“Now that shore is a kind of a pale horse,” Oriole said, smiling. “But you aint very pale yoreself, and you got only one head.”
“Howdy,” Colvin said. “How’s ever little thing? Everbody feelin okay?”
“Maw’s got some bad chest pains,” Oriole said, “if you’d care to look her over.”
“Later, maybe. I got to git on up to the mountaintop to see about Tenny.”
“She aint there no more. That real pale horse and that real pale rider done come and got her.”
Colvin was stricken. “You don’t mean to tell me. You don’t mean she…she didn’t depart, did she?”
“She departed down to Jasper, which is where the feller finally took her. She knew him, of course, or we wouldn’t’ve asked him to spend the night, and Daddy wouldn’t’ve allowed her to ride off with him this morning. She knew the pale horse too. Named Malengro or Menargo or something.”
“Marengo,” Colvin said. Then he said, “Russ Breedlove!”
“You know the feller? Aint he a sight to behold? Maw and Granny is still swoonin over what a looker he is, and I tell ye, I’m tempted to up and leave Jerry Bob myself and see if I caint git Russ to notice me!”
Colvin was a mite perplexed. “You folks just allowed the boy to swoop down and git her and take her off like that?”
“He was wearin a white shirt,” Oriole declared. “And when he spent the night with us, I talked Tenny into spying on him while he slept, and sure enough, he is a kind of a freak, if not a monster. But despite filling the bill all we could hope for, he claimed he wasn’t comin to git her for hisself. Naw. His momma had sent him. That’s Tenny’s music teacher, Miz Breedlove, and she tole her boy Russ to say that she wanted to give Tenny some private lessons for her voice if Tenny would care to just come stay with her in Jasper, until school started. So Tenny just packed up her school clothes and her books and all, and off they went.”
“Voice lessons?” Colvin said, more to himself than to Oriole.
Wayne Don Tennison came out of the house, and said to Colvin, “Kimono ambeer pudenda? Albino chaunk rotunda? Halo silo solo!”
“I think he wants to show you his snake collection,” Oriole translated. “Or else he’s inviting you to stay to dinner, one.”
Colvin stayed to dinner, the womenfolk not sitting down at the table until after he and Wayne Don had finished eating, as was the custom. Then Wayne Don took Colvin to look at his collection of rattlesnakes, copperheads, and water moccasins, and Colvin petted the reptiles and made appreciative remarks. Jonette Tennison, Tenny’s momma, hoped the doctor would take a quick look at her chest pains, and Colvin examined her and determined she had heartburn, which, he attempted to explain, could not be helped by the Dr. Potter’s Heart Tonic she was dosing herself with, because it had nothing to do with the heart but was caused by a hiatus hernia, for which he prescribed rest, six meals a day rather than three, and the avoidance of coffee, tea, and Heart Tonic.
Throughout this business, Colvin was asking himself if he’d want to have Wayne Don and Jonette as his father-and mother-in-law. He decided they weren’t any worse than Piney’s folks, and he kind of liked Oriole. She was okay. Finally taking his leave, and asking how to find the road to Jasper, he said he expected he would be seeing all of them again.
But Lampon, he discovered, was in no condition to carry him the long way into Jasper, so, impatient as he was, he reluctantly decided to return the palfrey to Ingledew’s Livery, wait until the next day, and take Nessus with the buggy into Jasper.
“Hon,” Piney asked, “are you feeling all right? You don’t seem to have been yourself lately.” Colvin tried to assure her that he was “jist fine,” which was his favorite expression for everything in the world. “Well, I’ve been thinking,” she said, “about what you dreamt. You know, getting me a piano. I think it would be very nice to have a good piano, if we can find one that isn’t tinny.”
Colvin coughed. “I don’t know if we could afford one,” he said. “To pay for a good piano, I’d most likely have to teach another year at Parthenon.”
“Wouldn’t you want to do that?” she said, in such a way that he knew she knew that he’d been thinking about it.
“Wal, I reckon I’d best run up there and see if they still want me,” he said.
