Chapter six
Your champion and mine, sweet Miss Mary Celestia a-sprawlin yonder with that clever grin on her face, has taken it upon herself to correct me on another error, but I think she may be growing as deaf as you are, to go along with her blindness as a final withdrawal from this sorry world. She claims I said Tenny was the most beautiful gal on earth. Did I say that? Hell, you being so deaf yourself, you wouldn’t know if I did or not, would you? I didn’t hear myself say it. I didn’t even say Tenny was the prettiest girl in Newton County, which she wasn’t. Mary says she wants to remind me that you’ve already pointed out in more than one of your books that Latha Bourne was the most beautiful girl in the world. Didn’t I tell you Mary knows your books? Well, so do I. In fact, there was a time before Colvin Swain was telling this story to me that he told much of it to Latha herself, a-sitting there on her porch with her the way they did so often, with nothing better to pass the time of day but talk about how the past was passed but had been so nice, and so mean, to both of them. So Latha knew almost all of the story about Tenny, and she would never forget the one afternoon that her dear friend Colvin got up his nerve and told her that he wanted her to know that Tenny may have been the prettiest little thing he’d ever laid eyes on, but she wasn’t anywhere near as lovely as Latha.
To tell you the truth, Tenny wasn’t even the second most beautiful female in Newton County, after Latha. She was third. Late today I’m going to have to bring Mrs. Venda Breedlove into this story, that music teacher at the “college,” because if anybody had ever thrown a beauty contest like that one where the shepherd boy gave that golden apple as first prize, and Latha won it, then the shepherd would have had to give a silver apple to Venda, and poor Tenny would have had to be happy with the bronze apple…but I think we already know her well enough to know that she wouldn’t have wanted any of them apples.
Anyway, I’ll have a good deal to say about Venda later on, because if Colvin was the most important man in Tenny’s life, Venda was going to become the most important woman, more important than Tenny’s momma or her grandma or anybody else. That grandma was the one she was named after, Tennessee McArtor, who had been born in that state east of here and had twenty children but chose to spend her old age, and that of her husband, Grampaw Ray McArtor, with her favorite daughter, Tenny’s momma, Jonette McArtor, who married Wayne Don Tennison. Both families went way back practically to the beginnings of Newton County. The Tennisons may have come originally from Indiana, not from North Carolina or Tennessee or any of those other mountain places that produced most of the settlers of the Ozarks. No doubt the family was related at one time to the same people who produced the great poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson, but they didn’t know how to spell it. They could also have been related to the Tennisons that was already settled all over the Missouri Ozarks. But as Wayne Don Tennison said, “It don’t matter where we come from. It only matters where we’re a-gorn, and that’s straight to Salvation.”
He was a Holiness preacher, Tenny’s dad. Some people call them Pentecostals, they themselves prefer to be called Church of God, I’ve always known them as Holy Rollers. Whatever you call them, they have some wild church services, with plenty of shouting and flopping around and speaking in tongues. And they handle poisonous snakes. When Tenny lay a-licking that lollipop on the lounge in Colvin’s office and telling him her whole story, all fifteen years’ worth, his ears perked up when she got to the part about the copperheads and rattlers and moccasins, because he’d been quite a snake handler himself. But Colvin had handled snakes as friends and pets, while Wayne Don Tennison handled snakes to convince the skeptical that he had the spirit and the power and the faith and the glory of the Lord in him, because the Bible says, “They shall take up serpents,” and although the Bible doesn’t say it, it ought to have said, according to Wayne Don, “You better take up snakes yourself if you want to attract enough believers to start a congregation in the Baptist back brush of the Ozarks.” Wayne Don was the first snake-handling Pentecostal in Newton County, and he had the devil’s own time trying to scrape together enough believers to fill a brush arbor, let alone a church house. He had started out a Baptist, like most of his neighbors, and in fact his wife, Jonette, never really quit being a Baptist, but Wayne Don had the “gift” for speaking in tongues and the Baptists wouldn’t tolerate that, so he had to try to start his own church, and he’d been trying ever since, hardly ever making any money at it but convinced he was God’s own appointed servant to convert the Baptists into Pentecostals.
