Grandpa’s Mules on Main Street

“They’re dog food, Garrett,” my cousin Royce said, and he laughed while he said it. “Old dog food. Quincy’s coming Saturday with his trailer, and he’s giving me six hundred for the pair.”

We were standing at the barn lot gate on Grandpa’s place, the middle of a June afternoon, with the sun on our necks and the flies working. Pet and Kate stood under the walnut tree swishing their tails at us.

I had come straight from my shift at the feedlot to throw them some hay. I still had my gloves in my back pocket. My two boys were in the truck with the windows down, and they heard every word.

“Dog food?” my oldest said through the window. He was eleven that summer. “Dad, is he selling Pet and Kate for dog food?”

Royce turned around and looked at the truck like he had forgotten anybody was in it. He did not take it back. He just shrugged and said, “That’s what old mules are for, bud. Ask your dad.”

Quincy buys horses by the pound for the killer trucks. Everybody in three counties knows him. He pays about thirty cents a pound, give or take, and he hauls them north to a buyer who loads them for the border.

Two old molly mules at a thousand pounds apiece, give or take, comes out right about where Royce said. Six hundred dollars. That was the whole price of more than twenty years of Grandpa’s life.

“Royce,” I said, “Grandpa asks about them every time I go up there.”

“Then tell him they’re fine,” Royce said. “He’s eighty-eight. He’s not coming back out here, Garrett. You know that and I know that. Somebody in this family has to say it out loud.”

He got in his pickup and drove off. The dust from the lane hung in the air a long time.

Kate walked over to the fence and put her nose on my shoulder, the way she always did, looking for a sugar cube I did not have.

How We Got There

My grandfather is Elzie Sams. He farmed the same two hundred acres of south-central Missouri hill ground for sixty-four years, and he farmed a lot of it behind mules.

He had a tractor. He was not a crank about it.

But he said a tractor never once came to the fence to see how he was doing, and he kept a team his whole life. Pet and Kate were the last team, and the best ones.

He broke Pet himself when she was two. Kate came a couple of years later, from an old man down by the river who was quitting.

By the time I was in high school, the two of them worked together like one animal with eight legs.

Grandpa used them to skid firewood out of the hollow, to pull the garden plow, and to haul hay on the old wagon when the ground was too wet for the tractor. In the fall, he drove them to the church picnic and gave rides to every kid in the county.

In May, he fell in the kitchen. He was on the floor most of a morning before the mail carrier saw his back door standing open and came in to check.

It was his hip, and his heart was not good besides.

The doctor at the hospital told us plain. Grandpa could not live out there alone anymore. He needed somebody with him day and night, and none of us could do it. Tasha and I both work. Royce works. We have kids.