In the middle of summer, five months after we moved to Jacksonville, mama announced that we were moving back to the farm. She had managed to put a down payment on a little place about a quarter of a mile from where we used to live. It was not at all like the Williams place. The house was unpainted; the mule stable and corncrib were badly slanted. There was no tobacco barn because the place had no tobacco allotment. Many nights I got myself to sleep by seeing how many stars I could count through the shingles of the roof, and when things were slow during the day, I would fish for chickens. But I had to be careful that mama didn’t find me with a fishhook tied to a piece of tobacco string and baited with a kernel of corn hanging through a crack in the floor down to where the chickens scratched under the house.
The farm was a little less than thirty acres in cultivation, and so we only had one mule, whose teeth showed him to be probably over twenty, which meant he was on the downhill side of his life. A mule man can always tell within a year or two how old a mule is. And if a mule is young enough, he can tell his age within a few months.
A mule has a full set of teeth when he’s born. But when he is two years old, he sheds two of the teeth right in the front. A good mule man can tell if he’s shed those two front teeth, in which case he is between two and three years old. A really good man can tell if those teeth have just grown back in or if they’ve been back in the mule’s mouth for several months. The next year, when he’s three, the mule sheds two more teeth, one on each side of the two he shed the year before. From then on the mule sheds two teeth a year until he’s five years old. That’s the last time he sheds.
Then you have to go to the cups to tell his age. Mules and horses have little trenches, called cups, in the top of each tooth. Eating corn and picking up sand when they graze on grass wear down those cups. Each year they become shallower, and by the time he’s ten he becomes what farmers call smooth-mouthed. When the cups are entirely gone, the mule starts to get a noticeable overbite—buck-toothed. From the age of ten until the animal dies, it becomes progressively harder to get his age with much certainty. Unless you happen to be a real mule man. If you are, you can check the angle of inclination of the teeth and get his age within a year or two. About the time the mule is thirteen or fourteen, he has become about as buck-toothed as he’s going to get. Then instead of looking in the mule’s mouth, you get behind him, squat down so you have a low-angle vision of his legs and haunches, and have somebody lead him away from you so you can see how he tracks. The mule man wants to see how he walks. Does he favor a leg? Do his hindquarters “drag,” that is, seem to be pulled along rather than offer the driving power they should have? Does anything on the animal seem to be sore, particularly his back?
After the first ten years, the rest of it depends upon the mule man’s eye and his experience. Usually the mule traders who judge the age of very old mules are themselves very old men. They sometimes make bad mistakes, because some old mules will look very young, having a high sheen on their coats, smooth, tight-muscled bodies, and a spirit in their hearts that kept their heads high, kept them fast walkers and mean. An old mule usually will not kick you and he will not bite you. But there are exceptions, and it was on these exceptions that the best of traders sometimes got cheated.
But that wasn’t the only way to get cheated. There were men—a few—who specialized in reconditioning a mule’s mouth. And as is always the case, there was one man who was better at it than anybody else in the county. All the other men charged about $1 a head to work on a mule’s mouth. But the man who was the recognized expert at it charged $5, and he was worth it. Nobody looked down upon these men for what they did. They had a special and perfected craft, and they exercised it for anybody willing to pay the freight.
What the mouth doctors did was to put the cups back into the teeth with an electric drill that had a bit about the size of a match stick. They just put a twist on the upper lip of the mule so he would stand still and then drilled a little trench in the top of each tooth. When that was done, they stained the trench so that it looked as it would if it were the original. All the mouth doctors had a special stain, and they would die and go to hell before divulging how it was made. It was common knowledge that the base of these stains came from green walnuts, but whatever the ultimate ingredients, the best stains could not be taken, not even with sandpaper. An old mule that’s been recapped is allowed to stand in the lot for a week or two before he’s taken to market. Any mule, no matter how old he is, that is not worked for a couple of weeks gets as frisky as a colt, his ears are always up, and he farts a lot. It is an act of faith in Bacon County that “a farting mule is a good mule.” Such a mule will kick you, too. If it’s all done right, it takes a good man not to get beaten in a trade for a mule whose mouth has been worked on by somebody who knows what he’s doing.
