My Extraordinary Ordinary Life (10 page)

Vickie and I rode our horses all over the county, sometimes as far as Lake Quitman. We’d lope along the highway in the summer heat, stopping at the filling station about halfway to drink a Coke and water our horses. I’d give Buck a coffee can filled with water; he’d hold it between his teeth and tip his head back to drink.

One time I was riding Buck out to the lake when a guy drove by in his pickup and slowed down alongside us.

“How much you take for that horse?” he shouted.

“A million dollars!” I said, throwing my chin in the air. I meant it, too.

As much as I loved that horse, I had a lot to learn about taking care of him. I gave him pneumonia by swimming him in the cold lake after the long, hot afternoon rides. Vickie and I would take off our saddles and ride the horses bareback, then swim around with them all afternoon. One day Buck started coughing. “Why are you doing that? Stop it!” I told him. Luckily a course of antibiotics fixed him right up.

After that I joined the 4-H club out in Coke to learn more about horsemanship. Mother would drive me out to the dusty rink in her Buick with a homemade trailer hitched to the back. Around the same time, Robbie got a bay quarter horse named Gunsmoke that never wanted to be separated from Buck. Gunsmoke would follow the horse trailer when we loaded up Buck, so we’d load him up, too, and off we’d go, me and Buck, Robbie and Gunsmoke. It was fun learning to ride in formation and doing square dances and quadrilles on horseback. Before long, Robbie and I were competing in rodeos.

One of my favorite events was barrel racing, where you ride your horse at top speed, circling around an obstacle course of three upright barrels in a cloverleaf formation. It was a perfect event for Buck, who had only two speeds: on and flat out. Buck was a roping horse; he was trained to stop when you get off. He didn’t understand “whoa.” So I’d have to throw off one leg to get him to stop, which was challenging to say the least.

Robbie and I competed as a team in the Rescue Race. He would ride Gunsmoke as fast as he could to the end of the ring, circling around me as he threw his arm out to pick me up. It was supposed to go like this: I would grab his arm, jump on the back of the horse, and then race to the finish line triumphantly. The only problem was that I couldn’t seem to figure out how to throw my leg all the way over Gunsmoke’s rump after Robbie reached down to pull me up. One time I never even got mounted, and Robbie just held on to my arm as we galloped to the finish line. Mother was watching the race and told me I looked like a little flag, napping in the wind.

At first we boarded Buck and Gunsmoke with our aunt and uncle Sam and Maurine, who had some pasture around their house on the outskirts of Quitman. Later we rented the fenced field across the highway from our house to keep the horses. As soon as I’d get home from school, I’d run over there with my saddle, and off we’d go. One day after a particularly long ride, I thought I’d bring Buck back to the house and put him in the backyard for a while. I thought it would be nice to let him graze on the cool, thick grass. I couldn’t tie him to the cherry laurel tree because it was poisonous for horses. So I took his saddle off and tied him on a long rope to the clothesline out back, which was two T-poles sunk in cement, with three wires strung between them. I figured Buck could move up and down the line like a dog, and eat grass wherever he wanted. Another bad idea. As soon as I had him situated, he got all tangled up in the long rope, which is something I quickly learned horses don’t handle very well. Before I knew it, he’d taken off running, pulled down the clothesline, and stretched the wires so tightly, the sound they made when they snapped behind him was like ricocheting rifle shots. Buck tore through the side yard and across Edna Lipscomb’s beautiful front lawn, tearing up her Saint Augustine, and headed for the highway.

I was running after him when I saw a huge tractor trailer bearing down on my horse. I closed my eyes and all I could hear was the driver leaning on his horn. When I opened my eyes again, the truck was gone and Buck was standing across the street in a neighbor’s yard, shaking like a sweetgum leaf. I don’t know who was trembling more, me or Buck. There were skid marks in the asphalt from his metal horseshoes. I still don’t know how he survived.

