But anyhow, that was the science of medicine in our family--if the tongue is coated, take a pretty little pink tablet and wash it down with a glass of water. I hated even the thought of taking one. The slightest taste of one gagged me. To prevent vomiting in the kitchen, I would ask Mama if I could go out on the porch and take mine. Now, I knew I wasn't apt to vomit on the kitchen floor, but Mama didn't know it. Another thing she didn't know was that there was a knothole in the porch floor, under which, as years went by, a small mound of pink tablets grew into a large mound. They never caught me putting the tablets through the hole because it was always dark. No one ever took calomel in the daytime, unless he had nothing else to do but sit around and wait for a call to the bathroom, which was way out back in the cold--always cold. Not one of us ever had a coated tongue in the summertime. 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."