Butterfly Weed

by Donald Harington

  “She’s out yonder a-settin in the porch swing,” he said.

  “Well, maybe me and her ought to have a heart-to-heart women’s talk,” his mother said, and started to leave the room.

  “But she still hates your guts on account of what ye done with Doc Swain, and she don’t want to see you. Me, I don’t hate your guts but you shore let me down, breakin your promise and all.”

  “We’ll talk about that later. I think maybe I will give Tenny some voice lessons after all, and maybe even teach her how to yodel. I’ll fix you some supper in a little while. You’re still grounded.”

  His mother left him, and he felt both relieved that he had managed to cool her off a bit, and unhappy that she had grounded him. Dang it all, she couldn’t ground him, because he was a married man, and married men don’t get grounded—they don’t even have to obey their mothers anymore. He scarcely had time to brood about this before his mother returned and just stood in the doorway staring at him for a while, until she said:

  “Okay, I get it. You really did fix her up with Mulciber, didn’t you? And you’ve just been pretending you didn’t, just to tease me, or just to git even with me for breakin my promise not to fool around with any other man until I gave you your reward for fixin her up with Mulciber. Oh, you naughty boy, you! That’s just the kind of stunt you’d pull, isn’t it? So all this time you’ve just been waiting to collect that big reward! Well, come to Momma!”

  She held out her arms to him, but he didn’t understand. “Where’s Tenny?” he asked.

  “She shore aint on no porch of mine,” Venda declared.

  Even though he was grounded, Russ rushed past his mother and out of the house to the front porch, but Tenny wasn’t there. There was no sign of Tenny, up nor down any of the streets. The rain had stopped, completely. The last vestiges of the sunset were visible to the west, clouds the same color as that pretty ring that Tenny wore. Russ stood there a long while, watching the sunset and thinking. His mother came and joined him. It was his turn to ask one of those questions that are meant just for show. “Do you know what I think?” And since his mother made no attempt to answer it, he told her, “I think Tenny must’ve rode off with Doc Swain.” Then he told his mother how Doc had come to the courthouse and followed them to Mulciber’s and then kept on following them, all the way to Venda’s, and he must’ve somehow talked Tenny into going off with him. That was terrible. The thought greatly pained Russ. If everything had gone the way it ought to have gone, with clear skies and all, he and Tenny would be enjoying the beginnings of the shivaree along about now, up on Brushy Mountain, with folks making stupendous noises shooting off guns and banging pans and scaring the daylights out of him and his bride. Instead, the wedding night was plumb flummoxed and shot to hell! Russ felt so sorry for himself that he began to cry, and his mother began to cry also, feeling sorry not for him but for herself because she had her own problems dealing with the situation.

  Mother and son held each other and bawled their hearts out.

  Chapter nine

  Tenny, as we are about to discover, no longer had hypochondria, but ironically just at the time that she was cured of it I seem to be coming down with it myself. Leastways, Dr. Bittner this morning said he couldn’t find any reason why I should be having this cough. You’ve noticed it, I’m sure. It started somewhere along in there about when I had Tenny up on that mountaintop. Dr. Bittner didn’t give me a very thorough look-see; he just had me open my mouth for a second, and then he said it was possible I had a bit of gastric reflux that was causing a backup to irritate my throat, and he gave me some pills for it, but what I probably need is just some old-fashioned cough drops, so if you can remember, next time you come, could you pick me up a package of Smith Brothers?

  How did Colvin persuade Tenny to get into his buggy and go off with him? Of this entire story, that was the part that Doc was most stingy in telling me about, as if modesty prevented him from bragging about the accomplishment. After all, she was mad as hell at him and never wanted to see him again. So I personally don’t know everything that passed between them while she was sitting in that porch swing of Venda’s and he was sitting in his buggy. I know only a few details, that he started off by asking her to confirm his suspicion that she had actually had a dream the night before. At first, she wouldn’t even talk to him, but she finally admitted that, yes, for the first time all summer she had had a dream. He told her he had tried to reach her in her dream, but couldn’t find her, and she admitted that she’d been looking for him but couldn’t find him either. “Sometimes,” he said to her gently, “other folks keep us from doing what we want to do, don’t ye know?” Then he got her to listen while he tried to explain what had happened last May to spoil that beautiful dream they were having together, that Venda had intruded into that beautiful enchanted forest and four-poster they had created, that Colvin had not wanted or welcomed her, and that they were certainly not making love then, but yes, they were making love earlier this afternoon because Venda had doped his coffee with a powerful love potion. The thing was, that love potion was supposed to make a feller fall madly in love forever with the first person he saw, and although it had robbed Colvin of his willpower and allowed Venda to seduce him, he definitely had not fallen in love with Venda.

