every night. It was inconceivable to them that somebody didn't have a radio.

  Sometimes in the evening I would sit in front of our broken radio and pretend that I was listening to my favorite programs. My mother would pretend to read the Reader's Digest, but I knew that she really wasn't reading the magazine. She was just sitting there, listening for a gas leak.

  The walls of the apartment were like dingy yellow roses and that's perhaps another reason why I disliked that apartment so much. It reminded me of all the funeral flowers that I had seen five years ago or was it twenty years ago? before I was even born.

  The War seemed to have gone on forever, so that's why 1940 seemed such an incredible distance away, but when I stared at those walls long enough 1940 came closer and closer, and I could see the funerals moving in slow motion like old people waltzing in a movie.

  I had very few friends because I was so exhausted all the time from the fear of dying by gas that it was very difficult for me to concentrate on anything or have the interest in trying to make friends.

  So for that period of time, I just looked at other kids after I asked them what was on the radio. That was about the best I could do. Once I was awakened by the sound of my mother crying. I got out of bed. The apartment was dark except for a light shining under the bathroom door. She was in there crying. When she wasn't crying, she was just sitting in there repeating over and over again: "Gas, gas, gas, gas." Then she would start crying again.

  I went back to bed and wondered if I should cry. I thought about it for a long time, and decided not to. My mother was crying enough for both of us.

  While we were living in that apartment, a child died in the neighborhood. She was about eight years old and one of three sisters who lived half-a-block away in a large house that had a yard cluttered with an enormous amount of toys. There were enough toys in their yard for an armada of children.

  I'll bet there were at least nine balls in that yard, along with a convoy of tricycles and scooters. There were about ten Christmas trees of broken toys or toys deeply in trouble and on their way to being broken. It was only a matter of time and time was running out for them.

  I wondered how those girls avoided serious injury from falling over their toys and breaking their necks or cutting their heads off with broken toys.

  But everything went along smoothly until one of the girls died. Strangely enough, she did not die from a toy-related injury. She died of pneumonia which was always an ominous and frightening disease to me. Whenever I heard the word pneumonia, my ears perked up. To me it sounded like an awful way to die. I didn't want my lungs to slowly fill up with water and then to die by myself, drowning by means of myself, not in a river or a lake but in me drowning. I always had a feeling that you died from pneumonia when somebody was out of the room. You'd cry for help, but they wouldn't be there and when they came back, you'd be gone: drowned!

  Whenever I heard of someone dying of pneumonia, young or old, I was obviously agitated. If I ever got pneumonia, I wanted whoever was there to tie a very long string on my finger and fasten the other end of the string to their finger and when they left the room if I felt I was dying, I could pull on the string and they'd come back.

  I wouldn't die alone if there was a long piece of string between us.

  Anyway, she died of pneumonia and Thank God, it wasn't me. When I heard she had died of pneumonia, I really said my prayers that night. I promised to be so good that I would make a saint seem like a sack of coal.

  The day after she was buried all the toys in the front yard of their house disappeared and were very slowly replaced with totally different toys, but for a while that front yard looked like a toyless desert. I wondered why this had happened and finally I heard the story.

  Her living sisters were afraid of their own toys because they didn't know what toys had belonged to the dead girl and they didn't want to play with the toys of somebody who was dead. They had played so freely and intensely that they could not separate the toys of the living from the toys of the dead.

  Nothing their parents said could change their minds, so it was decided to give all the toys away to the Salvation Army where they would be changed into Christmas presents for the unsuspecting.

  All the sisters had blond hair that was yellow like the apartment we lived in. Whenever I see a bl
ond woman, I almost always think of that long-ago apartment that always teetered on the edge of either poisoning or blowing us up.

  I wonder why I don't talk about my own sisters.

  I guess this story is not about them.

  Once my mother had a date with a man who was an unemployed roofer. I stayed at home and waited out her date. I read the Reader's Digest that she pretended to read. It had nothing to do with my life. There wasn't a single thing in there that reminded me of my existence.

  I guess some people lived like the Reader's Digest, but I hadn't met any and at that time it seemed doubtful that I ever would.

  My mother's date turned out to be quite short.

  She came home around ten, early.

  I heard the unemployed roofer's truck pull up outside. Maybe it helped being a roofer if you were four feet eleven, but it hadn't helped him because he didn't have a job. I knew that something was wrong because my mother slammed the truck door.

  "Aren't you asleep yet?" she said when she came angrily in.

  I tried to get on her good side, so I told her that I had been reading the Reader's Digest. I don't know why I thought that would put me in her good graces.

  I was a strange kid.

  I guess you could safely add very.

  My mother just looked at me when I told her I had been reading the Reader's Digest. It had not worked. I decided that it was time to go to bed and went very quickly there.

  A few moments later I could hear my mother in the front room, repeating over and over again, in a hissing whisper: "Gas, gas, gas, gas. "

  Looking back at it now, here in the forty-fourth year of life, my mother was the only leak in that apartment.

  The next morning I got out of bed and put my clothes on very quietly, like a mouse putting on a Kleenex, and went over to the house where the little girl used to live before she died of pneumonia.