Friday, December 25, 1998

Edwin called at eight o'clock this morning. Before I could say anything he said, "Merry Christmas, Dad."

That's the first time he's called me Dad since 1995. I know because I've been listening for it every Sunday since September.

Joyce had sent him a box of pralines last week, without telling me, with a card that said "From your father's friend on Decatur Street." He said they were gone in two days and his girlfriend ate half. So now I know there's a girlfriend. Her name is a secret, apparently, but she has good taste in candy.

He said his mother is doing fine. She remarried last year, a man from her church, and they have a house in Denham Springs with a porch. I said I was glad, and I found out I meant it. That surprised me as much as anything.

We had Christmas dinner at Joyce's sister's in Metairie again, all twenty-some of them, and this year the children didn't look at me like a new appliance. Somewhere between the turkey and the bread pudding I went down the hall to the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub for a few minutes. Joyce knew. She didn't say anything when I came back. She just put her hand on my arm under the table.

Merry Christmas.

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Sunday, October 18, 1998

Edwin and I talk on the phone every Sunday night now. Sometimes ten minutes, sometimes an hour. He calls me; he said he'd rather, and I understand that. A man likes to know he can hang up.

He's a dispatcher for a trucking outfit that hauls containers off the ships at the Port of Houston. He's good at it. He grows tomatoes in buckets on his balcony, which he got from my mother, who could grow tomatoes on a fence post. He's an Astros fan. They won a hundred games this year and lost in the first round anyway, and he's still sore about it. We talked about the Saints for a short time, which is all the Saints deserve.

We haven't talked about 1995. Not yet. I'm not going to push it. I spent too long pushing.

The mules came home fine from the storm, all of them. Dolly was mad about the trailer ride for a week. She's over it.

Tours: 11 · Tips: $104 (a convention of dentists) · Dolly: forgiving

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Tuesday, September 29, 1998

Home. The storm missed us. And something else happened I'm still trying to take in.

By Saturday morning the radio was telling everybody who could leave to leave. The boss loaded the mules into trailers and took them across the lake to a farm a friend of his has, up on high ground. I watched Dolly go up the ramp. She looked back at me once like it was my idea. Joyce went with her sister's family to Lafayette. She wanted me to come with them, but there wasn't room in the cars for one more and a cooler, so I drove up to Baton Rouge to stay with Willie Hamilton, who I worked beside at the refinery for twenty years and who was the best man at my wedding.

It took six hours to get to Baton Rouge. It's usually an hour and a half. The whole city was on the interstate going the same direction at about the speed of a mule.

Sunday they opened the Superdome for folks who couldn't get out. Sunday night at Willie's, about nine o'clock, the phone rang, and Willie's wife held it out to me with a look on her face and said, "It's your boy."

It was Edwin. He'd been watching the storm on the news in Houston. He called his mother to ask where I was, and she knew right where I'd go, because when things go bad I always go to Willie's. She's known me a long time. Edwin said, "I just wanted to know you were all right." I said I was. Then neither one of us said anything for a while, and then we talked for forty minutes. About the storm, and the traffic, and the mules, and his job. Nothing that mattered and everything that did. Before he hung up he said he'd call again Sunday.

Monday morning the storm turned and came ashore over in Mississippi, around Biloxi. We got wind and rain and some trees down and the power went out in parts of town, but the city came through. I feel for the people on the coast. I drove home this afternoon in two hours. My apartment's fine. The mules come home tomorrow.

Three years. One storm. I don't know what to say about it except thank you, to whoever it is you say that to.

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Thursday, September 24, 1998

Everybody on the Square is watching the sky today and talking about a hurricane called Georges. It's been tearing across the islands all week, and tonight it's running along Cuba, and the weatherman says it'll cross the Keys tomorrow and come out into the Gulf. After that nobody knows. Some of the maps on TV have it pointed right at us.

The tourists are already thinning out. The ones who are left want to know if they should go home. I tell them I drive a mule, I'm not the Weather Service. But I'd go home.

The boss says if it keeps coming this way, he'll move the mules out Saturday. Joyce is filling jugs of water and taping her shop windows and saying she's done this before, which she has, plenty of times. I've only ever done it from Baton Rouge, where you mostly worry about the rain. This town is lower than the river on one side and the lake on the other. You think about that, at a time like this.

Tours: 5 · Tips: $38 · Dolly: restless, ears going every direction

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Sunday, August 2, 1998

Two years of this journal. Two and a half years on the seat.

