Grandpa’s Mules on Main Street

The Tire Money

My wife Tasha keeps our money in a coffee can in the cabinet over the refrigerator. The bank gets the paychecks and the bills. The coffee can gets the money for things we are saving up for.

That June, the coffee can had six hundred and twenty dollars in it. It was for tires.

The truck needed four new ones, and the front two were showing cords on the inside edge. I had been putting it off since March.

I told Tasha about Royce at the supper table. I told her what he said, and I told her the boys heard it.

She did not say anything for a minute. She just kept cutting the little one’s pork chop into pieces.

Then she got up, got the chair, and climbed up to the cabinet over the refrigerator. She took down the coffee can and counted out six hundred dollars in twenties and fifties onto the kitchen table.

“Tires can wait,” she said.

“Tash, those front tires are bad.”

“Then drive slow,” she said. “Garrett, your grandpa gave me a ride on that wagon at the church picnic the first summer I knew you. He told me I was too pretty for you. He was right, too.”

The boys laughed. I laughed. She put the money in an envelope and wrote “Mules” on the front of it in her handwriting, and she put it in my lunch box so I would not forget it in the morning.

At breakfast the next morning, the little one said the blessing. He asked God to keep Pet and Kate off the truck. Tasha said amen like she meant it.

Paying Royce

I went to Royce’s body shop the next day after my shift. He was in the back with his head under the hood of a car, and he did not come out right away when he saw me.

When he did, he wiped his hands on a red rag and looked at the envelope in my hand. He knew what it was before I said anything.

“I’ll give you the same as Quincy,” I said. “Six hundred. I’ll haul them myself, today.”

He took the envelope and opened it and counted the money twice on the hood of the car. Then he looked at me and shook his head, and he laughed again, the same laugh from the barn lot.

“Your money,” he said. “Your dog food. You’re paying dog food prices for dog food, cousin.”

I did not say a word. I have found that when a man says something like that, the best thing you can do is let it sit there in the air where he can hear it himself.

Royce stopped laughing after a second. He went into his little office and wrote me out a receipt on his shop pad. Received six hundred dollars for two mules, Pet and Kate. Into E. Sams account. He signed it.

“It goes in Grandpa’s account,” he said, not looking at me. “Every dime. I don’t keep any of it. You know that, right? That money pays for about two and a half days of his bed.”

“I know it does,” I said.

“I’m the one looking at those bills, Garrett. Every week. You come up there and you visit and you bring the kids and that’s nice. I’m the one who sits in that office with the woman and figures out how many months he’s got before the farm goes.”

That was the first true thing he had said to me all summer. I did not argue with it. He was carrying something heavy, and he was carrying it alone, and part of that was on me for letting him.

But you can carry something heavy and still be wrong about what you set down.

Calling those mules dog food, in front of my boys, was not a weight he had to carry. That was something he picked up on his own.

“The wagon too,” I said. “And the harness. Is that on your list?”

He waved his hand. “Take the wagon. Nobody at a sale is going to bid on it. The harness is hanging in the barn where he left it. Take all of it.”