Waking up with the Mules
~ Lucky Owens’s last keynote speech at the Groundhog Hoedown — February 2, 1972 ~
First thing I get asked everywhere I tell stories is how I come up with them. In the handout you got when you came in the door is the wrote-down version of the first story I won a prize for telling. My black lung has me too short of wind these days to give a speech and tell a tale the same day so I’d really appreciate it if you will pay close attention to my speech before you try to read the prizewinner they handed out.
For the most part, I’m stumped by the question of where I get my stories, but to keep the floor today for all the time they’ve allowed me, I have to give the background of how I come up with the story you are holding in your hand.
Since it was the first story I won a prize for, it’s as good a place as any to try to unlock the secret of where I’ve gotten the inspiration for my prizewinners. My wife Betty told me I should say keeping my secret all these years was because I didn’t think you all considered me a leader with all the commensurate gravitas needed therefor.
“Come across as just an ordinary person today,” she said. [Lucky sips.]
Coming across as an ordinary person is hard for me to do with a straight face: I myself have give enough speeches at conventions and hoedowns around these hills and hollers and got good enough at lying that some wonder out loud why I don’t run for mayor.
But here goes: There won’t be many more years I’ll be able to stand up here and tell stories. About all I’m fit for these days is to open up the show. Today, before I turn it over to you young fellers, I want to pass along the tip I received many years ago from Rockin’ Chair John, God rest his soul. I hope young fellers out there with more wind than I have will keep Rockin’s torch burning.
Rockin’ gave me my best storytelling tip 25 or 30 years ago, before some of you older storytellers had ever heard of a TV. I was over at the TV store looking at one, thinking about buying it when Rockin’ came on it talking about storytelling.
I never missed listening to Rockin’ every week on the Richmond radio station unless the signal was bad. I did turn it off when I couldn’t hear Rockin’ for the static.
That day he come on the TV at the TV store and told me about using a tape recorder. I had just started stopping telling stories to myself to save my wind to tell them to other people. Anyway, the tape recorder wasn’t the important part of Rockin’s tip — using it to capture word for word his dreams of mules and listening to them, first thing — even before coffee — was the thing that struck me like a thunderbolt. Dreams of mules as a source of stories never occurred to me. [Lucky takes a deep draw from an oxygen mask.]
Even before I heard Rockin’s tip — even before we named our storytelling club — us in the Blue Ruby Liar’s Club met down at the Blue Ruby Diner on Saturday after breakfast to tell true stories, mostly about the past week. Somehow we started exaggerating things we claimed we’d accomplished when we was young enough to be good at what we was trying to do, which would have been before any of us knew each other.
The storytelling crowd got big enough and the stories long enough that I set it up with Sammy so we could also meet Sundays for lunch at the diner. On Sundays I wouldn’t even stop to change out of my church clothes, just drop Betty at home and come in to the diner. Sammy gave us the big round table they had before they went to all booths, a discount on the Sunday chicken dinner, and let us set there ’til supper if it took that long. One free refill. Betty was just as happy to have Sunday dinners off.
I was still a miner at the time Rockin’ come on TV and I didn’t own a tape recorder, not that I knew how to use one. I didn’t know how accurate tape recorders could be, nor how valuable they could be for a storyteller until I saw Rockin’ that day. Stories had to stay in my head or somebody had to tell stories in person like Rockin’ did every Saturday night on the radio. The day I saw them talking to Rockin’ on TV, I come away wishing I had the nerve to try a tape recorder. [Lucky takes a sip, a draw of oxygen, and wipes his brow.]
In that news special he was sitting on his front porch in a rocker about like Betty bought me a birthday ago. Rockin’ was not near as pretty on TV as his voice made him on radio, which told me right off how smart a man he was to tell his stories on the radio. From then on when I heard him on the radio, my ears perked up. You have to respect a man’s intelligence that knows the proper medium for his message.
Rockin’s full tip was to go in the kitchen and talk into a tape recorder as soon as you wake up every morning before your coffee is even ready.
