<TITLE>17. Par 46-47</TITLE>L-46 And the grease was a cure-all at our house. You'd have a cup full of coon grease. If one of the kids got sick, dropped a couple of drops of turpentine on it for a bad cold, and swallow it. I don't know how we lived, but we did it. But it was a cure- all. If somebody got a bruise, they'd put coon grease on it. A headache, they'd rub coon grease across your head.
And we had to sleep upstairs, there's a little two room house, and mother and dad, and five of us children, before the others come. We slept upstairs, the boys. Pop and mom, there's no floor in it at all, dirt floor. Had a stump cut off for a table. And then they... In the room there, they had a--a bed built out of straw tick on it, with a shuck pillow. Daddy used to have a shaving brush made out of shucks. We were way up in the mountains.
My grandmother died at a hundred and ten years old and never seen a train in her life. Only seen one car, and I brought it up there, and it taken me all day long to travel four miles, putting rocks in a creek so I could get it up there. All the neighbors standing out, never seen such a thing in their life, when I brought this little '26 Chevrolet up through those mountains. I got stuck down there; I asked the man if he'd take his horse; he was plowing, said, "My mare if you get it close to there, it'd tear that thing to pieces. She'd never seen anything like that."

L-47 So we were poor. And then we had... Cut out a couple of saplings, and had an upstairs when the family got kindy big, a loft, big cracks in the walls where the chink mud had fell out, old clapboard shingles put on in the light of the moon; they turned up. Lay there at night time... And mom would put a feather tick over the top of us in the wintertime, and then she'd put all the old coats and things we had, then a piece of canvas, where if it rained, we'd just duck under that canvas like a rabbit, if it rained or snowed.
And you could lay there and count the stars any time. And there'd come up a cold spell, and if we didn't get under that canvas, we'd get cold in our eyes. And there... Mom called it matter. I don't know what it is, but it'd stick our eyes together. And I'd have to get up of a morning make the fire, come down these two saplings with sticks across them, and make the fire in a old chunk stove... And so then, mama would call me at morning, and she'd say, "Billy." Bless her little heart.
I'd say, "Yes, mama."
She'd say, "Come on down, it's four o'clock. Your daddy's got to leave."
And I'd try to get up, me and my brother, and our eyes would be full of matter, all stuck together; the cold done it. I'd say, "Mama, I can't see."
"Call Edward, your brother."
I'd say, "He can't see either, mama. His eyes is stuck together."
Mama'd go out to the little step stove in the kitchen, setting up on some chunks. And she would make the fire, and go over and get the coon grease can, set it on the stove and get it hot. She'd come up there and massage our eyes with that coon grease. It worked good. We was able to see after she oiled up our eyes with coon grease.


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