I continue to receive requests for more ‘Elwood Drew’ stories. Apparently, tales from his life are as funny to others as they have always been to me.
Born prematurely in the early 1900’s, the midwife didn’t think he would live, so she put him in a shoebox wrapped in a blanket and stuck him on the open oven door of the wood stove in the kitchen. After caring for his mother, she was surprised to find him still alive when she went back into the kitchen.
When a horse stepped on his foot as a youngster, the horse shoe perfectly cut off his little toe. He picked it up and took it to his mother who proceeded to clean both the toe and his foot and then sewed the toe back on with her needle and black thread. I know this happened because he used to show the scars to me when I’d complain about getting immunization shots at school.
I remember watching him use his pocket knife to carve out several teeth that were bothering him when we didn’t have the money to go to the dentist. Home remedies and home doctor’n were not strangers in our family.
The older generations were tougher than us I suppose.
Prior to World War II, my parents lived in Park City, Utah, where my father worked in the mines. One of my mothers brothers lived with them while he too worked as a miner.
For various reasons, boils and carbuncles were more common place back then. If you’ve ever had one or more of them, you understand how painful they are.
Late one evening, Dad and my uncle decided to use some ‘medicinal’ whiskey to try and fix a couple of extremely painful boils that were on the posterior of my uncles anatomy.
After testing the whiskey for poisons, they found that they’d used all of the contents. Dad turned and put the empty bottle on the coal stove in the kitchen to warm it up with the intent of using it to draw out the core of the boils as it cooled down.
Dropping his drawers, Earl presented the awful swellings to my father for remediation.
Dad put the mouth of the hot whiskey bottle over the worst offender and then they waited for it to cool and create the intended suction to pull the core free.
When telling me the story, he said that everything didn’t go quite as planned. The boil wasn’t quite ‘ripe’ and the core wouldn’t come out. The rapidly cooling bottle began to suck Earl’s posterior inside the narrow neck of the bottle.
Dad said that when a little over an inch of boil and surrounding flesh had been drawn into the bottle, Earl’s aplomb vanished and he began to dance around the kitchen exclaiming all kinds of things.
Apparently, his thought process increased significantly, because he rallied long enough to run to the side of the cast iron stove where he could literally, “twist and shout” and strike the bottle against the metal.
There must be a certain skill set required to break a whiskey bottle attached to your tush by swinging it against a stove, because it took a number of swings to do the trick. After each swing, Earl’s exclamations became louder and the suction seemed to consume even more of his tender flesh. Finally, the bottle broke and released its embrace on his rear assets.
Of course, by that time, all of the family had been awakened and had run downstairs to see who was being killed in the kitchen.
There was less psychological damage to the minds of my older siblings who witnessed the naked tush of our uncle than you might suppose. None of them ever exhibited any lasting effects from the vision, but from time to time, I have witnessed tears run from their eyes when they’ve been together and revisited the ‘Tale of the tail’.
Family stories are a treasure. I hope you are recording your own stories.
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