I read back over the first entries tonight. That fellow who started this sounds like a man who'd been hit in the head. He was lonely and he didn't say so. He was ashamed and he said it once and then went quiet about it.

I'm not all the way different now. But I have a job I'm good at, a mule who's glad to see me, a woman who feeds me red beans on Monday and tells me when I'm wrong, a friend in Mr. Jerome, and about thirty people in different states who write me letters about their grandfather's mules. That's a good deal more than I had.

What I don't have is my son. I sent another card in March. I'm going to keep sending them.

Tours: 6 · Tips: $44 · Dolly: off the street at one o'clock, heat

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Friday, June 26, 1998

Mr. Jerome Shelton drove his last tour today. Thirty-six years on the Square. He's sixty-five and his wife says that's enough, and when Mrs. Shelton says that's enough, it is.

For his last ride he put Mrs. Shelton in the back seat in her church hat and took her around the Square at a walk, and he gave her the whole tour, every word of it, true and otherwise. All the drivers lined their carriages up along Decatur Street and when he came around the last corner we stood up on our seats and clapped. A man playing a trumpet by the Cathedral fence played something slow and sweet as he went by.

When he climbed down he shook my hand and said, "Dennis, you tell it straight. That's all right. Somebody ought to." That's the nicest thing anybody's said to me since I came to this city.

Dolly is back on the street since the middle of May. Hank went back to his regular driver. It's been brutal hot. We've come off the street before two o'clock four days this week.

Tours: 4 · Tips: $35 · Dolly: hot, patient, better than me

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Tuesday, April 21, 1998

Dolly came up lame on the left front Saturday. The vet says a stone bruise, from something on the street, and she needs three weeks of rest and soaking. She's fine otherwise. She's eating like a queen and getting her foot soaked in a bucket twice a day, which she treats as a spa.

Meanwhile the boss has me on Hank. Hank is a big black john mule (that's a boy mule), six years old, strong as a tractor and scared of exactly three things: brass bands, pigeons, and a man on Chartres Street who paints himself silver and stands still for money. Unfortunately, this is New Orleans, and all three of those are on every block.

Hank and I are working it out. When he sees a tuba coming I talk to him low, the way my granddaddy talked to his mules, and he keeps his feet. Mostly.

Tours: 7 · Tips: $59 · Hank: jumped at a tuba, and at the silver man, twice

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Monday, March 9, 1998

Edwin is twenty-seven today.

I sent a card last week with a twenty-dollar bill in it, which is what you send a boy, not a man, but I didn't know what else to do. On the inside I wrote the address of this page. I said if he ever wanted to know what his father does all day, it's all here, and he doesn't have to call to read it.

I don't know if he has. The counter goes up, but the counter doesn't tell you who.

If you're reading this, son: happy birthday. I'm proud of you. I was always proud of you. I just had a poor way of showing it.

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Wednesday, February 25, 1998

Ash Wednesday again. Second Mardi Gras.

This year I spent the day itself on Joyce's balcony over Decatur Street, with a pot of coffee and a plate of her sister's fried chicken, watching the costumes go by underneath. You have never seen anything like the people of this city on Mardi Gras morning. I saw a whole family dressed as a box of crayons. I saw a man dressed as a shrimp po-boy, dressed all the way. I saw nine grown women dressed as the Supreme Court. Joyce has been watching from that balcony since she was a girl and she still laughed so hard she had to sit down.

King cake season is over, thank the Lord. Whoever gets the little plastic baby in the cake buys the next one, and at the barn I got the baby three times. I believe somebody was cheating.

Tours: 6 · Tips: $40 · Dolly: unimpressed by Ash Wednesday, as always

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Saturday, January 10, 1998

Christmas at Joyce's sister's went fine. They looked at me like a new appliance for about an hour and then like a regular one. Joyce wore the earrings.

New Year's Eve we watched the fireworks over the river from the levee. Joyce brought a thermos. I brought nothing, as usual, and was forgiven, as usual.

Big news at the barn: Mr. Jerome is retiring in June. He'll be sixty-five. He says he's going to sit on his porch and tell lies to his grandchildren for free. I asked who's going to tell the lies on the Square. He said "Not you, that's for sure," and patted me on the shoulder like a man patting a mule.

I'm going to miss him more than I'm going to say here.

Tours: 6 · Tips: $45 · Dolly: in her winter blanket at the barn, a sight

~ end of 1998 ~