Authors: Robert Ashcom
Now people didn’t talk to Matthew like that no matter what their color or position. People just didn’t yell at Matthew Tanner. But Leonard did then. For him the insanity of the whole affair had boiled down to that one scene. Leonard said that at the time he thought Matthew had gone out of his head.
“Where did that machine come from? That is my dead, one-eyed mule laying there, and I didn’t tell nobody they could come in here and bury her with no huge machine and Johnny Griggs running it.” He had just as well have spit into the wind, and he knew it the minute he saw Charlie hanging on to Matthew’s sleeve.
Robert was grinning. “Matthew,” he said, “that white boy done turned your head clean around. Who on God’s earth would think of burying some old mule except Charlie Lewis? And you’re letting him do it.”
The hole was six feet deep and seven feet long and four feet wide. It had taken forty-five minutes to dig.
Johnny glanced over at Charlie as he swung the bucket across the mule’s body so that he could push her into the hole. He took off his aviator’s glasses.
Charlie nodded.
Bat’s body was very close to the edge. Gently the bucket pushed sideways against her. And then she fell in. She hit the bottom with a loud thud. She gave her final whistle as the air was driven from her lungs by the fall. Charlie looked over the edge at her legs sticking up and her head and neck skewed to the side.
Drawn by the crowd, Gretchen had come out from the house in time to see the old mule pushed into the hole. She gasped in horror and started toward Charlie. There was a stillness in the air. Not a sound. Johnny had turned off the tractor. Not a bird. Something in Charlie’s look made his mother stop before she got to him. “Charlie, why do you do these things? Why didn’t you just let the men take her away and forget her. There was no reason—why, Charlie? …” Her voice trailed off.
Charlie’s face suddenly went dead white. And then, as if to the whole group—to all of us—he shouted, “Because I loved her!”
A flight of mourning doves came over and landed in the barn lot. And the only sound left in the early summer afternoon was their cooing.
This time in a whisper, he said again: “Because I loved her.”
• • •
The professor arrived the next morning on the train from New York City. He was struck nearly speechless when Matthew told the tale.
“Does Johnny Griggs really think that he is going to be paid?” the professor demanded. “And what about Charlie? What is to be done with Charlie, gallivanting off to town and committing me to pay to have a twenty-five-year-old one-eyed mule buried? Really, Matthew, it is too much!” The professor was chuckling in his wheezy way. “And why didn’t you stop it? Don’t tell me that boy fooled you. You knew all the time what he was doing. It is so unlike you, Matthew …”
Then Matthew, in the confidence of their old, old relationship said, “I’m glad he did it. I don’t know why, but I’m glad. It was like burying that old mule made the end time of mules. I don’t reckon we’ll ever see a mule on this farm again. I never did much like mules, but …”
Charlie grieved and time went on. A lot of people had seen the backhoe in action, and the professor even paid Johnny the twenty-five dollars. Johnny said that if it hadn’t been for Charlie and Bat, heaven knows if he would have ever got that machine off the ground. But off it went. There were houses to build and he began to dig drain fields, too. Farms got cut up. Eventually the company Mr. Lewis worked for moved to town and brought jobs.
There were no more mules at Silver Hill. The following spring Leonard bought a tractor—a Farmall, Model C, used. But it plowed the gardens just fine. Professor James signed the note.
Winter came and it snowed. And as usual, in the evenings, people stood around the potbelly at the store, talking. The tale of the wild dogs was told again. Then silence. Just the sizzling of the fire, and the crack of the expanding cast iron. And then a muffled chuckle as Robert Paine remembered Bat’s burial. “It was the craziest thing I ever seen. Even for that Charlie Lewis. And him getting you into it, Matthew. I still can’t believe you went along. And the professor, too.”
Matthew didn’t answer. He stood quietly next to the stove, his face turned away into the shadow. It was as if the events themselves were already beyond comment, as if they had passed into a realm of remembrance where they stood alone, of their own strength. His leather baseball cap was pushed back on his head and his eyes were fixed on something beyond the store.
Robert shook his head, still amazed. His gesture just about covered it. Because not one of us had ever heard of someone loving a mule before.
