Gradually, very gradually, I got more and more use of my legs, and finally, they were completely straight. I could straighten them all the way out so that the knees locked. My bed was taken out of the fireroom, and I myself was put out by the fence to hold onto the wire and walk around the house and around the house, despite the fact that from hip to heel my legs were nothing but bone loosely covered with dimpled, wrinkled skin, so ugly that nobody short of your God or your mama could have any faith in them.
I did not particularly want to walk around the house holding onto the fence. It was painful and boring and more than a little hopeless, but mama gently encouraged me and would sometimes walk along with me. If she wasn’t with me, Willalee and blind Sam was nosing at my heels out there by the fence. Willalee was as depressed by my legs as I was. My being crippled had changed his life nearly as much as it had changed mine. And Sam was sick in a way he had never been before. The bleeding in his ears was not as bad as it had been, but he had started losing his teeth. Within a month of the time he had lost the first one, nearly all of them were gone. With our loving him as we all did, it was getting very close to the place where it would be unbearable.
One day Willalee’s daddy, Will, came to me out by the fence. I knew right off it was going to be bad when he took my arm and helped me to the porch. Then he sent his boy home while he talked to me.
“Your daddy sent me to talk to you,” he said.
“What about?”
“He woulda come hisself, but he wanted me to do hit. He thought I better do the talking.”
“Do what?” I said, but I already knew. I’d known it was coming and that it wouldn’t be long.
He looked out at the brown, cut-over fields under a lowering fall sky. The stalks had been cut already, cotton stalks and corn stalks and tobacco stalks, and the landscape had that butchered quality peculiar to Bacon County just before winter comes down in earnest.
“I got to take Sam off yonder behind the field,” he finally said.
I didn’t say anything.
“I got to do hit today.” Then after a long pause: “Now.”
“I reckon,” I finally said.
“It ain’t right to leave him like this,” he said. “Sam been too good a dog. Him blind, he won’t even know about hit.”
“I don’t reckon,” I said. I was trying to keep from crying, not because Will was there, but because I felt how useless and silly it was to cry. If you couldn’t cure an animal, you killed it. And nobody ever cured anything of old age. If constant and unrelievable pain was the alternative, death was right. There wasn’t anything to talk about.
I could feel Sam breathing there where he stood in the dust by the porch. I didn’t call his name, and I didn’t look at him.
“All right,” I said.
Will took a short lead rope out of his back pocket and dropped a loop around Sam’s neck. Sam followed him off down the lane, his huge square head down, his wet tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth.
Later, when I was back by the fence, walking, I heard the single shotgun blast in the woods behind the house. That was when I cried.
By late January I was able to walk all the way out to the lot by myself and watch them as they sheared the mules with hand clippers. The mules would grow a thick coat of hair as winter came on to keep them warm. But when the farmers started breaking ground in early February, or as soon as the ground thawed, the mules carried so much hair that they couldn’t stand to work in front of a turnplow all day unless they were clipped.
I never knew any mules that liked to have their hair cut. That busy steel mouth chewing away over their hides brought them to the place of blasted nerves and blasted bowels. The problem was solved by putting on a nose twist, a simple loop of plowline over the mule’s upper lip with a stick through the loop so that it could be twisted tight enough to bring a little blood, not much, but a little blood down from the upper lip, tracing a thin line over the gum and teeth.
When the blood began to show, I began to cry. At first it was only a whimper with a few tears, but before Will, who held the twist, and daddy, who did the clipping, had finished with the third mule, I was nearly in hysterics. It embarrassed me terribly and embarrassed Willalee, too, who was there with me in the corner of the lot, but I could not help it. I do not know whether it was from my long stay in the bed with paralysis or whether it was from the increasing violence in the house at night—the shouting and screaming and sounds of breaking dishes and splintering chairs—brought on by daddy’s bouts with whiskey, but I had been crying more and more as the winter deepened, crying as I had never done before, over anything or nothing. Sometimes when I was right by myself, tears would burst from my eyes.
Daddy tried to get me to go to the house, but I would not, and because I had been so sick for so long, he did not make me get out of the lot, as he might otherwise have done. They put off clipping the fourth, and last, mule until a time when they could do it without me being aware of it. And still I cried. Every time I looked up and saw the three trembling, naked mules, a bloody foam at their mouths, I fell into a louder fit of crying.
Daddy, who had been holding me in his arms, trying to comfort me, finally asked in a desperate voice—for he could not bear my tears—how I would like to go in the wagon with Will to Mr. John Turner’s farm, a place about six miles away. Willalee could go, too. Since I almost never got off the farm, and had not been anywhere since I got sick, not even to church, I snuffled and hiccuped and was finally quiet.
When mama found out about it, she was immediately against it, which threw me instantly back into hysterics, and she relented. We left the farm, Willalee and I, in the bed of the wagon, wrapped up together with just our heads showing, and Will up front on the crossboard, driving the only mule on the place that still had his hair.
Will was on his way to Mr. John Turner’s place to help a horsing mare couple with a jack. Will was known throughout the county as a man successful in such matters, a man who could, with his hands and voice, gentle down jacks and mares and, consequently, keep their breeding from being any bloodier than it had to be.
