DRY CRIK Journal

With that he turned and motioned for us to follow him. Miz Shivers and the three Perez kids were sitting under the big lone hackberry tree that shaded half of the backyard cutting slips from sweet potato vines and putting them in tubs of well water.

“Winnie, when you and them Meskins get four tubs cut, take them Meskins and Mr. Speaker of the House with you and set ‘em to cutting some more vines out of Noto’s field. We’re going to need at least five more tubs of slips by the end of the day. Shavetail and I’ll hook up Sweet Becky and lay out what you got cut there and we can start planting right after dinner.”

He turned to me and said, “Hey, boy, you ever drive a mule?”

“No sir.”

“Come on, I’m gonna teach you right now. Can’t nobody but me get a bit and harness on Sweet Becky or I’d teach you that too, but once that’s done, she’ll let anybody drive her until it’s time to come to the house and then she don’t need driving; she just comes whether you’re ready or not.”

“Yes sir.”

Ronny had taught me how to get along with Popeye. My guess was that “Yes sir” and “No sir” was about all the talking I was going to need all day long.

Sweet Becky was a little, light red, mare mule no more than nine hands high. Even though she took more after her little jackass daddy than her horse mamma, being more the size of a big donkey than a mule, she sure had a mulish look about her and, as it turned out, mulish ways. She had a black mane whose color continued on as a thin stripe down her light red back and spread out on her rump like a fan before running on down into her coal black tail. Her muzzle was a light gray color that mixed through the red on her cheeks as it ran up her jaws to the bottom of her black ears. Her eyelashes were snow white like a sweet little old lady’s.

When we walked up she was in the handling lot next to the barn standing on three legs with her head down and her eyes closed looking like a nice little old lady taking her ease in the morning shade. The only thing to cast some doubt on this serene image was the notion that her left rear leg wasn’t just up and resting off the ground; it was cocked and ready to kick the mortal hell out of anybody fool enough to walk behind her.

“Now don’t you just look sweet and gentle enough to work at the pony ride, you four-flushing, vicious, bitch of a mule straight out of hell. You sure ain’t fooling me with your play acting. I know you like a book, I do.”

Sweet Becky half-opened one eye, laid one ear back alongside her head and swished her tail.

“Shavetail, you stay right here outside the fence and just watch until I tell you different. Whatever you do, don’t get anywheres near that mule unless she’s hitched, you hear me?”

“Yes sir.”

Popeye went in the front door of the barn and came out through the stalls and into the lot carrying a lone, solid oak, three foot singletree. No bridle, bit, reins, collar, trace chains or harness, just a singletree. Becky slowly half-opened the other eye and laid back the other ear but didn’t move nothing else. Popeye tried to circle her at about three steps out to get around in front of her, since she had her rump pointed right at him when he walked out of the stalls. As he got close, she slowly came alive. As Popeye circled she turned, keeping her rump pointed right at him as he moved around her. He tried a little jig step or two to fake her out, but she was just as fast as he was and beat him every time.

Finally he ran right at her heels waving that singletree over his head and hollered, “Heah – Mule – Haa!”

In one instant uncoiling motion she delivered a double-hoofed high kick that would have sent the San Jacinto Monument halfway to Dallas had it connected. She missed by less than a foot and he was right under her left shoulder before she could recover – too far up to kick and too close to bite. They pirouetted around for three full circles in a ballet of jumpin’, cussin’, and bitin’ air when he jumped out in front of her with that singletree held high over his head and brought it down with a mighty crack right between her ears. She let out a swooshing noise through her nose and went down first on one knee and then the other. I thought he had killed her. Her eyes were wide open and crossed with one looking at the other one like they hadn’t been introduced.

As she was staggering back up on her wobbly legs, he was slipping the bit into her mouth and buckling the bridle on her poor old sore head. She shook her head like a wet duck dog shaking pond water and then stood there just as nice and ladylike as you pleased while he finished harnessing her and hitching her to a little wooden sled.

“Open the gate, boy. It’s time you learn how to farm.”

