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Raking Miss Hannah’s Leaves

[Published in 94 Creations, 2012]

 

“Run down to Miss Hannah’s house, Danny. See if she wants her front yard raked.” Mom gave me one of her I-mean-it looks before I had a chance to utter a word.

            I thought about an “Oh, Mom” moan, but she drew her hand up to her hip. This was hard, I can tell you. I had promised to meet the guys for a sandlot football game at noon. The clock on the kitchen wall said twenty after eleven. I wondered if it would do any good to plead a prior commitment, but her stare bore down on me, unrelenting, like she was mad at me and had been for a week.

            “Take the rake. Knock on her door, hard, so she’ll hear you. Her doorbell doesn’t work. Don’t come back and tell me she’s not at home.”

            Mom did this kind of thing to me at least once or twice a month. “Go over to Mrs. Heimerdinger’s and ask her if you can carry her wash out to the line.” Embarrassing stuff, especially when our next door neighbor had just done a load of underwear, bras and panties, that kind of thing. “Ask Mrs. Schmidt if you can run any errands for her. She’s down with the gout.” And now this raking business. I couldn’t wait until I got old enough to explain to my mother in language persuasive and eloquent just how much I hated what she was doing to me.

            Miss Hannah’s yard was dominated by a gigantic tree. My brother Jake once told me it was a silver maple, though I’m not sure how he knew that kind of thing. It had to be a hundred years old. Had to be. Three feet across. Huge roots curling up from the ground. Leaves were falling like crazy outside our kitchen window, some of them probably from Miss Hannah’s tree four doors down. I wouldn’t be surprised. How could I, or any other eleven-year-old in the entire world, for that matter, be expected to rake that yard? I could finish the daggone job and have to start all over again. It didn’t make any sense. And on a Saturday morning, the best morning of the week. Wasn’t Saturday a day of rest? 

            “Can Jake help me?”

            “Jake has practice this morning at St. Francis. Big game tonight.”

            “Dag.”

            “I beg your pardon?”

            “Nothing"

* * *

Why would anyone want their leaves raked a week before Halloween? That was part of the fun, crunching through ankle-deep leaves on the lawns, swan-diving into high piles, inhaling the musty odor of earth and leaves from the maples and oaks and sycamores that grew in the front yards of Mulberry Street.

            I loved this street. I loved the shade of the trees in the summer, the feeling of  . . . well, family, I guess, when you walked down the sidewalk because the neighbors always waved at you and said hello, and the fact that a lot of the houses were pretty nice, most of them with covered porches that stretched across the front. Room for a porch swing and a couple of chairs. A place for reading or daydreaming or pitching pennies. By far the best spot in the world to watch a summer thunderstorm: the lightning sizzling through the dark sky, the crack or rumbling roll of thunder a few seconds later, the fresh new smell in the air, the spray of wind-blown rain on your arms. But now I was faced with one of the negatives of living on what Mom called the right side of the tracks, her way of describing our block of Germantown. Yes, houses with great porches, but also lots of big trees. Which meant tons of leaves that needed to be raked. Something that had never been a problem for me, since Jake was the master-raker at our house. He loved the job. He loved that I was his apprentice. With just a single rake, that meant I stood and watched, mainly, and ran for a Coke or 7-Up for him, or maybe some pretzels. He held onto the matches. Pretty boring, really.

            But that was fine with me. I hated raking, had tried it for a few minutes once thinking it might be fun since Jake liked it so much, but it wasn’t, it was just plain boring. And tiring, more than I would have guessed. I wasn’t afraid of work. I liked cutting grass, a pretty cool job if the push mower was sharp and oiled, and usually Jake kept it in good shape. I liked the way the blades whirred, clean and smooth and easy while sending the snipped blades of grass flying. But raking leaves. Dag.

            How could I handle this? What if I went to the house and pretended to knock? What if I stood there for a minute and pretended to knock hard at Old Lady Hannah’s front door? Maybe that wouldn’t work, though, maybe Mom had already figured out I might try that because of what she’d said to me, but there had to be a way.

