The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  Colvin’s class had to get away on along to Chapter 35, Reproduction, the last chapter in the book, the last week of school, before Tenny learned the name for that monthly message and learned that all girls get it and it didn’t come from ’See. That was in the springtime, the middle of May, and Tenny had already passed her sixteenth birthday, the age at which her parents had told her she would get married. She had not met anyone she would want to marry, except Colvin Swain, and he was already married, and she was trying to decide how she would be able to tell her parents that she was not going to get married, because all she wanted to do with her life was to long for a man who was already married. But then when she got to page 622 and the explanation of what the book called “the monthly sickness,” she grew angry at Colvin for the very first time. Despite her devotion to him (or because of it), she couldn’t understand why he hadn’t troubled himself to correct her ignorance when she was a-laying there licking lollipops on his lounge. She must have already consumed a couple dozen of those suckers (in fact, Colvin had told the storekeeper to order him a box of them, and there had been twenty-four to the box). So the next time she stretched out on Colvin’s lounge, she refused the final sucker, saying, “My teeth are going to rot plumb out from eating them things.” And she added irritably, “And you don’t know yore ass from yore elbow about dentistry, do ye?” And then on top of that she said, “And apparently you don’t even know enough about menstruation to tell me I’m wrong when I’m a-layin here spillin my guts about me and ’See.” She let that sink in, and waited for his apology or whatever he had to say for himself.

