Fortunately for her husband, who will be broke, the proprietor of the tiny hotel in Fallsville will know Colvin, and will agree to let them have on credit the room for their last night. Tenny will not touch her supper. “You aren’t eating,” Colvin will observe.
“One out of three,” she will say.
And later, in bed, when he will do his thing with the stethoscope, and pressing his ear to her chest, he will observe, “You don’t seem to be breathing.”
“Two out of three,” she will take enough breath to say.
And all the next day, as they will drive the last miles over the hills and mountains toward Stay More, not once will she ask him to stop so that she can relieve herself. She will say to herself, “If all three of them things have done come to pass, I must already be there, but I sure caint tell that it’s no different.” She will so pleased and comforted to know that it does not look any different that she will snuggle up against Colvin and put her head on his shoulder.
“Thank you for bringing me home,” she will say to him.
“Thank ye for coming home,” he will say, and then, in the future tense, “We will soon be there.”
And in the future tense, they will always soon be there.
From that vantage point, with her corporeal head on his shoulder, she will cross forever from the world of eating and breathing and shitting to the world of…but we will have to let her, who will always remain in charge of this tense, to tell what she can.
She will be glad to discover that although she has surrendered heartbeat and breath and digestion and elimination and all that bodily business, she will not have surrendered her control of the future tense. They will pass a fisherman sitting on the bank of the creek, and she will be so certain that it will be Grampaw McArtor she will try to call this to Colvin’s attention, but will discover that she will have surrendered voice as well. She shall never again be able to “speak” to him. She will have surrendered all her senses: hearing, sight, touch, everything. So how then will she be able to perceive? Only she will be able to tell, but she will be able to tell this much: that all senses will be replaced by a single pervasive sense of tell, as in “How can you tell?” or “Can you tell what that thing is?” or “You can’t even tell the difference”—none of these implying speaking, informing, or narrating, but only perception, not necessarily visual. Tenny will find herself able to tell anything. She can tell the time of day without a watch, but will have no desire to. She can tell what Colvin is thinking, but will never be able to tell him that she can tell. She can tell that she will never again feel any pain nor hunger nor be required to toil. She can tell at once the answer to a question which has always bothered her about this Other Place: “Do people—or souls or whatever they become—ever go to sleep and have dreams?” She can tell that both sleeping and dreaming are parts of the living body’s functions, and thus she no longer will need them, nor have any further thought of them. Even if she will have wanted them, she will be too busy telling ever to have time for them.
She will become almost like a child with a new toy, discovering what-all she can tell, what-all she will be able to do: she will so easily rise and soar a thousand feet above the buggy and can tell its movements in relation to the winding road and landscape; she will be able to leap on ahead to Stay More and can tell that the town will be waiting there for their soon arrival. She can tell that the sense of humor will be the most powerful of all “living” qualities retained by the “dead,” and her playful sense of humor will think that it would be funny if she could just stand there on Colvin’s front porch waiting to welcome him. But while that impossible image will amuse her, she realizes that a much more serious moment will be occurring as soon as Colvin brings the buggy to a halt and discovers that his bride apparently asleep on his shoulder will no longer be alive.
She can tell there will be nothing she will be able to do about it. She will be able to be there, but she will not be able to make her presence known or felt or heard. But she can tell that just being there will make it much easier on Colvin. That, and his own knowledge that the duration of her life on earth could only be numbered in hours.
Still, he will be wracked with grief. He will simply remain in the buggy for a long time holding her body. Then he will carry her into his house and place her on a bed, her hands folded together over her stomach. He will go into his office and write the death certificate, and she can tell what he has written under “Cause of death:” Fibro-cavernous pulmonary tuberculosis.
Later he will take her to E.H. Ingledew, who is both the town’s dentist and its mortician. E.H. will embalm the body and prepare a casket for it.
Colvin will have to speak with several people about the matter of burying her in the Stay More cemetery. By ancient tradition, only native Stay Morons can be buried there. As you pointed out in the architecture novel, not even the great Eli Willard, the perennially returning peddler, who had spent enough of his very long life visiting Stay More to be considered at least an honorary Stay Moron, was permitted to be buried in Stay More cemetery. One had to be born in Stay More to be buried there. (Strictly speaking, as we recall, Colvin himself was not born in Stay More and thus had no right to be buried there, but all the dead Swains had always been buried there, so it was his right by default.)
After much deliberation and heated argument, the men of Stay More will agree upon one solution: if a double headstone would be erected, Tenny on one side waiting for Colvin’s eventual interment on the other side, that would be acceptable. And that will be what will happen. There will be few attending the graveside service, in a downpour, scarcely enough people to make up the four singing parts of the four-part harmony for “Farther Along”; indeed, there will be no soprano, but Tenny will provide it herself, delighted to note that the words of that old funeral hymn are in the future tense: “Farther along we’ll know all about it, farther along we’ll understand why…” But she will already understand why.
