Way along in the night, he was awakened by something like a bee sting on his thigh, and looking up from his pallet, he beheld Tenny standing over him with a candle. A drop of the hot candle wax had fallen on his leg and stung him. Tenny’s mouth was open in that O which distinguished her from all the O-girls at school, and she was staring transfixed at his peckers, both of which had escaped through the fly of his underpants. Nobody except his momma and Doc Swain had ever seen his peckers before, and he was somewhat embarrassed, and grabbed the sheet to cover himself. It occurred to him that Tenny had been meaning to slip into bed with him, but why did she have the candle? Now she blew the candle out and said to him in the dark, “So you are the one, after all. My sisters said you were, and they told me to come in here and look at you to find out if maybe you are a freak, but I didn’t believe them.” He waited breathlessly for her to lie down beside him, and he waited, and waited, and after a while he realized that she was no longer in the room.
At the crack of dawn, he dressed and went out to sit on the front porch and think about what had happened. He felt somewhat humiliated, that she had discovered his secret and thought of him as a freak, and that she hadn’t been attracted enough to want to get in bed with him. He was tempted to saddle Marengo and go on back to Jasper without her, but if he did that his mother would be angry and wouldn’t keep her promise, and he could hardly wait for his mother to keep her promise. After a while, Tenny came out and sat on the porch too, but she didn’t say a word to him, so he didn’t speak to her. They just sat there together silently, as if they both understood something that didn’t need any discussion. At breakfast, the Tennisons and the grandmother and the two older sisters all talked about the wedding and the shivaree and the infare dinner as if it was all set, and they wanted to discuss who to invite and what cakes and pies to make, and all that. Russ tried to remind them that his job was only to transport Tenny into Jasper so his mother could give her voice lessons, and that they’d both be going back to school in the fall at N.C.A. But Tenny’s family just smiled and winked at each other, and went on making a big fuss over him.
Finally Tenny got her gunnysack with her clothes and stuff, and they climbed up on Marengo and said their good-byes. Tenny’s sisters kept saying to Russ that if he changed his mind about Tenny, either one of them, Oriole or Redbird, would be awfully glad to have him, but Russ figured that was just insincere politeness, like when you ask somebody to come go home with you but you don’t really mean it. Besides, there was no question of changing his mind about Tenny, because his mind was not his own, but his mother’s; if it had been left up to him, he would have gladly made the Tennisons happy by becoming Tenny’s man.
In Jasper, Tenny reminded him that she didn’t want to have to see his momma because she despised her for ruining things with Doc Swain, so Russ took her straight on over to Mulciber Breedlove’s house on the other side of town. It was a fairly nice place, big two-storied house, as befits an upstanding citizen, and had some modern conveniences, including one of the first “enclosed horn” Victrolas in Newton County, which Russ had persuaded his father to buy. The house was right next to the big Breedlove Smithy, where Mulciber spent his days shoeing horses and mules and fixing wagons and tools. Russ belatedly realized, as he dismounted and led Tenny to meet his father, that nobody had said a word in advance to Mulciber about this “arrangement,” let alone thought to get his approval. When Tenny got her first look at Mulciber, her intended, she blanched and looked as if she were about to puke. Russ had to allow that he would have had the same reaction himself if he didn’t already know the man.
And for his part, Mulciber was civil, even hospitable, but his eyes didn’t light up at the sight of Tenny. “Paw, she’s come to stay,” Russ declared. Mulciber just allowed as how that was pretty nice, he reckoned, and he hoped she was a good cook.
“Well, I’ll show her around and maybe play the Victrola for her,” Russ suggested. He took Tenny into the big house and showed her the big kitchen and a room actually called “living room,” meant to contain just a big sofa and assorted chairs and the big Victrola which, he revealed, had an enclosed horn. He cranked up the machine and put on a platter of a jazz band playing “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.” It was the first jazz that Tenny had ever heard, and he explained to her what jazz was, how the black folks had started it, and how the word itself, and especially the sound of the music, were suggestive of the motions that men and women are impelled to make in doing what was found in Chapter 34 from the hygiene textbook, Reproduction. Then he left her to listen to another platter called “Arkansas Blues” while he ran back out to the blacksmith shop and said, “Paw! You don’t understand! I’ve brung her for you! She’s all your’n, Paw!” Old Mulciber just looked kind of pensive and replied that he shorely appreciated the thought, but that he’d taken a vow when he got rid of Russ’s momma that if he ever took up with a woman again, she’d have to be as homely as a stump fence because he’d had all he wanted of well-favored women, and that there Tenny gal was near about as sightly as Russ’s momma, blast her hide.