  Colvin was abashed. Dear Tenny had never been cross with him before, and he wasn’t sure he deserved it. The school year was at an end now, and he might not see her again, because he’d decided not to return for another year to Newton County Academy. He didn’t need the salary. Ever since the previous autumn, when his people of Stay More had abandoned the dream cure and returned to the good old ways of being treated in the flesh by him and Doc Plowright, he hadn’t really needed the piddling pay that N.C.A. was doling out to him, although Jossie Conklin had offered him a raise to thirty dollars a month for the next school year, and thirty-five if he could see his way to coaching basketball. He didn’t want it, and only two things had kept him from quitting before Christmas: he wanted to help Tenny, if he could, and he believed that anything you start you ought to finish. Well, he could never finish helping Tenny. He’d read Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, all the thousand pages of it, and even reread the parts on the cure of hypochondriacal melancholy several times, but he hadn’t really learned anything about curing Tenny, who, despite sometimes thrice-weekly sessions on the lounge with lollipops, remained just as hypochondriacal or hypowhateverall as she had ever been. When they had taken up Chapter 13, The Receptor System, she had been so impressed by the section on Pain that she had developed analgesia, loss of the power to feel pain (which had at least alleviated her headaches for a whole week). After Chapter 14, The Ear, she had become deaf, not responding to his tuning forks or voice and not hearing the class discussion of Taste and Smell, which had kept her from losing the sense of either. Colvin had dreaded Chapters 15 and 16 on The Eye, but had arranged with Tenny’s classmate and only friend, Ozarkia Emmons, to spend a week serving as a kind of seeing-eye dog for Tenny, who had of course been excused from kitchen duty until she could again see the dishes. Colvin had decided to skip entirely Chapter 20, on the Action of the Heart, because he didn’t want Tenny to acquire any of the symptoms of cardiac disease. It bothered his conscience, cutting out the heart, and Tenny had even asked him about it, “Why did you ignore the heart?” and he’d tried to explain that it was a very tricky subject, and the heart has things about it that we can’t know, by heart. Ever once in a while, Tenny would say, “You left out my heart,” and they both knew what she really meant. The day he ought to have taken up the heart was her sixteenth birthday, the beginning of the year in which she would get married. Colvin had a form of heart disease himself, which made him give her on her birthday a golden ring set with an amethyst, not because it was her birthstone (it was) but because it was her favorite color. The ring was the first jewelry she ever owned, but she had to tell her friend Zarky and anyone else who asked that it had come from her rich older sister Oriole who lived in a big city. Colvin tried to cure his heart disease by rereading what old Burton wrote in the chapters on “Love-Melancholy.” But Burton hadn’t been able to do any more for Colvin’s love-melancholy than he had done for Tenny’s hypochondria. There might not be any cure for it. Colvin had realized it might become incurable when he had learned that Tenny’s childhood had been so much like his own: because they had both been reared in such solitude they had a special bond of lonesomeness that would always draw them to each other. On that day in February, with the very first signs of the coming of springtime, when he’d left from home with that amethyst ring in his pocket, Piney, who still knew everything, had asked him why he had got into the habit of going up to Parthenon on Wednesdays and Fridays also if he was only supposed to work on Mondays, and quite possibly she had not accepted his explanation that the students at N.C.A. were having the usual run of late-winter ailments that needed his increased attention. The painful truth was, Colvin still loved Piney. With all his heart, I was about to say, but then I remembered that he had omitted the heart, and I also remembered the sad thing about the old-time Ozark use of that word, “love,” that I’ve already told you, as if you hadn’t already found it out in your own life in the Ozarks: the word itself was considered indecent, so that if a hillman ever did admit that he loved a woman, he meant only that he petted her or screwed her. Piney, knowing everything, knew the word in all its meanings, and knew it in its sense of deep-down devotion as well as desire, and she loved Colvin in that sense even if she never told him so. And he fully reciprocated the feeling, even if he never told her so. Tenny hadn’t known the word. It had never once been used in the house where she grew up. The first she ever heard of it was when Ozarkia Emmons, her seeing-eye dog during that spell of blindness, smuggled a copy of True-Story magazine into the dormitory, where such trash was strictly forbidden. Zarky was the only girl who was friendly with Tenny and didn’t seem to hate her for her good looks and intelligence, even if she hadn’t been appointed by Dr. Swain as Tenny’s seeing-eye dog. Tenny’s and Zarky’s beds in the dormitory were side by side and when somehow Zarky got ahold of a copy of that lurid confessional magazine, she read parts of it aloud in a whisper to poor blind Tenny, who thereby learned about something called “love,” a disease which is supposed to attack you during your adolescence and possibly continue for the rest of your life. Love is such an awesome disease it wasn’t even mentioned in the hygiene textbook. As a connoisseur of diseases, Tenny was totally captivated. Love might or might not give you hot flashes and heart irregularities, but it definitely affects your brain and your whole nervous system. It makes you pick out another person and focus all your attention on that person, pretty much in the same way that Tenny had once focused all her attention on ’See. But ’See had been a girl, and love is supposed to make you want to spend every minute you can steal with a member of the opposite sex. Tenny supposed that perhaps this could have applied to her feeling for Grampaw, except she could not honestly remember ever wanting to get into bed with Grampaw, which is what you have to do. She had spent many hours beside Grampaw’s bed but never in it. Zarky had actually spent a whole night in the bed of one of her uncles, and while she was too bashful to give Tenny all the details, she made the experience sound wonderful. “More fun than sending off a big order to Sears Roebuck,” Zarky said. Tenny asked if the uncle had brought her a mess of babyberries. “Baby berries, you say?” Zarky said. “Well, if they was any babyberries, he poured so much cream over ’em I couldn’t see ’em.”

  But what Zarky had had with her uncle could not have been this thing called “love,” because the essential characteristic of love is not what you do with your bodies but rath
er what you do with your ears and voice, parts of the anatomy that Tenny was now an authority on, having spent countless hours on Colvin’s lounge talking to him, and having finished the chapter on ears in her textbook at the cost of her hearing, now returned although she was blind. Love is blind, Tenny learned, but it sure aint deaf nor dumb, because the main part of love is feeling as if you could say anything that pops into your head to that other person of the opposite sex, and that opposite-sex person would hear every word you said and even tell you in return some of anything that popped into his head.

