The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  So, coughing now and again, she told him everything that had happened to her recently, including the night before, when she was the guest of Russ and his daddy, Mulciber Breedlove, and Russ had been under orders from his mother to play Cupid and fix Tenny up with Mulciber, but Tenny had been sickened by the very sight of the ugly old blacksmith, who was indeed the sorriest-looking specimen of humanity Tenny had ever seen. It was a good thing she was so sick she couldn’t even drink her milk, because she suspected that Russ had doped her milk to make her fall in love with Mulciber. Then she knew that he had, when he drank the milk himself and became “over-frisky” and “a-rollixin.” He was so fired with lust that he had proposed to Tenny. She hadn’t exactly said yes, but she’d gone to bed with him.

  Doc raised his eyebrows. “So you’re not a virgin anymore,” he said, and was surprised that he felt no intense dismay or jealousy. Well, after all, he told himself, virginity is just a state of mind, anyway.

  But she said, “I guess maybe I still am. He couldn’t get it in. I mean, he couldn’t get them in. Colvin, did you know that Russ has got two of them?”

  Colvin nodded, although the nod itself was a violation of the oath to Kie Raney never to discuss a patient’s condition with anybody else. “It’s uncommonly rare,” he said. “But that don’t make him a freak.”

  “Still, Cassie Whitter prophesied that I’d marry a freak, and I don’t know how to tell you this, but me and Russ got married this afternoon.”

  “I figured you did,” he said.

  “You don’t hate me for it?” she asked. “Can you forgive me for it?”

  “Can you forgive me for already being married?” he asked.

  “I reckon I can,” she said. “I guess—I guess the main thing that made me marry him wasn’t because Cassie Whitter augured it but the thought I was getting even with you. I thought it wasn’t fair for you to be married, and me not.”

  They talked until way past bedtime. Colvin of course realized that the moment might come eventually when he would be required to demonstrate his manly vigor, which was totally sapped from his day-long romp with Venda, so he wanted to postpone bedtime as long as possible. Past midnight, he began really to fret, and he wasn’t sure he could explain to Tenny’s satisfaction that a man who has made love thirty-eight times in one day simply cannot hope for another erection without whatever drug Venda had been supplying. So he kept talking to Tenny about everything, and eventually a subject that both of them had been avoiding reared its ugly head: what were they going to do with themselves? The sun was going to rise the next day, and the day after, and how were they going to face it and live with it, enwrapped in their great but illicit love for each other? “We have got to find a way,” he said, and they spent the next hour thinking and talking about finding a way. Colvin concocted some whimsical schemes, but rejected each one of them. He could take her to live in Stay More and tell Piney that she was just a student who needed a place to live because the dormitory was all filled up. No, he couldn’t. He could take her away to some distant place and start all over, like perhaps belatedly accepting that offer to teach and practice in St. Louis. No, he couldn’t. He could offer Piney half of all his worldly goods and what little cash-on-hand he owned to leave him, to move out of his house. No, he couldn’t. He could put Tenny back for her sophomore year at Newton County Academy, and go on teaching there himself, to give both of them time to see if they couldn’t work something out. Yes, he could.

  Colvin had no trouble at all persuading Tenny that she ought to return to school, because she had been intending to do that anyway, and had not even considered that her marriage would interfere with continuing her education. There were a couple of other girls at N.C.A., Olivia and Oralie, who were married, although of course they were not permitted to stay in the dormitory and had to live off-campus with or without their husbands. “Tenny,” Colvin declared solemnly, “I am going to have to go on living with my wife. Do you want to go on living with your husband?”

  “Do you think he would let me, after tonight?”

  “What’s ‘tonight’?” he asked.

  “You and me are really going to become lovers,” she declared. She gestured toward the bed. “It’s a four-poster, all right,” she observed, “but it’s a sorry substitute for that one we had in our dream.” She lifted Bob’s wife’s butterfly dress over her head, and the sight of her naked body gave him such twitchings in the Kobelt bulb of his corpus cavernosum and the fundiform ligaments at the root of his penis that he felt his equipment was desperately trying to put itself into order. But as he got out of Bob’s clothes, he realized there was just no way the blood sinuses would engorge. Tenny had never seen a limp pecker before. Colvin’s in that dream as well as with Venda, both of Russ’s at all times, and Mulciber’s—a total of four peckers she had seen, and all of them had been hard and upright and just a little scary, especially the double-barreled job of Russ’s. Now as Colvin stood there looking abashed and uncertain, her smart mind did some quick thinking and determined the reason for his dangling doodle, and she requested, “Colvin, what if we just hold each other until we’re asleep? Sleep is where you go to be all alone. And dreams are where you go to get away from the loneliness of sleep. Maybe we could even find that forest again.”

