Reba: My Story (14 page)

B
UT CHARLIE COULD BE MORE TENDERLY SUPPORTIVE, TOO, AND
that was the side I was increasingly drawn to. During our courtship, I lost my Grandpap, and I was glad I had Charlie to help me through. Grandma Reba Smith had died when I was fifteen, and I was thirteen when my cousin Gary died. But I was older and more sensitive when Grandpap died. At that point, nothing had ever hurt me as much in my life as the death of the man who had been one of my major anchors.

I rode with Charlie in his pickup to the funeral. As I got out of the truck and started toward the church house, I somehow converged with Pake, Alice, and Susie. We just came together like magnets. We did it without thinking. It was like we were in a trance because we were grieving so hard over Grandpap’s death.

All we could think of was our times with Grandpap: how he’d let us drive his old car he called his “hoopie” even though we were underage, how he’d put tobacco juice on our wasp stings, or give us a dime for a soda water, and of course how he’d rescue us when we were lost in the mountains while gathering cattle. But he sure could be aggravating too. He would do things to get attention, most
of them directed at Mama, his daughter-in-law. Pake and my son, Shelby, are a lot like him. They love attention!

He spit tobacco juice in the water cooler fan one time, when it was running. He’d spit behind the heating stove and wink at us kids. When he ate at our house, he would intentionally sit two feet away from the table. His hands shook and he could not get the food from his plate to his mouth without it falling off his fork onto the floor. But you were wasting your breath to ask him to sit closer to the table. And he’d walk through our little house with footsteps as heavy as those of a three-hundred-pound person. His boots were two sizes too big, and he slammed them down with every step he took. The whole house shook. Us kids loved to imitate him.

But it was Mama, the target of most of Grandpap’s antics, who stood by his deathbed and took care of him until the day he died. She even moved to Oklahoma City, approximately 140 miles away, and rented an apartment so she could watch over him in the hospital.

There is a special place in heaven for people as unselfish as Mama.

I’ll never forget being in Grandpap’s sickroom with Mama and Preacher Ward. Brother Ward stood over Grandpap, who was in a daze from sickness and strong medicine. His mind was wandering. Grandpap thought the preacher was Lowry, one of his old rodeo buddies from years ago.

“Lowry, is the girls here?” Grandpap asked the preacher.

“Yes, John,” the preacher said. “Jackie and Reba are here.”

Grandpap wasn’t asking about Jackie and Reba. He was asking about the party girls that he and Lowry used to know.

Mama and I had to laugh.

Grandpap was buried next to Grandma Alice in the cemetery in Coalgate, Oklahoma. Except for his last days in the hospital, he lived and died within a few miles of his
house. His tombstone was engraved, as clear as day, with the words that describe him best: “Lifetime Cowboy.”

I
WAS GROWING TO RELY ON CHARLIE VERY MUCH AND TO LOVE
him. He was becoming my whole world. So no one was really surprised when we announced our plans to marry. The date we chose was June 21, 1976, the first day of summer.

We married at the Stringtown Baptist Church, in Stringtown, Oklahoma. We had a tough time finding anyone to marry us, since Charlie had been married before. It was a real short ceremony, and I didn’t even have a gown—I just wore a green summer suit.

About all of my family attended—Mama, Daddy, Aunt Jeannie, my cousin Don Wayne Smith, my sister Susie and her boyfriend Kevin Bacon, Alice and her children Vince and Garett and her second husband Brent, my cousins Patricia Ann and Rickie Joy and Rickie’s daughter Bridget and our friend Cody Miller. But not Pake. He didn’t think I should be marrying a man with two kids, and time proved him right about that. I personally asked him to come. He said no, and I said no more. I didn’t beg, but I was terribly hurt.

Looking back, I’ve decided there might have been more to it than Pake’s disapproval of Charlie’s having kids. Pake and I had been extremely close, traveling all over the country together rodeoing and singing. At that time in my life he was my best friend. Pake had also just lost Grandpap, and maybe he thought he was losing me too. Maybe he resented Charlie coming into my life because he thought Charlie would come between us and Charlie would take priority. Charlie did.

Yet during the first week of our marriage, Charlie and I spent more time apart than together. After the “ceremony,” we drove to Whitehouse, Texas—in separate vehicles. Charlie pulled the horse trailer and I drove another
truck. I had a singing job that weekend, and he had rodeos to go to. We left the horses and trailer at Whitey Bob Walker’s house and spent our wedding night in a Holiday Inn in Corsicana. It wasn’t an especially romantic time, as we’d gotten in late. No roses, no champagne. I had to be up early the next day to promote my song “I Don’t Want to Be a One Night Stand” during an interview on a Houston radio station.

