Butterfly Weed (27 page)

Now, however, his Tenny was gone home for the summer to whatever bushwhacker shack she inhabited in the remote sticks of the county, where her folks would get her married off before she became any more sixteen than she already was, and Venda could invite Colvin to drop in and visit her in her pretty white cottage off the square in Jasper. “How about this afternoon?” she asked him.

Colvin was tempted, although he didn’t particularly care for Jasper. The county seat was a place he had to visit when he needed to pick up something at Arbaugh’s Rexall, or when he had to go to the courthouse, but Jasper was the private turf and battlefield of two other competing physicians, McFerrin and Bradley, and he was not comfortable stomping around in their stomping grounds. “I better not, I reckon,” he declined, and then, because it is automatic hospitality to temper any rejection with a counterinvitation, he added, “You’d better jist come go home with me.”

Venda raised her eyebrows. “What about your wife?” she asked. “Oh, I din’t mean it like that,” he said, wondering why Venda didn’t understand that such invitations are just formalities, tendered in courtesy, not meant to be taken literally. “I just meant, if ye ever happen to be in Stay More, stop in and say howdy.”

“So that’s it?” Venda demanded. “I throw myself at ye, and that’s all I git?” When he did not comment, she said, “You aint a-comin back here to work in the fall, so I might not never even see ye again. Except maybe in my dreams. Do ye suppose we could git together once in a while in our dreams? I’ll furnish the four-poster.”

Colvin could only smile as pleasantly as he could and say, “I’m sure it would be a right purty bed, but, to tell ye the honest truth, I think I’m going to have to give up dreamin. It’s too risky.” He raised his coach whip and gave a cluck to Nessus, and the buggy began to move.

“You haven’t seen the last of me, Colvin Swain!” Venda hollered after him. He would not stop. He kept on going, down the hill, away from Newton County Academy, out of her life. “But you’ve seen the last of Tenny!” she screamed.

He stopped. He turned. He stared at her, and asked, “Jist what do ye mean by that?”

“You know she’s supposed to git herself married, now that she’s sixteen,” Venda said.

“Yeah, that’s right, I reckon,” he said, and drove on. But as the summer progressed, Colvin began to wonder if Venda was right, that he never would see his Tenny again.

For a while, Colvin kept on trying to meet Tenny in his dreams. Every night he would find the spot in the enchanted forest where their bower had been, and it was still there. He would sit down atop that beautiful Garden Butterfly-pattern quilt of Tenny’s, and just wait for as long as he could stand it. Sometimes he would call for her, softly. She never showed up, and so he just started sleeping in that four-poster. It was a mattress that Tenny had stuffed with the down of a hundred geese, and even a few swans thrown in for good measure, and it was the best sleeping that Colvin had ever had. Whenever he woke up, he was always back in his own bed beside Piney, but he was so rested that even his arthritis stopped bothering him.

Life went on. Piney was glad that he wasn’t leaving three times a week to go to Parthenon, and she started showing her appreciation in several ways, cooking his favorite dinners with a lot of special pies and cakes for dessert, refraining from arguing with him whenever she was right and he was wrong about anything, and totally satisfying his libido before he dropped off to sleep and went searching for that four-poster, which he no longer sought in expectation of consummating the unfinished love with Tenny but only in hopes of finding her and talking to her and explaining to her what had happened before.

One night when he went to the four-poster, he was surprised to discover that there was another, larger four-poster right beside it, with an even more beautiful quilt in a Cottage Tulip pattern, atop which was reclining the naked, wriggling, perfumed body of Venda Breedlove. She was a sight such as no man could resist…except a man who had just been disburdened of all his semen by his wife.
Sorry, chickabiddy,
he had to say to her,
but I’m all fucked out.

Then what did ye come here for?
she demanded. He explained to her that he just wanted to talk to Tenny, that he’d been coming here every night hoping to find her. He said he hoped that Venda hadn’t done anything to her.
She’s gone to Brushy Mountain, and probably already married,
Venda declared.
You might jist as well climb in here with me, and I’ll bet ye a hunerd dollars I know something that will rise up yore pecker again.
Colvin said that he had no doubt that Venda could do it if anybody could but he just wasn’t of a mind to try it, right now. Then he asked her if she knew where Brushy Mountain was.
Do you think I’d tell ye, even if I knew?
she said.
But I honestly don’t have any idee whar it is. Jist some’ers at the ends of the airth.

All that summer, Colvin had been in the habit of asking people if they might know the location of Brushy Mountain. His dad, old Alonzo Swain, had been all over the whole county and knew the name of every mountain, hill, and rise, but he’d never heard of Brushy Mountain. Colvin asked several old-timers, patients of his who’d lived in Newton County all their long lives and done some traveling all over the county’s back brush, and one very old man said that he’d been there, many years ago, but had been drunk at the time, so he couldn’t even draw a map, and all he knew was that it was somewhere east of Stay More, east of Spunkwater too, up toward Mount Judea. Colvin checked with Postmaster Willis Ingledew on the possibility that there might even be a post office of that name, “Brushy Mountain,” but there wasn’t. Finally Colvin overcame his prejudice against Jasper to venture into the county seat and inquire at the tax assessor’s office. B. E. Greenhaw, the assessor, consulted his maps and his plats and his rolls and his records, and found a Dry Brush Fork and a Bushart Holler, but no Brushy Mountain. Driving his buggy away from the courthouse, Colvin passed the pretty little white cottage where Venda lived, and there she was, sitting on her porch swing, and she saw him, and began beckoning like mad, trying to get him to come join her, but he just lowered his head and drove on.

