Butterfly Weed

by Donald Harington

  The next morning when he awoke Colvin discovered that there was some blood on the sheet. He would have to pay Cousin Bob some extra for that. He did not wake her, but took the liberty to examine her and determine that carunculae hymenales were all that remained of her hymen. As we are all able to do, sometimes, he sought to recapture the dream, and remembered it, and was astonished by its authenticity. Now in the light of the rising sun, he saw that the lovely landscape of her body was beaded with sweat like the morning earth beaded with dew, as if the exertions in their dream had made her perspire. He decided to take a towel and blot up the sweat and if that didn’t wake her, he would leave her be.

  But she woke. “Dreams are where you go to get away from the loneliness of sleep,” he repeated her words to her. “But daylight comes to reveal all the other people in the world that we have to deal with.” He had her get dressed, and he put her in his buggy and took her to Parthenon. “You’ve got to have a place to live, and I’ve got to see if I caint work out some kind of future for me and you.”

  Jossie Conklin just happened to be in her office, the only person on campus. Colvin had Tenny wait in the buggy while he went up to talk with Jossie. Jossie was thrilled to learn that Colvin had reconsidered and might want to return to N.C.A. for another year, but she had to inform him that the Baptists had sent from Baylor a new man, Tim James, with a master’s degree, to teach Bible and Science with explicit instructions to teach the hygiene course without any reference to reproduction. Jossie was awfully sorry, but there just wasn’t any way Colvin could teach hygiene. “I don’t suppose you could teach Psychology, could you?” Jossie asked. “And coach basketball?”

  Colvin lied. He knew as much about psychology as he did about basketball, which is to say that both were inexact sciences, that throwing that thing up in the air might or might not get it through the hole, you couldn’t never tell, you could only use your mind to hope that it would go through the hole, but if you missed the hole you might or might not get a chance to try again. Neither psychology nor basketball was like medicine, in which you can at least count on some things to happen. But Colvin supposed that both psychology and basketball had something that medicine lacked: entertainment value, since they were sports and had the power to divert and even to amuse. “Yes ma’am, I reckon I can handle both,” he said. “But I shore hope you don’t have to wait until jist before class starts to let me see the textbook.”

  Jossie laughed, and handed him a copy of his textbooks for Psychology. There was no textbook for basketball. He was amazed at the little coincidence that the author of Human Behavior was named Stephen Sheldon Colvin, Professor of Educational Psychology at Brown University. Our Colvin had never heard of anybody else with the name Colvin, and he felt a little as Russ must have felt when he learned that he wasn’t the only person in the world with diphallus. Right away Colvin believed that Professor Colvin was his spiritual kin, or at least psychological kin, and could probably teach him a few things, which he in turn would attempt to teach his students. Thumbing through the book, Colvin noticed that there was a section on the nervous system, which he already had in his head. No, he wouldn’t have any trouble teaching psychology.

  They shook hands over the deal and agreed upon a salary of thirty dollars a month, including his duties as school physician. Then Colvin said, “Jossie, hon, I wonder if it might be possible for one of the girl students, my best pupil from last year, you remember Tennessee Tennison, well, as you may know she comes from a dirt-poor family way back up in the jillikens, and they threw her out, and she don’t have nowhere to stay, and I was just wondering if she could go ahead and move into the dormitory, and live there by herself until school starts.”

  Jossie studied Colvin as if she might be guessing at things that weren’t within her realm of understanding. Then she smiled a knowing smile and said, “Thelma Villines, the housekeeper, has already moved in, so if it’s okay with her, it’s okay with me.”

  Colvin installed Tenny in the dormitory with the help of Mrs. Villines, who reckoned she could find some work to keep Tenny busy and earn her room and board. Then Colvin had a private moment alone with Tenny to say good-bye to her and tell her he’d try to get back this way whenever he could. They kissed.

  “Thank you so much for everything,” Tenny said, and she walked alongside him and his buggy to the edge of the campus, but, in the superstition of the Ozarks, turned aside to avoid watching him disappear from sight.

  Colvin’s dealing with Jossie had been like falling off a log compared with dealing with Piney. The road to Stay More was still more liquid than solid, and several times he got mired, and both he and Nessus were covered with mud and exhausted by late afternoon, when they reached home. He had concocted a dozen good excuses, but Piney, who knew everything, knew that he must have been “carrying on” with Jossie Conklin, and she accused him of it. “Strike me dead if I never even touched her!” Colvin protested. “Except to shake her hand when we agreed on my salary…which, you’ll be happy to know, means that now we’ll be able to get for you that pianer.”

  “Goody,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  And sure enough, Piney insisted that Colvin take her to Little Rock to shop for a piano. It wasn’t easy. First he had to scare up some kind of loan of the money, and since the Swains Creek Bank and Trust Company had been robbed and was out of business he couldn’t apply for a loan, all he could do was hatch a kind of health insurance scheme which the American Medical Association wouldn’t have endorsed. He examined his ledgers and made a list of all the patients who had ever paid him in cash money instead of livestock, produce, working-it-off, or other form of barter, and he went around to each of them, a total of only thirty-nine, and with his hat in hand he offered to treat them in perpetuity regardless of the severity of their condition in return for a modest advance premium of only twenty dollars. Eleven of the patients claimed that they didn’t see how they could possibly raise that much cash money, although seven of these admitted that it sounded like a real bargain. Five patients told him he was out of his mind. But from twenty-three patients he collected twenty dollars each, and with this money he was able to take Piney to Little Rock. Instead of using Nessus and the buggy, inadequate to freight the piano back to Stay More, he hired a team of mules and a wagon from Ingledew’s livery, and with Piney sitting on the buckboard beside him, he drove to Russellville, reaching it in two days, and took a Missouri Pacific train from there to Little Rock, and spent two nights in the capital city, where he had never been before, nor had Piney, and they were able to enjoy the sights of the city, including the enormous state capitol which imitates the U.S. Capitol; the state’s tallest edifice, the Donaghey Building, towering fourteen floors above the street; and the recently opened Broadway Bridge spanning the Arkansas River, the largest and most expensive bridge in Arkansas. Both Colvin and Piney, walking across it on the pedestrian skirt, found it incredible that anything in the world could cost a million dollars. At the Hollenberg Music Company, a high-pressure salesman who was himself a piano virtuoso demonstrated that the affordable pianos indeed sounded tinny. They found one baby grand that did not sound tinny but was far out of their price range, and the salesman by playing Liszt on it convinced Piney that she’d never learn how to play a piano and had better play it safe and stick with one of these here player pianos that used rolls of perforated paper to do all the work for you. Of course player pianos cost a good bit more than ordinary instruments where you have to do the fingering, and then also of course you have to get yourself a supply of the rolls of the perforated paper to make the thing go, and the transaction left Colvin flat broke except for just their return train tickets, but Hollenberg Music Company paid the freight for taking the piano back with them on the same train to Russellville, where they loaded it into their wagon.

  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 ra
g; “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.”