Winter Run Page 9

  Bat had gotten stuck in the cattle guard just as the hunt got under way. The result was her spectacular bellow of fury.

  And so at that late date in her long life she became a hero and the subject of tales told in the evening around the potbelly in the store. And much laughter. Who had ever heard of a mule saving a hunt for wild dogs? And Charlie’s eyes would squint as he listened to the tone of the laughter, until he was sure no one was making fun of her.

  That spring she began to fail. Leonard Waits came for her and tried to plow gardens as usual, but she was so slow he got impatient and used Queen, one of his giant workhorse mares. Queen was too big for the job, but what was he to do?

  So Bat spent her days on the edge of the garden patch, with the creek right there for water and shade under the paradise trees. Charlie gave her last year’s hay from the barn and fed her by hand with grass cut with a sickle. At the time of Bat’s death, Charlie’s father was in Philadelphia during the week because he had a job with a company that would be moving to Virginia to get away from labor unions.

  Charlie’s mother, whose people were from Sweden, was tall and had a slender figure. She was what you might call willowy—a cool beauty. She was in her early thirties. She loved to garden, but she didn’t like the animals much. Some of us felt she was too motherly with Charlie. And Charlie, at eleven, was in full rebellion against it.

  The week before Bat died, she took a walk up to the big house. Professor James, who taught law at the university in town and was famous, was preparing a speech he was to give in New York City the next week. The professor had lived among us all his life, and his family from time almost out of mind. We weren’t exactly sure what made him famous, but anyone who went to New York City to give speeches was not your everyday person. Also, when a family was in need, help would come, anonymously, through the post office. The professor would receive a letter of thanks and smile and say it must be a mistake, but it was nice that there were people who would help out in hard times.

  As the professor watched from his study window, the old mule made her way up the lane. He said later that there was no doubt in his mind that she was nearing the end, but that she also seemed so old as to be somehow beyond death—in his fancy phrase, “a fleshly rendering of something mythic.” The professor, who was tall and thin and old and who, some of us felt, bore a gaunt resemblance to Bat himself, was concerned about her that morning. And being unable to find Matthew, he called the Corn House and got Charlie who said he would be right up to get her.

  The two of them stood on the porch watching as Bat, who had stopped her ramble, nibbled some grass on the edge of the lane.

  “Will she die, Professor?”

  “Why, yes,” he replied, “she surely will die, as must we all, Charlie. You know that.”

  “But not soon,” Charlie said. It was a statement.

  “She looks pretty feeble, don’t you think, Charlie?”

  “Yes sir, but why does she have to die now? I don’t want her to die!”

  “She has had a long life and, in terms of the usual mule life, I would have to think a good one. And of course she is a hero. Yes, she can certainly die now without reproach. All things pass in their time. You must remember that Charlie … Now you take her back down the hill. We don’t want her to get too tired out, do we?”

  “No sir, I guess not. It’s just—”

  “You run along with her, Charlie. I’m busy working on my speech.”

  But the professor said later that he had sent Charlie along with Bat because he was afraid the boy was about to cry. After all, he was still only eleven. And the professor wasn’t sure about how to handle tears in an eleven-year-old, having never had any children of his own.

  So back down the hill they went, Charlie leading Bat and talking to her in his strident voice. The professor could hear him all the way back up at the big house. But he couldn’t make out the words.

  • • •

  Charlie was as much a character in the neighborhood as Bat though he looked like any other eleven-year-old of the time. He had a crew cut and was skinny and his nose, inherited from his father, was big. So it was not so much what he looked like as what he did and said that caused his fame. He talked in a voice that was loud and grating and carried far.

  Each June when school let out, the first thing Charlie did was take off his shoes and declare that he was not going to put them back on until September. When Charlie first took this notion, he said he wasn’t going to wear shoes all summer, period. But his mother rose up in arms over that and stated that she was not going to have Charlie seen in church without shoes. It would look as if the Lewis family couldn’t afford to buy shoes for their son. So a compromise was struck, and Charlie was allowed to go barefoot even to town as long as he agreed to wear his shoes to church.