  “I still love you, Tenny,” he said. “I reckon I didn’t need ary love potion the first day I laid eyes on ye, up at the school. I fell in love with you that day, and if love is a disease, as you once thought, then mine has been progressive, chronic, insidious, and terminal. I will love you all the days of my life.”

  Like I say, I don’t know what else he said, but maybe he didn’t need to say anything else, because the next thing she knew, Tenny was standing up from that porch swing. “I love thee, Colvin Swain,” she said aloud, “and you don’t know how long I’ve waited to say it.”

  “I will make the rain stop for you,” he said, and he believed it himself, that he could do it, and he goddamn did it. The rain just quit. It didn’t taper off or fade away, it just all of a heap stopped, and the sky cleared up and the sunset was visible, and by god if he didn’t also arrange for the sunset to be in all the possible variations of her favorite color, amethyst.

  She got into that buggy with him, and they had a real long, powerful, thrilling kiss. They didn’t care whether anybody saw them, or whether Russ or Venda came out of the house. No, it wasn’t that they didn’t care; they didn’t even think of it. It never crossed their minds that there was anybody else in the world except themselves. Finally Colvin broke the kiss long enough just to cluck his tongue and say, “Gidyup, ole Ness.” The buggy began to move, and Colvin wrapped his arm around her, and she lay her head against his shoulder.

  If he’d had his druthers, he’d have taken her straight to Stay More. But two mighty things kept him from it: one, of course, was that there was already a woman in Stay More who loved him very much and whom he still loved right considerably; and two, it had rained so hard that the roads were quagmires, and even if the buggy didn’t get badly bogged, Hogshead Creek wouldn’t even be fordable. He had stopped the rain, but he couldn’t dry up the route. And night was coming on.

  Did I mention that the owner of the Commercial Hotel at that time was Bob Swain, Doc’s own cousin? No? Well, I thought I had. Maybe I hadn’t even mentioned that Bob was one of the few fellers in Jasper that Doc considered a friend. Anyway, it was no problem for Colvin to take Tenny to the Commercial and ask Bob to keep it quiet. Colvin asked Bob, “Have any of your rooms got four-poster beds in ’em?” Bob said that only the bridal suite did, and it would cost him a bit extra, and Colvin said money didn’t matter. The Commercial was a fairly large white house, two stories, rambling all over creation with porches or verandas upstairs and down hither and yon, and the bridal suite was up on the second floor, with a good view of the main road through town and the mountains to the west. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you that the quilt on the bed was Garden Butterfly, so I won’t, although you must believ
e that it was a Gingham-and-Calico Butterfly, a kind of cousin to the Garden variety. There wasn’t any Victrola to play soft music, but Tenny could hum and sing both, if need be, and in the course of the evening she did. One thing bothered her: there was a toilet in the bridal suite. It was the first indoor running-water toilet Tenny had ever seen, and when Colvin explained to her what it was, she said that was too bad, and would bring other folks running in and out all night, invading their privacy. Colvin convinced her that it was their own personal toilet and nobody else would use it. The first thing they had to do was get out of their soppy clothes, and Colvin borrowed some of Bob Swain’s clothes for himself, and one of Bob’s wife’s dresses for Tenny; it was several sizes too big, but it was a cotton-print dress with orange butterflies all over it. Even in their borrowed clothes, Colvin didn’t think it was a good idea for them to have their supper at the communal tables downstairs with everybody else, so he got Bob’s wife to bring a tray with some supper up to the room. Tenny’s appetite had returned, but she was still coughing. Knowing her as he did, Colvin knew that she could have all the symptoms of bronchitis or even pneumonia—it was a short, dry, unproductive cough, like this one I’ve got—without actually having those diseases, or anything else. He felt her cheek, which was neither hot nor cold, and he took her pulse, which was normal. He asked her routine questions such as what kind of headache she might have, but she didn’t have a headache, she didn’t have a stomachache, she didn’t have any trouble eating or breathing, she didn’t have anything wrong with her except that little cough. He was surprised to find her so asymptomatic, and he wondered what had happened to make her want to stop being ill…or to replace all of her usual symptoms with just that cough. How long had she been on that mountain crag? Had she actually been made to wear a black dress? He wanted her to talk, not simply to tell him what had been happening to her, but because he was still at a loss for words himself, and needed her to do most of the talking.

  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 j
ust 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.