Texas, My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy

40. TIGIE LANCASTER'S MULES

+40+ TIGIE LANCASTER'S MULES L AS T YE A R AT TH E St. Paul's Episcopal C hurch ice cream social in Marfa, a woman with a ruddy compelexion, short gray hair, and very blue eyes drove up to the church in a rubber-tired buckboard pulled bya mule. She asked a small boy standing at the curb to go in and get her a dish of ice cream, and then sat in the buckboard and ate it. Her name is Tigie Lancaster, and she has lived in Marfa since 1998. The mule's name was Hollywood Doc. Well, actually, it was just Doc, but Lancaster says that he had been in so many movies that she called him Hollywood Doc. Doc, who died last spring, was a big mule, sixteen-and-a-halfhands high. His mother was a Kentucky thoroughbred mare and his father was a Mammoth jack. "He was the mule of my dreams," Lancaster told me the other day. "He was everything you would want in a mule." When I asked her exactly what she meant by that, she said, "Not many mules would let you put a tutu on him." Then I remembered that Doc was the mule that Lancaster entered in the Beautiful Burro and Mule Contest in Fort Davis last year. He not only wore a tutu, but also had simulated ballet slippers on his hooves. Doc had other good qualities, too, according to Lancaster: "He had a superior attitude around horses-you could see that he didn't approve of their kicking and running around. He was real smooth- he didn't have any rough, bouncy qualities. He was unflappable. He was a special mule." Although Lancaster is basically a horse person, she has had a lot of experience with mules. When she was a child in Dallas, she was fascinated by the mules that pulled the garbage wagon through her neighborhood, and she persuaded the garbage man to let her climb up beside him when he came by and ride to the end of the block. Her grandmother was horrified, but her mother said, "There's no point in telling her not to do it. She'll just do it anyway ," which seems to have been a pattern in Lancaster's life. A few years later, when she was at a girls' boarding school in Colorado Springs, she was introduced to an army mule named Hambone who could jump with thoroughbreds. She sometimes went foxhunting with the El Paso County Hounds, and one of the army officers at Camp Carson used to bring Hambone along on fox hunts. He could sail over fences with the best of them. Lancaster got to ride Hambone once, and she told me that it was like riding in a Rolls-Royce. Hambone became her standard of "a real doing lTIule." Lancaster's first mule, however, was not up to Hambone's standards . "He was a Shetland mule, a handsome strawberry roan with white stockings," she said, "but he had a cheating heart and was not generous. He had been trained to pull but you had to retrain him every day, and if he got a chance to let you have it, he would. He was the opposite of Doc in every way." Most mules, Lancaster was quick to add, are not like that, although they are independentminded . "Mules are smarter than horses," she said. "Horses aren't Einsteins and they can be bullied into doing things they shouldn't do, but mules don't like bullies and they won't go anywhere that isn't safe." Mules get their good qualities from donkeys, Lancaster told me, and she is also fond of donkeys-in fact, she has four of them in her pasture right now, named Black Jack, Apple Jack, Bottom , and Pearl Lite. "The only animal I ever rustled was a donkey," she told me. This was in the late 1950s, she explained, and she had come out to the Big Bend for a short vacation. She drove her pickup to the store at Lajitas and asked the man there if she could drive on down to the river, and he told her that she had better leave her truck at the store and walk to the river, as someone might steal her hubcaps if she parked it on the river bank. She took his advice and walked through the brush...