One day Colvin got a postcard from Tenny. All it said was a question: “Dear Colvin. What do you call the disease of being unable to dream? Your Tenny.” There was no return address. The postmark was Mount Judea, so Colvin decided to just send a letter addressed to her General Delivery at Mount Judea, and he wrote and rewrote it five or six times before he was satisfied with it. He told her there was no word in the medical dictionary for such a condition, so he would have to coin a word,
oneiresia,
loss of the power to dream, a word just for her and her temporary (he hoped) condition. He told her that he was awfully sorry that their romantic rendezvous in that dream had been trespassed upon by an uninvited interloper, Venda Breedlove. He explained that even though Mrs. Breedlove had been as naked as the day she was born, there had not been any actual intercourse between them. He suggested that Tenny ought to try drinking some butterfly weed tea before bedtime to help her relax, and allow herself to dream again, and if she could do that, Colvin would be glad to join her, and they could pick up where they’d left off before they’d been so rudely interrupted. He said that if she still couldn’t dream, just send him some kind of little map to show how to get to her house, and he’d rush right up there and handle all her problems in person in broad daylight. He said that he sure did care for her more than he’d ever cared for anybody, and he thought she was the most wonderful person who ever lived. He mailed this off, and waited, unable to do anything else for five days, until his letter was returned to the Stay More Post Office marked in a postmaster’s crude scrawl “
ADRESSY ONKNOWEN
,” and Piney, picking up the day’s mail, asked him who Tennessee Tennison was. He took his letter, tossed it into a pile of papers on his desk, and said it was just some student who’d tried to get her grade changed.

The summer was almost gone before it eventually dawned on Colvin that we don’t need to know the exact location of a place to reach it in our dreams. All those years he’d been obliged to practice the dream cure, when patients were no longer actually coming to his clinic, nor even sending messengers there to summon him to their homes, he had been venturing to all sorts of locations to treat the various dream patients. He had delivered babies on rooftops and tree limbs, and removed tonsils in streambeds and caves. He had performed cystoscopies while riding backwards on a galloping horse, and had set more than one broken bone while floating in the air. Seldom if ever would he have been able to say, “I’m two miles eastwards on Banty Creek” or “I’m about to enter Jesse Dinsmore’s place.” Locations don’t matter in dreams.

So one night at bedtime he decided he’d have more energy for the journey ahead if he refrained from sex, and he gently told Piney to keep her nightdress down because he had a headache. Instead of mounting him, she stroked his temples with her fingertips, which made him feel guilty for lying but also put him right to sleep. The way was dark, and long, and bent with many strange turnings. He didn’t even try to heed forks in the road, nor look for any signs or landmarks. All he had to go by was Tenny’s talk about the place during her lollipop sessions; the cabin faced westward, high on Brushy Mountain, and it had tomato crates stacked in the front yard to make crude pews for the Pentecostal services. After a long arduous climb through the mist, Colvin eventually came to such a place, on the western bench of a lofty mountain covered with the brush of red cedar and blackjack oak, and he was accosted by an old hound dog who might have been the one Tenny had told him about, but the dog wasn’t wearing pants. His male organ was clearly visible. As dogs are supposed to do, the hound barked to alert the occupants of the house, and a man appeared.

From Tenny’s description, Colvin realized the man, in his late fifties, had to be Wayne Don Tennison, but Colvin politely inquired anyway if this was the Tennison place. The man nodded.
I’m Colvin Swain, from over to Stay More,
he said,
and I’d like a word with yore darter, who was my pupil at the Newton County Academy.

The man made a gesture toward the very top of the mountain, a lofty crag, and said,
Passel akimbo gondola armadillo bodacious oregano now, also enchilada asafetida lally-gaggin mezzo-soprano worryword.

Colvin stared in the direction the man was pointing but couldn’t see anything except the peak, obscured by clouds. Colvin gave his head a shake, to clear his hearing, and said,
I shore am sorry, but I din’t catch a word ye said. Wal, maybe one or two words, but they didn’t make ary bit of sense.

Yes, violincello hacienda cabala guano jillikens,
the man said,
incunabula zero formula cicada antihero sang root lashins and lavins armada lambda pagoda missingmyth.

Colvin realized two things at once: the man was not speaking English, nor, despite certain Spanish and other Latinate words, any understandable language; and the man was not now pointing at the mountain peak but was motioning for Colvin to go.
I jist wanted to see Tenny for a minute,
Colvin pled,
to explain something to her and find out if she’s all right.

But the man more dramatically motioned for Colvin to depart the premises, and angrily intoned,
Memoranda dobbers cymlin gigolo, corrigenda lolliper adagio hoopla!

Tenny came rushing out of the house and grabbed her father’s arm, saying,
Daddy, let me talk to him!
But Tenny had aged something terrible! She looked like she was pushing forty, and her beautiful long hair was cut short, and Colvin wanted to cry, “My God! What have they done to you?” but she took his arm and led him away from the house, and out of earshot of her father. She said,
The old fart is jist talkin in tongues and he don’t even know what he’s sayin.
Then she looked him up and down, saying,
So you’re Colvin Swain, air ye? I’ve heared tell the most marvelous things about ye. But also the most horrible things.
She offered him her hand.
I’m Oriole Eubanks, Tenny’s older sister. One of ’em, anyhow. Redbird’s coming soon—she lives way off up to Kansas City now, though she din’t marry the least bit better than I did, ’cause Jerry Bob Eubanks owns the biggest insurance agency in northwest Arkansas, I’ll have ye to know. He couldn’t come with me. Too busy. I done been here two weeks, tryin my best to help baby sister, but I done all I could and I’m a-hankerin to git on back to Springdale.

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?