There was nothing to do but dope their drinks at supper-time. Russ used the eyedropper to measure out six drops of the love philter his momma had given him, and slipped it into Tenny’s glass of milk. Then he slipped four drops into his father’s coffee. Next, because he knew that the stuff would make you fall madly in love with the first person you laid eyes on, he found an excuse to get himself out of their line of sight long enough for them to take a drink and look at each other. He said he had to go to the privy, and he actually did, and sat there and waited for a good long while, long enough for them to have taken a drink and then laid eyes on each other. But when he returned to the house, Tenny was just sitting there with her milk untouched and Mulciber had finished his coffee and gone. Tenny said that some customer in one of those Model T automobiles had come honking up to the blacksmith shop and Mulciber had to go see about ’em. As for herself, she was relieved he was gone, because the very sight of him had made her become so nauseated that she couldn’t touch her food. “But aint you at least thirsty?” Russ insisted. “Don’t you want a little sip of that there milk?” Tenny just held her stomach as if she were about to puke. Russ went to the window and looked out at the blacksmith shop, and there was Mulciber flat on his back up underneath an auto, some furriner’s out-of-state vehicle, no top, owned by some lady in one of those newfangled skinny-tube dresses, and her hair bobbed. “Uh-oh” was all Russ could say. Then he tried unsuccessfully to get Tenny to drink her milk. She said not only was she sick to her stomach but also had one foot in the grave, with a runny nose and all-over miseries and maybe a touch of the flu. She was coughing a lot. Russ commenced to get agitated, that his plans were going awry, and in his nervousness he decided he might as well have a little snort of that milk himself, just to keep it from going to waste. So he told Tenny that as long as she didn’t want it, he’d just drink her milk.
There wasn’t anything to do but play the Victrola some more and wait to see what had happened to Mulciber. But Mulciber never did come back. At one point in the course of his long and desperate pursuit of Tenny, Russ paused to get his breath and went down to the blacksmith shop, but there wasn’t any sign of Mulciber or of that lady in the auto, and Mulciber had hung his CLOZED sign on the door. He never came back, neither, and Russ ceased to care, because he had only one thing on his mind. It was the same thing he always had on his mind, but this time it was not only on his mind but also on every other part of his being. The very sight of Tenny had always given him duplicate erections, but he’d never been able to do anything except have the red-comb-and-stone ache. Now, he was emboldened by the love potion to make overtures. He tried every good jazz record in his collection, even including “I’ll Say She Does,” which was supposed to incite lust in old maids. But I’ll say she didn’t, not Tenny. He kept asking her if he couldn’t get her something to drink. “Maybe jist a glass of water, maybe?” he suggested. But she didn’t think she’d
be able to “keep it down.” He offered to show her how to dance, how to do the new rages called the Charleston, the shimmy, and the black-bottom. It was difficult for him to demonstrate these dances holding his hat over his groin, so finally he just said, “The heck with it,” and tossed his hat away and didn’t mind that she could see the two great bulges making a V across the front of his pants. She didn’t seem to pay much attention; after all, the night before, she’d already seen them without any coverings. Further emboldened by her nonchalance, he offered to show her the fox-trot, which involved some bodily contact, and gave him a chance to demonstrate that his V could fit into the V of her pelvis. This feeling so mightily emboldened him that, since she kept shaking her head whenever he asked, “Aint you thirsty yet?” and “Caint I git you nothin to drink?” and “Would ye keer fer maybe some real lemonade?” he was moved to improvise and to offer to show her the latest craze in dancing, called, he said, “the business,” which would require them to lie down on the floor and for him to get on top of her.