One thing I was good at was fishing. My dad and I would spend hours together out on the lakes around Quitman, although once I did hear him mention to my mother that my chattering scared away most of the fish. My crowning achievement was when I was six and the whole family spent the summer in Colorado, where Daddy was taking some post-graduate courses. We drove out to a big river to fish for trout. He and the boys had fly rods, but nobody thought I would catch anything, so all I had was a pole with a string and a hook. I didn’t even have a worm on my hook, but something that looked like a worm that had fallen from a flowering tree.

I was standing upstream from my brothers holding my pole when all of a sudden I saw a huge fish splashing on the far side of the water. I was so transfixed, I couldn’t move as I watched that fish jump and twist in the air. I heard someone yelling, “Pull it in, pull it in!” but it wasn’t until Robbie and Ed came running and grabbed my fishing pole that I realized that the big fish was attached to the end of my line. I got all the glory, but they saved the fish. And they were so proud of me. For years they told the story of how Sissy caught the biggest fish. I even have a picture to prove it.

My brothers were great sportsmen, but both were too sensitive to get much pleasure out of hunting. Ed sometimes tells the story of how upset he was the first time he killed anything. He was eight or nine years old and home alone with Robbie. He figured our mom had probably stepped out for a quick errand and taken me with her, because the boys were rarely left by themselves. Ed had just gotten his first BB gun, a Daisy Red Ryder, and he was itching to try it out. He looked out the window and saw a bird splashing in the birdbath.
Look at that bird
, he thought. And his next thought was
I can shoot that bird.
So he loaded his little BB gun, went outside, and crept up on it. He took aim, then shot. The bird flopped to the ground, dead.

Ed’s mouth dropped open. And then the reality of what he had just done hit him—he had murdered a living thing for no reason—and he began to cry. He dropped the gun and ran into the house, hysterical. Ed knew he wasn’t supposed to bother his father at work, but Mother wasn’t home and he was panicked. So he called Daddy’s office and got him on the phone. By now he was so upset all he could do was sob, “I’ve killed him! I’ve shot him, I’ve killed him!” And of course, Daddy thought he was talking about Robbie.

Daddy jumped into his car and raced home, probably about to have a heart attack thinking Ed had shot his brother. He ran into the house and saw that the boys were both okay, and quickly figured out what had happened. He hugged them both for a long time.

As they grew older, Daddy didn’t take the boys hunting as often. When Robbie was in his early teens, he still hadn’t shot his first deer and he wanted one so badly. He kept asking Daddy to take him deer hunting, and finally he did. They spotted a three-point buck in a thicket, and Robbie brought him down with one clean shot. At first he was excited, but when he walked closer, he looked the deer in the eye and watched the light drain from it as it died. Then he sat down, put his head in his hands, and wept. I still have that mounted deer head somewhere in our garage. I can’t bear to put it up on the wall, but I can’t bear to part with it.

… 5 …

When I was six, my parents took my brothers and me to the tiny brick schoolhouse in Coke, Texas (pop. 25) for a picnic and a performance by the Coquettes. It was the day I decided to go into show business.

Coke sat about five miles outside of Quitman, surrounded by rolling plains and oil fields. The whole town consisted of the school, the riding arena where I later rode my horse as a member of the 4-H club, and one country store. The store was constructed like it should have been part of a city block. But the rest of the town was never built, and the store stood alone against the sky, with nothing around it as far as the eye could see.

About forty kids from all over the county attended the little public school, which ranged from first to eighth grade. One magical evening my parents took the family to an open house out at the school. It started with a picnic on the lawn, and then we moved inside for a tour.

