Lifestyle
Gifts from My Father
“Even in this most extreme of living states, close to death, he maintained the tough, ironic Texas grit that marked his whole life.”
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Brother and Sister Harrell and Brother and Sister Caddell and Brother and Sister Danchak, church folk from Devine and Pearsall, came by several times and said they’d be glad to do anything they could. Brother Swim, who used to drive down from San Antonio to preach for us, stopped by nearly every day to check up and lead us in “a word of prayer for Brother Peggie.” Temo Hernandez, one of my dad’s most valued employees in recent years, apologized for breaking into tears but explained that “Mr. Martin was like a second father.” Temo’s wife left a long letter thanking him for helping them get through some difficult times and told how their children thought of him as a grandfather. Odis Doyal, who worked for him thirty years, said, “You know, your dad is like an older brother to me.” To Elmer Stehle, a thin, leather-faced workingman I have known all my life, he was more like an uncle. Henry Brigman, who has, according to my mother, “made a good little preacher,” said, “You all are sort of like kinfolks.” Anaceto Cortez, a small wrinkled man in khaki trousers and purple shirt, put his hand on my shoulder and said, “He’s my good, good amigo. I know him for a long time. He’s sure a good man.” Jesse Alvarado, a former employee and old friend, said through tears, “He always called me ‘Mexican,’ but he treated me like a white man.” One banker gave my mother a check for several thousand dollars and told her there would be no interest. Another made sure she knew where to come in case she needed any more. And an apparently endless procession of men in Western pants and boots and short-sleeved shirts, with creases in their oiled hair that fairly pled to have the respectfully removed hats returned to their natural places, stood around and said things like, “Your dad did us a lot of favors.” I was beginning to see that he had done me some, too.
As he sank lower and lower, our lives organized themselves around death. I flew back and forth between Houston and San Antonio every few days and held reservations on a lot of flights I didn’t take. In addition to his primary ailment and long-standing emphysema, he developed pneumonia and tuberculosis, his liver multiplied in size, his heart and kidneys began to fail, his skin leaked water and blood, and—what we had all dreaded most—he lost his mind, except for rare lucid moments. As every vital sign got worse, the doctors said they did not recommend “heroic measures,” since the only kind of life these might sustain would be so severely reduced as to be worse than death for such a man as this. I had seen a television program about Karen Ann Quinlan a few nights before and found it ironic that my mother and sister and I had just stood in the hall and agreed to let a life end with as much dignity as was still possible. No controversy, no trial, no headlines. We just talked about it and cried a little bit and that was that.
Mama told me who would speak at the funeral and who would be the pallbearers, and explained that, even though she and Daddy had always said they weren’t going to spend a lot of money on a casket, she had changed her mind, because Pearsall is a high-class town and people would remember it if she put him away in something cheap. I drove over to the Wonderland Mall and bought a new white shirt to bury him in and thanked the salesgirl when she told me to have a nice day.
A few days later, about two in the morning, a nurse said, “He’s going. His eyes have begun to set. He probably won’t last more than an hour now.” My mother, whose life had been bound up with this man for nearly half a century, squeezed his hand and said, “Don’t leave me, Honey.” Somehow, he heard her and had strength enough to answer. He said, “I’m not.”
And he didn’t. From that moment, he began to get better—just a little, but better. After a couple of weeks, the doctors said maybe he could die at home if he could survive the seventy-mile trip in an automobile. He survived, but his mind was still gone and we were apprehensive of my mother’s ability to care for this wasted but familiar body now inhabited by a demented, sometimes irascible stranger. For two weeks, he said little that made sense. Then one night my mother heard a loud bump and woke up to find him sitting on the floor. Neither of them can figure out how he got out of bed, but they don’t ponder that mystery too much. More significant is that he began then, and has continued, to think and speak in a completely normal manner. His explanation is probably as good as any: “I fell flat on my butt and I’ve been fine ever since. I just gave myself a good chiropractic adjustment.”
