Grandpa’s Mules on Main Street

Up on the Seat

Getting an eighty-eight-year-old man with a bad hip up onto a wagon seat is a job. We had thought about it. Linus and I had stacked three square hay bales next to the front wheel like steps.

Grandpa went up them one at a time with Linus behind him and me in front, both of us holding him by the belt and the arm. On the last one, he stopped and caught his breath.

“I used to jump up here,” he said. “One foot on the hub.”

“I remember, Grandpa.”

He got on the seat. I climbed up beside him and handed him a bottle of water and put the sunscreen on the back of his neck like Sybil said. He let me. He did not even complain about it.

Tasha came up and kissed him on the cheek. The boys took the shovel and the bucket and got in place behind the wagon, arguing quietly about who was going first.

I picked up the lines.

At nine o’clock, the fire siren went off and the color guard started out of the parking lot, and Arlo waved at us, and I spoke to the mules, and the wagon rolled.

Main Street

Our Main Street is four blocks long. It starts at the school and runs past the brick storefronts, the hardware store, the bank, the café, the old theater that shows movies on Friday nights, the churches, and ends at the nursing home on the east end.

It was full that morning. People on both curbs, on lawn chairs, on the tailgates of pickups pulled in on the side streets.

Kids with little flags. Old men in their veteran caps. It was sunny and bright and the flags were snapping on every pole.

We came out of the school lot behind the color guard, Pet and Kate stepping out together, heads level, the wagon rolling smooth on its new-greased bearings. Grandpa sat up straight on the seat with his hands in his lap.

The first block, people clapped the way they clap for everything in a parade. Polite. Happy. The way you clap for the fire truck and the band.

Then somebody on the curb said his name.

“That’s Elzie Sams.”

And then somebody else said it. And then it went down the street in front of us like wind going through wheat. I could hear it. Elzie. Elzie Sams. Those are his mules. That’s Elzie on the wagon.

And people started standing up.

Not all at once. One here, one there. An old woman got up off her lawn chair. A man got off his tailgate. Then a whole family. Then the whole curb, on both sides of the street.

They did not clap at first. They just stood up.

Old men took their caps off, or touched the brims, the way men did when a hearse went by when I was a boy, except nobody was dead. A farmer I knew from the sale barn put his hand over his heart.

Treva was on the curb in front of the feed store with her whole family, standing. Thursa from the harness shop was there, an old man with a cane, standing. He raised it at us.

Grandpa saw all of it. He did not wave. He just looked at them, one face at a time, all the way down the street. Some of those faces he had known for eighty years.

“Garrett,” he said, real quiet. “I didn’t know anybody remembered.”

“They remembered, Grandpa.”

He started humming then. Real low, under the noise of the street. It took me a block to place it.

It was the old hymn they sing at our church at every funeral and every baptism. Shall we gather at the river.

He hummed it all the way through the second block.