When the feller asked him what for, I’ll never forget what Rockin’ said, “I get most of my stories out of my dreams. I noticed on my own I was remembering my dreams from my nap after lunch better, when the mules seem nearly to dance all around my bed as soon as I woke up from my nap. But with my night mules, by the time I had coffee in the morning I’d forgot what I dreamed at night. When I got involved on radio and learnt how to use a tape recorder, I got better at remembering what the night mules was telling me in my night dreams, nightmares included, although I’m not much for scary tales.” [Lucky takes a sip.]
I learnt a new word and had to smile myself when the young feller talkin’ to Rockin’ smiled and asked Rockin about his juxtaposition of “nightmares” and “night mules” in the same thought. Made me think the young feller might’ve plowed with a horse not a mule at some point in his life.
Being still in coal mining. I was too ignorant to even know I had a use for a tape recorder. Even when I found out, I was still skittish about paying all that money for a machine I guessed was smarter than me. I just took Rockin’s hint about mule dreams and tried to make it fit my circumstances.
I started remembering my mule dreams to Betty every morning without telling her what it was for. She’d get up early with me to fix my lunch, usually fry a couple of thin-cut pork chops and warm some pinto beans for my thermos, and wrap some of yesterday’s cornbread; and send me off to work after a hot breakfast of sausage, and its gravy, and biscuits. And eggs. If I wanted eggs. [Lucky sips.]
After Rockin’s tip, before I got a tape recorder, it got so most mornings, just from tryin’, I woke out of a dream about mules the night before. I’d wake Betty up and tell her what I dreamed and ask her to remind me of it the next morning. It got easier to remember my mule dreams.
Betty said once when I woke her up, she wished I was on a radio so she could turn me off — Betty has always said about herself that she was never a morning person. I still hadn’t worked up the nerve to try a tape recorder so I told her I wished I had a radio show too so I could learn how to use a tape recorder and not have to aggravate her with mule stories. That was all the hint she needed. [Lucky takes a draw of oxygen.]
That first Christmas in the year I started telling Betty my mule dreams back in that April, she didn’t give me a tape recorder for a Christmas present. She gave me one as an after-Christmas present, which she got at a big discount. There was a big package strapped to it of free tapes to learn on.
It wasn’t but a few days after she gave it to me before she said if I wanted to catch up storytelling with LeRoi, who’d already started to use a tape recorder, I ought to wait ’til she woke up and set up in the bedroom and close the door and tell it my dreams every morning while she was fixing breakfast. I read the instructions and learned how to use it in less than three weeks. It was some more accurate than Betty at remembering and a lot better at not getting agitated.
I found out a year or two later from Pearl Slemp that I was so good at dreaming about mules because I was raised around them and they made a big impression on me. It was my undermind that was impressed. I think Pearl said it was what the undermind’s main job was. She didn’t know I had a tape recorder by then that was helping me remember my dreams. LeRoi claimed he was getting good at his tape recorder, too, but what he didn’t know about was dreaming about mules.
Pearl bragging on me was enough hint for me that they probably was just waiting for me to start telling my mule stories down at the diner. I told the diner crowd I was dreaming about mules a lot was the reason I was talking so much about mules, but I didn’t let on that I was dreaming about mules on purpose from the tip I heard from Rockin’.
It finally got out that I was learning to use a tape recorder. For a while we stopped telling stories to talk about tape recording. The ones who didn’t own tape recorders finally voted to put a limit on how long you could talk about good brands of tapes and when to stop it and how to get to a spot fast by looking at the speedometer on it without having to listen carefully and how you could talk right over what was already on the tape. After they voted in the limit, I heard LeRoi kept talking about tape recorders over at the pool hall. [Lucky takes a sip.]
Must have been the third or fourth annual Storytellers’ Retreat at the Groundhog Hoedown after it was shifted to Blue Ruby, Rockin’ was sick and couldn’t give the keynote speech. He died the next year and I been giving this speech ever since. The way I’m feeling today one of you out there will be giving it next year.
