by Mark Critch
I started the mower again, the air growing thick with the smell of gasoline. I pushed on. The lawn sloped down toward the highway, meaning that with each fresh pass I had to stand at more of an awkward angle. My ankles, already diagnosed by my doctor as “weak,” strained to the breaking point, yet still I persevered. This field would not break me. As I reached the lower portion of the lawn I encountered an obstacle, much as I imagined Dr. Livingston had faced when searching for Victoria Falls. A flowerbed proved insurmountable. The station had spelled out their call letters in marigolds that ran parallel to the road. VOCM in ten-foot letters made for excellent advertising, and my brother had taken some pride in their maintenance. They were very hard to mow around, however, and pushed me to the limits of my powers.
Each letter had its own challenges. The V wasn’t so bad. I could walk the mower up and down its sides, careful not to cut any marigolds when dipping into the arrowhead of its middle. But the O meant lifting the heavy mower over the flowers, dropping it in the centre of the letter, and then tracing dizzying rings like some crop-circle-making farmer tricking city folk into believing an alien had landed in his field. As I walked horizontally on the downward slope of the hill I’d occasionally lose my balance, flipping the mower on its side. Its deadly blades spun mere feet from my face. And yet, careless of my own personal safety, I carried on. Some people like to throw around the word “hero,” but it is not my place to say as much myself.
Eventually I realized that walking sideways on a bank with a mower next to four lanes of traffic was foolhardy. So I devised a plan. There were spools of rope in the station’s garage; I’d tie two together for the required length. To start the mower you had to push and hold down a lever on its handle, so I’d knot the rope around that and set it to “perma-mow.” Then, from the top of the station’s driveway, I’d lower the mower to the bottom and then pull it back up again, letting gravity do the pushing for me. It was genius. When I conducted a test run the mower bounced around a bit, but it worked. The uneven choppiness of the cut didn’t look too bad unless you were up close, and I figured the station manager would only ever see this bit of lawn on his drive to and from work. Man had conquered nature.
I was lowering the mower toward the tip of the O when disaster struck. I’d never been a boy scout, so knots were not my thing. (I did go to one cub meeting, and although I loved the slimming uniform—the sash hides a lot of flaws—the general outdoorsiness of the organization was not for me.) I wore Velcro sneakers. The only boat I’d ever been on was the Bell Island Ferry, which was not a sailing vessel. So when it came to tying things I was more of a wrap-and-tuck man, and now I saw my tuck becoming unwrapped.
I frantically tugged on the rope, which loosened it even more until it slipped free from the “knot” connecting it to the other rope, the one holding down the lever—that particular wrap-and-tuck held tight. So not only was the mower now rolling away from me but it was still on, its blades spinning as it cut into the marigolds forming the O.
I watched helplessly as the mower, roaring in favour of its newfound freedom, tore through the bottom of the flowery O and made its way across four lanes of traffic. I raced off after it—for what is a workman without his tools? Cars screeched to a halt or swerved to avoid hitting it, and now traffic had stopped in both directions. I ran across the highway to pull my mower out of the ditch. It had mowed its way down a bank, still running, and splashed down next to a culvert.
The spinning blades churned the water, sending it into a 360-degree spray like an angry sprinkler. I couldn’t manage to untie the rope so I hauled the mower, blades digging into dirt and gravel, backward up the bank and onto the side of the road, where drivers honked their horns and swore their disapproval. I looked back at the lawn. The flowerbed no longer spelled out V-O-C-M; it spelled V-backward C-C-M. I could give no more to the landscaping industry. I pulled my mower back to the garage and left it there, still running, on the concrete floor. I had no energy left, and surely it too would soon wear itself out.
It rained that night, a heavy downpour that seemed befitting of my mood. Maybe the O’s desecration could be blamed on the rainfall? I pictured my mower, alone in the garage, still brimming with raw destructive power. The sound of thick, pulsating sheets of water on my window comforted me. I wondered if, without the rain, I might be able to hear the mower running on, like the Tell-Tale Heart. Soon I drifted off into the deep sleep that comes only after a good twenty-five-minute workday.
