The Duck Commander Family (3 page)

Being in the hospital was kind of fun because I got lots of attention and sympathy. What was not so exciting was the nearly full-body cast they had to put me in to keep me immobilized until the bones could fuse back together. They had to put me to sleep to insert a pin in my leg to hold the bone together. The cast completely covered my broken leg and went halfway down the other leg. It came all the way up to my chest, so I could not move at all from my waist down.

Word somehow got to Phil. I’m not sure how it happened since cell phones weren’t invented then, and even if they were, Phil certainly would not have had one. At any rate, he found out and rushed home from his offshore job. He came to the hospital and started yelling at Kay for letting me break my leg, as if there was anything she could have done about it. At that point in my life, it didn’t seem like Phil was really interested in us kids, but when I got hurt his concern was evident. He even spent the night in the hospital with me until I was allowed to go home. I don’t know how he, Kay, and I all slept in that little hospital bed, but we did, and I felt loved and cared for, despite our somewhat nomadic existence up until this point in my life.

One of Phil’s friends, Jerry Allen, owned a car dealership. Jerry brought me one of the roller seats that mechanics use to work on cars. I rolled around our trailer on the seat for three or four months, bumping into everything in the house. My aunts and uncles tell me they still remember me rolling around the seat in the yard, trying to keep up with my brothers and cousins. I must have looked like an ape trying to navigate the creeper with nothing but my arms! I remember that part being pretty fun, but my brothers just remember the smell. They say that cast stunk like crazy! You can imagine the smell after a summer in the Louisiana heat in a full-body cast. The doctors cut a hole out of the back, and Alan remembers having to carry me to the bathroom every time I had to go. It was rough. I probably should apologize to him for that one.

Also, I learned a difficult life lesson: sometimes in trying to be king of the playground, you could end up off the playground for about six months if you’re not careful. In other words, as it says in the Bible: “Don’t think of yourself [or climb] more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you” (Romans 12:3).

Things were okay for a while, but Phil was still drinking a lot, and one rainy night during a drinking binge, Phil told Kay he wanted her to take her sons and leave. He said he was sick and tired of all of us and wanted to live his own life. We spent the night at my uncle Harold’s house, and then the church helped us get a low-rent apartment.

I was really too young to remember many of the details, but I know Kay was very worried that she was about to lose her husband and her sons were about to lose their father.

2

T
HEREFORE, AS
G
OD’S CHOSEN PEOPLE, HOLY AND DEARLY LOVED, CLOTHE YOURSELVES WITH COMPASSION, KINDNESS, HUMILITY, GENTLENESS AND PATIENCE.
B
EAR WITH EACH OTHER AND FORGIVE ONE ANOTHER IF ANY OF YOU HAS A GRIEVANCE AGAINST SOMEONE.
F
ORGIVE AS THE
L
ORD FORGAVE YOU.

—C
OLOSSIANS
3:12–13

A
bout three months after Phil kicked us out of the house, Kay was working at Howard Brothers’ corporate offices when one of her coworkers told her Phil was sitting in his truck in the parking lot. Kay looked out the window and saw Phil hunched over the steering wheel. She figured he was probably drunk again. But when Kay got to his truck, she found Phil crying. It was something she had never seen before and probably has never seen since.

“I want my family back,” Phil told her. “I’m so sorry.”

Fortunately for all of us, Kay was strong enough to forgive Phil and take him back. But she took him back with the following conditions: Phil had to quit drinking and walk away from his rowdy friends. Kay enlisted the help of William “Bill” Smith, the preacher at White’s Ferry Road Church in
West Monroe, Louisiana, who Phil had run out of his bar several months earlier. In one of their early conversations, Smith asked Phil if he trusted him. Phil told him no, he didn’t, so Smith held up a Bible.

“You don’t have to trust me,” Smith told him. “Trust what’s written in here.”

From that day forward, Phil started his study of God’s Word. He attended church several times a week and started going to Bible study nearly every night. He was baptized at the age of twenty-eight and gave up drinking and partying altogether. We moved into an apartment on Pine Terrace in West Monroe in 1976. Kay rented the apartment under an assumed name and didn’t give our address or phone number to any of Phil’s friends. We shared the apartment with Granny and Pa, so seven of us (my youngest brother, Jep, wasn’t born yet) were living in a two-bedroom apartment. It was pretty cramped, but we didn’t care. The only thing that mattered was our family was back together again.

Alan, Jase, and I slept on the floor of the living room in army sleeping bags that my uncle Si had given us. Si had brought them back from Vietnam and they were stuffed with real goose feathers. I was only about four years old at the time and had a habit of wetting the bed nearly every night. Phil used to get onto me for peeing in the bed and would threaten to spank me every morning that my sleeping bag was wet. Like I could help it! I eventually figured out that I could hold my sleeping bag up to an old butane heater and dry it. I would pee in the bed and then wake up early so it would be dry before
anybody else woke up. I can only imagine how bad that sleeping bag must have smelled! I doubt that I was fooling anyone. One of our kids was a bed wetter and I never disciplined that child for it. Bed-wetting was something I totally understood.

Phil took a job teaching at Ouachita Christian School, a new school in Ouachita Parish. He thought he needed to be around Christians as much as possible as he continued his spiritual healing. Phil still says the kids he taught at Ouachita Christian School influenced his Christian walk more than anyone else. They really left an impression on him at a time when he needed it most.

Kay kept working at the department store office, so my brothers and I spent a lot of time together. Alan was the oldest and was left in charge. He assumed the responsibility of caring for his younger brothers. He was a free babysitter for Phil and Kay more than anything else, as we still didn’t have much money. Kay remembers some really rough times when Alan would feed Jase and me our bottles and put us to bed—he was only seven or eight years old himself.

My brothers and I really had a good time living in the apartment. I’ve always been a people person, and there were a lot of kids who lived in the complex. We would go out in the parking lot and do choreographed dances. This was the 1970s, so I guess we were being influenced by the movies of that
time, which involved a lot of singing and dancing.
Saturday Night Fever, The Rocky Horror Picture Show,
and
Grease
were always some of our favorites.

Alan was in charge of feeding us lunch when Kay and Phil were at work. When it was just the kids, our standard meal was fried bologna sandwiches—they were cheap and easy to make. And for that reason, Mom always had a loaf of bologna in our icebox. We became bologna connoisseurs. Even though we were kids, we were still Robertsons, which meant we took our food very seriously. No ordinary bologna sandwiches with mayonnaise slapped between two slices of bread for us. I think we tried every way you could make bologna better. Our favorite way, which I still make from time to time today, involved cutting three slits in the bologna, creating three triangles that were held together by the middle. We did that so the bologna wouldn’t bubble up too much while we were frying it. We would almost burn one side, then flip it and put a slice of cheese on the top while the other side was cooking. In the meantime, we would warm the bread in the pan so that it had a little flavor from the grease and was slightly toasted. Yum, I’m getting hungry thinking about it! A little cheese or butter on anything makes it better. All of our meals at that time involved at least one of those two items. Granny lived to ninety-six years old and Pa till eighty-seven, so I guess it wasn’t all that bad.