Butterfly Weed (29 page)

For the rest of the morning, Venda allowed Colvin to exist without a single thought of Tenny. At noon he had no physical appetite remaining but he was hungry, so she fed him dinner, pork chops and corn on the cob and a big glass of buttermilk, into which she probably put another ten or twenty micrograms of whatever private stock love potion she was using, so that without even waiting for him to digest his meal she took him back to bed for the rest of the afternoon. Again he had no thought of Tenny, and his only thought of Piney was a reflection upon those times, years before, when Piney in her eagerness to conceive again had depleted entirely Colvin’s reserves of “seed-juice,” but it had taken her several days and nights to do it, and now Venda had drained him empty in just a matter of hours. He was bone-dry, and tried to call this fact to Venda’s attention, but she said, “You can still explode even if ye caint shoot off, cain’t you?” And she was right; if anything, each successive orgasm was more paroxysmal than the one before, and he was beginning to amaze himself at the way his whole body shook and shuddered at the moment of unproductive ejaculation. “Thirty-seven,” Venda remarked after one particularly violent explosion had left him so limp that he could only lie there as if in a coma. He thought she was revealing her age to him, and he wanted to assure her that even though that was a year older than he was, he didn’t mind. But then she explained, “You’ve done come thirty-seven times,” and she smiled beatifically, adding, “but I’ve come seventy-one, myself.” He allowed as how he didn’t think mortal human beings were capable of that many, and therefore they must be either inhuman or immortal, one. He told Venda that if she would reveal to him the ingredients of whatever love potion she had used on him, they could both get rich bottling the stuff and putting it on the market. She just laughed and said, “And then any hussy could use it. Do you think I’d let any woman other than me ever git a-holt of it?”

“Wal, you’d better pour me another little drap of it,” he suggested.

“How about some good whiskey for a chaser?” she offered, and jumped out of bed long enough to mix him a drink.

It was real fine whiskey, better than Chism’s Dew, and possibly even bottled in the bond. And she must have been generous in lacing it, because his tired, sore, scrubbed old jemmison, which looked as if it had leprosy, commenced to unbend and rise yet again, and Venda helped it along with some more of her mouth music, saying, “I bet ye didn’t know I could yodel.” If that’s what you call it, her yodeling gave his
corpora cavermosa
a transfusion. Pretty soon, they were at it again, plunging and bucking, grunting and squealing, lifting and floating, galloping and trotting, you never saw anything like it, nor had they. Colvin realized that not only were his testicles empty but so were his lungs; he had used up all his breath, and didn’t have enough of it to keep going. Venda herself was nearly all out of breath too, but she had at least enough to get on top and keep bouncing her bottom, and she still had some strength left in those powerful vaginal muscles of hers that were milking his jemmison, and he hoped that she could keep going just another minute, which was all he needed to have the biggest burst he’d ever had…

He happened to glance over and notice that there was a couple of folks sitting in straight-backed chairs beside the doorway, watching them. One of them was this woman’s very own offspring, a young man name of Russ. The other one was Colvin’s very own true love, a young lady name of Tenny. Such a situation had all the earmarks of a dream, or perhaps even a nightmare, but it was still unclabbered broad daylight. Russ had a big grin on his face like he was really having fun watching his naked mother squatting atop a chemically elongated pecker. Tenny’s mouth had formed itself into that perfect O which was the envy of all her O-named classmates, and she was resting the fingers of one hand, on which she wore that amethyst gold ring, alongside her cheek, as if in astonishment. But both of them were just sitting there, watching. Venda hadn’t noticed, she was trying so hard to reach number seventy-two. After recovering from the first reflex jerk of surprise, Colvin realized that it was simply too late to make any pretense. It was clear to even a blind and deaf person who still retained a sense of smell that some real fucking was going on in this room. And to a person, or two of them, like Russ and Tenny, who could see and hear as well as smell, there was no fooling whatsoever. Colvin was so close to number thirty-eight that he figured he might as well just keep on keeping on, so he did, but he closed his eyes out of some sort of politeness, as if by shutting her out of his vision he might be sparing her a little of spectacle. Venda went wild as she arrived within reach of her climax, and she reached mightily for it, and got it, and commenced yodeling again, but in a different key from when she’d had a mouthful.

