The Farmer
Cheryl Unruh
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
“I can remember the first time I ever saw him,” Ila Mae said when I asked how she had met her husband.
“I knew he was the one; I knew it from the start. But it took awhile for him to know it,” she grinned.
After her husband’s burial, Ila Mae Whitlock and I talked in the basement of the Elmdale United Methodist Church where the church women had prepared a meal.
Ila Mae is my mother’s first cousin. As a child, when I visited my grandparents and great aunts and uncles, all of whom lived in Arkansas, I heard Ila Mae’s name mentioned often. But it wasn’t until a family reunion several years ago that I finally met her and her husband, Merle.
Mom had always told me that I would like Ila Mae. And I did. I immediately felt comfortable around this graceful woman — who still has that “Apple Blossom Queen” sparkle in her eyes.
As we finished the meal, Ila Mae told me about Merle. He had originally been a friend of her older brother, Stanley.
She grew up in Elmdale, but in 1937, her family moved to Fayetteville, Ark., where she attended high school. “I would come back to Elmdale to visit — with the idea of seeing him,” she said.
Earlier that morning, the sanctuary was full. My mother and I sat behind the pews, in the overflow section. The pianist began the funeral with “Softly and Tenderly” and “This is My Father’s World.”
Merle was a Chase County farmer. I didn’t know him well at all; I’d only had a few conversations with him at family gatherings. But I had listened when he talked with other farmers about planting beans and killing bindweed.
He said that clearing timberland for crops was a lot easier than claiming land from the prairie grass. And, like any good farmer, Merle could recite precipitation amounts from the last five rainfalls.
Rev. John Hastings read the obituary. Merle Whitlock died at age 89. He had lettered in football and track at K-State. He and Ila Mae were married in Fayetteville in 1942. There are two daughters: Gwen and Karmen, five grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren.
“When I was a little girl, Daddy had his record player going for me all the time and this was one of the songs he liked,” Gwen Simmons said before she sang “Whispering Hope.”
“I will miss him,” Rev. Hastings said, his voice hinting at emotion. “I don’t like to do funeral services for friends.”
The minister described Merle’s ornery nature and that he had taught the young ones in his family how to slurp noodles. In college, Merle placed sixth in the standing long jump event at the Texas Relays. One Election Day during a flood, he used his tractor to haul voters to the polls.
“He’d sit in the back of the church and count those who came in,” the minister said. “And when he was in the hospital, he asked his family what the church attendance had been that morning.”
Rev. Hastings spoke of Merle’s love for farming and that while working the fields, “he would avoid a patch of ground that had a wild animal living in it, so that it would have a home.”
As the funeral procession headed west, a Chase County deputy stopped traffic on U.S. Highway 50, allowing us to cross uninterrupted. A green funeral tent offered a break from the mighty south wind which brushed the hilltop cemetery.
On that gusty February morning, under a streak of gray clouds, a farmer was returned to the Chase County soil.
The cemetery accepts bodies of the departed ones, but each person leaves behind a trail, a posse of friends, a circle of family, a book of stories.
F “Flyover People” is online at www.flyoverpeople.net. Cheryl Unruh can be reached at cheryl@flyoverpeople.net.