Mylo the Bull That Went to Heaven

““AND soon after that the bull went to heaven.”’

She was telling me the story of the years in a gentle reminiscent way, and suddenly, with almost startling emphasis, fell this sentence — ““The bull that went to heaven.’’ For she knew something of that pleasant place; she had heard of the lovely open gates and the walls whose foundations were jewels and the bright streets and the river and the trees. It is this picture of glory and beauty that first holds the imagination of the child and the childlike. Later conceptions can wait. Did she see the golden pavement of those wide streets trodden, as the streets of all towns and villages are here, by leisurely sauntering bulls, glorified probably to suit the place, but still the bulls she knew? And if there were a river and trees, there must be open country near, many spreading miles of it. Why, then, not bulls?

“Yes,” she continued dreamily, as if living through that evening when her bull went to heaven. “Long, long ago, on a day of sorrow, I had gone to a field of my mother. In hunger of heart I went and in thirst, and the field was called the Land of Precious Water. For near by there was water where the workers could go to drink, and always the cotton grew well there.

“Tn that field, in my thirst, I drank of precious water; not the water of earth, for there indeed my true God spoke to me. The cotton was young then; it was the month after the sowing and the plants were a span high. I hung my baby’s hammock to the branch of an acacia. It was covered with yellow flowers, such as always come, balls of sweet-smelling yellow. I see it all again.

“Now to me came that field for a year’s use, and the salt bazaar prospered. We bought a pair of ploughing bulls, and one of them was grey and the other was brown. It was Mylo, the grey one, that God took to Himself.

“But first great had been our gain. These my hands weeded the field and tilled it; no idle coolies did I call; with my own hands I tended the plants and gathered the cotton and carded it. So all the gains were ours. And they were far larger than they had ever been before, so all the people wondered. And my husband said: ‘The first spending must be for thy ear jewels.’ So they were bought.

“Then one evening at dusk, for no reason that we knew, Mylo, the grey bull, turned from his food, and he lay down, and God took him.

“We grieved. So much had we meant to do. It was not a little loss to us. But what would you? He was gone.

“Then like a light upon me fell a thought. Must not all that the good God does be good for the child that is His? Is any ill suffered to approach? Then is not this good? What if Mylo the bull had lived, should we not, perhaps, have gone on desiring and, adding field to field, become entangled in the love of earthly things?

“Then remembered I my husband’s elder brother, the subtle one; gain to us could not be without ravenous thoughts awakening in him. Family feuds would have arisen. We should have become enmeshed in new varieties of distresses. This foreseeing, had not my God, as a Father going in the way before His children, cleared a path for our feet, lest they should hereafter be caught in the net?

“Thus Mylo, the bull that went to heaven, was to us a bull of blessing, not to be mourned over, but accepted with tranquillity. And, wondering at the wise ways of my God, I remembered the saying of the old grandmother: ‘You will be wonderfully led. lx every least thing you will be wonderfully led.’”

It was not so difficult for her husband. He took it as his fate, and Fate had never been very kind to him. And this talk of his wife, though curious, was comfortable to his ear; for, after all, eventually fields meant exertion, and exertion was undesirable. Now they could be quiet. But for the wife, with her sense of capacity and keen, adventurous spirit, it was a real trial at first, and this thought was, as she said, like a light. She knew nothing then of that particular provision of grace that can enable us so to pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal. So the thought came with a new composing force, and ever after she looked back lovingly on Mylo, the little grey bull that went to heaven, marking a track for them all, as it were, with his four little hoofs.