He drove her over to the hackberry tree and I loaded four tubs of slips on the sled.

“Let’s have a cup of coffee and I’ll explain what it is we’re trying to do.”

I couldn’t believe what I saw. He just dropped the reins on the ground and we walked off into the kitchen without him even looking back at Sweet Becky. She dropped her head, lifted her left rear leg and half-closed her eyes, and but for being hitched, looked just like she did when I first saw her: a nice old lady mule at peace with the world.

He got two big thick white mugs without handles like they use aboard ship and poured us up two cups of real black coffee with the grounds floating around in it. I was afraid to ask for milk or sugar and gagged it down like I drank it that way every morning.

“First off, we don’t plant eyes like they do Irish potatoes or seeds like they do corn. We plant slips. A slip is a little piece of the sweet potato vine that has been cut off to about six inches long and has at least one joint where some roots have started to grow out. I bought the vines from Noto as they lay in his field. That’s where Winnie is right now, watching the Meskins and Mr. Speaker cut vines. We soak them overnight causing little roots to grow out from the joints in the vine. That’s what was in those tubs under the tree, soaking vines. What we have in the tubs on the sled is the slips cut from those vines.

“We take the slips and lay them out on the top of the rows about two feet apart and the field hands come walking along and poke them in the dirt with a broom handle with a notch cut in the end taking care that the little roots at the joint is buried. Then they kick dirt over the hole left from the poking and step on the slip to pack down the dirt and walk on to the next one and so on. Then all we have to do is pray for rain the first two weeks and a drought the last two of the growing season and we got us a crop. If it don’t rain the first two weeks, the slips die – and if it does rain the last two, the potatoes rot. Once we get through planting, the rest is up to God except for a little early cultivating to keep the weeds down. Now you understand why most farmers go to church. Let’s go – we’re burning daylight.”

We climbed on the sled. He clicked his teeth and Sweet Becky started a slow deliberate walk in the direction she was pointed and answered the reins like a pet the mile or so to the field. I was standing on the sled waiting for her to back over us and kick our brains out, but she acted like this was all her idea, like she was going to do the farming and brought us along to watch so’s we’d know how the next time.

The sweet potato field was one of eight fields evenly divided off out of a fenced section of pasture land (one mile square or 640 acres) by further dividing it with one fence straight down the middle and three more across it leaving eight separate eighty acre fields to farm or graze. The way it was divided, the fields came out in one-half by one-quarter mile rectangles. Because the slope of the land, Popeye ran the rows lengthwise, making them a half-mile long. Planted two feet apart it takes 1320 slips to make a row. The row tops were four feet apart. That gives you 330 rows. That’s 435,600 slips. That’s a whole bunch of sweet potatoes. I was too little to do this sort of arithmetic in my head, but I knew just from looking at all them long rows that me, Ronny, Popeye, Sweet Becky and three little Meskin kids weren’t going to finish in this century.

Popeye said that Sweet Becky like to work to the left, just like racehorses like to run to the left, so he started her up between the first two rows commencing on the southeast corner of the field. That way Sweet Becky could go to her left on her first turn at the north end of the first rows. He said she didn’t seem to mind having to turn back to her right after she came back to the starting end to go back up the field. I wondered out loud why she thought she had to go left on the first turn since there ain’t no real good way to go up and down rows without turning left on one end and right on the other. What difference could it possibly make to her which way she turned first.

Popeye said, “Mules are a whole lot like wives ‘ceptin’ you ain’t allowed to hit wives in between the eyes with a singletree whether they need it or not. There ain’t no explaining some of their notions, but if you really put your mind to it you can learn to live with them with just a little bending here and there and still get the job done. On the other hand, if you don’t do it their way every now and then, it ain’t nothing but a peck of trouble from morning to night. The only real grief is figuring out what they have on their minds, not how come. Shavetail, there ain’t but two good, foolproof, logical ways to handle a female anything and I don’t know either one of them. That’s just the way they are and that’s good enough for me.”