  The only person that Tenny had ever felt this way about was her doctor. Learning all about “love” from Zarky and her copy of True-Story, Tenny realized with a shock of recognition that these were exactly the feelings she had for Doc Swain, even though he was twenty years older than her, and married, and a teacher, and everybody knew that teachers weren’t allowed to “flirt” with students, and vice versa. Students could flirt with each other, and teachers could flirt with teachers, and in fact Mrs. Venda Breedlove was flirting something awful with Doc Swain. An essential lesson of True-Story is that love between two persons married to somebody else is very dangerous. It always ends in heartbreak, suicide, disaster, or gunshot wounds from jealous spouses. So Tenny knew that her great overwhelming passion for Doc Swain was hopeless, because he had a wife, and Tenny didn’t understand why Mrs. Breedlove didn’t leave him alone on account of it, especially since she had a husband herself, even though there was a rumor going around that Mrs. Breedlove no longer lived with her husband but had her own house in Jasper, right off the square, where she lived with her boy, Russ, who was one of the boys who rode a horse to school; he had a big white stallion he called Marengo, and each day he brought his mother to school riding sidesaddle in front of him. Supposedly Russ had to take Marengo and spend weekends living with his father and helping him in his blacksmith shop on the other side of Jasper. Zarky thought that Russ was awfully “cute,” a word that Tenny was slow in learning because she associated it with “acute” in reference to diseases which are sudden and intense. Perhaps Zarky had a crush on Russ which was sudden and intense, but the way she and other girls used that word “cute” was as if it had something to do with looks, and there was no denying that Russ was the sightliest-looking boy at Newton County Academy, understandable in view of how pretty his momma was, and especially when Russ was mounted on Marengo with or without her. Tenny had Mrs. Breedlove for music twice a week and also Mrs. Breedlove was in charge of the Glee Club, which was an organization of students who were supposed to be devoted to merriment or joy but mostly just stood in rows trying to sing the school’s song:

  There’s a school of learning

  There our hearts are yearning;

  N.C.A. we love thee.

  To thine ideals guide us

  Lofty aims supply us.

  In life’s joys and sorrows

  O’er land and waters,

  Thy sons and daughters,

  We will e’er to thee be true.

  Although Tenny was the only member of the Glee Club who could sing all the words without forgetting one or making a mistake, she wasn’t sure she could honestly say she loved N.C.A., because N.C.A. was not a member of the opposite sex to whom she could say absolutely anything that popped into her head, the way she could talk to Doc Swain. Whenever she sang the song, she always substituted “Colvin Swain” for “N.C.A.,” same number of syllables and nobody noticed if everybody was singing.

  There was one final thing she knew about love, and that is this: it always gets bigger. Sometimes like a little tree sapling, it may start out just as a seed, but it keeps on growing, and it never stops growing until it dies and goes to that Other Place where we don’t have to breathe, nor eat, nor use the privy. Tenny was bothered by the thought that she could not say everything to Colvin that popped into her head, but she was confident that if love grows, then someday she would be able to say everything, including this, “Colvin Swain, I love thee.”

  But she had told him her whole life’s story, had told him things she would never have mentioned to Grampaw, and had told him her deepest, darkest secret, about ’See, and about ’See’s monthly message in red, and Colvin had just sat there with a pleasant smile on his face, saying, “That shore is real purty” and “How did that make you feel?” And then now at the end of the school term, by coincidence right at the time of a message from ’See, Tenny had read that textbook’s shocking last chapter, Reproduction, and had learned about menstruation. Most of the chapter was just dull stuff about cell division and maturation of germ cells and heredity and chromosomes, but then all of a sudden there it was, a section on the Male Reproductive Organs with all kinds of stuff on vas deferens and vesiculae seminales and spermatozoa, and penis. Especially penis. She realized she had read the entire section of three paragraphs on the penis without once taking a breath, not once. Erectile tissue, enclosing cavities that filled with blood! Corpora cavernosa, two of those caves along the penis’s topside, that swell with blood! Corpus spongiosum, that surrounds the pee-tube and culminates in the glans, a “terminal dilation,” sort of like a mushroom, covered with a prepuce, soft, moist, red, to the meatus, the opening of the pee-tube, where some other stuff also comes out. The book didn’t say a single blessed word about either a practical reason nor a pretty reason for all of that apparatus, except something about the spinal cord being the center of reflex excitation associated with sexual emotions. Since the book had already made quite clear that we experience emotions not in our heart or soul or guts or anywhere except our brain, Tenny wasn’t sure how the spinal cord could be the center of sexual emotions, whatever those were, and she couldn’t wait for the class to take up that chapter. She would ask Colvin in private, with or without a lollipop. But before she got a chance to see him again, she kept on reading, into the Reproductive Organs of the Female. Just as she suspected, girls are much more complicated than boys. The only illustration in the portion on the male was a cross-section of a testis that made it look like a slice of lemon, but the female portion had a bunch of pictures, including a poor girl’s whole cut-away bottom end with all those tunnels and tubes and cavities up in there. Tenny had no idea that she was so deep, and in three different places down there, one for pee, one for shit, and one for…blood? She couldn’t be sure what the middle tunnel was for, squoze betwixt the other two but running way up to a big-mouthed critter labeled uterus. She kept on reading, and was amazed to discover that women make eggs just like chickens, only they don’t lay them or sit on them to hatch them, but hatch them up inside.