We had no such trouble with the mule we bought when we got back to Bacon County. Every physical attitude, every aspect of the way he moved showed he had done his time between the trace chains and then some. He’d even gone gray in the head. As young as I was, I was glad Pete—that was his name—didn’t know he’d been sold to us for $20.
Pete, with that old gray head and a mouth full of ground-down and bucked teeth, had also been cupped, which shamed Mr. Willis as much as if somebody had spit in his face. Mr. Willis was the hired man mama had got to come and live with us to tend the farm. He must have been fifty, but with his body still ropy with muscle, carrying almost no fat, so reticent that he rarely spoke unless spoken to, and never in a hurry. The house could have been burning down and he would have moved as slow as grass growing. Mama would sometimes say something to him about working a little faster, and he would stop completely, turn to her, and say in his grave, considered voice: “Mizz Crews, I ain’t made of iron nor steel nor run by lectricity,” then he would methodically resume whatever he was doing in his same slow way.
He’d been a hired hand all his life, but he was formal to the point of being courtly. I don’t even remember his first name; everybody called him Mr. Willis. He was a man whose schedule was as regular as the ticking of a clock. The first thing he did in the morning was take his hat off the bedpost and put it on his head; the last thing he did at night was to take it off and put it back on the post. If you wanted to see him without his hat, you had to catch him asleep. Which nobody ever did because he got up with the chickens.
He slept with a tiny piece of tobacco in his mouth, about the size of a pencil eraser. After he got his hat on, he took out the chew he’d slept with, which he said with utter conviction kept a man’s stomach free from worms, and replaced it with a half a plug of Day’s Work, keeping it in his mouth all day except for meals. Sometimes, apparently forgetting to take it out, he would eat with the tobacco bulging like a tumor in his right jaw.
He was also—I think—the cleanest man I ever knew. I say I think he was the cleanest man I ever knew because like everything else he did, he made his toilet in absolute privacy. After his hat was on his head, he filled a syrup bucket full of water from the well, went off through the field to a little head of woods about a quarter of a mile away, carrying with him rags torn from worn-out bed sheets stuffed in his pockets. He would stay down there for an hour and come back carrying an empty bucket and no rags. My brother and I went back to where he washed and there were white rags hanging everywhere, from limbs of trees, from bushes, carefully spread out to dry. Several cakes of homemade lye soap would be wedged in the crooks of trees and wrapped in the rags be washed in. Eventually a quarter acre of woods was decorated with white, various-shaped rags. And yet every morning he would carry another pocket of rags with him. When he came to breakfast, his skin was red and scrubbed to glowing. In the year he farmed with us, I never remember him saying anything at breakfast. It was not in his schedule. He ate slowly, chewing slowly and with the precision of a metronome. He never drank anything while he was eating, but the moment his jaws stopped he lifted the quart of iced tea he insisted upon for every meal and drank it down slowly, without stopping. We always stopped to watch him do it, his throat pumping impossibly until it was all gone. Then he would abruptly set the jar down and leave the table to go to the lot to put the gear on Pete.
Later we would see him and Pete in the field. Mama, looking at him through the window, would say: “Damn, if you wouldn’t have to set a peg out there to see if he’s moving.”
Pete would stop about every seventy yards, and Mr. Willis would stop with him, standing quietly between the handles of the plow until Pete would start up again in about five minutes. We had bought Pete from an eighty-year-old farmer, and Pete had learned to stop about every seventy yards so the old man could rest two or three minutes before going on. Pete had been doing it for twenty years or more, and Mr. Willis saw no reason to change Pete’s ways.
Mama, short on patience as usual, suggested that Mr. Willis take a strap to Pete when he stopped for the rest periods. Mr. Willis thought about it for a minute and finally said: “Mizz Crews, Pete’s as old as I am, turned as many rows as I have, and I ain’t got it in me to beat this old man.” Mr. Willis clucked and Pete leaned into his collar and the two of them moved off down the row at the same ambling gait for another seventy yards.
But all mules, young and old, had their ways. You got to know them like people, what they liked and what they didn’t, what they would put up with and what they wouldn’t. And you remembered them like people, just as vividly.
The most intense love affair I’ve ever known was between two mules we owned the year I finally left the farm for good. Doc, a big iron-gray horse mule, and Otha, a little red mare mule about 300 pounds lighter than Doc, were matched mules. They had been broken together, trained to move in their harness with precision and smoothness.
