As
a boy, I sometimes spent the summers with my grandparents on their small farm
at Slocum, an Anderson County community supposedly named because the mail delivery
was "slow to come."
During
one of my visits, I slipped into the hog pen to play with a batch of new pigs.
The mother sow resented the intrusion and as I climbed over the fence to escape,
I slipped against a protruding nail and cut a gash in the center of my chest.
It wasn't a serious wound, but my grandmother sized up the situation
with alarm and summoned my grandfather. "Gus," she commanded, "fetch some axle
grease."
Grandfather Gus returned with a tin of grease, and my grandmother
spread it freely over the wound. The bleeding stopped immediately and in a few
hours she cleaned the wound, dabbed it with a little coal oil, and tied a strip
of white cloth around my chest.
If
you grew up in the country, miles away from the nearest doctor, home remedies
were something you accepted routinely. Using axle grease or coal oil for cuts
probably made pretty good sense, especially if you got well.
In 1996,
we completed "Rub Onions and Skunk Oil on my Chest and Call Me Well," a
collection of home remedies and folk medicines. Most of the contributions came
from older people who used the folk remedies themselves or remembered parents
or grandparents who found the home medicines an essential part of rural life in
Texas. We discovered a multitude of cures for warts, but they often fell more
into the realm of superstition than remedies.
Several people told us
to rub our warts with a rooster comb, and bury it.
Ruby Yount of Lufkin
said her mother-in-law removed several warts from her kids' hands, and it was
all done in privacy. She tied a knot of sewing thread over the wart, then went
outside and buried it in the earth. By the time the thread rotted, the wart was
gone.