So he would use that as an excuse to leave for Jasper the next day at dawn. That night he had a dream in which it seemed that Tenny was calling for him; she was somewhere out of sight trying to contact him, so he went out looking for her. He went to Venda’s house, and Venda was sprawled out sound asleep and naked and inviting on her bed, but the other bed in the house had neither Tenny nor Russ in it. He tried the Academy, drifting around through the girls’ dormitory and the classroom building, but she wasn’t there. Next, he visited their enchanted-forest trysting place, and the four-poster was still there, although covered with dust and pine needles, and some birds, tufted titmice, had built their nest on the Garden Butterfly quilt, but there was no sign that Tenny had been there for quite some time. Yet he could clearly hear her calling his name, and he called back, “Where are you, Tenny?” Piney asked him if he was still shopping for pianos.
The next day, he left ostensibly for Parthenon but he didn’t stop at the Newton County Academy. He drove his buggy on to Jasper, and pulled up in front of the little white cottage off the square where Venda Breedlove lived. He just sat there for a while, studying the house and wondering if his darling were actually inside. If so, which room?
Venda stepped out onto her porch, dressed in her house robe, with her hair up in curlers, and holding a cup of coffee. “Good mornin, precious,” she said. “I’ve been expectin ye. Climb down and have you a cup of coffee with me.”
Following her to her kitchen, he saw that there were only two bedrooms, and both were empty. “My first question is,” he said, sitting down at her kitchen table with the cup of coffee she poured for him, “not where is she, but how did you find out the whereabouts of Brushy Mountain? You tole me you didn’t know.”
“There are some men in this town who can tell you anything if you ask ’em right,” she said, and winked at him.
“Okay, then, my second question is: where is she?”
“It’s Saturday, did you notice?” she said. “On weekends, Russ has to go and stay with his daddy, over on the other side of town.”
“So what’s that got to do with Tenny?”
“So Russ took her to meet his daddy. My ex, you know, Mulciber, is a fine, upstandin, solid citzen, not only the best blacksmith in the country but also the Jasper Fire Chief. Even if he was a son of a bitch to me, he don’t deserve to live all by hisself, and he’s been kind of lonesome ever since he threw me out. Russ and me figured that maybe Tenny could cheer him up or something. Who knows? Her folks want to git her married off, and Mulciber’s jist about the most eligible bachelor in town.”
“Ding blast it!” Colvin exclaimed, outraged. “Why, the way I heared it, Mulce is the ugliest old galoot in the country, and so crippled he can hardly walk. What would Tenny want with a gimpy freak like that?”
Venda touched him under his chin to make their eyes meet, and said, “Women don’t always git what they want, in this world.”
Her double meaning wasn’t lost on him. “Did you jist cook up this scheme so you could git me away from her?” he demanded. She only smiled, and began taking the curlers out of her hair. “You didn’t really bring her to Jasper to give her voice lessons, now did ye?” he insisted, but she wouldn’t deny it or confirm it. “But didn’t it occur to you,” he wanted to know, “that you’d be a-punishing that pore gal to fix her up with the likes of Mulciber Breedlove?” Venda just went on smiling and removing the rest of the curlers from her hair. “What has Tenny done to you, that you’d want to punish her?” he asked. Venda took a hairbrush and began to brush her golden hair. “Has she offended you because she’s so young and fine and sweet to behold?” he asked, standing to confront her and setting down his coffee cup. Ven