In the morning my father woke me. This had never happened before. In fact, I don’t think Dad had ever even been in my bedroom. He shook my shoulder and I rubbed my eyes, yawning hello. He looked at the posters on my walls with confusion, as if wondering why the wallpaper was so unevenly spaced and why it had pictures of the Beatles on it. Soon he brought his gaze back to me and I feared the worst.
“Did the lawn mower blow up?” I asked, sitting up in bed.
“Good God, no,” he exclaimed. “Why? What did you do to it?”
“Nothing,” I lied. “I must still be dreaming.”
“Oh, you’re a dreamer all right,” he said, somehow taking all the positivity out of the phrase. “Get dressed and come outside.” I took my time pulling on my casual clothes. It was a weekend so I didn’t have to wear my drab blue-on-blue school uniform. I settled for a blue T-shirt and a pair of blue sweatpants. Dad was standing outside smoking next to the oil tank. He pointed toward the station with his cigarette. “Can you tell me what the hell happened here?”
Everything was covered in wet grass: the cars, the walls of the building, the windows—everything. It was as if the parking lot was the floor of the Jolly Green Giant’s barber. Clumps of wet, freshly cut grass camouflaged every surface. I’d cut most of the lawn before my Jack-and-Jill moment with the mower, but I had neglected to rake it. The wind and rain from the night before had taken my freshly cut meadow, spun it around, and sprinkled it everywhere, like a tissue left in a pair of black pants in the washing machine. There wasn’t a big enough lint brush on earth to save me now.
The station manager sat me down in his office. He didn’t look me in the eye as he spoke; in fact, he didn’t look in my general direction at all, as if he were afraid he might catch my incompetence. “Look,” he began, “some people are just not cut out for this kind of work. I think you’re one of those people. Do you even want to keep working here?” The way he said it made replying in the affirmative seem pointless.
I looked away from him, even though he wasn’t looking at me, and sank down in the vinyl spin chair. “I guess not,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “I’ve already hired someone else. It’s just so strange. Your brother was so good at it. Lawn never looked so good as when your brother did it. But you…” His voice trailed off as he looked out the window at his lawn. He wasn’t looking at the actual lawn, though. He was looking at the bits of it that were stuck to the window, blocking him from seeing out the window at all. A million little green clippings covered the glass and gave him a slightly greenish glow in the sunlight.
I left my (former) boss’s office and stepped outside a free man. I’d been cut from the chain gang, but I didn’t feel any relief. I’d let everyone down: my boss, my dad, my brother. I passed a man in a yellow pickup with the words “Lawn Pros” written on the side. He was pulling a mower from the back of the truck. This guy really was a pro: he’d brought his own equipment. I looked back at the garage and thought of my old friend. Had it spun out yet? Would it ever again have its thirst quenched by the sweet taste of gasoline now that the professionals had been called in?
I watched my replacement as he started to rake the grass into piles. My boss had told me that I wasn’t cut out for this kind of work. Maybe he was right? It wasn’t me—it was the type of work. My father had said I was a dreamer. It was time I started acting like one. I lay back on the damp grass and stared up at the clouds, happy to be alone and happy to not have a job. I was not meant for manual labour. I knew that. But what
was I meant for?
I listened to the sweet sounds of another man’s hard work. This was my second breakup in as many weeks and, like the girl in the park, mowing the lawn just hadn’t been the right fit. For now, there would just be me, and I was okay with that. I fell asleep on the uncut grass, dreaming. There would be other girls and other jobs, but for now I was happy just to be a kid.
10
INNOCENCE LOST
NO ONE EVER KNOCKED on our door. Our house simply wasn’t in the kind of spot where you’d just drop in. If anyone were to visit, we’d usually know they were coming days ahead. Occasionally, the overnight disc jockey at the radio station would run down to the house after locking himself out while he “snuck a draw” in the parking lot and Dad would have to let him back in, but that was about it.