Colvin sensed that when Tenny talked about her father, she was both embarrassed and angry. She had never quite recovered from her first attendance, when she was four years old, at a Pentecostal meeting held on the front porch and in the front yard of their house on Brushy Mountain in eastern Newton County. For pews, rough lumber had been spread across empty tomato crates to make backless benches in the yard, but hardly anybody remained seated once the services started. She had been required to watch her daddy, for whom she had a lot of natural affection, screaming and crying, jerking and jumping, whistling and hooting, swaying and swooning, strutting and stamping, twitching and falling, working up a sweat that completely soaked his clothes, and then sticking his hands into a box and bringing out a whole bunch of big writhing snakes that like to have given her her first heart attack. Afterwards she shunned him, couldn’t bring herself to look him in the eye or listen to him, closed up her ears when he tried to demonstrate he still knew how to talk gently and rationally, and she transferred her affection to her mother’s daddy, Grampaw Ray McArtor, a pleasant man who was always smiling and making Tenny laugh with his quips and his banter, and who wouldn’t attend the Holiness services himself but would take Tenny fishing during them, or play his fiddle to get her to sing and dance, or otherwise entertain her despite eventual violent arguments with Wayne Don, who tried to tell her that she was going straight to Hell by avoiding church, and when his pictures of Hell failed to intimidate her, began to shake her, grabbed her by her shoulders and shook her and shook her, saying, “You wouldn’t never of been born if it wasn’t for me!”
What he meant was, ironically, not that his loins had sired her, which maybe they hadn’t, but that it was his prayers and his gift of Divine healing which had cured his wife, Jonette, of her barrenness. Tenny had two older sisters—much older: Jonette at the age of fifteen had given birth to one girl, and at the age of sixteen to the other one, but both girls had grown up and married and gone away from home and even had children of their own before Jonette, at the age of thirty-seven, had, after years of fruitless attempts and even visits to some doctors, been able at last to conceive Tenny. Wayne Don claimed that it was his conversion to the Holiness faith and his acquisition of the gift of Divine healing and his many, many prayers for his wife to regain her birthing powers, prayers uttered fluently in “the unknown tongue,” that had made Tenny possible. She was literally a gift from God, and Wayne Don had tried to name her Dove, as the bird of God, and because her older sisters had been named after birds, Oriole and Redbird, but Jonette felt it was her mother’s advice that had made her fertile again, so she named the baby after her mother, Tennessee. And what had that advice been? Tenny couldn’t be sure, but from some remarks that Grampaw Ray McArtor had made, she had suspected since the age of five that Wayne Don was not her actual father.
Whatever Jonette had done to become pregnant again, the pregnancy had not been good for her health, and while she adored and treasured little Tenny as the child she’d waited twenty-one years to have, she possibly also felt some hostility because, as she said to Tenny one day in a rare moment of anger, “I aint had a single blessit minute of feelin good since the day you was born!” Although Jonette and her mother were close, they argued over methods of treatment for Jonette’s many ills. Tennessee McArtor in the best Ozarks tradition had a “natural” cure for everything (even for infertility!) and believed devoutly in the efficacy of superstitions and herbs, while Jonette, being much younger and
much more “modern,” believed just as devoutly in any number of patent medicines that were available. When Jonette was bothered with one or another of the “female troubles,” her mother would insist on administering teas brewed from black snakeroot (Cimicifuga) or squawroot (Caulophyllum thalictroides), while Jonette would prefer taking large doses of Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound (18? alcohol) or Watkins’ Female Remedy (19? alcohol).
But Wayne Don Tennison did not believe in any sort of medicine except Scripture and speaking in tongues. “Is any sick among you?” he was given to frequent quoting of James 5:14–15. “Let him call the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; and the prayer of faith shall save the sick.” Wayne Don was so opposed to both his wife’s patent medicines and his mother-in-law’s herbal remedies that he even omitted the oil from that Biblical prescription.
