Hidden behind a wall of reeds on the shore was a stump that I hit at full speed.
I could see he was confused, so I hollered, “What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to get away from that bad thing on the bank!” he replied.
There were a lot of other unforgettable incidents. Once, Silas and I took several men on a guided hunt. I had already taken a bigger boat with some of the hunters to the blind. Si was loading the rest of the men into a smaller, twelve-foot boat. When the four men, whom Si estimated weighed at least 250 pounds each, stepped into the boat, it sank deeper into the water—alarmingly deep! The five men in that overloaded boat pushed it down to the point where the water almost overlapped the sides. But Si persevered and was almost to the blind when (maybe he was traveling a little too fast) the front of the boat dipped and started under.
Si knew the water was not deep in front of the blind and had the presence of mind to grab all the shotguns as the boat completely submerged, dumping everyone into the water. The four guests, who had no idea how deep the water was, thought they were in danger of drowning in their heavy hunting clothes and started floundering and flailing at the water.
Me and the other hunters in the blind realized they weren’t in danger and started shouting, “Stand up! Stand up!” Si, holding their saved shotguns, stood neck-deep in water watching them.
Each of the Benelli and Browning shotguns I have owned has ended up at the bottom of a lake multiple times. Each of the shotguns lost during my wild years was recovered, except one that was flipped out of the boat by a limb. Sometimes, I had to resort to buying a wet suit to recover guns from icy, murky waters. Remarkably, the first shotgun I ever owned somehow survived the madness. I worked as a roughneck for a while, following my father into the offshore drilling business. I gave every one of my checks to my parents because I thought that’s what I was supposed to do. But with my last check, I asked Pa if I could buy a new shotgun. I purchased a 1962 Browning Sweet 16 shotgun for $150 and still have it today; sometimes I even shoot with it.
During my outlaw years, much of our duck hunting took place at Moss Lake, where we had a blind halfway up a remarkable cypress tree that stood on the edge of a circle of water surrounded by other cypresses. My brothers Tommy and Jimmy Frank discovered the hole on a bluebird day when they kept seeing flight after flight of ducks circling the area, dropping down into it, and not coming back up. Pa was also hunting with them that day.
Tommy and Jimmy Frank decided to investigate, although they were having a pretty fair shoot from the floating blind they were in, which was in open water about a quarter mile from where all the other ducks were going. Pa stayed in the blind.
My brothers got in their boat and motored straight at the area until they ran aground on a submerged ridge covered with buck brush. Deciding the day was warm enough, although the water was ice-cold, they tied the boat and started wading. They were without waders and just in their hunting boots, but this was the way we hunted back then.
The water was only about knee-deep on the ridge, but then quickly dropped off and rose almost to their waists as they progressed toward where the ducks were still spiraling down. They were soon among the trees and witnessed an amazing sight. It was like something out of primeval times. There must have been five thousand ducks in the opening, probably only thirty yards wide, surrounded by the trees! The entire surface of the open water was completely covered with ducks—so many that they crowded shoulder-to-shoulder, like a giant raft made of ducks. It was a year when the male-female ratio was out of balance, and most were mallard drakes, their green heads standing out sharply in the dark mass. Ducks continued to spiral down from above as my brothers watched in amazement.
Jimmy Frank got tangled in a dead tree underneath the water, but Tommy kept moving forward. The ducks spotted him. They stirred but didn’t fly. When he felt he was close enough, Tommy shot them on the water, surprisingly downing only two ducks. Still the ducks didn’t fly away but continued to mill around, dodging in and out among the trees. And more ducks kept spiraling down from above the hole.
By the time it was over, my brothers downed a total of ten ducks.
As amazing as the number of ducks on the water was, even more impressive was the old cypress. It was nearly twenty feet wide at the base and hollow from water level to about thirty feet up. The opening was wide enough for a man to easily pass through, and it was there that Tommy and I, along with our friend Maurice Greer, built a blind with a porch from which eleven men could shoot.
