Winter Run (11 page)

First we pried up two pipes and tried to get her to step out front end first and then the back end. The mule, however, was not interested. She had developed the ability to concentrate all the weight of her nearly thousand-pound bulk in one leg at a time so that not even Matthew’s inordinate strength could budge her. So back to the pry bar we went, and while we were heaving at the next pipe nearest her hindquarters, she turned her huge old head around until her sighted eye was aimed at us. And as if that was not enough to supervise the operation properly, she cocked one ear around to be sure she was taking everything in.

As we pried with the bar, I began to see the morning’s hunt over and over, and then the scene at the rock when the dogs had killed the doe. And although I am probably imagining it, I seem to remember that the day grew a little colder and the clouds a little closer. And I was glad when Bat finally stepped out of the cattle guard, and we could lead her home and I could walk down the hill to the Corn House and Gretchen’s grilled cheese sandwiches.

That should have been the end of it. But no one would let it alone. After all the versions of the great
dog hunt had been told, and everyone had laughed at Bat’s antics, we still didn’t know where the dogs had come from or how they had lived before they started killing livestock. Or how they had learned to run down wild deer, being just farm dogs. The questions lingered like the dirty snow from the winter the likes of which we had never seen before either.

Spring came. Things worked back toward normal. Leonard went around the neighborhood plowing gardens with Bat and, to my disgust, I was back at school. One day when Leonard wasn’t using her, Bat, who was still living at Silver Hill, went for a ramble up the summerhouse lane. My mother saw her going and called the Jameses. Sally, who had the same opinion of Bat as she had of me, reluctantly agreed to find Matthew. Later that morning, he walked up the lane and brought the old mule back.

When I got home from school that day, I went to find Matthew and see if anything was happening. “C’mon, Charlie, let’s walk up the summerhouse lane. I got something to show you.” Bat was out for the second time that day and we let her come ambling along behind us.

Halfway up, the lane cut through a bulge in the land, leaving four-foot banks on either side. A dismembered deer carcass lay there, skewed and weathered. You could see tooth marks on the long bones.

We stood silent for a moment, looking at it, with
me holding on to Matthew’s sleeve again with old Bat right behind us, ears cocked.

“Leonard found a carcass like this over at Joe Stephens’s farm last week. Do you see what happened, Charlie?” he asked.

But I didn’t, not at first.

“There was a drift here between the banks,” he said. “They run her up the lane, and when she hit the deep snow, she went down, and they caught her. Just like us, that doe didn’t know nothing about no winter and deep snow. I don’t reckon we’ll ever find out where they come from, but that’s how they learned to run down a deer. It was the snow what taught ’em.”

And suddenly I could see it in my mind’s eye: the tan bitch waiting at the foot of the lane, taking up the chase as the deer went by; and the other three, winded, beginning to flag; and her barking the sight chase, the deer running hard; and the final surge as the deer hit the drift and went down; the bitch reaching for the throat hold and the other three piling on.

And then again, the hounds in full cry and Matthew with the double barrel, waiting, as the bitch rounded the little bluff and looked back—to be sure it wasn’t just a game.

She was very old. Despite Leonard Waits’s insistence that she was thirty-five, most of us agreed that she was in her twenty-fifth year, and no one had ever heard of a mule living to that age before. She had long been a figure of importance. Not only was she the last mule in the area, she was a mule of independent and eccentric mind. As mentioned, even at her advanced age, she refused to stay in a pasture when she got the notion to ramble around. And even though she lived on the professor’s charity, she and Leonard still plowed all the gardens in the neighborhood every spring.

Her blind eye had long ago turned a milky white. As a result, she had a strange way of cocking her head around to get her sighted eye on what she was looking
at. She had a curious habit of standing on a hilltop, staring out over the land, unmoving, like an ancient stone marker. Professor James said she was like something you might read about in the Old Testament. But we always took the professor with a grain of salt. After all,
he
was so eccentric he once told Matthew that he liked the smell of skunk because it made his asthma feel better.

Bat had been among us for so long that people who were grown and had families could remember giving her an apple or a carrot when they were kids.

The previous winter, when the four domestic dogs gone wild had killed a doe right in front of Charlie as he was walking in the lane from the store, Charlie’d had the hell scared out of him. We all had.

Our little village had been snowed in to the point that school had not kept since Thanksgiving and the drifts had piled up ten feet deep in some places. It wasn’t supposed to snow like that in Virginia. We were barely able to do the chores and be sure the cows had paths to get to water. Then came the dogs. It was like an old tale about wolves. But Charlie would tell you at the drop of a hat, and at the top of his voice, that it was no fairy tale that afternoon when he saw the dogs drive the doe up to the rock where the tan bitch was waiting. Certainly no tale when she pulled the doe down by her tongue and the rest piled on and killed her. After that, some families wouldn’t let their children walk to the store alone. It wasn’t until the January thaw that we could deal with
the dogs. Matthew Tanner organized the hunt with Luke Henry’s hounds.

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 and his mind unencumbered
by the knowledge of reading, knowing that she was dead.