The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  Piney had needed a whole day just to pick out her rolls, at forty cents each for those that had words, and thirty cents for the wordless ones. Piney’s selections included “Red Pepper,” a rag; “Woodland Echoes,” a reverie; “Barcarole,” a descriptive piece from The Tales of Hoffman; “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home?”—a jazzy blues number; “Frolic of the Frogs,” a concert waltz; “Nights of Gladness,” a dance waltz; and “Humoreske,” a light classic. All these were wordless. The wordy pieces were: “Arkansas Blues,” a blues piece that sounded familiar to Colvin; “When I’m Gone You’ll Soon Forget,” a ballad; “Tonight You Belong to Me,” a waltz; and the following fox-trots: “All I Want Is You,” “I Wish You Were Jealous of Me,” “Roses of Picardy,” and “Then I’ll Be Happy.” How do I with my imperfect memory recall all these titles? Because I played all of them on Piney’s piano in the days I dwelt in Stay More and, hell, I still know the words of most of ’em, and if you and Mary would excuse me, I’ll see if I can’t still croak one of ’em for you:

  Blues ________ have overtaken me _____________,

  I’m so weary, days are full o’ gloom _____________,

  Homesickness has got me down in mind _________,

  ’Way down in old Arkansas ___________________.

  I know a lot more of “Arkansas Blues” than that, but I’ll interrupt it the same way Colvin interrupted me when I tried to put it on the player piano and sing it “Doc, that was Piney’s roll,” he said, “but it was Tenny’s song, so I’druther you’d play something else, if it’s all the same to you…”

  Piney’s player piano immediately became the sensation of Stay More, and folks would come from all over to loaf around the porch of the Swain Clinic and listen to Piney a-pumpin the pedals and singing the tunes that had words to them, and even the tunes that didn’t have words inspired all the listeners to make up their own lyrics. The Stay Morons invented a dozen different versions of the lyrics to “Red Pepper Rag,” and they even concocted a respectable chorus for that concert waltz, “Frolic of the Frogs,” as well as a four-part contrapuntal harmony for “Barcarole.” But everybody’s favorite was “Roses of Picardy,” even though nobody had the least notion where Picardy was, and Colvin himself, who never could sing worth a damn, usually joined in when there were a hundred people out in front of his house crooning about the hush of the silvery dew and there’s never a rose like you.

  Of course the problem with all of this music was that it made everybody neglect the old-time folk songs and ballits that had been family heirlooms all the way back to the seventeenth century in old England and Scotch Ireland. When I was collecting the thousand titles for my four-volume Ozark Folksongs, published in the late forties, I had the devil’s own time culling out the new stuff from the old, because so much of the repertoire of the best old singers and pluckers had been “contaminated” by what they’d learned from their Victrolas and from piano rolls.

  But the Jazz Age was creeping into the Ozarks, and there was no stopping it. When the Newton County Academy opened its doors for the fall semester of its second year, Colvin immediately noticed that the dresses of many of the girls had hemlines scarcely below the knee, and some of them had painted faces (although for the first day only, because a strict N.C.A. rule would forbid the use of rouge and lipstick), and nearly all of the girls had cut their hair short, and were wearing it in what was called “bobs.” He held his breath, waiting to see if Tenny might’ve cut short her waist-length hair.

  But he couldn’t find Tenny. She wasn’t in the dormitory. He accosted Thelma Villines, the housekeeper, who only said, accusingly, “Didn’t you never know that married gals aint allowed to live in the dormitory?”

  He went to Jossie’s office. The principal laughed and said, “I heard all about how you eloped with Tenny on her wedding night!”

  Colvin recalled, much belatedly, that Jossie and Venda were practically best friends. “Where is she?” he asked.

  “Well, as you should have known,” Jossie said, “married girls are not allowed to live in the dormitories, and we had to evict her. She had nowhere to go. Her husband and her mother-in-law very graciously gave her a place to live in Jasper.”

  Colvin was greatly chagrined at the thought. “But she’s coming back to school?” he asked.

  “We shall have to see,” Jossie said.

  This was an October Friday, his school day changed from Monday of the previous year because the basketball teams would be playing their games on Friday afternoons. He had also promised Piney that he would not be traveling to Parthenon extra days each week if it could be avoided. So each Friday he would receive and examine pupil-patients in his office, teach a class in psychology, and coach basketball, a full day that would leave him, he had been hoping, a few moments in the company of his hopeless but not impossible love. Just as he had done on the first day of the semester the October before, he spent the morning examining everybody, faculty and students alike, for evaluative diagnosis, and finding the usual gamut of maladies, malformations, malnutrition, malignancies, and malaise, as well as malingering. It was more time-consuming this year because the student enrollment had increased by forty, to 184, and that was forty more smallpox vaccinations to give.

  Doing the faculty first, he was surprised to find a friendly Venda eager to see him and be examined. Venda was the proud new owner of a Ford automobile, and drew Colvin to the window to look out at the parking lot, where it sat right alongside another Ford owned by Tim James, the new Bible and science teacher who had taken Colvin’s hygiene class. Colvin didn’t understand how these people could afford to buy autos on the trifling salaries they earned, but he supposed they didn’t spend their money on things like player pianos. Venda didn’t have any complaints, but she took her dress off anyway just to see if it might give Colvin any sort of reaction. He was trying hard to remain professional on Doctor’s Day, and he kept his clipboard covering the rising in his pants. Venda said one reason she got the auto was because there wasn’t room on Marengo for all three of them, and Tenny had usurped her position on Russ’s horse if not on his heart.

  “Where is she?” Colvin asked.

  “Oh, I reckon she’ll be coming in to see you for her checkup like everbody else,” Venda said. “Anyhow, she can tell you that we’ve been good to her. She has done what she was told, and has been real handy around the house. And you may not believe this, but I really truly have been giving her voice lessons, although her voice aint in none too good a shape, with this sore throat she’s got and her cough that won’t never go away.”

  Before leaving his office, Venda took Colvin’s chin in her fingertips to get his full attention while she declared, “I hope you won’t let that gal come between us this year.”

  One of the first pupils waiting to see Colvin was Tenny’s husband. Like his mother, he surprised Colvin by being friendly. Russ announced to Colvin that he intended to “go out for” the basketball team, and he hoped that “Coach,” as he would now begin to call the man who was also “Doc,” “Teacher,” and “Wife’s Lover,” would find a place for him on the team. But also he was thinking about signing up for Psychology. Could Teacher tell him anything about what the subject involved? “Is psychology anything like apology?” Russ wondered.

  “Well, I reckon you could say so,” Colvin allowed. “We’ll study regrets. We’ll study why we feel the way we do, and why we think the way we do, and maybe even why we do what we do. How’s your wife?”

  “Oh, she caint complain,” Russ said. “That cough of hers comes and goes, and she’s kinder moody most of the time, but she caint really complain, so she don’t.” Russ explained that Tenny at the moment was over visiting her friend Zarky in the dormitory but would probably be coming in to see Doc Swain pretty soon. Then Russ said a strange thing. “Coach, there aint no use pretendin that you aint still the only feller in this world that Tenny cares about. She don’t hardly talk about nothin else, and I reckon I ought to be jealous but there don’t seem to be nothin
I could do about it. Except maybe…do you recollect you once offered to hack off my extry pecker for me? I’ve wondered a lot if she would like me more if I had only one of ’em.”

  Awkwardly Colvin tried to determine if the diphallic condition rendered intercourse difficult or impossible, but Russ blushed and hemmed and hawed and managed to say only that “We aint been able to work out a good fit.” And then he said, “Heck, Doc, I don’t need the extry one. Will you slice it off for me? Of course, I don’t mean right now, but sometime soon?”

  “Let me think about it some,” Colvin requested, and pointed out that he had no experience with that particular operation and would have to study up on it.

  Strange to relate, not very long after Russ had left, Colvin had a visit from one of the forty new students, a pretty girl named Oona Owens, whose file indicated that she had come from a remote village in Madison County to the west. When Colvin asked his conventional opening question, “Has anything been a-troublin ye?” Oona giggled and declared:

  “I aint never been to a doctor afore.”

  “Don’t be bashful,” he said. “Jist let me check a few things. If you’ll open wide and say ‘Ah’…” Colvin put a tongue depressor into her mouth and looked around, and then he stuck an otoscope into each of her ears, and a nasoscope into each nostril. Apart from slight adenoids, her head was negative. She giggled again when he stethoscoped her chest, and also when he hit her knees with his reflex hammer. He performed all his little tests, but she didn’t seem to have anything wrong with her except for the adenoids. “You’re okay,” he said. “I’ll see you in Psych class.”

  “But Doc,” she said, “there’s one little thing a-troublin me. I caint show it to ye, though.”

  “Well, can you tell me where it’s at?”

  She quickly touched her crotch and instantly drew her hand away. “Down here,” she said. “My pu***…,” her voice fell to a whisper.

  “Is it itchy? Have you got a rash or sores or anything on it?” he asked.

  “Nope, nothing like that. Only there’s two of ’em.”

  Colvin studied her, and kept his face impassively benign. Then he said that of course he couldn’t tell for sure without examining her but it sounded as if she had what was known as duplex vagina, which, although it was exceptional, quite rare in fact, didn’t mean she was a freak or anything, and there was nothing to be ashamed of. Colvin told her of some other known cases of duplex vaginae in faraway places like Rhode Island and North Dakota, and that while offhand he didn’t know of another case of it in Arkansas, there was bound to be a few he didn’t know about. He said he hoped that after she got to know him better, as her teacher for Psychology as well as the school physician, she might feel comfortable enough to permit him to have a look and determine if she had a true duplex vagina, that is, two of them, or only a septate vagina, that is, one of them with a kind of partition dividing it into two parts. The latter condition was fairly common, and even more common was the condition of having a double uterus. Colvin felt it was premature to discuss with her her sexual life, if any, or the possibility that when she became a mother she might have to have a Caesarean, so he did not mention these things. He simply said, “I’m right sorry there aint nothin I could do to help your condition.” Except, he said to himself, introduce ye to a feller who’s probably dyin to meet ye,

  “I aint worried,” Oona said. “They don’t pain me none. But will they keep me from being on the basketball team?”

  “Only in the sense that they mean you’re a female, and the basketball team is for males.”

  “Huh?” she said. “But there’s a girls’ team too, aint they?”

  Sure enough, he discovered after checking with Jossie Conklin on the matter, there were going to be teams for both boys and girls, and he was expected to coach both. “I thought you knew that,” Jossie said. While he was at it, he asked Jossie, since she was supposedly a math expert or at least the math teacher, to calculate the odds against a person with X condition, one out of five million, being found in the same place and same time as a person with Y condition, one of three million. Jossie did a lot of figuring, and even used her adding machine, but finally announced that the odds were incalculable. In other words, it was impossible.

  It was almost time for noon dinner before Tenny finally came to see him. He was thrilled to see that she had not cut her hair, nor was she wearing face paint, and her dress, which obviously was a cast-off of Venda’s, still came down to her ankles. She seemed kind of pale, though, and thin. “Tenny!” he said.

  “Colvin!” she said, closing the door behind her, then she leapt into his arms. “I’ve missed ye so!” They had a long kiss, and she commenced rubbing her body all over his, especially in the areas where the legs end, then she tried to pull him down to the sofa. He resisted, protesting that there were other students outside the door waiting for his attention. “I’m a-perishin for ye!” she exclaimed. “I’ve got to have you inside me, right now!”

  “But Tenny,” he said. That was all he knew to say, which perhaps was enough, the way he said it, to try to let her know that although he himself had an enormous erection at this moment which he would dearly enjoy sliding into her, they were going to have to learn restraint and discretion and patience if they were successfully to manage their romance. “Later maybe we can steal a moment,” he tried to console her, “but right now all I’m supposed to do is examine ye. Has anything been a-troublin ye?” He automatically asked his routine question, then said, “I wish we could talk for hours, but this is a real busy day for me. So why don’t ye jist talk and tell me everything while I do an examination on ye?”