Tenny will always like to visit the spot, anytime she can tell, not that she will necessarily approve of the barbaric custom of sticking dead bodies into the earth. She will like that double headstone, an ultimate expression of bigeminality, if you will, even though it will be many years before Tenny will get a chance to tell your architecture novel. Once, years or so later, while she will be admiring the double headstone and dusting some debris off of it (for the one power of moving things which the dead retain is a certain control over the breezes), an automobile will drive up, and a woman will get out of it and stand for several long moments over the grave, which will not yet have received Colvin. Tenny can tell that it will be Piney. She can tell that Piney will be feeling some sadness, and just a tinge of jealousy, to be reading the name “Tennessee Tennison Swain” carved into the same block as “Colvin U Swain.” Piney will not remain long, and will visit nothing else, no one else.
Well, sir, you yourself will go back to that cemetery yourself the next chance you will get, tomorrow maybe, so that you will be able to confirm that it will be there like Tenny has been telling you. Tenny will be there when you will arrive, and although she will possibly not manifest her presence to you in any way, not even in the breeze, she will let you know that she will be fully in control of the future tense, and will never relinquish it. But if you will stand at that grave long enough, which now contains both of them, and if you will listen hard enough, with your hearing aid turned up as high as it will go, you might even be able to hear the lovely soprano voice singing that aria of pure notes, rising and falling, not meant to say anything but only to chant, or to carol, some wordless expression of that feeling of kindly melancholy, a mixture of yearning, wanting, hoping, desire, with maybe a tinge of loss and bewilderment. You will think you are being haunted by the last fading notes of the Ozarks.
She will never have haunted Colvin, let alone have appeared to him. But, having waited a decent, seemly length of time after the funeral, she will begin regularly to “do something” about his nocturnal erections.
She will recall that information he’d given her about incubus and succubus, and she will even recall (she can tell anything that she ever said or was ever said to her) her exact words in proposing what they’d originally tried to do; “I’ll be your concubine and succubate you?” And of course she will recall as if it were only a moment ago (in fact it was) the night on Brushy Mountain she caused the sleeping Colvin to impregnate her. So it will be easy for her to begin the practice that she will continue for the rest of his life: entering his dream and giving his erection enough attention to detonate and defuse it.
Alas, it will be my mention of this which will lead to some ultimate ill-feeling between Colvin and myself, and to my departure from Stay More. Colvin will have been continuing, on a daily basis, to sit with me on his porch and relate the end, painful though it be, of the long story he will have been telling me. Almost by unspoken consent, I would cease being his house-guest as soon as his story will have ended. My typhoid fever will have been totally cleared up, I will have been fit as a fiddle, and there will have been no excuse, really, for me to stay more at Stay More except my love for the place and my desire to hear of what will have happened to him in the years after Tenny’s death.
But there is so much of what you have been learning that Colvin could not possibly have known: all the things that happened to Tenny on Brushy Mountain and in the sanatorium, all her thoughts and feelings that have come to us under her own point of view in the future tense. If I didn’t get any of this from Colvin, and I’m not just making it up, where does it come from? I wish I could give some “valid” explanation, such as that Tenny’s spirit visited me as I lay on that cot which had been her bed. Or that she will have told me all of this during the “visitations” when she comes to me if I close my eyes right.
But the truth will be that Tenny can not only tell, she can also tell.
At whatever point Tenny will have taken over the telling, and the “telling,” she will not only have made herself immortal but also have made her story not something which happened, or is happening, but will be happening, as long as she is still “around.” And believe me—or you know it, don’t you?—she’s very much around. Remember I told you how I can close my eyes to make someone disappear and be replaced by someone else? Don’t be offended, but I will be replacing you with Tenny, all the time. I will see her now.
One afternoon Colvin and I will be sitting on the porch, and Rowena will be quitting for the day. As Rowena will walk down the porch steps and out into the road, she’ll give her fine hips a jauntier swing than usual, and when she’ll be out of earshot, I’ll banter with Doc, “Did you ever git any of that?”
Doc will chuckle, and will blurt, “Never had no need of it.”
“Oh?” I will say, and before I can stop myself will ask, “Because Tenny takes care of you every night?”
Doc’s mouth will fall open, and he will stare at me, and then his face will grow very red. I will not be able to “tell” if the red is embarrassment or anger. Maybe some of both. Then he will demand, “How’d you know that?”
“It’s part of the story,” I will observe.
“But goshdang ye, it aint no story that I ever tole ye!” he’ll declare. “Where’d you hear it?”
“Did you ever tell it to anyone?” I will challenge him. “Even Latha?” He will shake his head. “Then how could I have heard it anywhere?”
“Have you been sneaking into my diary?” he will demand.
“You never told me you kept a diary,” I will say.