When he got Sweet Becky started up the first row, he tied off the reins to one of the handles on the front tub to keep them up out of the way and started slinging slips off first one side and then the other so they fell about two feet apart on the rows on either side of the sled. Sweet Becky had her head down, her ears flopped forward and her eyes half-shut and was keeping a slow, steady gait of about 60 human paces per minute which gave the slip slinger just the right amount of time to set the slips without having to hurry and mess up the spacing once he got the rhythm of it.

When we got to the end of that first row Sweet Becky turned left, walked over two rows, turned left again and started back without Popeye ever touching the reins or saying a word. Popeye sat down on a tub, rolled a cigarette out of sack of Bull Durham and told me to have a go at it. I missed a few and had to run back and put them where they should have landed and then catch up with Sweet Becky and the sled. By the time I caught the sled I had overrun five or six slip spots leaving a fourteen foot gap. Things were already getting out of hand and I just got started. The only thing to do was grab a double handful of slips and put them down on the run as I was chasing the sled. I was getting winded and tired while Sweet Becky was just plodding rhythmically along with her eyes closed and a look of complete repose on her muley face.

“Shavetail, it’s hard to tell who’s the mule and who’s the boy by who’s doin’ the most work but it’s sure plain as day who’s the smartest. I don’t see the mule doing no running.”

“Yes – sir.”

“Whoa – you lop-eared sister of Satan. Whoa! Or I’ll jerk your damn teeth right out of your damned hard head if I have to get up and untie them reins to make you whoa you red willful stubborn bitch of a cross between a dumb jackass and whore horse. Whoa! I say.”

Sweet Becky stopped but laid her ears back and rolled her upper lip to let everybody know she didn’t approve of having her rhythm broken or her deep thoughts interrupted by a boy’s clumsiness in slinging slits. She was used to working with pros and had no patience with amateurs.

“Just get back in, catch your breath and don’t get in such a hurry. It’ll come to you by the time you get to the end of the row. Now see if you can get this little red bitch to walking again and working for you instead of you working for her.”

Popeye had a little grin on his face. I suspected that Sweet Becky had her own peculiarities about getting back to work.

“Get up, Mule. Hii, mule –gettieup – go!”

All I got out of Sweet Becky was a hide-ripple down her backbone that started at her withers and rippled back to her flanks.

“Shavetail, it looks like she’s confused about who’s supposed to be in charge here. Women or mules, you can’t ever let that happen, not even once or you’ll windup being the mule forever.”

I walked around to the side of her head and bit the mortal hell out of her left ear. She didn’t even look up. She started her mule shuffling gait down the row like nothing ever happened.

Sure enough, by the time we finished that half-mile row I was pitching them in there like Dizzy Dean. Popeye hopped off the sled at the end of the row.

“I’ll bring out five more tubs of slips. That’ll hold you two until dinner. Don’t worry about what time to come to the house for dinner – Sweet Becky will know when it’s time. Just give her her head and she’ll come on in, but don’t encourage her too much or she’ll get in too big a hurry.”

It looked like Sweet Becky and I had come to an agreement. She did her job of walking up and down the rows and I did mine of placing slips. She even knew to stop for fresh tubs while I dropped off the empties and reloaded the fulls without any orders from me. We turned out to be quite a team once we got the preliminaries worked out. I never had to touch the reins for the rest of the morning except to retie them to a full tub.

She even taught me something Popeye forgot to tell me. When it was about 11:45 according to my nickel-plated, genuine brass, Pocket Ben dollar watch, she didn’t start back up the next row, but turned down the house-end of the field and stopped at the nearest stack of empty tubs at the end of the row where we had left them. It took me a minute to catch on, but she knew that we were supposed to bring them back to the house to be refilled. This was the first time she looked back at me all morning. I put the two empties on the sled and she plodded on to the next stack and then the next, stopping briefly for me to load and stack them inside one another on the sled.