The year before Rockin’ got sick I won first prize for a story about Otis, the big, blue-nosed mule, which was the first story I told out in public after I started using Rockin’s tip, and is the one — printed on both sides — in the package you got when you came in the auditorium and ought to be looking at right now.
After I told Otis’s story, a young feller who worked for a newspaper down in Arkansas and was here trying to learn to write stories instead of tell them out loud asked if he could interview me for his newspaper and would I take the time after the interview to repeat the story of Otis. He offered — without me asking — to pay me $50 in cash money for the interview and as much as his newspaper would pony up in the form of a check for Otis’s biography if he could convince the powers that be to publish it. He was sure Otis’s biography would be a big seller over at Missouri. They love mules over at Missouri.
Even though I didn’t know I had black lung at the time — that it was what was causing me to get short of breath — I did warn that young feller up front I was born short of breath, which I thought I had been. I’d started having to take sips of water to make it through most stories and speeches. Sometimes in other places than you’ve heard me I’d ruin a story with coughing fits until I learned about water sips. But I did tell that Arkansas feller he could come back in August for the Blue Ruby Pawpaw Fry and get a full-winded version of the story for free. At the Fry then they’d already started bringing in outside celebrities to give their keynote speech and they just allowed me to tell one story. [Lucky takes a sip, a long draw of oxygen, and wipes his brow.]
The young feller told me it was a long way back from Arkansas to Virginia on the bus and would cost him two days and more than $50 to get back. It sounded like from Virginia to Arkansas was just as long, if I ever wanted to go there. He was scared of planes, which he would learn in the interview we had in common.
He finally agreed to give me $150 for a package that included the interview and something called first rights for Otis’s biography. He said the publicity’d cause other publications to want to publish it and make me more money in the form of checks, which he said was the same as money when they came from publications.
I was not to worry about coughing; he was staying two more days, time enough to tape record what I said. We could leave the same tape in the machine ’til I stopped coughing and start it again the second I was better. Once he got Otis’s autobiography wrote down, I’d not have to worry about being short of breath from then on. He said he’d make it so the water sips didn’t show up in the written story the way they come out on the machine. He was a lot better at a tape recorder than I ever got.
After I told him the story you have in your hand, in the end of the interview, he scrinched his left eye closed, scratched at his chin, and wondered out of the right side of his mouth whether Rockin’ Chair John hadn’t said “muse” not “mules.” When he explained what a muse was and described what a Greek one of them looked like, and listening to the way I pronounced mules just like muse made me wonder myself, made me blush out loud as a matter of fact, made me cringe at all the young folks I must have puzzled all these years.
I tried to stop the deal. Even told him he could have the interview and Otis’s life story for free if he wouldn’t print the part about me giving out Rockin’s tip about mules. He said he wasn’t interested unless I let him tell the story just like I told it.
He’d tell people in Arkansas I’d been fooled by my ears into hearing mules. He promised on his mother’s grave he’d testify that the day he was here I had come to the Hoedown with clean ears, which was proof enough for him my ears was clean when I heard Rockin’. I tried to remember to him that a big 19-inch TV must have fallen off a shelf just as Rockin’ Chair John said “muse.”
He wanted to pay me with a $100 and a $50 bill, which was only the second fifty and the first hundred I’d ever seen. He finally agreed to go across to the bank and change them for fifteen $10 bills and add one more ten so I could divide them up, four to a pocket in case I wore a hole in one of my pockets and one bill got out. [Lucky takes a sip.]
The next year at the Hoedown, I ducked the young feller from Arkansas. I was ashamed to tell him my dreams was still contrary as Grandma. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t wake up with a muse. I didn’t want to admit to the young feller I’d forgot what one of them muses would look like if you put him in a Greek harness.
Even today, more mornings than not, I’m waking up with Otis or one of Daddy’s short-legged mining mules instead of a muse pulling a story through my mind.
The story I had them hand out to you is wrote down, but it’s the first mule story I ever told Betty at breakfast, straight out of my dreams. It may not be as true as my later versions when I got good with the tape recorder Betty bought me.
