She not only stays in school, but, typically, excels in all her classes. In Colvin’s course in psychology—and, for the most part, he has straightened out the difference between Psychology and Basketball—Tenny is always the first among the hundred or so filling the auditorium to raise her hand with answers to his questions about Reflex, Instinct, or Sensation, and, more importantly, to ask pertinent questions about things he has overlooked or never even considered.
Despite his first-day error, or because of it, the Psychology class continues to refer to themselves as the Newts, and to talk about winning, and to think of themselves as a team who are out to beat the world by developing superior reflexes, instincts, and sensations.
Principal Jossie Conklin summons him to her office one day. She begins by saying how much she has been enjoying the Psychology class, and how she has learned so much in the class about Expression that she has had an easy time of approaching the new man, Tim James (Bible and Hygiene), and revealing to him her attraction to him, which he has reciprocated, even to the extent of—with some suggestions from her best friend, Venda Breedlove—the development of episodes of quite intimate contact between them. But, and this is the main reason she wants to talk to Colvin, Jossie has inadvertently discovered that Colvin is “keeping” Mrs. Tennessee Breedlove in his office, perhaps for purposes of gratification of the flesh. What happened was, Jossie had observed Tenny letting herself into Colvin’s office on a day when Colvin was not there nor supposed to be there. After a while, Jossie had let herself into the office with her master key and discovered Tenny sound asleep on Colvin’s sofa. Rather than wake her and ask for an explanation, Jossie had decided to keep a close watch and see what was going on, and, on another occasion, when Colvin was there and was supposed to be there, she quietly unlocked his door and peeked in to discover that he was doing something he was not supposed to be doing: he was atop Tennessee with his trousers down. Jossie had been quickly able to determine, from Tennessee’s own behavior and sounds, that the student was not being taken advantage of, in fact was a willing, eager, even joyous participant in the proceedings. Indeed, Jossie has to confess, she had even learned a thing or two, by watching, about the possibility of the female’s taking a less than passive role in the exchange, contrary to what she had been taught or had assumed and had followed in her relations with Tim James. Nevertheless, in any event, be that as it may, for having said all that, Jossie feels constrained to demand, “What in hell is going on?”
“Tenny and me are crazy about each other,” Colvin confesses.
“Obviously,” Jossie says. “But you are both married to other persons, and you are committing adultery, and you are using school property for illicit purposes, and you are violating every conceivable standard of personal and professional morality, and I ought to fire you and expel Tennessee.” When Colvin cannot think of a proper defense against that indictment, Jossie goes on, “But Tennessee is the top student in this school, and you are not only doing a bang-up job with Psych class but I hear that your boys’ basketball team went up against the fearsome Antlers of Deer and lost by only thirty points.” Colvin is humbly grateful for that “only.” But it is true that the Deer team is the best in Newton County, and the Newts had been lucky they hadn’t lost by a hundred points. “So,” Jossie says, “I can’t fire you, and I don’t suppose it would do me any good to try to forbid you to keep on seeing Tennessee. But I can’t allow her to have a key to your office, so that she can come and go in there any time she pleases.”
“Wal, heck,” Colvin protests. “Mostly she just goes in there to rest on the sofer.”
“Rest?” Jossie says. “If you call that rest, I’d like a chance to watch when she’s busy.”
“No, I mean when I’m not here, between her classes, she needs to take it easy, doctor’s orders, on account of her condition.”
“What’s her condition?”
“You know,” he says truthfully, “doctors aint supposed to tell their patients’ troubles to other people.”
“Okay. But is it contagious?”
Once again he decides to lie, but a little white lie about the Great White Plague. “Nope.”
“That’s what you said about her cerebral palsy,” she reminds him. “But the whole school caught it.” And he is all too aware that there is a possibility the whole school could catch Tenny’s tuberculosis if they were exposed to it closely and constantly over a long period of time. He cannot promise anything.
Jossie says, “Well, you are lucky that poor Venda isn’t holding this against you. Maybe because she’s got another boyfriend now.”
