Arriving at the funeral home, the chairman of the Hill County Republican party asked me whether my mother, a resident of Hillsboro, the county seat, had known how the local elections had gone. She knew, I told him. Democrats had dominated the county since Texas entered the Union. But last fall, for the first time ever, Republicans won every contested seat.
Martha Leila Martin Eastland was most pleased with that result. She was a Republican from the time she first voted, and she could never understand why Hill County, south of Dallas, had remained so Democratic for so long, why it had chosen to dwell in such, well, ignorance. My mother never voted for the Democratic presidential candidate, not even, as you will have deduced, for FDR, who ran up big margins in the South.
Mother was a conservative long before conservatives captured the GOP. She read conservative books and made sure to transmit conservative ideas to her children. Weekdays at 6 P.M., we listened to Fulton Lewis Jr., who gave you the news in a fair and balanced kind of way. Next was H.L. Hunt, the super-wealthy oilman, who catechized listeners in conservative doctrines.
This education bore its first fruit in 1964 when my brother and I went to a rally (in Dallas, where we lived) for Barry Goldwater. Mother was of course disappointed with the landslide election that kept LBJ in the White House, but very happy 16 years later when Ronald Reagan won.
Mother was a patriot with a passion for things American, including the country’s art and architecture. Descended from Scots-Irish settlers, she was a Daughter of the American Revolution and a Daughter of the Republic of Texas. The Alamo remained large in her imagination. She was intrigued with the life of her paternal grandfather, who came to Texas from Alabama, survived four years in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, and later was elected to Congress (only parenthetically do I think Mother would permit me to say he was a Democrat).
Mother was a good student and in 1938 took a degree in home economics from Texas State College for Women, up in Denton. She taught that subject in middle and high school. She left behind a vast collection of recipes, few of the lean cuisine variety. As a cook, she was fastidious, and she had that intuition good cooks have, by which an ordinary recipe, with subtle modifications, can be made to yield a better result.
“Determined” was what my mother always was. She planned to do this and that, big projects and small, and nothing was ever going to stop her.
She was this way even in her last years. Last February she had an appointment with a foot doctor in Ennis. Nearing the town, she stopped for a moment to roll down the window and get some fresh air. Fog had settled in, and she didn’t know that her car was on some railroad tracks. A train exiting a spur at 11 miles an hour hit her in the driver’s door, totaling her car. She was okay. The state police rushed her to the hospital, but she made it clear she had come to Ennis not to visit the emergency room but to see the foot doctor. They took her by ambulance.
The biggest challenge my mother faced, together with my father, concerned my sister Janie, who at 16 months had measles encephalitis, which left her brain-damaged. Mother never flagged in her determination to improve Janie’s life. She had no patience with doctors and other professionals who thought little could be done to help her. Janie had 20 good years before another disease–Parkinson’s–began its relentless assault. She learned to read and write. She kept a diary. She sewed and she helped in the kitchen. At our neighborhood cafeteria, close enough for her to walk to and from, she won employee-of-the-month awards. Mother cherished them.
The Psalmist wrote, “The years of our life are seventy, even by reason of strength eighty, yet their span is toil and trouble.” Mother’s span was ninety, and the last five brought major health trouble. Even so, she could make you laugh. In her last months, having worked hard to learn again how to swallow food, she could get down only a third of a teaspoon. So the feeding tube did most of the “eating.” She joked that real eating had become, for her, the home economist, “recreation.”
At her service, she wanted hymns sung, Scripture read, and the Gospel preached. That was what we did. She also wanted played the Boston Pops Orchestra’s version of “Chariots of Fire.” I couldn’t find that and went with Vangelis. She liked the movie. Maybe Chariots of Fire reminded her of the race that had been set before her, and which she was finishing as death drew near. It played as the rows emptied.
TERRY EASTLAND
