Mueller drove his oxcart to market every Sunday. He wore a Moyle’s cap and a cutter’s overcoat, the cuffs frayed and stained. He pulled hard left on the ox-lead, bringing the cart to a stop, the oxen snorting like pugs, and lowered himself to the ground. A man in a crowberry hat held up his hand, his face red as a fall apple, and shouted, ‘…stop!...that’s near far enough, now back up and hobble the beasts…’. Sitting across the street, legs crowed into staves, the dogmen eyed the oxcart, the littlest of the dogmen chewing on the cob of his pipe, the biggest swatting at a fly with the back of his hand. Without warning or counsel the sky fell, caving in every head in sight. Off in the middling distance a Moyle’s cap, the brim torn to tatters, spun like a tailless kite in the empty sky, the cob of the littlest dogman’s pipe railing after it for dearest life.