But she looked at him sidelong, and said, “Russ, I aint that scatterbrained.” When she saw the expression of frantic desperation on his face, she added gently, “Besides, what would your daddy think, if you was to shag his bride-to-be?”
“Tell you the honest truth, Ten,” Russ said. “I don’t believe my daddy wants you. He told me you are jist way too purty for him, and his next wife has to look like a stump fence.”
Tenny gave him another sidelong look and declared, “I figured that was jist a trick, you saying you wanted me to take up with your paw. You really jist wanted me for yourself, now didn’t you?”
Russ realized he was going to catch holy hell from his mother, but it was too late for that. “Yeah, Tenny, that’s the truth. I really truly jist want you all for myself. And boy, do I want you!”
“Then say it,” she said.
“I jist did,” he said. “Boy howdy, do I want want want ye!”
“No, I mean, say you want me to marry you. Ask me to.”
“Tenny, babe, would you keer to be my wife?”
“Cassie Whitter said my husband would be a two-headed monstrosity. I reckon she must’ve been thinkin about them.” And she reached out and touched one of the prongs of his V. Her touch drove him wild, although he was already as wild as he’d ever been in his life. “So I reckon if I caint never marry Colvin Swain, then you are it. Have you got a four-poster in this house?” Mulciber’s house had some fancy headboards and footboards on the beds, but none of them was a four-poster. Russ took her upstairs to the bedrooms and showed her what they had. “Any extry quilts?” she asked. “Have you got a Garden Butterfly pattern?” They looked through the quilt chests, but the best they could find was a kind of homely Double Chain. “Have you got any slow music for the Victrola?” she asked. They searched through the platters, and tried out a few, but the only thing even fairly slow was something called “The Sheik of Araby,” with some suggestive words about “At night when you’re asleep, into your tent I’ll creep.” Russ began to wonder if he was going to have to wait until she was asleep before he could try to creep his peckers into her.
But since Mulciber never did come home that night, they had the house to themselves and went to bed together. He asked her if she wouldn’t at least care to try a swallow of some cough syrup or at least a glass of water for her cough, but she still wasn’t thirsty. She asked him if he had any white nightshirts with flouncy sleeves such as swashbucklers wear, but he’d never heard of them. She said, “There’s a couple of things you ought to know,” and she began to sound like a schoolteacher, telling him how what they were fixing to do would cause the rupture of something called the hymenal membrane, and it would get blood on the sheets. She took his hand and guided his finger to feel the thing she was talking about, and the touch of her down there excited him so much that his peckers started doing the Charleston together. Then she raised his finger to another place, and he could have sworn it was Doc Swain talking, instructing him in the existence of a tubercle at the top of her vulvar groove which was homologous with the penis(es) and ought to be respected as the seat of the woman’s pleasure just as the penis(es) was/were the man’s, and she asked him if he remembered page 620 of their hygiene textbook, wherein the clitoris is identified. He’d made a better grade in hygiene than any of his other courses, and like everybody else had been fascinated with that chapter on reproduction, but had been so intent on finding the word diphallus that he had not noticed clitoris, and so disappointed in not finding the former that he didn’t really care about the latter, which seemed useless anyhow.