The big hollow at the water level was so large that a pirogue could be pulled into it (a larger boat was used to reach the area and was hidden some one hundred yards away, beneath some buck brush). After sinking the pirogue to conceal it, we made our way to the blind above by climbing up through the hollow on several boards that we’d nailed on the inside to form a ladder. When we got to the shooting porch, ducks that circled to look at the decoys often flew right in front of us. At times, we actually shot down at the ducks.
The old cypress tree was one of the Almighty’s great creations, and it’s where we spent many glorious mornings together as a family. But during my rompin’ and stompin’ days, I never embraced its beauty and rarely cherished the time I spent with my father and brothers.
The old cypress tree was one of the Almighty’s great creations, and it’s where we spent many glorious mornings together.
The only things I seemed to be worried about were how many ducks I could kill and when my next drink was coming.
By then, I had a growing family at home. Our sons Jase and Willie had been born, and Kay was at the end of her rope with me. I was always out, partying with my buddies, leaving her alone to raise our three sons. I was growing more distant from everything I had known and been taught and was pulling even farther away from the people who loved me the most. Kay felt her entire life was in ruins and that she had failed as a wife. After a while, the school where I was teaching could no longer ignore my public conduct. Students and their parents were beginning to notice my boorish behavior, and my days as a teacher and coach were numbered.
Sadly, even as my life continued to spiral out of control, like a downed duck falling from the sky, I failed to realize that “callous” also described me as a man.
HONKY-TONK
Rule No. 6 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy
Put the Bottle Down (You’ll Thank Me in the Morning)
After I resigned from my teaching position (before the school board could fire me), I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life: I leased a honky-tonk in the middle of nowhere. I managed the place, worked the bar, cooked for the customers, and broke up occasional fights. One of my specialties was something I called squirrel mulligan: ten pounds of freshly killed squirrels, ten pounds of onions, ten pounds of potatoes, and enough crumbled crackers to give it the proper thickness. It didn’t taste too bad, and its aroma smelled better than the overwhelming scent of urine and stale beer that permeated the place. I also served fried chicken, pickled pig’s feet, and boiled eggs, though most of the regulars, including me, were only there to drink as much beer and whiskey as we could.
It was a rough, rough place. I managed the place before integration was firmly established in the South, so my honky-tonk was somewhat unusual. It was really a segregated beer joint, which you didn’t see very often. The blacks drove up in the back, and we had their jive going on back there, and the rednecks came through the front. I was in the middle, serving and cooking for everyone, while trying to keep the peace.
Kay and our three sons moved out in the middle of nowhere with me. The bar was a long, low, one-story wood building, unpainted and yellowed. Our trailer home and another building were roughly attached to it, making the whole complex an irregular U-shape. It wasn’t very pretty, and it certainly wasn’t the proper place to be raising my boys. Kay, of course, worried about me constantly, so she worked as a barmaid most nights to make sure I stayed out of trouble. She never was much of a drinker—p
robably because she saw what alcohol did to her mother—but she was right beside me on most nights, watching me slowly drink away our lives.
After a while, my parents, brothers, and sisters started to hear what was happening with me. One night, my younger sister, Jan, drove out to the bar with William “Bill” Smith, one of the preachers at White’s Ferry Road Church in West Monroe, Louisiana. Jan lived close by in the area, so she knew more than the rest of my family how far I had strayed from my former ways. She was determined to save me and enlisted Bill Smith to help her.
When they walked into the bar, Smith found me sitting at a desk in the connecting structure. I had a quart bottle of beer in my hand.
“You some kind of preacher?” I immediately asked him. When Smith told me he was, I added, “You ever been drunk?”
“Yes, I used to drink a few beers,” he told me.
“Well, what’s the difference between you and me?” I asked him. “You’ve been drunk, and I’m getting drunk right now. There ain’t a dime’s worth of difference between you and me, Jack. You ain’t putting any Bible on me. That’s the way I was born.”
