Reba

CHAPTER 1
 
LOVE IS A LIVING THING. ANYTHING LIVING MUST BE nurtured. It takes time, effort, attention, and sometimes work, but the return is way over tenfold. I’m very lucky that Narvel and I work together and that we can take Shelby with us when we want to. All the rest of my family is still in southeastern Oklahoma. I talk to them or visit them as often as I can.
 
My oldest sister, Alice Lynn Foran, is the county director of the Atoka, Oklahoma, Department of Human Services. She’s married to Robert and has four great kids, Vince, Garett, Trevor, and Haley, whom I love dearly. Alice is the rock, the one you can call at three in the morning, and she’ll always be ready to help in any way. The next in line, my brother Pake and his wife, Katy, run cattle on their ranch outside of Kiowa, Oklahoma. Pake’s real name is Del Stanley, but he got the nickname “Pecos Pete” before he was born. Mama and Daddy would refer to the unborn baby as Pecos Pete, and we’ve called him Pake for short ever since. Besides ranching, Pake sells insurance and sings with his three daughters, Autumn, Calamity, and Chism, all over the country. My baby sister Martha Susan, who we call Susie, sings too and records on Integrity Music. She and her husband, Paul Luchsinger, have an evangelical ministry called Psalms Ministry, so on their tours, she sings and Paul shares his testimony, often with rodeo cowboys. Their three kids, E.P., Lucchese, and Samuel Clark, go with them a lot of the time.
 
My Mama, the former Jacqueline Smith, stays home most of the time now. A yearling hooked her “in the short ribs,” Daddy says, about ten years ago. Actually, Mama said, her ribs have been broken twice by steers and once when she stepped out of the pickup onto a log that rolled out from under her. “It took me two months to get over that one, and after that, I just started staying home.”
 
She talks to her children or grandchildren almost every day. Our love is nurtured.
 
 
MY DADDY, CLARK VINCENT MCENTIRE, IS A FORMER THREE-TIME world-champion tie-down steer roper. He began roping when he was a small boy and entered his first amateur roping contest when he was twelve, in 1939. It happened almost by accident, when Eddie Curtis, Daddy’s friend, asked him, “Are you going to rope?”
 
“Don’t guess,” Daddy said.
 
“You are now,” Eddie said, after pitching down three dollars for an entry fee.
 
“I don’t have a horse,” Daddy said.
 
“You can ride mine,” said Dick Truitt, a former World’s-Champion steer roper and friend of the family.
 
Daddy wondered what in the world he would have done if he had caught the calf. They were great big calves (350 pounds).
 
Daddy turned professional when he won the Pendleton Round-Up All-Around Cowboy roping contest at seventeen, and by 1947 he was the fifth-highest-paid steer roper in the Rodeo Cowboy Association. That year he won $1,222. In 1957—the biggest year he ever had—he earned $5,184.
 
I once asked him if winning the championship was as good as getting there. He said, “No, the fun to me was seeing if I could beat em and win the money. After I won, it was like, ‘So what?’ ”
 
I’m a lot like my Daddy.
 
 
THE MCENTIRE CLAN BUILT A LEGACY IN THE COMMERCIAL RODEO world, but that story came a generation after my eccentric great-grandfather, Clark Steven McEntire. He was born on a Mississippi riverboat on September 10, 1855. Everyone in my family simply called him Pap. His family lived in Cairo, the southernmost city in Illinois, because of its nearness to the nation’s largest river. I’m told he didn’t like to tell folks he was born in Illinois because they would think he was a Yankee. The Civil War had erupted when he was a boy.
 
If he had checked a map he would have noticed that Cairo is as far south as western Kentucky or eastern Missouri. But in his day, an Oklahoman who was suspected of having lived in or even near the North had the same kind of social standing Benedict Arnold had during the Revolutionary War.
 
Pap had broken his back while riding a bicycle and carried a tremendous hump between his shoulders. Pap was married twice, fathered twelve children, and had numerous girlfriends, or so Ray Williams says. He’s Daddy’s cousin, who lived with Pap until he was ten.
 