He tried to pay attention to Tenny’s little lecture, but he wasn’t sure how it was supposed to help him in any way. He was going to have to get blood on the sheets and that was all there was to it, so he might as well get started. Rather clumsily he got her to lie on her back and spread her legs, and he took his two dancing peckers in his hand and held them tight together to make them quit dancing, and then he tried to get them to go into Tenny’s hole and rip that hymenal membrane. It wasn’t much of a fit. He gave a shove, but they wouldn’t go in, and Tenny said, “Ow!” like he was hurting her. He attempted to put just one at a time into her, but with both of them so stiff he couldn’t get one to go in without bending and hurting the other one. He attempted several different positions, atop her, beside her, and even behind her, and raising her two legs one way or another, and finally lifting both of her legs to put over his shoulders. Nothing worked. He decided the only thing to do was see if he couldn’t get one of his peckers to use that other tunnel while the other pecker went where it was supposed to, a kind of complicated position that required him to lie perpendicular to her from behind, and he tried that, using both of his hands to try to guide his peckers into their respective holes, until finally it dawned on him that there just wasn’t enough lubrication. Her parts were all dry, and his parts were each oozing just a drop or two, not enough. “‘Scuse me,” he said, getting up. “I’ll be right back.” And he ran downstairs and looked for something oily or greasy, finally finding a bottle of his father’s Wildroot cream hair oil, and he grabbed that and took it back upstairs. Tenny was sound asleep. She had a smile on her face like she was only pretending, but he shook her and discovered she really was in deep sleep, and maybe having a lovely dream which accounted for the smile on her face. The Victrola was playing “…at night when you’re asleep, into your tent I’ll creep…” so he took advantage of her sleeping to smear some of the Wildroot over both of her holes and both of his poles, and then he tried to make entry into her sleeping body. He tried and he tried, and wore himself plumb out, and had just enough strength left before falling asleep himself to smear some of the Wildroot on his two hands and make love to himself.
The next day, he could think of only two things: one was that he was going to catch holy hell from his mother, who was going to have a conniption fit, see red and sizzle, hit the ceiling, and jump down his throat. The other thing, a more disturbing thing, was that even though the love potion had sort of worn off, he was still in love with Tenny. It must be true that whoever touched a drop of that love potion would fall madly in love with the first person they laid eyes on, but Russ hadn’t realized that it meant you had to love them forever. He sure didn’t mind being in love with Tenny, because she was not only the most well-favored and sightly person in the world, next to his mother, but she was also the nicest, possibly even nicer than his mother, who wasn’t going to be very nice at all, from now on.
The sheriff, Sam Hudson, knocked at the door and told Russ that his daddy was being held at the jail and Russ could come and get him and take him home. Charges had not been pressed, but Mulciber was jailed for disorderly conduct, trying to molest a tourist-lady staying at the Commercial Hotel, where Mulciber had spent most of the night and was arrested in the wee hours. So Russ told Tenny to make herself at home, eat anything she took a notion to, and play the Victrola, and he’d be right back. He brought his father home, and then w
as obliged to work with his father in the blacksmith shop and make sure Mulciber didn’t try to go back to the Commercial Hotel. All of this activity gave Russ time to think about what he was going to say to his mother.
That afternoon, he asked Tenny if she would go with him to his mother’s house and tell his mother the “truth”: that the sight of gruesome Mulciber had made her so pukey that she couldn’t possibly marry the old geezer.
“I tole you, I don’t want to see your momma,” Tenny said. “That would make me even pukier.”
“But you don’t need to hate her no more for coming between you and Doc Swain, since it’s me you’re gonna marry, and when me and you git married, she’ll be your mother-in-law, so you’ll have to see her.”
Tenny seemed to be thinking about that, and whatever thoughts she was having were making her very sad. Russ wondered if she really did want to marry him, and, even if she did marry him, would she always be carrying a torch for Doc Swain?
Neither Russ nor Tenny had the slightest notion that they’d find Doc Swain at Venda’s house. When they went in the door, and heard the sounds coming from the bedroom, it took Russ awhile to remember that such sounds are the cries and grunts not of people being hurt but of people enjoying that supreme act which he himself had never yet known. Just as he had done so many times in his childhood when his mother was entertaining a lover, he crept silently toward the noise. Tenny followed. When they saw who was in bed with Venda, Tenny gasped, but her sound was drowned beneath those coming from the bed. The couple in the bed were having such a splendid time of it that they did not notice Russ arranging a couple of chairs so that he and Tenny could take a load off their feet while they studied the spectacle. Russ had seen this sort of thing many times before, but Tenny hadn’t, so he figured it might further her sex education and maybe put her in the mood for it. She was obviously awestruck, and her mouth was fixed into that almost holy O. The bed partners switched positions, with Russ’s mother on top, allowing her freedom of movements which, Russ hoped, would suggest to Tenny that perhaps she and Russ could more successfully manage their hookup if Tenny was on top doing the connecting.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 65