Charlie had a way of focusing heavily on whatever was his interest of the moment. Anyone could see that. It was as if he had tunnel vision. But it was a mistake to believe that he was blocking out the rest of the world. He could suddenly shift his attention and you’d realize he’d had been absorbing everything around him all the time.
The August he was twelve, he shifted his attention from Matthew and Silver Hill to Luke Henry and his hounds. Charlie had, of course, been along on the hunt for the wild dogs the previous winter, and he had been possum hunting with Luke a few times at night. But he had never shown any special interest in the hounds. He liked dogs—Charlie liked all animals—but that was all.
Luke lived with his wife on seven acres on the back side of Owens Mountain. They lived in a log cabin that his daddy—who had been slave born—had built by hand at the turn of the century. With the exception of a little grove of oaks, the property had originally been covered in mature field pines, which is where the logs for the cabin came from. Tightly chinked, the cabin was almost fifty feet long and divided into three sections. The main one on the end had a massive chimney built with rock hauled up the mountain on sledges pulled by workhorses. That room was the kitchen and living room. The cabin was in a little grove of oaks so there was shade in the summer.
There was a privy close to the porch, with its clay path worn smooth and hard. There were hog pens below the house. If the wind was blowing in your face when you approached the pens, the smell would nearly knock you down. All the small landowners and farmers, black and white, kept hogs. Hogs were the difference between living and what we thought was living well.
Next to the house, just past the privy, there were three pens where Luke kept his hounds. He was the only one in the area who had hounds. They had to be fed, of course, but Luke had inherited them from his daddy along with the place, and he couldn’t imagine life without them.
Luke was the section foreman on the C & O Railroad and made more money than any other black man in the community. He was tall and erect and wore
khakis summer and winter. In the winter he wore that red-and-black lumber jack coat and hat, and those tall boots with his pants tucked in. When he stood next to the potbelly in the store he was half a head taller than everyone else. Quiet. When he and Matthew Tanner happened to be talking, people stood away so as not to bother them. They were the most important men in the black community. Truth be told, maybe in ours, too. When the deer started to come back after the war, Luke and Matthew were the first two hunters to bring down a buck. No one was surprised at this.
Luke’s four sons were gone. Two were in the army, and the other two had jobs in town and lived there. So Luke and his wife, Jessie, who, like many of the black ladies, worked for a white family in the village, were alone at the homeplace. None of the sons showed much interest in Luke’s way of life. As quick as they could, they left. It was a loving family, but by this time things had begun to change and the boys wanted no part of the old ways. Using the colored bathrooms at the depot did not suit them. Of course, they soon discovered that they had to use the colored bathrooms in town, but at least there they didn’t have to live with the peace that Luke and Jessie had made with Jim Crow.
One Saturday morning in the late August heat, Charlie appeared at Luke’s out of the blue, riding his pony. He tied the pony to a locust sapling at the edge of the clearing. Luke and Jessie were sitting
on the porch, which was on the side of the log house looking out at the valley. It was lucky that Charlie found them sitting because, by nature, they hardly ever did. Luke said later that in spite of knowing Charlie since he was little, the presence of the fair-skinned, gray-eyed boy with his almost white hair, walking across his own dirt yard shocked him. Most people felt that way about Charlie. He was so pale he looked like he was from somewhere else, maybe somewhere in the Scandinavian countries, the north lands, like Gretchen, his mother.
“Morning, Jessie … Luke,” he said as he nodded to each in turn. Then there was silence, unusual for Charlie. He looked down at the ground. What was happening was that Charlie had made up his mind that come hell or high water he was going to get near Luke’s hounds. He wanted to so badly he was afraid he might say the wrong thing and mess it all up. So for a moment, he was absolutely out of character, speechless.
“Are you going possum hunting tonight, Luke?”
“I reckon so,” replied Luke, who saw right away what was going on. “You want to come, Charlie?”
“Yes sir.” And then Charlie started off in his regular headlong way of talking. Fast, as if the conversation were an emergency. “Will you turn loose from the summerhouses? Maybe we could jump a fox and not a slow old possum and run him into the swamp below the lake. And then the hounds would run in there all night long and we could sit on the dam and listen.
