Reba: My Story (6 page)

The next time Daddy had to gather, he said, “Reba, you gonna go help?”

“You gonna holler at me?” I asked.

“Probably,” he answered.

“Nope,” I said.

I
’VE BEEN ASKED IF I RESENTED THE WAY DADDY WHIPPED US
kids. I don’t. That’s just the way he was.

What I did resent were the times I had to work cattle with the men, then go in about 11:30
A.M.
to cook dinner, which is what we called the noon meal. We cooked it, the men ate it, we cleaned up the mess, then returned to work with the men. What’s wrong with this picture?

Me having to cook stopped when I was eleven. It was noon one day, and Mama was at work. I don’t remember where Alice was, but if she had been there, Daddy would have sent her. Instead, he told me, “Reba, you go on up to the house and fix dinner.”

I looked in the cabinets and found a can of green beans. And lima beans. And pork ’n’ beans.

I honestly didn’t realize that everything I opened was a variety of beans.

“Reba, are you partial to beans?” Daddy asked when he and the rest of the family came inside. Pake, who still tells the story to tease me, says, “Can you imagine a damn cattle outfit with no meat?”

Daddy wanted some meat and potatoes, food that would “stick to his ribs.” Instead, they all got a vegetarian meal years before that kind of eating became popular. I don’t remember Daddy ever sending me to the house to cook again.

W
HEN WE WERE GROWING UP I USED TO REGRET THAT DADDY
never told us that he loved us. It bothered me that he never gave us kids Christmas presents, except one year when he gave Pake a pocketknife. But Mama took care of that like I found out later a lot of mamas do. Daddy was just too busy.

After messing with yearlings from daylight until after dark, Daddy would just lie on the couch and then he’d go to bed, to the quiet. On the rare occasions when he was rested and he felt good, we’d pile on him on the couch and wrestle. Sometimes, he even took us swimming in the pond on the top of the mountain after we’d been working cattle all day. I remember there was a creek just right for swimming up past Grandpap’s house almost to Uncle Keno’s, Grandpap’s brother. We’d take a watermelon and throw it in to get cold while we swam. Then we’d cut it open and eat it. It was a lot of fun. Lots of great memories.

I think my Daddy never learned how to show love like a lot of people because of his upbringing and him being an only child. Back in 1987, when he had triple-bypass surgery, I went to see him in intensive care. He had tubes sticking out from all over him and was still groggy from the heavy medication.

I just sat by his bedside, thinking back on those tough days on the ranch and understanding how rough it must be for Daddy to see those years of hard living catch up with him. Work was his whole life. “You can’t mess around,” he used to tell us. “If you’re in business, you tend to business first.” I realized then how much like him I am.

Squeezing his hand, I leaned over to him. I explained that I had to go meet the bus, that I had a show to do in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the following night.

In a faint voice he said, “Okay. I love you, honey.”

That was the only time I ever heard him speak those words to me or to anyone else.

But he’s come close. “I don’t know,” he said recently, “I’ve seen Reba on television now so many times. I’ll say it still just makes me go to pumpin’ inside.”

I
NEVER KNEW HOW ABNORMALLY ROUGH MY CHILDHOOD
was until I went home with other kids. Most of my friends had time on their hands, to play with toys and things. The only time we got out of work was when we went to school. When I came home, I took my school clothes off—hand-me-downs mostly from my cousins or sister; the only time I received new clothes was at Christmas—and put on my everyday clothes to get to work.

I had a white sweatshirt with the sleeves cut out that I wore for a long time. One day I’d wear it correctly. The next day, I’d turn it around, and the next day I’d turn it inside out. Then, the next day, I’d turn it around again. Since Mama had a day job and her hands were full when she got home, I thought I’d help out as much as possible. But I was never clothes conscious anyway, and to this day I prefer to wear jeans when I’m not onstage.

I don’t mean to suggest that we were dirty. On school nights our evening routine included baths for all of us, but
we only had one bathroom for six people. We bathed in a galvanized bathtub and whoever got there first had clean water, which was pulled by gravity through pipes from our pond. The cattle also drank out of that pond, so I never drank the water when I was at home unless it was fixed as iced tea. The water did go through a filtering process Daddy had bought, but iced tea is clear compared to the water that we had running into the house. Grandma Smith got their water from a well at their house, and I remember watching her strain it through a cotton dish towel to remove most of the foreign objects.

But my story is not another attempt by someone in show business to tell you how hard she had it as a little girl. My friend Burt Reynolds talks about how successful folks try to “outpoor” each other. They sit around telling stories, something like, “We were so poor when I was a kid that we didn’t have running water.”

“Oh yeah?” another argues. “We were so poor that the wolf brought his lunch when he came to our door.”