Matched mules are nearly always the same weight because if they are not and they are asked to pull something really heavy, the bigger mule lunges into his harness, bellying down behind his collar, and simply snatches the smaller mule back against the doubletree, an iron bar to which their trace chains are ultimately fastened, and, in effect, this loses all the pulling power of the lighter mule. It becomes a seesaw, with one mule lunging and then the other. The bigger mule isn’t pulling with but against the one he’s in double harness with.
Not so with Doc and Otha. Doc waited. He compensated. The two of them would, slow as breathing, tighten their traces together, leaning into their collars. When I’ve seen Doc turn—even in the middle of the worst kind of pull—and look at his fine little mare mule beside him giving all she had to give, I knew he was thinking how best to help her, how best to take whatever part of the load he could off her. I always knew he thought about her a lot. Thought. A deliberate word. I can’t prove it’s true, but then most of what I believe I can’t prove.
We always had to take both Doc and Otha to the field even if we planned to work only one of them. We had to hitch the one not being worked so that they would never be out of sight of one another. If we took one out of the lot without the other, or for any reason made it so they could not see each other, they would literally rip themselves apart in an effort to get back together: knock down fences, go through barbed wire, cut their heads and chests slamming through stables.
I’ve never doubted the love between Doc and Otha. As everybody knows, mules are hybrids and cannot breed. Who, but a fool, though, would maintain that breeding is an indispensable part of love? Doc and Otha were the same age, both five-year-olds. One of them had to die first. I’ve always been grateful I was not there to see the one that was left.
I was unfortunate enough to see Pete almost die. We’d cut a lot of green grass and put it in the corncrib to dry. Somehow the door to the crib was left open, and Pete got in there with all that corn and green grass and just about ate himself to death as old mules will sometimes do. Mr. Willis came to the house and told mama she had better come out to the crib and see Pete.
“What ails’m?” she asked.
“Swol up,” he said.
“Swol up?”
“That old man’s foundered?”
“Mr. Willis, for God’s sake, spit it out. What is it you trying to say?”
What he was trying to say was that Pete was hideously swollen in the belly and legs and that he would very probably die, being as old as he was.
“Them old fellers cain’t take it much. He was younger, he’d have a better chance.”
“What are we gone do?” mama said.
“Best we can, I reckon,” he said.
Mr. Willis’ best was good enough as it turned out. I went with him down to the creek, walking very slowly, leading Pete, who waddled like a duck. Even Pete’s face seemed swollen from eating all night. And he insisted on stopping every seventy yards or so to rest awhile even though he wasn’t pulling anything.
Mr. Willis took Pete out belly deep in cool running water and hitched him there. “We’ll just let that old man stand there in that water a few hours and see don’t that help him some.”
Pete stood in the water until sundown, and when Mr. Willis took him out of the water, he didn’t look much different from the way he did when we put him in.
“Didn’t go down much, did he?” said Mr. Willis.
“He don’t look like he went down none,” I said. Mr. Willis had taken out his pocketknife. “What you aim to do with that knife?” I asked.
“I’m gone bore some holes in’m and let that swelling out.”
“You better ask mama before you go boring holes in the mule,” I said.
His saying he was going to bore holes to let the swelling out scared me. I had an immediate vision of Mr. Willis up under Pete’s swollen and drum-tight belly boring away with his knife, stabbing great gouty holes through the flesh, and black poisonous fluid pouring down over his head and shoulders as he did so. I was considerably relieved to see him bend to Pete’s hooves.
“What you do is bore some holes down here where the hair meets the hoof.” He grunted while he worked. “Let’m give a little blood.”
“Will he be all right then?”
As was his way, he quit entirely with what he was doing, stood up, and turned to face me. “Well,” he said, after he had considered the question for some time, “he might and he might not.”
He put about five holes in each hoof while Pete, stunned from eating all night and standing in water all day, didn’t even flinch as the blood started trickling over his hooves. Finally, he began to stamp and paw the ground.
“See, that right there smarts,” said Mr. Willis, “and gits’m to stompin his feet. Now, he’ll either die or he’ll git better.”
