The Donkeys of The Waters
Counting Down the days (46) to Publication of The Waters
There are two donkeys in my new novel The Waters (coming January 9). They graze in the field in front of Wild Will’s boarded up house, along with some Hereford beef cows. Their names are Triumph (a jack) and Disaster (a jenny), chosen by Wild Will in reference to Rudyard Kipling’s manly poem “If,” which contains the line
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/And treat those two impostors just the same … (plus a lot of other things)… Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it/And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
Wild Will, one of the missing people of The Waters, was the kind of guy who would have fancied Kipling. His wife, Hermine, calls the donkey named Disaster Aster, like the flower.
The girl in the story is named Dorothy, but her nickname is Donkey, given to her as a baby by her grandmother when donkey milk was required to save her life. Donkey milk is considered by many cultures to have healing properties, and there are some groups in the United States who feel similarly—there’s even a Facebook group.
When I was a kid, my mother really did have two donkeys named Triumph and Disaster, named by her farrier, Drew Anderson, who very loosely inspired the character of Wild Will. Drew came from Texas (I think), and during WWII he, like the fictional Wild Will, was part of a battalion that used mules to transport heavy artillery from India to China along the Burma Road. It’s a hell of a story—I researched it as best I could for the brief mention of it in the book. I think my mother was in love with Drew—after all these years, I think it’s safe to mention it.
After a visit to Barcelona, I got myself certain of the idea that it was Catalan donkeys used for the hauling. I got this idea because I was in a tavern and the tavern owner told me a story that his father sold Catalan mules to the U.S. military during WWII—I had been telling him how much I admired the Catalan Mules I’d seen grazing. So that is the version I included in the book. I hope I get to visit that tavern again some day. The entire back wall of the place was tiled with individually painted tiles depicting (artistically) scenes from Don Quixote. I wept with joy to study them as I drank red wine and ate anchovies and olives. I was there with my Spanish publishers, Javier and Nacho of Dirty Works.
Drew Anderson’s son Scott was my farrier for a long time. Now even he is retired. I still have two donkeys, Jack and Don Quixote, both gray donkeys with vivid strips. In the book, Triumph is a gray like my guys, while Dis(Aster) is spotted. Spotted donkeys are rare and precious. A few are pictured here.
