The Duck Commander Family (8 page)

5

A
FRIEND LOVES AT ALL TIMES, AND A BROTHER IS BORN FOR A TIME OF ADVERSITY.

—P
ROVERBS
17:17

W
hen you watch
Duck Dynasty,
it might be pretty easy to see that Jase and I are very competitive. When we were younger, whether it was fishing, hunting, playing sports, or just about anything else, Jase and I loved a good competition. It wasn’t just against each other. We would challenge anybody, but since we were the closest in age and lived all the way down at the mouth of the river, a long drive from civilization, for the most part we were all we had. So competing against each other and, more important, beating each other (and then reminding the loser about the details of our victory afterward) became our favorite pastime. It was that way when we were kids, and it’s still that way today—whether it’s in business, duck hunting, fishing, or golf.

When we were younger, we would spend every weekend and summer day competing against each other in something. Every day was about who could catch the most fish, throw the
football the farthest, or shoot the most squirrels. When we wanted to go fishing, Phil and Kay would never buy bait for us, so we would have to go out and find our own bait. I was really good at it. We’d catch crickets or grasshoppers or dig for earthworms. Our neighbors had some catalpa trees and they were always covered with black worms that had two lines on their backs. We would take those worms and just go wear fish out with them. I used those worms in one of my earliest business ventures. I set up an old boat and literally filled it with cow manure. Our neighbors had cows, so I spent days picking it up to get an entire boatful. I would just pick it up with my hands. Worms thrive in cow manure, so I created a worm farm in it, and these worms were huge! Remember the boat dock that Granny charged people to use? Well, it was an easy marketplace. My customers were coming to me. I would set up my little stand and sell worms for five cents apiece all day long. Nowadays, Korie’s always asking me to go buy bait for the kids when they want to go fishing. Now, I can afford it, but something seems wrong about buying something you can find for yourself if you’ll just go outside and turn over a few logs.

I carried my fishing pole with me everywhere. We would fish on Cypress Creek, which ran next to our house, as well as sneak on other people’s ponds to fish. As Jase and I got older, we started expanding our fishing territory. Judge John Harrison, the state district judge in Monroe, had a fishing camp up the road from our house. The judge was only there on the weekends, so we’d sneak under his gate and fish his pond all
week when he wasn’t around. The judge had built a bridge across his pond, and the first time I saw it, I was like, “You’ve got to be kidding me!” I was so excited my arms were actually shaking while I held my fishing pole off the bridge. I threw my line into the pond and a fish immediately hit the hook. My cork flew under the water, and I immediately dropped my pole. I ran back to our house as fast as I could to get Jase.

“I’ve found the mother lode!” I told Jase. “You will not believe how many fish are in this pond!”

Jase and I ran back to the judge’s pond, and we stayed there the entire summer. We probably caught every bream in the pond and then we put out trout lines. We even carried our boat up the river and into the pond and fished from it all summer. When we were done fishing for the day, we would leave our poles behind and hide the boat. One time when we came back, the judge had taken our fishing poles, so we knew he was onto us, but that didn’t stop us. By the end of the summer, we had cut a ditch under the gate from sliding under it. When we were finished with that pond, you couldn’t even get a bite anymore. We literally caught every fish in the pond!

Whenever Jase and I were fishing, we always had our own fishing spots. Jase would always try to creep over to my spot if the fish were biting, and we would end up getting in a fight right there on the bank. One day Jase and I were fighting, and
I looked at him and said, “You’re a whore.” I’d heard the word somewhere and didn’t really know what it meant, but I knew it was bad. Jase turned around and looked at me.

“What did you call me?” Jase asked.

“I said you’re a whore,” I told him.

Jase didn’t know what the word meant either, but he still ran as fast as he could back to the house to tell Phil what I had called him. Of course, Phil knew what it meant and I got a whippin’ for it.

When we were old enough, I think we got a whippin’ nearly every day for fighting and misbehaving. Jase would usually get three licks from Phil, but I would only get one because I would already be screaming and twisting before the first lick ever hit me. Jase always tried not to cry because he thought it made him tougher than me, but I didn’t care. It was self-preservation. Hebrews 12:11 says, “No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.” This is so true!

