Employer

Chapter Six

The crane swung it's boom back. Duncan Braeburn shut his eyes for a moment, then steeled himself and opened them. The wrecking ball swung through the air in a graceful arc and smashed through the the framework of the coffee shop on 8th and Pleasant. College students would have to pay more for their coffee, and Mr. Braeburn would have to learn to live without this shop.
All the trendy furniture had been sold, all the equipment sold or destroyed, all the salvageable parts of the building scrapped out and sold or given to Habitat For Humanity.
Braeve Coffee was done.
Gone.
A thing of the past.
Now it was time to move on and learn about fruit trees, berry bushes, and vegetables. And time to buy jeans and possibly work boots.

Two weeks later, there was not a single Braeve Coffee house left.
Mr. Braeburn did not wallow at home and grieve, much as he was tempted. Instead, he visited a few of the razed locations and watched landscapers bring in fertilizer and lay water lines and sprinkler systems.
Fascinating.
He forced himself to take a little interest, asking questions about the nutrients needed to rebuild the soil and the mechanics and necessary volume of water. It wasn't very riveting.
Until a few weeks later, a gangly, homely man who looked much more like a scarecrow made from twine and chewing gum than a human brought in a truckload of young fruit trees.
His truck was easily the sorriest thing that Mr. Braeburn had ever seen. It was a Ford from the seventies, with about half the original paint threatening to peel off. The rest of it already had.
"Hi." said the scarecrow. "I'm Jim MacDomnhall."
He said it the way that Duncan Braeburn had grown up hearing it.
Jim MacDovnall.
Mr. Braeburn smiled for the first time in a depressing couple of weeks. "I'm Duncan Braeburn. Want to walk around and have a look before you start?"
"Thanks." mumbled the scarecrow, and shuffled around the lot, picking up a clod of dirt here and there, sniffing some, crumbling others, and even tasting a bit.
Mr. Braeburn reserved judgment. Some people eat fish eggs, so why not dirt?
"You had landscapers do this, right?" asked the scarecrow.
"Um, yeah. Who else would I have do it?" asked Mr. Braeburn, baffled.
"Well, landscapers usually use cheap topsoil, like what they can get from construction sites, and they use chemical fertilizers, like this stuff in the soil here. It will make everything grow like crazy this year, but it sterilizes the soil and kills all the nutrients that occur naturally. You'll be totally dependent on it in five years because your soil is dead as the moon. To rebuild the soil will take about twice as long as you've had the chemicals on it. And also, the fruits you'll grow from chemically enhanced soil doesn't have much if any nutritional value." the scarecrow was suddenly animated, and Mr. Braeburn could see Jim under the clumsy, gangly façade.
"Ok. What would you do with it?" he asked.
"Put manure on it. Manure and straw, but mostly lots and lots of manure. If you can find an organic farm with cows and chickens and a manure pile that's a few years old, that's the best stuff. Horse manure is pretty good too, but it sometimes has seeds in it so you will get weeds. You have to let the soil set a while, maybe a season, with cardboard or straw over it so that you kill the weeds without poisoning your soil with herbicides."
Mr. Braeburn stared at Jim with dawning horror. "You put what on it?"
Jim MacDómnhall looked at Mr. Braeburn pityingly.
"Manure. Organic waste from herbivorous animals. The natural cycle of things is totally independent of human intervention, you see. Good soil grows plants which feed animals, which leave their waste on it. During winter, the manure and left over greenery decompose, rejuvenating the soil for another healthy year. We humans can only help by boosting Nature's own recipe. We can add more decomposed matter and water, but aside from that, we're mostly better off leaving science labs out of the cycle."
Mr. MacDómnhall was a hippie, then. Or a bohemian. Or maybe an under-appreciated genius.

🌾

Mr. Braeburn's days changed.
Suddenly there were no more office days full of coffee shop paperwork. No more Quality Assurance days full of satisfied customers. No more beautiful shops to admire, coffee to test taste, or baristas to vet.
Instead, Mr. Braeburn purchased a pair of sturdy black denim trousers, (tailor made, at least. One couldn't go from slacks by Napoleon Zhenga to something like Carhartt from off the rack.) a pair of sturdy leather combat style boots and a durable wool coat purchased in Northern Scotland, and began visiting each of his newly cleared gardens.
It was a different world. The workers in this industry raised an eyebrow at any and all cuff links, looked censoriously upon Italian made shoes, scoffed at well made suits, and shook their heads when Mr. Braeburn looked blank when offered power tools or yard tools.
At least they admitted that he had unerringly good taste in arrangement and landscaping.

Mr. Braeburn staggered into his apartment at 8 pm nearly two months after the destruction of his last coffee shop, and woefully looked at his immaculately clean kitchen. Unfortunately, he knew without looking that his refrigerator was in a state of identical unused cleanliness. He was hungry, exhausted, and despite a proudly maintained gym body, he was sore and stiff from actual physical labor. Who knew that manually planting fruit trees and building a 'tasteful stone barrier' could find so many unused muscles?
"A pox on thee, wicked Jim MacDómnhall!" he muttered. Dinner surely was not worth the effort, so he walked into his bedroom and began tossing his dirty clothes on the floor. (They were actually dirty. Like dirt ground into the knees and grime on the sleeves from dust and sweat. It was disgusting.) He caught a look of himself in the mirror, and started.
"What are you looking at, Mr. Braeburn?"
"Goodness, gracious me. Duncan Óg, you are looking rather like a gym advertisement. I can't decide if it looks good, or if I miss that sleek gentleman-of-leisure look."
"Mm, hm. Mr. Braeburn, perhaps you should start wearing tight tank tops and swaggering."
"The horror! I may never be rid of that ghastly mental image! I need to bleach my brain!"
"I think, with all jocularity aside, that you should go to bed."
"Duncan Óg, you are a wise, wise man."

The next day, Mr. Braeburn slept in until 7, which was luxuriously late for him, and began to rifle his wardrobe. He had planned to visit the HTD club, but to his dismay, his shirts were tight across his shoulders, and his breeches were half an inch too big at the waist.
"Oh, curse it!" he grumbled. It was embarrassing. A man in his respectable thirties should not, not, look like a... a twenty five year old ex-con, or worse, a body builder.
He looked again and found a pair of breeches that he had set aside about ten years ago when they had become to small. He hated to throw them away because they were impala skin and made by an exclusive tailor in Paris who was so sought after that he rarely made anything for anyone who wasn't royalty.
They fit just right again.
But his shirts! They were too tight, and he had never been so broad across the shoulders before. Woefully, he searched through his shirts, and finally settled on a riding shirt that had some stretchy material at the seams for improved flexibility. It would have to do until he could get a new wardrobe made.