This was the whole page, the first year. I've left it alone.

Tuesday, December 24, 1996

Christmas Eve. I worked till four. The tourists this week are families with grandmothers, and a lot of folks who just didn't want to be home. I understand those.

The Cathedral is lit up white tonight and there's already a line down the side for midnight Mass. I walked by on my way home from the barn and stood across the Square for a while. Didn't go in. I'm not sure what I'd say in there.

I took Dolly an apple before I left. The barn is quiet on Christmas Eve. Just the mules shifting around and a radio somebody left on low, playing carols. Dolly took the apple off my hand like a lady taking a cookie off a tray.

When Edwin was little, and if I wasn't on shift, we'd drive up the river road to St. James Parish on Christmas Eve to see the bonfires on the levee. They build them tall as a house, out of logs, and light them all at once to guide Papa Noël. Edwin used to fall asleep in the truck on the way home with his face sticky from the hot chocolate. Most years, though, I was on shift. A refinery runs 365 days a year. I told myself that was what a man did. Maybe it was. I'd do the math different now.

Merry Christmas to whoever is out there.

*   *   *

Thursday, November 28, 1996

Thanksgiving. I drove a half day. You'd be surprised how many people want a carriage ride on Thanksgiving morning, before the turkey. One grandfather from Atlanta tipped me a twenty and said "Keep the mule happy." I will.

At noon I called Edwin in Houston. I got his machine. I said Happy Thanksgiving, son, I'm in New Orleans now, I'm driving a mule carriage if you can believe it, and I'd like to hear from you when you're ready. Then I gave my number twice, slow, the way you do. I don't know if he'll call. I don't know if I would, if I were him.

Then Mr. Jerome surprised me. He came around the barn at one o'clock and said his wife sent him to get me, and there was no point arguing, because she'd already set a place. So I had Thanksgiving with Mr. Jerome and Mrs. Shelton and their children and grandchildren and somebody's neighbor, about twenty people in a shotgun house, and I ate till I couldn't see straight. Mrs. Shelton makes a sweet potato pie that ought to be against the law. She sent me home with half of one.

I am thankful for that pie. And for Mr. Jerome. And for Dolly, who doesn't know it's a holiday and doesn't care.

*   *   *

Thursday, October 31, 1996

Halloween in the French Quarter. Half the people on the street are dressed up as vampires, on account of the books, and they all want to know where the vampire houses are. Mr. Jerome has a whole route of ghost stories that he tells in a low voice with long pauses. I asked him once how many are true and he said, "Dennis, they're all true to somebody." So when I tell them now I put "they say" at the front, and the customers don't seem to mind.

Here's one I like better than any ghost story, because it happened. You know the long red brick buildings on both sides of Jackson Square, with the iron galleries? Those are the Pontalba Buildings. A lady named Micaela, the Baroness de Pontalba, had them built around 1850. Before that, back in France, her own father-in-law shot her, over money and a marriage gone sour, and she lived through it. Then she came home to New Orleans and put up the grandest buildings in town, and had her initials worked into the ironwork, A and P, so nobody would forget who built them. You can still see them up there in the railings. I point them out every time.

I tell the tourists that if they want a ghost, that lady was tougher than any of them.

Dolly wore a black witch hat today. She ate the brim off it by three o'clock.

*   *   *

Sunday, September 15, 1996

Some questions I got this week, with answers.

"Is that a donkey?" No ma'am, she's a mule. Her daddy was a donkey and her mama was a horse. She got the best of both, the size of the horse and the sense of the donkey. Mules don't panic the way a horse will, and they stand the heat better, which is why you'll see them in this town instead of horses.

"Where's Bourbon Street?" Two blocks that way. You'll hear it before you see it.

"Does she bite?" Not people she likes.

I had a family from Ohio on Friday with three boys, and the littlest one asked me all of these plus about twenty more. Does she like her hat. Does she get to go home at night. Does she have a family. That last one stopped me. I said she has the other mules at the barn, and me. He seemed satisfied with that.

