Old Tales

An interesting time, how wonderful. We sat on the patio of our “small town” home the other day allowing the sun to fade in the west and enjoying “Happy Hour.” We got to talking about things that will be lost to local history someday. She told me about the steam machines in which physicians used to sterilize hypodermic needles. I remembered them but knew no details. She told me how the late country Doc in her hometown, Dr. Byron E. Holmes, taught her to use the autoclave as a young girl. I hadn’t known the details, I only knew that when a doctor swung that top open, and the steam rolled out, a shot was coming and, like one of Pavlov’s dogs, I would instinctively shrink from the impending pain.

I told her about the homemade “boll weevil” trap my father used on his little three-acre cotton patch out behind our store. I think he raised it more for fun than for profit, and to have an excuse to go his barn after he closed the store, find his bottle of Old Yellowstoned, and enjoy his own "Happy Minutes."

Anyway, to kill the weevils, he constructed this little contraption that seemed to think would work. He placed two saw horses in the middle of the field, and placed “two by sixes” across them upon which he placed a Number Three washtub full of water. He put a plank across the tub and, upon it, placed a railroad lantern.

With the lantern lit at night as a draw, the boll weevils would fly to the flame, get too hot, and fall into the water, whereupon they would drown. Don’t ask me if it worked or not. It didn’t last long before it fell over one night and his helpers refused to attend it further, fearing some demonic “haint” at work in the field. He quit growing cotton not long after that and switched to raising cows.

We got to thinking, she and I, about how much folklore, lies, truth, and exaggerations involving rural life, and the old ways in general, will be lost under the pitiless void of cell phone staring. Most times that the funeral home doors open, there is one less person left to tell us about how things used to be. I’m not talking about who was president, or what war we had started. That stuff gets written down and made public. Most of it anyhow. Well, some of it.

I’m talking about how to make those canned peaches that Mamma Rodgers used to make. I’m talking about how my daddy used to make me hold a piglet’s legs while he “unmanned” the poor creature. I’m talking about how they used to make the women sit around a quilting frame and sew on Sunday afternoons while the men played dominoes and talked politics.

On people I’ve known, and on a more cosmic scale, I’m talking about how many Einstein’s, Casals, Hurstons, Picassos, Darwins, Newtons, Kings, Salks, and Mandelas died, or grew up undernourished and brain-damaged, in a sun-scorched shotgun shack in the Arkansas Delta, never to sing their songs.

Maybe someone should start a blog called, “Old Days, Old People, and Old Tales.” Who knows? Someday, someone might show an interest. Who knows, maybe someday, after a much more spirited Happy Hour, I may share the tried and true U.S. Navy way, according to the old salts, of getting rid of crabs.

I knew the children of
former slaves like this
woman, but never asked.