            I dropped the rake and gloves in the yard near the sidewalk and climbed quietly up five grey-painted concrete steps to Miss Hannah’s front porch, an old swing barely moving in the breeze, making a rusty-chain kind of squeak up near the ceiling. I turned to check out the tree. Its branches reached over to the driveway on one side and the neighbor’s yard on the other, to the sidewalk out front and the porch where I stood. The tree had to be the oldest and biggest on the block, and even while I watched, a jillion leaves were floating down from its branches. A tiny wind funnel, like a miniature tornado, skipped across the yard, spinning the brown and red and golden leaves along. They looked excited, rising and falling and rising again. Then the little twister paused for a second before moving on again, finally dropping the leaves topsy-turvy in a scattered pile near the driveway. I always loved watching the leaves swirl like that. A magical dance, it seemed. But raking them, no thank you. What was wrong with leaving them where they fell?

            At the door I raised my hand, knuckles forward, ready for a pretend knock, feeling blue about it because I would have to lie to Mom, which was always risky. But at that very instant the door opened. There stood Miss Hannah, ancient, hunched at the shoulders, bent a little at the waist, white haired, wrinkled, in a blue and yellow flower-print dress that reached below her knees, two sticklike legs shrouded in sagging brown hose, and covering her arms and chest and shoulders, buttoned from hips to neck, a pink cardigan sweater, a size too large, fending off any possible chill. An odor—What could it be? Oldness?—hung in the old lady’s hair.

            “Why, hello there, Danny,” she said, a surprise to me because I’d only waved to her from time to time as I passed down the sidewalk in front of her house in the summertime, when she liked to sit on her porch swing and knit. She always gave me a little wave back but never said a word. I didn’t even know she knew my name. “What can I do for you on this fine fall morning?”

            Miss Hannah’s voice was young. I don’t mean young like mine, but younger than her age. My-mother’s-age young. Miss Hannah looked way older than my grandma, but I understood every word she said. Clear and strong like my mother’s time-for-chores voice. Clear and strong as the bells from St. Elizabeth’s four blocks over.

            What could she do for me? I considered her question, and for a second I thought about saying, Well, m’am, you can tell me that your lawn doesn’t need to be raked. That I can reach a light bulb on the top shelf of the kitchen cabinet for you. That your garbage can needs to be emptied or your water hose carried to the garage. Anything, just as long as your lawn is fine. I’d heard my mom’s Disrespectful Lecture a couple of times in the past month, though, so I couldn’t go there, but I was tempted. “My mom was wondering,” I said, understanding there was a question of integrity here but nevertheless searching for the right words, ambiguous words, “if you might want your yard raked.”

            Miss Hannah stood there but said nothing. I didn’t know if she’d heard me. Then I wondered if I had actually said those words or only thought them. She peered at her yard like it was the first time she’d seen it in a long, long time, and shuffled out to the top step to gaze up at the maple. She shook her head. I couldn’t believe it. She was shaking her head back and forth. An emphatic NO in any language on earth.

            “This place is getting to be a tad too much for me anymore,” she said, her head still shaking. “A few years ago I could rake this yard in twenty minutes.”

            I’d never seen Miss Hannah raking her front yard.

            “Yes,” she said, and turned, her eyes on mine.

            Yes? Yes? I stared at her.

            “Do you need to borrow my rake, honey?” She pulled a yellowed handkerchief from the sleeve of her sweater and blew fiercely. Turning the hanky and wiping away the residue under her nose, she waited for my answer.

I nodded out to the yard where my rake and threadbare cotton gloves were still visible, barely, under newly fallen leaves.

            “You’ve come prepared. Good. Thank you, Danny. And thank your mother for me. It’s a lovely offer.” She turned to her door. “Oh, be sure to knock when you’re finished,” she said, her voice ample and eager and full of cheer, almost like it was grateful for this chance to be used.

            I waded into the sea of leaves and started raking. There was no way out of this and I knew it.

