Mama would say, "Hurry, now, it's cold out there." I knew full well it was cold out there. But I wasn't about to take that little pink tablet. I was determined to go through ice or snow or any other bad weather rather than have that little tablet go through me. It didn't take long for me to put a tablet through a knothole, throw a glass of water out into the yard, and get back into the warm kitchen. I don't know how the other kids made out. The knothole was my own secret which I shared with no one.
Looking back, I can easily see that I should have let the entire family in on my secret. They could have saved the cost of the tablets as well as those miserable early morning trips to the cold bathroom. And as it turned out, the white coating on my tongue disappeared during the night the same as theirs did.
I was about eight years old at the time—that is, at the time I learned to use the knothole. I enjoyed it until we moved away from the Exum place. By the time I was 12 or 14, I began to understand the scripture where it reads, "As a man thinketh, so is he." The scriptures proved to be true. I thought I didn't want to take the tablets, so I didn't. I thought I would get well, so I did.
Another verse reads, "The Lord will provide." We often overlook the little things the Lord does for us, like putting knotholes in the most convenient places. Fifty years later, I learned that at age eight I was a Christian Scientist. They too, are a group of people who do not believe in taking medicine.
Many years later, when I was 40 years old, a neighbor told me he had fleas under his house and he wondered if I might know how to get rid of them. I told him, "Try Calomel. I used it when I was a kid and we didn't have fleas under our house."
When I was quite a small boy, a number of us were hoeing cotton one day. We had stopped at the end of the rows to get a drink and sharpen our hoes. Playfully, Frank picked me up and pretended he was going to throw me over the fence and out into the county road. Well, he swung me over the fence and stood me on my feet down in some weeds. And there between my feet was a beautiful little pocket knife.
This seemed almost too good to be true. I was the happiest little boy in the whole wide world. I guess every boy wants a pocket knife, and I had one—all my very own.
The others all looked at the knife and wished they had one like it. Jokingly, Frank said the knife was half his because, if he hadn't pitched me over the fence, I wouldn't have found it. So, a few days later, when he asked if he could borrow it, naturally, I loaned it to him, not because I thought it was half his, but because he was my brother and wanted to borrow it.
Frank was going to school at Hamlin at that time and when I thought it was time for him to return my knife, he told me that a boy in town had borrowed it and wouldn't give it back. And that was the end of my knife.
Now, did I hate Frank for what he had done? Of course not. I was too young to hate. Hurt, yes, but hate, never! I still loved Frank just as much as I ever did. And it was the same when he had to correct me. I loved him just as much while he was whipping me as I did before he began and after he stopped.