recently visited my only surviving sister, the occasion was her nintieth birthday, and she brought out a box of pictures and newspaper clippings that I hadn't looked at in ages. One of the clippings was dated over sixty years ago and was an article about a mule we once owned named Beck. What had made Beck newsworthy was she had just turned forty, or so my father claimed. He was quoted in the article as saying, "I know that's right because she was born two years before my oldest daughter and she's thirty-eight."
But Beck hadn't been in our possession all that time. Somewhere along the way, my father had sold her, and then several years later had bought her back. My father was a horsetrader by avocation, and had bought old Beck at an auction along with three or four other animals, and when he got her home and took a closer look, he was amazed to recognize her as the same mule he had owned years before. I don't know how he knew. By and large, one mule looks like another to me, but he claimed to have recognized certain markings and peculiarities.
"Besides," he said, "she remembered me and walked right up to me." Well, some might argue with that kind of evidence, but I never did.
Beck, if indeed it was her, figured in one of the family legends. It happened soon after the birth of my eldest sister and long before my time. My father was breaking up a piece of ground he had rented where a house had once stood, using Beck and a one-horse plow. He heard a cracking beneath his feet, and then the earth opened up and dropped him and the plow into a deep hole. My father plummeted on to the bottom, but the plow hung suspended by one of the trace chains until Beck gave a lunge and opened up a link in the chain and the plow came down, too. My father had enough presence of mind to hug the wall of the hole, so the plow missed him.
Looking up, my father could see what had happened. The hole was an abandoned cistern. Someone had recklessly laid boards across the top and pulled dirt over them. The boards had eventually rotted and weakened. Beck's passing had cracked them, and my father and the plow had finished the job. Cisterns in that day were bottle-shaped holes, maybe fifteen feet deep and eight feet in diameter, narrowing to three at the neck, and plastered to hold water. The plaster had long since cracked and fallen off this one, but it was fairly dry, so my father was in no immediate danger, unless Beck, who was stomping around above, happened to get too near and came in on top of him.
"Go home!" my father hollered at Beck. "Go home and get me some help!"
And that's what she did. She showed up at the back screen door and hee-hawed for attention. My mother, seeing she was dragging her trace chains, thought, "Good lord! Something has happened to Andy," and she grabbed up my sister and headed for the fields with Beck trotting along just ahead of her. Beck led her right to the hole, and when she looked in, there was my father, sitting on the plow, grinning up at her.
With the traces hooked together and Beck's help my father was able to escape and later to rescue the plow. In an ideal world, he would have been eternally grateful, but those were hard times. Later on, for whatever reason, he sold Beck. I can understand his joy at getting her back again. She remained with us, taking her ease, until she died at, I think, forty-five.
