Saturday, November 23, 2024

Mr Ward

Mr Ward lived across the street

in a converted garage surrounded

by a wildly overgrown garden.


A few charred timbers lingered

under ivy that covered the

foundation of the house


where his wife had died

when the house burned down

some years before.

He never rebuilt it.


Mr Ward worked the night shift

at the Hamm’s brewery on

Bryant near Seals Stadium.


The Giants were playing there

while the new park at Candlestick

was under construction.


We could see the cranes

from the the street in front

of our house on the hill

in Brisbane.


Mr Ward would

sometimes come out

to join us, tell us stories

about people who had

lived up here on the hill.


Like the man who had lived in

the house that we now rented.

After a landslide next to the house

a riot of poison oak had erupted.


He cut it all down and burned it.

Stood close to the pyre

tending it. Breathed too much

of the smoke, which inflamed

his lungs badly.


Hospitalized,

but I don’t recall if Mr Ward said

that he died. just wanted us

to know, not to burn poison oak.


One day, as we standing

out in the street, a garter snake

crawled out onto the road.

I had never seen a real live snake

before.


It was beautiful, red and black

checkered sides, cinnamon and turquoise

around its head, a pale green stripe

down center of its back.


Mr Ward picked it up so I could

look at it. I turned to Mommy

and asked if I could keep it.

She laughed and said No,

not this one, maybe another one.


Mr Ward put the snake down

in the shrubs at the edge of his

garden and the snake quickly

disappeared. He said it guards

his yard from pests and varmints.


Later on, Mommy said Mr Ward

was a hermit. Because he lived in

that converted garage and

didn’t rebuild the house because

he wife had died in the fire.


I told her that when I grew up

I wanted to be a hermit too.

And have a wild garden with snakes

and work nights at Hamm’s

so I could play with my snakes

in the afternoon.


We moved away from Brisbane

a few months later to a brand new

subdivision in  Lucas Valley.

Mr Ward gave us a Century plant,

the kind that can go decades

before itt blooms. Which it did

years later.


And I caught my first

snake there, a huge gopher snake,

long enough to wrap twice around

my waist like a belt. I brought it

to the back door. When Mom

opened the door I said, “You

promised I could keep one.”

And so I did, the first of many.