We did have one frequent visitor to the door, though: an ancient dog by the name of Tippie. Tippie belonged to George Kirkland, a mechanic who lived above his garage and was our closest and only real neighbour. Tippie loved cookies, and would meet my father at the door for a nightly treat. The dog, perhaps due to an all-sugar diet, was both blind and deaf. She could be called only by stomping your foot on the floor. Tippie would blindly shuffle toward the vibrations, sniffing as hard as she could for hints that would lead her to the affection she craved. Head pats and foot stomps were her only form of communication. This didn’t slow her down, though, and every night she’d show up like clockwork for a Chips Ahoy, to the great joy of my father and the great disgust of our cat. Tippie was our only regular. I can count on one hand the number of surprise visitors we had at the house on Kenmount Road. In fact, to my memory, there were only ever three.
One night a knock came at the back door, a door that had never been locked. If someone we knew was coming they’d just walk on in. The knock was a telltale sign that a stranger was present. “Good God,” the old man predictably exclaimed. “Who the hell is knocking at this hour?” It was seven-thirty p.m. Dad’s shock at the workings of the clock was like clockwork. He walked the ten feet or so from his perch at the kitchen table to the back door and opened it. I followed at his heels, excited by this rare visitation. The glow of the porch light revealed a middle-aged man in a leather jacket. He had a moustache and just enough hair on the top of his head to be worth combing over to the side. The one curly lock gave him the look of an oversized baby disguised as an adult. A big black Cadillac was parked in our driveway. It was still running and someone sat mysteriously in the back seat behind tinted windows. This was a most unusual event for our house. To be fair, though, any event was unusual.
“Sorry to bother you,” he began, fussing with his lone lock of hair. “My boss just moved in across the street and he had a few questions about the neighbourhood.” Neighbourhood? I’d never heard it called that before. I could give him a rundown of the “neighbourhood” if he wanted one. Car lot, another car lot, garage, farm, old-age home, radio station. We didn’t need a neighbourhood watch program because most places in our neighbourhood had night watchmen.
“Well, come on in and have a cup of tea,” Dad offered, opening the door wider from “I’m not buying anything” mode to “take whatever you need” mode. He leaned out the door to wave the reluctant stranger in from the car.
“Oh, he doesn’t like to meet people,” the stranger told him, stepping between my father and the car and shielding his passenger from the friendly wave as if it were a bullet. “He just wants information on schools…who lives around here…stuff like that.”
“Schools,” Dad repeated with a hint of surprise in his voice. A question about schools implied students, which meant children. I leaned in closer. I might get a friend to play with. This could be a game changer. And if the stranger in the fancy car wanted to ask about schools then my father had to ask the question that always followed the start of any conversation on the subject. “Catholic or Protestant?” St. John’s was a cosmopolitan city. We had both kinds of schools.
“Neither,” the stranger answered, looking a little sheepish. “I mean I’m not sure. He’s Chinese.” Chinese? The neighbourhood was getting multicultural. I told you we were cosmopolitan. Dad filled the man’s man in on the best schools around, explaining who was who. In response, the stranger told him that the man in the car had bought the old-age home across the street and was planning on turning it into a Chinese restaurant. I’d never had Chinese food before. I’d been to Chinese restaurants, but I don’t think two chicken balls and a side order of fries and gravy would pass as a traditional dish. My world was expanding at an incredible rate.
It deflated pretty quickly, though. We never saw the mysterious man in the car again. But over the coming months we watched the goings-on across the road with fascination as a restaurant slowly took form. The owner would park his car around the back, so we never did get a good look at him. No kids came knocking, asking if I wanted to hang out at the restaurant and perhaps try my luck as a very short short-order cook. No new kids enrolled at my school. Multiculturalism had failed to materialize and my world went back to having all the diversity of a snowbank.