As I am writing this, eight months after his fall, he is still alive and interested in reading what I might have to say about him. He walks with a cane and he drives his new Lincoln. As a matter of fact, he had a wreck trying to gun it out of a parking lot in front of a lesser vehicle. He enjoys having people tell him what a fine car it is, and he likes for you to notice how good it rides out on the highway. He stays in touch with the doctors, but has worked out his own regimen, taking pills in the dosages that make him feel better rather than those prescribed. When his skin began to itch terribly, an apparent side effect of the medicine, he cured it by rubbing himself with Pine-O-Pine for a couple of weeks. And to make sure he doesn’t lose him mind again, he goes to the chiropractor every so often.
It seems to be working. He looks bad and he knows it. He laughs about the time he saw an old man coming out of the post office and thought he’d rather died than be that feeble, then he realized he was seeing his own reflection in the mirrored door and changed his mind, on the spot. When I first see him, I am always taken aback at how worn and small and bent he looks, but then he starts talking—about the church’s new bus ministry or some article he had read or some story he thinks I might like to hear. I may be wrong, but I think he is making a conscious effort to pass on the oral tradition. In the last few months, he has told me wonderful stories I had never heard before, stories about driving a wagon to the gin when he was six or selling watermelons in Waco when he was twenty, stories filled with every detail that is pertinent and a good many that aren’t. And when he talks a while, he seems to straighten up and fill out and his skin gets smooth and he is young and strong again, like a man about forty.
He spends most of his time nowadays working in his yard, an avocation to which he turned only in retirement. He putters and plants and pulls nut grass for several hours a day, sometimes sitting so long on a low stool that he can barely get up. He’s had a fence put up and a sprinkler system installed, and the last time I saw him he had ordered some cuttings that were supposed to grow into giant shade trees in less than two years. When he opened the package and found three or four little pieces of root that looked like rotted grapevine, I think he suspected it had not been one of his wisest purchases. But, as I have indicated, he doesn’t give up easily. He looked them over, twirled them between his fingers, then said, “Better to get me a ladder. I’d hate to get trapped up in one of these things in case I don’t get out of the way fast enough.
I finally got up the nerve to tell him how much I appreciated the way he had maintained the integrity of his personality all the way to what I had thought was the end. He said, “I’m glad that’s the way it was and I’m glad you noticed. Some people are full of fear. They are afraid to live and afraid to die. As long as you have that attitude, you are half whipped to start with. I heard people saying I was going to die, but I never really thought I would. I felt sort of like I was falling off a tall building and somebody was going to come along and put a mattress out for me. I wasn’t ready, but if it was time, I wasn’t going to panic. I guess I inherited that from Mama and Papa.”
He explained how matter-of-factly both his parents had faced death and how he had admired that. I understood what he was saying. I told him, “It’s hard to give your children a greater gift than that.” He said something like “Wellsir,” and, typical of the way he has always dealt with conversations that get too close to the core, started talking about a helicopter that was flying over the house. Later, as I prepared to leave—knowing then, knowing now, that any such leave-taking might be the last—he said, “I’m glad we had that little talk.” I told him I wished I could do something to make him well. Since I couldn’t, I would try to be the best man I knew how to be. He squeezed my hand. I think he understood what I was saying. I hope I did.
L. C. “Peggie” Martin died August 13, 1978, after a brief period of hospitalization. He was 73 years old. At his well-attended funeral, his grandsons served as pallbearers, his friends sang “Amazing Grace” and “I Come to the Garden Alone,” and, in keeping with his precise instructions, no one read the 23rd Psalm. Five men who had known him well spoke with reasonable accuracy of his work, his character, and his personality. More than once, the burden of sorrow was lightened by laughter at the memory of an uncommon man. Adapting the words of the Apostle Paul to the audience and the occasion, the last speaker closed his remarks by saying, “Peggie Martin fought the good fight; he finished the course; he kept the faith; and he hoed his row to the end.
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