Flower Man
by Michael Guendelsberger
For L.S. and J.D.
Each summer, the village of Sommerset awarded one street the coveted prize of Most Beautiful Street during the second weekend in July. This was not some simple wreath of flowers awarded to those who lived on that street; the residents got a banner to hang from the main entrance to their street and they got to march in the annual Sommerset Days parade in mid-August. And if that wasn’t enough, anyone who wanted to sell his or her house that following calendar year certainly saw a spike in property value equivalent to twenty-thousand or more. You wanted to live on the Most Beautiful Street in Sommerset and, for this reason, those of us on Washington Avenue hated the residents just one street over. For seven years running, the people of Franklin Place had won.
If I’m being honest, I’d have to say that they did deserve it. The people of Franklin Place took deep pride in their nomination and ultimate acceptance of the annual award—and they did everything they could to earn it. In the fall, you’d see the husbands doing the first of some insane multi-step process that involved bags of colored fertilizers, pressure pump jugs of weed killer, and the latest in battery- and gas-powered lawn tools. When nominations officially started in late May, the wives had mulched and planted the flower beds, all weeds had been eliminated from the seams in their concrete driveways, andfront lawns looked as crisp and tight as a country club fairway. Seven members of the Sommerset Village Council then went up and down the streets, taking notes on clipboards, and nodding in approval at the trimmed trees and manicured lawns. They looked for anything out of place—a broken porch stair, peeling paint or discolored siding, or tree branches hanging too low over the sidewalk.
This is not to say, however, that those of us over on Washington Avenue didn’t do our part. Quite the contrary. We held driveway conferences when the weather started to turn warm and, over beers and cocktails, we discussed our own processes for weed elimination, proper yard maintenance, and tree trimming. We attacked our yards with rakes and gas trimmers and drop spreaders and bagged push mowers. The end result? A fine looking street, if I may say so, with no single blade of grass out of place. Each year we waited. Each year we received the nomination. Each year we lost.
All because of the Flower Man.
We had all kinds of theories about the Flower Man, perhaps developed out of our growing losing streak. If anyone knew his real name, it never came to light. We had all grown accustomed to calling the man in the brick corner house the Flower Man because it fit him in a way that no proper name could. Someone suggested that he had once been a botanist. Others just thought of him as a crazy guy in his mid-50’s who had too much time on his hands. His epithet came simply enough—he had allowed flowers of all kind to take over his yard. As the flowers grew and replaced what had once been grass, we started to see him out in the early morning. He would go from flower to flower, plant to plant, with a magnifying glass in one hand and a pair of tweezers in the other. We guessed at cross-pollination, but none of us knew enough about plants to say one way or the other. We watched the Flower Man from our living rooms or second floor bedrooms, pushing aside the curtains just enough to peek across the street at his creations. He blacked out the windows and we never saw him receive any guests. If he had family, they stayed clear of him. His car—a rust colored Ford from the late 80’s—gradually filled with boxes, bags of soil, pots, and black plastic seedling trays to the point that the driver’s seat became the only empty space in the vehicle. We wondered over our smoky backyard barbeques and craft beer tastings if the house itself had filled the same way. But of course there was no way of knowing. Ted McNeely and his wife Sandy, the Flower Man’s closest neighbors, called the village on him a few times but there was little to be done. It wasn’t that he let his grass grow out of control. The man had no grass—just some jungle of weird flowers he’d created. Every square inch of yard was taken up by his nonsensical experiments.
So it went, year after year. Each June, the Village Council would nominate us and each year we’d lose to those smug yuppies on Franklin Place. The Flower Man didn’t care about it, didn’t care about the award, or the prestige, or our property values. Each year our rage grew greater. We needed that award. We needed the recognition.
We were so close and our suspicions were confirmed when Joan Gruber, who sat on the award council, leaked some information to her friend Brenda Shoemaker. “It’s that place on the corner,” Joan apparently said over lunch one afternoon at the Good Day Café. “If you could just get him off your street and get someone in that house who cared, you’d win it hands down. The rest of Washington Avenue is just so beautiful, darling, and you’ve got that one house there sticking out like a piece of spinach in your teeth. I tell you, Brenda, it’s almost offensive.”