“I don’t,” he will admit. “But where in blazes did you learn about what Tenny does at night…unless you’re just making a wild guess?”
Well sir, we will have gotten ourselves into quite a flap or row over this matter, and, as such things will, it will escalate until we’re hurling epithets at each other which we will both regret the next day. Quite possibly I will have known that my time at Stay More will have come to an end and unconsciously I will have been picking a quarrel with him in order to make the parting easier. But as it will turn out, we will even argue over his bill. He will refuse to present me a bill, and will accept nothing. I will insist upon paying at least for the medical care if not for all the room and board or “hospitalization,” but he will act as if my money is tainted and won’t touch it.
I will not even be able to recall my last words to him, as I will be putting on my hat and lifting up my knapsack. But I will think they were: “Don’t you see, Doc? She will still be telling all of it, and always will.”
We will keep in touch, sporadically, over the years, with postcards. Doc will never have been much of a letter-writer. I will learn over the years how he will continue his obsession with the Great White Plague. Not from him will I learn the story of how, during the Second World War, one day in the heat of August, Colvin will discover some of his free-ranging chickens acting sick, having trouble breathing. Still being a veterinarian himself from way back, he will take cultures from the chicken’s throats and after incubating the plates for several days he will observe cultures of actinomycetes developing. He will excavate the soil in which the chickens will have been scratching, and will find that the organisms are resident in the soil, and he will continue working with these cultures until he feels he has discovered enough to send them off to other scientists who are working on the problem, one of whom, named Selman Waksman, will convert Colvin’s cultures into a powerful antibiotic called streptomycin, and will receive the credit for having discovered it. Colvin will not have been interested in any credit, anyway. He will simply have wanted, with all his heart, to wipe out the Great White Plague. And his streptomycin will have done it.
Will it be time for you to leave, now? Yes, soon; I will have only two things essentially left to say: how Colvin himself will have gone to join his beloved Tenny in the Land of Telling, which you will possibly already have known. I will forget the year; perhaps it will have been as late as 1957. They will say, as they will never tire of saying wondrous things about Colvin U Swain, that he will have had an opportunity to have done something that he had not quite been permitted to do that day on those rounds in the St. Louis hospital so many, many years before: he will restore a dead man to life. You will wonder, anyone will wonder: if he will have been capable of it, why will he not have done it to Tenny thirty some years before? We will never know. We will know only that this man, who will be clinically dead, and will have been so for a great number of hours, will be resurrected by Colvin. We will not even bother with the man’s name. The man will have meant nothing personally to Colvin; just one more Stay Moron with a terminal disease. But Colvin will have always believed: The patient need not mean anything whatsoever personally in order to receive the physician’s most devoted attention.
Anyway, the gods or Whoever will have been angry with Colvin for restoring life, because one day not long after, while he will have been walking fast to get out of a rainstorm, he will have been hit by a thunderbolt and reduced to a pile of ashes, just enough ashes to be placed in a cannister and interred beside Tenny at that double tombstone.
So much for Colvin. Recently, I will have written this simple note to Mary:
“Dear Mary Celestia: The VA people will attend to all the details of my burial—undertakers, coffin, grave diggers, etc. Even the flag on the coffin, the chaplain, and a government marker for a tombstone. ALL FREE. If anybody asks you for money, call your lawyer. Wommack, isn’t it? You don’t have to do ANYTHING. If you don’t feel like going out to the National Cemetery, Don’t Go. I am sorry I have no money to leave you, Mary Celestia. I love you, as always. Vance.”
I will not know, of course, how much more time Tenny will grant me in this future tense of hers. I might well be able to stick around for a few more years, but I’d just as soon get on over to the Fiddler’s Green in the Land of Telling as soon as they will be able to make room for me on the Liar’s Bench. I tell you, when I reach the Land of Telling, I intend to tell ’em a thing or two!
But all that
telling, whether we mean knowing or narrating, is as immaterial and fugitive as those breezes bearing Tenny’s song, or the imagined choiring of trees. Her future tense may never come to an end, but it will pause for now, with the realization that the only way she will ever be able to give shape and substance and heart to it will be to transmit it to me in such a way that I will be able to pass it along to you, and you will be able, one of these years, to turn it into novel, giving the reader two whole handsful of Tenny’s future tense.
Which is exactly what I will have done, for Tenny no less than for you. Good-bye, my boy. Godspeed.
About the Author
Donald Harington
Although he was born and raised in Little Rock, Donald Harington spent nearly all of his early summers in the Ozark mountain hamlet of Drakes Creek, his mother’s hometown, where his grandparents operated the general store and post office. There, before he lost his hearing to meningitis at the age of twelve, he listened carefully to the vanishing Ozark folk language and the old tales told by storytellers.
His academic career is in art and art history and he has taught art history at a variety of colleges, including his alma mater, the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where he has been lecturing for fifteen years. He lives in Fayetteville with his wife Kim.
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