Old man Sims was the last person in the Black Creek section of the county that still did his plowing with a mule. He did my grandfather’s garden every spring. A lot of old people liked to hire Sims to do their plowing. They claimed that the mule didn’t pack down the soil as much as a tractor. But mostly they liked to watch Sims work his mule and remember. The mule’s name was Old Mule. They only plowed small plots, two or three acres or less. Sims said Old Mule was too old for more than that. Then in his seventies, perhaps Sims was as well. Because he rode Old Mule to his jobs he would only plow for folks who lived within four or five miles of his place and they had to have their own plow.
He used a walking plow on the acre plot where my grandfather grew corn, squash, climbing beans, and tomatoes. Years of working together as a team had all but eliminated the need for vocal commands. When they’d come to the end of a row, an easy pull left or right on the plow lines instead of what I had imagined was the customary gee and haw. A slight tug on both and Old Mule would stop. With the exception of whoa at the end of a work day most his communications with Old Mule were simple clicks of the tongue, varying in tone and number. Sims did talk to Old Mule, he was actually quite talkative, but such conversations took place when he rode him to and from where he was plowing. He talked with Mule about the weather, the day’s work, the quality of crops, what he was going to make for dinner. If Mule found any of this interesting, I cannot say, but after years of such discourse, perhaps he found it engaging, perhaps even soothing, Sim’s voice a constant in the seasons round. Watching them work at their easy pace for a while I decided that plowing was something that I might be able to do. “Easy,” he said, “just keep the mule out front.”
It was not easy. Sims handed the plow lines to me and stepped back. “All right,” he said, “it’s yours.” I flipped the lines. Old Mule stood there. I flipped them again, with a little more energy. Nothing. “He don’t know what you want to do,” says Sims. Then I tried a variety of verbal instructions, ranging from ‘Go,’ to ‘Giddy Up,’ ‘Let’s go Old Mule,’ to an explicit ‘Hey! Let’s move!” to no avail. Mule just flicked his ears. “You ain’t got his attention,” Sims observed, made a clicking sound with his mouth and Old Mule stepped forward and started moving down the row, moving a bit faster than had I anticipated. Holding tight to the plow lines and the plow handle, he pulled me face down in the dirt. Mule stopped, turned his head around and looked down at me a little scornfully. Sims laughed and helped me up. “You gotta keep at it” he said. He clicked his tongue again and Old Mule started off. I was prepared this time and managed to keep on my feet, holding on the handles of the plow and started down the row, turning over the soil. If I managed to plow a straight furrow it was entirely to the credit of Old Mule, not as a result of my effort, never mind skill, with the plow.
I anticipated disaster when we approached the end of the furrow but, thanks the patience of the mule and help from Sims, I managed. Mule stopped just beyond the end of the row and Sim’s showed me how to horse the plow around to turn and cut the next furrow. He took the plow lines, tugged a little, and Old Mule turned to face the other way, then I set the plow like I’d seen him do and we were off. It was harder to keep a steady pace than I’d imagined as the plowed furrows made for rough walking. I staggered along for about ten rows and decided I’d had all the education in plowing I could absorb for one morning. Sims could work it all day. An old man’s endurance.
A lifetime later I would again see and hear Sims and Mule at their plowing in a poem by John Masefield, The Everlasting Mercy.
A plowman’s voice, a clink of chain,
Slow hoofs, and harness under strain. Up the slow slope a team came bowing,
Old Callow at his autumn plowing,
Old Callow, stooped above the hales,
Plowing the stubble into wales;
His grave eyes looking straight ahead,
Shearing a long straight furrow red….
Early fall and Sims and Old Mule could be found pulling a sled through rows of tobacco. Hot days in South Georgia, but they seemed never to mind. In years past they had worked in turpentine, Old Mule pulling a rubber-tired wagon through the woods while Sims and a couple of hands scrapped resin from the tin cups nailed to the trees into barrels. According to Sims and anyone else old enough to remember, working turpentine was hotter and harder than working tobacco, and although sap from tobacco leaves was sticky, it was nothing like pine sap. Harvesting pine resin from the woods had very nearly disappeared by the early 1960s although a few small landowners kept it up, for traditions sake as much as money. You can still find the cat face cuts on pines in the woods, but those are old trees and the scars have almost disappeared. “Not sorry to see that done with,” Sims said, “it was rough work, for men and mules.”
Sims lived alone in a small house across Mill Creek and farmed a few acres of his own land. He kept cows, hogs, and chickens. On still evenings you could hear him all the way to my grandfather’s, calling his cows up from the pasture, his voice carrying across the creek and bottom. He kept a neat place, the yard, the lot, barn and his various sheds tidy, orderly, and organized, nothing left out in the open. Even the plows, harrows, hay rake, and other implements were kept under a shed. He always had a cord or more of wood, stacked and dry under sheets of tin. He kept his axe sharp, the teeth of his cross-cut saw filed after each use. Maybe living alone gave him time to keep things up, a way to occupy his evenings, or maybe it was a way to keep disorder at bay.
The sound of tree frogs in their thousands rose in waves up from the bottom below his house, the frogs accompanied by crickets, owls and the occasional shriek of a bobcat. I’d never actually seen a bobcat in the woods down there, but heard them now and then at night from the screen porch at my grandparent’s place. I had a fox walk right up to me one evening while squirrel hunting. Leaning against a tree, a .22 across my lap, a red fox walked up the path, stopping about five feet away. He studied me a moment and, with no evident alarm, turned and walked back down the path. Maybe he thought I was a stump. The sounds coming from the woods and the swamp were Sim’s only music. The volume and tone changed with the seasons and the temperature, he said, and after a rain the sounds coming up from the creek became a roar.
Plowing with a mule should not be taken to imply that Sims lived without modern convenience. His house had electricity and he drove an old International Harvester pickup and though the house was heated with propane he cooked with a wood stove. Biscuits taste better, he said. I went to his place a few times with my grandfather. Electricity and propane notwithstanding, Sims didn’t have a phone so if a person needed some plowing done you had to drive over.
My grandfather was a rural delivery mailman and folks on his route often gave him produce from their garden, or eggs, sometimes a cake or a pie, often more than he and my grandmother could eat. He might give some of what he’d received to Sims. Riding over with my grandfather generally meant half an hour sitting on Sim’s porch listening to them talk over the news from that section of the county, about the weather, who was growing what in their gardens, who had died. In summer they talked about baseball. And fishing. They were fishing buddies and often talked about fishing. Cane pole fishermen, they could spend an evening together in one of the wooden boats my grandfather kept at his dock and, between rolling cigarettes, they would fill the boat well with bluegill, redbreast, bream, warmouth, and every so often a small bass, all while arguing about who was the better fisherman.
A few years later my grandfather died. My grandmother sold the place, land, lake, and house, and moved away. It was a couple of years later when I next went through. I stopped at a store in Black Creek to ask about Sims. “Died a little over a year ago,” the store owner said. What about Old Mule? “A neighbor took the mule. Didn’t try to work him, kept him fed, took care of him. Last I heard the old mule had also died. I know he was over forty, old for a mule. I think he just missed talking with Sims.” Another customer spoke up, a face I remembered if not a name. “Sims and that old mule worked under blazing suns,” he said, “and pulled logs out of the woods when there was ice in the ditches. Old Mule was the last working mule we’ll likely see,” he said, “them days are gone.”
Georgia Stories and Songs 
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