(Since I turned four, Grand had ignored my faintly suburban first name. “Bryan is somebody’s last name. And not ours either. No, here we got a person called Willy … it’s as solid of a Willy as I’ve ever seen.” Since then I have tried becoming the pure shrewd decent country “Willy” Grand considered me. Even in my present spreading urban middle age, I work at being worthy of the name.)
“Now we finally strike my own patch of it, a relief. Good clean fun, Buck’s hog sales. Free. What us poor kids had instead of wireless or these new television sets. Maybe I was only your age and yea-high to nothing, but ‘Ears’ Grafton was all eyeballs in the front row. Here comes Little Bobby Grafton who lived in trouble and missed nothing and got punished even for things he didn’t do, but never snitched on who did. A boy like you, only maybe keener, if not so book-smart. Your daddy went to Harvard College—though I paid for it. He swears you will. Go there. He’ll have to pay. I don’t know as I approve. Your dad’s still rotten with Cambridge this and that. If you go, you’ll probably forget everything Grand here ever tried telling. But I plan to anyhow. Nobody can say my Willy never learned what ‘Lancaster’s mule’ means. Sure I was scrappier and smarter than you are now—but not by much, so don’t pout so.
“Was the morning after last night’s mule sale, was during a hog auction, with Buck conducting bidding at forty miles a minute (who else would he trust to do it?). Say Buck was making regular waltz music and a sermon from his morning’s shoat sale, when in blunders our young hayseed. Boy’s definitely gnawing his lower lip, dark in the face, hat pulled low, leading the selfsame mule (all dusty now, limping bad, one eye closed). The farmer also totes a huge aught-aught shotgun, old-fashioned even for then. Quite the hush falls over everything, hogs included. Hogs are smart, Will. A hog loves its life.
“Soon as Buck spots that musket, which just looks loaded, he signals everybody to please hold still, not run for cover. Not yet. Using eyebrows only, he hints how his hirelings should sneak behind the customer, disarm him. And you can wager that during all of this, Buck kept the last and highest hog bid in his head. Didn’t his very name have a ‘Buck’ in it? He grins. ‘So, my agriculturally minded young friend, returned to the scene of earlier glories, I see. What, sir, can we do for you today?’
“At this the farmer gets to breathing funnier, hiccuping, little stray burps roll out—uncontrolled, we’re talking here. ‘What can you do? What can you do?’ His red face under the straw brim goes toward purple. “More like undo, you double-dipping jackal. You might could give me my durn money back with interest and travel expenses. Is one thing you might could do. To save your hide. I’m here to announce before every other fool present, Mr. Lancaster, that me, my precious wife and six children—we consider you a … flesh-eating liar and a thief.’
“Certain murmuring rises. Even hogs squeal some, like whistling. A hog knows a insult when he hears it; a hog is so smart that he can … Hogs are smart. But not that smart, Will. What is it about you makes me tack on extra stuff?
“‘Those’—Lancaster stands taller—‘constitute strong words, stranger.’ (He’s secretly signing his hog gaffers to sneak up from behind.) Meantime, Lancaster stalls by checking his famous pocket-watch. The case chimes open, its usual hymn ‘Work for the Night Is Coming.’ Buck rolls eyes through barn roof and heavenward.
“Hirelings whip off their hats to prove how religious Buck is. Lancaster does a silent ‘Amen,’ grinning down the gun’s very barrel. ‘Come, let us reason together. As says the Book. Take it you had a bit of trouble managing your new animal?’
“‘Trouble? Trouble? Mr. Snake, I’m up before sunrise, planning to get a full day’s work from this critter I paid way too dear for. Broke out the new harness. Even combed my own hair. Overdid, I admit it. My wife and young ones line along our fence, smiling, half asleep. Well, our noise wakes the new mule. Seems a good sign. He trots out of the barn. He takes him a deep breath. Well, that strikes us all as a pretty good sign. A lot of nodding from folks on the fence to me, from me back to them at the fence, then back to …’
“‘Get on with it,’ Buck snaps, bold—even at gunpoint. That Buck! We should all be more like him.