The same conflicts of opinion occurred over the little girl’s ailments. Tenny remembered at the age of three receiving the devoted attentions of her whole family because she had croup. From her description of it, Colvin determined that Tenny had had laryngismus stridulosa, for which he would have put her into a hot bath with mustard, and blankets over the bath to make a tent so she’d inhale the steam, and then have steamed a kettle of tincture of benzoin beside her bed. But Tennessee the grandmother had tried dosing her with skunk oil—this stuff is rendered from the fat of skunks trapped in the winter, and makes a strong stinking mess. It made Tenny vomit, and then the grandmother rubbed Tenny’s chest with a salve made of groundhog oil, turpentine, and kerosene. After this, Jonette the mother insisted on trying something called Campho-Rub on top of the groundhog mess, and having Tenny drink something called Dr. Sloop’s Twenty-Minute Croup Remedy. The alcohol in the latter (15?) had given Tenny a pleasant buzz that partly took her mind off her paroxysmal cough, while the stroking of her mother’s fingers in applying the former had done nothing for her larynx but had made her chest feel good. Then her daddy had spent a whole night chanting and warbling some gibberish over her bed, and shaking his fist at God. What Tenny remembered best about the whole experience, however, was the way one or another of them, including Grampaw and Daddy, kept sitting down beside her bed and looking at her with great concern. This, Colvin decided, may have been what kept the little girl from a blockage of the larynx which might have been fatal. But it was also, he knew, the beginning of the need for attention which every hypochondriac craves.
At a very early age, Tenny began to observe that her father and her mother argued loudly about everything but primarily about health matters, since Wayne Don rejected medicine and doctors but Jonette swore by her patent nostrums and remedies, and constantly complained of one or another disorder, disease, or emotional problem that could only be cured by Wine of Cardui or Carter’s Little Liver Pills or Zymotoid, and tried to ignore Wayne Don while he was speaking in tongues she couldn’t understand in his efforts to help her.
Tenny had the thrash at four. Did you ever get that when you were a kid? Maybe you called it thrush. It’s an inflammation of the mouth with white patches on the tongue and lips and palate. Colvin knew it was caused by a fungus, Candida albicans, and he knew it generally affected babies and children who already had a serious constitutional weakness, and he usually treated it with applications of borax-honey and gentian violet but also did a lot of other things to improve the child’s general condition and keep the infection from invading the throat and lungs. He listened with astonishment to Tenny’s recital of the “cures” her family had tried on her. Her grandfather Ray McArtor was convinced that common creek water drunk right after a rain would do the trick, but if anything this just gave her a new set of germs. The grandmother called him a fool and said that the rainwater had to be drunk out of an old shoe, but it has to be a shoe that hasn’t been worn by any of Tenny’s kinfolks, so they searched all over that part of the country to find an old cast-off shoe that had been rained in, and dosed Tenny with the water, but it didn’t seem to help too awfully much. The grandmother then tried various ointments made of crushed green oak leaves, and of garden sage, and while the latter seemed to help a little, it didn’t remove the white patches. The mother took over and dosed Tenny’s mouth with Dr. Philpott’s Thrush Tonic and Mme. Yale’s Antiseptic Syrup, but these had no effect. Finally, since Wayne Don’s babbling of gobbledygook wasn’t helping either, he was persuaded to try the old folk belief that the only cure for thrash is to have a preacher blow into the child’s mouth. We may only imagine (Tenny was unable to say) what psychological effect it may have had on the child for her daddy to grab the sides of her face and squeeze her mouth open and press his lips up close to hers and blow and blow and blow. This was just a few months before the experience she would have of watching him go crazy in a church service. His ministrations gave her a headache and a bad taste in her mouth, but didn’t seem to help the thrash, so Wayne Don had to just keep on doing it, day after day, along with intermittent recitations of the unknown tongues, plus the others’ repeated doses of all that rainwater and sage ointment and patent medicine, until finally the thrash just cleared up of its own. Colvin considered the possibility, without sharing his theory with Tenny, that something in her had held on to that thrash in order to continue to get all the circus of concern she was getting from all of them.
That experience of her father blowing air into her mouth was probably what set her to studying the whole business of breathing. The Tennison cabin had a great view toward the west, and Tenny could sit for hours on the porch, not necessarily admiring the view but watching it while she meditated upon the passage of air in and out of her body, through her nostrils, and between her teeth, wondering where the air went and what it did when it went there, deep down inside. Sometimes she would see how long she could hold her breath without passing out. For the longest time…in fact, until Colvin’s course in hygiene finally got around to Chapters 23 and 24 on respiration, she believed that the air she inhaled went down into all of the parts of her body, even her feet, and that it went up inside her head, and that if she didn’t breathe properly or allowed herself to fall asleep and not pay attention to her breathing, the absence of good air inside her head would cause the headaches that she often had.
