Butterfly Weed

by Donald Harington

  What’s wrong with her? Colvin demanded.

  Oh, jist real bad heartsick, I reckon, Oriole said. Of course she had a bunch of ailments that Maw and Granny helped her with, nothing too serious—summer cold, costiveness, vapors, hip-swinney. But mainly she’s jist reached the age where it’s time for her to git married, and the only feller in this whole wide world that she wants to marry is you, and if we’re not mistaken, you’ve already got a wife. So there. That’s it. Pure and simple. Oriole paused for breath, then examined him more critically, and asked, You aint by any chance thinkin about leavin yore wife, air ye?

  What could Colvin say? Sure, he had given it some thought, but could not admit, even to himself, that he had been thinking about it. So all he could say was, Not any time soon. I was sort of hoping to give Tenny a chance to git grown up, and finish school, and all.

  Git growed up? Oriole snorted. Aint she growed enough fer ye already? I tell ye, if I’d had her face and figure when I was sixteen, I’d of had ever man in the state of Arkansas tryin to lead me to the altar. Well, I din’t do so bad, with Jerry Bob, but many’s the time I’ve thought it wasn’t fair that God would give such good looks to jist one gal without spreadin it around! And caint none of us understand why a girl as beautiful as her hasn’t already had gobs and mobs of fellers proposin to her. Is there somethin wrong with her we don’t know about? You’re her doctor. Does she have some fatal disease that we don’t know about that’s scared off all of the fellers that might want her for a wife?

  All Colvin could think to say was, Tenny’s a goddess, I reckon, and all men are afraid of divinity.

  Huh? Oriole said. Well, it aint funny. Maw and Daddy has even went to see this fortune-tellin woman, Cassie Whitter, who lives way back up on yon mountain, to ask her how to find a man for Tenny.

  Well? Colvin said impatiently, for he knew Cassie Whitter. What did she have to say?

  Oriole took his arm and directed his attention to the mountain peak, rising up from one end of Brushy Mountain, that Wayne Don had been gesturing at. See that crag yonder? Oriole said. Wal, Tenny’s jist a-sittin up there in a black dress, and I’ll tell ye why. The fortune-teller Cassie Whitter, Oriole explained, had done her “reading” of Tenny’s future and had at first refused to tell Wayne Don and Jonette what she had discovered. Wayne Don would not leave Cassie’s cabin until she told him; Wayne Don promised he would “camp out” there forever and speak in tongues all day long until Cassie told him. She finally gave in. “Hit wouldn’t do no good,” Cassie said, “to hope for her to have a ordinary husband. You mought as well dress her in a black wedding gown with a black veil and leave her alone on some mountaintop, to see who would come along and take her. Whatever bridegroom she gits is bound to be a freak, maybe a double-headed monster, a pale rider on a pale horse.” That’s all they could get out of Cassie, and they came back home sorely perplexed, because they didn’t know any neighbors who had pale horses, let alone any freakish neighbors, except Clint McCutcheon, who was an albino, which made him pale all right, but his horse was a spotted Appaloosa, not white. And they’d never heard of black wedding gowns, or any other color for that matter, because both Jonette and her mother, Tennessee, had been married in ordinary dresses—fancy dresses, to be sure, but not gowns. The only black garment for women in the household was a sateen wrapper that Tennessee McArtor had ordered from Sears Roebuck to wear to the funeral of her husband, Ray. But it was black, and it could be made to fit Tenny. So Tenny had been up there all day on that mountaintop in that black dress, waiting to see what pale rider would come along on a pale horse, maybe with two heads, the rider, that is, not the horse, but come to think of it, maybe the horse would have two heads too.

  Colvin began running toward the mountaintop. You aint got no pale horse! Oriole called after him, but he kept running, wishing he had any color of horse, so he could get there faster. That mountain peak was a long way up there, and mostly obscured by mist. He was tired out, and had to slow to a walk and even sit down and rest a bit during the steepest parts of the climb.

  At last he heard singing. He recognized, coming from far away, Tenny’s lovely soprano voice. He stood still and tried to make out the words, identify the song. But there were no words. It was not even like her father’s babble. It was just pure notes, rising and falling, not meant to say anything but only to chant, or to carol, some wordless expression of a feeling he could recognize from having read Robert Burton: kindly melancholy, a mixture of yearning, wanting, hoping, desire, with maybe a tinge of loss and bewilderment. It was an incredibly beautiful song, and it made Colvin’s skin break out in goose bumps, and an enormous shiver to run up his spine.

