His mother’s unrequited absorption with Doc Swain became matched eventually by the vehemence of her jealousy toward Tenny Tennison, the prettiest of all Russ’s classmates and the one girl whose very presence, even from a distance of a hundred yards, would give Russ hard-ons. It took Russ a while to realize that his mother was so madly jealous of Tenny not because Tenny gave Russ hard-ons but because Tenny was somehow preventing Doc Swain from reciprocating his mother’s lust for him. Russ didn’t understand why Doc Swain would want Tenny, who was probably a virgin and didn’t know anything, when Doc could have the beautiful, experienced, and most desirable Venda just for the asking, and this gave Russ an ambivalent feeling toward his much-admired physician/teacher: while he couldn’t help envying Doc Swain because of his mother’s lust for him, he also resented Doc Swain because Doc was not making Russ’s mother happy.
Even after school had let out for the summer, his mother got worse instead of better. “You and me have got to find us some way to ruin that gal Tenny,” she told him one summer’s day. “And I mean ruin her.” She studied Russ’s face intently while an idea slowly crept into her mind, and then she grabbed Russ and gave him a kiss on the mouth. Russ had succeeded in achieving mouth-kisses with Olga and Orva and Orlena and Ohio, but those Baptist girls had always kept their lips tight together and considered the kiss finished in not more than three seconds. Now Russ’s momma parted her lips and brought her tongue out and stuck it into his mouth and wrapped it around his own tongue, and his two peckers swole so much they commenced bumping into each other. After a long while, she broke the kiss and said, “Do ye like that? Russ honey dearest, if you really like me and want a bunch more kisses like that, I want you to go up to Brushy Mountain and git Tenny Tennison and bring her down to meet your father, and I want you to git ’em together and keep ’em together. Git the idee?” Russ said he knew his father wasn’t much of a looker, in fact, he didn’t mind saying that Mulciber was the ugliest wretch he’d ever laid eyes on, and he wasn’t very confident that such a pretty young thing like Tenny would want to take up with him. His mother gave him another, longer one of those open-mouthed kisses, and whispered in his ear, “I promise I’ll let you have what you’ve always wanted. If you will do this thing for me, I’ll let you stick both of your hard-ons in me.” That was a proposition that Russ couldn’t refuse, but he wanted her to promise that she wouldn’t let anybody else stick any peckers into her before he got his chance to do it, and she promised. And he wanted to know if the offer would be null and void if by chance Tenny and his father weren’t attracted to each other, which didn’t seem likely anyhow. So his mother pressed into his hand a little purple vial with a cork stopper in it, and gave him an eyedropper to go along with it, and explained that it was a love potion, and to put not more than six drops into Tenny’s drink, and, if needed, not more than four drops into Mulciber’s. That way, they’d be irresistible to each other. Whoever touched a drop of that special love potion would fall madly in love with the first person they laid eyes on. Russ had just one more question: how was he supposed to persuade Tenny to go off with him, and to let her folks know that it was above-board and all? “Just tell ’em,” Venda said, “that because she has such a sweet singing voice and lots of possibilities for being a great singer, I am offering to put her up here at my house and give her free voice lessons.”
His mother had a little map, that she had acquired somehow from the county judge, Frank Criner, showing how to get up to Brushy Mountain, and she gave it to Russ and told him to wear his Sunday-school shirt, and comb his hair good, and all. Then he climbed atop Marengo and took off. Even with the help of the map, it was hard to find and took him nearly all day, and when he got there Tenny wasn’t at home. Her folks, her mother and granny and a couple of older sisters named Oriole and Redbird, fell upon him like he was the first male creature they’d been able to lay hands on in ages, and they made a big fuss over his horse and even over his Sunday-school shirt, as if they’d never seen a white shirt before. Oriole kept saying, “Why, you aint no monster, after all!” and Redbird kept saying, “Couldn’t no horse git no paler than that’un,” and Russ began to get the notion that somehow he had been expected. It was a right peculiar family. The father didn’t get a chance to say much, and when he did, Russ couldn’t make out exactly what he was trying to say.
Finally they told him that Tenny was waiting for him, but she was waiting up on the top of the mountain. He didn’t understand. He didn’t know how she knew he was coming, and he didn’t know why she was waiting in an inconvenient place like the mountaintop. But he followed their directions and went on up there. It was a hard climb, and he had to leave Marengo tethered to a tree while he made the last part of the climb. When he got up there, she was just sitting on a rock with her head in her hands, and she was dressed all in black, which made her look somehow a lot older, although the black was a fine background for her long light-brown hair. As usual, whenever he so much as glimpsed her, both of his peckers expanded to their full size and caused a pair of great bulges in his britches, which he had to cover with his hat as best he could. He stood there with his hat over his groin, realizing that he didn’t have the nerve to ask her if she’d like to fuck, and he said bashfully, “Howdy, Tenny.”
She raised her face and gazed at him without surprise. The blue sky of her eyes was rainy. “Howdy, Russ,” she said. Then she observed, “That’s a purty white shirt.” She asked, “Did you bring Marengo with you?” and when he nodded, she said, “I guessed it might be you. But you’ve got only one head.” He didn’t know what she was talking about, so she had to back up and tell him all about the prophecy of Cassie Whitter.
He was embarrassed. “Wal, heck, I shore wouldn’t mind being yore bridegroom, but it aint me. It’s my daddy. I mean, I wasn’t supposed to tell ye until you’d had a chance to meet him, but that’s who you’re supposed to marry,”
“Is he a freak?” Tenny asked.
“Most folks think so,” Russ said. “He’s in purty bad shape, what with his crippled legs and all. But he’s a good man, and he’d treat you real nice and keep you happy.”
“Nothing will ever keep me happy again,” Tenny said, sadly. Then she stood up. “Well, if I caint marry Colvin Swain, I might as well marry yore daddy or anybody. Let’s go.” Russ helped her down off the mountaintop. The west wind was beginning to blow real hard, and it was getting a mite too airish up there, and was turning dark, too. He helped her climb up on Marengo, sidesaddle the way his momma had ridden to school with him so often, and he explained to her that they could tell her family that she was going to Jasper to live with Venda Breedlove and take voice lessons, until school started. “But that aint true, is it?” Tenny said. “I don’t want to live with your momma. I hate her guts.” Russ assured her that he himself sometimes hated Venda’s guts, and that it was just an excuse to persuade Tenny’s folks to allow her to come to Jasper.
It was dark by the time they reached the cabin, and of course the Tennisons insisted that Russ spend the night. They gave him a big supper, with five kinds of dessert, and treated him like he really had proposed to Tenny and was planning the nuptials. It wasn’t a big cabin, and both beds was all full up, what with the sisters visiting, so they had to fix Russ a pallet on the kitchen floor, and that’s where he slept. It was a real hot August night, without any kitchen windows to let in the night air, and Russ stripped down to his underpants to keep cool, and, once everybody else had gone to bed, he left the sheet off, although just the thought of sleeping in the same house with Tenny gave him a pair of all-night erections, and he realized he’d better try to wake up in the morning before the women came in to fix breakfast.
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 starin
g 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 b
ulges 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!”
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