Brenda passed this information on to her neighbors and it gradually trickled through the other thirteen houses on our block of Washington Avenue. No one told the Flower Man because what good would it do? He obviously didn’t care. That lawn had been his mother’s pride and joy. We’d see that old woman out in the springtime in overalls and a big floppy hat, plucking weeds from her rose bushes and watering down the flower beds every night at dusk. No one knew why he came back to live with her. She allotted him a small raised garden bed at the side of the house, where he first started his experiments. Over the next couple years, they started to creep out to other parts of the yard, gradually taking valuable territory from her black-eyed Susans, gernaniums, and Virginia bluebells. We witnessed some strange, silent battle between the two of them, fought with potting soil, trowels, and wooden garden stakes. When she died a few years after his return, there was loose talk that the Flower Man had done away with her so he could conduct his bizarre flower experiments in peace. We had no proof. An ambulance came and took her away one night and that was the end of it.
In late August, as many of us started drop-spreading winterizer, word spread across the street that someone had trashed the Flower Man’s yard. We relayed the information over back fences and front porch cocktails. We took turns taking walks that day that would lead us past the corner house to confirm what we had heard. Nobody seemed to know who had done it but the results had been immediate. Someone had splashed the yard with a sort of weed killer that had turned many of the plants brown nearest the street. Would a store-bought weed killer work so quickly? Or had this been someone’s home brew? By evening, as we lit our grills and gathered with neighbors for Saturday night drinks, hopefulness had started to creep into our voices.
“It’s about time,” we said. “The place is an eyesore.”
Bruce Danielson, who lived alone directly across from the Flower Man, said he hoped whoever had done it would do it again and finish off the rest of the yard. We agreed, though not out loud. We watched to see what the Flower Man did. The next day, he was at it again—clearing away the dead plants. He emerged from the house to plant new flowers in the place of those that had been destroyed. He just wasn’t getting the message. We took turns leaving notes on his door and in his mailbox, urging him to clean up the yard for the sake of his neighbors if not for himself. They had no effect. He continued his experiments with his microscopes and eyedroppers and tweezers.
In late March, a couple of the husbands scouted out the activity over on Franklin Place and, for all intents and purposes, we had the jump on them. Nobody over there, our commando squad reported, had yet recovered from winter. This could be our year, we said. It really could. And we would inevitably, silently turn to the Flower Man’s house. How had he spent his winter?
By the first week of April, no one had yet to see him. In years past, we had seen him making his rounds by mid-March at the earliest. Now, his strange plants and flowers went unattended, their leaves and vines creeping out over the sidewalk making it virtually impossible to even walk past his house. “We’ll never win,” Ted McNeely said to Hank Shoemaker as they sharpened their lawnmower blades one Sunday afternoon. Baseball season had just started and from the radio in Ted’s garage, they could hear the Reds getting solidly trounced by the Chicago Cubs. “It’s all pointless.”
We didn’t share that point of view—and apparently, neither did Ted. He mounted his blade to the lawn mower that evening and the following weekend, the street came alive with lawn mowers. The warm weather had hung around for a few days and all of us felt reasonably sure that it would stay. We dumped charcoal in our grills, turned on the sprinklers, and washed away winter dirt from the cars in our driveways.
Award selection for Most Beautiful Street in Sommerset would happen in a little over three weeks. We started leaving notes again, the language of which gradually got more severe and to the point. Garret Young and his wife even mocked up a note on fake village letterhead. They showed it to us at a cook out the last weekend in April. It looked like an official communication from the Sommerset police department and we applauded their efforts. They posted it on the Flower Man’s door late that night.
By the following weekend, it had fallen unread to the porch. With the deadline approaching, Bruce Danielson said, we couldn’t take any more chances. The Flower Man had been warned, we had told him numerous times to clean up his yard and he’d done nothing about it. You couldn’t walk past the house even if you wanted to. His Ford had a flat tire on the passenger side that he refused to fix. Bruce fired up his Briggs and Stratton on a Saturday night, ran it across the street, and plowed through the Flower Man’s experiments, mowing them all to the ground. We watched him from our front porches as he made laps around the yard, back and forth, cutting down everything in his path. We grinned and silently cheered him on. We knew that the Flower Man would come out and sure he’d be pissed but enough was enough. We would win this year.
Bruce finished the mowing and pushed his mower back across the street to his house. We waited. “It’s a funny thing,” Bruce said. “I didn’t even see a curtain move. I thought for sure he’d come out.”
