One of the things my father told me about his funeral was that he did NOT want us to play “Amazing Grace.”
We were drinking beer in my garage. It was late. I thought about that for a bit.
Our conversations were never the hurried flurry of words you hear from most people. There were long pauses. Silence. Reflection on what was said. Then searching for the right reply.
“Because,” he said. Another pause. “I’ve never been lost a damn day in my life!”
He seldom explained his pronouncements.
He did have other ideas about what song to play at his funeral. We’ll get to that.
We’re going to talk about trees.
When my father retired from the Army, he moved just north of Tyler, Texas, about halfway between the Starrville Church of the Living God and Lambert’s Liquor store, just across the county line in Gregg County.
(If you’re thinking that’s a metaphor, well, yeah. He was probably a little closer to the county line than the church.)
His place was in the country, essentially. He had neighbors, but he could ride a four-wheeler, fish in a pond, shoot a gun. And he had trees. A dozen or so huge, towering pine trees.
He loved trees and loved watching the animals that lived among them. He had been a hunter in his younger days but in his retirement years was essentially a bird watcher and animal lover. He took in several stray cats, including one that had been shot up by a neighbor’s kid. He waged a peaceful battle against the raccoons that attacked his bird feeders. Shooting them was never an option for him. He had to outsmart them.
Still, he talked tough.
He texted me one day, while he was living out there.
I texted him back, “Well, close the garage door and put a cat in there. If the cat gets the snake, you’re good to go. If the snake eats the cat, you probably ought to move.”
He had tried a succession of jobs after the Army -- but he didn’t fit in with the private sector. There wasn’t a lot of room in the Northeast Texas good ol’ boy network for a guy who was gonna tell the boss that he was wrong and this is how it should be done.
He worked for a car lot for a very brief time. Would you buy a used car from this man? No. Because if you asked enough questions, he couldn’t help but tell you that the car was a piece of shit.
He loved those trees. Wouldn’t cut one down unless it was dead. But he had no problem turning the remains of oak trees into family treasures. He didn’t go out to Home Depot and pick out a few boards. Lumber was delivered to him on 18-wheelers.
So, Bullworker took the plunge and started his own business -- Solid Oak Wood Products. Did I say these were his retirement years? Hell, we were 15 years away from that.
With a little bit of help, he could’ve made a good and comfortable living selling custom pieces to wealthy customers. But nobody in our family is a salesman and we had no way of connecting the craftsman to the customer.
Instead he sold display cases wholesale. Working himself stupid seven days a week out of his garage. Mom pitched in. Full time. Family members would come visit and find themselves cleaning the shop and sanding boards. If anyone thinks I picked up woodworking pretty quickly, keep in mind I spent hundreds of hours working and watching before I ever made a thing myself.
There was success -- he was proud to send cases to the George W. Bush White House. And to Super Bowl winning teams. He was proud his cases were the finest available -- “none of that plastic crap,” he’d say.
He gave up the business when he got 100% disability from the Army. At this point he had money rolling in, and he didn’t have to work -- couldn’t work -- to get it.
Over those years the big pine trees started to die. Pine bark beetles killed most of them. Lightning struck the biggest one in the front yard. One by one, he’d have the dead trees cut down and hauled off.
If you think I’m going to make a Samson-esque reference to the dying of the pines and the loss of Bullworker’s vitality, well, yes.
There were good times in the last years at Starrville. He was a fine grandfather -- he insisted on being called “grandpa.” “None of that paw-paw shit,” he’d tell me. Even though he was very fond of nicknames for everyone else.
He’d tirelessly drive the kids around on his John Deere riding mower. When my young boys identified him with his John Deere hat, he’d never fail to greet them in costume. We set up a zip-line. In true Bullworker fashion, we didn’t do it half-ass. We’re talking an 80-yard ride rigged up with professional rock climbing equipment.
And he and mom would come to my house for birthday parties -- state visits, we called them -- and he’d come by himself to help me with some project or other, which usually involved us staying up past midnight drinking beer in the garage and pontificating -- his word -- on topics of all sorts.
But, the dying of the pines. I remember the time I came up to visit and found that he had actually left his tools out on the ground. A sin he had long warned against. There were projects left unfinished. There was a new silence at the house. He didn’t talk about the future. He wouldn’t answer questions. There was a depression. Perhaps a bitterness. Maybe even fear.
