Happy, Happy, Happy (8 page)

I was sixteen and Kay was fifteen when we were married.

I counsel young men all the time, and I tell them to find a woman and eat six of her home-cooked meals before signing on
the dotted line. If you’re going to spend the rest of your life with her, you at least have to know what the grub is going to taste like. If her cooking passes the test, then she’s passed the first level. Even more important, she has to carry a Bible and live by it, because that means she’ll stay with you. She also needs to pick your ducks. Some of the young bucks call and ask me, “Hey, what about two out of three?” I tell them two out of three is better than nothing.

As it says in 1 Peter 3:1–6:

Wives, in the same way submit yourselves to your own husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives. Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as elaborate hairstyles and the wearing of gold jewelry or fine clothes. Rather, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight. For this is the way the holy women of the past who put their hope in God used to adorn themselves. They submitted themselves to their own husbands, like Sarah, who obeyed Abraham and called him her lord. You are her daughters if you do what is right and do not give way to fear.

That’s Miss Kay in a nutshell—she’s a kind and gentle woman. In my eyes, she’s the most beautiful woman on Earth, on the inside and the outside. She has a natural beauty about her and doesn’t need a lot of makeup or fancy clothes to show it. The more makeup a woman wears, the more she’s trying to hide; makeup
can hide a lot of evil. I think Miss Kay is probably a lot like Sarah was. For some reason, we always talk about Abraham, the father of our faith, but nobody ever mentions Sarah, the mother of our faith. I’m beginning to suspect the reason the mother of our faith is never mentioned is because people don’t appreciate a woman who is beautiful on the inside, who is quiet, gentle, and submissive. But God says that being a woman like that is of great worth in His eyes. I believe that Sarah, the mother of our faith, should be revered as much as Abraham, the father of our faith.

Kay and I always were the perfect match. I was our high school quarterback, and she was a cheerleader. We first started going together when she was in the ninth grade and I was in the tenth. One of Kay’s older friends decided we might make a cute couple, so she told Kay that I wanted her to walk me off the football field after one of our games. Then the girl came to me and said, “You know that little cheerleader Kay Carroway? She wants you to walk with her off the field after the game.” The rest is history, as they say.

Kay and I started dating shortly thereafter, but it didn’t last very long. As soon as the Christmas holidays were over, hunting season started, and I was determined to spend all my free time in the woods. I didn’t have time for a girlfriend, and I certainly wasn’t going to take Kay in the woods with me. Women are a lot like ducks—they don’t like mud on their butts. I figured she
would just get in the way. But then the next May, Kay’s daddy died of a massive heart attack. She was only fourteen at the time, and I knew it was going to be really hard on her. I went to her daddy’s funeral, and we made eye contact. I asked her out a few weeks later, and we’ve been together ever since.

Women are a lot like ducks—they don’t like mud on their butts.

Kay’s mother wasn’t thrilled when we started dating again. She told Kay, “You don’t want to marry into that bunch.” But Kay told her mother that even though my family didn’t have much money, we loved each other and that was worth a lot more than new cars and fancy clothes.

“They might be poor, but they don’t know they’re poor,” Kay told her mother. “They’re a very happy family and love each other. They don’t realize they’re missing things other people have.”

After Kay’s daddy died, her mother started dating again and spent a lot of time away from home. Her mother started drinking heavily and became an alcoholic. It was a hard time for Kay, but she always had a safe place to go at our house. Kay is a person of strong principles—many of them learned from her grandmother, whom she called Nannie. Kay spent a lot of time during her growing-up years with Nannie, as both her parents worked full-time in the Ida general store, which was founded by her grandfather and had been in the Carroway family for seventy-five years.
Kay’s father worked in the store every day, while her mama tried to do it all: cooking, taking care of the house, and working alongside her husband.

Kay learned how to cook from her grandmother, and I love the woman for teaching her. Kay can prepare anything from wild game to unbelievably good pies, biscuits, and just about anything you can name. The table she sets is renowned among our family, friends, employees, television crewmen, hunters, and others, and there always seems to be a large number of people eating at our house. For years Kay prepared a big meal at the noon hour for anywhere from six to fifteen or more people. She jokes that we could have built ten mansions with the money we’ve spent feeding everybody over the years. But we don’t regret it one bit, and she’s enjoyed doing it every day. As it says in Romans 12:13: “Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality.”

Because both of her parents worked, Kay spent many childhood hours alone. She filled them with activities like taking in stray cats and other animals. Some of the cats were wild, and she would give them milk and tame them. Her father had bird dogs, and she made friends with them. Her family also had chickens, turkeys, canaries, turtles, baby alligators, and a pony. She likes to joke that she had her own circus while growing up, but she didn’t know she was going to marry into one!

Kay’s father hunted and fished, and she always loved those
things about him. When I came along with the same attributes, she was naturally drawn to me. Her love for animals also came into play in our relationship. We were soul mates from the very beginning.

It wasn’t long before I started taking her with me on fishing or hunting expeditions. My qualms about taking Kay into the woods were quickly relieved. And Kay wasn’t only a spectator. She helped catch baitfish, gather worms, hook them onto trotlines, and of course, pick ducks by plucking their feathers to prepare them for cooking. You know you have a good woman when you return home from a hunt and she’s standing on the front porch, yelling, “Did y’all get anything?” Before I repented, Kay also drove my getaway car when I was hunting out of season. I always knew my woman was waiting for me on the other side of the woods if I got into trouble.

Before I repented, Kay also drove my getaway car when I was hunting out of season.

When I received a football scholarship to Louisiana Tech, we moved to Ruston and rented an apartment in the same complex as my brother Tommy, who had received a scholarship to play for the Bulldogs two years earlier. Tommy and his wife, the former Nancy Dennig (they were also high school sweethearts), had been living there for more than a year. With their company, the
transition to Louisiana Tech was much easier for us. Kay had not yet graduated from high school, so she finished her senior year at Ruston High School. She was pregnant with our first son, Alan.

We lived in the Vetville Apartments, which the school built in 1945 to accommodate married veterans coming home from World War II. The red-brick apartments were located on south campus, about a mile from the main campus. For Tommy and me, it was like reviving old times. Tommy bought a boat, and I bought a motor for it. We began fishing and hunting in the area waters and woods: the upper Ouachita River and Bayou D’Arbonne Lake, a recently impounded reservoir just north of town. We would usually take someone fishing with us and come home with the daily limit. Kay and Nancy carried a black iron skillet between our apartments until the grease burned it from frying so much fish and other game.

Tommy and I even arranged our schedules so he went to class on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and I went on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Tommy would fish while I was in class, and I fished when he was at school. It didn’t take me very long to figure out that a few of my instructors loved crappie, or white perch, as they’re called in Louisiana. A judicious gift of fresh, filleted white perch to certain instructors, particularly in subjects where I was having difficulty, greatly improved my grades.

One particular class in sports medicine—which was about
taping ankles, diminishing the effects of bumps and bruises, and such—held little interest for me. It was primarily for athletes who were planning to become coaches, which I wasn’t sure I wanted to do. Those white perch allowed me to make a passing grade in the course without even attending classes. For whatever reason, the instructor only gave me a C. I thought those fish were worth at least a B. Shoot! Maybe even an A—all those fish!

Generally, I was a quick enough study that I didn’t have difficulties in many classes. I basically looked for a strong C average, and I made sure I maintained it. I paid attention in class and took good notes—when I was there. Occasionally, I had to buckle down with a book to get past some difficulty, but I only spent about 30 percent of my time on college. To get better than a C average would have taken too much time and would have interfered with my hunting.