I was born January 30, 1946, in Brady, Texas, but the world I first came to know was seventeen miles away on a farm near Lohn. It was a hard country even in good times. When the rain stopped coming, it became harder still.
The drought that settled over West Texas in those years lasted for seven years. To a child, a drought is difficult to understand. You don't think about rainfall totals, crop yields, or farm income. You simply know that the adults are worried and that things aren't going very well.
My father, Hardy Marshall, was trying to make a living farming land that increasingly refused to produce. Farming is always a gamble because a farmer can do everything right and still lose. He can prepare the ground, plant the seed, cultivate the crop, and work from daylight until dark. But there is one thing he cannot do. He cannot make it rain. The drought affected almost everything around us. It affected the crops, the money, the farmers, and eventually the families themselves. I was too young then to understand the pressures my father was under. Looking back at it now, I understand much more.
We did not own that farm. Its 247 acres belonged to Rube Huffman, my grandmother Latimer’s brother. He owned a dairy and was comfortably well off. Dad farmed the land in return for a share of whatever profits there were. We were among the poorest families in Lohn Valley. By the time I reached school age, our family depended on government assistance each year to help pay our debts and live. As I remember it, the drought began in 1950. When the land could not produce a crop, there was very little for a sharecropper’s family to fall back on.
But while the grown people were worrying about crops and rain, I had problems of my own. Two of them rode the school bus.
The Long Ride Home from School
Living in the country meant riding the school bus from Lohn. It wasn't a short trip. The route wandered through the countryside dropping off children to farms scattered over a large area, and the entire trip could take about two and a half hours. The ride to school was rather short. For a little boy, that school bus was a world unto itself. There were older children and younger children, friends and enemies, teasing and horseplay—and, as there have probably been on school buses since school buses were invented, bullies.
I was small. That made me a good target. Two older boys began picking on me. This wasn't a single incident. It kept happening day after day, and I finally decided that I had had enough. I found an unusual weapon out at the vocational shop.
Those boys thumped my ears, gave me head burns, and kicked my feet under the seat. Finn tried to protect me at school, but he did not ride the bus in the evenings. On that long trip home, I had to face them without him.
It was a broken baseball-bat handle about 12 inches long, drilled out with bearings inserted in the business end. I remember playing one day by myself and finding the club, hidden in the wall of the shop, and I knew what I intended to do with it. I hid it inside my pants. That wasn't especially difficult because my clothes were hand-me-downs and were considerably larger than I was. Then I waited.
The Club
That afternoon the two boys were on the bus. Eventually Benny Johnson got off. That left the other one. His name was Lynn Fullagar. I took out my club and went after him. I wasn't trying to make a philosophical statement about bullying. I wasn't considering the long-term consequences of violence. I was a little country boy who had been picked on repeatedly and had finally decided that I wasn't going to take it anymore. And apparently I made my point. The next morning, Lynn apologized to me.
The bullying stopped. That might have been the end of the story except for something that happened more than thirty years later.
“The Boy Who Beat Me Up With a Club”
In 1985, I returned for the Lohn Homecoming. By then the little boys who had ridden that school bus were grown men. The drought was history. The farms had changed. Families had scattered. More than three decades had passed since that afternoon on the bus. And there was Lynn Fullagar. Lynn was there with his wife. When he saw me in the school hallway, Lynn told me to stay right there. He went to find his wife, brought her back, and introduced me:
“I want you to meet the boy who beat me up with a club.”
He had never forgotten it. What had once been a serious matter between two boys had become something we could remember without bitterness. Lynn apparently hadn't forgotten that club any more than I had forgotten why I used it.
There is something about growing old that changes the way we look at childhood. Things that once seemed enormous become stories. People who once frightened us become people whose hands we are glad to shake. Old grievances lose their importance, while the memory itself becomes precious simply because there are fewer and fewer people left who remember it with us. And perhaps that is why I remember Lynn's introduction so clearly. He wasn't introducing the little boy who had once been his enemy. He was introducing someone who had shared a piece of his childhood.
The drought eventually ended, and the rain returned. More than thirty years after that afternoon on the bus, Lynn and I could meet at a Lohn Homecoming and laugh about it. Neither of us had forgotten the club.