In dreams it scarcely matters, or is even known, whether one is right-side up or upside down, so without even being aware of it they were no longer vertical but horizontal, stretched out together upon the percale sheets of that fabulous bed, and Colvin took Tenny’s fingers in his own and guided them to the exploration of her vestibule, while he gave her a rather lengthy explanation of the structure and function of, as well as both the practical and pretty reasons for, the hymen and the clitoris. Tenny grew squirmy, not because she was embarrassed, nor because she was impatient, but because it was exciting her as she had never been aroused before, not the feel of her own fingers there but the thought that it was his fingers which were making her fingers feel. We all need to feel that others are making us feel. But I’m afraid there was one other reason for her squirming. All this time, the Victrola had somehow started a new platter; this was a good sixteen years before the first automatic changeable Victrola, but dreams don’t know that, and it was playing not just the violins getting faster but a bunch of clarinets and oboes and flutes getting faster and faster, urgent and immediate, and Tenny thought she was approaching a glimpse of that Other Place where people and birds and bugs don’t never have to eat nor breathe nor defecate. But she suddenly realized that here on the doorstep of Paradise she needed to go to the privy. They had not taken the trouble to furnish their dream with an outhouse, but there was a lush virgin forest all around their bower, and she could “use the bushes” just as well as she had back home on Brushy Mountain. ’Scuse me, she said, I’ll be right back. And she jumped out of that big four-poster and ran off into the forest, hoping she was not ruining the moment or the mood. Colvin sadly watched her go, and worried that his corpora cavernosa would release their blood and let his pecker droop and he might have an awful time getting it to rise again.
Now I hate to mention it, but I myself have got to attend to one of nature’s subpoenas. Son, I’m going to have to ask you to excuse me while I summon the orderly to help me get out of this bed and into that potty-chair yonder. No, no, I don’t want you to help me; I’m such a goddamned cripple I have to be lifted and carried. The whole process is so complicated and cumbersome that I’d appreciate it if you’d just run along now and hold your curiosity until tomorrow, when I’ll be obliged to reveal the somewhat disturbing conclusion to that wonderful dream-tryst they were having.
Damn it all, I’m almost eager to get myself to that Other Place where people don’t have to eat nor breathe nor
Chapter seven
I don’t mind telling you that yesterday after you left and I finished my interminable business, Mary C. and I got to talking about this matter of being able to take a roll in the hay in your dreams. Mary said she didn’t think it was possible. Well, you’ll recall when I was a graduate student in psychology at Clark, I did my whole damn thesis on dreams, and I must’ve read everything written on the subject, not just Freud, but Jung, Ferenczi, Brill, Abraham, all those fellers. Two things I learned pretty fast: one, all dreams are sexual, period. But two, there are very few dreams that are explicitly sexual. Dreams are filled with sexual symbols, but you hardly ever see a real pecker or a real twitchet in a dream, let alone such particulars as maidenheads or clits. I not only kept records of all my own dreams in those days but I went around talking to other graduate students, women as well as men, and getting them to tell me their dreams, and I almost never found a case of anybody actually getting their ashes hauled in a dream, and let me tell you this right now: I never once found a single case of any two people having the same dream at the same time, goddamn it!
So what are we to make of this story? This is what me and Mary got into an argument about that lasted till bedtime last night, and then she had the boldness to suggest to me that we give it a try, I mean, see if we couldn’t “get together” in our dreams. Hell, maybe I shouldn’t be saying it, but Mary and me haven’t “got together” in the world of “reality” for many and many a year. We don’t never even sleep together. I was already past seventy when I married her, and it wasn’t no May and December marriage neither, more like November and December. But anyhow, just as an experiment, we agreed last night to see if we couldn’t meet in our dreams. We tried our best, too. But the sad fact is, you don’t have no control whatever over what you’re going to dream. Among the involuntary systems of the human body, the dreaming system is the most involuntary of them all.
That don’t mean the story of Colvin and Tenny is a bunch of hooey. Nor even a fairy tale. Any good story, in order to hold our interest and entertain us, must concern itself with things that never happened to us but which we believe could possibly happen to us. And I for one, even though I never met Mary nor anybody else in my dreams for the explicit purposes of unashamed and undisguised he’n-and-she’n, have the right to believe that what happened to Colvin could’ve happened to me!
So if you and Mary want to sit there and laugh behind your hands while I try to tell this, go right ahead, that’s your privilege. If you don’t want to believe me, you might as well just turn off that hearing aid, goddamn it, and I’ll lay here and finish telling the story to myself, which is what I’ve been doing most of the time anyhow when you aren’t here or Mary Celestia has faded off into whatever celestial realm she prefers to inhabit.
Anyway, excuse the interruption, and excuse my present dyspepsia. I hope you didn’t get too impatient, being sent away right smack in the middle of the first really good sex that we’ve had so far, before it even had a chance to “consummate” itself, as they say. Maybe yesterday I didn’t have the heart, nor the bowels, to reveal that this sex story didn’t have a climax, but an anticlimax.
