The Duck Commander Family

by Robertson, Willie

  Kay was handling payroll and employee benefits. Phil finally came home and got a job working in the offshore oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico. Kay was happy our family was back together again.

  During the time that Phil was working at the offshore drilling sites, Kay had to put us in a day-care facility while she worked. I was only three years old, but even then I was always trying to impress my friends. One day I decided to do something that had never been done before—climb up the slide backward. I shimmied my way up the slide while the other children oohed and ahhed. Once I got to the top, I turned to raise my hands in victory and to prove once and for all that I was king of the playground. I made a minor tactical error, however. That slide was slippery, and I fell eight feet to the ground right on top of a tree root. The teacher called my mom, who rushed me to St. Francis Medical Center, where they found I had shattered both of the bones in my thighs. One of the bones was splintered all the way from my knee to my hip.

  I WAS ONLY THREE YEARS OLD, BUT EVEN THEN I WAS ALWAYS TRYING TO IMPRESS MY FRIENDS.

  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.

  WILLIE’S BEANS AND RICE

  You can be creative with this. Don’t worry about doing it exactly the way it is written. If you don’t have an ingredient, make it anyway. I make beans every time we make or buy a ham—the ham bone is the key. You will find hunks of that ham when it cooks off the bone that you never knew existed, and they are delicious. Never throw a ham bone away!

  1 pound dry kidney or pinto beans

  1 ham bone with as much ham left on it as you want (I buy one that is honey glazed, take the ham off for sandwiches, then use what’s left for beans)

  10 cups water, divided

  1/3 cup olive oil, plus 1 teaspoon for frying

  a couple of slices of bacon, cut up

  1 large onion, diced

  2 tablespoons minced garlic

  1 green bell pepper, diced

  2 stalks celery, diced

  2 bay leaves (if you don’t have any in your cabinet, don’t worry about it)

  1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper (less if you are feeding kids)

  1 tablespoon parsley flakes (again, don’t sweat it if you don’t have them)

  1 teaspoon Phil Robertson’s Cajun Style Seasoning

  1 pound andouille sausage, sliced (add more if you like sausage, or a different kind if this is too spicy)

  a pinch of brown sugar

  2 cups long-grain white rice

  Louisiana Hot Sauce

  1. Rinse beans and transfer to a large pot with ham bone and 6 cups water. Make sure the water covers all the beans.

  2. In a skillet, heat olive oil and cut-up bacon over medium heat. Sauté onion, garlic, bell pepper, and celery for 3 to 4 minutes.

  3. Stir cooked vegetables into beans.

  4. Season with bay leaves, cayenne pepper, parsley, and Cajun Style Seasoning.

  5. Bring mixture to a boil and then reduce heat to medium and cook 4 to 6 hours, or until beans are tender. Check every 2 hours and add more water if needed.

  6. Cut sausage into slices and brown in skillet on medium heat with a teaspoon of olive oil.

  7. Stir sausage into beans toward the end of cooking time and continue to simmer for thirty minutes.

  8. Add brown sugar to taste.

  9. In a saucepan, bring 4 cups water and rice to a boil. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer for 20 minutes. Serve beans over steamed white rice and add plenty of Louisiana Hot Sauce.

  2

  FRIED BOLOGNA

  THEREFORE, AS GOD’S CHOSEN PEOPLE, HOLY AND DEARLY LOVED, CLOTHE YOURSELVES WITH COMPASSION, KINDNESS, HUMILITY, GENTLENESS AND PATIENCE. BEAR WITH EACH OTHER AND FORGIVE ONE ANOTHER IF ANY OF YOU HAS A GRIEVANCE AGAINST SOMEONE. FORGIVE AS THE LORD FORGAVE YOU.

  —COLOSSIANS 3:12–13

  About 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.

  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.

  WHEN IT WAS JUST THE KIDS, OUR STANDARD MEAL WAS FRIED BOLOGNA SANDWICHES.

  The apartment got a little less cramped when Granny and Pa moved to Arizona to work on the oil fields for a few months, but we didn’t live there for long because soon Phil decided he could make more money as a commercial fisherman than a teacher and wanted to start working toward that goal. Being out in the woods or on the water was still what brought him the most joy. He told Kay to search for some land with access to water that eventually flowed into the Gulf of Mexico.

