It made me mad in a way I can’t really explain.
When I was a kid, Locust Street was the prettiest street in Cedar Ridge. The men took pride in their yards. They’d mow on Saturday mornings and then stand at the curb in the afternoon with cans of Busch and talk about each other’s grass. Grandpa won Yard of the Month from the garden club three summers in a row.
Now it looked like nobody lived there at all.
I looked back at Grandma on the porch.
She was looking down the street too.
I rolled the mower next door.
Miss Edna Pruitt lives in the little yellow house with the green shutters. She’s eighty-one. She taught third grade at Cedar Ridge Elementary for thirty-eight years, and she taught me, and my dad before me. She used to give out butterscotch candies if you got a hundred on your spelling test.
She was sitting on her porch in a straight-backed chair with a big metal bowl in her lap, snapping green beans. When she saw me coming up her driveway with the mower, she stopped snapping.
“Hunter Gaines,” she said. “Is that you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Look at you. In your shorts. Back from overseas.” She looked me up and down over her glasses. “You’ve filled out.”
“The Marines feed you pretty good, ma’am.”
“Well, it shows.” She looked at the mower. Then at her shaggy yard. Then back at me. Her face changed. Something careful came into it.
“I can’t pay you much, honey,” she said.
“I’m not asking you to pay, Miss Edna.”
“Well, I’d want to.” She set down the bowl of beans. “But I have to tell you the truth. I can’t afford much. Your uncle’s price was dear.”
I went still.
“My uncle,” I said.
“Raymond.” She nodded. “He came around in the spring. Said he was doing your grandma’s yard and he’d do mine too. Said I couldn’t keep letting it go, the city would send me a letter.” She shook her head. “Two hundred dollars a month, he wanted. For a yard this size.”
“Did you pay it?”
“Two months,” she said. “April and May. Then I had to tell him no. My pills went up. My insurance changed in January. I just couldn’t.” She looked down at her hands. “He wasn’t very nice about it. He said I’d be sorry when the city fined me.”
Ray had been to her too.
I stood there in her driveway in my PT shorts with the sweat drying on my back, and something went cold in my chest. The same cold I’d felt sometimes overseas, right before things went bad.
Two hundred dollars. From a retired schoolteacher who gave out butterscotch candies.
“I’m not charging anybody today, ma’am,” I said.
She looked at me for a long time over her glasses.
“You were always a sweet boy,” she said finally. “Even when you couldn’t spell ‘necessary.’”
“I still can’t, ma’am.”
She laughed. Then she picked up her bowl of beans and started snapping again.
“Go on, then,” she said. “And watch my roses along the fence. Herbert planted those in 1972.”
I cut her grass. I went slow along the fence line so I wouldn’t nick Herbert’s roses. I raked up the worst of the clippings into a pile by the curb, so they wouldn’t smother the lawn.
When I was done, her yard had stripes too. Dark and light.
Miss Edna stood up from her chair and came to the edge of her porch. She looked at her yard for a long time. She put one hand on the railing.
“Herbert would’ve liked that,” she said quietly.
Chapter Five: Sweet Tea
Word travels faster than a mower.
That’s true anywhere, but it’s especially true on a dead-end street in a small Missouri town on a Saturday morning in July. By the time I finished Miss Edna’s backyard, I could see curtains moving in the windows up and down Locust Street. A screen door creaked open across the road. Then another one.
A woman came across the street toward me, carrying a big plastic pitcher with ice clinking in it.
She was younger than the others. Maybe sixty. She had short gray hair and reading glasses pushed up on her head, and she was wearing scrubs with little cartoon cats on them. I recognized her after a second. Loretta Simms. She was a nurse at the county clinic. She’d given me my shots for kindergarten.
“You look like you need this,” she said, and poured me a big plastic cup of sweet tea.
I drank the whole thing in one go. It was so sweet it made my teeth hurt. It was the best thing I’d tasted in a year.
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“Don’t thank me,” Loretta said. She poured me another one. “Thank your grandma. She’s the one who called me.”
I looked over at Grandma’s porch. She was still sitting in her lawn chair. She raised one hand at me. Just a little.
“She called you?”
“Said her grandson was home from the Marines and was out cutting grass and might need something cold.” Loretta looked down the street. “She didn’t say you were going to do Edna’s too.”
She was quiet for a second. Then she lowered her voice.
“He charged these old women,” she said. “Your uncle. Did you know that?”
“I’m starting to,” I said.
“He went door to door in April. Told them the city was cracking down on tall grass. Told them they’d get fined fifty dollars a day if they didn’t keep it cut. Then he offered to do it for them.” She shook her head. “Two hundred. Two-fifty. Three hundred for Mrs. Banks, because her yard’s bigger.”
“Is that true? About the city?”
“There’s an ordinance,” Loretta said. “Grass over twelve inches. But they send you a letter first and give you ten days. Nobody gets fined fifty dollars a day. I called city hall myself.”
“Did you tell them that? The ladies?”
“I told some of them.” She sighed. “But he’s Opal’s boy. And he was polite about it, at first. And they’re scared, Hunter. Most of them are living on a few hundred dollars more than your grandma. One letter from the city and they think they’re going to lose their houses.”
I looked down Locust Street. At all those shaggy yards. At the curtains moving in the windows.
“Half of them paid him a month or two and then couldn’t anymore,” Loretta said. “So he stopped coming. And their yards went to seed. And now they’re all scared the city’s going to come after them.” She looked at me. “Which is why every one of them is peeking out their window at you right now.”
I drank my second cup of tea. I set the plastic cup on Miss Edna’s porch rail.
Then Loretta asked me the question.
“You gonna do the whole street?”
I looked at all those shaggy yards. Nine houses. Ten counting Grandma’s. A widow in most of them. Seeds blowing off the tops of the grass in the hot wind.
I thought about the checkbook. Ray. 400. Ray. 400.
I thought about Miss Edna saying, I can’t pay you much, honey.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I believe I am.”
Loretta grinned. “Well, all right then.”
She turned around and walked straight up the middle of Locust Street with her pitcher of tea, calling out in her clinic voice, loud enough to wake the dead.
“Dorothy! Margaret! Irene! Archie! Get on out here. Opal’s grandson’s cutting the whole street, and it’s free, and he needs tea.”
Chapter Six: Ten Yards
Ten yards in a Missouri July.
If you’ve never been in Missouri in July, I can’t explain it to you. The air is so thick and wet it’s like breathing through a hot towel. By ten in the morning it was ninety-one degrees. By noon it was ninety-six. The cicadas in the oak trees were so loud they drowned out the mower.
I’d been in a desert overseas. Real desert, a hundred and fifteen degrees in the shade. And I’m telling you, Missouri in July is worse. At least the desert’s dry.
By the third yard, my tan shirt was so soaked it was dark brown. I took it off, wrung it out over the curb like a dishrag, and put it back on wet. It felt good for about four minutes.
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