Ray tells a story about Pap traveling with his first wife and their two boys when one of the boys became ill. He decided the youngster needed chicken soup for medicine just about the time the group passed a house with a flock of chickens. Pap jumped from his wagon and began to chase a chicken, whose squawking alerted its owner.
 
The owner ran outside and demanded to know what was going on.
 
“We’ve got a sick child,” Pap replied. “Please help us catch one of our chickens that got loose.”
 
The chicken’s rightful owner chased it down and turned it over to Pap, not knowing he had surrendered part of his own flock. The child eventually died, as did his brother. Within a month after burying the two boys, Pap buried his wife, the boy’s mother, then went on with his life.
 
But for all his resourcefulness, Pap remained impoverished. He tried his hand at chicken farming, but spring rains made the land too muddy for man or chicken to wade. Chicks were nonetheless hatched. When the rain ceased, the land dried and cracked and the chicks fell through the cracks, taking Pap’s dreams of raising chickens along with them. Eventually, they say, his farm at Cairo, Oklahoma, east of Coalgate, was repossessed.
 
 
 
THE MOST FAMOUS STORIES ABOUT PAP ARE SO EXTREME THAT you have to wonder if they’re true. But I’ll tell them to you anyway. As my Daddy admits, “There just ain’t no telling what all that old man did.”
 
At one point he moved out of the big house, away from his wife and children, into a shanty filled with dogs, rats, snakes, chickens, bugs, and more—he fed every stray animal that came around. He castrated the males and threatened to do the same to young boys who ventured near. He didn’t have a lot of visitors.
 
Actually, his shanty was more like a rock pile in the yard with a protruding stovepipe. He called that dwelling his Dutch oven.
 
Who knows what kind of germs Pap caught from the stray animals he took into his Dutch oven? Ray said that he and Pap more than once caught the mange from stray dogs. To try to get rid of it, they coated their bodies in creosote dip, my Mama said.
 
The creosote was probably an improvement on Pap’s usual condition. He never washed his clothes or himself, never took a bath in his entire life, or so Ray says. He’d boil coffee in a filthy bucket on top of a wood stove, let it cool below a boil, then drink it in gulps as if it were a soda pop. At night, he’d put his coat or vest on the back of a chair and a chicken or two would roost on it. The garment would be covered with droppings the next morning, but he never would wipe them off. He’d just put on his spotted wrap and let the droppings fall off throughout the day, in time to be replaced that night.
 
Pap also had to allow for chickens that slept on the headboard of his bed. When a chicken is asleep, you can pick it up, turn it around, and if you’re careful, it won’t wake up. Pap would turn around several roosting chickens each night before he lay down to keep them from leaving droppings on his head.
 
Though he dressed in near rags, Pap was never seen without a necktie. It was stiff from dirt and never formally tied. He just wrapped it around his neck a couple of times and made a makeshift knot. Even his hat, a derby, was rigid with filth. He wore only clothes that he picked up—literally. Some had been thrown away, but others were permanently “borrowed” by Pap when the owner wasn’t looking.
 
Despite Pap’s habit of “borrowing” everything from others, he accused people of stealing from him whenever some of his ragged clothes or useless junk was missing, and he fought for their recovery. One time Pap was sleeping on the ground and put his false teeth on a wagon-coupling pole. At sunrise, he couldn’t find his teeth and accused another man of taking them.
 
“Why would I take your teeth? I got a perfect set of my own,” the guy argued. Pap threatened to pull the man’s natural teeth to be sure they weren’t false.
 
He was one tough old bird. Daddy contends that Pap knew the legendary Jesse James and his gang. And Ray tells the story of the time that Pap stepped on a blacksnake during the night and picked it up by its middle instead of its head or tail. Doubling back, the snake bit Pap squarely in the face.
 
“He flogged it again’ and again’ the ground,” Ray said, until the snake was dead.
 
Then Pap crawled into his three-quarter-length bed, whose mattress was only a pile of rags. The dead snake lay on the floor for three days until its stench became unbearable and the swelling began to ease from Pap’s face. He finally threw the decaying reptile outside to the dogs. He never went to a doctor.