Gravely Mowing the Lawn
On Saturdays male college students left campus in abundance. Some went to the mall. Some went home. And some of us who needed cash went to work for the good folks in the local community.
It was on one such Saturday that I found myself at Mrs. White’s, along with a fellow college student named Phil.
We rode there in Phil’s rattle-trap car, parked, got out, slammed the doors, and walked to the front door of a rambling white house with dark blue shutters. Wisteria grew profusely on a trellis to the left of the door, draping it in purple, and a hulking magnolia tree grew on the right, fully in bloom and fragrant.
Phil knocked, and when the door opened, a tiny former Southern Belle with completely white hair welcomed us. It was Mrs. White. She must have at least been in her seventies, and you could tell she had always been happy and honest of soul, two traits that had given her a grandmotherly glow from within. We stepped just inside the door, and she introduced us to her son, Plato (yes, “Plato”), who was a dapper fellow in his fifties of average height with white hair, a big smile, and wire-rimmed glasses. He looked like Harry Truman.
“The job pays five dollahs an hour. Plato will tell you what to do. And we’ll have lunch around noon!” Mrs. White promised.
So we did our yard work under Plato’s watchful eye. He sent Phil to go around the yard and pick up sticks and throw them away. To me he said, “I want you to use the Gravely. I just got her fixed and running again!”
“‘Use the Gravely.’” I had no idea what that meant.
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I had mown a lot of lawns growing up, but I had never seen a monstrosity like this. She seemed to be glowering at me with a threatening smile. Suddenly I had a flashback to junior high. This was exactly the way that big, stupid lump named Kim used to grin at me before beating me up. She was the toughest girl I ever knew.
Behind the ungainly front end was the motor, two wheels, and two handlebars. Not one handlebar, like normal mowers, but two, widely separated, one for each hand, sort of like the “ape hangers” some motorcycles have. There were gadgets on them to make the mower go forward, stop, and reverse.
Plato started her up with a few brutal yanks on the pull cord. Gravely roared angrily into life.
“Now,” Plato said, yelling in my ear to be heard over Gravely’s cantankerous cacophony, “this levah makes her go fawad.” He demonstrated briefly. “This levah makes her stop.” Again, a demonstration. “And mash this foah reverse.” Yes, that worked correctly too. “So go ahead and mow Mama’s yard.”
I stood there looking at her, scared to death.
Plato laughed. “Now, don’t letta intimidate you! You got to show her who’s boss!” And then, “Be sure to take good care of her. I just spint a lotta money to get her runnin’ like she should.”
Placing myself behind her, my legs spread wide, I grabbed her handlebars. A more awkward, powerless position, I thought, could not possibly be imagined. All this weight in front of me plus self-propelled wheels would, I knew, have me bouncing along behind, feet barely touching the ground; I was in the worst possible posture to ever hope to control this beast. Had he asked me to grab an angry bull by the tail and direct him where I wanted him to go, I couldn’t have been more confounded.
Forward, Stop, Reverse
As I look back now, what Plato was asking me to do was really unfair. If you want to teach a young man with little upper-body strength to tame a Gravely, you put him out in a huge field of grass—a gigantic field with no obstacles—and you tell him to mow it. This gives him an opportunity to get to know Gravely; it allows him and the fiend to develop a grudging mutual respect without endangering either the machine or the operator.
Nowadays I would probably laugh and say, “Nope, sorry, I’m not going to do this.” But young college-age men don’t do that. They are trying to prove themselves in nearly every situation. And besides, I had probably mown a thousand miles of grass when I was growing up. I thought back to all those mowers now—in comparison to Gravely, they all seemed tiny, tame, easy to use, and friendly. Why, I used to stand at the top of a drop-off in Betty Plant’s yard and let gravity take my mower to the bottom, maybe four feet away, while holding on to the handlebar (note that that’s a singular noun!) and then pulling it back up over and over again. Suddenly I missed that little mower. He was small but feisty. He was comparatively quiet. He was calm. He was obedient. Yes, as Gravely’s violent vibrations caused all the little bones in my wrists to rattle around like dice in a Yahtzee cup, I suddenly missed old Toro. If Toro were here, the two of us would make short work of this job, prompting Plato to say, “Whah, that’s the best mowin’ I evah did see! And you a Yankee too! Heah—heah, boy, take this tin-dollah bill!”