“You some kind of preacher?” I immediately asked him.
At that moment, one of my patrons stuck his head in the door and said, “Phil, your sister’s running into some problems out there in the bar.”
Jan was in the barroom handing out religious tracts. The patrons were cussing and carrying on as usual—getting drunk. One guy was arguing with her. “Hey! Hey!” I said as I stepped in.
They all turned around, looking at me. “This is my little sister. She’s handing out religious tracts. Let her hand them out. But don’t be messing with her, or you’re going to deal with me.”
“This is your sister?” one of them asked.
“Yes. She’s going to do whatever she does here,” I told him. “Leave her alone!”
Jan, now in a little bit of a dither, went on handing out tracts—in a dead quiet—until she had given everyone one. I turned around, went back to Smith, and ordered him out of my bar.
As Jan and Smith walked back to their car in the drizzling rain, with the country music wailing behind them in the front of the building and rhythm and blues blaring in the back, he exclaimed, “Whew! I don’t think he’s ready! Let’s give him a little time. I’m glad I got out of there without getting beaten up!”
Although Smith’s visit left me unmoved, Kay later began to study the Bible with him. She knew our marriage and lives were rapidly deteriorating.
A few months later, I hit what I thought was rock bottom. One night the couple that owned the bar came in and informed me they were going to raise my rent. So I decided I’d hightail it out of the place after fulfilling the last two months on my lease. An argument ensued, and I ended up throwing the man and woman across the bar, injuring both of them pretty badly. By the time the fight was over, there were four police cars out front. Ambulances were also on the way to take the bar owners to the hospital; I’d whipped both of them pretty good. I went out the back door and jumped in my truck before the police could arrest me. Before I left, I told Kay, “I’m going to the swamps or somewhere. You’re not going to see me for a few months.”
Of course I left Kay behind to clean up my mess. The police issued a warrant for my arrest, but Kay persuaded the bar owners to drop criminal charges against me. The plea bargain came with a hefty price: the bar owners took nearly all the money we’d saved while operating the honky-tonk. They wouldn’t even let Kay get our personal belongings—a washer and dryer and photographs and keepsakes of our boys—out of a storage shed in back. Fortunately, Kay had hidden about two thousand dollars in a lockbox and used that money to move our trailer—which we were still paying for—back to Louisiana.
After the fight, I got out of Arkansas. Even though Kay paid off the bar owners, I didn’t know whether there were still arrest warrants out for me—assault and all that stuff. The bar owners had a restraining order against me, so I couldn’t go anywhere near them. I stayed out of Arkansas for about a decade because I didn’t know whether they were going to try to get me, put me in jail, or what.
Kay moved our trailer to a spot beside Lake D’Arbonne at Farmerville, Louisiana, as she and I had discussed during a phone conversation. I eventually got a job working in the oil fields offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. In the meantime, Kay had to handle everything concerning the move back to Louisiana. For about the next year, she and I somehow endured, though our marriage was under tremendous strain.
While I was a fugitive, I kept hunting and fishing as much as I could—sandwiching the activities I loved around my offshore job. The incident at the bar didn’t stop me from romping, stomping, and ripping with my drinking buddies. Kay later said I wasn’t an alcoholic, only a problem drunk. But it was pretty clear I had a problem. She always held out hope that I would change my ways, and she believed that if we moved to a new location and met new people, things would get better. But they never did; things only got worse.
Kay said I wasn’t an alcoholic, only a problem drunk. But it was pretty clear I had a problem.
