Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
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Authors: Richard Brautigan
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The Gathering of a Californian
A Short Story about Contemporary Life in California
The Lost Chapters of Trout Fishing in America: "Rembrandt Creek" and "Carthage Sink"
An Unlimited Supply of 35 Millimeter Film
Homage to the San Francisco YMCA
I was Trying to Describe You to Someone
Trick or Treating Down to the Sea in Ships
The Post Offices of Eastern Oregon
A Long Time Ago People Decided to Live in America
A Short History of Religion in California
A Complete History of Germany and Japan
The Literary Life in California/1964
Women When They Put Their Clothes On in the Morning
Crazy Old Women are Riding the Buses of America Today
The World War I Los Angeles Airplane
The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966
BOOK 1: Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight?
Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight?
The San Francisco International Airport
A Telephone Call from Woolworth's
The San Diego (Not Los Angeles) International Tipping Abyss
Fresno, Then 3½ Minutes to Salinas
So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
Revenge of the Lawn
copyright © 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966. 1967. 1969, 1970, 1971 by Richard Brautigan
The Abortion
copyright 6 1970, 1971 by Richard Brautigan
So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
copyright © 1982 by Richard Brautigan
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions. Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Brautigan. Richard.
Revenge of the lawn : The abortion ; So the wind won't blow it all away / Richard Brautigan.
p. cm.
ISBN
0-395-70674-2
I. Brautigan, Richard. Abortion. II. Brautigan, Richard. So the wind won't blow it all away.
PS
3503.
R
2736
A
6 1995
813'.54âdc20 94-26177
CIP
Printed in the United Slates of America
DOC 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
Some of the stories in
Revenge of the Lawn
first appeared in
Rolling Stone.
Playboy, Ramparts. New American Review. Vogue. Coyote's Journal.
Mademoiselle. Nice. Tri-Quarterly, Esquire. Evergreen Review, Kulchur,
Now Now, Sum, Jeopardy. R. C. Lion, Parallel,
and
Change.
A portion of
The Abortion
originally appeared in
The Dutton Review,
volume I.
STORIES
1962â1970
BY RICHARD BRAUTIGAN
Â
This book is for
Don Carpenter
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M
Y
grandmother, in her own way, shines like a beacon down the stormy American past. She was a bootlegger in a little county up in the state of Washington. She was also a handsome woman, close to six feet tall who carried 190 pounds in the grand operatic manner of the early 1900s. And her specialty was bourbon, a little raw but a welcomed refreshment in those Volstead Act days.
She of course was no female Al Capone, but her bootlegging feats were the cornucopia of legend in her neck of the woods, as they say. She had the county in her pocket for years. The sheriff used to call her up every morning and give her the weather report and tell her how the chickens were laying.
I can imagine her talking to the sheriff: "Well, Sheriff, I hope your mother gets better soon. I had a cold and a bad sore throat last week myself. I've still got the sniffles. Tell her hello for me and to drop by the next time she's down this way. And if you want that case, you can pick it up or I can have it sent over as soon as Jack gets back with the car.
"No, I don't know if I'm going to the firemen's ball this year, but you know that my heart is with the firemen. If you don't see me there tonight, you tell the boys that. No, I'll try to get there, but I'm still not fully recovered from my cold. It kind of climbs on me in the evening."
My grandmother lived in a three-story house that was old even in those days. There was a pear tree in the front yard which was heavily eroded by rain from years of not having any lawn.
The picket fence that once enclosed the lawn was gone, too, and people just drove their cars right up to the porch. In the winter the front yard was a mud hole and in the summer it was hard as a rock.
Jack used to curse the front yard as if it were a living thing. He was the man who lived with my grandmother for thirty years. He was not my grandfather, but an Italian who came down the road one day selling lots in Florida.
He was selling a vision of eternal oranges and sunshine door to door in a land where people ate apples and it rained a lot.
Jack stopped at my grandmother's house to sell her a lot just a stone's throw from downtown Miami, and he was delivering her whiskey a week later. He stayed for thirty years and Florida went on without him.
Jack hated the front yard because he thought it was against him. There had been a beautiful lawn there when Jack came along, but he let it wander off into nothing. He refused to water it or take care of it in any way.
Now the ground was so hard that it gave his car flat tires in the summer. The yard was always finding a nail to put in one of his tires or the car was always sinking out of sight in the winter when the rains came on.
The lawn had belonged to my grandfather who lived out the end of his life in an insane asylum. It had been his pride and joy and was said to be the place where his powers came from.
My grandfather was a minor Washington mystic who in 1911 prophesied the exact date when World War I would start: June 28, 1914, but it had been too much for him. He never got to enjoy the fruit of his labor because they had to put him away in 1913 and he spent seventeen years in the state insane asylum believing he was a child and it was actually May 3, 1872.
He believed that he was six years old and it was a cloudy day about to rain and his mother was baking a chocolate cake. It stayed May 3, 1872 for my grandfather until he died in 1930. It took seventeen years for that chocolate cake to be baked.
There was a photograph of my grandfather. I look a great deal like him. The only difference being that I am over six feet tall and he was not quite five feet tall. He had a dark idea that being so short, so close to the earth and his lawn would help to prophesy the exact date when World War I would start.
It was a shame that the war started without him. If only he could have held back his childhood for another year, avoided that chocolate cake, all of his dreams would have come true.
There were always two large dents in my grandmother's house that had never been repaired and one of them came about this way: In the autumn the pears would get ripe on the tree in the front yard and the pears would fall on the ground and rot and bees would gather by the hundreds to swarm on them.
The bees somewhere along the line had picked up the habit of stinging Jack two or three times a year. They would sting him in the most ingenious ways.
Once a bee got in his wallet and he went down to the store to buy some food for dinner, not knowing the mischief that he carried in his pocket.
He took out his wallet to pay for the food.
"That will be 72 cents," the grocer said.
" AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!" Jack replied, looking down to see a bee busy stinging him on the little finger.
The first large dent in the house was brought about by still another bee landing on Jack's cigar as he was driving the car into the front yard that peary autumn the stock market crashed.
The bee ran down the cigar, Jack could only stare at it cross-eyed in terror, and stung him on the upper lip. His reaction to this was to drive the car immediately into the house.
That front yard had quite a history after Jack let the lawn go to hell. One day in 1932 Jack was off running an errand or delivering something for my grandmother. She wanted to dump the old mash and get a new batch going.
Because Jack was gone, she decided to do it herself. Grandmother put on a pair of railroad overalls that she used for working around the still and filled a wheelbarrow with mash and dumped it out in the front yard.
She had a flock of snow-white geese that roamed outside the house and nested in the garage that had not been used to park the car since the time Jack had come along selling futures in Florida.
Jack had some kind of idea that it was all wrong for a car to have a house. I think it was something that he had learned in the Old Country. The answer was in Italian because that
was the only language Jack used when he talked about the garage. For everything else he used English, but it was only Italian for the garage.
After Grandmother had dumped the mash on the ground near the pear tree, she went back to the still down in the basement and the geese all gathered around the mash and started talking it over.
I guess they came to a mutually agreeable decision because they all started eating the mash. As they ate the mash their eyes got brighter and brighter and their voices, in appreciation of the mash, got louder and louder.