When we got to Mr. Turner’s lot, Willalee and I climbed up on the top board of the fence and watched the mare loping around the lot, agitated, her wild eyes rolling, her tail lifted, and her jaws working around a light froth that bubbled from her mouth. We did not have to be told that she was horsing, that is to say, that she was ready to receive a male, either a stallion or a jack. From a stallion, Mr. Turner could expect a horse or mare colt in the spring; from a jack—a male donkey—he could expect a mule. In this instance, he was looking for a mule, and the jack was already there, haltered and hitched, waiting outside the lot. The jack was about half as tall as the mare, and no more than a third her weight, but he had already smelled her and his huge ears were pitched forward and his mouth, too, was champing and foaming. He was ready to work.
Will went in the lot and got a loop of plowline around the neck of the charging mare, and then a halter. While she rolled her eyes and grunted and slobbered—all the while pulling Will around the lot, dust swirling at their feet—Will talked to her in a low, unhurried voice. They let the jack in, and without hesitation he galloped across the lot on his stubby, ugly little legs and bit the mare on the rump. She, just as quickly, kicked him twice in the chest. The jack’s eyes shot with blood, and he wheeled and kicked her in the side with both feet. As they pitched and rared and bit and kicked, Will—still talking on in his soft and soothing voice—was working the mare to the hole dug in the middle of the lot. He had to get the mare backed down into the hole or the little jack would never be able to mount.
On the lot fence, I had begun to whimper, not as badly as I had done earlier at the clipping, but tears were beginning to form nonetheless. There was obviously no reason to cry because nobody was doing anything to the animals; they were doing whatever hurt was being done to each other. But still the tears were about to come.
“You know how come it is,” said Willalee, “mules cain’t do it an git little mules like goats do it and git little goats or hogs do it?”
“No,” I said. I knew it was true, but I didn’t know why. I had never thought to wonder.
“Well,” said Willalee, “in the time of Jesus. . . .”
While his daddy got the mare into the hole to receive the jack, Willalee Bookatee told a story he’d got from Auntie about how it was a mule that had carried the beams out of which Jesus’ cross was made and for that reason the mule had forever after been deprived of the joy of coupling with his own kind.
Just as the little jack was driving the mare to her knees with his final, savage thrust, Willalee was saying in his wisest voice: “It also how come mules have to work so hard at the plow, on account of what all they done in olden time. Auntie say so.”
All of us grew up in Bacon County surrounded by sexual couplings of every kind. Nobody ever tried to keep such matters from us. It would have been impossible anyhow. Even though I was only five years old at the time, in some vague, unconscious way I knew that people must do the same thing as animals, more or less, but it had never occurred to me that I might be expected to try it. Therefore, it was a real jolt when my brother sidled up to me one day and said: “It’s time you got yourself a little piece, boy.”
I knew very well what he meant, but I resisted it. “A piece of what?” I said.
He told me.
“Naaawww,” I said.
“Yep,” he said with chilling finality.
I told him I did not know anything about it, nothing at all. He proceeded to tell me all about it, in much greater detail than I wanted to listen to. He told me how it was done and where I was to do it—under the house—and further that I should put the girl on top of an old dishpan that he had already thoughtfully stored under there for me.
“On a damn dishpan?” I said. When I was away from grownups, I had recently begun to see how all the curse words I knew would fit my mouth.
“Ain’t nothing bettern a dishpan,” he said. “Put her up on that dishpan when you lay’er down and it’ll turn that thing up to you like a fried egg.”
I didn’t know why I wanted it turned up like a fried egg, but Hoyet said I would see how it all worked once I got started. More than that, I didn’t really want to do it because I couldn’t see any sense in it, but my brother clinched it for me when he said: “It always comes a time in a man’s life when he’s got to do it. Purvis says it’s sure as death.” Purvis was a boy who worked for one of our uncles, but he was already old enough to come home drunk and bloody at daylight, for which we greatly admired him. If it was good enough for Purvis, it was good enough for me. Lottie Mae was the girl.
It was cold enough to crack your eyeballs, and Lottie Mae and I were bundled up in clothing. But I worked at her shivering, buttoned-up little body as best I could and finally got her out of her clothes there where I had her under the house that sat up about two and a half feet on blocks made out of brick. We were trembling, both us naked as babies, as I struggled to get her up on the dishpan. To get her square-legged, homemade drawers off I had to promise she could play with me and Willalee in the catalogue.
She didn’t know any more about it than I did, and at first she thought I wanted to see her pee. When she did begin to see what I had in mind, she thought I was crazy.
“It ain’t no way to do that,” she said. “Ain’t gone do. Try if you wants to, but I knows it won’t do.”
I carefully explained to her what my brother said we should do, and while I talked, I watched her eyes grow rounder and rounder and her mouth go slack, and even though she shook her head the whole time I was saying it, she did not balk at the dishpan and I finally had her on it, both of us full of chill bumps from the cold. Just as I was about to mount, to do God knows what, because in the wind I was rapidly forgetting my brother’s instructions, I heard something behind me, and when I looked over my shoulder, I saw mama’s stout legs, those knees flexed and ready.
“Come out from under there, youngun,” mama said. And I did. I came out quickly, head already contritely down heading for the place where she would catch and hold me while she violently shredded a peach tree switch over my upturned bottom, stung by the cold, cheeks red already.
Never a word about my crippled legs and never a word about the months in bed, so recent I still had small sores the size of fever blisters on my back. It was the first whipping I’d had since I got sick, and I knew that I was well and whole again.