Grandpa’s Mules on Main Street

The Fourth of July

The Fourth came up clear and sunny, already warm at seven in the morning. I was in the barn lot at six with the sun just over the trees, brushing out Pet and Kate until they shone like two old brown saddles.

Tasha had bought me a new red T-shirt for the day, and I wore my good ball cap. The boys wore their church shirts, which they complained about, and blue jeans, which they did not.

We loaded the mules in the trailer and Linus pulled the wagon to town behind his truck. Arlo had us lining up in the school parking lot at eight. The parade went off at nine.

I went to the home at seven to get Grandpa.

Ileta, the aide on his hall, had been there since six. She had taken his blue work shirt home with her the afternoon before and pressed it on her own ironing board, with starch, the way her mother used to do it.

When I came in, she was clipping his suspenders onto his trousers for him, because his fingers could not work the clips anymore. She was talking to him the whole time, low, the way you talk to someone you love.

“There,” she said. “Now you look like Elzie Sams.”

He picked up his straw hat off the dresser and put it on. Then he stood up on his walker and looked at himself in the mirror on the back of the door for a long time.

“Garrett,” he said, not turning around. “Will they know me? The girls. It’s been since October.”

“They’ll know you, Grandpa.”

He nodded. He did not look sure.

Ileta hugged him at the door and told him she would be on the lawn with everybody else. Then she went back into the hall pretty fast, and I heard her blow her nose.

Kate

I drove him to the school parking lot in my truck, slow, on those bad front tires. He watched the town go by out the window. Flags on every light pole on Main Street. Bunting on the bank.

When we pulled in, the parking lot was full of fire trucks and tractors and the high school band and the little league teams and the church float with the hay bales on it. Linus had the mules harnessed and hitched to the wagon at the far end.

I got Grandpa out of the truck and onto his walker. It was a long way across that parking lot for a man with a bad hip.

He did it a step at a time. People stopped what they were doing to watch.

When we were about thirty feet from the wagon, Kate turned her head.

She looked at him through her blinders, as much as she could. Her ears went straight up.

Then she let out a sound I had never heard her make, a low, long, rumbling nicker, the sound a mare makes to her foal.

Pet heard it and turned her head too. And then Pet did it too.

Grandpa stopped walking. He stood there on his walker in the parking lot with his straw hat on and his pressed blue shirt and his hands shaking on the grips, and he could not go any farther for a minute.

“Hello, girls,” he said. “Hello, my girls.”

Then he went the rest of the way.

When he got to Kate, he let go of the walker with one hand and put it flat on her neck, right under the collar, and leaned his weight against her. She stood there like a stone.

He did not say anything. He just stood there with his hand on her neck and his eyes closed. Linus turned around and walked off to check something on the wagon that did not need checking.

My oldest came and stood next to me. He did not say anything either. He just put his hand on my back. He has never done that before or since.