Since I was the baby of the family at the time, my older brothers and their friends could hit harder than me, so I had to come up with a different tactic if I was ever going to get a lick in. I figured the only way to get them good was to throw something at them, then count on my running skills to get away. I had a pretty good throwing arm; must’ve gotten that from my old man. One day Jase pushed me out of the recliner and stole my seat in the living room.

“I’m the king of the house,” Jase yelled proudly.

I was so mad I went to my room and got a twelve-gauge shotgun shell. I was leaning out the door and said, “You’re the king of the house, huh?”

“Yep, king of the house,” Jase said.

I reared back and hit Jase right in the forehead with the shotgun shell. He caught me at the top of the hill behind our house and shoved dirt in my mouth. I knew if I told Phil and Kay about it, I would be in trouble, too, so I kept my mouth shut and planned my next attack.

Alan was the oldest boy in the family. He was really too big and too much older than us to be fighting with Jase and me, but he always liked to get our fights started and then just sit back and watch. It was like entertainment for him to see how our fights would play out. Al always brought his buddies over to the house to play basketball, and they would start picking on me because I was the youngest. One day I’d had enough of their teasing and grabbed a basketball and hit one of Al’s buddies right upside the head with it. I took off running. I knew I couldn’t outrun Al, but I was faster than all of his buddies. I ran into the woods and they never caught me.

Al and his friends loved to play tricks on me. Sometimes after I had gone to sleep they would shake me, hollering, “Willie, wake up; it’s time for school.” I was a pretty heavy sleeper, but I’d wake up, get dressed, brush my teeth, and then go sit on the couch. They would all look at me and just start laughing because it would be like one o’clock in the morning.

Our fights usually ended with a good whipping. We probably deserved even more than we got. We were rough boys who all had a strong, stubborn streak, and while we always seemed to be in trouble at home, we were never in trouble at school or church. We were well-mannered, respectful kids. Kay and Phil say that our teachers always bragged on how good we were. But at home, it seemed like we were always either about to get a whippin’ or just coming off one.

Korie:
Hearing all these stories about the whippings and fighting always shocks me. It is just so different from the way I grew up. First of all, we didn’t call them whippings, we called them spankings, and we did get them, but they were few and far between. I had one brother and one sister and we just were not allowed to fight. I remember pinching my brother when we were little, but that was as bad as it got. I honestly do not remember one time when one of us hit the other because we were mad.

Calling someone stupid or saying “shut up” were absolutely forbidden, as well. One of my mom’s favorite sayings was “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” So when my sister and I were mad at our brother, we would give him what we called the “silent treatment.” We wouldn’t talk to him and basically ignored him for as long as we deemed necessary. It drove him crazy, but we were following Mom’s
advice. That’s pretty much the end of our family’s fighting stories!

An example of our getting away without the whipping we deserved, or at least Jase deserved, happened when Kay was over at Granny’s house watching
Dallas
. For some reason, Jase thought it would be really funny to lock me out of the house, and I was furious. I kept banging on the door, but Jase had turned the music up loud so he wouldn’t hear me. He kicked his feet up on a table and kept yelling, “I can’t hear you. I can’t hear you.” I went to Granny’s house and told Kay what Jase had done. Kay went marching back to our house and was hotter than a catfish fry in July. She started banging on the door, but Jase thought it was still me and just kept blaring the music and enjoying having the house to himself. Kay got so angry that she banged on the glass pane and her fist went right through the window, cutting up her hand pretty badly.

This caught Jase’s attention. When he saw her hand, he knew he was in big trouble. “When your dad gets home, he’s going to whip y’all’s butts,” Kay told us.

I hadn’t even done anything, but Phil didn’t usually conduct an investigation to find out who was at fault. He just whipped whoever was in the vicinity of the crime. Jase and I ran back to our room and padded up with anything we could find—socks, underwear, and pillowcases. We sat on our bed with our butts padded, waiting for Phil to get home, certain we were in big trouble. Phil came into the house and saw the bandage on Kay’s hand.

“What in the world did you do?” Phil asked her.

“Look at what these boys did,” Kay told him. “Jase locked Willie out of the house, and I was banging on the door for him to let us in. My hand went right through the window.”

“Kay, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Why would you bang on a glass window?” Phil said.

Phil walked right by her and took a shower. Jase and I were standing there with padded behinds, our mouths wide open with relief.