Studying the way your own body breathes is a sure way to start feeling that your body doesn’t belong to you, or, maybe a better way of putting it is that your body is also inhabited by somebody besides yourself, who never forgets to do your breathing for you, especially while you’re asleep. Although they had given Tenny a doll or two of her own to play with, there wasn’t any kind of doll that had a body as interesting as her own body, so she spent a good deal of time examining herself all over, inside and out, every inch, heart and soul, sometimes with the help of a hand mirror. She became her own doll. Does that make sense? She believed that she was inhabited by another entity, her breathing-doll self, and she even gave it a name, ’See, taken from the last syllable of her own name, Tennessee. Of course it must’ve sounded redundant even to herself when she addressed that doll and used the verb “see” at the same time, as in, “’See, see what a cute nose ye’ve got,” or “Let me see, ’See,” or “’See, see what I mean?” She did a lot of talking to ’See, more, by and by, than she ever did to her folks, except maybe Grampaw McArtor.
Tenny and ’See were not twins or clones or double-gangers or whatever you’d call them. There were differences. For example, on the matter of favorite things. Tenny and her ’See would sit “together” of an evening on that porch, watching the sunset, and studying its colors, and while ’See decided that her favorite colors were the bright red ones, crimson and carmine and scarlet, Tenny decided that she preferred the sunset’s dark purplish colors, the deeper bluish shades. These colors did not exist anywhere around the house or in their clothes or anything Tenny and ’See could see except the sunset. Once, after watching the sunset until it got dark, Tenny and ’See tripped over a washtub and fell off the porch and cut her leg,
which bled. When Grandma McArtor held Tenny in her lap while her mother stopped the bleeding and covered the wound, Tenny studied the color of the blood and decided it was ’See’s blood because it was ’See’s favorite color, and she told herself that if she ever bled herself, it would be deep purple, and it wasn’t until a number of years later, when Colvin’s class got to Chapter 17, on the Structure and Functions of Blood, that she finally asked, “Why is blood red instead of blue or some other color?” and received from Colvin an answer that satisfied her.
When Grampaw McArtor started dying, Tenny and ’See spent as much time with him as she could get away with, as if to repay him for all the time he’d spent with her when she was sick, or sad, or scared. Ray McArtor had consumption. He could only explain to Tenny that his lungs was bad, and he wasn’t sure what had caused it. Nothing he ate. Maybe his cigarettes, he didn’t know. His wife, Tennessee, and his daughter Jonette were doing everything they could, and Jonette had sent off for a whole bunch of stuff, a four-week supply of Addiline, a quart of Prof. Hoffs Consumption Cure, and a box of Dr. Hill’s Systemic Wafers. Wayne Don was coming down with laryngitis from speaking in tongues on his father-in-law’s behalf. They tried everything on Grampaw McArtor, but he kept on getting worse, losing lots of weight and coughing all the time. Tenny told ’See to see if she couldn’t get down inside of Grampaw and see what was wrong with his breathing, and fix him up. When Grampaw began coughing up blood, Tenny was convinced the blood was a signal that ’See was sending up, to let them know that she was down in there finding the trouble and getting rid of it. For two months Grampaw coughed up blood and couldn’t get out of bed. One day when nobody but Tenny was sitting with him, he smiled at her and said he reckoned it was time he told her good-bye. She asked where was he going. ’See was still down inside him and Tenny didn’t want him taking ’See with him. He said he didn’t believe in that Gloryland that Wayne Don preached about, but he was going somewhere that folks don’t even have to breathe, nor eat, nor take a shit. That place was the same place that every bird and bug went when their time was over and the birds and bugs didn’t have to breathe anymore, nor eat, nor take a shit. “Can I go too?” Tenny asked him. Not for many and many a year, he said, but he’d be waiting for her when she finally came, and maybe in that place folks could go fishing or fiddle and dance and sing even if they didn’t breathe nor eat nor…Grampaw’s voice faltered and his eyes closed and Tenny had to finish the sentence for him, “…take shits?” but he didn’t hear her, because he was already over there in that place amongst those folks and birds and bugs. He didn’t take ’See with him, either. ’See came back into Tenny and helped to console her over Grampaw’s departure, and they talked a lot together about how long they might have to wait before they could go to that place and visit with Grampaw.
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