And then there was Henry and Rory.
Henry we told from the outset, but with Rory we kept it a secret; his reaction was going to be priceless (and likely the reason I agreed to it). He was already in a constant bad mood because of Hector sleeping on his bed, and sometimes even Rosy, or at least she’d just rest her snout there:
“Oi, Tommy,” he’d call across the bedroom, “get this bloody cat off me,” and “Tommy, stop Rosy’s bloody breathing.”
Tommy would try his best. “She’s a dog, Rory, she has to breathe.”
“Not near me she doesn’t!”
And so on.
We waited the rest of the week, so we could bring the mule home on Saturday. We could all be there to supervise that way, in case anything went wrong (which it might).
On Thursday we got the supplies. Malcolm Sweeney no longer had a horse trailer, so we’d have to walk him home. The best, we agreed, was early morning (trackwork hour), on Saturday, at four a.m.
The previous Thursday night, though, it was beautiful, it was four of us there with Sweeney, and Rory most likely out drinking. The sky and the clouds were pink, and Malcolm looked lovingly into it.
Tommy was brushing the mane, while Henry appraised the tools. He carried stirrups and bridles toward us, and held them approvingly up. “This shit,” he said, “we can do something with…but that thing’s bloody useless.”
He’d jerked his head with a grin at the mule.
* * *
—
And so it was—we brought him home.
On a still morning in late March, four Dunbar boys walked the racing quarter, and between us a Greek-named mule.
He’d stop sometimes by a letterbox.
He’d gangle and crap on the grass.
Henry said, “Got any dog bags?”
All of us laughed on the footpath.
What always gets me hardest is the memory of Malcolm Sweeney, crying silently by his fence line, as we walked the mule slowly away. He’d wiped at the yeast of his cheeks, and ran a hand through his frosted hair. He was moist and the color of khaki; a sad old fat man, and beautiful.
And then just simply the sound of it:
The hooves clopping over the streets.
Everything around us was urban—the road, the streetlights, the traffic; the shouts that flew right past us, from revelers out all night—and between it the rhythm of mules’ feet, as we walked him over pedestrian crossings, and crossed the empty Kingsway. We negotiated one long footbridge, and the patches of dark and streetlights:
Henry and me on one side.
Tommy and Clay on the other.
And you could set your watch to those hoofbeats, too, and your life to the hand of Tommy—as he led the mule fondly home, to the months and the girl to come.
So this is what happened:
They’d broken the unwritten rules.
There was the feel of her naked legs.
He remembered the laid-down length of her, and the plastic mound beside them; and how she moved and gently bit him. And the way she’d pulled him down.