Reba: My Story (44 page)

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NOTHER IMPORTANT SOURCE OF HAPPINESS FOR ME IS THE FACT
that my parents have long since escaped the poverty that afflicted their lives when us kids were young. They bought a new place four years ago. There is a window in the living room that goes from the floor to the ceiling and you can see in three directions for miles. Everything visible belongs to them.

At sixty-six, my Daddy oversees a seventeen-thousand-acre cattle ranch that spreads from Chockie, Oklahoma, to the Pittsburg County line in southeast Oklahoma where I grew up, fifty miles from the Texas border.
The very first words out of his mouth when he talked to Tom Carter about his place in Stringtown were, “I built this ranch myself. Reba didn’t buy it for me.” A lot of people have insinuated that. That bruises a cowboy’s ego.

Daddy calls his ranch “rough old land.” But his eyes scan the earth as he speaks, and you can tell he’s proud of his spread, covered with brush thickets of no use to man or beast. The cattle can’t eat them and they get in the way of anybody trying to round up a herd. Vehicles can’t drive through them, horses get cut on the thorns, and no chemical will kill them.

So Daddy and Pake burn the brush of their respective land in late winter when the growth is dry, brittle, and flammable. Daddy says the Forest Service takes a dim view of the practice, thinking it could make out-of-control fires that might spread to adjoining ranches.

Daddy tried to hire a man this year to burn the brush, but the fellow said he couldn’t do it yet. “It’s too windy, Clark.”

“That wind’ll die down tonight,” Daddy told him without ever getting out of his truck.

“Well, what would I do if it didn’t, how would I put out the fire?” the man replied.

“Pee on it!” Daddy said, and drove away.

The next morning, a few hundred acres of Daddy’s land were cinders. Daddy himself burned it in the night, when the wind died down as he knew it would. He started one fire to burn into another, so that each would burn the other out. He knew exactly how to do it. Not one bush, not one blade of grass, was burned that wasn’t supposed to.

But when I called Mama and Daddy this past New Year’s Day, I heard that she and Daddy had had a little excitement. After she told me about Garett, my niece, getting four wisdom teeth pulled, Mama said, “The other day your Daddy had been over at Fred Smith’s place trying to gather a couple of steers that had gotten out. He roped one of the steers, dangling the rope in front of him until he
tangled up and fell on the ground, and then Daddy tied him up to a tree. He left him there until he could come back with a trailer.”

When Mama heard Daddy was going back over with the trailer she said she would go with him. “Well, if you’re gonna go with me, I’ll take Ole Roy (a horse) and try to catch the other steer,” Daddy said.

Daddy doesn’t rope off a horse unless someone’s with him for safety reasons. He says he might not be found for days if something happened to him.

So they took off again to Fred Smith’s place and Daddy got on Ole Roy and found the other steer close to the one tied to a tree. Even cattle become buddies and stay close together. So Daddy started trailing the steer, getting him used to the horse and then took after him to rope. Just about the time he was gonna throw, the steer looked back and something told Daddy to look back too.

The pasture was on fire.

Fred Smith and his hired hands, Tom Pinner and Blue, had driven up and were talking to Mama while Daddy was “cowboying.” The hired hand saw Ole Roy’s hooves hit a rock and the sparks catch the knee-high tickle grass on fire.

Daddy jumped off his horse, tied him to a tree, let the steer go, and took his saddle off. He got the saddle blanket and went straight to fight the fire. It took all four of the men to put it out. My daddy is sixty-six years old. That’s pretty good thinking for a sixty-six-year-old cowboy.

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ADDY STILL GETS UP AROUND 4 OR 5
A.M.
, AS HE HAS DONE
all his life. In March 1993, when Tom Carter, my collaborator, went out to interview him, he told Daddy that he’d call him in the morning and make plans to meet him. Tom assumed Daddy wouldn’t be up quite so early because of his age and all.

Daddy called Tom’s hotel room at 7
A.M.

“I thought you was gonna see me today!” Daddy said. “Did you change your mind?”

Daddy asked him to go along while he fed the cattle. He said he’d meet him “up on the highway,” and that he’d be sitting in his feed truck.

“What color is the truck?” he was asked, “so I’ll know it.”

“Muddy,” Daddy said and hung up.

For four hours Daddy bounced Tom through the rolling and rocky underbrush that sustains virtually nothing but cattle and rattlesnakes. Daddy’s 1990 truck had over sixty thousand miles on it before the odometer broke. He estimates the figure is closer to seventy thousand now. Almost all those miles were run up on his ranch when the bluestem grass turns to brown for six months every year. During this period Daddy has to feed the animals from his truck the nourishment that won’t grow from the ground.

On the wav, Tom asked Daddy an obvious question: how many steers did he have? Daddy said he must have about 600 head. He does, plus 2,400 more. But then the next day Daddy said, “You remember yesterday when you asked me how many steers I have?”

“Yes.”

“You should never ask a cow man how many head he has. That’s like asking about his sex life. It ain’t nobody’s business. I didn’t lie to you. I just didn’t tell you all the truth. I waited until I liked you to do that.”

