Hogs, Mules, and Yellow Dogs: Growing Up on a Mississippi Subsistence Farm

Humoring a Mule

166 Humoring a Mule In my eighth and ninth years I spent time during the summers helping Grandpa with many farm chores at Old House. I enjoyed helping him draw water from the well, chop stove wood, select collards for supper, make a brush broom from gallberry bushes, sharpen hoes with a file, and slop the hogs. But I enjoyed even more watching him work with mules. He seemed to be able to read their minds. When we were alone at the barn, Grandpa entertained me by slipping an ear of corn through a stall door to a mule, all with one amused eye on me. I was learning the fundamentals of farm life. And I felt closest to Grandpa, and most grown up, when we plowed together. I recall a time we were in the cornfield near the barn when suddenly he began talking about mules as if he were giving me a lesson in life. “There ain’t no ruse, no trick, no angle, nothin ever done by a human bein on the farm that a mule ain’t already thought of first, and used years before ya. They’re wilier than a hog, but not as smart,” he mumbled. “I been plowin em since I had to raise m’arms to reach the plough handles, and should know. I learnt more from em than from most men, but wouldn’t trust one any mor’n I would a man, neither. One day they’re slobberin all over ya for an ear o corn, and the next kickin yo guts out for no reason whatsoever. Now an’ then ya wanna shoot em, but catch y’self, knowin you can’t do without em. M’dad tried oxen for fieldwork when he come over here from Alabama, but they’re too slow and dumb. He also tried horses, but they eat expensive oats and cain’t stand the heat and flies. So we’re stuck with these crossbreed bastids, and nobody can make a crop o anything without em. This’n here ain’t bad. Old Mattie is the best I ever had. Outwork any man all day, and at sundown wants to frolic. And she ain’t no colt!” Humoring a Mule 167 Grandpa emphasized colt and continued: “Watch them blades o cornstalk, Dick, they’ll cut yo face like a razor. And walk just a little farther forward so you won’t catch so much dust. Yeah, this’n is special; had her for five years, and she’s never missed a day; summer ’r winter. Special she is, heah me? Bought’er with another’n, blacker and littler called Maude, but that’n ain’t half the mule Matt is. Bought em as a pair for loggin, but that other un can’t pull her side o the tree. Main problem is that only I can muzzle and hitch er. Everybody else is too scared to try. She knows that, too. Turned on Charlie Brown, and kicked’im in the nuts. I had to take’im to see McLeod. So, you be careful around this here mule, boy. I’ll teach ya how to handle er.” With that promise, he paused, and we made another round of plowing corn in the field across from Old House before we would “take out,” the local expression for quitting time. The routine for me in early May after the school year had ended was to go to Grandpa’s and help on the farm. He and the mule plowed corn. I listened, observed, and followed, barefoot in the next furrow, always with a row of cornstalks between us. My nostrils filled Plowing corn with a 1930s Georgia stock. Life on the Farm 168 with the smell of the earth, the corn’s chlorophyll, and mule sweat. I was primarily company to the grandfather I loved and admired, but I was also a ready arm to assist him with any job that an eight-year-old could handle. “Fetch me a bucket o water from the well, and bring the gourd dipper,” he would command. There was no market for timber, as the Depression had already set in. Charles Hillman had to rely on working his own land. Chores abounded for my pair of young hands. I pulled weeds, sometimes until my hands bled. I scraped grassy debris from the shaft of the plough and heel-sweep or...