Pat Bullard

Pat Bullard doesn't remember much about the worst day of her life.

"I had gotten ready for bed, and it was January, and we all had long flannel gowns on from Christmas," says Bullard, the owner of the popular Pat's Bakery on Walton Boulevard in Bentonville. She's petite and energetic -- like a cheerful hummingbird. She tells her story matter-of-factly, sitting in her cozy bakery that smells like your grandma's kitchen on baking day. The scents of sugar cookies and cinnamon rolls mingle, and it's difficult to say which smells more delicious.

"The draft was open on the stove," she continues, "and it's my understanding that a coal or something rolled out, fell on [my] gown."

Bullard notes that most of what she knows about that evening she learned from family members -- shock and pain erased most of her own memories. Her nightgown -- which, in 1962, didn't have the benefit of being made of non-flammable material -- went up "like a torch," says sister Diane Puryear, who watched in horror with four other siblings.

"She was running around in a circle in the living room in full blaze," remembers Puryear. "Mom was in the kitchen, and she came to the doorway of the kitchen to see what the commotion was all about, and here's Pat running around, full blaze. Well, there was a throw rug right there, and she immediately reached down, grabbed it, caught our sister, wrapped her up in it and threw her in the snow bank."

Bullard's mother's quick thinking probably came from the fact that she was a licensed practical nurse by trade, though, at the time, she was raising six children at home and helping her husband tend a 360-acre farm in Huntsville.

Puryear says her only other vivid memory from that night was watching her mother lay her injured sister down on a bed that was clothed in snowy-white sheets that had just been laundered that morning.

"Here's Pat, just charred," she says, shaking her head slowly. "She's black. Mom lays her in that bed, and I couldn't see her. Just black. That's all she was."

Bullard's father was helping at his parents' farm that night, so a neighbor -- fetched by Bullard's younger sister, Susie -- took Bullard and her mother to Huntsville's tiny hospital. Bullard rode in the cab of the truck, cradled in her mother's arms. Her one memory of the night is of looking out the window at the night sky and saying, over and over, "It hurts, Mom. It itches, and it hurts."

"I guess it was the burns, but it felt like a wool blanket was wrapped around me tightly," she says.

Bullard's injuries were so severe that the rudimentary hospital's staff gave her parents little hope for her survival.

"I always say, 'The good Lord needed me here for some reason,'" says Bullard with a laugh. "I stayed alive for two weeks laying there."

The long road back

When Bullard hit the two-week mark, the hospital administrator suggested to her parents that they transfer her to Arkansas Children's Hospital in Little Rock. Desperate to do what they could for their daughter, they readily agreed. Huntsville didn't have an ambulance at the time, but the local funeral home drove Bullard to Little Rock in their hearse. Her father squeezed in the back with her and held her I.V. bags up the entire way.

Bullard's parents struggled to spend as much time as possible with her at the hospital in Little Rock while still caring for her six siblings -- four of whom were younger than she was -- and maintaining the family farm back home in Huntsville. The children were sent to stay with various relatives and friends of the family while the parents were with Bullard.

"There's a section of my childhood I [lost]," says Puryear. "I just don't remember [it]. I think my brain shut down due to separation anxiety. We were a pretty close-knit family.

"One weekend, they took us all down there so we could see her, and they wouldn't let us go up on the floor. Pat was four or five stories up in the building, and we were standing down in a grassy area. They had her standing at the window, and we waved from below. That was as close as we got to our sister until she got to come home. I guess it was almost two years before we got to see her again."

Bullard stayed nine months in Little Rock while her condition stabilized. But she would see little of her home from that point on. The next nine years of her life would include multiple reconstructive surgeries and long-term stays in Shriner's hospitals in St. Louis and Galveston, Texas, to help her regain movement in her head, neck and limbs, which were rendered immobile by the scar tissue.

"I couldn't raise my arms up, that skin was all webbed," Bullard says. "I had to learn to walk again, learn to talk again, because I had [tracheotomies] three times. I had to learn to talk with [the breathing tubes] in, and then again when they took them out."

Back home for brief periods in between surgeries, Bullard would resume normalcy as much as possible, which included helping out with the chores, which all the children were expected to do.

"We had a big farm," she says. "There was dairy and chickens. We spent most of the time in the summer gardening and putting that up and preserving things and taking care of the farm animals."

Puryear laughs as Bullard brings up one particularly brazen stunt Bullard and her siblings pulled off one summer. Their parents had left the house for the afternoon, and the kids purloined the family's tractor for a joyride down to the watering hole a mile down the road.

"All six or seven of us piled on a Massey Ferguson tractor and rode down the road," says Bullard, laughing. "We were straggling off that tractor in every direction you can imagine. We would have been in big trouble had we been caught."

But there were more hospital visits waiting around the corner -- always more hospital visits. When Bullard got a little older, she would navigate the trip herself, even as young as 12 or 13. Other times, a kind friend of her father's flew Bullard and her mother or father to the hospital: Dr. Phil Deal was a dentist who flew his own plane between his Fayetteville and Harrison practices. He offered to fly the family back and forth between Fayetteville and the hospitals treating Bullard that were hours away.

Life continued on this way for the teenage Bullard until finally, she had had enough.

"When the doctors wanted me to have more surgery when I was 16, I finally told them, 'Look, I'm tired of coming to these places,'" she remembers. "'I don't want any more surgeries. You can't make my skin look natural. This is the way I'm going to look the rest of my life. I've accepted it, and I'm content with my life as is.' So they told my parents, and my parents were kind of mad at me. But the doctors said, 'She's OK with this. You need to let her go.'"

