Elegy For The Mule Out Back || Fiction || Brandon Cory Brock (B. C. Brock)
Elegy For The Mule Out Back
They buried the old mule out back, behind the shed. Put him under the chinaberry tree that never bloomed quite right. Mama always said the ground over there was too hard. Said the soil wasn’t decent.
Daddy dug the grave himself, then patted the earth down like he was tucking in a child. When he finished, he lit a cigarette—full flavor, bright red box. That surprised me. He hadn’t smoked in three years. He didn’t speak. Just stood there, leaning on his shovel.
I stood next to him in my church pants, knees stained brown from helping. I didn’t cry. Didn’t know if I should. Or if I even could. I asked him if he thought the mule could still hear us.
“He’s gone on,” Daddy said.
I didn’t know what that meant. I asked where he’d gone. He didn’t answer—just stared out toward the cornfield, like he was waiting for something to walk out of it. He flicked his cigarette onto the fresh dirt and said, “He went where things go when they’re too tired to pull anymore.”
I wanted to dig him back up. I was scared he’d be lonely. Daddy’s words sounded like poetry, but they felt like lies. I didn’t understand them back then. I do now.
That night at supper, I asked if we could pray for the mule. Mama said animals were already innocent—they didn’t need prayers. Daddy just chewed his food, staring into the middle distance like a man avoiding something he couldn’t outwork. Again—I understand now.
I snuck out later with a flashlight and a can of molasses. Poured it over the grave like an offering. I didn’t want the mule to go hungry, not wherever he was.
Just as the last of the molasses spilled from the can, I heard the screen door creak open and slap shut. Daddy stepped out in his undershirt, barefoot, cigarette already lit. The smoke trailed behind him like train steam. He walked up slow, quiet, and stood beside me.
“I know what you’re thinkin’,” he said. “The first death hits different. It’s like the earth cracked open. Feels like the first should also be the last. But it ain’t.”
“Will you die too?”
He took a drag and exhaled. “Yep. But not for a while yet.”
“What about me?”
“Someday,” he said. “Yeah.”
We stood there under the chinaberry tree that still refused to bloom, staring up at stars that blinked like they knew all our secrets and wouldn’t share a one. The mule never got a headstone. Just grass growing thick where we laid him.