Please read my first prizewinner. My throat is beginning to tickle and I’m getting short of breath. When I catch my breath, I’ll be out in the lobby to answer your questions. I will see you next year… [Lucky breaks into a coughing fit that sips don’t stop. Two male nurses come to the lectern with a wheelchair and help him into it and affix the oxygen mask on his face.]
∞ ∞ ∞
Best I can figure back, I was around nine or ten years old that early morning. It was a little after the sun come up and we were without the fixings for a decent breakfast. When I come in the kitchen, there were tears on Grandpop’s face and he was snuffling real loud. He was trying to convince Grandma we should eat Otis, his blue-nosed plow mule.
Otis was one of your best field mules before he died that morning at the end of a furrow. He was most of the way through his spring plowing chores.
Finding out he was dead relieved my mind some considerable. I didn’t want us to kill him just ’cause we was restless-hungry.
Otis was too long-legged to work in most mines and, even if he’d took a job in mines with a high ceiling, his hooves were too big to be nimble in bad light. In bad light he’d forever’ve been stubbing his toe on lumps of coal or crillin’ his ankles on rails or ties.
But put Otis in broad daylight and he was one of your seven wonders. He had your big hooves to keep him from sinking in plowed ground and he, as his best trick, could dance a jig pulling a harrow after he plowed a field.
COME TO REMEMBER, I MAY’VE been older’n ten. I had a full mouth of second teeth I could’ve eat even a stringy mule with if Grandpop was just able to talk Grandma into fixing Otis for us.
I was still Archibald Moses Owens when Otis died so I know for sure it was several years before I’d lost all my permanent teeth but three, which was when Cicero Kilgore gave me the name Lucky. I thought of this when I first remembered the story out loud to Betty and had just got my partial plates.
The day I got the nickname Lucky hung around my neck, I was bragging to the diner crowd that Betty got up and fried me two pork chops most days for lunch. Cicero chuckled how ‘lucky’ I was that two of the three teeth I had left met. I tried to tell everybody Betty fried pork chops a way they was easy to tear off in bites you’d not have to chew, but Cicero still wouldn’t stop laughing. Kept saying those two teeth meeting was about like winning the Irish sweepstakes. Cicero later tried to make out it was his twin Caesar gave me the name Lucky but it was Cicero kept calling me Lucky after that.
Anyway, I know Otis died when I remember Grandpop and Grandma still alive and Grandpop still using a plow mule… so I was some age for sure.
GRANDPOP MUST HAVE SAID FIVE times at the breakfast table the morning Otis died that he was as good a friend as Otis had on Earth but Otis’s earthly problems were over and Otis no longer minded being eaten.
Grandpop reminded Grandma — but only once — he wouldn’t mind being eaten if it was him instead of Otis at the end of his furrow.
Grandma’s argument against eating Otis was that Otis had a Christian name. Grandma wouldn’t eat any animal with a Christian name even if Grandpop had a recipe he was proud of.
Was Grandma going to ast her preacher to give Otis a Christian burial? Grandpop didn’t have the strength to bury a mule on a empty stomach and he wouldn’t ask any man to — includin’ Grandma’s preacher. Ask her preacher to conduct the buryin’ and he’d sit on the front porch prayin’ for God’s intervention. While he was tryin’ to talk the mule into the ground, he’d gain weight eatin’ chicken and biscuits we’d have to borry. When he left for the day, Otis’d be layin’ where he was, and we’d be another fryer in the Porters’ debt.
As with most days when the mines hadn’t been working a full schedule, the day Otis died we were just restless-hungry. In my recall we never got weak-hungry in the Kraft household. Grandma said there were four or five lumpers in the root cellar, three or four cups of corn meal in the pantry, a slab of fatback about the size of your hand in the salted meat bin… Tomorrow there’d be eggs she thought… Lucy Layer and Samantha Setter had taken the day off today.