Pete must have bled two quarts before the wounds closed up. The next morning the swelling had gone down a lot, and in a few days Pete was back in the field working. Pete had all that land to break by himself, and it was a killer. The place had lain fallow for a year, so there were no stalks to cut and rake and burn, but there were weeds: cockleburs and coffee weeds and dog fennel. The fields had to be burned first and then disked with a plow we called a cutaway harrow. Only then could it be turned. But eventually it was done, because although both Pete and Mr. Willis were slow, they were steady.
After Pete was over his sickness from eating too much, I talked to Mr. Willis about the cure, something that had been bothering me.
“Didn’t it hurt Pete to cut his feet that way?” I asked.
“I reckon so,” he said.
“It was a awful thing to have to do to’m.”
Mr. Willis thought about it for a little and said: “No, it weren’t.”
“It weren’t?”
“Not awful as dying,” he said. “Nothing else to do. Things git easy when it’s nothing else to do. I known that when I weren’t no biggern you are, boy.”
When something was necessary, it was done, whether to a mule or to a child or to your own mother did not matter. People in Bacon County never did anything worse to their stock than they were sometimes forced to do to themselves. Mr. Willis was no exception. I never knew him to be sick (despite the fact that he bathed naked in the woods out of a syrup bucket in freezing weather), but he did have very bad teeth, perhaps from sucking on tobacco day and night. His reticence and courtly manner never left him except when the pain from his teeth was on him bad.
He lived in a shedlike little room off the side of the house. The room didn’t have much in it: a ladder-back chair, a kerosene lamp, a piece of broken glass hanging on the wall over a pan of water where he shaved as often as once a week, a slat-board bed, and in one corner a chamber pot, which he carried out every morning himself.
I slept in a room on the other side of the wall from him. One night after winter had come, I was asleep in my red gown Grandma Hazelton had made for me since we’d come back from Jacksonville, and Mr. Willis’ mouth came alive with what had to be an unthinkable pain.
When I heard him kick the slop jar, I knew it was his teeth. I just didn’t know right away how bad it was. When the ladder-back chair splintered, I knew it was a bad hurt even for him. A few times that night I managed to slip off to sleep only to be jarred awake when he would run blindly into the thin wall separating us.
He groaned and cursed, not loudly but steadily, sometimes for what seemed like half an hour. Ordinarily, mama would have fixed a hot poultice for his jaw or at least tried to do something. But she had learned he was a proud man and preferred to suffer by himself, especially if it was his teeth bothering him.
The whole house was kept awake most of the night by his thrashing and groaning, by the wash pan being knocked off the shelf, by his broken shaving mirror being broken again, and by his blind charges into the wall.
What was happening was only necessary. The dentist would not have gotten out of his warm bed for anything less than money. And Mr. Willis didn’t have any money. Besides, the dentist was in town ten miles away, and we didn’t have anything but a wagon and Pete, who, stopping every seventy yards or so to rest, would have taken half a day to get there.
I was huddled under the quilts, shaking with dread, when I heard him kick open the door to his room and thump down the wooden steps in his heavy brogan work shoes, which he had not taken off all night. I couldn’t imagine where he was going, but I knew I wanted to watch whatever was about to happen. The only thing worse than my nerves was my curiosity, which had always been untempered by pity or compassion, a serious character failing in most societies but a sanity-saving virtue in Georgia when I was a child.
I went out the front door barefoot onto the frozen ground. I met Mr. Willis coming around the corner of the house. In the dim light I could see the craziness in his eyes, the same craziness you see in the eyes of a trapped fox. Mr. Willis headed straight for the well, with me behind him, shaking in my thin cotton gown. He took the bucket from the nail on the rack built over the open well and sent it shooting down hard as he could to break the inch of ice that was over the water. As he was drawing the bucket up on the pulley, he seemed to see me for the first time.
“What the hell, boy!” he shouted. “What the hell!”
His voice was as mad as his eyes, and he either would not or could not say anything else. He held the bucket and took a mouthful of the freezing water. He held it a long time, spat it out, and filled his mouth again.
He turned the bucket loose and let it fall again into the well instead of hanging it back on the nail where it belonged. With his cheeks swelling with water he took something out of the back pocket of his overalls. As soon as I saw what he had, I knew beyond all belief and good sense what he meant to do, and suddenly I was no longer cold but stood on the frozen ground in a hot passion waiting to see him do it, to see if he could do it.