We looked at the destruction in the Flower Man’s yard. Bruce had done an admirable job cutting down the mess over there and we saw potential in the destruction. If we could get it in shape before the Village Council came, we’d be strong competition for the award. There was no formal conversation about this—it just happened organically. We raked the dead flowers and plants into trash bags. Someone brought over an edger and cut a beautiful, deep line between the sidewalk and yard. Now exposed to sunlight, the grass started to grow again into a lush green carpet.
Somewhere along the way, someone noticed the smell.
We tried to ignore it at first, dismissing it as some animal that had gotten caught under the porch and died. As we crept further into May, it got stronger. Somebody suggested looking in the house. Bruce, Ted, and Garret volunteered to do it. They came back out clutching their shirts to their faces. Bruce doubled over and threw up over the porch. Ted looked over at all of us and shook his head, his face a mixture of disgust and horror. Garret was the only one of them to speak and he said someone should call the paramedics. Brenda Shoemaker ran into her house to do it and the ambulance came screaming down the street less than ten minutes later. We watched as they took the Flower Man out on a stretcher but we saw nothing of him; the paramedics had covered him with a sheet.
About a week after his death, someone came down from the health department in a white van. Brenda Shoemaker knew someone who knew her and she managed to talk her way into the house. The smell, Brenda told us later, had started to dissipate some by then but not completely. Brenda said she held her nose the whole way through her brief tour of the house, preferring to breathe through her mouth instead. “You could hardly walk,” she said, “for all the boxes and clutter everywhere.” She gave us the full report at Bruce Danielson’s porch party that weekend. The Flower Man had stuffed his house full of junk, piling every piece of furniture with newspapers, books, empty food containers black with mold, and discarded clothes. On the second floor, Brenda found what she believed had been his bedroom. The only available space there was taken up by a small cot more suitable for a child than a grown man.
The health services woman would not let her enter the second floor bathroom where Ted, Bruce, and Garret had found him the previous week and that suited Brenda just fine. The stench from the bathroom, even with the door closed, hung in the air like a ghost. Brenda spotted the hardbound notebook near the front door, upon which someone had meticulously lettered the year in gold script. Brenda told us she didn’t know why she picked it up—only that it seemed the only piece in the room not covered in grime or dust. She flipped it open and saw on its first page a list of dates, letter and number combinations, and the Latin names for various plants and flowers. Brenda closed the book, told the woman from health services that she had let the Flower Man borrow the book and would like to have it back. The woman shrugged. It didn’t matter to her.
Brenda brought it to Bruce’s party and we passed it around like a relic. On the second page, the Flower Man had drawn out the layout of his yard, breaking it into a grid, and detailed exactly what had been planted in each square and when that planting occurred. We didn’t know what to make of it and looked to one another for some sensible answers. Eventually, Brenda took the book back to her house and we didn’t see it again.
In the following weeks, we kept up his yard, dug out all the remaining plants and flowers, and re-seeded the lawn. When the Health Department came back and threw open all the windows, Bruce Danielson joked that the Flower Man was still clouding the street: his flowers may be gone, but now his house smelled. When the Village Council made their rounds mid-May we had turned around the Flower Man’s yard. It rivaled some of the nicest on the street, which made sense since all of us had pitched in to clean it up. The Council appeared impressed with our street but we found out two weeks later at the ceremony that Franklin Place had won again. Bruce said it really was the Flower Man’s fault; he had apparently seen one of the council members wrinkle up his nose when the council walked past the house.
Someone came and eventually cleaned out the house. A few big trucks pulled up in front of the house and four or five guys went inside and worked all day. They loaded the trucks, drove away, and didn’t come back. We heard about the Flower Man just once more that summer. A police detective came around to ask if we’d noticed anything suspicious about him or his house that prior winter. Had we seen anyone poking around the house? No, we all said. The Flower Man kept to himself and didn’t have visitors. The detective nodded and wrote this down. He explained that the Flower Man had been dead at least two months before he’d been found and that decomposition had made it particularly difficult to determine a specific cause of death. We told him we were very sorry, we really didn’t know anything. None of us had known the Flower Man. The detective thanked us, put his notebook back in his suit pocket, and drove away.
15 October Cincinnati, OH
“Silence Vanishing into Moonlight” by Bill Wolak