da opened her house robe, revealing that she had nothing beneath it. He could not take his eyes off her mons veneris, and it was almost as if he were addressing his next question to it: “What I’d like to know is: if she must’ve hated you for jumping into her four-poster with me like ye done, and thought of you as her rival or enemy, how did you make friends with her so fast? What did you get Russ to say to her to persuade her to come here?” Venda came to him and gave him one of those kisses where the tongue too comes into play. He hadn’t ever had one of those kind before, and his corpora cavernosa nearly hemorrhaged. He tried to push her away, but she dropped to her knees and clawed at his fly until she had it open and could get her hands inside. She brought him out and swallowed him. Then she very slowly unswallowed him, and he forgot the next question he was going to ask her. He wasn’t getting any answers to his questions, anyway. But he began to remember this question, because it was an important one: “Did you trouble yourself to explain to Tenny that you hadn’t been invited to that four-poster of hers, and that you and me weren’t really fucking?” Venda couldn’t answer, because her mouth was full, but she gave her head a vigorous shake, which bent his cavernosa ever which way. Colvin had never felt sexual excitement like this before, and while he knew that the busy activity of her lips and tongue and whole mouth was the main cause of it, he knew that there had to be another reason, and he asked her, “Did you put something into my coffee?” She could only nod her head energetically, which pained his pecker somewhat, because it was so stiff it wouldn’t bend down. “What?” he wanted to know. She managed to mutter some syllables which, for all he could tell, were cream and sugar. “Spanish fly?” he asked. She shook her head, which wobbled his pecker. “Ginseng?” he asked. Another shake and wobble. “A drop of menstrual blood?” he asked. She giggled while shaking her head; the giggles tickled his frenulum. “Snakeroot? Mandrake? Yarrow? Mistletoe? Dodder? Wasp nests? Coon bone? Horse spleen? Powdered heart of roasted hummingbird?” He ran through the whole catalog of known aphrodisiac substances, but she just kept on shaking her head, in between thrusting it forward and drawing it back. He had never realized that the muscles of a woman’s neck would allow such a variety of lively movements. He was determined to remain true to Tenny, but there is no resistance against whatever chemical substance Venda had concocted for him, and he was in her power. He could only follow eagerly when she wrapped her hand around his pecker to make it into a leash, and led him off to her bedroom. The bed wasn’t a four-poster, but that was okay.
For the rest of the morning, Venda allowed Colvin to exist without a single thought of Tenny. At noon he had no physical appetite remaining but he was hungry, so she fed him dinner, pork chops and corn on the cob and a big glass of buttermilk, into which she probably put another ten or twenty micrograms of whatever private stock love potion she was using, so that without even waiting for him to digest his meal she took him back to bed for the rest of the afternoon. Again he had no thought of Tenny, and his only thought of Piney was a reflection upon those times, years before, when Piney in her eagerness to conceive again had depleted entirely Colvin’s reserves of “seed-juice,” but it had taken her several days and nights to do it, and now Venda had drained him empty in just a matter of hours. He was bone-dry, and tried to call this fact to Venda’s attention, but she said, “You can still explode even if ye caint shoot off, cain’t you?” And she was right; if anything, each successive orgasm was more paroxysmal than the one before, and he was beginning to amaze himself at the way his whole body shook and shuddered at the moment of unproductive ejaculation. “Thirty-seven,” Venda remarked after one particularly violent explosion had left him so limp that he could only lie there as if in a coma. He thought she was revealing her age to him, and he wanted to assure her that even though that was a year older than he was, he didn’t mind. But then she explained, “You’ve done come thirty-seven times,” and she smiled beatifically, adding, “but I’ve come seventy-one, myself.” He allowed as how he didn’t think mortal human beings were capable of that many, and therefore they must be either inhuman or immortal, one. He told Venda that if she would reveal to him the ingredients of whatever love potion she had used on him, they could both get rich bottling the stuff and putting it on the market. She just laughed and said, “And then any hussy could use it. Do you think I’d let any woman other than me ever git a-holt of it?”
“Wal, you’d better pour me another little drap of it,” he suggested.
“How about some good whiskey for a chaser?” she offered, and jumped out of bed long enough to mix him a drink.