But Toro was hundreds of miles away in Ohio. I pictured him sitting forlorn, all alone in my dad’s dimly lighted garage, sort of slouched and sad, thinking of me. A tear trickled down my cheek.
“You gonna stand theah all day, son?”
Suddenly back in the present. The horrible present. I pulled the thingy that made the mower go forward. Forward we went, faster than I had anticipated. She nearly pulled me off my feet, and I stumbled and ran to catch up with my hands, which had a death-grip on the handlebars. For a second I envisioned her jolting ahead so fast that she ripped my hands off—I saw myself chasing after her, waving my bloody stumps around and wondering, even if I caught up with her, how I was going to stop her.
Before hitting a tree, I pushed the make-her-go-forward thingy back to its original position, and Gravely growled to an unwilling stop. I looked at the other thingy to push to make her go backwards. Before pushing it, I bent my knees and looked behind me. If she went backwards as powerfully as she went forwards, I’d better be ready to run or she would bumpity-bump right over me, leaving me flat on the ground, spurting blood from numerous lacerations. I could already tell she wasn’t the type to stop and see whether I was okay; she would just keep on going, shouting, “Freedom! Ah, sweet freedom!”
Reverse! OK, at least I knew what to expect this time. I looked really ungainly as I struggled to match her speed, but at least I didn’t end up flat on the ground, spurting blood from numerous lacerations.
We continued to work together, Gravely and me, and, to my surprise, things started going better. Oh, I was still awkward, and when I put her in forward, she still yanked me so hard and so suddenly that my head snapped backwards, but at least I was getting down the basics of controlling her—
Pull the thingy: race forward, giving the grass a high-and-tight, scalping it at times. Push the thingy: stop suddenly, breaking all known laws of physics regarding deceleration; avoid allowing momentum to fling you forward, sprawling across the mower deck. Mash the reverse thingy and practice your backward-running skill, something you are developing on the spot because in twelve years of public-school PE, no coach ever saw backward-running as a skill worthy of being taught. Apparently none of my coaches had ever tried to mow with a Gravely.
Repeat. And repeat again. Etc.
Slowly, painfully, the grass was getting cut. I tried to do it in orderly sections, and soon the next section was down by the creek.
A Tragedy
I should have run Gravely parallel to the water, whistling in the sunbeams while colorful butterflies flitted about my head, blithely mowing away while the clippings rainbowed into the stream. But I had become so accustomed to the pull-push-mash method that it was the only thing I knew how to do. So I stood a few feet away from the bank as she rushed forward; at the right second, I would push the thingy, stopping her on the precipice. Then I would mash the other reverse-thingy, saving her from a watery death.
Well, that was the idea anyway, and it worked exactly twice. On the third endeavor I remember thinking, “If this were some dumb TV sitcom, this thing would end up in the creek!” And then, on the third effort I didn’t push the reverse-thingy fast enough, and Gravely sailed off the bank, clattering down into the water three feet below while my hands remained clasped around her handles.
So much for the third time being the charm.
Bless her heart, she kept running. “Blubbblubb blurb blurb,” said the recently refurbished blades as they cut through the water, causing mindful minnows and careful crawdads to scatter away screaming, “It’s the end of the world!” Gravely wanted to keep going, to cut right through the stream and come out on the other side. I, as Plato had instructed me, was determined to show her who was boss, so I did not permit it: I was hunched over on the bank, tearing divots in the yard as I desperately back-pedaled, trying to pull her back up the vertical bank (a physical impossibility) before Plato Truman White saw what had happened.
And now, for the first time, a realization entered my rattled brain. Plato Truman White hadn’t told me how to turn the blasted thing off! So Gravely and I held our positions for a while in a stalemated tug-of-war. “Blubbblubb blurb blurb,” said Gravely, “blubbblubb blurb blurb blurb!” while I silently prayed, “Lord, if this is a nightmare, please, please let me wake up now! … Now! … OK, then, NOW!”
Suddenly Plato Truman White was jumping into the water, ruining his shiny oxblood penny loafers and getting his perfectly pressed khaki chinos wet to the knees. Phil also jumped in. At great risk to all twenty of their fingers, they lifted Gravely’s still-running blade deck back onto the bank. (My delirious brain giggled as it said to me, “Hey, look at that: ‘All hands on deck!’ Ha ha haa!”) Still in “fawad,” she proudly repeated her new trick: a death-defying jump back into the water, causing an alarmed Phil and Plato to stumble back a good three feet.