  And then, the section with that big word, menstruation, and the explanation of ’See’s message. Tenny reddened as she read, not from embarrassment but from anger and also perhaps because she was menstruating at the moment, and she came across this: “During menstruation there is apt to be more or less general discomfort and nervous irritability; the woman is not quite herself, and those responsible for her happiness ought to watch and tend her with special solicitude, forbearance, and tenderness, and protect her from anxiety and agitation.” Tenny felt kind of cheated, thinking of all the wasted opportunities she might have had for solicitude, forbearance, and tenderness if only she had told her mother or grandmother about the message from ’See.

  She also realized that it was her menstrual discomfort and nervous irritability which made her snap at Colvin, “And apparently you don’t even know enough about menstruation to tell me I’m wrong when I’m a-layin here spillin my guts about me and ’See.”

  Colvin realized it too, and once he had thought the matter over, he asked her, “Are you getting the message right now?”

  It didn’t take her long to figure out what he meant, and she confessed, “As a matter of fact, yes, I am. Started yesterday.”

  “Didn’t your folks ever use words like ‘courses’ or ‘flowers’ or ‘monthlies’?” he asked. Tenny shook her head. “‘On the rag’? ‘Unwell’? ‘Period’?” Tenny shook her head. “‘Flying th
e red flag’? ‘Falling off the roof’? ‘Coming around’?” Tenny shook her head. “Well,” Colvin tried one more, “surely you’ve heard of ‘having a friend’?”

  “I never had no friends except Grampaw and you,” she said.

  “And ’See,” he reminded her. “Don’t you see? Maybe that there’s the purty reason for the menstruation, and I wanted to hear ye draw me a pitcher of it. The reason I never interrupted ye to set ye straight was because I thought the idee of ’See as a kind of soul who has gone to that Other Place but sends you a monthly message is a much nicer explanation of catamenia than anything us doctors could come up with. Or that textbook, either.”

  “But what about ‘babyberries’?” she asked. “What about my stupid idee that babies are born from the mouth? How come ye never set me straight on none of them other dumb notions?”

  “I jist wanted to git to know ye,” he said, and then he went a little farther than that. “I jist wanted a glimpse of your soul.”

  “Why me and none of them other kids?” she wanted to know. “Maybe they’ve got some purty dumb notions too. But you don’t spend any of yore time with them. I think Zarky suspicions that this purty ring came from you, and Zarky says there’s a lot of talk going around that you are giving me private lessons in ‘reproductive behavior.’ I wasn’t sure what she meant. Don’t ye dare laugh, but until I read it in the book, I never heard of a pennus!”

  Colvin blushed, but he corrected her pronunciation. “That’s ‘pee-nis.’ Why do you think the textbook kept puttin off that chapter, till the very end? Since all the rest of the body is the result of what happens to it after it’s been conceived by the coming together of the male and female, you’d think that chapter on Reproduction ought to come first instead of last, wouldn’t ye? Why do you think they held off so long?”