Reba: My Story (2 page)

M
Y 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.

T
HE 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.

T
HE 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.

He just went on with his life.

But Pap could be kindly, I’m happy to say. In his later years, he had a vehicle, a battered truck that he cranked by hand. Its top speed was maybe ten miles per hour. He drove it down dirt roads past people walking to town with buckets of cream for sale. He and his motorized contraption, which he and the neighbors named “Truckie,” were a familiar sight. People would simply hop on the back of the moving vehicle, and by the time Pap reached town, as many as fifteen people would be hanging from the truck’s bed and running boards. Pap spared them the long, dusty walk.

I’m told that people used to say it would kill a human being to live in that Dutch oven. I don’t know if it killed Pap, but that’s where he died, at the age of seventy-nine.

Nathan Rhyne, the ancestor of Clark Rhyne, my high school teacher, fashioned a pine box that was narrow at the head and feet. Ray said he tacked satin inside, but my Daddy says it was tar paper. A cemetery lot was bought for two dollars at Wardville, Oklahoma, and Pap’s remains are there to this day.

I
T
’
S EASY TO SEE WHY EACH OF PAP
’
S WIVES STRONGLY DISLIKED
him. I don’t think I could be married to a man that “colorful.” Daddy said his grandma, Helen, used to get on her knees and pray that Pap wouldn’t return each time he left.

It was Helen, Pap’s second wife, who gave birth to John Wesley McEntire, my grandfather, who became our family’s first rodeo star.

In 1930, John Wesley McEntire, who us kids called Grandpap, traveled from Cairo to Limestone Gap, Oklahoma, so he could put his cattle out on “open range.” “The Depression hit and his cattle weren’t worth anything,” Daddy recalls. “He couldn’t afford to renew his leases where he was staying south of Ada. So he moved his old cows down to Limestone Gap, because that was range-land and he didn’t have to pay a grass bill. He was just trying to exist, but in the spring the bank came and got his cows. So he just stayed.”

His wife, Alice Kate Hayhurst McEntire, came to join him, bringing Daddy, and got a job teaching school at Limestone Gap. When she first arrived, Grandpap said, “There’s no place for y’all to stay.” Grandma said they’d live in the Cake House, which Grandpap had built to store the processed cottonseed cake feed for the cattle. So they did. Grandpap built another room and then a third so Grandma’s Daddy could come live with them, though he didn’t stay long. Daddy still remembers playing on the sacks of feed stacked up in one end of the house.

The Cake House today is only a leaning building with sheet-metal siding, a tin roof, and a floor that is one-half dirt and the other half concrete. You can slide your hand through the cracks in its seams, large enough to allow snow to blow through in the wintertime.

The house once had a wooden floor. At night, rats would crawl from beneath the floor and steal Grandpap’s socks. One night a rat stole his false teeth and Grandpap tore the floor out to find them. The teeth were located and returned to their proper place. The floor never was.

My Daddy grew up in the Cake House, although his Daddy never owned the house or the land where it sat.

D
ADDY WEIGHED OVER TEN POUNDS AT BIRTH, AND MY GRANDMOTHER
had a terrible time delivering him. Due to the primitive medical techniques of those days, she never fully recovered and suffered from female problems for the rest of her short life. There were no more children after that. Mama has told me many times about how Grandma Alice would be so sore that she was rolled back and forth in the sheets to turn her over.