By Thursday, Charlie was back rodeoing and I was traveling alone in my pickup, on the way to a show and dance at the Do-Drop-Inn in McAlester. I finished the show about 1
A.M.
and was at home asleep by 2:30
A.M.
I did the same thing Friday, and Charlie showed up from his rodeo by the end of my four-hour dance set on Saturday night. That was my honeymoon.

I
WOULD COME TO MISS CHARLIE SO BADLY WHEN WE WERE
apart. I would cry for two days before he left for a rodeo if I knew I wasn’t going along. Once, early in our marriage, I went to Nashville to record “That Makes Two of Us,” one of my duets with Jacky Ward. “I played this song and Reba just broke down and started crying,” my producer Jerry Kennedy remembers. “The bottom line was that she got so melancholy about wanting to go home that she went home. We canceled the session and I took her to the airport.”

I was insecure and just plain immature when I got married, I’ll tell you. I was scared of the dark at twenty-one years old, had been afraid of the dark all my life in fact, ever since Alice pushed me outside on the front porch, locked the door, and turned off the lights.

I’d sleep with my sheet pulled tight to my chin, and would never, ever, once I’d said my goodnights, put my hand outside the sheet. I was still gripped by a childhood memory of a movie I’d seen. In it, two sisters are sleeping in twin beds in the bedroom of a big house. Then one sister asks the other to turn her hand loose.

“I’m not touching you,” says the other sister. It is a ghost that is clutching her hand.

So I would ask Charlie not to go to sleep until I did. And he wouldn’t. I’d lie next to his big and breathing body, secure and safe by his side. I had never felt so safe.

T
HE FIRST
“
HOME
”
THAT CHARLIE AND I SHARED WAS A BEDROOM
at Mama and Daddy’s house, where we stayed for a few months. Then we moved into the “Chockie Shack,” which I could call a glorified dump except that there was nothing glorified about it. The ceiling literally fell in twice during the four years that Charlie and I lived there. I think the walls remained standing because the mice were holding hands. The rent was $10 a month.

We didn’t even have running water. Charlie got our drinking water from the water plant in Atoka and brought it home in a big tank on a trailer. He put it into a cistern, and then it was pumped into the house. We used it for washing dishes, showering, and to fill the commode. To wash clothes, I had to go to Mama’s or to the Laundromat in Atoka.

We had hand-me-down furniture and two hand-me-down televisions. One had a picture, the other had audio, and they sat one on top of the other so we could see and hear. We thought we were pretty inventive with that one.

In those days we had nothing, but we wanted for little. For a long time, just having each other was enough.

T
HE YEAR I WAS MARRIED, 1976, ALSO BROUGHT ME
another great joy: my first hit song.

On January 22, 1976, I did my first professional recording session with Glenn Keener at Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville. He assembled Nashville’s finest recording session players of the day, including Pig Robbins, Pete Wade, Ray Edenton, Bob Moore, Buddy Harmon, Lloyd Green, Leon Rhodes, and Tommy Allsup.

We recorded the 1950s Roger Miller/Ray Price song “Invitation to the Blues,” because that’s a song that Pake, Susie, and I had done a lot before. And we recorded “I’m Not Your Kind of Girl,” “I’ll Give It to You,” “A Boy Like You,” and “I Don’t Want to Be a One Night Stand,” which became my first single.

Glenn and I had listened to a lot of songs before settling on these. I’d sing three or four songs, and I’d come out of the recording booth and we’d find some more songs
and do another session. It wasn’t at all like I do it today, where in five consecutive days I’ll record ten songs.

Then it was back to Oklahoma. I didn’t sit around on pins and needles waiting to become a star. I didn’t even expect it. If it was going to happen, it was going to happen.

I’ll never forget one afternoon in June of 1976, the same month I got married, when Mama, Susie, and I were sitting on the floor in the hall at Mama and Daddy’s house. We had the old static-filled AM radio tuned to KVOO, the 50,000-watt powerhouse in Tulsa.

The disc jockey announced a new record by a new singer, and then I heard “I Don’t Want to Be a One Night Stand” on the radio.

The three of us sat there and cried.

Pake, Susie, and I were still performing together, so we incorporated the song into our show. It rose to number eighty-eight on the
Billboard
country charts, then dropped off after five weeks.