Grandpa’s Mules on Main Street

The Lines

We were coming into the last block, the one that runs down to the nursing home, when Grandpa held out his hands.

“Give me the lines, son.”

I looked at his hands. They were shaking, and they were thin, and the knuckles were swollen up from the arthritis. They were the hands that had held those lines for twenty-five years.

“Grandpa, are you sure?”

“Give them to me.”

So I gave them to him. I kept my hands close in case. I did not need to.

He took up the slack the old way, lines between his fingers, thumbs on top. He did not pull.

He did not have to. The mules felt him the instant the lines changed hands. Both sets of ears came back to listen.

“Pet,” he said. “Kate. Walk up, girls.”

And they walked up. They lifted their heads and leaned into their collars and stepped out like it was thirty years ago and they were going to the field. You could feel it in the wagon. You could feel them knowing.

Grandpa sat up even straighter. He was smiling. Not big. Just at the corners. The way he used to smile at the end of a long day in the hay when the last load was in the barn.

I sat there beside him in my red T-shirt with my hands in my lap, and I did not say a word for that whole block. I could not have if I tried.

The Lawn

The nursing home lawn was full.

They had brought out every resident who could be moved. Wheelchairs in a long row along the front sidewalk. Folding chairs behind them.

Nurses and aides in their scrubs standing at the back, and Sybil on the porch with her glasses on her chain.

Ileta was right in front, standing beside a lady in a wheelchair with a little flag in her hand.

When the residents saw who was driving the wagon, they started waving. Old hands, little flags, a man in a wheelchair with a veteran’s cap who saluted.

A lady in a pink housecoat stood up out of her wheelchair, which she was not supposed to do, and two aides grabbed her arms.

Grandpa took one hand off the lines and raised it to them. Just raised it, palm out, the way he would wave to a neighbor from the tractor seat.

They knew him. These were the people who ate supper with him every night, who played dominoes with him in the dayroom, who had watched him sit in his window and look out at Main Street since May.

And then I saw Royce.

He was standing on the curb right in front of the nursing home, at the bottom of the lawn. He was by himself.

He had his arms folded across his chest and he was not clapping, and he was not standing because everybody else was. He was just standing.

Half the people on that curb were looking from him to us and back again. Everybody knew. Treva’s counter had made sure of that.

Royce’s face was red. Not from the sun.