“Turn it off! Turn it off!” yelled PTW as he clambered over slippery rocks to get back to the blade deck. And then he viciously condemned Gravely to perdition.
“I can’t! I don’t know how it works!” I screamed. (I was quoting the Wizard of Oz, but I suspect PTW didn’t pick up on the allusion.)
Moving surprisingly fast for a man of his age, Plato scrambled up the bank on his hands and knees, turning the front of his chinos from khaki to South-Carolina-mud red. He reached over to a location on Gravely’s anatomy that I had not hitherto noticed, and the roaring stopped. “Blubbblubb blurb … blurb … blurb … blub … bluuuurrrrrrrbbbb,” Gravely grumbled as her blades stopped churning.
Plato stood on the bank, his hands on his knees, gulping gigantic breaths, unable to speak. I took advantage of that situation to tell him how very sorry I was—I was so sorry—I—
Without standing up he pointed at the creek. “You git down there and git that thing back up here on drah layand!”
“Yes sir!” I dropped to the ground, quickly pulled my sneakers and socks off, and scootched off the edge of the bank, the cool water almost up to my knees.
Phil gave me a sympathetic grimace, and then we hoisted Gravely back up onto dry land.
“Mr. White, I’m so sorry, I’m so embarrassed. I was trying to cut along the bank, but I didn’t put her—um, it into reverse fast enough, and … well, I’m really very sorry!”
Red-faced, Mr. White slowly stood up and glared down at me from the bank. “I just spent a hundred and fifty dollahs to get that thing runnin’ again! I hope you haven’t ruined her!”
I couldn’t think of anything to say other than “I’m sorry,” but I thought it better just to keep my yap shut.
A voice like a tinkling silver bell drifted across the lawn. “Boys! Come on up heah, I got sandwiches in the kitchen!” It was Mrs. White, aka Mama White, Plato’s mother, and, bless her sweet heart, her timing was perfect.
Still standing in the creek, Phil and I looked up at Plato, unsure what to do.
“Go on up theah,” he said, ineffectively attempting to brush the mud from his chinos. For some reason Phil and I just stood there staring, unable to move, our feet growing numb in the chilled creek water. Suddenly PTW stood up and yelled. “I said, go ON!” Phil and I scrambled up the bank, past PTW and Gravely, who was staring at me with a smug gloat of victory. I stopped to grab my shoes and socks, and I heard PTW say, “If you want somethin’ done right, do it’cheseff!” I looked quickly over my shoulder and saw him holding a penny loafer upside down as a crawdad tumbled out. Then he said, his voice starting out quiet but rapidly crescendoing to the last word, “Lay-yand a GOSHEN!”
Lunch
Thankfully, when we came in, Mama was too busy to ask us about our frumpled appearance. Lunch was delicious—Mama White’s homemade chicken salad sandwiches, cool slices of cantaloupe (I hate cantaloupe, but Phil ate enough for both of us, and I put one of his rinds on my plate), tater chips, and homemade chocolate cake for dessert—all washed down with Mrs. White’s homemade sun tea, sweet as the day is long and so cold it hurt your teeth. I drank three glasses of it.
All the time we were eating, we could hear Gravely bellowing back and forth across the lawn. This actually made me feel better, knowing that (1) I hadn’t ruined her and (2) I wouldn’t have to use her again.
Mrs. White looked out the kitchen window. “My land, Plato is just tearin’ up that yard! Why, it looks just awful! And just look at his trousahs! What in thee world—?”
Suddenly the mower cut off. I sighed with relief. Maybe the job was finished.
“Oh my stahs!” Mrs. White suddenly shouted, and she hurled the window open. “Plato Jackson White!” she hollered. “Whah are you mowin’ the creek!?”
Copyright 2024, Steven Nyle Skaggs
AUTHOR'S NOTE: As I often do with this blog, I have taken an actual event and fictionalized much of it in order to make it funny. (Well, that is my goal anyway.) So what portions are true?
1. I did attempt to mow Mrs. White's lawn.
2. Her son, who really did look like Harry Truman, but who was not named Plato, insisted that I use the recently refurbished Gravely, which scared me to death.
3. I really did run the stupid thing into the creek (but only one time), and Mr. White and the other college guy had to lift it out. But in reality Mr. White was quite understanding about it and did not yell at me. Nor did he later run the monster into the creek. But it made for a nice ending, don’tcha think?
That was hilarious. I still remember when that happened. So funny!
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