As a matter of fact, fortunately for our story, which already has such a tangled web of interpersonal relationships that it needs all the simplification it can get, Colvin has not been seeing much of Venda, outside of Psych class, where she has called attention to herself with some rather stupid answers to questions, and a general ineptitude for the subject. He has escaped her extracurricular blandishments with the lie that he is being faithful to his wife. Venda would have found this inexcusable and frustrating, but it happens that Nick Rainbird, the History and Natural Science teacher, also as a result of being in the Psych class and learning the same ideas of Expression that had helped Jossie start something with Tim James, has been liberated to express his long-secret infatuation for Venda. So passionately have Venda and Nick become involved with each other that she has even lost interest in her continual revenge upon poor Tenny. After subjecting Tenny to the three ordeals, or tasks—the sorting of the jumbled pantry, the shearing and gathering of wool from some dangerous sheep, and being sent to climb Mt. Sherman with a bucket to fetch home some water from an ice-cold spring that was jealously guarded by a cranky old man’s attack dogs—Venda had planned a fourth and final, crushing task for Tenny but, becoming involved with Nick Rainbird, Venda couldn’t even remember what she had planned. “Oh, the hell with her,” Venda has said. “She can go to Hades for all I care.” And while this may be construed as a dismissal, perhaps in its perverse way it is consigning Tenny to the fate of her fourth and final task, her descent into the Underworld of tuberculosis.
While Venda has lost interest in Tenny, her son has not. Russ still sleeps with Tenny every night…except those occasions when the basketball teams must travel to such remote locations for their games, Huntsville over in Madison County, Valley Springs in Boone County, Snowball in Searcy County, that an overnight is necessary, and while Russ opts to bunk with the other guys in one room, and Tenny is presumed to be bunking with the girls in another, Coach and Manager are actually contriving and conspiring to spend the night together in a third, in each other’s arms. Russ does not know this, but he knows that his wife cares more for Coach than for anyone or anything in the whole wide world. He has resigned himself to this fact. He cannot change it any more than he could change the seasons so that summer would follow autumn. Still, he is able to sleep with Tenny almost every night, kissing her goodnight and snuggling up against her and, after waiting until she is deeply asleep, experimenting with one or another positioning of his dual peckers in an effort to get one or another of them to penetrate one or another of her orifices, always, alas, without ease or success. These sessions usually leave him achy and restless. But he has made a shrewd and remarkable observation: after such a night, he always plays better in basketball, as if the frustration and pent-up jism of his efforts with Tenny are translated into his energy for the game. Russ Breedlove is the star forward of the Newts, or at least the highest scorer, and he doesn’t mind admitting to himself that his shot goes through the hole more frequently and adroitly because he cannot shoot off either of his peckers into any hole.
But there are still all those days when there aren’t any games to be played, and Russ would sure admire to shoot off both barrels every chance he could get. He is still convinced that if only he could get rid of his surplus pecker he would be able to poke the survivor not only into Tenny but into any gal who struck his fancy. He keeps planning to visit Doc again wh
en the man is Doc and not Coach or Teach or Wife’s Lover, and remind him once again of his standing offer to slice off the spare. He keeps putting it off, however, and eventually it is Doc who calls him in, not, as it turns out, over the matter of performing the surgery.
“Russ, son,” Doc says, “has Tenny told ye anything about what her trouble is?”
Russ realizes that Tenny has many troubles, but he isn’t sure which one Doc is talking about, so he shakes his head.
“She hasn’t told you she has tuberculosis?” Doc asks.
“Aw, hell, Doc,” Russ observes, “at one time or another’n in her life, she has had cystic fibrosis, multiple sclerosis, neurosis, diagnosis, halitosis, and just about ever other ‘osis’ there is.”
“Those were only in her mind,” Doc points out, “but she has really and truly got tuberculosis, and it can be catching if you’re exposed to it long enough, and I thought I’d better warn you that it would be better for you if you didn’t sleep with her.”
Russ narrows his eyes at Doc. “Shitfire, Doc,” he says, “you’re jist a-makin that up, because you don’t want me to sleep with her, because you’d rather sleep with her yourself.”