“‘My new mule breaks into a full trot (extra good sign). Mule heads straight toward the only oak tree in my paddock. Mule knocks hisself clean out. Lays there, cold-cocked, panting in the dust. Well, me and my family eyeball each other. Mule finally comes around, shakes his head, picks hisself up, leans on the tree for help. I’m thinking: Could happen to any creature, just overeager is all. Pounds into the side of my barn. Hits so hard—half the hay I spent all Saturday getting up there drops. Not real good of a sign. Every time he came to, got his bearings, he’d gallop slap into some fence, wagon, barn, tree, barn, barn, tree, fence. Lancaster—I don’t mind telling you and all these fellow suckers, my wife and babies just stood at our fence crying. They acted disappointed in my judgment. And I’m man enough to admit: made me cry, too. So, you latrine-mouthed coyote—I am here to get a total refund or your life, one. Because, Lancaster, you done went and sold me a blind mule!”
“Now, Willy, Lancaster rocks back on his heels, sizes up the moment like it is for sale. ‘My good man,’ Lancaster says, thumbs crooked into vest pockets, watch chain dangling, and him staring out at the auction crowd, getting folks ready. ‘My good man, that mule ain’t blind. That mule just don’t give a damn.’
“Well, everybody fell out. In such hooting, somebody yanked the rifle off the unhappy customer. Buck offered him a new seeing-eye mule, plus let him keep the first one. But the poor fellow’s Pitt County reputation was ruined, permanent, because he’d tried to buy a mule … help me out here, Willy, who from?”
“Lancaster especially!”
“And at when …?”
“At pitch-black dark night!” My eyes nearly popped, that cooperative with the story. I breathed deeper, as if we’d just come a great distance at a hard gallop, which we had.
“Why, I should say so. Anyhow, from that very minute forward, all around here for three counties easy, folks just fell in love with saying that. Found it… useful, as a story. And ever since, whenever people my age and your daddy’s speak of anybody doing crazy and being wild and trying whatever strikes them and not minding banging their heads against whatever’s in the way—well, we call them what, Willy?”
Solemn, I answered.
“And odd part—even though that poor mule was blind—what caught on was Lancaster’s turning its being blind into a joke that saved his neck. So, see, Will, a good story, if it comes at just the right second, adds up to something. Slips into folks’ everyday talk. And this whole one I’ve told—to keep you from ending up crazy-mean and by your lonesome, plus because you’re young yet and have missed so much good stuff that came before you, stuff that surely won’t strike ever again—it all stays crated up forever in those four words.”
Silently I practiced.
“Moral being today—you’d best straighten up and do right or you’ll quit being my pick of the litter. Plus, nobody’ll ever come near you. You don’t want to end up corraled all alone, do you, son?”
I wagged my head No, sir. I turned then—my back fitted against Grand’s front. I shifted my weight to his opposite hipbone. That way, maybe I wouldn’t hurt one arthritis place so much. Speckled arms locked around me matter-of-factly. The chair wheezed. We both seemed heavier now his tale was done. Sawdust probably trickled onto Grandmother’s inherited rug, an hourglass-spill running straight out of us. From the porch: voices of women and men (political fighting), bickering grandkids (contested toys).
One of my heavier aunts now bounded past our chair, rushing toward the bathroom. (She always waited till the last moment, afraid she’d miss something good, then she had to gallop. Family joke—one of many.) “Oh,” Auntie said, startled. “Oh, you all. It’s chilly in here. I don’t know why you don’t come outside like sociable people.” I planned scoffing at her when I heard Grand, asleep already. Farm sinew thrumme
d, two short questioning snores. To avoid talking back to Auntie or apologizing, I shut my eyes (an old man’s trick).
The bathroom door double-locked. One uncle outside laughed. “Says who? Where’s that law written?” Shocking, how many others still jabbered out there, ignorant, unsteady, too up-to-date. Poor pygmies-of-the-present—offered nothing but shrinking crawl space. The future alone would allow us decent headroom. Thanks to vitamins and rocket travel, we’d be bigger-headed but heroic. Each our own car pool, flying out safe in front.
