Oak Bluff don’t entirely agree on just exactly how Jim and Luty did grow up. Jim’s daddy owned the General Store and a nigger jook and a row of shanties in the Quarters. Jim growed up mean and close-fisted and now he owns the Store and two nigger jooks and the whole mess of shanties and ain’t nary son of Ham in the county ain’t always in debt to him, on account of him keeping the books hisself. When he got to be buggy-riding size, he got hisself married. His daddy was still alive and holding tight to what he had, so Jim seed to it he married him a gal had a nice little farm. And that’s how come him to grow up to need a mule, along about when he was twenty-one.

Now the way Luty growed up, some say the Lord done a pore job of raising him, for there wasn’t nobody else to blame. He was a orphan as far back as I can remember, and all he ever had to his name was his daddy’s rowboat and a dozen fish-traps and a wore-out seine. Until he was a growed man, he never had no more shoes than a yard-dog. He fished along a little and he ketched alligators and he made out. He had the sense not to marry. He had a hound gyp, and it always having pups, and he couldn’t of fed a woman and the gyp, too. He made a good haul of fish one time and he bought ten acres of land that joined up to me and Will. He planted it to sugar-cane and he rigged up a piece of a mill and he set up a syrup-kettle. And that’s how come him to need a mule for the cane-grinding.

I was passing Perry’s sink-hole the very October day, twenty-eight year ago, when they traded. Old man Perry had a small kind of a mule on a halter. Jim and Luty was standing thoughtful, just looking at the mule, the way men do when they’re trading. Right then, it was only Jim was trading. Luty wasn’t into it.

Old man Perry called out to me, “Quincey, what’d you say to a feller won’t offer but thirty dollars for a fine young mule?”

Jim said, “What’d you say to a feller asks fifty, and the mule not much more’n a colt, has never been broke nor worked?”

Old man Perry said, “Broke but not worked.”

I said, “I can meddle enough in my county, without I should meddle in t’other feller’s.” But in them days, me fresh-married, I hadn’t learned good to keep my mouth shut. Jim did look so all-fired pious. I said, “I reckon fifty ain’t too much for him.”

Jim spit one way and old man Perry t’other and Luty grinned.