The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  His mind was not on the subject as he went to face his Psychology class. He had read enough of the Colvin textbook, and he had a fair idea of what he wanted to say, but his concern over Tenny’s condition seized his mind and would not let him think of anything else. He had distracting problems finding the meeting place of the Psych class: for some reason it had been scheduled to meet in the gym, the new, long, low barnlike building of fieldstone that completed the triangle of main buildings on the campus. The pupils were not sitting at desks but just around on the floor. At least he had been provided with a portable blackboard, and he wrote his name on it, as if there were anybody (there wasn’t) who didn’t know it. Jossie Conklin had not yet arrived with an armload of the textbooks.

  “Wal, my friends,” he started off, “I hope we’re gonna have a heap of fun in here. But I ort to tell ye, right off, that what we learn in here aint really necessary. You can live without it. It won’t make you rich, and it likely won’t make you happy neither. So what’s the point in messin around with it? Unlike other subjects you’re taking, it caint be put to much practical use. It won’t teach ye how to speak proper. It won’t help ye to do sums. Some of y’uns remember I taught a course last year in hygiene, which at least showed everbody how to take care of theirselfs and keep healthy. Wal, this here that we’re gonna do might or might not give ye some sort of mental comfort, but I wouldn’t guarantee it. It might help ye understand better how your mind works. It might help ye to get along better with yore feller man. I can’t guarantee none of that. But I can guarantee that if you pay attention, and put your heart into it, it will shore enough give ye somethin to think about!”

  He plunged right in, with Prof. Colvin’s first subject, Consciousness, and managed to keep them paying attention for half an hour’s worth of talk about how imagination is necessary to consciousness, and the different levels of consciousness (which he diagrammed on the blackboard) and how each of them affects our conduct. His lecture was hampered by his thoughts of Tenny and her condition. She was right there on the floor, not next to her husband but not far from him, and she was looking up at him with adoration, and also with a look of expectation, as if he might be about to explain the meaning of life.

  Seeking to demonstrate the distinction between consciousness in full control and consciousness when it is reflexive or instinctive, Colvin noticed that there was a basketball lying on the edge of the court. He picked it up. It was the first time he had ever handled one. He bounced it. It sprang free from his control, but he chased it down and recaptured it. “Now if I was to try to make this thing go through that hoop,” he declared, “trying with all my might to make it go in, the chances are I’d shorely miss.” He propelled the ball upward, and, sure enough, it did not even come close to reaching the hoop, falling short by a couple of feet or more. “See?” he said, chasing down the bouncing ball again. “But if I had learned not to let my consciousness interfere with my instinctive tossing of the ball toward the hoop, there’s a fair chance I might get it in.” He shut off his mind and tossed the ball again, and it rose in a long smooth arc and went cleanly through the net. It may have been an accident, or beginner’s luck, but the students gasped, and then applauded, and several of them hollered things like, “Dandy shot, Coach!”

  “Now you may be wondering, aint it a contradiction to try to consciously be instinctive? That will be the subject of our next meeting, and here’s your homework.” He wrote on the blackboard a list of questions he had made up for them to answer, such as, “List several examples of instinctive behavior you’ve observed in yourself.” He wrote down the page numbers, 1–23, for them to study in the Colvin text.

  Finally, he asked, “Any questions?”

  One boy raised his hand and said, “Yeah, Coach. When is our first game?”

  “Game?” Colvin said. He glanced at Tenny, as if her facial expression might give him some clue, but she seemed merely to be awaiting his answer to the question. He realized that perhaps the students expected him to enliven the dull classes with some games. It oughtn’t to be too awfully hard for him to make up a few, although Prof. Colvin didn’t really get into the matter of play and Hall’s theory of games until the second chapter. “Wal, week after next, I reckon,” he said. “I ort to be able to have some games ready for y’uns by then.”

  A girl raised her hand and asked, “Don’t we need some special shoes?”

  Colvin thought that was a funny, if irrelevant question, and he laughed. “Heck, you can go barefoot for all I care!” he said. The students looked at each other, and Colvin sensed that they might have been disappointed in his answer. “I mean,” he said, “wear jist whatever kind of shoe you want.” He dismissed them.

  Several of the students lingered after class to fool around with the basketball, trying to put it through the hoop, and he was pleased to see that they were attempting “lab sessions” with his talk about instinctive behavior. But he needed that basketball for his next hour, so he reluctantly expropriated it from them.

  Most all of these students, however, were also going to be in Basketball, which, he discovered, was not meeting here in the gym where there were several hooped baskets available, but up on the second floor of the main building, where his hygiene class had met. When he got to the assigned room he discovered that every seat in the room was filled, kids were sitting on the floor and standing against the walls, and there was a big crowd outside the door who couldn’t get in. This potential audience included most of the faculty as well, and Colvin was dismayed at the realization that there might be not only girls’ and boys’ teams but also a faculty team that he would have to coach. Jossie came up to him and asked, “Would you mind if we moved to the auditorium?” Then she added, “I didn’t even try to bring the textbooks, because there simply aren’t enough to go around.” Feeling already dazed with his agitation over Tenny’s condition, and the experience of having just conducted a class, Colvin wondered if he had perhaps misunderstood Jossie previously: maybe there was supposed to be a textbook for Basketball. He certainly hoped so, because he needed one. All he had was a five-cent Little Blue Book from Haldeman-Julius, Fundamentals and Rules of Basket Ball, which just scratched the surface and left him uncertain about the distinction between a forward and a guard.

