By Neil King Jr.
A donkey I’d known for years died the other day. I heard the horses whinnying through the trees as the rain beat on the porch roof and when I went to investigate, I found Buddy crumpled in the mud along the fence, more the discarded effigy of a donkey than the angular, craggy soul he was on hoof. Buddy was ancient and had lost his spark in recent weeks, so it was no surprise he’d died. But the small space he occupied now, with his motionless eyes still open, made a grey morning greyer.
A backhoe arrived and started cutting into the sodden earth. Judy the local vet came across the pasture with two lengths of rope in her hand, as solid and plain a woman as you could ever find. Plain in the best of ways, grounded, immediately impressive. Her family gave its name to the road she grew up on a mile or so away.
“He died well,” she said. “By the look of his legs you can see he just collapsed all at once. Heart attack, probably.”
Once the hole was dug, a neat rectangle six feet deep, they then had to get Buddy into it. Judy looped one of her ropes around his back hooves and then cinched it to the front scoop of the tractor. He’d died during the night, she said, judging by the stiffness of his limbs. I stood with one foot on the lowest fence rail and marveled at her adroitness, the knots she used, her ease at handling a dead donkey in the mud. The tractor driver swiveled Buddy around to where he lay at the edge of the grave, and then gently nudged him with the front scoop. The driver then lowered Judy into the hole.
Buddy had tumbled in with his head pressed upright against the dirt wall of his grave, and that wouldn’t do. “We have to make him comfortable,” she said. Judy tied his back hooves again with the quick motions of a calf roper, and with the tractor they slowly pulled him into proper position. She adjusted his head with her hands, as you would a child preparing to sleep. Then she tucked his tongue into his mouth, closed his one visible eye and brought his ears upright. I thought of all the people I’d met over more than 20 years in Washington, and how none of them knew the first thing about burying a donkey, driving a backhoe or even what knot to tie around the hoof of a donkey to drag him to his grave. “A simple sailor’s knot,” Judy said, when I commented on her skills. “Nothing fancy.”
The tractor guy began to cover Buddy with dirt, one huge scoop at a time. He did it with a care bordering on tenderness. When the grave was full, he tapped the dirt down with his scoop. “Buddy was a good soul,” Judy said, recoiling the rope into a neat figure 8. “This is where he would want to be. He will be comfortable here.”