The mule kept running.
That’s how it happens sometimes. Not with a sword, but with the slow unraveling of a man’s pride caught in the low limbs of providence.
The woods of Ephraim swallowed Absalom that day and not by fire from the sky, but by roots and branches, by moss and mud.
His long hair, once his glory, knotted him to a tree. His mule, unbothered, p…