Moving forward

Bullard finally left the surgeries behind and never looked back. She graduated from high school, completed a key punch program in Hot Springs and headed off to Little Rock to give life in the big city a try. She didn't take to it, realizing she much preferred small-town living. After a brief stint at the Timex factory in Little Rock, she married a young man she had met while in Hot Springs. The nearly 10-year long marriage resulted in three children: Maggie, Amy and Nathan. Bullard's father had settled into Bentonville, having retired from construction and moved into truck driving for Wal-Mart. When Bullard divorced, she and the children moved there as well. Bullard began working for Wal-Mart and, as a single mother of three, supplemented her income with jobs at restaurants like Bentonville's popular Fred's Hickory Inn.

"My parents got divorced when I was young," says oldest daughter Maggie Bullard-Konschak. "And, from day one, my mother worked two jobs and went to night school for over two years to get her associate's in business administration. My mother has never slowed down since I was a child."

Bullard was good at her job at Wal-Mart and quickly moved up the ladder to management. But the economy took a downturn, and, after 25 years with the company, she found herself a victim of layoffs.

"I didn't know what I was going to do. Every place I had applied to was only going to pay me an eighth of what I was making at Wal-Mart. I was like, 'I can't live on that.'"

When Bullard went to roll over her retirement fund, the man helping her asked her a question that would change her life: "What would you do if you could do anything you wanted to do?"

"I laughed and I said, 'It will never happen,'" she remembers. The germ of an idea had formed while visiting her daughter, who was living overseas. "I told him that while I was traveling in South American and European countries, I always dreamed I could have a little bakery shop, because they're all wall-to-wall every place you go there. I said, 'I love to cook, I love to bake, and I would love to have some way to do that for customers.' He knew the couple who had this little shop as a coffee house and knew they were ready to sell. So he sent me down here to look at it.'"

Fate had opened the door: Bullard loved the space, and the price was right. "It was a scary step in my life, but I prayed about it a lot. I said, 'God, if this is the right thing, let it fall into place' -- and it did. I've been here nine-and-a-half years now."

Surprise destination

As does any new business, the bakery struggled at first.

"Those first years were scary," says Maggie. "She was barely making it. She kept saying, 'It's going to get better,' and it has." Maggie helped her mother out in the bakery for some time when she and her family moved back to the United States. "I was astounded at the amount of customers and product that can come out of that little shop."

Bullard's busiest season, she says, runs from October -- when all things pumpkin are in demand -- through November, with Thanksgiving; December, with Christmas; and February, when her homemade heart-shaped sugar cookies, beautifully hand-decorated in red, pink and white, fly off the shelves.

She also keeps herself busy catering events and creating custom-made wedding cakes, and in addition to baked goods, she serves soups, sandwiches and salads. Oh, and her chicken and dumplings are famous.

"[Former Wal-Mart COO] Don Soderquist loved her chicken and dumplings," says Maggie. "His phone number was on the refrigerator, and she had to call him every time she made chicken and dumplings."

A lot of Bullard's creations come from old family recipes, passed down from her grandmother, who was of Dutch-German descent.

The job is not easy: Bullard is on her feet for an entire shift, and it is hot, busy work, waiting on customers and pulling cookies out of the oven at the same time. She's at the shop between 4 and 4:30 a.m. -- she often has to rise at 2:30 a.m. during her busy season -- which means that by the time the bakery closes at 5:30 p.m., she's exhausted and ready for bed.

Wendi Deacon helped Bullard out part time for six years, and she marvels at how hard Bullard worked, especially given some of the lingering physical issues caused by her childhood accident. She says that Bullard's feet and legs, used so many years ago for skin grafting, would often show the strain after a full day on her feet.

"I remember looking down at her feet," Deacon says, a slight hitch in her voice. "You know, she was like a second mom to me. I would say, 'Pat, you have to get off of your feet!' But it didn't matter how bad she hurt, she never stopped. She always kept going."

There seems to be little doubt that much of Bullard's spark -- her energy, her zest for life -- is a result of the terrible accident that occurred so many years ago, from which she managed to emerge stronger, wiser and more empathetic.

"She's always trying to 'pay it forward'," says longtime family friend Kris Witten. "A few years ago, it was around holiday time, and I was working with her. We heard about a family who needed help, so she gathered everything together for their whole Christmas meal. We provided everything. A few of her customers caught wind of it, and they brought in gifts and money. The whole family was provided for that Christmas. She's got a loving generosity, she's always trying to give back."

Occasionally, Bullard's scars can be a magnet for other people who have experienced similar accidents.

"I met a lady once, she was about my same age," remembers Bullard. "This was maybe 20 years ago. She had been burned in a house fire, but she was an adult when she had her injuries. She asked me, 'How do you get beyond what you look like?' and I said, 'Well, I don't remember what I looked like before. I've always looked like this, so it's just something I guess, in my heart, I've accepted.' I felt bad for her.

"I had a nurse one time tell me, 'Just because you don't see the faults in someone, or the issues, appearance-wise with them, doesn't mean there's no damage there. Everyone has damage, no matter what -- it's just not always visible.' And I thought, well, that's a good way of looking at people."

"Pat told me one time that when she was laying in one of the Shriner hospitals, her mother told her that there were people out there who were a lot worse off than she was," remembers Deacon. "I cannot even fathom the pain that she went through. But she told me that she looked across the room, and there was a baby lying in a bed, and the baby had no fingers, no toes. She said, 'It came to mind that there really were people who were worse off than me, and I think that kind of shed light on me that no matter what kind of pain we go through in life, if we set our mind to something, we can do it.'"

NAN Profiles on 02/05/2017