Of course he didn’t take to old age. He was used to being vital. He was used to being in command. But it wasn’t him. No, it was mom. She had dementia. Alzheimer’s. He couldn’t leave her alone. He couldn’t make the trips he loved.
He wanted, desperately, to protect her dignity, and wouldn’t tell the family he needed help. He carried this burden even as his own health began to fail. “Bulletproof” he’d tell me. “I was damn near bulletproof.”
When it came time to leave their home, only a single great pine remained. He needed to move to North Texas to be near my sister, Julie, so she could help take care of mom. But he didn’t want to go. I appealed to his pride: “You can still steer this boat,” I told him. “Or you can wait a year and be a passenger.”
He went, reluctantly.
Their new house overlooked the empty vista of a grass farm. They owned it for three years, but mom only spent a year there before going to an assisted living facility. Dad spent most of the second year in a succession of hospitals and rehab facilities.
But in that first year, he planted a tree in the backyard. Not a giant pine tree. Not a mighty oak. Just a tree. Any damn tree. Someplace to hang at least a single bird feeder.
In August. Just a month ago. When he was dying in that hospital bed in his living room, he was impossibly small. In a moment that morning between hospice nurses it was just me and him. “I love you,” I told him. “But it’s OK. I got this.”
Looking out the window, that little tree he had planted was dying too.
That was the end.
But that’s not where we’re going to leave Bullworker.
We’re going to build him up again. He deserves to live in our memories as the man he was.
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When Larry McMurtry introduced Captain Woodrow Call in “Lonesome Dove,” he wrote:
“The funny thing about Woodrow Call was how hard he was to keep in scale. He wasn’t a big man -- in fact he was barely middle-sized -- but when you walked up and looked him in the eye, it didn’t seem that way.”
It was much the same way with Bullworker. Even in his 60s, when he had shrunk to my height and his shoulders had been worn to the point where he couldn’t raise his hands in anger if he wanted, his hard stare and commanding voice would make a big man step aside.
Growing up, toughness was a hard-earned tradition for the Thomas family.
When my grandfather was a boy, his own brother accidentally shot him in the stomach during some foolishness with a rifle at the swimming hole. My great-uncle carried my gut-shot grandfather over his shoulder -- if you can imagine that pain -- and took him to the nearest road, where a passing horse-drawn wagon took them to the nearest hospital.
The doctor took a quick look, decided my grandfather was going to die, and put him in an auxiliary room -- a shed really -- behind the hospital.
Grandpa lived. This was the blood in Bullworker’s veins. This was the stock that he came from.
Toughness was the key to growing up on the farm. First in Magnet, Texas. Then in Wharton. He raised livestock -- became president of the local FFA chapter. He welded. He rebuilt cars and motorcycles. Raised hell on a motorcycle -- he talked about buzzing the local church on Sunday morning and passing a jug back and forth among his friends while speeding down the highway.
But most of all he worked. Because his dad did, and Bullworker was determined to be just as tough as his old man. He told me when he was under that farm truck trying to put that transmission back together, it didn’t matter how heavy it was. It didn’t matter how tired he was. If it was going to be done, he had to do it.
And it had to be done.
When it came time to go to college, Texas A&M wasn’t his first choice. I would guess that the military was a sore spot in his immediate family. His uncles had served in World War II, but his father -- because of his childhood injury -- wasn’t allowed to serve. It was a hard thing for my grandfather to live with.
Bullworker was going to be an agriculture teacher.
Dad told me he and a friend drove all day up from Wharton up to Texas Tech in Lubbock. Right as they entered town, a dust storm was blowing in. They turned around and drove home. Right then.
On the way back, they stopped at Texas A&M.
I’m not sure if dad had any intentions of a military career when he enrolled at Texas A&M, but he found his calling. He was traditional enough to love the farm life, smart enough to leave it behind and tough enough to handle whatever the Corps, and then the Army threw his way.
He was a senior at A&M when he met my mother. He called it a blind double-date. As much as an accidental meet-up as possible. But let’s face it. The man had no problems with his dating life.
Let’s consider this photo.
Look at this man. This looks like a still from a Hollywood movie. That is your good-looking leading man right there. The one who saves the day and gets the girl.
If you’re here because you know me. And you’ve ever wondered why I was determined to be fearless, to work hard, to be stoic -- it was because that was all I could genetically muster to try to live up to Charlton Heston here.
This man didn’t even break a sweat when he worked.