When the last two tubs were loaded, we moseyed back to the house and she stopped under the shade of the hackberry tree. She slowly turned her head toward the back door of the house, perked up her ears and let out a “Heeee-Haaw Heee-Haaaw” that made me jump a foot out of my brogans. Popeye stuck his head out of the kitchen window and hollered, “Dammit to hell, I seen you come in, you noisy old bitty. Hold your harness until I get my shoes on you contrary old bag of bones. I’m comin’ – I’m comin’ – dagnabbit.”

The omission of the Lord’s name and general mildness of his cussin’ meant that Miz Shivers was home and probably in the kitchen with him. Popeye came out and unhitched Sweet Becky, led her to the water trough and then put out a half-bucket of feed and motioned me to the kitchen door.

I had been watching this mule-man tenderness from my place under the hackberry tree where Ronny and the Perez kids were sitting on buckets and tubs eating a dinner of corn bread, pinto beans, mustard greens and sausage off tin plates with a bucket of milk and a tin dipper set out for drinks. It looked mighty good to me and I was anxious to get started, but I sure knew better than to do anything else but follow his stiff-armed, over-handed wave toward the back of the house.

“Hello, Miz Shivers. Can I have a drink of water, please ma’am?”

She turned on Popeye like a quick terrier rat dog and hissed, “Earl, have you had this boy out in the field all morning on a scorching South Texas day like today without a bucket of water?”

“Now Winnie, don’t get excited. You know that if I had a bucket of water in that field he wouldn’t have got but a little snip anyway. That mule would have drunk it all or stepped in it as soon as I left. Besides, it ain’t July or August, like it was hot or anything, and I did it for his own good, that’s what I did.”

She had been filling a glass with chopped ice and water while all this talking was going on. She wiped my face with a wet dishrag and handed me a brimming glass of ice water.

“Honey, you go in the bathroom and wash up and come on and sit down at the dinner table. Earl, you and I’ll talk more about this later.”

We had pot roast, mashed potatoes with cream gravy, early green beans, cucumbers floating in ice water and vinegar; hot biscuits with fresh churned butter and a dewberry cobbler.

“I’m sorry that I didn’t have time to make some ice cream for that cobbler, but I got so busy with the vine cutting and the field hands’ dinner that I just plumb ran out of time.”

“Aw – that’s all right Winnie. You can crank up some for supper if it makes you feel better. This’ll do for dinner, such as it is. By the way, you forgot to sweeten the tea.”

“Earl, you heathen, I wasn’t talking to you. You’re getting more like your mule every day.”

“Miz Shivers, that was a real nice dinner. I sure do thank you.”

She broke into one of her contagious grins and gave me a big sweaty hug and told me to wait until she fixed me a water bottle to take to the field with me. She said that if I kept it covered up with wet slips in one of the bottom tubs it might stay cooler. She handed me a quart Mason jar of ice and water wrapped with a towel and glowered at Popeye as she shooed us out of her kitchen, and hollered at Ronny and the Perez kids to bring in their dishes. I noticed that Gloria Perez was washing them under the pump as we walked out so all Miz Shivers had to do was scald them and set them to dry.

Popeye told me to get Ronny aside and tell him not to tell the Perez kids what he was making. At the end of the day he wasn’t going to give Ronny but three quarters like the Perez kids but was going to give me Ronny’s extra fifteen cents on the side when he slipped me my dollar.

The Meskins will want white wages if they know what I am paying you two. No sense in making them feel bad. What they don’t know can’t hurt them, I always say. Come to think on it, I’ll give you an extra quarter so Mr. Speaker will get his whole dollar. I’m getting five more six-bit Meskins in this afternoon so I won’t need him tomorrow. Winnie’s got too many dollar friends for my six-bit budget as it is.”

“Yes sir.”

That afternoon Ronny, the Perez kids and five older, near-grown Meskins I had never seen before were all out in the field planting the slips I had laid out that morning. At first it looked like they might catch up with me and Sweet Becky, but after the first hour they started straightening up more often and holding their low backs and drinking more water. There wasn’t no doubt about it. Riding that sled and slinging slips was the choice job. My old man was right. It wasn’t as much what you knew as it was who.

