One day last spring, Jude Hart shot off a piece of his finger. He had wanted to scare a rooster sounding a raucous cocka-doodle-doo and strutting around the front yard. "That rooster just kept crow-in', louder, and louder, and the sound got to pesterin' me," Hart tells it. "I was just trying' to get a little peace and quiet on my front porch."
That morning he went inside his farm house, near Batson, Texas, on the border of Big Thicket woods, and found his ancient .22-caliber pistol. Using a roof support on his porch to steady the gun, he aimed close to the trumpeting rooster. Kapow! Unfortunately, his left forefinger partly covered the hole of the barrel.
Who's to say whether the rooster was scared more by the dust-puffing bullet, the shattering report, or Jude's recriminations? They all happened together. Jude let the screen door slam as he went into the house to get a rag. He poured kerosene on it and wrapped the bleeding finger, making sure the soaked place touched the wound. Muttering, he returned to his chair on the porch, which commanded a peaceful view of the barn, woods, mule pony, and any great grandchildren that might come hollering and running up the dirt road that leads to the porch. The kerosene burned the raw wound a while, then let up. It was good medicine, long taught in the Hart family.
"May be my age," Hart explained, referring to the gunshot goof. "Been handling' guns all my life, and this is the first time I've done a foolhardy thing like that." He laughed. His Stetson, darkened with use and sweat, sits slightly cocked on his head, belying a sense of humor behind the straight, spare frame and inborn dignity.
He's either seventy-eight or seventy-nine. "I've set my age up and back so much, can't tell for sure," he said. His birthday is April 23. All his life, he's lived in Batson. His great-grandfather came to Hardin Country in 1832 with the second wave of white settlers in the Big Thicket. The first wave had arrived a decade earlier.
"Organized Hardin Country and appointed himself treasurer," Hart recalled of his great-grandfather. "Not a bad deal, appointin' yourself treasurer, eh? Trouble is, he left the family only about enough land to be buried on. An even that's contested.'
Whatever his exact age, Hart's generation is virtually the last one to practice folk medicine in the Big Thicket. A mixture of Indian, Spanish, Mexican, French, German, and assorted other customs and concoctions, Big thicket folk medicine became one of America's richest sources of humanistic botany, homespun wit and magic, and wilderness healing. To say "virtually the last generation," is no cop-out. Even today, in the deep recesses of the thicket, where a few families still don't care much for civilized ways, folk medicine remains the accepted treatment for most wounds and many diseases.
The Big Thicket has been termed "the biological crossroads of North America' and "America's ecological ark." Eight major ecological systems or plant communities - some scientists say nine - dovetail in this corner of southeast Texas, producing a diversity of plant life so vast that no other comparable area on the continent, or perhaps in the world, rivals
...
Read Full Article
|
