The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  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 ask
ed, “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.

  One of the awfullest things about Grampaw’s leaving was that Tenny would never get any answers to the many questions she’d asked him which he’d responded to by saying, “I reckon we’ll jist have to wait until you’re older before I can properly answer that fer ye.” Now here she was, much older, but Grampaw was gone. If the McArtors and the Tennisons had always been oversolicitous for Tenny’s health and well-being, they were even more overprotective when it came to shielding her from all the “nastiness” that exists in this world, and she remained ignorant of all things that were considered indecent or foul. They were determined that she remain “pure” until the age of sixteen, when she could get married. Her grandmother Tennessee had married at fourteen, and her mother, Jonette, had married at fifteen, but they were determined to keep Tenny “innocent” until she was sixteen, even if folks talked about her becoming a spinster at that age.

  Not only did they not give her any sort of teaching that could’ve been remotely called “sex education,” but they did their level best to keep her from ever finding out that there is any such thing as sex. Any kid growing up on a farm is bound to see some evidence of Nature’s way of propagating the various species, such as a bull mounting a cow, or a boar giving it to a sow, or a stallion with a yard-long pecker trying to stuff it into a mare. But not Tenny. Her folks were not only very careful to use all those old euphemisms, like calling a bull a surly or a male-cow, and calling a boar a stag-hog, but they also were careful never to use even euphemisms if the connotation was sexual; for example, they couldn’t even mention rhubarb or okra or horn or goober or even tool because of the suggestion of a penis, an item of the anatomy which they were determined to conceal entirely from Tenny’s knowledge. Whenever the various male farm animals were displaying their penises in preparation for “service,” Tenny would be kept inside the house with the curtains drawn. There was an old dog on the premises who had the habit of sticking his pecker out of its sheath so he could take a lick of it, but Jonette sewed a pair of pants for him to wear whenever Tenny was around.

  Tenny did not know there was such a thing as the male organ until she was nine years old. Her folks were careful not to let her play with boys, for fear she’d find out, and they weren’t happy about her playing with girls, for fear some girl would tell her. So she’d mostly had just ’See for companionship and Grampaw ’til he went away, and ’See didn’t know anything more about penises than Tenny did, and Grampaw never could bring himself to say. When she was nine years old, her mother took her visiting a cousin who had recently had a baby. Babies, she knew from asking her grandmother, were born from women’s mouths after being carried in their stomachs for three seasons. Both her grandmother and her mother agreed that women have to puke the baby out through their mouths (Tenny had spent many hours with her mirror studying her mouth and ’See’s mouth and trying to make it open up enough to expel a baby), but her grandmother and mother disagreed on how the baby got into the woman’s stomach in the first place, the grandmother insisting that a woman had to have a husband who could journey deep into the woods to find and bring home a mess of babyberries for the woman to eat, while the mother knew that all the woman had to do was drink enough Wine of Cardui (20? alcohol) so that she was relaxed sufficiently to permit her husband to feed her some babyberries, which were hard to swallow. Tenny would just have to wait until she was sixteen and got married and could find out. Anyway, this cousin had recently puked up her baby, and was about to change its diaper, and before Jonette could stop her daughter from getting a good look, Tenny observed that the baby had some kind of growth between its legs. Too polite to call attention to it on the spot, Tenny waited until she was alone with her mother to ask about it. Her mother explained that it was a large wart. All boy babies have those big warts, Tenny was told, which was God’s punishment on them for being descended from Adam, the first male, who was disobedient and smart-alecky and tough, which boys have been ever since. The warts could never be removed or healed; they just kept on getting bigger and bigger.

  When Tenny was eleven, she happened to come across a seven-year-old neighbor boy who was standing in the path heeding nature’s call, and she noticed that he was making water through his wart! He was even holding on to it! She drew nigh for a closer look. “Does it hurt, at all?” she asked him, because she had never had any kind of wart, not even a mole, nor boil, nor even a blister. She had seventeen freckles, was all.

  “What hurt?” he said, ceasing his tinkling.

  “Yore wart,” she said, and pointed.

  The boy laughed. “This aint no wart, you silly,” he said. “This here’s my doodle and when I git growed up I’ll be able to stick it in ye.” He gave it a shake and pointed it at her. “Wouldje like to feel of it?” She reached out gingerly and touched it. It began to swell, and she backed away, wondering if she’d caused it some strut by touching it. But he held it proudly as it plumped, and told her, “Girls don’t git doodles. Too bad. Do ye want to show me where ye aint got nary un?”

  When she showed him, he said, “See!” as if calling to her doll-self although she knew he wasn’t. Then he said, “Well, that’s jist what ye git for bean a gal. Nothing but a cut.”

  Not very long afterwards, her cut began to bleed. She thought it was ’See signaling again, ’See sending out her favorite color to let Tenny know that she was away up in there doing something, she didn’t know what. This blood had a kind of tinge of purple, which was Tenny’s favorite color, not ’See’s. Tenny hoped it didn’t mean that she had consumption like Grampaw, but maybe it did. She wanted to be able to ask someone, but she
couldn’t. If she had a stomachache or a bad headache, she wouldn’t feel the least hesitation about telling her mother or her grandmother about it, so they would comfort her if not cure her, but somehow she felt that this profuse bleeding from her cut was just a personal matter between her and ’See, not to be shared with anybody. After five days, the bleeding stopped, and Tenny waited to feel ’See returned to the world of watching sunsets, but ’See did not return. Tenny began to think that all of that bleeding was ’See’s way of saying good-bye, as Grampaw had said good-bye. She decided that ’See had gone to that Other Place where Grampaw had gone, and although people who had not yet gone there still called it by the ugly name, Death, Tenny knew that ’See was not dead but just roaming in that Place where Grampaw was. Tenny was very sad and lonely to lose her only companion, but she was happy for ’See, that ’See had escaped this terrible world where everybody has to breathe constantly, and eat all the time, and take many, many shits.

  But while Tenny never heard from Grampaw again, every month Tenny got a message from ’See, and Tenny knew it was from ’See because it was in ’See’s favorite color, addressed to Tenny in a tinge of Tenny’s favorite color.