  The singing gave him the strength to make one last determined effort to climb the mountain, and finally he came in sight of her, standing on the foggy peak with her arms wrapped around herself and her face lifted to the sky, singing that heartbreaking chant. Black did not become her, and he wanted to grab her and take her home and put her into a pretty dress, and marry her himself if he had to. Tenny! he called to her so that she would look down at him.

  “Who’s Tenny?” Piney asked.

  He stared into his wife’s eyes until he knew that he had lost his way out of the dream. For a moment he was tempted to answer Piney’s question, to confess his love for his student, to express to someone who could understand (and Piney understood everything) his love and his concern and his great uneasiness and even fear over that prophecy of Cassie Whitter’s. He knew who the Pale Rider was, and the meaning of the Pale Horse. He was surprised that Wayne Don Tennison, a minister of the Gospel, even if a Holy Roller, was not familiar with the sixth chapter of Revelation. Was Tenny still, at this moment, on that mountain crag? Colvin became more desperate than ever to reach her, but Piney would not let him go back into his dream again. “Aw, I was jist dreamin of buying you a pianer,” he said. “We was gone plumb to Little Rock to shop for pianers, and I kept turnin down one or another, this’un sounded too scratchy, and that’un was too twangy, or tinny. I was jist rejectin that tinny pianer when you woke me up.”

  Maybe Piney didn’t believe that, but it was the best he could do. He got up, dressed, had breakfast, and told her it was time he paid his respects on old Kie Raney. He wasn’t lying, either. But instead of hitching Nessus to the buggy, he went down the road to Ingledew’s Livery and asked Willis Ingledew if he had any pale horses. There was a kind of off-white or dirty-white palfrey named Lampon, and Colvin rented her and rode her as fast as she would go to the cave where he had grown up, in the woods above Spunkwater. Nothing had changed. It was almost as if he were sixteen again, Tenny’s age, the age he “graduated” from Kie’s preceptorship. And Kie hadn’t changed a bit either. He bashfully shook hands with his former foster son and protégé and invited him to sit down and tell his whole life story since he’d left the cave at sixteen. But Colvin apologized, saying he was really in a terrible hurry, and he’d stop back later on to explain, but right now all he wanted was to know if by any chance Kie Raney might know the location of Brushy Mountain. Kie had to scratch what remained of his hair for a long time. “I aint been on Brushy Mountain since I helped a granny woman deliver a breech baby, oh, nigh on to sixty year ago. McArtors they were.” Colvin begged Kie Raney to try and remember where Brushy Mountain was and tell him how to get there.

  The directions that Kie gave him were similar to those he had followed in his dream, and he recognized some of the boulders and lightning-struck trees and waterfalls that he had seen in his dream journey. But real journeys are always longer and harder than dream ones, and poor Lampon was tired and worn out by the time Colvin finally reached Brushy Mountain, and he realized he might have to dismount in order to climb up to the crag where Tenny was…if she was. He thought he’d best stop at the house to say howdy and ask if Tenny was still up there.

  “Now that shore is a kind of a pale horse,” Oriole said, smiling. “But you aint very pale yoreself, and you got only one head.”

  “How
dy,” Colvin said. “How’s ever little thing? Everbody feelin okay?”

  “Maw’s got some bad chest pains,” Oriole said, “if you’d care to look her over.”

  “Later, maybe. I got to git on up to the mountaintop to see about Tenny.”

  “She aint there no more. That real pale horse and that real pale rider done come and got her.”

  Colvin was stricken. “You don’t mean to tell me. You don’t mean she…she didn’t depart, did she?”

  “She departed down to Jasper, which is where the feller finally took her. She knew him, of course, or we wouldn’t’ve asked him to spend the night, and Daddy wouldn’t’ve allowed her to ride off with him this morning. She knew the pale horse too. Named Malengro or Menargo or something.”

  “Marengo,” Colvin said. Then he said, “Russ Breedlove!”

  “You know the feller? Aint he a sight to behold? Maw and Granny is still swoonin over what a looker he is, and I tell ye, I’m tempted to up and leave Jerry Bob myself and see if I caint git Russ to notice me!”