There were other friends to be had in the neighbourhood, however. One morning I heard a soft rapping at the back door—the second such visitor we’d ever had. At first I thought it was just the wind, but the faint knocking persisted. I went to the door to find a tiny woman standing on our back step. She was dressed like a teenage girl. More specifically, like a teenage girl from the 1950s. She wore what could only be described as a poodle skirt. She complemented the look with ankle-length bobby socks, black loafers, a heavy winter coat, and a bandana around her head. She looked as though she’d been beamed to our backyard from a sock hop. But this was no teenager. This woman must have been in her sixties, at least.
“Oh, my, mister,” she murmured, marking the first time in my life anyone had ever called me “mister.” “Something shockin’ is after happening. Is your father home?” She seemed very distressed. Something had clearly unnerved her. Perhaps Paul Anka had cancelled a concert appearance? I told my time-travelling visitor that Dad had already left for work, and this upset her even more. “Oh, don’t tell me that! My God, mister, that’s some shockin’. Oh, my. My mother always told me that if anything bad happened to go get Mr. Critch. Oh, my. It’s shockin’ is what it is. It’s shockin’.”
“Mooooooooom,” I bellowed. “Visitor.” I made my way back to the living room to play some Donkey Kong and left my mother to deal with the new arrival. Mom loved a bit of gossip, and whatever had brought Gidget to our house sounded very, very shocking. I was sure they’d get along famously and settled in for some uninterrupted barrel jumping.
“Oh, my God, missus,” she moaned as soon as Mom turned the corner. “Something shockin’ is after happening. Come quick! There’s something wrong with my mother.” Mother? I imagined her mother looking exactly like her but slightly tattered, like someone wearing a low-end costume of her for Halloween.
“OhMyGodGirl,” Mom began, wasting no time in diving into the drama of it all. “Mark,StayHere. I’mGoingUpToMercedes’sHouse.” Apparently, Mercedes was a neighbour that I didn’t know we had. She lived with her mother in a tiny shack tucked away in the woods, just past our new Chinese neighbours. Like them, you’d never know Mercedes and her mother were there. Back when the area had been all Church land, Mercedes’s father had cut himself out a little patch to build his tilt on, and over time the city had slowly stretched its way out toward him. She and her mother rarely left the house that her now-deceased father had built for them. Besides Mass, Mercedes would leave home only long enough to cash a government cheque at the bank and get some meagre groceries, saving the rest to donate to the collection plate.
Mercedes and her mother believed in three things: God, the Fairies, and Hank Snow. Local tradition held that a fairy might play tricks on you and lead you astray over the edge of a cliff. For people in small communities, fairies were nature personified. Fairy stories were a great way to keep local children fr
om wandering off too far by scaring the crap out of them. Mercedes always kept some bread in her pocket so the fairies wouldn’t make her get lost in the woods and “do away with her.” She was very much still a child, despite her advanced age, and she feared the fairies the way I feared exercise and Mom feared silence.
The love of her life was Hank Snow. Mercedes and her mother lived a frugal life, but their one luxury was his music. Hank Snow was Canada’s Country Gentleman and the apple of Mercedes’s eye. “Oh my, missus,” she would say, “that Hank Snow is some handsome. Oh, that’s a sin for me! I’m some shockin’. But he sure is handsome, missus.” The only person who meant more to Mercedes than Hank Snow was her mother, and now her mother had suffered a shockin’ fate that not even Canada’s Country Gentleman could save her from.
After a while, Mercedes and my mother returned to our house in a terrible state. “Oh, no, missus, oh no. It can’t be. It can’t. What will become of me now?” The little woman was so distraught that, for a moment, I contemplated pausing my game. It seemed that Mercedes’s mother had, indeed, died. Mom called the church to send a priest over. There was no sense in calling an ambulance. Her mother had been dead for a day or two already and her daughter, who’d never been alone before, had been too upset to admit it and go get help.
“Oh my, missus,” she wailed, “I’m an orphan now. Who will take me in?” An orphan? Who would adopt who? She was older than my mother. I was less concerned about Mercedes than I was about myself. Where would she live? Would I have to share a room with her? Did she have TV shows she liked to watch that were on at the same time as the TV shows I liked to watch? Should I stop playing Donkey Kong? There was a lot to think about.