At last, the booming of cannon came nearer, an expedition having reached Willtown only seven miles away, and, as negroes from nearby plantations were “running away to the Yankees,” a farm was leased in the far away land of Abbeville, and thither, for safekeeping, went a number of slaves under Zedekiah Johnson, a kindly and reliable overseer. With this venture went Old Pickett, and here, until the end of the war, she faithfully followed the curved and crooked furrows that ran around the terraced hills, and stubbed her unshod hoofs against the flinty stones thick sown about the ruddy soil. In the up-country, women sometimes plowed, and Old Pickett, blinkered and forward-looking as she was forced to be, submitted to the indignity of being “gee’d” and “haw’d” and chevied along by a bare-footed, sun-bonneted female of the species.
Freedom came. The low-country negroes whom it overtook in Abbeville, went their ways. The wagons and mules, all save old Pickett, were sold for the pitiful greenbacks that the profiteering few who had them, were willing to pay, and old Pickett came home. A low-country freedman, wishing to return to his habitat, kindly consented to ride her the two hundred miles, cannily exchanging his fore-knowledge of the road for the use of her four legs. And what a home-coming! The “big house” at the head of the wide live-oak avenue lay in ruins, sentineled by the tall, charred trunks of “Sherman’s laurels,” the two great magnolias that sometime stood in their glossy green liveries overhanging the hospitable hearths that once glowed within. Wildcats lurked in the briar thickets now upsprung from the fertile soil where once stood the great stables. The plantation quarters, whose streets formerly resounded with jest and laughter, at the touch of the vandal’s torch had flared into flame and vanished, and among their ashes Jimpson weed and other rank growths struggled.
In a rough stable, hastily improvised of blackgum logs, Old Pickett was introduced to strange, young Western mules, new to negro ways, but, from the time of her home-coming, she seemed to grow resentful toward all the world. While still performing her tasks faithfully, she would not be hurried, and no freedman was ever able to urge her into a trot, so, by example, if not by precept, the younger mules associated with her gradually acquired somewhat of trickiness and of truculence. Old Pickett still respected the former slave-holding planters, and under one of these (she was a good saddle animal) she would still condescend to canter, but the small white boy of ten or eleven years, and the negroes of all ages, she held in utter contempt. Saddles and bridles were scarce after the war, and spurs were rare. “The Captain” had a single ante-bellum spur with which he urged recalcitrant horse or mule to such bursts of speed as a grass diet would warrant. When rallied by his hunting companions on his lack of the twin spur, he shrewdly observed that if he could make one side of his steed travel fast enough to suit him, the other could always be induced to go along, too. As this precious tool was never loaned, the small boy who aspired to equestrian exercise was forced to kick his steed in the ribs with his bare heel, to which was sometimes tied, with a piece of hickory bark, a forked stick shaped like a wishbone, usually an effective goad with which to tickle the equine flank, but Old Pickett was unresponsive. She was, in a manner of speaking, on all-fours with St. Paul. “None of these things move me,” she thought—and they didn’t. The ambitious boy who expressed a willingness to adventure a trip to the railway station, two miles away, for the mail, only for the chance to ride, was sometimes offered Old Pickett, just to chill his ardor. If he accepted the mount, he was given a plow bridle, a folded crocus bag upon which to sit, and was allotted a few hours in which to make the trip. A stout switch was permitted him, which he carried in his right-hand for style, rather than for any impression he hoped to make on Old Pickett’s tough hide. Fortunately, the kindly amenities of war had left the great avenue without a gate, or he could not have passed, as no amount of urging could have brought Old Pickett within arm’s length of the latch, so the way was clear to the old King’s Highway. The boy had plenty of time to admire the scenery as Old Pickett walked sedately along between the willow-fringed canals that flanked the approach to the “Two Bridges.” In the summer, water snakes dropped quietly into their element from the overhanging branches upon which they had been sunning themselves, terrapins slid from their floating logs, and now and then a small alligator sank slowly downward, leaving only his eyes above the water. Just beyond, where the boughs of a grove of Spanish oaks stretched above the road, squirrels sometimes played, alighting among the smaller branches with a soft “swish” as they sprang from tree to tree. Then, on to Jupiter Hill, or “Town Hill,” as the negroes called it, because it lay in the direction of Charleston. Here, with a clay hole on one side and a Colonial milestone on the other—“31 M. to C Town” cut in its brown sandstone face—the roads forked, the right-hand leading to the Village, the left to the station. Although Old Pickett’s way always led to the station, she never failed to submit the selection of the road to argument, and invariably leaned to the right. Whether the memory of the brave, hopeful, early days of the Confederacy, when she had drawn artillery or army wagons along this road, urged her to tread again the once familiar paths, or whether she sought only to match her will and her wits against the boy’s, one may not know, but, as far as the boy was concerned, the discipline was wholesome, for loss of temper availed nothing against Old Pickett. Her response to an application of the switch was to sidle up to the nearest tree or sapling, against which she would rub her rider’s bare legs, so she was seldom switched. Sometimes the boy would sit on her back ten or fifteen minutes without moving, while she drowsed and dreamed of the past, and then, when, perhaps, she had forgotten the dispute between them, he would get her started in the way she should go. At other times, however, when she could not be wheedled out of the Village road, her rider let her have her way, and, after going two or three hundred yards, would slowly turn her head into the pineland and, gradually sweeping around in a wide semi-circle to the left, would reenter the road to the station a quarter of a mile beyond. Arrived at his destination, the boy would be fortunate to find some idle negro around who would bring out the mail to him, for, once dismounted, he could not remount without assistance, Old Pickett invariably backing her ears, baring her teeth, and altogether turning toward him “an unforgiving eye and a damned disinheriting countenance.” To grown-ups Old Pickett was dangerous only at the rear, but to a dismounted boy she was loaded at both ends and—a revolver at that—she was so pivoted that head and tail could swap places with surprising facility. Old Pickett’s tracks on her way home, however, were the prints of peace. Like so many of the human race, she knew the way to the trough, and thither she was willing to be guided.
On Sundays, Old Pickett was turned into the big pasture with the other mules, for rest and recreation, but, while her companions galloped or trotted and played, she kept away from them, grazing alone until satisfied, when, withdrawing to a far corner of the field, and resting her head upon the rider of the rail fence, she would gaze into space with retrospective eyes. Sometimes the Sunday outings would be in cornfields after harvest, where the slovenly freedmen usually left bunches of rank-growing sheep burrs, having a strong affinity for the manes and tails of horses and mules. Of these, Old Pickett acquired her share. The negro who plowed her extracted without difficulty those which lodged in her mane, but the taking of them out of her tail was an event in stableyard circles. Strongly tethered in her stall with a short halter, a stout bar was run into grooves behind her, so hampering her hindquarters that she could not extend herself. Thus helpless, she was ignominiously despoiled of the burrs that clung to her tail, even the small black boys participating in the spoliation, of which they did not fail to brag later to their companions at the quarters.
“You see dis sheep buhr, enty? Uh tek’um out’uh Ole Pickett’ tail,” said one, proudly pulling a burr out of the wool about his ears.
“No, you nebbuh! You duh Gawd fuh projick ’long Old Pickett’ tail? ’E yent come out’um!”
“’E yiz, now!”
“’E yent!”
“’E yiz!”
“’E yent!” and then they fought.