Grandma said she’d been saving almost a gallon of cold buttermilk in the springhouse for biscuits when we got flour. We’d git by with the Lord’s help, plus Daddy was bringing flour home when he got off the graveyard shift. And coffee. And they might be something in the muskrat traps if she could just get Grandpop off his derriere to go check.
Grandpop got up and went outside. He started walking from one end of the porch to the other. He’d look around the corner of the house out at Otis at the southwestern corner of the cornfield; then on his return trip he’d look northeast down the hill in the direction of the big stump hole he knew of but was too far off to see.
Otis had pulled the stump years ago.
The hole was far enough away from the house we wouldn’t be able to smell Otis unless we had a nor’easter, but it’d take half a day to drag him there even if Otis had been born with ball bearings. Even if Otis had had ball bearings, Grandpop told me we’d still need to walk down and borry Oatsie, Otis’ twin sister, from the Porters to drag him to the hole.
Grandpop come back in and reminded us about rigor mortis. When he found Otis was dead instead of tired, he tucked his legs up under him first thing. He told Grandma that just so’s she wouldn’t accuse him of wanting to eat Otis right off. The stump hole was big enough to fit Otis with his legs tucked; the pile of rocks beside the hole was enough to cover him with. Grandpop talked for a while about how foresightful he’d been to leave the northeast hole. Mules die, he seems to remember thinking at the time he was saving the stump hole and the pile of rocks he dug out to make it easier on Otis to pull the stump.
Grandma said it was him taking credit for God’s blessed gift. She finally gave Grandpop part credit for keeping the hole and the rocks, but she seemed to remember recognizing at the time the stump hole might be a heavenly gift, even if she had nagged Grandpop nearly every day to fill it.
Grandpop stopped pacing long enough to propose a compromise: Maybe we could eat Otis’ legs, maybe his neck, make him a little rounder so’s to roll the rest of him down to the hole? We could roll the round part of him into the hole today and cover him with enough rocks to keep the buzzards from getting to him before he was resurrected.
Talk of resurrection, and big rocks, and buzzards getting at him, got the hole he would have to dig for Otis deeper for Grandpop. Grandma lit in against burying Otis with his legs bent, saying he’d be stiff at the Resurrection. Grandpop talked her out of straightening Otis’s legs by saying there’d be ligaments and tendons to cut.
We all went outside and looked down to the northeast where the hole was now surrounded by Tree of Heaven saplings, some as tall as 30 feet.
Grandma decided the hole was to be dug deep enough that we — we being Grandpop — could cover Otis over with enough dirt that buzzards flying over couldn’t smell him.
Grandpop said Grandma didn’t know buzzards, they could smell people that had gone to hell.
That made her say we needed to put the rocks on top after Otis was cushioned from the rocks with screened top soil. Even if they could smell him, buzzards’d need a steam shovel and a sledge hammer to dig him up. Dust thou art and to dust thou should returneth, she said. When we met Otis in heaven she wanted him with a neck and working legs from the gitgo, even if it did take a while for him to work out the kinks Grandpop had bent him into.
Grandpop mumbled he’d now need to borrow the Porters’s soil screen too.
Then he circled back at Grandma’s doctrine: Hadn’t he heard her calling their hens and roosters Christian names? Samantha Setter? Lucy Layer? Freddy Fryer? And, what about the hogs? Since they’d been hitched, they’d killed a hog every year in late November after the first hard frost and Grandma was the first one at the pork chops, practical before they’d finished grace.
And Grandma right back at him: Had they give airy one of them hogs a Christian name? Besides chickens only got two legs. He needed to get hisself up and go borrow the Porter mule and their big rope and the screen rig.
There was her problem! Did Suze (Suze was Grandpop’s pet name for Grandma) think he hadn’t give them hogs Christian names? If she’d ever come out to watch him slop them she’d’ve heard him call every one of them ladies and gents by name at least once a day. Remember Henrietta last fall? And Percy the year before?
Grandma didn’t even look up, just kept tapping the porch slow-like with her left foot to keep her rocker going — taayup, taayup, taayup… as she nodded off into one of her holler-famous fifteen-minute naps.
