Mule Killers [Lydia Peelle]

            Mule Killers by Lydia Peelle uses direct characterization  in terms of appearance. I can’t get rid of the image of the girl with onion paper hair. Even if you’ve never seen or felt onion paper, it perfectly characterizes her – sums her up. There’s nothing particularly ugly about onions, and nothing evil or bad, just simply plain. Plain, oily, a thing of the earth. You cry when you cut up an onion – just as you feel sorry that this woman spent her life with a man who never really loved her in any passionate sense. She never even gets a name. By contrast, Eula has magical, mysterious dark hair and just like night she is both beautiful and terrible. She’s larger than life, and couldn’t possibly pair with the farmer’s son.

            The son is the narrator and his character is a little flat but needs to be. He is the filter we read the story through, and so only occasionally do we spot bits of him, “I am twice as old now as he was, the year of the mule killers”. Really, he is more characterized in the last line “Nothing [grows] except the asparagus, which comes up year after year” than in any single part of the story. He is a reflection of his environment, just as his father was, and perhaps his grandfather. This generational theme is what holds together the story.

            The real character here is the father. The man who loved another woman, but still gave the one he married the decency of death before telling anyone. A man whose mind focused on only two things, mules and Eula. The chapter’s advice on knowing what the character wants is pretty clearly used here, the father wants Eula and he wants his childhood mule to live forever, but he is a man repressed. He is also self-aware, as he tells his son this story, perhaps so he doesn’t make the same mistakes.

            The set-up of this story is very practical, as the son had never been told it before all the dialog is significant to him. Nothing conveys information he already knew. There are times when certain elements are overused, however. I personally disliked the characterization of the tractor as a mule. I just kept thinking “okay, I get it already”. It was more than a little heavy handed. I was also disturbed by the image of the father sticking the record player in his front teeth. It’s a good way to show how unsophisticated, yet genuine he is – it’s kind of an innocent thing to do – but the image itself was just very weird.

            One thing about the father is that he is kind of a coward. Eula may have never known how he felt about her. It wasn’t until he took action against her that anything happened in his life – and it was in the opposite direction of what he wanted. He was at odds with himself. He had a choice in that moment when Eula (who probably knew her friend liked him and so didn’t join them) leaves the shop, and he took the opposite course of action. If you could read this story from the girls’ point of view, perhaps all that happened would seem planned out or just as it should be – it’s amazing how what’s in someone’s head isn’t a reflection of reality and that’s obvious here.

            I will end this by talking about the Universal Paradox and how it applies to Mule Killers. This is a very specific story – it’s about pastoral farm life in a religious little town. That’s all reflected in the details – but it still resonates on a larger scale – boy likes girl, boy gets other girl. It’s about heartbreak and settling and perhaps how that isn’t the end of the world, but the future generation can do better.  That’s a bigger theme and that’s what you carry with you when he story is over.