  His other habit had to do with reading. From the time he got to the fourth grade, he would, each summer—as with the shoes—publicly state that it was his intention to unlearn how to read. Not forever, just for the summer. Charlie was so serious about this that he refused to acknowledge he could read the labels on the merchandise in the store when his mother sent him for groceries. When asked about it, he would become shy, as if he himself didn’t know exactly why he did it.

  There was also, of course, the way Charlie was with Bat. It had started when he was a little boy. One day Professor James saw Charlie walk up to Bat in the back pasture. She was standing in front of the old smokehouse, which was no longer used and was beginning to sag—although if the breeze was in your face it would still make your mouth water from all those hundreds of hams and shoulders that had been cured in there. Charlie was holding out some grass for old Bat to eat. There was plenty of grass for her without having to lift her head for a five-year-old. But the old mule raised up her head, cocked it around so she could see the little boy, and gently took the grass from his hand. Her head and ears were almost as tall as the whole boy. When the professor described this encounter, his eyes would go distant. He said it was the sweetest thing he’d ever seen.

  From then on Charlie and Bat were close. She could hear him coming and would turn her head around to see him. Her huge ears would go forward as if she could somehow see through them, too. Bat was a pretty tame mule, but even so, most mules are a little bad about getting caught up from the pasture. But she would wait for Charlie. Then you would hear his grating voice, talking to her in regular language, not the fake baby talk people use to talk with animals. But no one ever quite got what he said because if you came close he would stop, as if embarrassed.

  Charlie also spoke to grown-ups in a grown-up way. There was an urgency to what he said that often outweighed the message. If he wanted to go possum hunting, he would ask Luke Henry, who owned the hounds, when he was going next. Not in the tone of voice of request, but urgently. It wasn’t impatience. It was something more somehow.

  As Charlie grew older and started to school, Bat would sometimes go on a ramble that ended up at the school bus where Charlie got off. Some of us thought it happenstance. But if you heard Charlie say hello to her in that normal language, as he stepped from the bus, you might wonder. And if you saw him trudging in the upper lane with old Bat walking behind him, swinging her long ears in perfect step with the boy, or the two of them outlined in winter light against a leaden December sky, or stopping to look out over the fields side by side, you would know that it was not happenstance that brought them together.

  And so that afternoon Charlie returned Bat to the lot, cut her some fresh grass with the sickle, and went home.

  One week later, when old Bat brayed at dawn, even Gretchen knew something was wrong. It was not Bat’s usual bray. This one began with the bellow and ended with the whistle. The reverse of the usual. And the whistle was long and drawn out and gradually faded away.

  By the time the whistle stopped, Charlie was out of bed and running, in his underpants—no time for clothes, let alone shoes—running across the garden plot with his already tough bare feet a
nd his mind unencumbered by the knowledge of reading, knowing that she was dead.

  But even then in the sudden, slow coil of his mind, he must have begun the shift from life to death, begun to make the connection between the dead doe and the dead dogs—and old Bat. And he must have heard again the professor’s words: All things pass in their time, Charlie.

  You can see Charlie bursting into tears of outrage, saying, No! to the dead mule lying before him, with her tongue hanging out and already beginning to go dry, and her milky eye looking up like a huge marble.

  So just as he had done after he saw the dogs kill the doe, he started up the hill for Matthew, who had seen lots of dead things, including people, and would know what to do. Charlie found him milking, sitting on the little stool, his cap pushed back against the early summer heat. And just as before, when Charlie smelled the cow and heard the milk swishing in the bucket, he came to his senses and told his story. “She’s dead!”

  Then silence, except for the slow buzz of a wasp and the splashing of the milk and the chewing of the cow. Matthew gazed steadily at Charlie with his dark eyes—eyes that had turned bloodshot many years before, as if the accumulated burden of all they had seen had at some point suddenly burst the tiny vessels in the whites.