  Colvin was a mite perplexed. “You folks just allowed the boy to swoop down and git her and take her off like that?”

  “He was wearin a white shirt,” Oriole declared. “And when he spent the night with us, I talked Tenny into spying on him while he slept, and sure enough, he is a kind of a freak, if not a monster. But despite filling the bill all we could hope for, he claimed he wasn’t comin to git her for hisself. Naw. His momma had sent him. That’s Tenny’s music teacher, Miz Breedlove, and she tole her boy Russ to say that she wanted to give Tenny some private lessons for her voice if Tenny would care to just come stay with her in Jasper, until school started. So Tenny just packed up her school clothes and her books and all, and off they went.”

  “Voice lessons?” Colvin said, more to himself than to Oriole.

  Wayne Don Tennison came out of the house, and said to Colvin, “Kimono ambeer pudenda? Albino chaunk rotunda? Halo silo solo!”

  “I think he wants to show you his snake collection,” Oriole translated. “Or else he’s inviting you to stay to dinner, one.”

  Colvin stayed to dinner, the womenfolk not sitting down at the table until after he and Wayne Don had finished eating, as was the custom. Then Wayne Don took Colvin to look at his collection of rattlesnakes, copperheads, and water moccasins, and Colvin petted the reptiles and made appreciative remarks. Jonette Tennison, Tenny’s momma, hoped the doctor would take a quick look at her chest pains, and Colvin examined her and determined she had heartburn, which, he attempted to explain, could not be helped by the Dr. Potter’s Heart Tonic she was dosing herself with, because it had nothing to do with the heart but was caused by a hiatus hernia, for which he prescribed rest, six meals a day rather than three, and the avoidance of coffee, tea, and Heart Tonic.

  Throughout this business, Colvin was asking himself if he’d want to have Wayne Don and Jonette as his father-and mother-in-law. He decided they weren’t any worse than Piney’s folks, and he kind of liked Oriole. She was okay. Finally taking his leave, and asking how to find the road to Jasper, he said he expected he would be seeing all of them again.

  But Lampon, he discovered, was in no condition to carry him the long way into Jasper, so, impatient as he was, he reluctantly decided to return the palfrey to Ingledew’s Livery, wait until the next day, and take Nessus with the buggy into Jasper.

  “Hon,” Piney asked, “are you feeling all right? You don’t seem to have been yourself lately.” Colvin tried to assure her that he was “jist fine,” which was his favorite expression for everything in the world. “Well, I’ve been thinking,” she said, “about what you dreamt. You know, getting me a piano. I think it would be very nice to have a good piano, if we can find one that isn’t tinny.”

  Colvin coughed. “I don’t know if we could afford one,” he said. “To pay for a good piano, I’d most likely have to teach another year at Parthenon.”

  “Wouldn’t you want to do that?” she said, in such a way that he knew she knew that he’d been thinking about it.

  “Wal, I reckon I’d best run up there and see if they still want me,” he said.

  So he would use that as an excuse to leave for Jasper the next day at dawn. That night he had a dream in which it seemed that Tenny was calling for him; she was somewhere out of sight trying to contact him, so he went out looking for her. He went to Venda’s house, and Venda was sprawled out sound asleep and naked and inviting on her bed, but the other bed in the house had neither Tenny nor Russ in it. He tried the Academy, drifting around through the girls’ dormitory and the classroom building, but she wasn’t there. Next, he visited their enchanted-forest trysting place, and the four-poster was still there, although covered with dust and pine needles, and some birds, tufted titmice, had built their nest on the Garden Butterfly quilt, but there was no sign that Tenny had been there for quite some time. Yet he could clearly hear her calling his name, and he called back, “Where are you, Tenny?” Piney asked him if he was still shopping for pianos.

  The next day, he left ostensibly for Parthenon but he didn’t stop at the Newton County Academy. He drove his buggy on to Jasper, and pulled up in front of the little white cottage off the square where Venda Breedlove lived. He just sat there for a while, studying the house and wondering if his darling were actually inside. If so, which room?

  Venda stepped out onto her porch, dressed in her house robe, with her hair up in curlers, and holding a cup of coffee. “Good mornin, precious,” she said. “I’ve been expectin ye. Climb down and have you a cup of coffee with me.”