Grandpop went to the baluster and kept talking towards the hole. And furthermore, it was Grandma’s daddy affirmed at their wedding mules was good to eat. Remember her daddy laid his hand on Grandma’s prize catch’s shoulder when he give them their first mule for their big gift… and implied — if he didn’t say so straight out — you could eat a mule but you couldn’t eat a tractor if it was to die on you halfway down the furrow?
Talking half under his breath, when he turned back to us, so as not to wake her up, Grandpop walked me to the end of the porch to look out at Otis. They’d not need another mule after Otis was buried — they’d just hitch Suze up to the plow, stubborn as she was. Course, he weren’t sure him having to push a plow would be any easier with her in the harness than it would be without her. It’d not surprise him none for her to start recitin’ Scripture with him runnin’ up her Achilles ankles before he realized she’d stopped to hold a outdoor Bible study without any warnin’.
He closed his eyes and put his hand on my shoulder and licked his lips. Mule was a delicacy in France… Would I tell Grandma I’d read at school mule was not only good, good, good, but better for you than pork chops?
We went back and set down and watched her until she woke up.
Grandpop told her about eating mule in France in the war and tried to tell her how good of a mule stew they could make, fat as they kept Otis. He told her to talk to me about what I heard at school and raised off the baluster like he was fixing to go off and borrow Oatsie and the timber rope and soil screen from the Porters. He said over his shoulder as he went in the house he was close to too wore out from convincin’ that he better go while he still had the energy to think about the walk down to the Porters.
I reckon Grandma could tell I was lying about hearing mule was better for you than pork chops; she just kept shaking her head and looking around at the screen door. When Grandpop heard her tapping faster — taptaptap — he could tell — from just inside the screen door — it was time to go.
Well, Suze, he was goin’ now, if it’s what it took to please, even if he was too hungry to walk down a mountainside to git Oatsie, let alone pull her back up the hill when she found out she was being asked to wake up to drag her twin brother down the hill to his grave. It was against Grandpop’s religion to ride a female mule, or any other animal that worked for a living, up a hill to drag her twin brother halfway back down the hill to bury. His own religion was for the livin’.
And he’d make dang sure it was him and not Oatsie that carried the hundred foot of heavy loggin’ rope on one shoulder and pulled the screen rig behind him. Before he’d subject Otis’s sister to such indignity.
Grandma didn’t ask me anything about eating mule after Grandpop left, but she did get up a time or two to go look off the end of the porch at Otis and then down the hill to the northeastern stump hole.
Grandma was mostly quiet at supper that night except her eyes, which went asquint on her at most things Grandpop said. Grandpop talked about Otis’s right side being skinned up pretty bad from dragging: Did she want to put some mercurochrome on Otis before they covered him over?
Or maybe she might want to move him again, this time UP the hill? Where she could look out her bedroom window at his grave before she prayed at night?
For her edification, the thought she’d want to move him again was the dadburn main reason he’d not covered Otis over already and not took Oatsie back down to the Porters. But heavens to Otis, for her not to worry: It was God’s blessing buzzards didn’t work nights.
THINGS GOT CONSIDERABLE BETTER FOR us some few years after we didn’t eat Otis, just like Grandma said they would. They found easy-to-get-to coal on a piece of ground Momma inherited and Daddy began to mine. He pulled the coal cars out of the mines with short-legged mules until they got too broke down to work a full shift.
Daddy gave every one of them mules names. He kept them on the place and gave them all quiet buryings “for the good they had done.” He wouldn’t sell them for dog food after he retired them neither. But he did quit praying over them after Grandma died.
When Daddy started keeping mules on the place, long after Otis was buried, the oldest living Porter boy started sneaking on the place to ride them while they were still alive. When King Charleroi run under a low limb, the Porter boy’s folks made him stop doin’ it to keep him from almost knocking his head off again. They told him to start using his head at school like our folks told my brother Parker Isaac — Owin’ to you all — and me.
The Porter boy finished first at school