What I'm learning is that most people don't really need the history, though I give it to them. They mostly want somebody to be glad they came. That part I can do.

*   *   *

Monday, August 26, 1996

Hot. That's the whole report.

No, I'll say more. The city has rules about the heat, and when it gets bad enough the mules come off the street and go back to the barn, and nobody argues with that, me least of all. It means no pay for the afternoon, but I wouldn't want to pull a carriage on that pavement either. Three days last week we were done by early afternoon.

At the barn they've got big fans going and a hose, and the mules stand there and let you spray them down and close their eyes like it's a church service. Dolly likes the water on her neck. She leans into it.

Every mule on the Square wears a straw hat with holes cut for the ears. It's for the sun, and it's for the pictures. Dolly's has pink silk flowers on it. She has also figured out how to eat the flowers off the hat of the mule parked in front of her, so I have to watch her in line. Mr. Jerome says she's the only mule he's met with a sweet tooth for fabric.

*   *   *

Wednesday, August 14, 1996

I should say something about how a person learns to do this.

When the boss hired me in March, he didn't put me on a carriage alone for three weeks. I rode up on the seat next to Mr. Jerome Shelton, who has been driving tourists around this square since 1962, and I listened. Mr. Jerome knows every balcony, every ghost and every famous person who ever ate a sandwich in the French Quarter.

The thing is, about half of what he says is true, and he'll tell you that himself. I asked him about one of his stories and he laughed and said, "Dennis, the truth is fine, but the truth doesn't tip."

Well, I spent twenty-seven years at a refinery where if you got a number wrong somebody could get hurt. I can't get used to just making things up. So on my days off I've been going to the library and reading, and checking, and writing down what I find in a spiral notebook.

Some of what's in the notebook so far: Jackson Square used to be the Place d'Armes, the parade ground. They renamed it for Andrew Jackson after he beat the British at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. That statue of him in the middle, with the horse up on its back legs, has two twins: one in Washington and one in Nashville, all by the same sculptor, Clark Mills. And there's been a church where the Cathedral stands since the 1720s, though the building you see mostly went up in 1850.

I've been trying the truth on my customers for two weeks now. The report is in: the truth tips about the same. I told Mr. Jerome. He said "Huh," and then he went and told a family from Memphis that Jean Lafitte hid a cannon under the Cabildo.

*   *   *

Friday, August 2, 1996

Well, here goes.

My name is Dennis Hovey. I am fifty-one years old, and I drive a mule and a carriage around the French Quarter of New Orleans for a living, which is not a sentence I ever expected to type, on a computer or anywhere else.

Some background. For twenty-seven years I worked at a refinery up the river near Baton Rouge. I started as a helper and worked up to operator, and I was good at it. Last year they cut a lot of us, and I was one. The same year my wife Sandra and I ended a marriage of twenty-six years. I won't go into all of it here. I'll say that most of it was my fault, and that our son Edwin, who's twenty-five and lives in Houston, hasn't spoken to me since, and that I can't say I blame him.

After the layoff I took a class at the community college they had for people like me, "Computers in the Workplace." I learned to type with more than two fingers. Three, now. Then this spring I saw an ad in the paper: carriage drivers wanted, will train, must like animals and people. I like animals. People I was willing to try. My granddaddy farmed with mules up in Tangipahoa Parish when I was a boy, and it turned out I could still harness one, which surprised the boss and me both.

So I sold my half of the house to Sandra, packed the truck, and moved to two rooms off Esplanade Avenue.

Her name is Dolly. She is a sorrel mule, a molly, which is what you call a girl mule, about thirteen years old, and she knows the route around the Square better than I do. If I forget to turn, she turns. Mostly she's patient with me.

The young lady at the library showed me how to make this page. I don't know who would want to read it. But I spent a lot of years not saying much of anything, and I'd like to see if I can do better. I'll write when I can.

Today it was hot as a skillet on the Square and Dolly drank about a bathtub of water.