Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [15]
After Mommy got married, she used her Indian ways to raise us. She had her first seven kids at home, with an old midwife coming in to help. The last one, she went down to Paintsville Hospital to have. She figured she earned that. After Mommy had me, she was out setting onions on the hill only three days later. Mommy did everything the way they do it now—more natural. They get you up on your feet the first day now, and they let you go home after three days. Mommy was just ahead of her time. All eight children are alive today—so she must have been doing something right.
Whatever went wrong up on our holler, Mommy would take care of it. For burns, she’d make a salve of castor oil, flour, and sulphur. She’d cook it all together, then rub it on the wound and it would heal real fast. When you got a cold, Mommy would make a poultice from mustard seeds and rub it on your chest. It would take the cold right out of you. But it was so hot and smelly, us kids would swear we’d rather have the cold than the poultice.
One time my brother, Herman, was cutting some weeds with a big scythe and he hit his foot, cutting an artery. That blood was pumping swoosh-swoosh-swoosh. Mommy just ripped off her petticoat and twisted it around his leg in a tourniquet to stop the bleeding.
Mommy saved my life, too, when I was little. My dress caught fire when I was sitting too close to the fireplace. Mommy was supposed to be peeling potatoes for dinner but she decided to sit by the fire to get warm. She saw my dress on fire and she just pulled me off the floor and ripped that dress off my back. Then she beat out the fire with her bare hands. I didn’t get burned at all, just a bloody nose from bumping against a chair. Mommy’s hands were blistered for a week, even though she put them in cold water right away the way the Indians did.
Mommy had a special tea for every occasion. She’d make her teas out of roots and herbs, but she had to be real careful or they could kill you. Like one time she made a tea from the may apple root, but instead of using the female may apple she used the male. It gave one of the kids a stomachache for days. Mommy also made sassafras tea. Daddy drank that for his high blood pressure.
When I was little, I had a real bad case of black measles. I had ’em for nine days, but they wouldn’t break out, and I was getting worse. Mommy told me she was gonna make a special tea out of sheep manure that was supposed to make the measles break out. Lordy, I watched her making that tea and I knew I was gonna die if I had to drink it. All of a sudden those measles started popping out all over me, and I was better in about two days. I never touched a drop of that tea. Maybe that was the way it really worked.
We also had a tea made from a weed called Life Everlasting. It was good for colds and shivering. Sometimes we’d dry it out and smoke it a little. Some people think Life Everlasting is the same thing as marijuana, which also grows easily in the mountains, but I’m not sure about that. We never knew about marijuana when I was growing up, and I still haven’t tried it to this day. I never did like smoking much, and I haven’t touched tobacco since I was a girl.
Mommy smoked and she drank coffee, but she wouldn’t let none of us kids do it. And we wouldn’t complain about it, or she’d fix us good. One time we had company, and they asked me if I drank coffee. I was around eleven or so and I said, kind of smart, “No, Mommy won’t let me drink coffee.” Well, do you know that she made me drink a whole pot of coffee, just to teach me not to smart off? I was so sick, my stomach was foundering for a day—that’s a Kentucky word for “upset.”
But I didn’t learn my lesson about smarting off. We used to eat only two meals a day: breakfast and supper; we’d kind of snack on leftovers in between because we didn’t have enough food. (Mommy even had to grind up an old plate during the winter to feed the chickens. Seemed like they must have liked it ’cause they gobbled it up real fast.) Anyway, Mommy would put sweet potatoes, apples, turnips, and cabbage heads