  Kay searched the real estate listings in the newspapers and found an advertisement for a piece of property titled “Sportsman’s Paradise.” There were two houses on the land—which were really nothing more than fishing camps—and it came with six and a half acres. It was located just off the Ouachita River at the mouth of Cypress Creek. It was at the end of a dirt road in one of the most remote locations in the parish. When Kay took Phil to see the land, he knew instantly that it was where he wanted to live. Phil was convinced he could make a living fishing, and he wanted his sons to learn to hunt and fish and survive off the land like he had as a child. He believed our family could subsist on the fish and game we killed, along with fruits and vegetables we could grow in a garden. Phil wanted us to learn to become a man just like he had as a child growing up in the outdoors.

  One of the houses was a white, two-bedroom frame house and the other was a smaller camp house that had green wooden siding. About the same time Kay and Phil were trying to buy the land, Pa and Granny were returning home from Arizona. Kay and Phil reached an agreement with my grandparents. Pa and Granny would provide the down payment for the property, and Phil and Kay would assume the monthly mortgage payments as my grandparents eased into retirement. Our family would live in the white house, and Pa and Granny would live in the green one.

  I still remember the day Phil and Kay took us to see our new home for the first time. It is one of the happiest memories from my childhood. We pulled to the end of the dirt road and all the kids jumped out of the car and ran to the house. It was like heaven to us. Woods surrounded the house, which sat on stilts at the top of a hill to avoid flooding from the river. You could see the Ouachita River from the front porch. Phil and Kay still live in the same house today. I don’t think there’s anything that could convince them to leave that house. It is home.

  I STILL REMEMBER THE DAY PHIL AND KAY TOOK US TO SEE OUR NEW HOME FOR THE FIRST TIME.

  After we moved into the house, Alan and Jase started school again. I was still too young to attend, so I spent most of my time with my granny and pa. Phil worked at the school for that first year while he got his commercial fishing business going and Kay continued to work at Howard Brothers Discount Stores.

  This was a fun time in my life, with great memories of spending time with Granny and Pa. I had them all to myself while Jase and Alan were in school. I would sit at the table with them and play cards and dominoes, and we watched a lot of TV even though we only had three channels. We watched The Price Is Right in the morning and soap operas like All My Children and As the World Turns in the afternoon. When Granny was eighty, she actually appeared on The Price Is Right and won the game! It was “Spring Break Week,” and she competed against a bunch of college-aged kids. Granny was really good with numbers. Bob Barker would ask her the price of an item and she’d immediately yell out, “Six dollars, Bob!” Most of the college kids on the show didn’t know anything and were looking to the crowd for help, but Granny knew the price of everything almost immediately. She won two cars and a trip to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on the Showcase Showdown.

  I MADE A DEAL WITH GRANNY THAT I WOULD CLEAN UP HER YARD IF SHE WOULD LET ME BURN THE PILE.

  Granny was very opinionated and fun to be around. She would take me places, like the county fair or into town. She even let me burn things—which I loved. This was not a weird pyromaniac thing. When you live in the country, burning things is a way of life. There is no trash man who comes to pick up your trash. You just make a pile and burn it. I was barely five years old, at the time, but I made a deal with Granny that I would clean up her yard if she would let me burn the pile. Every day, I’d go out in the yard and rake up piles of leaves and sticks and set them on fire. I burned everything. I just loved building fires, and—you can ask Korie—I still do. We’ve had the fire department visit us a few times when they have had reports that a fire I started was out of control, but I’m proud to say that they’ve never had to act
ually put one out. I always had the fire under control by the time they arrived.

  I’d help Granny in the garden, too. One time I pulled the stem out of a cantaloupe because I thought that’s what I was supposed to do. Pa thumped me upside the head for doing it, and then Granny slapped him upside the head for hitting me. All of my cousins believed I was Granny’s favorite because I spent so much time with her.

  Granny was still having mental problems at the time, but I was too young to understand what was going on. She would do some really odd things. We had a chicken coop, and sometimes she would sit out there and crow with the chickens. Sometimes she would have her clothes on and sometimes she wouldn’t. One day I was walking on the concrete sidewalk between our houses, and Granny kicked open the screen door on the front of her house. She had a rifle and shot out a string of lights hanging between the trees. I guess that’s where my dad got his shooting skills. She was a heck of a shot.

  One time Granny had a bunch of bananas and started peeling them and cleaning her windows with them. Before she went to the hospital for an extended stay, she went through her house and painted everything that was a rectangle with red paint. She even painted her Bible red! When Granny came back from the hospital, she couldn’t figure out who painted everything in her house red. She didn’t even know she had done it.