  “She had to die, Charlie. That’s what happens. You know that. She had to die.”

  Sobbing, almost unable to speak, Charlie said, “What are we going to do with her? We can’t just leave her there.” And again: “What will we do with her? … Not pull her over the hill to the boneyard. She’s not a cow! She’s old Bat!”

  Then Matthew said softly, “Charlie, go home and get your breakfast. Soon as I finish milking, I’ll call down to the store. Most likely Leonard will be there. In a while we’ll figure out what to do.”

  At nine o’clock Matthew arrived with Leonard. Robert Paine was also with them. Robert had been on his way to sickle the honeysuckle off the bank below Mrs. White’s garden next to the church when he heard the news from Matthew that old Bat had died and Charlie was going to be a problem. So Robert said to heck with the bank. He was going to see what that crazy white boy would do. They got out of the pickup, three black men dressed in bib overalls with leather baseball caps on, even though it was June, and blue work shirts. They stood next to the truck waiting for Charlie. When Charlie came out of the house they went down the lane to the garden patch, crossed the little irrigation ditch, and walked over to the mule. Her dry tongue was hanging farther out of her mouth, touching the ground, and a single fly buzzed around her head.

  Leonard spoke first. “Well, Matthew, I reckon you need to carry me home so I can get the team and pull this dead mule back over the hill to the boneyard. She’ll sure start to stink if she stays here. And I know Miz Lewis don’t want no stinking mule this close to her house.”

  Matthew pushed his cap back even farther. “I don’t know,” he said. “This was a right special mule. Don’t you reckon we ought to bury her?”

  “Do what?” barked Leonard. “Bury her? What you talking about bury her? I ain’t digging no hole to bury that huge old mule in and her with only one eye to boot! Dig a hole, I reckon!”

  Robert let out a snort. He said later that he knew this was going to be good, because although Matthew Tanner was a physically powerful man, not even he would have had any idea of burying that mule single-handed. And it was a mighty favor to ask two grown men, white or black, to help bury a mule that ought to be drug over the hill where she belonged and forgot about—just because some skinny white boy whose family didn’t even own any land wanted him to.

  “Professor James—,” Matthew began, but Leonard interrupted.

  “I ain’t studying on no Professor James, Matthew. If he wants that mule buried, then let him come do it his self. I ain’t doing it, period.” Leonard would never have spoken to Professor James like that to his face, but Leonard was under the strain of an outrageous idea that looked like it might actually take hold and he was out of control.

  After a period of silence, Matthew, with Charlie gripping his sleeve, shifted his stance, looked right at Leonard and Robert and said, “Professor James is in New York City doing a speech, but he’s taking the night train. He’ll be home first thing in the morning. We’ll just wait till then. She won’t start to stink too bad before then … We’ll just let it be for now.”

  Again, silence. There was staring back and forth, but no contest. Matthew stood still, quiet. People—black and white—respected Matthew. That is, they did what he said, and not just because he worked for Professor James.

  When Matthew got back from taking the men to the store, Charlie was waiting, his face splotched from dried tears. He said, “Why don’t we get Johnny Griggs’s backhoe? You know that thing that dug the ditch at the Esso station. That thing could dig the hole in nothing flat, and then she’d be buried and wouldn’t have to be drug up the lane and over the hill to the boneyard by her neck and the hair skinning off and all. Anyway, there hasn’t been anything put in that place for years. Why should she?” Then he started to cry, clutching Matthew’s sleeve as he always did in an emergency—standing in the early June heat: the almost frail, white boy and the black man on whom so many of us depended.

