The youngster stood, shedding hay as he clambered to his feet, shivering slightly, hunch-shouldered in dawn’s dampness. His breath huffed before his face in wispy vapors. Outside a mockingbird called. “Jest lemme explain, Pap.”
“Nothing to explain, Titus. You left off work to go traipsing the woods. Left off the mule too. No telling what’d become of her I didn’t come back to see to your work at that stump.”
The look in his father’s eyes frightened him. He could remember seeing that fire in those eyes before, yet no more in all of Titus’s sixteen years than the fingers on one of his hands. “It was getting on late in the day anyhows—”
With a sudden shove his father pushed him down the path between the two rows of stalls in that log barn. “Grab that harness.”
“Yes, sir,” he said with a pasty mouth, too scared not to be dutiful and obedient.
A rain crow cawed on the beam above him. He shuddered as his bare feet moved along the cold, pounded clay of the barn floor. But he wasn’t all that sure he trembled from the morning chill. Not knowing what would come next from his father’s hand was all it took to make the youth quake. Alone Titus had faced most everything nature could throw at this gangly youth—out there in the woods and wilderness. But he had never been as frightened of anything wild as he was of his father when Thaddeus Bass grew truly angry.
As Titus took the old mule’s harness down, his father said, “G’won, hitch her up.”
The boy pushed through the stall door and moved into the corona of warmth that surrounded the big animal. She raised her head from a small stack of hay to eye him, frost venting from her great nostrils, then went back to her meal as he came alongside her neck and slipped the bridle and harness over her.
“Bring her out to me.”
“Here, Pap,” he said, almost like whimpering. “I … I’m sorry. Never run off on the work again, I swear —”
“I don’t figure you ever will run off again, Titus,” his father snapped. “Not after I’ve learned you your lesson about work and responsibility.” He pointed to a nearby post. “Get you that harness.”
“What for? I got the mule set—”
“Jest you get it and follow me.”
He trudged after his father, out the barn door and into the muddy yard, where a faint drift of woodsmoke and frying pork greeted him as warmly as the dawn air did in cold fashion. How it did make his stomach grumble.
“Can I quick go and fetch me something to eat while we’re off to the field, Pap?”
In the gray light shed by that overcast sky the man whirled on his son. “No. You ain’t earned your breakfast yet.”
“But—I didn’t have no supper last night.”
“Didn’t earn that neither. Off lollygagging the way you was.”
He swallowed and walked on behind his father, bearing south toward the new field they were clearing. Suddenly appearing out of the low, gray sky, the bright crimson blood-flash of a cardinal flapped overhead and cried out. In the distance Titus heard the faint call of a flatboat’s horn rise out of the Ohio’s gorge. Was it one of those new keels with a dozen polemen? Or was it one of those broadhorns nailed together of white oak planks the boatmen would soon be selling by the board-foot on the levee at far-off New Orleans?
“Here, girl,” Thaddeus said as he put the mule ahead of the harnesstree and himself at her head, beginning to coax her back a step at a time. “Titus, hitch her up.”
Titus hoisted the oiled hardwood and locked both harness traces in place. Then he straightened, watching his father pat the mule between the eyes.
Gesturing toward the tangle of leather and chain his son had dropped onto the ground, Thaddeus said, “Now you hook up that harness to the tree.”
Maybe he didn’t want to know any more than he already could guess. Maybe he refused to believe his father would really make him do it. No matter—Titus didn’t ask, didn’t say a thing as he bent over his work. His cold hands trembling, he found it was a tight fit lining up all the metal clasps into the harnesstree’s lone eye, but he got it done and stood again. Shivering in the cold air as a breeze rustled the green leaves of the nearby elms.
“We gonna pull the stump out and then we go to breakfast?”
His father slapped the mule one time on the rump as he moved back to take up the reins. “We gonna pull out the stump, that’s right. We’ll see for ourselves what comes next, Titus. Now, step in that harness and cinch yourself up.”
“M-me?”
“You heard me, son.”
“Y-yes, Pap.”
For a moment longer he stood there, gazing at his father. Thaddeus had taken the long, wide leather reins into his weathered hands, shifted it all to his left, then took one long double length into his right and began to wave it over the mule’s wide back.
“You seen what your pap has to do if’n an animule ain’t obeying, ain’t you, Titus?”
Quickly, he turned and stepped into the harness. “Yes, Pap.”
“Buckle yourself in and take up the slack,” the man ordered, then ever so gently laid the long strap of leather onto the mule’s back. Obediently she leaned into her harness and raised the harnesstree off the damp ground, then stopped, awaiting the next command.
“Aside her, I’m just gonna be in the way—”
“Lean into it, boy!”
“You ain’t really gonna make me pull this stump out—”
“I’m gonna make a farmer outta you, Titus—or I’ll kill you trying. Now, lean into it, goddammit!”
“Pap!”
“There’s work you left afore it was finished, son.” Thaddeus’s eyes glowed like all-night coals.
“Lemme pull the stump out by my own self with the mule. I’ll get it done—”
“Damn right, you’ll pull it out with the mule,” his father growled, savagely bringing the leather strap down on the animal’s back.
With a sudden snap she lowered her head, bobbing, her front quarters reaching forward for a purchase on the slick ground as her rear hooves dug in and both muscled haunches rippled while she locked herself against the stump.
Beside the snorting, heaving animal Titus pushed against the wide, soaped harness so hard, his feet lost their bite on the muddy ground. He spilled onto his hands and knees.
“Get up, boy!” the man bellowed. “Git, git, git!” He coaxed more effort out of the mule.
Leather stretched and the thick-linked log chain hummed as everything that could give was taken out of the links and latigo. Now it was nothing more than muscle and sinew and will against what grip this piece of ground still had on the stump.
Titus struggled back up, sickened, wobbly, nearly the whole of him covered in mud now. Looping his soppy hands inside the harness, he struggled to plant his bare feet again as the mule lurched forward a few inches. That sudden slack between him and the harnesstree they shared flung the youth into the mud once more.
“You ain’t pulling, Titus! Giddup!”
“Dammit, Pap!” he spat, his mouth filled with the damp earth once more.
“What’d I tell you ’bout cursin’?” and he laid the leather strap down on the mule’s back just enough to get her to strain forward again with those powerful rear haunches.
Titus’s thin neck swelled, bulging as his hands cramped around the harness lashed tightly across his filthy work shirt. Pushing this hard, he was sure something inside him was bound to burst.
“That’s it, son! Put your back into it and work with the animal! Work with her—not agin ’er!”
Out of the corner of his eye Titus glanced at the big mule; then he slowly turned to stare at her as he strained every muscle in the effort. Entranced, all but mesmerized by the two streams of vapor issuing from those great moist nostrils of hers. Then she seemed to roll her eyes his way as if to remind him that he was supposed to pull in tandem with her.
“Git, git, git!” Thaddeus clucked behind them.
Back against the harness he flung himself anew when he heard the leather crack across the mule’s broad back. In the next instant he pitched forward again as she wrenched more of the stump from the ground.