Maybe Matthew would come. And my daddy, too. He is home this weekend.”
“Sure, Charlie.” Luke was smiling all over his narrow face. “We’ll turn loose from the summerhouses, but I don’t want the hounds running no fox if I can help it. It’s too hard getting them off. And I don’t want to stay up all night long when I got to get ready for church in the morning, and worrying about them all during the sermon—though”—here he paused and glanced slyly at Jessie—“sometimes it’s more interesting to listen to the hounds …”
“Now Luke, don’t you talk that way in front of Charlie. He’ll get us wrong about church.” But she was smiling, too. And they both kept rocking easily in the split cane chairs, in the August heat.
That evening, Luke brought the hounds in their crates in his old pickup to the foot of the lane to the burnt-out summerhouses. Immediately it became clear that Charlie had found his new thing. Even before they turned loose, he started out talking almost nonstop. Question upon question, until Luke got disgusted at not being able to listen for the hounds. He said to Matthew, “Can’t you keep that boy quiet?”
“It’s pretty hard, Luke, once he gets going.”
Finally his daddy spoke to him. “Now Charlie, you be quiet and listen or we are going home. Keep your questions for Luke till you see him during the day. We’re out here to listen to the hounds, not you!”
So Charlie shut up and the hounds ran, above the lake in the oaks, their voices echoing through the
woods with the long trailing note of treeing night hounds. There were eight of them. Five dogs and three bitches, all black and tans, with ears long enough to stretch beyond their noses if you pulled them forward and dark eyes that looked like they had seen everything in the world at least three times over. And considering the bags underneath their eyes, you would wonder if they had ever closed them—ever slept. Solemn-looking. Gentle. Sometimes a little shy.
When they came over a ridge running toward you, throwing their tongues all together, your breath got short and the hair on the back of your neck rose up and you knew you were listening to something awful old. And it didn’t matter where you came from or what color you were.
They quickly treed a possum. Matthew and Luke knew they had treed when the note of their voices changed—it became quick and staccato, more like barking than the long, baying note they used when they were running the track. Charlie and the men ran through the thick woods and got to the tree short of breath. Matthew searched for the possum with a big flashlight, and finally they saw him. A big one—a boar, his eyes reflecting red in the light, looking down on them. Luke moved around the tree trying to get a clear shot with the old Winchester .22 pump. But the possum kept moving around also. Finally he stopped.
“You want to take a shot at him, Mr. Lewis?” Luke asked. “I reckon he’ll be a long sight easier to hit than
that bat I heard about you killed in church with the short-short.”
Charlie’s father might have been an outlander from Pennsylvania, but as you know, he was a sure shot with a .22. He had killed the bat in church because the thing kept flying around at evening prayer and scaring the ladies.
“Sure, I’ll give it a try, Luke,” Charlie’s daddy said. He was in his early thirties then, skinny, and as dark as Charlie was fair. But they both had the hawk nose that was said to have descended to them from far-off male ancestors. Charles’s job often kept him away during the week on business, and he didn’t share Charlie’s passion for everything to do with the countryside. He was, however, an understanding presence backing up Charlie’s life. It was a good time for them.
Charles took off his glasses and hitched himself around as was his habit. Eased out his breath. The hounds sat looking up. Their ancient eyes having seen it all centuries before, they were still mildly interested—even though they ran for the running, not the killing. Then the crack of the long rifle hollow point. Matthew held steady with the light. The possum jerked, but did not fall.
“Let me go up and get him!” Charlie gasped out the instant the possum jerked. “Let me go, Luke!”
Luke glanced at Charles, who smiled and nodded. And Charlie was off up the tree. Climbing through the limbs of the white pine as fast as he could.
“Now you watch him, Charlie,” called Matthew.
“You don’t have no idea is he dead or not. If he grabs you with those fox jaws, he could halfway bite your thumb off.”
Charlie climbed, a pale presence in the shadowy branches of the pine. As he climbed, the three men below glanced at each other, bemused by the boy. Matthew smiled and shook his head a little.