  Which is what they did. They entangled their naked bodies beneath the Gingham-and-Calico Butterflies, and after a long goodnight kiss they fell asleep and were soon meeting at the old four-poster in the enchanted forest. The bigger four-poster that Venda had dragged in beside it was still there, but Colvin found an ax and chopped it up into firewood, which he ignited to take the chill off the first signs of autumn. Once that bed was burnt, all was just as it had been before, with the moonlight exactly right and a canopy hung with long chiffon curtains a-wafting gently in the breeze to the tune of slow violins on the Victrola. And once again Tenny was dressed in a royal purple silk nightgown, and Colvin was dressed in a loose-fitting flouncy-sleeved white shirt such as swashbucklers wear to do their duels and adventures in. Tenny had made just two changes from the previous dream: she had added “Arkansas Blues” to the stack of platters the Victrola was going to play, and she had added a flush toilet identical to the one in their Commercial Hotel bridal suite, just in case she had to go, and wouldn’t have to suffer the sort of run-to-the-bushes which had spoiled the previous dream. So they were able to pick up exactly where they’d left off before they’d been so rudely interrupted. Colvin was able to finish his little lecture about the location and function of the clitoris, and he did something that Russ had not even tried to do in his fumblings and probings the night previous: he actually caressed her clitoris, and with the help of his fingers and his voice and the Victrola and the moonlight and the firelight from Venda’s burning bed, she was lifted to a mountaintop much higher than that she’d had to stand upon in black to await her bridegroom, and from this mountaintop she soared free on zephyrs that seized her and carried her all over the world. Only afterwards did she know, because Colvin told her, that she had begun to sing the same chant she’d sung on the crag above Brushy Mountain: the pure notes, rising and falling, of kindly melancholy, a mixture of yearning, wanting, hoping, desire, with maybe a tinge of loss and bewilderment. Colvin realized, however, that it was the kind of song you had to hear from a distance, not up close, and hearing it up close somehow took the haunting holiness off of it. So Colvin asked if she couldn’t turn that into a song of joy, and she tried, and while singing it she realized that he was inside of her, that he had entered her painlessly, joyfully, and that she really was not a virgin anymore.

  The next morning when he awoke Colvin discovered that there was some blood on the sheet. He would have to pay Cousin Bob some extra for that. He did not wake her, but took the liberty to examine her and determine that carunculae hymenales were all that remained of her hymen. As we are all able to do, sometimes, he sought to recapture the dream, and remembered it, and was astonished by its authenticity. Now in the light of the rising su
n, he saw that the lovely landscape of her body was beaded with sweat like the morning earth beaded with dew, as if the exertions in their dream had made her perspire. He decided to take a towel and blot up the sweat and if that didn’t wake her, he would leave her be.

  But she woke. “Dreams are where you go to get away from the loneliness of sleep,” he repeated her words to her. “But daylight comes to reveal all the other people in the world that we have to deal with.” He had her get dressed, and he put her in his buggy and took her to Parthenon. “You’ve got to have a place to live, and I’ve got to see if I caint work out some kind of future for me and you.”

  Jossie Conklin just happened to be in her office, the only person on campus. Colvin had Tenny wait in the buggy while he went up to talk with Jossie. Jossie was thrilled to learn that Colvin had reconsidered and might want to return to N.C.A. for another year, but she had to inform him that the Baptists had sent from Baylor a new man, Tim James, with a master’s degree, to teach Bible and Science with explicit instructions to teach the hygiene course without any reference to reproduction. Jossie was awfully sorry, but there just wasn’t any way Colvin could teach hygiene. “I don’t suppose you could teach Psychology, could you?” Jossie asked. “And coach basketball?”

  Colvin lied. He knew as much about psychology as he did about basketball, which is to say that both were inexact sciences, that throwing that thing up in the air might or might not get it through the hole, you couldn’t never tell, you could only use your mind to hope that it would go through the hole, but if you missed the hole you might or might not get a chance to try again. Neither psychology nor basketball was like medicine, in which you can at least count on some things to happen. But Colvin supposed that both psychology and basketball had something that medicine lacked: entertainment value, since they were sports and had the power to divert and even to amuse. “Yes ma’am, I reckon I can handle both,” he said. “But I shore hope you don’t have to wait until jist before class starts to let me see the textbook.”

