LITTLE ROCK — Joe Farmer wrote a lullaby for his kid, his firstborn daughter.
"Everything good I had to give," he wrote, "was the only thing she got."
He loved her. He did the best he could. But there was Vietnam.
"That's the man I'm going to marry," Vicki Schooley said when Joe Farmer and his brother drove up to the Main Street McDonald's in Pine Bluff in a blue Thunderbird.
"He was a lot of fun," Vicki Bearden says now of her first husband. "He played guitar, loved to sing. Always had musical friends around."
On their first anniversary, the Army called up Joe. A week after he left, Vicki's doctor informed her that she was pregnant.
Tonja was born in December 1969 and was nearly a year old when her father returned from Vietnam.
The changes in Joe weren't dramatic at first. "He was kind of paranoid," Vicki says.
"He had to have everything just so-so. His clothing had to be perfect. Shirts tucked in, side tucked."
He went to work for the Pine Bluff Commercial, writing obituaries. By the time Tonja was 3, he and Vicki had divorced.
When he stayed on his medicine, Tonja says, her father was good. He remarried and had two more children. But he wouldn't stay on his medicine. Three times as a teenager, Tonja testified in court that her father shouldn't have custody of her half-siblings.
The last time: "He was in the courtroom. It was heartwrenching. He never spoke to me again."
His hard times grew harder. For awhile, Joe was the Arkansas Democrat correspondent in Pine Bluff.
Later he would sit at the church across Scott Street from the newspaper and ask former co-workers for money.
Tonja lost track of him.
She once hired a private investigator who reported Joe was homeless in Little Rock.
She has her happy memories, though, the ones that make her laugh. "Here I am 15, and Daddy tells me to drive home. Wynne to Heber Springs. 'I can't drive a stick, Daddy.' 'You'll learn.' He pulled his cap down over his eyes and took a snooze."
Joe Farmer had been dead for more than three years when Vicki Bearden learned about it three weeks ago. Vicki had plugged thename of her ex-husband's grandfather into a genealogist database and found a story about Joe's death, written by an Alabama minister who had befriended him.
Joe had been living on a sidewalk outside a church in Birmingham. Early on a cold January morning in 2006, someone hit him in the head.
He died in a hospital about 10 days later.
The minister found people who wanted to honor a homeless Army veteran.
They buried Joe Farmer in the National Cemetery at Fort Mitchell near Phenix City, Ala.
"The single-most important thing he taught me was that the only prayer you'll ever need is, 'Thy will be done,'" Tonja said the other day,shortly after she learned her father is dead. "He wasn't a full-time parent, not even a part-time parent. But the time I did spend with him was the best time. ... He was a good daddy. His death is the least important thing about him."
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 08/27/2009