From my throne within a farmer’s ropy arms, I found I really pitied the weak, the living. Our Dead were giants who’d done battle. The last word stayed theirs. Grand had filled me up with them. My gossip was the gossip of the dead. At ten, I saw it as prediction. At ten, I still believed in the future.
This shadowed house felt cool and blue, full of ticking clocks I hadn’t noticed while he talked. Ten Swiss mantel clocks—wound every single American Monday morning since 1911. A front porch blazed, ice-tea glasses clinked. Another endless sneezy summer afternoon.
GRAND BREATHED beneath me. He seemed to breathe for me. I thought, Us two, we’ve just picked to be disguised as earthlings a while, see.
Earthlings for now. I nodded, sleepy. My ambitious ears lightly touched Grand’s cotton shirt sleeves. His front felt spongy, gigantic underneath me. Mulch and trampoline—my past.
Auntie finally prissed back by us, then turned, tugging at her hemline, centering her belt. She’d smudged on lipstick. As I watched with one eye, she gummed red marks onto a doubled Kleenex, then studied her own mouth-track. She read it like some love note from the future. “So [blot] which one’s he been [blot] trying to tell you today, Bryan? He always exaggerates, honey, don’t you believe a third of what he says.” My eyes pressed shut so tight they quivered. Then Grand and me were left alone, somehow more male for the interruption.
His chair was orange and under him—ugly, comfortable. He was mottled pink and orange and under me. He was a crank. I was a crank in training. He was shy around others. He saved his best for me. He had big ears. I had huge ears, grand ones.
And I believed the man: I’d better straighten up, fly right. Otherwise I might get stuck alone in some future cold-as-space. (Boy, what a waste that’d be, especially considering my straight-A record and how basically nice I was!) I practiced mumbling the new term many different ways. It’d prove useful up ahead. “The future” would be lots better than just “later on.” Wouldn’t it? I now reached down, I touched the roof of one cracked hand.
I was ten years old. I didn’t know: the future would do anything. “Crazy as Lancaster’s mule.”
2. EVENTUALLY …
THE OLD MAN enjoyed few great local successes. He prospered in a small-time way. Little Bobby Grafton was the hero of no story but my own, which this partly is. I found his tales entertaining till I turned thirteen, suddenly too old for them, for him. His favorites always featured other slickers in the leading roles. Maybe my grandmother’s fondest stories put her Bobby front and center. She’s dead, of course. But I’m not.
Grand was a steady, half-religious, usually quiet fellow, a major buyer of Kiwanis Club peanuts and Brooms by the Blind. He let himself be dragged to church on Christmas and Easter only. He was a great one for crime magazines and subscribed to three. Bobby considered these superb bathroom reading. My grandmother bought chintz book covers to improve his latest “numbers.”
Grand stayed one of those gentler sideline small-town guys who’re always there when it happens, expert witness to others’ triumphs. “Hey, Bobby? Come over here and tell these people how I told off that rude waitress that time, remember?” And he would: he’d block it out at his own farming pace, promoting the cad to a regular hero. People loved “Ears” Grafton for his skill at making them look bigger.
Though ridiculously and unprofitably honest himself, he admired the scams of strangers. He collected lore concerning folks who walk to the corner store for a newspaper and are never seen again and who’ve embezzled millions. “Untold millions,” I once heard him dreamily say. In 1962, Grand drove as far as Cary, North Carolina, just to see a Wachovia bank that’d been held up the previous Friday. He spoke about one bullet hole in a plate-glass door; he mentioned it so often that Ruth, his dignified wife, took to screaming and covering her ears and running from the room. A mild person, he lent cash to many souls in town. Who soon forgot. Bobby hated cruelty but loved pure nerve. In others. From behind his Raleigh News and Observer, he would chuckle, “That Mickey-the-Mouse-Mask robber has sure pulled a good one this time. Listen up, honey.”
MY GRANDMOTHER’S gall was just the kind that Little Bobby admired.
The august former Ruth Eder Pitt was ingenious as any Buck Lancaster, though fitted for more genteel purposes. She was a finely made woman with big incongruous jolly breasts. Her hair must’ve been nearly four feet long come morning before she again wove it against her head, tight as a beautiful basket you might buy. Bobby could sit all day on the porch rereading back-issue True Detective; Bobby entertained chums who stopped to hear enlarged versions of their own tired early exploits. “Yeah,” they smiled. “I guess I was, I guess I did.”