Popeye came out in the field and told me to finish the row, pick up the empty tubs and start Sweet Becky in to the house. That would leave just about the right amount of slips to last the field hands till sundown. I could sit and cut slips or something until quittin’ time after I got back in.

When we got to the end of that last row at 5:45, Sweet Becky turned left instead of right like she would have to do to start another four row round trip and started back in without me doing a thing to tell her it was time to go. That damned mule understood English.

I was hungry and tired and about as ready to go in as she was. I had gotten pretty cocky about being an expert mule skinner by the end of the day even though I hadn’t much to do with where Sweet Becky went or what she did on the way there. After we picked up our last empty tubs, I untied the reins from the tub handle and held them in both hands just like Popeye did. I noticed that Gloria Perez was watching and I couldn’t resist showing off a little bit. I popped those reins on Sweet Becky’s rump and whooped, “Haaaagh – Mule! – Giddap!”

Sweet Becky “haaaaghed” and “giddapped” that sled right out from under me and left me in the plowed dirt sitting on my embarrassed dumb ass in a pile of empty slip tubs. She bolted like a quarter horse coming out of the gate at Ruidosa, jerking the sled out from under my feet and the reins out of hands before I knew what was happening. All I expected out of that lazy, little old lady mule was a fast walk or maybe a trot, but I sure wasn’t ready for no right-now gallop.

I got up an started after her but it wasn’t no use. There wasn’t no way for me to catch that fool mule and sled running through a plowed field or anywheres else for that matter. The sled was bouncing in the air hitting the ground every six or eight feet; just about the spacing between Sweet Becky’s thunderclap farts each time her rear legs went off the ground together in her funny looking mule-lope.

I kept running after her on the way in like I had a chance of catching her and making her stop. I stopped and picked up the reins that she had stepped on and broke as she left the field and turned on the shell road to the house. The bouncing sled knocked down the mailbox when she turned into the driveway leaving one of its runners laying alongside it. She hee-hawed and farted across the mowed grass of the yard gouging a ditch through the St. Augustine grass and Miz Shivers’ fern and herb bed with the bouncing wreckage of the sled on her way to the hackberry tree in the back yard. She hee-hawed the house for Popeye and stood there as calm as a settin’ hen with her head down, left foot up and her eyes half-closed.

“Earl, come out here this instant and look at what your fool mule has done. If that little boy has as much as a single scratch on him, you and that mule are going to be living together in the barn. Do you hear me!”

“Yeah, Winnie, I hear you and so does the rest of Artesia. Just hold your water, woman. Here comes Shavetail now. No worse for wear except for a red guilty face and a dirty butt.”

With that he runs up to Sweet Becky first and looks her over and then kicks what is left of the sled and mumbles something under his breath that I couldn’t make out but Miz Shivers could.

“Earl, if you take the name of the Lord in vain just once more today, I don’t know what I’ll do – but whatever it is, you will sure regret it.”

“Shavetail, did you try to drive Sweet Becky home after I told you not to? I told you to start her in and let her come by herself, didn’t I?”

“Yes sir to both questions and I am mighty sorry for it. Believe me I am and I ain’t ever gonna to do it again.”

“Well, I don’t know about that, but I know for damn sure you ain’t gonna to do it again with this mule or on this place. Here’s your wages and Mr. Speaker’s two bits. You both are fired.”

With that he reached five quarters out of his pocket and told me to go home and play the rest of the summer like a kid ought to in the first place.

Miz Shivers patted me on the head and said, “Tell your mamma I’ll see her just as soon as planting is over, you hear?”

“Yes ma’am and thank you for the nice dinner.”

Ronny and I went to Moller’s Pit fishing and skinny-dippin’ the next day and talked about how bad we felt getting fired from our very first outside job of farming for day wages.

We caught a few sun perch and a blue gill or two. The water was clear and cool – just right for swimming. While laying in the sun drying off, we talked about how much candy and soda water that cash money would buy us. Somehow Popeye’s treating us wrong got nudged right out of our heads.

Ain’t it something how being rich and comfortable can make you forget all about your troubles?