Ron
The Life Care director gave me the name of the only nursing home in that end of town that would take my dad, a lock-down facility for geriatric troublemakers. I checked him in that afternoon. Just after midnight, a nurse called to tell me Dad and his roommate had gotten into a food fight that devolved into a fistfight. I tried to picture two old farts pelting each other with strained peas and tapioca, then circling each other like a couple of WWF wrestlers with their skinny butts hanging out of their hospital gowns.
“We moved your father to solitary confinement,” the director said.
I went to visit him the next day and saw that he had a black eye.
I tried to talk to him, but he cursed me. A week later, I took Regan and my two-year-old granddaughter—Earl’s great-granddaughter— to see him. They brought him homemade cookies. He slapped away their offerings and cursed them. Silently, I asked God to take him before I started hating him again.
A few weeks later, on Christmas Day, I took Mama to see Daddy. Last time they’d seen each other, they’d turned their nursing-home room into a war zone. As I guided Mama into Daddy’s room, I braced for a hostile reception.
But I was shocked when Earl said, very sweetly, “Oh . . . Mama. Come give me a kiss.”
I helped her over to his bed, and she bent down and kissed him on the lips.
“I love you, Earl,” my mama said.
“I love you, too, Tommye.”
The moment was as rare as a da Vinci painting.
I sensed it was the last time they would ever see each other, and I was hoping to hear them reminisce about the good times, about what had sparked their love so many years before. But it seemed they couldn’t remember, or they just wanted to forget everything but this moment. There was nothing left to say, so they simply stared into each other’s eyes.
Driving Mama back to Life Care, she told me about how, in October 1942, she had ridden the bus home to Blooming Grove, Texas, from Denton, where she was a junior at the North Texas State Teacher’s College. Her daddy—and my granddaddy,
Mr. Jack Brooks—ran a cotton farm in Blooming Grove, and he was the hardest-working man I ever knew.
When she got home that October, she told her daddy she was fixing to marry a soldier who had just shipped off to Phoenix—Earl Hall. Never one to pass up a chance to teach a lesson about hard work, he told her that if she’d help him pick a bale of cotton, he’d buy her a train ticket to Arizona. Five days later, she’d picked her bale, and her daddy drove her to the train station.
Listening to Mama tell this tale as we drove through Haltom City, I still couldn’t trace the roots of her love for Earl Hall. “So why’d you marry him?” I said.
She laughed. “Because it beat pickin cotton!”
So there I had it. I owed my very existence to my mother’s aversion to the cotton patch.