He had a piece of croker sack about the size of a half dollar in his left hand and a pair of wire pliers in his right. He spat the water out and reached way back in his rotten mouth and put the piece of sack over a tooth. He braced his feet against the well and stuck the pliers in over the sackcloth. He took the pliers in both hands, and immediately a forked vein leaped in his forehead. The vein in his neck popped big as a pencil. He pulled and twisted and pulled and never made a sound.
It took him a long time, and finally, as he fought with the pliers and with himself, his braced feet slipped so that he was flat on his back when the blood broke from his mouth, followed by the pliers holding a tooth with roots half an inch long. He got slowly to his feet, sweat running on his face, and held the bloody tooth up between us.
He looked at the tooth and said in his old, calm, recognizable voice: “Hurt now, you sumbitch!”
His old teeth never hurt him again like that while he was with us. They hurt him bad enough to make him stomp around and break a few things, but never bad enough again to make him go into his mouth with a pair of pliers. And it was just as well, too, because things were dreadful enough without that. But he never complained as he kept his methodical but incredibly slow pace fixing up the fence to keep the stock out (we didn’t have any to keep in), and putting in a big patch of collards and turnips—a winter garden that doesn’t even taste really good until the first frost has fallen on them—and building a pen for the hundred tiny biddies ordered by mama and brought by the mailman.
After we got the biddies, my grandma came to live with us. She woke up one morning paralyzed in her leg and arm and the cheek of her face, so they hauled her over to us in a pickup truck. Uncle Alton took in grandpa, who had withdrawn more and more into the silence of deafness. He spent his days reading three newspapers and taking little sips of moonshine from a jar on the mantelshelf. Grandma rocked relentlessly, stared into the middle distance a lot, and drained her mouth of snuff into a can beside her chair. But she took what came her way without complaining. Her mind was alert and she liked to talk. We were all glad she was with us except that the house was not big enough to accommodate another child, much less an old crippled lady. She didn’t eat as much as a bird, but we didn’t have enough extra food to feed a bird, not even a small one. Hunger was already in the house when she got there. But we made do.
We were already beginning to go out to the pen Mr. Willis built and stare at the biddies. They were then about as big as good-sized sparrows. Each day we tried to calculate how much longer it would be before we could fry up some.
“We could do six, even ten,” my brother said.
“Not now,” mama said.
“They big as dove, some of’m,” I said.
“But they ain’t dove,” she said. “They biddies.”
“I reckon,” said Mr. Willis. “Howsomever, I have seen’m split down the middle and cooked in two pieces.”
It was late afternoon and we were standing in the backyard. Even Grandma Hazelton. She carried her paralyzed hand in a sling from her neck and leaned heavily on a walking stick she held in her good hand. If she took her time, she got around pretty well in a kind of sliding, sidewise shuffle, dragging her bad leg. She had been helped down the steps when she came out with us to look at the biddies.
Just as we were about to go back in, a red-tailed chicken hawk glided low and fast over where we stood, taking a good look for himself into the pen.
“We gone have to git that hawk,” she said. “Don’t won’t none of us be eating them biddies.” She looked at me and winked her good eye. “You and me’ll fix that gentleman tomorrow.”
Mr. Willis said: “I don’t believe it’s a gun on the place.”
“Won’t need one,” said Grandma Hazelton, turning to begin the long, slow shuffle back to her rocking chair.
She woke me up early the next morning. “We better git on out there an fix breakfast for that hawk,” she said.
I got out of bed and, still wearing my gown, let her shuffle on down the hall to the backyard. She allowed me to help her down the three wooden steps, that being the only help she would accept. We went on back to the pen and stood looking in.
Chickens, as everybody knows, are cannibals. Let a biddy get a spot of blood on it from a scrape or a raw place and the other biddies will simply eat it alive.
“Git me that one out,” she said, pointing. “The one bout half eat up.”
I brought it to her. It was scabby, practically featherless, with one wing nearly pecked away. She took it into her old soft, liver-colored hands and stroked its head gently with her thumb until it settled down. Then she opened one of her snuff cans, and I saw it was a quarter full of arsenic. Calmly and with great care, she covered the biddy’s head and raw neck, making sure none of the poison got in its eyes.