There were two classrooms and an auditorium with a painted mural behind the stage. Inside the front door were glass-fronted cupboards, like the dining room furniture from somebody’s grandmother’s house, but they held a cornucopia of wonder. I pressed my nose against the glass for a better look at the displays of rabbit skulls, giant bugs, rattlesnake rattles, and all kinds of bird nests. There was more than the cabinets could hold, so tables were set up and laden with jars and jars of baby alligators, horned toads and frogs suspended in formaldehyde, and living things, too: tadpoles, real frogs you could play with, rabbits, and even a few mice and rats. It was the most amazing place. And it got even better when we took our seats in the auditorium. The music started up, and out marched the Coquettes. As soon as I saw them on that stage, boys and girls twirling their batons, dressed up in shimmery silver cowboy outfits, hats, and white majorette boots, I knew show business was for me.
I could do that
, I thought.
I should be up there.

I started taking twirling and tap dancing lessons to prepare for my career. By the time I was six or seven, I had formed an act with my friend Pam Cain, who had debuted on the Coke schoolhouse stage, and started performing at school and civic events around town. We wore leotards and tap shoes, and our mothers sewed us little white vests with tails and tiny jingle bells. We went to the hardware store and bought wooden dowels and rubber tips, the kind that keep chair legs from scratching the floor. We painted them gold and sprinkled them with glitter. We were ready and we were awesome. My dad was president of the Rotary Club for many years, so those poor Rotarians had to sit through “On the Sunny Side of the Street” and “Charley, My Boy” about a million times.

When I was a bit older, Robbie and I started an act together. Mother signed us up for dance lessons, but when it was time for us to go, Robbie would wrap his arms around a tree, and she couldn’t pry his fingers from the bark. So I went on my own. Later, after much cajoling, he ended up pantomiming playing banjo while I sang and danced the Charleston. I wore a flapper dress and Robbie had on a straw boater and suspenders. He was a natural performer, so handsome and bright—you couldn’t take your eyes off of him. We performed at local talent shows, and all kinds of community, church, and school functions. These events drew huge crowds in Quitman, where entertainment was scarce, usually filling the school auditorium. Daddy was in charge of the dance music, placing LPs on the record player we’d brought from home. But somebody had borrowed it before one big performance and left the setting on 45. So when the curtain opened, Robbie and I, about eleven and twelve years old, stood center stage, waiting to start the act, but the music that filled the hall was racing and squealing at crazy lightning speed. From the side of the stage I heard my father shout, “Dance, Sissy! Dance!” We stood there for a moment, unsure of what to do, until finally some good Samaritan drew the curtains and put us out of our misery.

I took up guitar shortly after that.

I tried piano lessons, but I decided what I really needed to do was to learn to play guitar. By the time I was twelve, I had saved up $14.95 to buy a Silvertone guitar, ordered out of the Sears and Roebuck catalogue. Nobody knew I’d bought it until a big cardboard box arrived one day. It came with a plastic record of instruction and a booklet of Hy White songs. I spent hours every day practicing “Little Brown Jug” and “What Do You Do with a Drunken Sailor?” I took lessons and progressed pretty quickly. Later I formed a hootenanny group that performed around town.

One day, a girl sat in with us and played a song called “Copper Kettle.” She far outclassed us. Instead of just strumming, she was picking the strings with her fingers, and that sound was thrilling. I asked her to slow down and show me, and spent the next couple of months teaching myself to Travis pick—thumb, thumb, finger, thumb; finger, thumb, finger—over and over and over until my fingers bled. Then one day, I could do it without thinking.

Sometimes I’d be practicing in my room and my dad would walk by, poke his head in the door, and say something like “That E-string’s a little flat, Sissy.”

By now I had graduated to a real guitar, a twelve-string Vox that sounded amazing when I finger-picked. I began writing my own songs and started searching for my own style. Although there were great country musicians in East Texas, I grew up listening to what my parents listened to: show tunes, big bands, Perry Como. Fortunately, all through elementary school, I had a wonderful music teacher named Mary Margaret Pepper, who was responsible for most of my early musical training. She recognized that I had talent and she gave me great confidence. She also did not encourage us to watch
The Lawrence Welk Show.
In fact she forbade us to watch it.