Ruth interrupted, aiming Bobby toward whatever profit he ever earned. The young Miss Pitt, in 1909, enjoyed some money of her own. She forever after called this “Bobby’s seed money.” She mentioned it fairly often. She saw her nest egg gained or lost in Grafton’s every business deal. (My family’s recent joke about our Ruth: “She was from the Pitts.”)
When I was ten, Grand still owned six rental homes on a street nobody would choose but where many lived anyway. Bobby collected the rent himself. “Only seems fair.” If a tenant’s excuse for this month’s lack of cash got stated in a vivid, well-told tale, Grand might just let him slide. For a month or three.
“Mr. Grafton, sir, you’re never going to believe this but I swear it on a stack of Bibles, and if you don’t trust me, ask my Wanda (Wanda, haul your sweet carcass out here, sugar). My foreman down to the mill has got it in for me. Just does. Large-boned fellow, sir, and on Thursday—was it Thursday, Wanda? so I suspected—in he comes big as life, one serious grudging look in his eye, that if looks could kill—and they can, Mr. G., for a person half as sensitive as I unfortunately am—bring the coffee, Wanda, bit of white-lightning sweetener in that for you, Mr. G.? So here my foreman comes, saying, ‘I just hate your face, son,’ at which point I, being a proud man—poor, sir, but proud—just had to carry that sledgehammer out toward his fancy new Studebaker. Well…so then things sure heated up quick …”
Grand leased two corner groceries in Falls’s black district along Sunflower Street. Few black merchants sold on long-term credit. But at stores Grand owned, if some debtor happened to be on hand the day Mr. Grafton arrived (folks hung around like attending some audition)—and if the debtor could then play a handy blues guitar for the boss man and his best-looking grandson—breaking an Orange Crush bottle against a nearby brick and using its neck to mute and sift sounds till you heard a train whistle getting nearer—and at night!—well, that man’s bill was permitted to coast for another little while.
When Grand drove his black Packard home from some rent-collecting trip, arriving empty-handed (except for a string of gamey sunfish, one new tune, and three excellent almost-new hard-luck stories), his bosomy, beautifully appointed wife stood waiting by the front door. “Where is it?” Ruth held out her hand. She belonged to that generation where the wife was often depicted clasping her single weapon—a rolling pin. I haven’t seen a rolling pin since 1960.
Ruth said, “It’s like slave days for Little Bobby Grafton here. Only without anybody’s being required to actually work for us. Slave owners fed their slaves—and that part he remembers. Meanwhile, we can’t even get the front yard mown, and here he is off feeding and clothing half of our Negro community just for the pleasure of their charming excuses. I’ve never seen anything like it. If it weren’t for my poppa’s money, we’d have long
since been dragged directly to the poorhouse.”
(Grand once told me, top secret, the full inventory of Ruth’s 1909 dowry: a good rawhide suitcase, the French rug, two pig-iron bedsteads, a fifty-dollar gold piece, one ruby-chip ring, a couple of cloisonné lamps and flower vases, plus the monogrammed linens. Period.)
Grandmother often mentioned her husband’s way with clothes: “It’s not so much poor taste. Bobby has un-taste. I can send him to the finest store in driving distance, one you’d think has stocked nothing but charcoal gray for thirty-five years. But he’ll make them go to the cellar—force them, beguile them, you know how he is—and they’ll scare up some houndstooth horse-blanket thing—a mat, I won’t call it a coat, it was a sort of mat with armholes. He comes to the car holding the thing, and I promise this: you can see it through the paper bag. Admit it, Bobby. Tell them. It’s still in one of the closets in the guest room. Go get it, Bobby. Show them. Admit you chose it. If it’s not upstairs, that’s because I sent it to the vet’s and had it put down. Which would, I daresay, be the only way you could get it out of the house and prevent its actually baying at a full moon! Or something. You see, now he’s got me sounding like him. I won’t have it, do you hear me, Little Bobby? I just won’t, sir. You over there, wipe that smirk off those ears, hear?”