  So Tenny talked constantly while he gave her as thorough a physical examination as his instruments would permit. She said she had nothing whatever wrong with her. He found that hard to swallow in view of her long-standing hypochondria. She said that she was so happy that school was starting up again, so she would not only get to see Colvin in his office, like now, but also she was going to take Psychology! “Do ye think I’d have any aptitude for that subject?” she asked.

  “Tenny, the subject of psychology ort to have been named after you,” he said truthfully, not meaning to imply that there was anything wrong with her mental processes or her motives or her behavior.

  She was also going to “go out” for the girls’ basketball team, so she could be with Colvin during even more of the precious Fridays, and she hoped that when they took long trips to the places where they would play games against distant teams, she could ride beside him in whatever conveyance was used. Possibly even, if any of those games involved going to other towns that could not be returned from in the same day, and they had to spend the night, they might even contrive some way to spend the whole night together, ever now and then, because she had thought about this quite a lot with both her heart and her head as well as her twitchet, and she had decided that they were going to have to find a way to hook up their sexual links not just once but many, many times repeatedly in the same night…or day, or whenever. “Remember,” she said, “‘we have got to find a way.’ That’s our motto.” It might even be possible for them to sneak off sometimes to Venda’s house in Jasper, when Venda and Russ were at the school. Yes, Tenny was doing all right, living at Venda’s house. At least she didn’t mind it too much. It was a roof over her head. From the beginning, Tenny had been required to do most of the cooking and housecleaning, but she didn’t mind. One of the first big jobs Venda had given her involved sorting and straightening the pantry. Venda’s pantry had been a terrible mess, everything all jumbled together as if any time Venda had been to the store she had just thrown her groceries all of a heap into the pantry. There were bags of dried beans that had got all mixed up with bags of dried corn, and Tenny had been required practically to sort all those seeds, one by one, and it had taken forever, and the only thing that preserved her sanity was the memory of the time she had watched a bunch of ants carrying little grains of sand diligently and patiently to build
their ant heap, and she had sought to do her sorting with the same mindless persistence. Tenny wondered if Venda had just given her such a tough job in an effort to part her from her senses, and, having failed, had given her the next tough job, which involved…But Tenny understood that Colvin had other students waiting for their medical examinations, and she had better save the rest of the story for later.

  Colvin was greatly disturbed. Not over the tasks that Venda had been giving Tenny, although that was disturbing enough. What was more disturbing, for now, was what his examination of Tenny revealed. At first, he couldn’t believe it, because he’d so thoroughly examined Tenny in the past without ever finding anything whatever wrong with her that it was hard now to accept that there might actually be something wrong with her. He wondered at the irony of the transposition: as long as she was a chronic complaining hypochondriac, she was safe, invulnerable, and absolutely healthy; but once she abandoned her hypochondria and claimed to be “just fine,” she was actually sick. His hand on her chest detected fremitus. His stethoscope found a vesicular murmur. Her pulse was rapid. Her skin was not dry, but clammy, beaded with sweat as it had been that morning in the Commercial Hotel. He asked her to cough, and collected on the end of a tongue depressor an expectoration that was greenish, muco-purulent. He debated with himself whether to tell Tenny of his suspicions, and decided against it “Tenny,” he said, “I’ll see you in Psych class, and again at Basketball, but right after that I’d like you to come back here to my office for just a minute so I can give you another test.”

  “Could we take more than just a minute?” she asked. “Couldn’t we take long enough to see if that sofa is good for anything besides lying on with lollipops?”

  He laughed, as if that might dispel his anxiety. “We’ll see,” he said, and kissed her again and sent her on her way, asking her to take it easy.

  Then he visited Jossie’s office yet again and inquired into the possibility of having a student-messenger with a horse ride into Jasper and pick up some stuff at Arbaugh’s Rexall, and he wrote and signed and sealed into an envelope a note from his prescription pad to R.C. Arbaugh, requesting a vial of tuberculin. The note said that just in case they were out of stock, kindly send somebody to Harrison to get it right away, and hang the expense.