The Marine Who Mowed Elm Street

Rick had told her it was broken. That was why he had to bring his own mower, he said, and his own gas, and that was part of the four hundred.

I wiped the cobwebs off the handle and tipped it up on its side to look underneath.

The blade was dull but straight. The air filter was caked solid with dust and old grass.

The gas in the tank had gone to varnish. That was all. That was the whole broken mower.

I knocked the filter clean against the side of the shed and blew it out. I drained the old gas into a coffee can.

Then I walked six blocks to the Casey’s in my PT shorts, bought a two-gallon can and filled it, and walked back.

On the fourth pull it caught, coughed blue smoke, and settled into the same sound it had made every Saturday of my childhood.

I stood there a second with my hand on the handle. I am not ashamed to say my eyes stung.

Grandma was on the porch by then with a glass of iced tea, holding it in both hands. She had heard it from inside.

She did not say anything. She just smiled at me in a way I had been carrying around in my head for seven months.

It was already hot, the kind of bright September morning in central Kansas where the heat comes up off the sidewalk by seven and the big shade trees on Elm Street are the only mercy.

I cut her front yard in stripes the way Grandpa taught me, out and back, each pass overlapping the last by a wheel.

Then the side yard. Then the strip between the sidewalk and the curb. It took me forty minutes, like I said it would.

Next door, Mrs. Opal Fisher was out on her porch in her wide straw sun hat, the one she has worn to the garden for as long as I can remember.

She is eighty-six. She taught me to say please and thank you at her own kitchen table.

Her yard was shaggy and going to seed. Her grandson lives in Topeka and comes down when he can, which is not often, and her husband Walt has been gone eleven years.

“Tyler Brandt,” she called over. “Look at you. Your grandmother has had the whole prayer chain at First Methodist praying for you since February.”

“I felt every one of them, Mrs. Fisher,” I said. “Would you mind if I cut your grass while I’ve got the mower warm?”

She looked at me under that hat brim. “I’d pay you.”

“No, ma’am,” I said. “You would not.”

She laughed and waved me on, and I started on her yard. Out and back, a wheel’s width over.