  Jossie laughed, and handed him a copy of his textbooks for Psychology. There was no textbook for basketball. He was amazed at the little coincidence that the author of Human Behavior was named Stephen Sheldon Colvin, Professor of Educational Psychology at Brown University. Our Colvin had never heard of anybody else with the name Colvin, and he felt a little as Russ must have felt when he learned that he wasn’t the only person in the world with diphallus. Right away Colvin believed that Professor Colvin was his spiritual kin, or at least psychological kin, and could probably teach him a few things, which he in turn would attempt to teach his students. Thumbing through the book, Colvin noticed that there was a section on the nervous system, which he already had in his head. No, he wouldn’t have any trouble teaching psychology.

  They shook hands over the deal and agreed upon a salary of thirty dollars a month, including his duties as school physician. Then Colvin said, “Jossie, hon, I wonder if it might be possible for one of the girl students, my best pupil from last year, you remember Tennessee Tennison, well, as you may know she comes from a dirt-poor family way back up in the jillikens, and they threw her out, and she don’t have nowhere to stay, and I was just wondering if she could go ahead and move into the dormitory, and live there by herself until school starts.”

  Jossie studied Colvin as if she might be guessing at things that weren’t within her realm of understanding. Then she smiled a knowing smile and said, “Thelma Villines, the housekeeper, has already moved in, so if it’s okay with her, it’s okay with me.”

  Colvin installed Tenny in the dormitory with the help of Mrs. Villines, who reckoned she could find some work to keep Tenny busy and earn her room and board. Then Colvin had a private moment alone with Tenny to say good-bye to her and tell her he’d try to get back this way whenever he could. They kissed.

  “Thank you so much for everything,” Tenny said, and she walked alongside him and his buggy to the edge of the campus, but, in the superstition of the Ozarks, turned aside to avoid watching him disappear from sight.

  Colvin’s dealing with Jossie had been like falling off a log compared with dealing with Piney. The road to Stay More was still more liquid than solid, and several times he got mired, and both he and Nessus were covered with mud and exhausted by late afternoon, when they reached home. He had concocted a dozen good excuses, but Piney, who knew everything, knew that he must have been “carrying on” with Jossie Conklin, and she accused him of it. “Strike me dead if I never even touched her!” Colvin protested. “Except to shake her hand when we agreed on my salary…which, you’ll be happy to know, means that now we’ll be able to get for you that pianer.”

  “Goody,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  And sure enough, Piney insisted that Colvin take her to Little Rock to shop for a piano. It wasn’t easy. First he had to scare up some kind of loan of the money, and since the Swains Creek Bank and Trust Company had been robbed and was out of business he couldn’t apply for a loan, all he could do was hatch a kind of health insurance scheme which the American Medical Association wouldn’t have endorsed. He examined his ledgers and made a list of all the patients who had ever paid him in cash money instead of livestock, produce, working-it-off, or other form of barter, and he went around to each of them, a total of only thirty-nine, and with his hat in hand he offered to treat them in perpetuity regardless of the severity of their condition in return for a modest advance premium of only twenty dollars. Eleven of the patients claimed that they didn’t see how they could possibly raise that much cash money, although seven of these admitted that it sounded like a real bargain. Five patients told him he was out of his mind. But from twenty-three patients he collected twenty dollars each, and with this money he was able to take Piney to Little Rock. Instead of using Nessus and the buggy, inadequate to freight the piano back to Stay More, he hired a team of mules and a wagon from Ingledew’s livery, and with Piney sitting on the buckboard beside him, he drove to Russellville, reaching it in two days, and took a Missouri Pacific train from there to Little Rock, and spent two nights in the capital city, where he had never been before, nor had Piney, and they were able to enjoy the sights of the city, including the enormous state capitol which imitates the U.S. Capitol; the state’s tallest edifice, the Donaghey Building, towering fourteen floors above the street; and the recently opened Broadway Bridge spanning the Arkansas River, the largest and most expensive bridge in Arkansas. Both Colvin and Piney, walking across it on the pedestrian skirt, found it incredible that anything in the world could cost a million dollars. At the Hollenberg Music Company, a high-pressure salesman who was himself a piano virtuoso demonstrated that the affordable pianos indeed sounded tinny. They found one baby grand that did not sound tinny but was far out of their price range, and the salesman by playing Liszt on it convinced Piney that she’d never learn how to play a piano and had better play it safe and stick with one of these here player pianos that used rolls of perforated paper to do all the work for you. Of course player pianos cost a good bit more than ordinary instruments where you have to do the fingering, and then also of course you have to get yourself a supply of the rolls of the perforated paper to make the thing go, and the transaction left Colvin flat broke except for just their return train tickets, but Hollenberg Music Company paid the freight for taking the piano back with them on the same train to Russellville, where they loaded it into their wagon.