I can add to that: “We were so poor when I was a kid, we didn’t even have a remote control for the TV.” That’s what I’ll tell my son, Shelby, someday.

We got a color television when I was twelve. I’ll never forget how excited I was! We stopped at a Pizza Hut in Ada, Oklahoma, to celebrate the purchase. I had never been to one before.

When the waitress came, Mama said, “Hamburger, please,” meaning hamburger pizza. I’d just been to the bathroom and didn’t hear what was going on, didn’t know there was more than one kind of pizza.

“Hamburger?” I shouted. “I thought we was gonna have pizza!”

Everybody laughed and never let me forget my stupid remark.

That TV became the nighttime entertainment center at our house—Pake could take an entire bath in the flash of a commercial. It also taught me my first lesson in democracy.
We would vote at the start of the week on which shows we were going to watch on which nights. The majority ruled. We made a list, and posted it above the heating stove. Believe me, no child today has ever enjoyed a video game more than we enjoyed our nineteen-inch television that received only two channels.

T
HE TV WAS OUR ONE BIG LUXURY, BUT KIDS WHO ARE
brought up with as few material things as we had usually become very inventive. One of the most fun and resourceful things us kids ever did together had to do with deer hunters. Our ranch had about as many deer as rattlesnakes, and both were equally visible.

During deer season in November, we’d go to Mama’s office at school and use the copy machine to print permits to sell for a dollar apiece to the hunters who wanted to come on the McEntire land. This is how we got our Christmas money every year. We’d put a rope up on our side of the cattle guard—boards like a bridge over the creek that keep livestock from walking across the creek—and when we’d hear a pickup approaching, we’d hop right up with our permits.

Then the lies and excuses would begin.

“Oh, we hunted on here last year and Clark said we could hunt again,” someone might say.

“You can, but it will cost you a dollar,” one of us kids would reply.

“Don’t you recognize me?” another might say. “I’m your kinfolk. I’m Uncle So-and-So.”

“Nice to see you, Uncle So-and-So, have you got your dollar?” Despite our serious efforts, sometimes hunters would come onto our place with us not knowing. So at night, us four kids and Daddy would load up in his pickup to raid the deer camps. Daddy knew the land better than anybody, and I don’t think we could have found our way
around up there at night without him. Daddy always knew where the camps would be.

There we were, bouncing over the roughness that was our land, searching for the brightness of a campfire. When we spotted one, Daddy would stop, and us kids would pile out of the truck.

“How you fellers doing?” Daddy would say, leaving the collecting to us.

“Have you got your permit?” Pake would say. Once again, the excuses and lies.

Most of the responses were in fun, because everybody always paid. Some years, we’d do very well, clearing twenty to forty dollars a day. But Mama remembers that Pake got discouraged when we first started collecting. He thought the men were really trying to cheat him, and if he hadn’t persisted, who knows if they would have paid? It was Pake’s first lesson in grown-ups’ dishonesty, as he had never previously known anything but the integrity of the McEntires and their friends, most of whom could use their word as their bond.

D
ADDY ALWAYS SAID THAT, BEING AN ONLY CHILD, HE WANTED
to have enough kids to have his own baseball team. But after having four kids that made as much racket as we did—that was enough.

And being normal kids, we were full of mischief. Next to the barn, for instance, was a shed where Daddy kept his sick yearlings. We would tie a rope to the rafters on the barn and Alice and Pake would swing from the top of the shed over the haystack. At the height of their swing, they’d let go and fall into the mountain of loose hay.

I always wanted to try doing things like that, but never had the courage. When I was ten, I stood on top of the shed and braced myself for the swing. Alice and Pake had already gone into the house for dinner. I had assured them I was going to take the swing, but I was simply too scared. I
climbed down the way I had come up, and never did take the plunge that was the McEntire version of bungee jumping twenty-five years ago. I wasn’t ashamed of being chicken. I felt it was the smart thing to do—not to get hurt.

But Alice and Pake called me a sissy for days.

Pake, especially, used to pull these derring-do stunts all the time. I recall feeling my heart in my stomach watching him climb up and down a three-hundred-foot tower just to prove to us he could.

Sometimes we’d play in the hay barn, where Daddy had stacked the hay from the ground to the rafters. There was no way for the smallest breeze to penetrate the hay when it was that tightly packed. Us kids dug tunnels through that mountain of hay. We’d crawl on our hands and knees through the maze of passages, which may stand as the dumbest thing we ever did. If the hay had shifted one bit, we would have been trapped inside and smothered to death. Haystacks are also a hiding place for snakes and skunks that burrow inside. It’s a thousand wonders we weren’t crawling through a tunnel to come face-to-face with a rattler. There is no way we could have gotten out of there.