The Duck Commander Family (9 page)

Phil was always in charge of disciplining us, but sometimes Kay tried to take matters into her own hands. Unfortunately for Kay, she was really an uncoordinated disciplinarian. One day when Phil was out fishing, Kay announced that she was going to whip us. She grabbed a belt that had a buckle on one end and told us to line up for a whipping. Now, Kay never liked whipping us and always closed her eyes when she swung because she didn’t want to watch. This time, she reared back and swung and missed, and the buckle flew back and hit her right in the forehead. Jase and I just looked at her, started laughing, and took off running into the backyard. I really don’t know how she survived raising us four boys.

Korie:
Poor Kay! All that testosterone in one house! Maybe that’s why she is so great to us daughters-in-law. She is thankful we took them off her hands. She has definitely enjoyed all of her granddaughters. She has set up a cute little library and a place for tea parties. They have coloring contests and dress-up parties. She didn’t get to do any of that
with her four boys so our daughters have gotten the full “girly” grandma treatment.

One time, I was painting something outside and came into the house with green paint on my hand. Kay looked at me and said, “I’m going to whip you for bringing paint in the house.”

I ran out of the room and put my painted hand on the bed to maneuver my way around her. The bedspread had a green handprint on it for like ten years. I ran through the kitchen and tried to kick open the back screen door, but it wouldn’t open, so I ran face-first into it. Before I could get into the backyard, Kay grabbed a fistful of my hair. Kay would always pull your hair; that was the only way she could really control us. We all had little bald spots on our heads from where Kay pulled out our hair. I don’t think Jep’s hair ever grew back fully. He still has some bald spots back there.

Kay also liked to turn her wedding ring around and knock you upside the head. She would just turn it around and give you a whack if you were out of line. One time, she hit Jase in the forehead with a steel Stanley broom. Jase was messing with me about something, and Kay said she was tired of listening to it. Phil looked at her and said, “Well, do something about it then.” So when Jase came around the door, Kay hit him right in the forehead with a broom! Jase was so mad he ran away. No one knew where Jase was after he left; he sat on top of the house like a big rooster for two days.

I was usually the one running away when I was in trouble or mad about something. This generally just involved going
to the top of the hill behind our house and staying there until I was cold, hungry, or bored. I would get in trouble for something and then announce angrily, “I’m running away.” It would take me thirty minutes to get all my stuff packed to leave, and Kay would be right there helping me pack. I would ask her, “Mom, where’s the Beanee Weenees? Where’s my sleeping bag?” She’d run into my room with a can of Beanee Weenees and my sleeping bag, making sure I had everything I needed. Of course, I would always come home as soon as I smelled dinner. I spent more time packing up than I spent away.

For whatever reason, Kay always bought our clothes in pairs. If she bought Jase a blue shirt, I’d get an identical blue shirt. If she bought Jase yellow shorts, I’d get the same pair of yellow shorts. When we were riding the same school bus, Jase would usually get to the school bus stop before me. I always liked to wear the same clothes Jase was wearing because I knew it drove him crazy. Once I saw what Jase was wearing for the day, I would wait until he went outside, then I’d run back in the house and put on the same shirt he had on. Jase would always hit me when I showed up wearing the same clothes as him. Not sure why I did it, because it was a guaranteed lick, but somehow seeing Jase’s face was worth it. And although I hate to admit it, maybe there was a little part of me that wanted to be like my older brother.

Phil was good at finding other ways of disciplining us, too.
Every Sunday, our family would load up in Pa’s Lincoln Town Car to make the drive to church. There were two bench seats in the car, and eight of us would be packed in there like sardines. It was really too cramped and a fight would undoubtedly break out every Sunday. There was just way too much touching. One time, Phil stopped the car about four miles from our house and told Jase and me to get out. He made us walk those four miles home. We missed Sunday lunch and still got a whipping when we got home. That cut down on the fighting for a while. Somehow after that we figured out how to get along, at least when Dad was in the car.

Kay used to drive an old, beat-up Volkswagen Beetle to work. There was a hole in the back floorboard, which was probably about two feet by three feet wide. She could have been arrested for having kids in the backseat of her car with a hole that big! Every time we went for a drive, Phil would put a board over the hole. Of course, Jase and I would move the board as soon as we pulled out of the driveway, so we could see the road while we were driving. You could have literally stuck your hand down and touched the road. Our favorite thing to do was throw trash out the hole. And that was another thing that usually ended in a whipping when we got home.

