62
PARTISAN REVIEW
because of the drouth hay sold high with all the small farmers
peeping for it.
Mule went up on the ridge with the tractor. This was
virgin soil, rocks the size of corncribs on the east end. He
plowed all day, took a couple of hours off, plowed all night. In
the morning Elsa banged the old iron wheel for breakfast. Steve
whistled. They couldn't hear the tractor. As they were eating
their oatmeal, they heard a crawling on the porch.
It
was Mule,
red as a slug, blood bubbling from all over him.
The tractor had turned over, smashed his face in, collar
bone felt broken, o.ne arm torn up in the biceps. Hospital was
the place for him. But there was no money. He spent most of
his
$30
a month with the little Steve saved after boozing to
make young Slim comfortable in the asylum. Murf had been
saving to get a stone on the old woman's grave. Mule wouldn't
touch Murf's. The shaggy little boss paced the room. "I know
how you feel, man. I promised you fellows bonuses, couldn't
give them because the mill took it all. It ain't a spider in me.
That mill's got me coming and going." He screwed up his un·
shaven face, couldn't look his foreman in the eye.
Mule was in a bad fix. Even the tractor gone back on him.
He wouldn't let them move him from bed, let him greenrot away.
Here Elsa stepped in. She would nurse him. She hovered
over him with her long nails like a brier patch and the smell of
hot bread and meat mixed with the milky smell of a woman who
is in good health and sweats easily. Or she sat near the window
peeling potatoes, her neck bent so you could see the bone and the
hair yellowish, thick enough for cropping.
Steve kept his eyes cocked on her. Believing Mule fast
asleep, he breathed out once, "What a rump she's built up for
herself. Fattened out like a smokehouse." His face twitched,
his eyes watered as if he had been given a blow in his nose.
Mule roared out, "You heller, good-for-nothing rumhound
getting ready for trouble
I"
Steve fell back. "I'm my own boss, damn you."
Mule kept getting queerer the more girl tended to him. He
lay for hours, the big bones of his hands heaped on his sunken
stomach. Evenings when the two men and the housekeeper kept
him company, he never said a word, his face yanked to the wall.
Murf said, "Here's a good riddle, people. Why's a woman
a better haypitcher than a man?"
Steve slapped his knees, guffawing.
