Grandpa’s Mules on Main Street

Tuning Up

Pet and Kate had not been in harness since October. Mules do not forget anything, but they do get a little soft and a little opinionated when nobody asks them to work.

So every afternoon after my shift, I harnessed them in my barn lot and drove them on the gravel road out front.

Two miles down to the low water bridge and two miles back. The boys rode on the wagon behind me.

The first day, Kate stopped at every mailbox. Every one. She would walk up to it, stop, and stand there with her ears up like she was waiting on something.

My oldest figured it out before I did. “Grandpa used to get his mail off the wagon,” he said. “He’d stop at the box at the end of his lane every day. She thinks every mailbox is his.”

He was right. So we let her stop at every mailbox for a week. The boys counted them out loud. Fourteen mailboxes between our place and the low water bridge.

By the second week, she only stopped at ours. By the third week, the two of them were walking out together like they had never quit, heads level, tugs tight, ears going back and forth to listen to me.

One of the tugs had a crack in it near the hame.

I took it to the harness shop out on the state highway, an old man who does saddle and harness work in a shop behind his house. He looked at it and nodded.

“That’s Elzie Sams’s harness,” he said. “I made those tugs for him. Nineteen eighty-eight.”

He put a new end on it and would not take a dollar for it. “You tell him Thursa said hello,” he said. “You tell him it held.”

The Idea

It was Tasha’s idea, really. Or maybe it was the boys’. It came out at the supper table, the way most good ideas do in our house.

“The parade,” Tasha said. “The Fourth of July parade. Your grandpa drove those mules in it every year until he was eighty. Why couldn’t he do it one more time?”

“He can’t hardly walk, Tash.”

“He doesn’t have to walk,” she said. “He has to sit. You’ve got a wagon seat. You’ve got a team. You’ve got two boys who will hold his hat for him.”

I thought about it all that night and all the next day at work. I thought about Grandpa sitting in that chair by his window, looking out at Main Street, at the very street the parade comes down every year.

The next afternoon, I drove to the veterans’ hall and found Arlo. He is a retired Marine who has run our town parade for twenty-two years. He was out back stacking folding chairs.

“I want to enter a team and wagon,” I said. “Elzie Sams’s mules. With Elzie on the seat, if the home will let him go.”

Arlo stopped stacking chairs. He looked at me for a long minute.

“Elzie Sams driving his own team down Main Street,” he said. “Son, I’ll put you right behind the color guard.”

Then he told me there was a rule. Any entry with horses or mules has to have somebody walk behind with a shovel and a bucket.

The town council made it after a pony club entry in 2009 that nobody wants to talk about.

When I told the boys, they fought over who got to carry the shovel. They worked it out that one would carry the shovel down Main and the other would carry it back.

Asking the Home

The nursing home director is a woman named Sybil. She is about my age, practical, kind, with reading glasses on a chain around her neck. I went in to see her on a weekday afternoon and told her what I wanted.

“He can sign himself out,” she said. “He’s a resident, not a prisoner, and his mind is better than mine. He has to be back by noon for his pills, and somebody has to sign for him, and he has to have his walker with him.”

“He won’t need the walker on the wagon.”

“He’ll need it getting on and off,” she said. “And he’ll need water. And sunscreen on the back of his neck. And Garrett, I mean this, if he gets too tired, you bring him back. I don’t care if you’re halfway down Main Street.”

“Yes ma’am.”

She smiled then, and took her glasses off. “You know the parade ends right out front here, don’t you? It always has. Our folks sit out on the lawn every year to watch it.”

I knew it. I had known it the minute Tasha said the word parade.

“Does Royce know?” she asked. “He’s the power of attorney. I have to tell him when Elzie leaves the building for more than an hour.”

“Then tell him,” I said. “I’m not hiding anything.”