  “Now Charlie, you listen here. She’s dead and ain’t nothing going to bring her back. She wouldn’t know nothing about it if we was to drag her over the hill, she being dead …”

  “But we would,” Charlie choked out. “We would know about it. And it would be like her life hadn’t meant anything if we don’t bury her. It would be like we forgot what she did when she turned the wild dogs, and when she used to get out and stand on top of a hill watching things out of her one eye, and when she snatched that tomato right out of Miss Farnley’s grocery sack and we all laughed…. If we don’t bury her, it will be like she never lived.” He stopped. He was out of breath. But the final recognition of the situation had set in. His mind had turned all the way around. And now it was time to do something. “What about the backhoe, Matthew?” he asked.

  “The backhoe!” Matthew said. “Lord only knows what it would cost to get that machine out here to bury a dead mule. It don’t make sense. Just wait. When I meet the professor at the train in the morning, I’ll try to talk him into getting a gang together to dig the hole.”

  After it was all over, we realized that there was plenty of warning that Charlie was going to do something. No sooner had Matthew said he had to go to the co-op for dairy feed, Charlie went home and told his mother he was going to walk to the village. Charlie set out with shoes and a shirt on. Mr. Dudley, who was postmaster and owned the store, saw Charlie standing outside the post office door, reading the bus schedule posted on the wall, against his rule that he could not read in the summer.

  Charlie walked over to the bus stop. The town was still small and the village smaller so it was not unusual for him to go to town by himself for a dentist appointment or the like. He was early for the next bus. Leonard’s cousin, Frank Maupin, saw him standing at the stop and pulled over to ask if he wanted a ride to town. Charlie said yes, thank you, that would be nice.

  The word of old Bat’s death and the argument over her burial had gotten around. Frank said he was sorry that she had died, knowing how partial Charlie was to her. But she was dead now and Charlie should just let them drag her over the hill to the boneyard the way it always used to be done with dead stock.

  “She’s not dead stock,” Charlie said in a tight voice. “She is Bat, the mule …” His voice trailed off un-characteristically. Frank glanced over at Charlie; the boy appeared to him to be really pale and he looked as if he was gritting his teeth. Frank also noticed the shoes and the shirt.

  “Where do you need to go in town, Charlie?”

  “Could you drop me off at Eighth and Main, please?” Charlie replied. “I need to see Dr. Stokes for my shots.”

  Now Frank knew that Dr. Stokes’s office was a good five blocks from Eighth and Main. But Charlie seemed so sure of himself, Frank just let him off
without giving it any more thought.

  Griggs Construction at that time owned a dump truck in which Johnny hauled his daddy’s old Ford tractor with a scrape blade that he used to finish his excavating jobs. Behind the truck he pulled a trailer with the pride of his life on board: a brand new fifty-horsepower Allis-Chalmers tractor with a Woods backhoe on the back. It was the first and only one in the county. He had a track loader but it stayed parked in the yard behind the office much of the time now that he had the backhoe.

  Johnny’s family lived on a small farm that they had owned for three generations and from which they could not quite scratch a living. So in addition to farming, Johnny’s father had worked at Hick’s Silk Mill for most of his adult life to keep the family and the farm together.

  Johnny had enlisted in the navy in ’42 and because he was good with tractors he ended up in the Seabees building airfields on Pacific islands. When the war was over, he came home, borrowed five thousand dollars with his daddy’s farm as collateral, bought the equipment, and proceeded to make a success of himself. Mainly he dug basements for the new houses springing up in the county as the university began to expand and businesses from the north moved in.

  Then the first all-hydraulic backhoe attachments became available. This was the machine Johnny had wished for in the Pacific, but the war was over before they were ready for the market. Now, if he had a bigger tractor with the backhoe attached, he could expand his business. The bank lent him another five thousand. Johnny figured out what he had to get to make his payments and some profit—twenty-five dollars an hour. No one had ever heard of such a price for a single piece of machinery. Also, the backhoe was a whole new thing. Nobody was sure what it could do. Johnny stayed busy with the other equipment, but business for the backhoe was slow, because drain fields were still dug by hand. He wasn’t getting enough jobs to make the payments. He was worried.