Despite having a grandfather who was a physician and a daughter who was married to one, Grandmother Clason took a dim view of modern medicine. Having grown up in the country down around Seale, Ala., she preferred folk medicine—the use of tobacco juice and icky homemade elixirs and toad skins and the like—which I guess was the only kind of medicine she had known as a girl.

Maybe she got her beliefs from the Indians or from some root doctor over there in Russell County. Who knows? All I do know is that her attitude worked a hardship on my life and led to considerable humiliation and not a little pain when I was a boy.

Like the time my sister Fleming cut off the tip of my finger when she was trying to cut through a knot in a string I was holding. When grandmother saw the blood spurting out of the tip of my finger she got her bottle of turpentine and plunged my finger in it. Five or six years of age is too young for a boy to experience the pain of childbirth, but I am certain I did at that moment.

Then there was the time I ended up with a case of ringworm after a glorious summer of wallowing in the dirt and engaging in mud ball fights in Bull Creek. This tragedy took place while I was in the first grade at Wynnton School, which is where my crowd went from the first through the seventh grades.

Grandmother had Mr. Jones at the Blue Jay shave my head until I looked like a dead turkey and then put some kind of foul-smelling purple medicine on it and finished this off with a skull cap made from the toe of a white stocking such as nurses used to wear. With this diabolical topping on my head I was sent off to school like some...

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