Because when Tenny, hurrying so fast to finish her visit to the bushes that she dampened her pretty purple nightdress, finally got back to the four-poster, rehearsing in her mind how the time had come at last that she could say, Colvin Swain, I love thee, she discovered to her horror that there was a naked lady in bed with Colvin! Being smart, she knew that sometimes in dreams we can step aside from ourselves and see ourselves as if we were somebody else, so she calmed down enough to attempt to tell herself that the naked lady in the bed was herself. But the lady’s hair was blond, not light brown nor nearly as long as her own, and it was cut in the fashion of Mrs. Breedlove’s. And she and Colvin were wrestling to beat all, something fierce, with Venda on top! Colvin looked over Venda’s shoulder and saw Tenny and yelled her name, Tenny! but she had already turned and was running as hard as she could, trying to find her way out of there.
Zarky was shaking her shoulder, saying, “Wake up, Ten! You’re havin a nightmare.”
“I sure am,” she said, and burst into tears, and cried so hard that Zarky had to hold her until sunrise, when she got up and began stuffing her clothes and books and things into a gunnysack to take them back home to Brushy Mountain.
“Who’s Tenny?” Piney asked Colvin.
He stared at her while he rubbed his busted dream out of his eyes, and began to feel the intense frustration of not having achieved his expected joy. “Aw, heck,” he said. “I was jist havin this dream of treatin ole Jim Bullen for his heart problem, and I asked his wife, Sarah, ‘He took that there medicine I gave him, din’t he?’ And when she wouldn’t answer, I kept a-saying, “Din’t he? Din’t he?’ You must’ve jist heard me saying, ‘Din’t he,’ not ‘tenny.’” Then Colvin jumped out of bed, grabbed a quick breakfast, and told Piney he had to go back up to Parthenon to collect his belongings. Piney wanted to know why he hadn’t just collected his belongings yesterday, on the last day of school, but he could only say that he’d overlooked a bunch of things.
He drove as fast as he dared without running the buggy off the road or wearing Nessus out, and reached the N.C.A. while it was still early day, and parents were arriving and departing with their wagons, and a few automobiles, to pick up their kids to take them home. Seeing him, his devoted students gathered around him to say good-bye and to wish him a happy summer and to beg him to please reconsider and come back
in the fall to teach something else like psychology or basketball. Colvin, who was looking all around for Tenny, could only tell them that he’d sure had a lot of pleasure knowing them, and he hoped they’d have the best of luck in life and not forget to take real good care of their bodies and systems.
He couldn’t find Tenny. He even entered the girls’ dormitory and boldly marched up to the sleeping rooms, but Tenny wasn’t among them. Thelma Villines, the housemother, grabbed him and told him that men wasn’t allowed up here. He asked her, “Have you seen Tennessee Tennison?” but she could only say she reckoned that Tenny had done already gone. Colvin spotted Ozarkia Emmons on the front porch, and asked her, “Have you seen Tenny?”
Zarky gave him a kind of frightened look and said, “Teacher, I don’t know what ye done to her last night, but ye broke her heart. She cried her eyes out ’til daybust, then lit out fer home.”
“Afoot?” he asked. And when Zarky nodded, he looked wildly around, as if he could see her, and asked, “Whichaway is Brushy Mountain, do ye know?”
Zarky pointed vaguely eastwards, then corrected her point to southeastwards. “Some’ers up in there way over round about beyond Mount Judy,” she said.
He had no idea how far it was, but he thought he might be able to catch up with her, and he was getting back into his buggy when Venda Breedlove came up to him and put her hand on his arm and said, “Honey, I’m sorry about last night.”
He stared at her. Rather than accept her apology, he replied, “You ort to be. That wasn’t your dream. That there dream belonged to somebody else.”
“Let me guess who,” she said. “If you’re aimin to catch up with her, you’re way too late. She caught her a ride out of Jasper on the mail truck.”
Colvin clenched his teeth, and glared at Venda. “Woman, you’ve done went and made an awful how-de-do of things. Tenny took a lot of trouble to git that rondy-voo set up jist right, and you come buttin in and spoilt it.”
“That there was the purtiest bed I ever did see,” Venda declared. “I jist couldn’t resist it!”
“Hit was Tenny’s four-poster, and quilt, and all, gosh-darn ye!”
“She’s jist a chile, Colvin,” Venda said. “Even in yore wildest dreams, she caint give ye the kind of lovin I could give ye, if you’d let me. You shouldn’t have thrown me out.” And Venda put her hand on his knee and began to scoot it along the inside of his thigh.
