Butterfly Weed

by Donald Harington

  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.

  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 rather 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 gunsho
t 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: