The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  Russ hoped that whatever feeling Tenny still had for Doc Swain would be wiped out by watching this. As for himself, he had all the proof he needed that his mother was dishonest and hateful: she had promised him that she wouldn’t let any other man stick his pecker into her until Russ had a chance to reap his reward for fixing up Tenny with Mulciber, and even though that effort had failed, Venda was going ahead and breaking her promise without even waiting to find out the results of the attempt.

  Now Doc Swain had turned his head and detected that Russ and Tenny were watching, but that didn’t stop him. He just kept on. Russ thought that was funny, and he grinned at the doctor, and the doctor grinned back at him and kept on thrusting beneath the wild bounces of Venda. All those times that Russ had spied on his momma with her lovers, he had never actually seen a simultaneous coming, but now he was watching one, and not only that but the bed was coming apart too, and when it did and they and the mattress crashed to the floor, his mother looked over and saw him and cried, “Russ!” in such a way that he knew she knew that he had been spying on her all those years.

  He was so impressed with the performance that he spontaneously began to applaud, the same way he’d clapped his hands in joy when his mother had brought him a present as a little boy, only it wasn’t joy now, but a kind of sarcastic admiration. Tenny caught the spirit of his applause and did some herself. Then he and she looked at each other, and her eyes said to him, “I’ve done seen enough to make me hate him and her both for the rest of my life,” and his eyes replied to her eyes, “So you and me don’t have nobody in this whole world excepting each other, and we might as well git out of here and go live happy ever after.”

  They got out of there, and rode Marengo straight to the courthouse. It all happened so fast that he couldn’t even remember afterwards if he and Tenny had actually said anything, until they were both standing there saying, “I do,” and then the man said, “I now pernounce y’uns man’n wife and you kids air shore gonna git wet as dogs if you try to go out in that!” and he indicated through the window the growing thunderstorm.

  Now it was drowning geese and strangling toads. He and his bride could only huddle in the doorway of the courthouse and wait for it to stop. “Are you okay?” he thought to ask her.

  “‘Happy is the bride the sun shines on,’” she said.

  “But the sun aint shining,” he observed.

  “And I aint too awful happy,” she said.

  Well, here come Doc Swain in his buggy, acting as if he hadn’t just been caught bare-assed with his red hand in the cookie jar. Now the fool was just sitting there in the deluge, sobby as a dog, and liable to get hit by a thunderbolt any second now. He just sat there with all that water running down his sad wistful face and he didn’t wave howdy or nothing. Tenny just glared at him. Russ didn’t personally have anything against Doc Swain, and still greatly admired him, even though he had once been the chief object of his bride’s affections, and therefore a rival. But Russ had never forgotten how kind Doc Swain had been to him, and how Doc had even offered to excise his extra pecker if necessary, and Russ was beginning to wonder if it might not be necessary.

  “I reckon I’d better have a word with him,” Russ told Tenny.

  “Don’t you dare!” she said. “Just ignore him, and maybe he’ll go away.”

  But Doc did not go away. Even the horse looked miserable. The thunder was slamming back and forth all down the mountainsides, and the wind was blowing the hard rain into the courthouse doorway so that Russ and Tenny were getting wet anyway.

  “Maybe you ought to go have a word with him,” Russ suggested.

  “Huh?” Tenny said indignantly. “Have you taken leave of your senses? I don’t have ary thing to say to him!”

  So they just waited for him to go away or for the rain to go away, but neither Doc nor the rain would leave. It commenced getting on to dark, and they both knew that it was too late to make it back up to Brushy Mountain for the shivaree and infare and all. Russ decided there was nothing to do but go on back to Mulciber’s house for their wedding night. “Let’s make a dash for it!” he said, and they ran out into the rain and hopped on Marengo and headed for Mulciber’s. Russ looked over his shoulder at one point and saw that Doc was following in his buggy, and Russ spurred Marengo to try to outrun him.

  They arrived at Mulciber’s. Russ didn’t know the concept of déjà vu, but he thought there was something awfully familiar about walking in and discovering a naked couple fucking, only in this case it was not the bedroom but the living room, on the sofa. Russ’s Victrola was up as loud as it would go, and Russ’s jazz music was playing, and there was Mulciber a-humping some stranger-lady, who, Russ recognized by her bobbed hair, was the same lady who’d stopped at the blacksmith shop yesterday. Once again Russ and Tenny pulled up some chairs and sat watching, although Russ couldn’t help noticing that this couple weren’t nearly so spectacular as Venda and Doc had been. Nor did they come simultaneously. When they were all done, Russ didn’t feel like applauding. He told them that all in all, he’d seen much better, but they’d done tolerable. Then he told his father that he and Tenny had just gotten theirselves married down at the courthouse. His father and the lady were hastily putting their clothes back on, and his father said the lady’s name was Edna. Although Russ didn’t think that Edna looked very much like a stump fence, Mulciber declared that Edna was “going to stay awhile,” so he’d appreciate it if Russ and Tenny would get lost. “But where can we go?” Russ whined.

  “I was you, I’d jist take her to your mother’s,” Mulciber suggested.

  Russ counted his money. He had once had six quarters, but he’d paid two of them for the marriage license, and two more to the justice of the peace, leaving him with only two, not enough for even a cheap hotel room. Tenny didn’t have a cent. So the only way to avoid sleeping somewheres out in the rain was for them to go on back to his mother’s and throw themselves at her mercy, and maybe if he told her how sorry he was and all, she might even forgive him.

  On the way to Venda’s, they couldn’t help noticing that they were still being followed by Doc in his buggy. Tenny was still determined not to see Venda, but she was tired, and soaked through by the rain, and a bit chilled, and her cough was getting worse, and she told Russ she hoped maybe there was some way she could have a bed at Venda’s without having to face the woman.

  “Wait on the porch while I talk to her,” he told her, and then he boldly stepped into the house to face the music, make the best of a bad job, pay the fiddler, and lay down and roll over. But he could stand up and take it. “Maw,” he said, “I shore am the sorriest feller on airth, and I don’t know how to tell ye this, but I’ve done went and fell in love with Tenny myself, and we’re fresh-married.”

  “Sweetheart, that’s only fair-to-middlin funny,” Venda said. “I’ve had a real hard day, and if you’re trying to cheer me up with some jokes, you laid an egg.”

  “It’s the honest to gosh truth,” he said. “Paw didn’t want her, and she didn’t want him, and I accidental-like drank some of that love potion myself, and then we seen you and Doc a-fuckin like a pair of minks, so we jist skipped on over to the courthouse and got ourselfs hitched.”

  Venda didn’t say anything for a while, but she didn’t get red in the face or clench her fists or start steaming out the ears. Finally she just said, “Go to your room.” He tried to protest, but she made it clear that she was still boss, so he did like he always did when she told him to go to his room. He went to his room. He sat on his bed and put on his baseball glove and slammed his fist into it, and he felt twelve years old. By-and-by, she came into the room and closed the door behind her. First, she asked him a question: “Do you honestly think that I could tolerate my competition as a daughter-in-law?” He figured it was one of those questions that are just said for the sake of making a point, and didn’t have any answer to them, so he didn’t try to make one. Then she asked him another question: “Don’t you think it’s bad enough that I
have to watch Colvin falling for her without watching my own son doing it too?” He decided this was another unanswerable question made for show, so he didn’t try to answer it either. “Do you know what you are?” she asked, and it must’ve been the same kind of question, because she answered it herself: “You’re a motherfucker!” He winced because that was truly an awful word, even though it described exactly what he aspired to be. “You’re not only a motherfucker but a motherkiller, and you’re killing me with what you’ve done!” Her face turned red, her fists clenched, and steam came out of her ears. “Oh Jesus H. Fucking Christ! I guess I didn’t bring you up proper. You never learned to tell right from wrong, or even up from down, and you never learned to obey me! You stupid wretch, I sent you out to ruin Tennessee Tennison, I mean totally wreck her life, I mean make her so miserable that she would be sorry she was ever born, let alone was such a knockout and built like a brick shithouse! I wanted you to dilapidate her to where she’d think she was a corncrib made of corncobs! And what did you do? Not only did you fail to destroy her, you led her down the aisle!”

  “Hit weren’t no aisle,” he protested feebly. “Hit was jist the hallway at the courthouse.” But that cut no ice with his mother, who begin to pick things up and throw them against the walls. “Maw, look at it this way,” he tried to reason with her. “I’ve done went and removed your competition. You don’t need to worry about her stealin Doc’s heart away from you, because now she’s a married woman and Doc has to leave her alone.”

  Venda stopped throwing things against the wall. She stared at Russ in such a way that he realized he’d made a good point. She thought about that, and then she said, “Now, why didn’t I think of that?” It was one more of those questions that don’t have any answers, so he didn’t tell her why she didn’t think of that. Then she finally asked a question that was answerable: “Speakin of whom, jist where is this blushin bride of your’n?”

  “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 believe 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.