            When I paused for a moment after a long stretch of work, I heard the bells from St. Elizabeth’s, resonant in the brisk air, and I counted along with them. Ten . . . eleven . . . twelve. I knew my football buddies were asking each other, at this very moment, where I was. Looking at the work I’d done, I figured I wasn’t even halfway finished. This was an endless task, with the breeze still blowing and the leaves still falling. Impossible, really. I thought of Sisyphus. That was Sister Mary Matthew’s favorite myth in the whole world. A few weeks ago we’d discussed it for an hour in class. My take on it was that I forgave the old king for his sins. Why? Because the punishment the gods condemned him to was unfair. Any punishment that goes on forever has to be wrong. Sister Mary had frowned at my analysis.

            So here I was, Sisyphus rolling a rock to the top of a mountain in Hell, only to have it slip from my grasp just before the summit and rumble back to its place at the bottom. I knew my chore would end only on the mountain top, a place I could never reach. What had I done to deserve this?

            As I went back to work, wetness leaked at the corners of my eyes. Maybe leaf dander, I wasn’t sure. My back started to ache and a finger on my right hand was blistering. Every time my pile reached an impressive size, the wind attacked and reduced it by a third. Leaves lay packed in deep pockets of the jutting roots, a tangled maze like the arms of an octopus around the thick base of the tree, forcing me to drop the rake and reach into the sloppy mess to scoop them out. The only thing that kept me from abandoning the yard was the prospect of getting the fallen leaves out to the front curb of the street. Once there, I could ask for matches. Two similar fires smoldered, grown men attending them, eight or ten houses down the block. I watched the men and their fires from the sidewalk and inhaled the wild, woodsy odor of the smoke that drifted my way. Suddenly I became energized, determined to finish the job. I’d always wanted to be in charge of one of these fires, but Mom would never let me. Jake always got to tend the fire. Maybe that’s why he liked to rake. This one was mine, though. All mine.

            I stared at the leaves and advanced against them, wielding my rake like a weapon. Suddenly I was a knight on a quest. There had to be fire in my eyes. I felt the heat run through my veins. 

            When I was way more than halfway through the job, my buddy Packy came flying down the street on his hotrod: no fenders, no chain guard, a jerrybuilt thing created from spare pieces of bicycle junk, but now, all fitted together and hand painted a wild cerulean blue, it was a very cool vehicle, something I coveted. I saw him before he saw me and knew he was heading for my house, so I raised my rake and hailed him. He cut sharply into the driveway and skidded to a stop, leaving a black tire mark on the concrete. Hopping off, he stared at me like I’d lost my mind. “What the hell?” he said.     

            “It’s a long story,” I said, trying to suggest that plots and subplots were part of this tale. I hoped he would infer the complexity of it all, understand that the situation had spun out of my control.

            “Well, shit. Everybody’s waiting for you.” He looked at me, head cocked.

            I shrugged.

            He said nothing, only glared. I thought he’d remind me that I was the one who’d gotten the game together in the first place, but he didn’t. Instead he turned abruptly and ran the bike along the driveway, leaping on it like it was a runaway stallion, tassels from the handlebar grips flying like a mane in the breeze. I shuffled out to the curb, wanting to call after him, tell him to wait up, to hell with the leaves, prop the rake against the silver maple and hop on his handlebars and go. Some words formed on my tongue and a sound dropped from my mouth to the earth beneath my feet. I   watched him all the way to the corner. He didn’t look around, didn’t turn to wave. As I glanced back at the yard I heard the honking of migrating Canada geese overhead and watched their shifting, imperfect V-shaped flight until they vanished in the great distance of the sky. I wanted to take wing and join them.

            That’s when I almost quit. I heard the jays and cardinals in the trees and the cries of the kids jumping rope and playing catch and hopscotch down toward the street that Packy had turned onto. A few minutes later I could have sworn I heard the guys at the sandlot a couple of blocks away shouting jubilantly over a great play, in my imagination a long touchdown pass or a razzle-dazzle run involving a last-second lateral.               