Some of my most fun childhood memories are of when my cousins came over. My dad had six siblings, so when the cousins all got together, we were quite the crew. It’s safe to say that our cousins didn’t grow up the way we did. I’m pretty sure most of them actually lived in subdivisions! I’m sure they
thought we were a little backwoods. But they all say they loved it when they got to come visit us. I think they were surprised by how rough we all were, though. We would get in a big circle and two people would wrestle in the middle. It didn’t matter if you were a boy or a girl; if you were brave enough to join the fight, you were fair game. I would always end up wrestling my cousin Amy, who was older and bigger than me. But my killer move was putting the leg scissors around her head. If I ever got my legs wrapped around her head, it was lights out. I would wrap my legs around her head and squeeze as hard as I could. One time I was wrestling Amy and she was screaming and crying, and her little brother, Jon, came running up and yelled, “Leave my sister alone!” He was wrapped around my neck and before too long, both of them were just whaling on me. Alan was always the referee, so he had to pull John off my head and send everyone back to their corners.

When we weren’t wrestling, we’d take my cousins into our room for a pillow fight. This wasn’t just your normal pillow fight. We always had to take it up a notch. There would be one person in the middle of the room with a pillowcase over their head. The other people were holding pillows, whose pillowcases we’d stuffed with blue jeans and anything else we could find. When the lights went out, we would pummel the person sitting in the middle. I don’t know how we didn’t end up killing each other. I liked to grab my smaller cousins and throw them in a headlock and make them smell
my armpits, too. Those were the good ole days. I was just awful.

Jase and I fought like crazy when we were younger, but as we got older we were really close. We never played organized sports when we were kids because Kay and Phil were so busy trying to get Duck Commander off the ground and make enough money to feed our family that there was no time to chauffeur us kids to baseball or basketball practice. But once we got old enough to drive ourselves, we played every sport we could. We went to a big public high school, so there wasn’t much chance of our getting a lot of playing time on the basketball court or in the baseball field. So we played church- and city-league basketball and softball all that we could, and we always played on the same team. Those were some really fun times.

Every year I would play on West Monroe High School’s basketball team until church league started. This worked out pretty well. I got out of having to go to PE. I got to practice with the team, so I got really good; then I would quit and play in a league where we could dominate. I was always in charge of assembling our church-league team, which was pretty easy because we only had six players. The team consisted of Jase, Paul, his two brothers, our youth minister, and myself. None of us liked having to sit out of the games, so we didn’t carry much of a bench.

We had a really good team. I bet we averaged more than a hundred points per game. In a lot of games, we would run over the scoreboard, so the final score would read forty-two points
to twenty-seven, when we’d actually scored one hundred and forty-two points. The scoreboard couldn’t even keep up with us! Jase was a set three-point shooter, but he couldn’t make layups to save his life. He would run back and always shoot a three-pointer; it was the only shot he ever took or made. In one game, Jase scored thirty-four points—thirty-three came on three-pointers, and he made one foul shot. He always took a high, arching shot and made most of them. I was the point guard of the team, but I liked to shoot the ball, too. When I went to college, I continued to play in recreation leagues, and I played for my fraternity, too—but more about that later.

At any rate, Jase and I had finally figured out a way to turn our competitive natures to sports, and it was serving us well. That is why our last fight—I was sixteen and he was eighteen—came as a surprise to both of us. Our last fight was a bad one. And it was over toast and pizza! I was at home one night and our friend “Curly” Don Foster was sitting on the couch. Curly Don was living with us at the time; one of our friends always seemed to be living with us because Phil and Kay were always willing to help out anyone who needed it. Curly Don and I were watching TV and cooking a frozen pizza in the oven. Jase walked into the house and started making himself some toast, which he then wanted to put in the oven, but my pizza was already in there. We had a small toaster oven, but Jase didn’t want to use it because he was making like twelve pieces of toast and he wanted to cook it all at one time.

“I’m going to take your pizza out for a minute and cook my toast really fast,” Jase told me.

“Uh-uh, son,” I told him. “When my pizza is done, you can have the oven.”

“No, I can just change the oven to broil and put my toast right on top,” Jase said. “It will cook really quick.”

I wasn’t having any of it. Both of us grabbed the oven door and started arguing about who was going to cook their meal first. I looked at Jase and shouldered him right into the refrigerator, making a big dent in the door. We were both into watching wrestling, and Jake “the Snake” Roberts was one of our favorite wrestlers. Jase picked me up and put me into Roberts’s signature move, the “DDT,” picking me up by my pants and lifting me so my legs were straight up in the air. All of a sudden, Jase dropped my head right into a barrel of flour Kay kept in the kitchen. Flour went everywhere. The entire kitchen was covered in a cloud of white!

I put my shoulder into Jase again—I don’t know why I kept trying to use that move—and we went flying across the kitchen table. Fortunately, the table didn’t break. But the flour barrel splintered and lay flat on the kitchen floor. Jase and I were both covered in flour, and the kitchen was an absolute mess.