She handed it to me. “Put it out yonder by the fence. If it don’t stay there, we’ll have to tie it down with a string the hawk can break.”
The biddy stayed where I put it though; it had been too brutalized by the other biddies in the pen to have much inclination to move around. And it wasn’t long—still early morning—before the hawk came in low over the fence, its red tail fanned, talons stretched, and nailed the poisoned biddy where it squatted in the dust. The biddy never made a sound as it was carried away. My gentle crippled grandma watched it all with satisfaction. The hawk lit in a tree in a head of woods, and I could plainly see him tearing at the biddy on the limb.
I loved the old lady for all things she showed me and told me, but the time came when she got in the way of what I wanted to do, and I showed my true, little-boy colors. Mama had to go to Waycross, which was an overnight trip. Mr. Willis took the opportunity to visit some of his own connections over in Jeff Davis County. That left my brother and me to look after grandma and take care of things on the place. Mama cooked us some food and left it in the safe, and then caught a ride to town, where she could get the bus for Waycross. She told us to clean up after we ate—wash the dishes, put the food back in the stove—and, above all, not to leave the spoon in the gravy.
“You leave that spoon in the gravy and it’ll be ruint sure. Taste just like tin.”
She caught her ride, and everything went fine that first day until about sundown, when Ray came over on the mule. Ray was a friend of my brother’s who lived on the next farm. He was going down the creek for some catfish and wanted us to come with him. My brother was all for it, and of course, I was too. But that left a problem. Grandma. I told her she’d be all right. She said she wouldn’t.
“I’m scared,” she said. “Don’t leave me here all by myself.”
“You’ll have to stay,” my brother said to me.
Who else? I was the youngest, and if anybody was going to stay home and do something dull and boring like look after an old crippled lady, it would have to be me.
“I don’t want to,” I said.
“She’s scared,” he said.
“Tell’m you ain’t scared,” I said. “If you don’t, they gone make me stay.”
“I’m scared,” she said. They made me stay.
They made me stay, but as soon as they were gone, I started closing up the house, every door, every window.
“What you doing, son?”
I’d gone into a little room where she was lying down and where my own narrow bed was jammed into one corner. It was just getting on toward dark on one of those occasionally steaming days Bacon County sometimes has in late September just before it begins to cool into fall.
“I locked up everything,” I said. “It’s so many bad things out there in the dark, you cain’t tell what’s apt to come in here and git us.”
Her old washed blue eyes watched me steadily in the light from a kerosene lamp I’d lighted on the little table beside her bed. She smiled uncertainly. “Ah, son,” she said.
The room was tight and hot and smelled of dust. The liver spots grew almost black in her ivory skin, and sweat started on her thin blue temples.
“Please, son, please, a little air,” she said. “Cain’t we open one winder?”
“I think we better keep them winders closed,” I said, “so we won’t be scared.”
I kept the dear old lady sweating, locked there in that steaming room, until my brother came back about four hours later. He immediately wanted to know what was going on. I told him. He, always being much more gentle-natured and decent than I, was not sympathetic.
“Boy, you gone git you tail beat bad when mama gits home.”
I had already known that when I started shutting the house up. We both assumed grandma would tell on me, and maybe she would have if things had been different.
When mama got home the next day and went back to the kitchen, the first thing she saw was that gravy bowl. It had a spoon in it. My brother and I had followed her back to the kitchen, and we saw the spoon the same time she saw it. Both of us kind of hunkered down, shriveled where we stood. Grandma was in her chair between the back door and the wood stove and saw it all.
Mama turned slowly from the safe, her eyes blazing, and said in a calm, flat, terrible voice: “You the two sorriest boys that ever shit out of the gills of an asshole.”
The skin over my heart went cold, and I could already feel the viselike knees gripping my head. But it was not to happen.
“These boys been just as good as they could,” grandma said. “They taken precious care of me.” She was looking directly at me where I stood, guilt pouring over me like scalding water. “They both taken precious care of me.”
I went to bed that night a very different boy than I had ever been before. Or at least with a different understanding than I had before. I don’t know how much it affected whatever I’ve done since, but that moment between mama and grandma and me was fixed forever in my head and heart as if nailed there.