Gardens and Guns
Last Saturday I built a small tool shed in the community garden near me.
Two nights later someone was murdered there.
It was an act of simple brutality. Four bullets fired in rapid succession around 10:45 on a monday night, less than two blocks from our home. I was oblivious, but my wife heard the sound of the gunshots echoing off the brick row-house walls of our street. Shortly afterwards there was the insistent sound of a police helicopter circling the neighborhood for 20-25 minutes.
Gunshots and police helicopters are no strangers to our part of town. Baltimore is a compact city, and though every neighborhood is distinct we are all knitted closely together.
The next morning when I walked my dog through the garden the wood-chips covering the floor of the shed were soaked in blood and scattered with discarded bandage wrappers and other EMT debris from the resuscitation efforts.
Details surfaced through discussion with neighbors:
We’re five minutes from a major hospital and five blocks from a fire station, but it took the EMTs 45 minutes to arrive
They resuscitated him long enough to get him to to the hospital but he didn’t live much longer than that.
He wasn’t from this part of the city but he had two children with a young woman in our neighborhood. One of the kids is less than a year old. The other is my son’s age.
Some will interpret all of this as confirmation that Baltimore is a murder-stricken post-apocalyptic wasteland, but really it’s just a young man, dead in a garden on the edge of a really lovely working-class neighborhood. A person who made enough bad choices to get himself assassinated in a cedar shed next to the berry bushes and the oregano.
Is it worth it to ruminate on the obvious irony of a murder happening in a garden? I don’t know. There’s a bloodstain and a bullet scar on one of the shingles and I can’t replace it without dismantling the entire side of the shed because the shingles are blind-nailed, overlapping each other the whole way up. Everything relies on what came before, and everything lays the foundation for what comes after.