Daddy looks like the cowboy he is. He has a rugged handsomeness, his face craggy and etched with lines from outdoor work that was too hard and paid too little. He is stocky and strong, a human fire hydrant under a Stetson. He’s as tough as leather, yet somehow soft as a doe. He’s hardness with a heart.

I’ve seen him stand in a hard wind so strong I couldn’t hear him yell a few feet away. But he knows how to get upwind from his herd, let the howling air carry his voice and call in hundreds of cattle with just his yelling.

“They won’t come much before daylight,” he says. “But that there wind ain’t no problem if you know what you’re doing.”

And he calls, in a plaintive, lonesome yell that no man can understand, but one that sets thousands of hooves in thundering motion, even in blinding snow. Seven mornings a week, from October through mid-April, the solitary voice of Clark McEntire echoes off the Chockie Mountains.

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COUPLE YEARS BACK, MY PARENTS CELEBRATED THEIR FORTY-SECOND
wedding anniversary in a way they hadn’t planned. Pake, Alice, Susie, their spouses and kids, Narvel, Shelby, and I, and some friends put on a surprise party for Mama and Daddy. We decided to meet at Pete’s Place in Krebs, Oklahoma, about forty-five minutes north of Stringtown.

Us kids asked some of our parents’ friends, Pauline and Max Kinyon, to invite them for supper at the restaurant. Daddy said he didn’t know if he could come because he had to brand cattle. So Max said he would send one of his hired hands down to help Daddy, and he did. Daddy never suspected a thing.

Instead, he walked Mama into the restaurant where a waitress told them they could use the back private room. Daddy said they wouldn’t need that much space, and didn’t want to go back there. But they did.

As the door opened, I could see Mama as she was partially lit by the hall light behind her.

“Well here,” she said, “the lights aren’t even on in here. Are you sure this is the right room?” I think she and Daddy were just about ready to leave.

Then we yelled “Surprise!”

Mama’s knees buckled and she almost went to the floor and she started crying. Daddy didn’t do or say a thing. That means he was really touched by the event. Mama kept crying and hugging each of her kids and grandkids. Narvel and I gave Mama and Daddy a brand-new Chevrolet van for
their forty-second anniversary present, and as of November 1993, it had logged more than 40,000 miles. It was a small payback for all the automobiles they wore out hauling us kids around.

That’s one of the best things about success—sharing it and bringing happiness to those you love the most.

M
AYBE IT
’
S JUST GETTING OLDER AND SETTLED IN LIFE THAT HAS
helped me recognize these things, but in some ways, I’m sure, the tragedy of March 16, 1991, has helped bring it home to me how fragile life is—and how necessary it is to concentrate on the essentials. No matter what happens to you, if you can draw strength from God and the people you love, nothing can ever defeat you.

I remember flying home alone for the first time on our new airplane in June 1991, not long after the crash, to return to Nashville after the last day of filming
The Gambler IV
. Before I got on I walked up to the plane, and I asked God to bless it.

“Now Kevin,” I said to Kevin McCutcheon, my pilot, “let’s agree right now in the name of Jesus that everybody who steps in this plane is protected, and that they will fly safely and swiftly.” He agreed.

I stepped onto the airplane and saw that Kevin had placed little bows on top of each seat. It was like a big present! He had also reclined the seats so that I could lie down. I slept soundly and peacefully. I always feel that way when God takes over.

In early November 1992, Narvel, Sandi, and I boarded another flight to Madison, Wisconsin, where our opening act, Brooks and Dunn, was getting ready to go onstage. By then I knew the sound of my plane’s landing gear returning to place after takeoff. On that night in November, I suddenly realized I wasn’t hearing what I was supposed to hear.

“Something’s wrong,” I said to Narvel.

“Yeah,” he said.

About that time Kevin looked through the curtain and motioned for Narvel to come to the cockpit. When Narvel came back, he confirmed what we’d feared. “The landing gear didn’t go up,” he said, “and it won’t go down. It’s jammed. We’re going to have to fly over to the Nashville airport and make some passes to let them look at it from the ground.”

We made a low sweep over the airport so the tower could see the bottom of the plane. Then Kevin’s voice came over the intercom. He spoke with assurance. “The tower has confirmed that the landing gear is jammed,” he said. “So we’re going to fly around a while to burn off some fuel. That way, if we make an emergency landing, we won’t have as much fuel on board.”

We cruised for forty-five minutes. During that time, to get our minds off of what could happen, Sandi and I played cards and talked about which Mexican restaurant we’d eat at in Albuquerque, where we’d be performing that weekend.

Narvel called Madison from the cabin telephone to tell Trey Turner, our in-house promoter, to ask Brooks and Dunn to extend their set because we would be late. Then he proceeded to tell Trey the details of our emergency. Later Graeme Lagden, my tour manager, said Trey went white while he talked to Narvel.

“What’s wrong?” Graeme wanted to know.

“I can’t talk about it,” Trey said.

But finally Trey explained to Graeme, saying that Narvel would be calling back in twenty minutes to let him know our arrival time.

So Graeme and Trey sat down by the telephone and watched it.