Reba: My Story (7 page)

A lot of our mischief came out at the roping pen. Once Pake and Phillip Miller, Pake’s buddy, dared Alice to ride one of our old steers, and a dare was all Alice needed. But the steer bucked and pinned her up against a split-rail fence, cutting her head open. Pake ran down to the creek, jerked his filthy T-shirt off, doused it in water, and ran back and crammed it on Alice’s head to stop the bleeding. They wondered why she didn’t bleed to death.

Then there was the time we could have lost Susie, a subject we talked about just this past Thanksgiving.

As we remembered it, Alice, Pake, and Susie had been down at the roping pen. Susie was riding behind Pake on Ole Brownie and Alice was on Pelican. When they got to the gate between the roping pens and the house, Pake stepped off his horse to open the gate and Alice rode on
through. So did Susie on Brownie. Both my sisters headed toward the house, leaving Pake behind. Brownie, in a hurry to get to the barn, took off, and Susie, who was really small at the time, couldn’t stop her horse. Brownie ran right by the house. I know because I had stayed at the house that day and ran out the front door when I heard her scream. Right behind our house was a long, two-line clothesline. Brownie went right under it and the lines caught Susie full in the face. One caught her in the mouth and one on the nose. Susie flipped about two times in the air before she hit the ground.

Alice, as the oldest, had been left in charge of us that day while Daddy took Mama to the dentist. She knew she’d get in trouble if Susie was seriously injured, so she tried to persuade her she wasn’t hurt. So she rushed Susie into the house and put a mirror up to her.

“Now see,” Alice said, “you aren’t hurt a bit!”

Susie looked into the mirror and saw her face dripping with blood.

“Then you never heard such screaming,” Pake said. “They liked to never got her quieted down after that. Susie thought she was killed.”

Susie easily could have been killed through a game we used to play in the pickup. We would ride everywhere in the back of the truck, and were forever saying, “Last one out is a rotten egg.” Susie, the baby of the family, didn’t want to be outdone. She got a couple of concussions by jumping out of the vehicle before it came to a stop. It took her a couple of times to figure out she could wait.

T
HERE ARE MANY NATURAL PERILS TO GROWING UP IN THE
rural Southwest—the ever-present wasps (I recall how Grandpap would apply tobacco juice to our wasp stings to take away the pain), the spring tornadoes that would send us running to the cellar Daddy had built for protection in the dead of night, and snakes, which were a constant fear.
We looked out for snakes the way urban children look out for playground bullies.

I once started down the hall from the bedroom and saw a snake curled on the carpet. Mama said later it was just a mouse snake. I began to scream, but she was in no hurry to kill it, seeing that it was harmless. I continued to yell until she cut it into two pieces with scissors. Bloodstains remained on the carpet for weeks after that, and I pouted for days because she had been so casual about the snake.

Another time, I was sitting in Mama’s bed Indian-style drawing on a chalkboard. A movement caught my attention out of the side of my eye. Then I saw a snake slithering around Mama’s magazine on the floor.

Again I started screaming for Mama, who was outside. I threw the chalkboard at the snake and the board shattered to pieces. Luckily it was a nonpoisonous blacksnake. The only harm to its potential victim might be a fear-induced heart attack.

Rattlers, of course, were our biggest worry. In Oklahoma they grow to a frightening size. Okeene, Oklahoma, 168 miles from Chockie, hosts the world’s largest rattler hunt every spring. An average of one thousand pounds of snakes are picked up off the ground in three days’ time, some of them longer than seven feet. Our hired hand, Louie Sandman, once killed a rattlesnake that was six feet two inches long, holding a live rabbit in its mouth. Mama tells me that the largest rattlesnake ever seen around Chockie was killed by Grandpa’s uncle, Belt Love, in the 1920s. That happened about a mile from where we lived. They laid the snake across the tracks, and he reached from one end of the railroad tie to the other while being draped over the rails.

A rattler’s venom can sometimes cause instant death. We’ve even found cattle lying in the pasture that Daddy figured had died of snakebite. And rattlers can be hard to stop. Recently, Pake ran over a rattler as big as his arm with a four-wheel-drive vehicle. The snake slithered off. Daddy
once hit a rattlesnake, which was coiled up, with a big rock. It bounced off like the snake was rubber. The snake slithered off under a rock, so Daddy left him alone.

A
S WITH ALL KIDS, THERE WERE TIMES WHEN WE TURNED OUR
mischief on each other. Being the youngest two, Susie and I naturally tended to get picked on. Alice used to trick Susie and me into going out into the yard, then lock us out of the house. Susie and I eventually figured it all out and started unlocking our bedroom window screens and climbing back inside.

