they decided – they wasn’t too smart, but they was good old boys – they decided they was gonna pool their money, come to Florida and go farming. Now I wouldn’t think that was too smart, but they was industrious. So they bought an old black Model A truck, and here they come south with this Model A truck, looking like the Beverly Hillbillies.
They was comin’ down Highway 27, which was a gravel road in them days, and they got just south of Ocala, and they seen a sign nailed to a live oak tree, and the sign said, ‘Plough Mule For Sale.’ Old Slem was driving the truck, and he said to his partner Clem, ‘Look at that, Clem! I forgot about that! We got to have us a plough mule.’ Said, ‘We can’t farm without a mule. Pull in there, we’ll see what that guy wants for it.’
So they pulled in this farmyard, and the guy was sittin’ there. He said, ‘Get on out, boys, get on down, come on in.’ And he said, ‘Sir, sir, we saw your sign back there says you got a plough mule for sale.’
Farmer said, ‘That’s right, and he’s a good ‘un too, son.’ Clem said, ‘Well, we want to buy a mule for farming. We’re from Atlanta.’ So the farmer heard opportunity knocking right away, see. He recognized these guys being city slickers. They said, ‘What do you want for that mule, sir?’ Farmer said, ‘I want two hundred dollars for it.’
TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS? They couldn’t believe it. Their eyes was bulging. ‘We just come from Atlanta wantin’ to be farmers. But two hundred dollars? We can’t afford that.’ Now I’m going to give you a little history here. During the depression, you could buy a ridin’ horse for five or ten dollars, but a trained, young pack mule was running a hundred seventy-five, two hundred dollars. Worked just like a tractor. Anyway, Clem said, ‘No, we just quit our jobs, we can’t afford that.’ Farmer said, ‘Well, how much money you boys got between you then?’ They said, ‘We ain’t got but twenty-five dollars.’
Well, the farmer said, ‘Boys’ – he had been peddling them old central Florida watermelons from his watermelon patch, and he had two of them left over, on a wagon over there where he’d been sellin’ em, and he was just fixin’ to bust ’em up because they was rotten, you know, and throw em over the fence and feed em to his cows – he said, ‘Boys, see them two green things over there on that wagon?’ They said, ‘Yessir.’ He said, ‘Do you know what they are?’ They said, ‘No sir, we don’t.’ He said, ‘Boys, you just happen to be looking at two of the finest mule eggs in the state of Florida, right there.’ They said, ‘Mule eggs? Never heard of such a thing.’
The storm was directly overhead at this point and the shack was shaking. Thunder followed lightning before I could start to count the seconds. About the time Colonel Rod pronounced the words ‘mule eggs,’ a lightning bolt lit up the window behind him, stinging my eyes with an instant image of cross-hatched tree branches across a background of seared white shards. I thought incongruously of the German Expressionists, and felt anxious.
The farmer said, ‘You’re lookin’ at two of the finest mule eggs in Florida. Look, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’ll let you have one of them mule eggs for five dollars.’ He said, ‘I’ll tell you what else I’m going to do. I’ll get some straw out of the barn, and I’ll make you a nest up the back of your truck. You put that mule egg in there, you throw a blanket or a jacket over it, keep it warm, and in about two weeks it’ll hatch out, and you’ll have yourselves your very own baby mule. It’ll be gentle as a housecat, and you’ll have a fine mule there.’
‘Boy, luck is on our side,’ said Clem and Slem. So he got the straw, and he made this big old nest, and they put that watermelon, I mean, ah, mule egg, up in there, and they put a blanket on it and paid the farmer, and they took off down Highway 27, comin’ south. And now I live in that part of the country. A hilly part. And they come to Clairmont, Florida. Now Clairmont is in a valley. A great big hill goes down in there, and up out the other side. Well these old boys wasn’t too smart. Here they come, they come down into Clairmont, and they did alright then, but when they started out the other side, the mule egg went, dumpty, dump, dump, dump, and it fell out in the middle of the road and – splat! – busted all to pieces. Big old pile of rotten red mess. And you know how them swamp rabbits get on the side of the road, late in the evenin’? Well, it was late in the evening, and there was a swamp rabbit standing there, and it spooked him when that watermelon hit the road, and he jumped out and got right in the middle of that red mess.
Well these two boys slammed on the brakes. Pulled over to the side of the road and jumped out, and looked back, and there sat that rabbit right in the middle of that mule egg. They said, ‘Look, he’s alive! He survived it! He’s OK! Get him! Catch him, catch him!’ And boy, they took off after this baby mule. They had five dollars tied up in him. They yelled, ‘Catch him, catch him!’
Well that old rabbit took off. He went through a briar patch, under a barbed wire fence. They chased him about a half a mile or so and they got in this kind of shape – Colonel Rod gasps like he’s dying – they just couldn’t even breathe. They couldn’t go another step. And as I said, old Clem was the smarter of the two, he was hanging on a tree, and Slem was sittin’ on a log. And Clem said, ‘Let him go, son, let him go. Just let him go. I don’t believe I want to plough that fast no-how.’
I desperately had to go to the bathroom. The storm had stopped abruptly, and Colonel Rod offered to direct me through the dark, dripping thicket of the backyard to his reproduction outhouse (also wired for light). When I got up to leave the shack, I noticed that behind me all along had been a framed photo of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., shaking hands. ‘One of my favorite possessions,’ said the Colonel, sounding like he meant it.
Back at the Mid-Florida Motel, around midnight, I sat cross-legged on my bed taking notes, thinking for some reason of Cyclorama. I had an uncanny sensation of motion. All of a sudden I realized that the floor was moving. I put my glasses on and a dozen immense, scuttling cockroaches resolved into focus. Having just read Redmond O’Hanlon’s No Mercy, his saga of traipsing through Congo with God knows how many parasites attached, I tried not to panic. But then again, this wasn’t Congo, and I had a choice. I grimly packed my things and slept – or rather lay awake all night listening to rain pelt the roof – in the back seat of the car.
The next morning I remembered I was actually in Florida, and decided to take a detour to the coast. Central Florida – actually the northwestern part of peninsular Florida – has no big hotels, no crowds, no Disney characters. The accents are rural, the land more inclined to scrub forest than cultivation or pasture. This may have been the Sunshine State, but I wasn’t in the playground part. It was still the South. And it actually looked like rain.
Colonel Rod’s cracker shacks dotted the landscape: tiny clapboard houses, often raised on cinderblocks to avoid flooding, leaning heavily on makeshift front porches. They were almost always half-hidden by shade trees, rarely exposed to the sun. I imagined dark rooms inside and mildew, windows democratically open to both breezes and mosquitoes in equal measure. In this climate it is air-conditioning that draws a line between real poverty and the lower rungs of middle-class comfort. Without artificial coolants, people still have to stop what they’re doing and sit in the shade, as they have for generations, and wait to cool off, and tell each other stories while the sweat dries (or maybe these days they just sit inside and watch TV). The majority of Southern stories aren’t about poverty any more than they are about heat or shade. They’re simply one by-product of a lifestyle that has either vanished – which is why tale-telling is so often associated with the elderly – or that we now call ‘poor.’
The sky began chucking it down. An unrelenting series of fierce rain squalls, really like thimble-sized monsoons, belted the car as I drove toward a small town on the West Coast called Cedar Key. Whenever one hit I was nearly blinded for about seven nerve-wracking minutes, and had to inch along Highway 19 at 25 mph; when it let up the windscreen revealed an unbroken flatness