Colvin told himself that if all he was interested in was loving a woman, he couldn’t do better than Venda. This gal had the old oomph oozing out of every pore of her body, and oomph was not in his medical dictionary but could easily be defined as that, or possibly it, with a lot of these and those, or what it takes. Venda Breedlove had what it takes to run up any man’s pressure. All year long she had been so friendly with him, and made herself so available, that if he hadn’t been completely absorbed with Tenny, he could easily have given in to Venda’s obvious enticements. Even after he had thrown her out of the four-poster, he had had more than physical pangs of regret. Her naked body had felt so voluptuous during the moments it took him to disengage himself from her that even now, thinking of it, he felt the blood backing up in his corpora cavernosa, and for a long moment he gazed upon sweet Venda with a desire that erased Tenny for the duration from his mind.
The gossip about Venda Breedlove was almost as alluring as her seductive body, and Colvin had been tempted all year to invite her to lie on his lounge and tell him all about herself, if not with a lollipop perhaps with a soda pop and a sentence he had rehearsed in his mind but had never spoken to her, “I’ve heard so many stories about you, I’d like to know the truth.” Nobody knows where she came from. She was said to be an orphan who was discovered one day floating in a johnboat on the Buffalo River, fully grown but as naked as she’d climbed into that four-poster, amnesiac but so lovely that she entranced the three sisters who found her, rescued her, dressed her, and took her home with them. These sisters, Aggie, Thalie, and Phrosie Grace, lived up toward Pruitt in northern Newton County, and they dutifully notified Sheriff J.C. Barker of their discovery, but he made an investigation without being able to find out just who she was or where she was from, or what she was doing naked in that johnboat. She had no memory of a mother or father, and wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Sheriff Barker wasn’t about to let those Grace girls keep her, because everybody knew those girls were kind of “funny,” if you know what I mean—it was a scandalous sort of Lesbian incest going on amongst them—and Barker was afraid they might turn the poor girl into one of them, so he took her home to his wife, figuring to give her a place to stay temporarily until she could find work or a husband, whichever came first. Pretty soon Barker himself was sneaking around with her, and Mrs. Barker was about to throw her out, so Barker fixed her up with his best buddy, Mulciber Breedlove, the blacksmith, who had once been living with Aggie Grace, one of those girls who found Venda.
Old Mulce was just about the ugliest feller in Jasper, and he was practically a cripple from a childhood accident that left him with twisted feet and dislocated hips, and a way of walking that made folks poke fun at him when they ran out of jokes about the fact that Aggie became a dyke as a result of trying to live with him. But he was a steady worker, the best blacksmith in the country, and a solid, peaceable, upstanding citizen, and he fell in love with Venda at first sight and became her devoted slave, willing to do anything for her. He made her a lot of jewelry out of horseshoe nails that was a sight to behold. Venda was so charmed by a wedding ring that he made out of a horseshoe nail that she couldn’t turn him down, and became his bride. He was the happiest man in the Ozarks, having such a beauty for a wife, but he should’ve had the sense to know he couldn’t hold her. When the baby boy Russ was born, Mulce became even more devoted as a father than he’d been as a husband, but he already had suspicions that he might not be the boy’s real father, or at best only one of his fathers, since the boy had two peckers, a sign that maybe he had two daddies.
Rumors of Venda’s infidelities were commonplace. She was not just the most beautiful woman in the country (your Latha was still a little girl at the time) but she was also the earthiest. Folks called her feisty and fleshy, the latter having nothing to do with her weight but with her devotion to the pleasures of the flesh. Feisty suggests fast and fleshy suggests flashy, and she was both of those too.
She had a lot of nerve accusing Colvin of picking a child when he took up with Tenny, because Venda’s own most famous love affair was with a boy who was practically just a kid, a teenager from up around Gum Springs named Donny Kilgore. He was only fifteen when Venda was out in the woods one day trying to show her little boy Russ how to hunt with his “bone air,” and she come across Donny also a-hunting, and was so smitten with passion for him that she left little Russ to amuse himself while she talked Donny into stepping over behind some boulders to hide them from sight. Venda didn’t take Russ with her next time she went hunting. She was bringing home more rabbits than they and all the neighbors could eat, and Mulce complained she was hunting too much. The truth was, Donny was such a good shot he could bag a whole nest of rabbits in no time flat, and have all the remainder of the afternoon to shag Venda. But pretty soon she wasn’t even bothering to bring home rabbits, nor even squirrels. She’d just disappear at all hours and didn’t even care if Mulce fumed and hollered. Practically everybody knew she and Donny were off somewheres fucking like minks, and a few folks had even spied them at it, in broad daylight.
But Donny kept on hunting in the woods, because that’s what he liked to do, next best to shagging Venda, and that was his downfall, because one time when he was a-chasing a bunch of wild razorback hogs, one of the big old boars turned and charged him and buried those sharp tusks in his side. Venda found him and took him to Doc McFerrin in Jasper, but it was too late to help him, and he died, and Venda was so heartbroken she didn’t even think about fooling around with anyone else…except her favorite man, who was Mulce’s brother.
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