  Following her to her kitchen, he saw that there were only two bedrooms, and both were empty. “My first question is,” he said, sitting down at her kitchen table with the cup of coffee she poured for him, “not where is she, but how did you find out the whereabouts of Brushy Mountain? You tole me you didn’t know.”

  “There are some men in this town who can tell you anything if you ask ’em right,” she said, and winked at him.

  “Okay, then, my second question is: where is she?”

  “It’s Saturday, did you notice?” she said. “On weekends, Russ has to go and stay with his daddy, over on the other side of town.”

  “So what’s that got to do with Tenny?”

  “So Russ took her to meet his daddy. My ex, you know, Mulciber, is a fine, upstandin, solid citzen, not only the best blacksmith in the country but also the Jasper Fire Chief. Even if he was a son of a bitch to me, he don’t deserve to live all by hisself, and he’s been kind of lonesome ever since he threw me out. Russ and me figured that maybe Tenny could cheer him up or something. Who knows? Her folks want to git her married off, and Mulciber’s jist about the most eligible bachelor in town.”

  “Ding blast it!” Colvin exclaimed, outraged. “Why, the way I heared it, Mulce is the ugliest old galoot in the country, and so crippled he can hardly walk. What would Tenny want with a gimpy freak like that?”

  Venda touched him under his chin to make their eyes meet, and said, “Women don’t always git what they want, in this world.”

  Her double meaning wasn’t lost on him. “Did you jist cook up this scheme so you could git me away from her?” he demanded. She only smiled, and began taking the curlers out of her hair. “You didn’t really bring her to Jasper to give her voice lessons, now did ye?” he insisted, but she wouldn’t deny it or confirm it. “But didn’t it occur to you,” he wanted to know, “that you’d be a-punishing that pore gal to fix her up with the likes of Mulciber Breedlove?” Venda just went on smiling and removing the rest of the curlers from her hair. “What has Tenny done to you, that you’d want to punish her?” he asked. Venda took a hairbrush and began to brush her golden hair. “Has she offended you because she’s so young and fine and sweet to behold?” he asked, standing to confront her and setting down his coffee cup. Venda opened her house robe, revealing that she had nothing beneath it. He could not take his eyes off her mons veneris, and it was almost as if he were addressing his next question to
it: “What I’d like to know is: if she must’ve hated you for jumping into her four-poster with me like ye done, and thought of you as her rival or enemy, how did you make friends with her so fast? What did you get Russ to say to her to persuade her to come here?” Venda came to him and gave him one of those kisses where the tongue too comes into play. He hadn’t ever had one of those kind before, and his corpora cavernosa nearly hemorrhaged. He tried to push her away, but she dropped to her knees and clawed at his fly until she had it open and could get her hands inside. She brought him out and swallowed him. Then she very slowly unswallowed him, and he forgot the next question he was going to ask her. He wasn’t getting any answers to his questions, anyway. But he began to remember this question, because it was an important one: “Did you trouble yourself to explain to Tenny that you hadn’t been invited to that four-poster of hers, and that you and me weren’t really fucking?” Venda couldn’t answer, because her mouth was full, but she gave her head a vigorous shake, which bent his cavernosa ever which way. Colvin had never felt sexual excitement like this before, and while he knew that the busy activity of her lips and tongue and whole mouth was the main cause of it, he knew that there had to be another reason, and he asked her, “Did you put something into my coffee?” She could only nod her head energetically, which pained his pecker somewhat, because it was so stiff it wouldn’t bend down. “What?” he wanted to know. She managed to mutter some syllables which, for all he could tell, were cream and sugar. “Spanish fly?” he asked. She shook her head, which wobbled his pecker. “Ginseng?” he asked. Another shake and wobble. “A drop of menstrual blood?” he asked. She giggled while shaking her head; the giggles tickled his frenulum. “Snakeroot? Mandrake? Yarrow? Mistletoe? Dodder? Wasp nests? Coon bone? Horse spleen? Powdered heart of roasted hummingbird?” He ran through the whole catalog of known aphrodisiac substances, but she just kept on shaking her head, in between thrusting it forward and drawing it back. He had never realized that the muscles of a woman’s neck would allow such a variety of lively movements. He was determined to remain true to Tenny, but there is no resistance against whatever chemical substance Venda had concocted for him, and he was in her power. He could only follow eagerly when she wrapped her hand around his pecker to make it into a leash, and led him off to her bedroom. The bed wasn’t a four-poster, but that was okay.