One rainy night, Kay came home late from work, and I accused her of running around on me, which I knew she would never do. It was a life-changing event for Kay, and she remembers the details and aftermath of the incident better than I do:
I think Phil’s problems really started during our first year at Louisiana Tech. He was playing football but had a wife and baby at home. It was a lot of grown-up responsibility for an eighteen-year-old, and he really wasn’t ready for it. He saw his teammates going out and partying all the time, and he wanted to go out, too. I think that’s why he so easily got in with the wrong group—he wanted to be like the single guys who had all the freedom. He’d never really experienced the single life since we married so young. I tried to do the party scene with him, but I couldn’t leave Alan, who was only a baby. I didn’t think it was right. I didn’t like drunkenness. I didn’t think it was wrong to have a drink, but I just didn’t like the whole scene.
I really thought that after Phil graduated from Louisiana Tech and we moved to Junction City, Arkansas, he would settle down. After all, he was going to be a coach and teacher, which came with a lot of responsibility. But Al Bolen, the man who hired him, was as big a party guy as Phil, so the partying and running around only continued.
When Phil leased the bar, people couldn’t believe that I went out and stayed with him. I worked as a barmaid, and the people there really respected me and told everybody, “Don’t you talk ugly to her. She doesn’t drink and she’s a nice lady.” It surprised me that those people were so protective of me. They always asked me why I was in the bar if I didn’t drink, but when I decided to stay with Phil and remain faithful to him, I felt it was my duty to protect him. With me at the bar, I felt he wouldn’t get in as much trouble as he would if I wasn’t there.
The year after the bar fight was probably the worst time of my life. Phil was working offshore and drinking more than he ever had before. When I came home one night, he accused me of having an affair, which was so stupid. I had never done anything like that, and it wasn’t because his friends weren’t hitting on me, either. It was because I wasn’t that kind of person. I always told him, “If I leave you, I’ll divorce you and find somebody else if I want to. I would never cheat on you.”
I’ve always considered myself a good person. I don’t know if it’s my personality or what, but I’ve always been a very serving person. During all of Phil’s troubles, I felt like I was operating on my grandmother’s faith and what she instilled in me. I finally realized you have to have your own faith. Phil was cursing me and calling me every ugly word under the sun. It was the first time in my life that I felt hopeless. When I was younger, I read that a person can live so long without water, so long without food, but that you can never live without hope. I have always believed that hope and dreams are what keep us going. My entire life, all I had ever wanted was to be the best wife and mother I could. I didn’t w
ant riches or fame; I wanted to have a loving, good, and safe home for my boys—that’s all.
“When I came home one night, he accused me of having an affair, which was so stupid.”
The night Phil accused me of having an affair, I hit rock bottom. I went to the bathroom and cried. It was the first time in my life that I didn’t know how to fix the problem. It’s the only time in my life that I had suicidal thoughts. I just wanted to go to sleep and not wake up because I didn’t know how to fix our lives and didn’t know what to do. Would I have gone through with it? I hope not, but I really wanted Phil to suffer because of what he was doing to me.
But as I sat there contemplating what to do, I heard my little boys’ house shoes running down the hall. Alan was nine, Jason was five, and Willie was three. Alan knocked on the bathroom door and said, “Mama, don’t be sad. Don’t be crying.” I’ll never forget what he said next: “God’s going to take care of us. You’ll be all right. We’ll be all right. Daddy will quit drinking one day.” It was like a light went off in my head. I thought, “Oh, my goodness, what am I thinking? I’ve got three little boys. Am I going to leave them behind to live with a drunk?” Phil couldn’t have taken care of the boys in his condition.
I prayed to God and asked Him to help me find some kind of peace. Obviously, my life wasn’t going right, but I knew I had to take care of my three boys. The next day, I was watching a TV show called Let the Bible Speak, and there was Bill Smith, the preacher Jan brought up to the beer joint. The things he was saying were what I needed to hear—what I wanted in my life. He was speaking about how to obtain peace and hope. So I called the number on the screen and set up an appointment to meet him the next day. Somebody kept the kids for me, and I went over to White’s Ferry Road Church.
Happy, Happy, Happy: My Life and Legacy as the Duck Commander Page 6
