It’s every poor kid’s nightmare to die in a rich man’s backyard, or at least it was mine the morning I found myself rattling like a skeleton against the redwood fence that ran the length of the Headmaster’s House at The Katherine Branson School where I worked as a fledgling gardener.
It was late winter and I was rototilling the soil of the empty flower beds that bordered the far side of the beautiful lawn that sloped majestically away from the main residence. Everything had been going smoothly, as I guided the gentle rolling, pitching and yawing of our walk-behind tilling machine. As I made my way up and back along the wide dirt border, I was transported by the churning of the rich soil and the sweet smell of Spring rising up from the fertile earth. I didn’t even mind the occasional bird divebombing my red hair thinking it was a blossoming flower, which is a real springtime ginger thing. Ask around.
After I turned and began my last blissful pass along the fence line, I half expected to see Pan himself tooting his flute in approval while he back-kicked some turf divots with his cloven hooves. It was in that moment that both sets of blades suddenly caught a thick, deep root buried beneath the surface, stopping all of them cold simultaneously, which meant it was now the rest of the machines turn to start turning, and I was instantly along for the ride. I found myself transported in a different way this time, up and violently to the left, pinned against the boards of the wooden fence, caught between the two shuddering handles, one of them thumping just under my right armpit while the other gave special and unyielding attention to that soft spot just beneath the tip of my sternum. Take a moment now and feel that soft spot under your own sternum. Enough said.
As I waited for the rototiller to run out of gas or for me to lose consciousness, whichever mercifully came first, I had a vision. I imagined a fundraising event where one of the more prominent donors looked out over the top of his glass of Chateau Lafite Rothschild and asked the Headmaster:
Sir Nigel: Robert? What is that against your fence?
Headmaster: Oh, that’s what’s left of our maintenance gardener who was shaken to death by a rototiller last season.
Sir Nigel: Really?
Headmaster: Yes, after the night animals picked him clean, it was Carol’s idea to use his ribcage as a natural trellis…that’s night blooming jasmine growing up through him.
Sir Nigel: Vivian dear? Let’s consider getting a dead gardener for our yard this year!
Headmaster: Now, Sir Nigel…about that donation to the school.
As I desperately attempted to free myself from this absurd situation, my brain continued to literally carom around the inside of my skull, as did my thoughts. They drifted next in the direction of the students at The Branson School. If this didn’t end well, would they even miss me?
Because of my upbringing, I always felt like I had just been released from a state penitentiary working at a private high school, amongst teenagers whose daily allowances I presumed easily eclipsed my monthly paycheck. At least at first, I projected all sorts of things onto the students at large. I was convinced that they didn’t know what to make of me exactly. I wasn’t a teacher, I wasn’t a peer, I wasn’t a parental figure…I even joked that some of them saw me more like a character from a folktale come to life; someone you might encounter in a Hans Christian Anderson story, wearing a felt hat with magic beans in my pouch and a grubbing hoe in one hand, swinging in time to my cross-campus whistling. On an early Spring evening, they might imagine finding me perched on a tree stump, smoking a long white pipe and warming my hands on the sides of the toasting compost pile at the end of the soccer field before calling it a night in the hollowed-out side of a Quercus Lobata or Valley Oak to civilians, because I was pretty convinced that some of the students just assumed I lived on the grounds, not in one of the handful of cozy apartments tucked away around campus mind you, but more likely in a mud-brick hermitage or perhaps in a cave hidden behind that small waterfall down in that angry little creek. At the very least, I assumed they believed I lived in the garages where we kept our equipment, perhaps curled up on bags of grass seed at night, my head resting on a hardback collection of Walt Whitman essays, borrowing the all-weather cover for the Toro riding mower as my blanket against the cold. Again, all of this just lived in my imagination, nothing the students did, but rather born out of my idea that I was somehow less than them. The fact that when I blew my nose at the end of my shift and dirt came out didn’t help…but, I thought I knew what they thought. How wrong I was. I was known then as Steve the Gardener.
With no warning, the stuck blades somehow rolled over the top of that sunken root, pitching the machine forward and down into the soil, away from the fence. I was suddenly freed from the shuddering clutches of my rototiller overlord, gasping for breath and now desperately leaping to catch up with what was once again my whimsical red metal dance partner. I finished the job, walked the machine over to the garages across campus and hosed down the blades. No hard feelings, Tilly.
It was just another day at The Katherine Branson School. Some days you were mowing lawns and rolling hoses and some days you were thrown against the Headmaster’s fence with such force that you just might have had some sense knocked into you…or at least a little nonsense knocked out.
A Good Shaking