How It Was: “Rake’s Progress” (Excerpt)

[from How It Was: Autumn, copyright etc. etc. etc. by John E. Simpson]

November. The sky and the tree trunks got grayer. The temperature continued its relentless, almost imperceptible downward slide. All the colorful dead maple and oak and sycamore leaves had by now withered and blown away.

Or no, not all of them.

Most of them, in fact, would be heaped up into piles at curbsides and in driveways around The Boy’s town, enormous crackling piles which as the weekends clocked by would be lit one by one, a community-wide ritual torching of the last traces of summer. The Boy loved the smell of burning leaves, which was to the perfumes of spring and summer what beef stew was to steak, or corduroy to school clothes: a coarser, more full-bodied saturation of a single sense. His nose twitched in the gray smoke, even as his eyes watered. Even when the day’s first bonfire was clear across town, ten blocks distant, The Boy could step outside the door of his house and sniff its presence in the air.

But before they could be burned, the leaves had to be raked, and The Boy hated raking leaves almost as much as he hated clapping erasers. He’d no sooner get every single one of the orange or brown blots swept up off the nice dead lawn when a wind would come up — not down here at ground level, Mother Nature wasn’t that perverse, but up in the treetops. Down and back and down and forth would sift another leaf, or a handful of leaves. He could almost hear them hit the frozen ground, giggling softly to themselves.

Except that they would eventually be burned, the leaves’ accumulation into piles seemed ridiculous, futile. Out in the woods, where there was nothing but trees — nobody raked the stupid leaves out there, did they…?

The fan of the rake’s blades scraped across the remains of the lawn.

…Yeah. Out in the woods, he bet, nobody raked leaves. The pioneers hadn’t raked leaves, he would swear to it. Davy Crockett — raised in the woods so he knew every tree — had he raked leaves? And then gone on to glory at the Alamo? The Boy imagined Santa Ana’s men clambering over the wall of the Alamo only to be whipped across their faces and arms with long, flexible bamboo tines. “Aaiiee!” the surviving Mexicans would scream in their heavily-accented English, “Go back señores, retreat, retreat!  They have rakes!” Frustrated yet again, infuriated, Santa Ana would fling his sombrero to the ground, and while dancing a disgusted Samba would swear in Mexican: “Caramba!“…

The fingers of the rake scraped across the edge of the lawn, scraped up onto and across the sidewalk. Rake. Rake. Raaake.

…Or the Indians. They would burst whooping from the forest onto the prairie, which The Boy thought of as a kind of clearing, only a lot bigger, raking before them herds of buffalo like enormous beefy animated leaves. Rumbling. Lowing in terror as the Indians drove them over the crumbling concrete cliff to the asphalt far below….

The Boy paused at the curb, propped the rake against his shoulder, looked down at his hands. They were freezing, chapped, and a blister was swelling at the base of each thumb.

He looked across the lawn at his house, imagined his family inside, looking out the windows at him. Snickering, nudging one another.

“What’s he doing now?”

“Shh, shh, he sees us!”

Ducking down behind the windowsills, crouching, the smooth unblistered palms of their own hands flat upon the rug.

Again he looked down at his ruined hands, rubbed them briskly together, looked up at the trees as a breeze whispered overheard. Don’t even think about it, you stupid trees.

He removed the rake from his shoulder, trudged back across the lawn, placed the blades against the lawn’s surface, and imagined for a moment that he no longer had thumbs. The rake handle held not in the tender crooks between thumb and forefinger, but in the curled palm of his hands. Better, yes.

A small airplane buzzed across the sky, circling lazily like an artillery spotter plane.

…Had the English raked leaves between bombings in World War II?  Or the French Underground?  Yeah. Maybe they dragged their rakes like this even, holding the rakes between the flat of their hands in a kind of exotic, foreign-accented grip. Heaping the leaves up, up, up, concealing the prone forms of their demolitions experts who were lining the curbs of Paris, waiting for just the right moment when Hitler or Goering would rumble past in his private halftrack. “Zut alors, mon ami! No so heavy on ze maple, no?  More of ze oak, eet must look natural, eh?”  Carefully mounding the leaves up into an innocuous-seeming pile and a narrow, innocuous-seeming but highly-flammable trail running the length of the curb, just like this, covering up the telltale fuse….

A milk truck rattled and clinked by, heading up Third Street. The Boy stopped to watch it, thought of the wire-crated, cardboard-capped bottles of milk in the truck. Looked at his house again, suddenly pictured milk heated in an open pot on the kitchen stove and mixed with Bosco into a deep, satisfying cold-weather brew. The mug stinging his blisters even as it soothed his stiff, chapped fingers and palms.

The lawn was clear, as clear as he intended to make it, anyhow.

He slung the rake over his shoulder, marched up the sidewalk to the front door, threw the rake alongside the porch in a clatter of sheet metal and bamboo. He could almost smell the chocolate already. Smiling, he opened the front door and passed into the living room (his sisters and brother springing up from the floor under the windows); behind him the door swung shut, its heavy wood muffling the cries of “Oui, now!“, the soft booms of the explosions, the clatter of armored-steel scraps falling to the street, and the rattle of a thousand sombreros forever being flung down, in disgust, from the trees.