I have to confess that I sometimes started trouble myself. Once, with Pake’s help, I convinced Susie she was adopted. I pointed out that, unlike the other three of us, who resemble Mama, she didn’t have red hair or freckles, and that that must mean she wasn’t a McEntire. She was so upset that she went to her doll for comfort. Her dolls were her life. She’d dress them up and talk to them. I think they were as real to her as her living, breathing brother and sisters.

When she picked up her doll and started to change its dress, she saw that Pake had painted its navel green. She began crying, hard. She packed her suitcase and she left home. She was seven. Susie got as far as the cattle guard and just stood there, bawling. She would have gone farther than that, but Mama had always told us that we could leave but if we ever went farther than the cattle guard we couldn’t come back. Only later, when she was older, did it dawn on Susie that she might not look like Mama, but in looks and temperament she was just like our Daddy! And her baby pictures looked just like Grandma Alice’s.

Unlike Susie, I was a tomboy and never had any interest in dolls or in talking to anything that couldn’t talk back. Maybe because our interests were different, or because we were so close in age and shared a room, she and I fought often as kids, arguing and pulling each other’s hair. Come
to think of it, though, Pake and I used to get into arguments a lot, too, usually while we were gathering cattle. He was bigger and no telling how many pounds heavier than me, but that didn’t scare me one bit.

Our arguments often turned into fistfights. The horses would be going around and around as we’d try to hit each other and knock the other one off his or her horse. Our favorite game was Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better.

M
ORE OFTEN THAN NOT, THOUGH, THERE WAS A LOT OF FUN
and laughing coming out of that little house in Chockie near Limestone Gap.

I recall how Mama had a pink record player, a Motorola, and a 45 of the Singing Nun singing “Dominique.” Now, Susie and I couldn’t understand a word of French, but my folks had this big dresser in their bedroom with a big old mirror. We’d stand in front of it and, using hairbrushes as “microphones,” we’d lip-synch the song. And once a week, the four of us would come parading down the hall in our pajamas, dancing and singing to the music of “77 Sunset Strip,” while it was coming on TV, all the time careful not to let our bare feet touch the hot floor where the furnace was. That was our idea back then of a “pregame show.”

But I especially remember several New Year’s Eves when friends and family came from miles around to dance in our brand-new living room, a large room built onto our house with money Mama and us kids had saved.

Putting the new living room on the back of the house would give us a lot more space. The old living room would become Mama and Daddy’s bedroom, so Pake could get their old one and Alice could get Pake’s. Susie and I would still share one, but it was better for two than for three. So Mama put back money from work. Uncle Peck, Grandpap’s brother, had given each of us kids a heifer calf when we were little, so when the calves grew up and had babies, we
could sell them. We did, and it was our decision to put the money into the living room account.

On those New Year’s Eves, someone would bring a guitar, another a fiddle, but everyone was required to bring either a “pie or a pint” (of whiskey). Nobody got out of line. There were kids everywhere. I watched those people play music, sing, and dance until daylight, and we sang along too. If someone got sleepy, he would pull up a piece of floor to sleep on. It was straight out of “The Waltons.”

Special times like these make me realize that music has always been a huge part of my life.

S
INCE MY DADDY WAS A RODEO CHAMPION, NATURALLY WE
spent a lot of time attending them with him. Some of my fondest memories are of those trips my family made to rodeos. At night, Susie and I would sleep on each side of our green Ford’s hump on the floor, while Pake slept on the shelf under the back window and Alice got the back seat. Going down the road in the dark, listening to the hum of the highway with our parents in the front, was a magical and safe feeling. Sleep and security came easily.

But often we’d get jolted out of that peaceful sleep. In those days there were no interstates, so we’d be traveling on two-lane highways that passed through small towns. When we’d come up on a red light, the heavy two-horse trailer we were pulling, which had no brakes, would be tough to stop fast. So Daddy would hit the brakes and Pake would fall off the shelf onto Alice and then both of them would wind up on the floor along with me and Susie. You can imagine the wrestling that went on after that.

Our daytime rides had their share of wrestling too. We were spirited children, and when boredom and restlessness set in, we could get bad about fighting, scuffling, and “Don’t touch me” and “Pake did this” and “Mama, Pake did that.” So when Daddy had had enough of it, which wouldn’t take very long, he’d let his arm fall from across
the back of the front seat and pinch whichever kid he made contact with first. So Mama would get us to singing to keep us occupied, teaching us three-part harmony and songs like “Please, Mr. Custer. I Don’t Wanna Go” and “I’m So Lonesome Every Day.”