I wish I knew more about my father. His name was Hardy Nathaniel Marshall. He was born January 28, 1908, and died March of 1960. I have spent a great deal of time trying to recover the history of the Marshalls who came before me, but when I come to my own father, there are questions I can no longer ask. I was still a boy when he died. At that age, you do not sit down with your father and ask him about his childhood.
You don't ask what he dreamed about becoming. You don't ask what frightened him. You don't ask whether he was happy. You assume there will be time for those questions later. Sometimes there isn't.
The Accident
Hardy grew up in Pear Valley, Texas, on his father's farm. When he was about eight years old, an accident changed the direction of his life. He was trying to cut a piece of wire using a rock and a hammer. He struck the wire. It separated. One end flew into his left eye and destroyed the sight in it. He would live the rest of his life blind in one eye. It is difficult to know all the consequences of something like that. One thing we do know is that years later, when other young men were being drafted into military service, Hardy's blindness made him ineligible.
So he stayed home. And he farmed.
Farming Was What He Knew
Hardy became a sharecropper. There was nothing easy about that life even when the weather cooperated. A sharecropper could work from daylight until dark on land he did not own and still have very little to show for it after the crop was divided and the bills were paid. But farming was what Hardy knew. And because he was blind in one eye, his prospects for doing something entirely different were limited. So, he did what men of his generation often did. He worked with what he had.
He married. He and Marie had children. And he tried to support his family by farming the land. Then came the drought.
The Drought
I have written elsewhere about what the drought did to McCulloch County. It dried up fields. It destroyed crops. It emptied stock tanks. It put farmers into debt. But when I think about my father, I believe the drought destroyed something else. It dried up his strength. A farmer can fight weeds. He can fight insects. He can repair machinery. He can work longer hours. He can plant again. But a farmer cannot fight the sky. If the rain does not come, determination cannot put moisture into the ground.
Hard work cannot make a seed grow in dry soil. And year after year, the drought continued. Farming was not simply Hardy's job. It was what he knew how to do. Imagine watching the only way you know to provide for your family slowly become impossible. Then imagine having few realistic alternatives. I was a child. I could see what was happening around me, but I could not understand what was happening inside my father. At eighty, I understand more.
The Marriage Ended
Eventually, my mother and father divorced. After my parents divorced, Mother took us away from the farm. Dad had lost both the household he knew and the livelihood he had struggled to maintain. I do not pretend to know everything that happened between my mother and father. A thirteen-year-old boy does not know the private burdens carried inside a marriage. But I know what I saw. And looking backward, I have come to believe that the drought did far more than destroy crops. I believe it destroyed my father's life.
Fifty-Two
Hardy Marshall died of a heart attack when he was only fifty-two years old. I was still a boy. Medically, his heart stopped. But when I think about everything that had happened to him, I sometimes describe it another way. I think my father died of a broken heart. That is not a medical diagnosis. It is a son's judgment after living long enough to understand something about disappointment, failure, marriage, responsibility, and loss. The little boy who lost his eyesight in one eye became a man with limited choices.
He chose farming. He tried to raise a family. Then nature turned against him year after year. The farm failed. The marriage failed. And before he had much chance to begin again, his heart failed. He was fifty-two.
Not all my memories of Dad are painful. On trips to Brady, Mother would shop at Piggly Wiggly while Dad took me to a tiny hamburger stand in the parking lot. I remember the grill, the counter, and the round stools. That hamburger stayed in my memory as the best I had ever eaten, perhaps because it was the first one I could clearly recall. Another time, Dad bought me a bowl of chili with crackers for only a few cents. They were simple meals, but they gave me something I still treasure: time alone with my father.
The Questions I Never Asked
I would like to sit down with Hardy today. I would ask him things I never thought to ask as a boy. What was Pear Valley like when you were a boy? What did your father, Jesse Henry, teach you? What do you remember about your mother, Ludie? What did you want to become before you lost sight in your eye? Were you frightened when the drought wouldn't end? Did you feel that you had failed your family? What would you have done if the rains had come?
And most of all:
“Dad, what did all of that do to you?”
I cannot ask him those questions. That opportunity disappeared when he died. But I can do something now that I could not do then. I can look at him with the understanding of another man. I know what it means to have a marriage fail. I know what it means to worry about supporting children. I know what it means to have a career change direction unexpectedly. I know what it means to watch circumstances take away something you thought would always be there. And because I know those things, I judge my father differently than a boy could.
Hardy Marshall was not simply a poor sharecropper who couldn't make the farm work. He was a man trying to make a living from land during one of the worst droughts Texas had ever known. He was doing it with sight in only one eye. He had a wife and children depending upon him. And farming was all he knew. He kept trying until there wasn't much left to try with. I wish I had known him longer. I wish I had known him better.
But perhaps, after all these years, I finally understand him a little better. And maybe that is one reason I have been trying so hard to recover these stories. I cannot bring my father back. But I can make sure he is not forgotten.