When I was twelve years old, I had warts on my knee. Four warty things on my left knee that bothered me no end. They were not painful to me physically, but psychologically they were traumatic. I was careful to wear clothes that covered my knee which was difficult to achieve in Florida in mid-July. It was one such sweltering day when my grandaddy took pity on me perspiring in my blue jeans and he offered to remove my warts.
My grandaddy was not a doctor of any sort and so this offer of wart removal did not occur anywhere near a hospital, clinic or doctor’s office. It occurred on the screened-in porch of my family’s beach house across the highway from the Gulf of Mexico. In 1970 these north Florida beaches were still and blistering hot in mid-July. My school-teacher mother, my sisters and I would move to the square beach cottage in the summer forcing my dad to commute back and forth 30 miles inland to work every day. On Sundays, such as the day of my wondrous cure of warts, my grandparents would drive the 30 miles to the beach after church to spend the afternoon and dinnertime with us.
Seven people for the afternoon at the beach house was a crowd. The house was a simple square structure with a kitchen, a living room and two bedrooms occupying each of the four quadrants. In the center of the house was the single bathroom which, conveniently, could be entered from every room of the house, but the living room. There had been reportings, on certain Sundays when seven people occupied the house, of three people simultaneously opening the three bathroom doors and ingressing to face each other squarely in front of the toilet. All three doors, as I recollect opened into the bathroom adding additional barriers to the conflict over who had first dibs on the facilities. I always made sure that I headed to the bathroom with plenty of time to spare, so that I could lock all three doors to insure my privacy. My fear of having someone open one of the three bathroom doors while I was inside was even slightly more nerve racking than keeping my warty knee covered.
The Sunday afternoon that grandaddy cured my warts he and I were sitting on the screened porch that ran along the front of the house. The view from the porch was of undisturbed sand dunes and the highway. Beyond the highway was a ridge of tall dunes capped by beach cottages that actually overlooked the gulf. We had a lovely view of their outdoor showers and back doors and we had unobstructed listening to the crash of the waves rolling to shore just beyond Big Dune. Grandaddy and I sat on the porch listening to the waves break the stillness of the untraveled highway and unpeopled dunes.
We had escaped the inside of the house because neither of us was dressed for the warmth of the unairconditioned cottage heated further by my grandmother roasting pecans under the broiler of the oven in the kitchen. My grandmother never cooked a meal that I can recall, but she was an expert at the extras. Divinity, fudge and ambrosia were her contribution to every Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner. On non-holidays she would piddle about the kitchen and make cheese straws or cheese wafers or rolled dates. Every Sunday afternoon in the middle of July she roasted pecans. She would bring a quart-sized freezer bag of pecans to the beach from the stash of Stewarts and Elliots that she and grandaddy had shelled and frozen the fall before. She would heat up the broiler and spread out the pecan halves in a single layer on a cookie sheet. She drizzled the nuts with melted butter, sprinkled them with salt and slipped the pan on the oven rack just beneath the broiler. Roasting pecans is an exact science. If the cooking time is too short the nuts are not crisp, too long and they are burnt and inedible. Lovey would spend several hours standing by the slightly open oven door peering in to watch the nuts. Every two or three minutes she would open the door, remove the cookie sheet and shake it around to turn the peacans. Periodically, she would eat one to determine the doneness. She ate some of the peacans over the course of the afternoon, but she always left in the evening with a full christmas tin of roasted pecans to last the week.
The partially open oven door always sent my grandaddy out to the screened porch because he was wearing his Sunday suit. He would take his suit coat off, but there he would sit on the screened porch in his long-sleeved white dress shirt, tie, suit pants, nylon black socks and Florsheim shoes. The Sunday of my cure from warts was no exception and, so, we sat on the porch together, grandaddy in his suit and me in my blue jeans.
“Dug, why aren’t you in your shorts or your bathing suit?” he asked.
“Oh, grandaddy,” I said, “I don’t feel like swimming now and you know I don’t wear shorts.”
“Why aren’t you wearing your shorts?” he asked.
“It’s my knee,” I reminded him. “You know those warts on my knee, grandaddy. They look awful.”
“Would you like me to take them off for you?” he asked.
“What?” I asked in return.
“Would you like me to take them off for you?” he repeated.
“Why, sure,” I said completely puzzled.
“Come with me,” he said and he got out of his chair and motioned for me to follow him through the screened porch door out into the silver white of the mid-afternoon sun on the dunes. We walked over two small dunes out of ear shot of the square sea-green cottage. We stood face to face in the sand surrounded by the turbulent rush of the surf. My grandaddy said, “I have special gifts and can do amazing things like remove warts. I have these special gifts because I am the seventh son of my father. If I had been the seventh son of a seventh son, then I would have had great powers such as the ability to move mountains, but I have only these smaller gifts since I am only a seventh son. Do you believe that I can remove your warts?”
I must admit that I had a brief inclination to ask a few pertinent questions like how come it was that in all my twelve years of life he had not once offered to use his special powers until now or even mention them for that matter? Or, even more puzzling, given the rare opportunity of being the seventh son and being able to spawn a seventh son of a seventh son why had he produced only a single offspring? But I must admit that as awesome as moving mountains might be, I was captured by the possibility of his removing my warts and, so I said, “Sure, I believe that you can remove my warts.”
So there in the shimmering moist heat of the hourglass-sand dune he broke my warty spell. Within one month the warts flattened and disappeared entirely. How did he do it? I am sworn to silence by the threat of the return of one hundred warts for every one removed if the secret is told. Even at age forty that frightens me.
I can tell you this. The seventh son of a seventh son can move mountains while the wise old seventh son may make it seem like he does.