The thought often struck him about what would happen if he ever got laid up in the hospital or simply dropped dead of a heart attack. At fifty-two it could happen. His family was of tough stock-which was one of the reasons the Durkins were awarded the contract in the first place-but the responsibility of weeding Aukowies took its toll. It had aged him well beyond his years. Lester came around later in life than he should’ve. The caretaker position should’ve been passed on to a first-born son a decade earlier. As it was it would be another four years before Lester would turn twenty-one, and until that happened, Jack Durkin would just have to hope that he didn’t suffer any major calamities or get hit by a bus or lightning or any number of other things that could lay him out. If he did, the end of the world would come soon after. He peered up at the sun for a moment, then went into the shed his great grandpa had built, took a canvas sack, a pair of leather gloves and a few gardening instruments from it and went to work.

Weeding the Aukowies was tricky. You had to make sure to keep your fingers away from their little pincers. Given a chance they’d spring to life and cut one off. You also had to be careful how you plucked them from the ground. Kind of feel your way to know which angle to pull at. When you did it right, and Jack Durkin almost always did it right, you’d pull out a thin root-like thing that ran a foot or so. He knew it wasn’t any root, not with the sickly-sweet smell he’d be able to catch a faint whiff of, or the shrill little death scream that he could hear when the air was perfectly still. If you pulled the Aukowie out wrong you’d only break it off at the stem leaving the root-like thing feeding what was left. It would still make a shrill little noise-to Jack Durkin it would sound more like a rage-filled cry than anything else, and next time it came up the stem would be tougher, thicker, and you’d better be all the more careful pulling the damn thing from the ground ’cause you wouldn’t get another chance after that.