When he left Texas A&M, Bullworker and my mom were married in Austin and he was sent to Germany instead of Vietnam -- although he’d get there a few years later.
The old world was a romantic wonderland for the young couple. Here he was, half a decade away from driving a cotton picker from Wharton to the Rio Grande Valley at 30 miles per hour (you could see every rock on the side of the road, he told me) and now he’s taking in Europe’s wine and food and culture first-hand.
He didn’t pass up an opportunity to point out that I was conceived during a trip to Italy, but I’m a bit more comfortable than Julie who recently made the mistake of reading some of their love letters -- and learning more than she wanted to know.
Once I was born, me and mom came home to Austin, while he went to Vietnam. He only spoke about that year in the broadest of terms. He drove trucks. It was bad. He listened to Kris Kristofferson sing “Me and Bobby McGree” and wanted to come home.
If anything haunting happened there, he kept it to himself.
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I’ve told you about the end and the beginning. Don’t worry, we won’t take another 20 minutes to run through the middle.
He was a good man. He worked too hard during the day. He drank too much in the evening. He smoked too much all the time.
He struggled hard to give me the raising that he had wanted. Most often I’d just work alongside him, but he took time out every now and then for a hunting trip. A fishing trip. A Dallas Cowboys game. Turns out, most of our adventures were misadventures. But you remember those better anyway.
He served in Desert Storm. And before that he spent a year in Lebanon as a military advisor.
He told me a little bit after he got settled in at his apartment in Beirut (I’m guessing it was about 5 minutes), he sent his driver out to find some whiskey. The guy was gone for hours. He finally returned with one small, dusty bottle of Four Roses whiskey. There basically was no whiskey to be had in Beirut. But Scotch? There was plenty of that. So Bullworker, practical as ever, switched.
There may have been some Scotch involved in this photo.
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We often talked about the “Thomas optimism.”
I told him that the title of my autobiography was going to be “It Was Harder Than I Thought” -- because we both had a tendency to look at something and think “I can do that.” He was right more often than I’ve been.
But over the last decade, I’ve realized he carried his disappointments a lot deeper than I ever thought. He retired a Lt. Colonel in the Army, bitter that he didn’t make full Colonel. The Army gave him 100% disability, but he was bitter when he could no longer work.
Old age brought with it fear. He wouldn’t speak of cancer. He wouldn’t talk about how he would do living alone. And when mom got Alzheimer’s, man he NEVER talked about his feelings about that -- at least not with me. He carried that heartbreak all by himself.
If he drank enough on a visit with me, he’d tell the same story he’d told me a dozen times. How, after he’d made it to captain or so in the Army, after he’d made himself a successful career, he went down to Wharton and took his old man camping down by the Colorado River.
It was the same spot they had camped when he was a kid. One of their few activities together that didn’t mean working their ass off. But now my dad had all the gear. Top-notch tents. Army stuff. Coolers. Beer and whiskey and brand-new fishing poles. He wanted to show his dad he had made it.
And grandpa came and hung out for awhile, but he didn’t stay. After a few hours, he abruptly told my dad that he had to go. And he went home.
And my dad spent the night alone on the banks of the river. Wondering what he didn’t do right.
Was grandpa really that ornery? Was grandpa already dying of lung cancer and too sick to stay? Or was he so proud that he was too choked up to stay? He never explained.
Fifty years later, my dad was still at a loss for words. Fifty years later, he still was looking for an answer. Confused enough to share that pain with his own son.
I told him it was probably a hard man struggling with his pride. But, hell, I didn’t know.
My own father did particularly well in his life. But he wanted more than he got.
There’s a Sam Peckinpah movie called “Junior Bonner.” No, it wasn’t one of his better-known ones. In it, a down-on-his-luck rodeo cowboy played by Steve McQueen finally returns to his hometown.
Of course, he wants to win the big rodeo, but one of the subplots is the backward-looking, wayward son reconnecting with his hard-drinking, idealistic old man, Ace Bonner.
Now you see what I’m getting at.
The day before the big rodeo the father signs the two up to compete in a wild cow milking contest. Not a serious competition, just a bit of entertainment for the locals before the big event.
But of course they give it all they got, and come up just short of winning.
The father is disappointed.
“We could have won,” he tells his son..
The son sees the bigger picture. Junior puts his arm around his father’s shoulder and says “We did, Ace. We did.”
Well… we won Bullworker. I hope you know it now.
We won.
Here’s that song you wanted.
(Plays “Whiskey River.”)
