Happy, Happy, Happy (7 page)

To catch them, we waited until dark and immobilized them by blinding them on the shoreline with a bright flashlight. One of us held the light and another used a long-handled, spring-loaded clamp, or “grab,” to “gig” the frog. Some people called the clamps gigs—but the actual sharp-pronged gigs were illegal. The trick was to hit the frog sharply on the back, thus springing the grab and causing it to clamp around the frog, then to lift it out of the water or off the ground quickly so it couldn’t use its powerful legs to leap free.

During one particularly memorable frog gigging, we caught a tow sack full of the big ones, probably thirty or forty pounds of them—so many that cleaning them was going to be a chore and take a while. So we laid the sack on the floor by the door when we went into the kitchen for a snack before beginning—carelessly leaving the top only loosely twisted to keep the frogs secure.

While we lingered in the kitchen, the frogs worked themselves out of the bag. When we returned, the bullfrogs were everywhere: leaping and jumping under the beds, tables, chairs, and chest of drawers. They were even inside our shoes—and every other place they could find to hide! One big one was in the middle of a bed!

It took us longer to find and catch the frogs the second time than it had the first.

It took us longer to find and catch the frogs the second time than it had the first. We were still finding them hours later, and when we finally went to bed, we nervously wondered if we would wake up with a cold, clammy companion.

Of course, we grew up with guns in the house. It was the era of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. Cap pistols were always a big Christmas item in our house, and as we grew older, BB guns became our prized possessions. Shotguns and .22s for each of us were beyond my father’s means, but there was always ammunition for his shotgun, and he freely allowed all my brothers and me to use it.

Every one of us learned to shoot with our father’s Browning semiautomatic sixteen-gauge shotgun. We also used a Remington .22 that belonged to our uncle Al Robertson and somehow wound up in our house. It was a bolt-action with a seven-shot clip.

From the time Pa purchased his shotgun, the year after World War II ended, he or one of us boys hunted with it almost daily. It would be difficult to calculate how many shells were fired through the old gun’s barrel—or the pounds of meat that were downed for our dinner table. Pa bought an entire case of shotgun
shells at the beginning of each duck season—and purchased more if that wasn’t enough.

The shotgun, more than sixty years old, has been retired. Silas, the last to use it regularly, still has it but doesn’t shoot it. Before his death, Pa sent the gun to Browning for refurbishing and repair but received a letter back from the company saying it was “extremely abused.” To repair and replace all the worn and damaged components would have cost almost as much as a new one. One of the faults, said the letter, was that the “barrel was kinked and unsafe” and would have to be replaced. Pa had always prized the hard-hitting, close pattern of shot the full-choke barrel delivered (you had to be pretty good to hit with it, as the tight cluster of shot left little room for error). He reluctantly laid the gun aside and bought a new one when times improved.

My brothers and I were all excellent marksmen. Yet my first remembered experience with guns was anything but auspicious. Tommy and I received new BB guns for Christmas one year, but one of them didn’t survive. There’s still some confusion as to exactly what happened. As my brother Jimmy Frank remembers it, he found Tommy and me fishing in the outhouse toilet hole with straightened wire coat hangers. One of us had been holding a BB gun over the toilet hole. I remember it being Tommy; he, of course, says it was me. Whoever was the culprit was trying to
get the other to do something (what isn’t remembered) and was bluffing that he would drop the BB gun if he didn’t do it. Then he did drop it—accidentally. It disappeared into the mess below.

Tommy remembers that it was his gun and that I did the dropping. Harold remembers that it was his BB gun that was dropped into the hole, and he blames both Tommy and me. I don’t exactly recall what happened. Regardless, the gun was never recovered—although desultory fishing operations went on for some time.

When Pa’s cast was finally removed, Barnwell Drilling Company put him back to work doing light duty as a tool pusher. He recovered almost completely, and later, after I left to go to college at Louisiana Tech, he and Granny moved south of Baton Rouge to Gonzales, Louisiana, where Pa worked as a pipe fitter in the area’s refinery and petrochemical construction boom along the Mississippi River.

Fortuitously, Pa had acquired a union card during the construction of a plant in Marshall, Texas, where he worked for a few months shortly after the war. The plant was under a construction deadline and was hiring anyone who could fit pipe together—particularly those in the drilling industry. Workers were required to obtain a union membership, and it was this reinstated pipe-fitter card from the late 1940s that later gave him the seniority to get high-paying construction jobs—if he was willing to travel to
them, which he was in his later years. He worked at a particularly well-paying job in Page, Arizona, in the 1970s, where a coal-fired electricity-generating plant was being built.

Even after we left the log cabin where I grew up and the beautiful woods and swamps surrounding it, I was never far from nature. I always found a way to get back to God’s most beautiful creation. Since I was a little kid, I’ve had this profound connection with and love for deep, dark, unmolested woods. I’ve always had a longing to be in the deep woods or on the water. I want to be on the lakes, streams, and rivers and be surrounded by everything that comes with it—the ducks, birds, fish, and other wildlife. I guess it’s in my DNA, and I just love being out there. Even to this day, it’s where I want to be. I think part of it is that there’s no clutter out there—there are no computers or cell phones (at least not in my duck blind), and constantly updated information isn’t being thrown at you from all directions. You might hear a train in the distance every once in a while or see an airplane in the sky flying to New York or someplace else, but your sense of peace and serenity isn’t disturbed by clutter.

I’ve always had a longing to be in the deep woods or on the water.

I have a deep connection with what God created, and what I would love to see more than anything else is a pristine Earth, just
like the one He created. There would be no power lines, skyscrapers, or concrete, but there would still be a big ol’ kitchen for Miss Kay to make her home-cooked meals. Heaven to me is endless cypress swamps and hardwood forests loaded with game and ducks and not a game warden around! Now, that would be a sight!

Rule No. 4 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy

Don’t Try to Figure Out Women (They’re Strange Creatures)

I
’ve been on this earth for sixty-six years, and I’ve reached a conclusion and it’s a fact: women are strange creatures. One day I went into the bedroom to go to sleep and then woke up a couple of hours later with my wife, Kay, standing over me.

“Phil, do you love me?” she asked.

“Yeah, of course I do,” I said.

“Well, write it down then,” she said.

“What?” I asked her as I closed my eyes to go back to sleep.

“Write it down,” she said.

I turned over and went back to sleep. I woke up about four
A.M
. the next morning to go duck-hunting. When I looked at my chair in the living room, I saw a piece of paper with a felt pen sitting right in the middle of it. Then I remembered my conversation with Kay the night before.

I took the sheet of paper and wrote the following: “Miss Kay: I love you. I always have, and I always will.”

I told Kay I loved her when she asked me, but she wanted it in writing. You know what Kay did with that piece of paper? She taped it to the headboard of our bed, where it has been for the last few years. I guess she goes to bed every night with the comfort of knowing that I really do love her. Therefore I concluded that women are very strange creatures; there’s simply no other explanation for the way they sometimes act.

Miss Kay was the perfect woman for me. I was sixteen and she was fifteen when we were married. Nowadays some people might frown on people getting married that young, but I knew that if you married a woman when she was fifteen, she would pluck your ducks. If you waited until she was twenty, she would only pick your pockets. Now, that’s a joke, and a lot of people seem to laugh at it, but there is a certain amount of truth in it. If you can find a nice, pretty country girl who can cook and carries her Bible, now, there’s a woman. She might even be ugly, but if she cooks squirrels and dumplings, then that’s the woman you go after.