  The group nearly filled the auditorium, which at least had a couple of basketball hoops attached to the sides of the stage, which had been the basketball court before the gym was built. He was both pleased and intimidated to see that so many people were interested in basketball. He noticed that even Venda was present, and he waved at her. He was too self-conscious to climb up on the stage where the basketball hoops were, so he decided to save that for later. He just stood in front of the first row, holding his basketball in one arm, and looked out over the crowd until he spotted Tenny, and he smiled at her, hoping the sight of her would give him encouragement, but on the contrary it simply reminded him that he was going to be distracted throughout Basketball by the thought of the results of the tuberculin test he would have to give her. He cleared his throat, and had a panicky thought that he might never again have the beginner’s luck shooting the basketball that he had had in Psych class, so maybe he had better not even try. “Wal, howdy, folks,” he began, and amended that to “Ladies and gentleman” to include his colleagues. He really didn’t know what to say next, and a long moment of painful silence drifted by, until he thought to break the ice with a little chitchat. “Aint it a beautiful day, though? It don’t look to rain anytime soon, and I kinder like this airish weather myself after that hot summer we had. How is everbody feelin? I hope you’re feelin fine. I’m feelin just fine myself.” All of them were smiling pleasantly as if all of them were feeling fine too except that they were a little impatient for him to get down to business.

  One thing that Colvin knew for certain about Basketball was that the entire object of all of that running back and forth and trying to get the ball through the hoop and steadily piling up point after point was to win. Winni
ng was everything. “We’re going to win! This is all about winning!” he said to them suddenly, and with such enthusiasm that his audience broke into spontaneous cheering. “Aint nobody ever gonna beat us! We will be the champ-peens of the whole country!”

  Now there were two things that had to be talked about in the very beginning, and he might as well get them out of the way as quickly as possible. The first one was a bit of a problem. He had hoped that he might be meeting the boys’ teams and the girls’ teams separately, because this was a matter that couldn’t comfortably be discussed in mixed company, but since everybody was here together, he might as well try to make the best of it He needed to discuss the absolute necessity, from the physician’s point of view as well as simply a matter of personal well-being, that each of the boys—including the two males on the faculty—obtain and always wear a good-fitting athletic supporter. “Call ’em jock straps or whatever,” he said, “they serve an important function which it ort not be too difficult for you to figure out. So I expect to see each of you fellers with one the next time we meet. As for you gals…” and he went on to discuss the need for them each to own and wear a good-fitting brassiere. It ought not be necessary to call attention to the fact that all the running and jumping of basketball would make their bosoms bounce up and down like mad if they didn’t have a good brassiere to hold ’em down. These here new Jazz Age fads, with boyish high-hemmed dresses and bobbed hair and what-all, might be okay just to be seen in, but apparently there was a new fad to de-emphasize the bosom by not wearing no brassiere at all, and that simply would not do, as far as we here are concerned.

  “Okay? So the next important item we have to discuss is: what are we going to call ourselves? We need a mascot name. And it ought to be original and distinctive, not just something commonplace like Tigers or Lions or Bears or Bulldogs or whatever. Any suggestions?”

  The members of the audience exchanged looks with one another, and Colvin hoped that they were actually thinking about the matter. Jossie Conklin raised her hand and said, “Perhaps in view of the subject, we ought to be the Butterflies!” and she laughed and looked around to see if any others had grasped the significance of her remark, but only Nick Rainbird, who taught history, was also laughing.

  Tim James, the new man (Bible and Hygiene, and destined shortly to become Jossie’s lover), said, “Since we’re the Newton County Academy, what say let’s call ourselves the Academicians?” and he fell out of his seat with his own laughter but few of the faculty and none of the students joined in.

  “Let’s let the students be heard from,” Colvin suggested, and they listened to several suggestions, some of them good ones based upon the local fauna, such as Hellbenders, which, however, was thought a little too naughty for a Christian school.

  Russ Breedlove suggested, “If it’s the Newton County Academy, how about we call ourselves the Counts?”

  “And call the girls the Countesses?” Colvin asked. He rather liked the idea although he wasn’t wild about it. He proposed to write the various suggestions on the blackboard and let them vote on a winner. He wrote down all those suggested, and waited to see if any others were proposed.

  Tenny raised her hand and rather quietly offered, “As far as that matter goes, how about the Newts?”

  There was a lot of laughter. Colvin allowed as how that might be appropriate if they had to travel distances through rough country, because newts were amphibious salamanders. “Of course, newts is tiny little critters, but they’re elusive and slippery and they can go ever which way,” he pointed out. “Yeah, that might be an appropriate name for us. I’m all for it. Thank you, Tenny.”