It was real fine whiskey, better than Chism’s Dew, and possibly even bottled in the bond. And she must have been generous in lacing it, because his tired, sore, scrubbed old jemmison, which looked as if it had leprosy, commenced to unbend and rise yet again, and Venda helped it along with some more of her mouth music, saying, “I bet ye didn’t know I could yodel.” If that’s what you call it, her yodeling gave his corpora cavermosa a transfusion. Pretty soon, they were at it again, plunging and bucking, grunting and squealing, lifting and floating, galloping and trotting, you never saw anything like it, nor had they. Colvin realized that not only were his testicles empty but so were his lungs; he had used up all his breath, and didn’t have enough of it to keep going. Venda herself was nearly all out of breath too, but she had at least enough to get on top and keep bouncing her bottom, and she still had some strength left in those powerful vaginal muscles of hers that were milking his jemmison, and he hoped that she could keep going just another minute, which was all he needed to have the biggest burst he’d ever had…
He happened to glance over and notice that there was a couple of folks sitting in straight-backed chairs beside the doorway, watching them. One of them was this woman’s very own offspring, a young man name of Russ. The other one was Colvin’s very own true love, a young lady name of Tenny. Such a situation had all the earmarks of a dream, or perhaps even a nightmare, but it was still unclabbered broad daylight. Russ had a big grin on his face like he was really having fun watching his naked mother squatting atop a chemically elongated pecker. Tenny’s mouth had formed itself into that perfect O which was the envy of all her O-named classmates, and she was resting the fingers of one hand, on which she wore that amethyst gold ring, alongside her cheek, as if in astonishment. But both of them were just sitting there, watching. Venda hadn’t noticed, she was trying so hard to reach number seventy-two. After recovering from the first reflex jerk of surprise, Colvin realized that it was simply too late to make any pretense. It was clear to even a blind and deaf person who still retained a sense of smell that some real fucking was going on in this room. And to a person, or two of them, like Russ and Tenny, who could see and hear as well as smell, there was no fooling whatsoever. Colvin was so close to number thirty-eight that he figured he might as well just keep on keeping on, so he did, but he closed his eyes out of some sort of politeness, as if by shutting her out of his vision he might be sparing her a little of spectacle. Venda went wild as she arrived within reach of her climax, and she reached mightily for it, and got it, and commenced yodeling again, but in a different key from when she’d had a mouthful.
Colvin didn’t even have enough breath to sigh, let alone utter anything, but he used the last of his strength to thrust so hard into her that when he came back down the bed slats busted and the whole bed came crashing to the floor.
Have I made up for yesterday? Yesterday I sent you away frustrated with the interrupted telling of the first attempt of Colvin and Tenny to make love. Today I’ve just managed to tell you the single most intense, sustained, and repeated bout of sex that I’ve ever collected, as if to atone for yesterday’s short-coming. I ought to wait until tomorrow to say what happened next, but I expect you’ll be coming back again anyhow. And tomorrow we’re going to have to get real serious.
So let’s clean up here, first: Venda and Colvin just lay there on the mattress where it had crashed to the floor, and it took both of them a long
time to recover their breathing abilities. During that time, Colvin could only stare woefully at Tenny and shrug his shoulders and spread his hands as if trying to communicate by sign language that he wasn’t responsible for whatever he’d just been doing. Finally Venda sucked in a big draught of air and got her eyes working, and discovered that they had an audience, and cried her son’s name. The audience, both of them, began to clap, first Russ and then Tenny timidly followed his example.
Then Russ and Tenny exchanged the merest of glances before getting up from their chairs and rushing out. The courthouse was conveniently just down the street, and they went in and got a marriage license and found a justice of the peace and had themselves declared man and wife before sundown.
Chapter eight
Is it raining out? I can’t see it but I think I can hear it. Mary Celestia, because her bed’s yonder by the window, is the self-appointed Regulator of the Blinds, an irony that won’t be lost on you, and she prefers to keep ’em closed because even though she’s blind the light hurts her eyes. So I can’t watch the rain, if that’s what’s falling out there. I shall never again see the dogwood bloom nor watch the red-horse shoal. But I can still see and hear and smell all the Ozark rains that ever fell in my life, and I can feel the ones that fell on me, and I could tell you the difference between an early summer rain, such as what’s falling out there now, and a late summer rain, which was what commenced deluging the village of Jasper before Tenny and Russ left that courthouse where they got married. You know of course that in the Ozarks it was considered the best possible omen for a good downpour to fall on a funeral, since it meant that the dead man’s soul was at rest, and even a few drops of rain at a funeral were more comfort to the bereaved family than anything the preacher man could say. Every Ozarker knew the little verse:
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