Doc coughs and blushes, and Russ realizes he has hit him where he lives. But Doc tries to deny it. “No, now, I’m a-tellin ye the honest to God truth, boy. What she has got aint easy to catch, like the common cold, but if you’re exposed to it night after night, month after month, the chances are you jist might come down with it yourself.”
Russ thinks. At length he asks, “Is that there tuberculosis the reason she coughs so much, and is gittin right skinny, and looks so pale, and drenches the bedclothes ever night with her sweat?”
“You’ve noticed,” Doc says, not without a little sarcasm. “Well, then, believe me, it’s serious, and it’s catching, and I jist thought I’d better do what I could to keep you from gittin it too.”
“Thanks, Doc,” Russ says, “but there aint a extry bed in our house. I may jist have to start sleepin with my momma!” The thought greatly amuses him, and he has a fit a laughter, although the possibility privately captivates him.
“Let’s keep this a secret,” Doc requests. “No sense in gittin anybody alarmed about it, so I don’t want nobody in this school to know about it.”
Russ agrees to keep mum, and takes his leave, but comes back a moment later. “Doc,” he says, “I hate to keep on reminding you, but there’s still a little problem that you promised to fix,” He points to his crotch.
“Yeah, I aint forgot,” Doc admits. Then he asks, “What do ye think of Oona Owens?”
“Don’t change the subject, Coach,” Russ says, although, by changing his form of address from “Doc” to “Coach” he has already partly changed the subject himself, because if he is the star forward of the Newts, Oona is the star guard of the Lady Newts (or Newtesses, as some call them). “She’s a whiz, aint she, Coach?” Russ observes. “Aint never seen a gal who can grab a ball the way she can.”
Coach Swain has often, during practices, allowed the girls’ team and the boys’ team to scrimmage against each other, by prior agreement “playing dirty,” no holds barred, the girls clawing and scratching and as often as not out-rebounding and out-shooting the boys. Russ has never faced a boy guard anywhere who can hamper him as effectively as Oona does. He not only admires her ball-hawking and bodychecking, but he also thinks she’s an awful pretty dish for an athlete. He even adores the odor of her sweat.
“Have you ever thought of steppin out with her?” Coach asks.
“Shoot, Coach, I’m a married man,” Russ reminds him.
“So am I” is all Coach says, but it is enough to remind Russ that Coach has not allowed the marriage vows to stop him from extramarital activity, including with the two women closest to Russ, his mother and his wife.
“You’re jist tryin again to git me away from Tenny,” Russ accuses.
“No, I’m jist tryin to git ye to find out if there might not be some other gal in this big wide world who could pleasure ye more than Tenny.”
“How could Oona do that?” Russ wants to know.
Colvin Swain must do some debating with himself. As Doc Swain, he is bound by oath not to let know Russ know of Oona’s “condition.” But as Coach Swain, he has no oaths. No, perhaps Coach Swain is not allowed to know everything that Doc Swain knows. “There is jist no tellin,” he says to Russ. “But if I was you, I’d shore keep my eye out fer a chance to play with Oona off the basketball court.”
And sure enough, there eventually comes a chance, during the post-Thanksgiving tournament in Eureka Springs, which requires two nights on the road, and possibly three if the Newts can advance into the semifinals. For once, the teams are staying in an actual hotel, albeit a small and very cheap hotel, but one in which there are several rooms at their disposal, three for the boys’ team, so that they’ll only have to sleep two to a bed, three for the girls’ team, ditto, one for Coach (and clandestinely Manager too), and even a spare room which happens to be the place where Russ Breedlove and Oona Owens discover that they have an anatomical affinity which affords many possibilities and delights. Coach Swain is supposed to chaperone his players on these overnight trips, but he is preoccupied and does not seem to know or notice that Russ and Oona are spending the night together. He is somewhat troubled, or disappointed, the next day in the tournament, when both the Newts and the Lady Newts are embarrassingly blown away by their opponents, principally because their star players, Russ and Oona respectively, are not giving it their all. Although eliminated from the tournament, they have one more night in their hotel before the long trip home, and once again Russ and Oona conspire to seclude themselves together in the spare room.