  “Excuse me,” Jossie Conklin said to him, “but what does all of this have to do with psychology?”

  Colvin wasn’t sure he understood her question. “Wal, I reckon if we had a mascot name, it would give us a sense of identity, you know. If we think of ourselfs as newts, even though they’re slinky and no-account, we can play our games better as a team.” He was proud of his answer, but he also was beginning to have a growing sense of uneasiness that something was amiss.

  “A team?” said Jossie Conklin. “I should think we’re perhaps a class, not a team. I facetiously suggested that if we have to adopt a mascot for Psychology class, it might be the butterfly, but I don’t suppose even you, Dr. Swain, realize the connection between Psyche and the butterfly, do you?”

  Colvin stared at her. Slowly he began to understand his great mistake, and as it dawned on him, he grew very red in the face and could hardly breathe. He could only stand there, thinking that it was bad enough he had mistakenly lectured to his basketball teams on Consciousness and Instinct, but it was unforgivable that he had urged his Psychology class to wear jock straps and bras. He sought some consolation from the excuse that Tenny’s problem had distracted and rattled him. And indeed, that was all he could think about. His eyes sought hers in the crowd, and he tried to communicate to her by his eyes alone his misery. His real misery, he understood, was not over his embarrassing mistake but over the possibility that this lovely girl, who had captured his heart, who meant everything in the world to him, and who had even, just now, by a stroke of her original mind, given a name to the official mascot of the Newton County Academy, had fallen victim to the Great White Plague.

  “Friends,” he said to the filled auditorium in a voice quiet and abashed, “doggone if I aint done went and made a boo-boo. The sorriest kettle of fish I ever mommixed. I’m supposed to handle two things, Psychology and Basketball, but I’ve done got ’em all confused one with the othern, and I’ve preached to the Basketball folks as if it was Psychology, and here I’ve been talkin to y’uns as if this was Basketball. So I do humbly beg yore pardon. Some way we’ll git this all straightened out.

  “But, you know,” he went on, “come to think of it, it don’t make all that much difference. If you stop to think about it, in the scheme of things, in the coming and going of the seasons, in the times for laughter and the times for crying, the times for building up and the times for tearing down, and all those other times the Preacher spoke of, trying to tell us about vanity and how everthing don’t matter all that much anyhow, whether we are studying Basketball or playing Psychology, or the other way around, don’t really amount to a whole heck of a lot of hills of beans, nohow. There are more important things, like love and staying alive. So if y’uns will excuse me, that’s all I can tell y’uns today.”

  Chapter ten

  A couple more afternoons is all it will take. I have enjoyed your company so much that I’ve been tempted to drag this story out as long as I can just to keep you here, but I think you realize yourself that we’re getting toward the end of it.

  Push that little red button on that thing, will you? And I hope you don’t mind. My young friend Mike Luster, who aspires to be a folklorist and comes to visit me just about as often as you do, has left his tape recorder here with the request that we preserve the remainder of whatever words I have to say in this story. Not that he mistrusts your ability to remember, let alone to hear, any of this, but he just wants to be sure that the end of the story is permanently recorded. You don’t need to worry that he might ever try to make a novel out of it himself.

  I suppose there’s a possibility that the tape recorder could intimidate me somewhat, hold me back, slow me down, whatever. For, although I insist that I’ve always told you the exact and honest truth without any embellishment, I’ve never had to be constrained by any thought of what permanent reception my words may have. In this regard, I’ve been like the old-time Ozark storyteller himself: my words have been only for the occasion, only for the present audience; I’ve known that my words might get repeated by my audience to some future listeners, but as far as the story goes, it begins and ends right here and now. I never had much luck trying to use a tape recorder myself, not for stories. I collected hundreds of folk songs with my recording machines, but those songs were things already known and rehearsed and possessed of some permanence to begin w
ith. Whenever I tried to tape a good story, it somehow inhibited the storyteller.

  Maybe the only differences you’ll notice are these: the rest of this story aint so comical. Assuming you’ve been amused by a lot of what I’ve told you—even though you don’t laugh much, I can tell when I’ve tickled you—you may find the rest of this story somewhat downbeat, certainly minor key. And also I’m fixing to switch it into the present tense. Why? Well, why do you do it your own self? In all your novels, you downshift (or upshift, is it?) from the past to the present tense toward the end, and then finally into the future tense. I’ve studied what you’ve done. I’ve considered that in my own collections of tales, there is often a kind of indiscriminate shifting from one tense to another, because that’s simply the way those old folk stories got told, perhaps without any rhyme or reason as far as tenses are concerned.

  But if you’ll pardon the analogy, there exists between storyteller and listener a kind of romance, and the progress of it parallels the stages of courtship: holding hands, hugging, and finally fucking, or some kind of consummation. All that past tense business is just holding hands, making contact, nothing truly intimate. But when you shift to present tense, you’re drawing the listener into more intimate contact, as if to make sure that the listener becomes a part of the story, not just an audience to it. And then, through the ultimate intimacy of the future tense, you make sure that the listener is always a permanent part of the story. Am I right? Thank you for bringing me the Smith Brothers cough drops. I need them.