Grandpa’s Mules on Main Street

Bringing Them Home

My neighbor Linus helped me load. He is seventy-six and he has hauled more livestock than I ever will. He backed my stock trailer up to Grandpa’s barn lot like he was parking a bicycle.

Pet walked right on. Kate stopped at the bottom of the trailer and planted her front feet, the way mules do when they have decided something. Linus just stood there with her lead rope, talking low.

“She’s waiting on Elzie,” he said. “She’s looking for him to come out of that barn.”

We stood there in the sun maybe ten minutes. Then Kate sighed, a big long mule sigh, and walked on up into the trailer beside Pet. Linus patted her on the hip and shut the gate.

I made a second trip for the wagon. It is a plain wooden hay wagon on old running gear, a flat bed with sides, and a plank seat up front that Grandpa built himself out of oak.

It had sat under the shed roof since last fall. The wood was gray but sound.

One of the wheel bearings needed grease, and the seat needed a new board on the back, and otherwise it was the same wagon it had always been.

The harness was hanging on the pegs in the barn, just like Royce said.

Two collars, two sets of hames, the breeching, the lines, the bridles with the blinders. Grandpa had oiled every piece of it last fall before he put it away.

I stood in that barn a long time with my hand on Pet’s collar. It smelled like neatsfoot oil and mule sweat and fifty years of Grandpa.

I am not a man who cries easy, but I had to stand there a while.

Linus waited out by the truck. He did not come in. He knew.