            I finally managed to muscle all the leaves out into the street gutter. For a minute I just stood there looking, amazed and kind of excited. I dropped the rake 

on one end of the long pile and hurried across the lawn, jumping two steps at a time up to the porch, where I knocked at Miss Hannah’s door. I waited, looked through the little glass window beside the door—the living room, all shadows and lace, was deserted—and knocked again. Hard. What if she’d gone somewhere while I was raking? But I would have seen her, wouldn’t I? Maybe I needed to check the back yard. Oh, God, what if she died? The idea of all this work for nothing terrified me. I wouldn’t get to tend the fire. More seconds, five, ten, fifteen—eternally long and silent—and then the leather heels of her slippers slapping the living-room floor. “Coming,” she called. “Hold your horses.”

            An inside deadbolt clicked open and there she was, a smile crinkling her cheeks. As she stepped over the threshold to the porch she stumbled, catching 

my arm as I reached for her. She steadied herself and paused, it seemed, to check on her own well being, patting her chest gently before looking out to the front lawn. “Lovely, Danny. Just lovely.”

            My eyes followed her gaze. It was lovely. The grass, still a healthy green, 

spread out before us, only a few new-fallen leaves scattered about. “I guess, if you could give me some matches,” I said, “I’ll go ahead and burn the leaves for

you.”

            “Oh, Danny,” she said, “I couldn’t possibly let you do that. Why, your

mother would have a fit. I’d never hear the end of that, no sir, if I let a child burn my leaves out in the street.”

            I looked around. What child? Then I realized she was talking about me. For a moment I felt stupid, but an instant later a different feeling took over. Child, huh? Well, this old lady had let this child miss his football game with his best buddies, she had caused this child to miss his favorite Saturday morning cartoon, had permitted this child to miss his whole childhood, practically, while he was out here in front of her adult house for hours and hours raking her adult leaves from her adult front lawn, but, no, why, of course not, no child could be trusted with a couple of matches and a foot-high pile of leaves along that adult gutter of the street. This was certainly not child’s play. What a childish notion I’d been entertaining, the crazy idea that I’d finally get to be the keeper of the burning leaves.

            “I’ll be careful,” I said. “I’ve helped my brother before.” I hated the whine in

my voice.

            “Here, honey,” she said, “take this and buy yourself some nice candies.” She pushed a thin silver dime, moist and warm, into my hand.

            Over two hours of hard labor and a blister that was stinging like Listerine on an open sore was going to get me a dime’s worth of penny candies that I could hold in one hand: Mary Janes, licorice babies, root beer barrels, red hots. I

wanted to cuss, to spit out some seriously bad words that I heard from the eighth graders at school practically every day. It was unjust, I decided, totally unfair, maybe even a mortal sin, though I didn’t exactly want to send Old Lady Hannah to hell, like that mythology writer had sent Sisyphus, for all eternity. But it had to be wrong, didn’t it?

            By the time I grabbed a sandwich at home and got to the sandlot, the guys were leaving. Laughter rolled across the field as accounts of heroic plays and clever maneuvers were shouted back and forth. “You shoulda been here,” Packy said to me. “Best damn game ever. We won it on the last play.”

            The air was filled with the scent of burning leaves. I turned for home.

            I fumed all day. When I complained about my ten-cent payment for a two-hour job, Mom said, “She didn’t have to pay you anything, now did she?” If I’d 

thought about it, I could have predicted her response. My day broken into jagged shards, like pieces of a dropped glass, I read until we went to Jake’s game that night. My brother played well. St. Francis won.

            At midnight I awoke. The house was still. Jake snored quietly in the upstairs dormer space around a corner from where I slept. I slipped into my jeans and tee shirt and tiptoed down the steps to the hallway and on into the kitchen. I reached up into the stick-match dispenser and gathered five or six in my fist. Out the back door to the driveway, a right turn on the sidewalk to the resting leaves in front of Miss Hannah’s house four doors down. I looked around for a long minute, back and forth, everything silent, dark, the only dim spot of light from a streetlamp halfway down the block. The beautiful day and coolevening had settled into a cold night, and I felt my bare arms goose fleshing, my fingers trembling.

            I hunkered down and scraped a match against the asphalt. It sputtered, darkened, and flared, lighting the world, it seemed, right there in my hand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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