In his own room, with Tenny, late in the night after they have exhausted themselves with sexual doings, Colvin cannot resist telling Tenny what may be happening nearby between Russ and Oona. He is violating his oath, but he feels that Tenny ought to know. The disclosure renders Tenny speechless. Colvin wonders about this, because she has already told him that Russ is no longer sleeping with her, that Venda has consigned Tenny to sleeping on a pallet in the pantry, and that Russ has even told her that as far as he’s concerned they might as well not consider themselves man and wife anymore. Finally, Colvin has to ask her, “Well? Does it make ye mad that your husband is cheatin on ye?”
“Oh, no,” Tenny says. “I jist feel kind of jealous, as if she’s able to do somethin that I could never do.”
Colvin laughs. “Would you want an extra vagina if you could have one?”
“I’d like to have a dozen of ’em,” she says, “if you could have a dozen penises.”
He laughs again. “Where would you put all of ’em?”
“Here,” she says. “And here. And one of ’em around here. And one up here.”
Playfully they re-create their anatomies so that they could be joined together all over their bodies. Almost by accident, Tenny gives herself a vagina in her left lung, her bad lung, and at the moment of realization of what she has done, she begins coughing, and for the first time spits up blood.
Hemoptysis. He has hoped that this would not happen. He realizes that it is spontaneous and inevitable, but that sexual activity can bring it on. There is less than a teaspoon of blood. This hemoptysis does not alter the prognosis, except that it may spread the disease to other parts of the lungs, and it can also increase the risk of pneumonia.
“’See?” she says. He thinks at first she is saying it accusingly, as if she knows that their act of love has caused it. But then he realizes that she is calling out to her old playmate or other self. He hopes that verily ’See will return and help in the battle. He knows that Tenny must remain in bed for seven to ten days until the bleeding has stopped, but he can’t keep her in this bed.
“We’ve got to git you home so you can rest in bed for a week or so,” he declares.
“Home?” Tenny says, and laughs. “Where’s that?”
“Don’t laugh,” he says.
“Try to stay as still as you can. Don’t even talk unless you have to. Talking and laughing can make it worse.”
As soon as he had learned that Tenny has been sleeping on a crude pallet in Venda’s pantry, an airless room reeking with smells of foodstuffs—vinegar and onions and spices and moldy cheeses—Colvin has been putting his mind to the problem of a better place for her. She cannot return to the dormitory. There are a couple of spare rooms in the gymnasium, but they are not heated at night. Likewise his office is unheated.
Now he decides bravely to take her to Stay More. Of course he cannot put her up in his own house, not with Piney there, but he can put her up in the hotel. Not too long before, the old woman living in the big Jacob Ingledew house on Main Street, the woman you have chosen to call Whom We Cannot Name in your architecture novel, died, and the house was inherited by Willis Ingledew, the bachelor storekeeper, who moved into it with his spinster sister, Drussie Ingledew, who realized that a house of a dozen rooms was too big for the two of them and decided to turn it into a hotel, the only hotel that Stay More ever had, and not a very successful one. In fact, when Colvin installs Tenny in one of the upstairs guest rooms, a south-facing one (Colvin’s own house is on the north side of the hotel), she is the only guest there. Both Drussie and Willis are greatly in Doc Swain’s debt for various medical services that he has rendered for both of them, and they welcome the chance to barter Tenny’s hotel bill in return for their medical bills, and they are even amenable to Doc’s request that they not tell a soul that a young lady is confined to one of their upstairs rooms. Colvin explains to them simply that she is a student at N.C.A. who has come down with a disease—medical ethics prohibits his revealing to the Ingledews just what the disease is—which requires confinement to bed for as long as ten days, and the N.C.A. itself simply does not have the facilities for such infirmary care. The reason for secrecy, he says, is so that word will not leak back to the student body of N.C.A. and possibly bring a horde of other students wanting to be treated likewise in the Stay More Hotel.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 71