Colvin didn’t even have enough breath to sigh, let alone utter anything, but he used the last of his strength to thrust so hard into her that when he came back down the bed slats busted and the whole bed came crashing to the floor.

Have I made up for yesterday? Yesterday I sent you away frustrated with the interrupted telling of the first attempt of Colvin and Tenny to make love. Today I’ve just managed to tell you the single most intense, sustained, and repeated bout of sex that I’ve ever collected, as if to atone for yesterday’s short-coming. I ought to wait until tomorrow to say what happened next, but I expect you’ll be coming back again anyhow. And tomorrow we’re going to have to get real serious.

So let’s clean up here, first: Venda and Colvin just lay there on the mattress where it had crashed to the floor, and it took both of them a long time to recover their breathing abilities. During that time, Colvin could only stare woefully at Tenny and shrug his shoulders and spread his hands as if trying to communicate by sign language that he wasn’t responsible for whatever he’d just been doing. Finally Venda sucked in a big draught of air and got her eyes working, and discovered that they had an audience, and cried her son’s name. The audience, both of them, began to clap, first Russ and then Tenny timidly followed his example.

Then Russ and Tenny exchanged the merest of glances before getting up from their chairs and rushing out. The courthouse was conveniently just down the street, and they went in and got a marriage license and found a justice of the peace and had themselves declared man and wife before sundown.

Chapter eight

I
s it raining out? I can’t see it but I think I can hear it. Mary Celestia, because her bed’s yonder by the window, is the self-appointed Regulator of the Blinds, an irony that won’t be lost on you, and she prefers to keep ’em closed because even though she’s blind the light hurts her eyes. So I can’t watch the rain, if that’s what’s falling out there. I shall never again see the dogwood bloom nor watch the red-horse shoal. But I can still see and hear and smell all the Ozark rains that ever fell in my life, and I can
feel
the ones that fell on me, and I could tell you the difference between an early summer rain, such as what’s falling out there now, and a late summer rain, which was what commenced deluging the village of Jasper before Tenny and Russ left that courthouse where they got married. You know of course that in the Ozarks it was considered the best possible omen for a good downpour to fall on a funeral, since it meant that the dead man’s soul was at rest, and even a few drops of rain at a funeral were more comfort to the bereaved family than anything the preacher man could say. Every Ozarker knew the little verse:

Happy is the bride that the sun shines on;

Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on.

And it was felt, therefore, that rainy weather on a wedding day is nothing short of calamitous. Russ and Tenny had planned to get on Marengo and ride back up to Brushy Mountain for the first night of their honeymoon, and the shivaree and infare and all, and so Tenny could say to her folks, “Well, I went ahead and got myself hitched like y’uns wanted me to. Are you happy now?” But they could only huddle miserably in the doorway of the courthouse and watch that toad-strangling pourdown. Leastways that old courthouse, plain and simple as it was, built in the first years of the century out of humble rough limestone, somehow had a little classical pediment over that doorway, and that was what Colvin noticed when he went out in his buggy looking for them. He just sat there in the open buggy with his clothes already soaked plumb through and through, and the lightning crashing down too close for comfort, and the thunder reverberating from wall to wall of those mountains that surround the little town, and he observed how the young couple had that Greek pediment over their heads as if the triangle was protecting them from the storm. They didn’t wave at him, and he didn’t wave at them, but he began to understand what they had done, going to that courthouse. Why else would a young couple go to the courthouse? Not to pay their taxes, nor to serve on a jury.

Now I suppose some day if you’ll try to turn all of this into a novel, you’ll want to know some of the facts about the situation that I haven’t yet offered. So maybe you need to know Russ Breedlove a little better, not that it would change your opinion of him, but it would help you understand why he and Tenny done what they did, or did what they done. What little we know about him so far is that he was seventeen years old and was about to be a sophomore at Newton County Academy, where he was considered the best-looking boy. We know that the principal, Jossie, had remarked that Russ and Tenny ought to make a pair, because they both had the same habit of trying to see how much they could get away with. He was mischievous, audacious, even bodacious. Tenny herself was known to refer to him as “an eternal boy,” and while she might just have meant he’d always be a male or masculine, she could’ve also meant that he’d never grow up. He was charming but cruel, with maybe a sadistic streak in him: one of his favorite pastimes was catching butterflies and striking sulfur matches to hold beneath them and watch them burn, the slower the better. The biggest difference between him and Tenny was that she had the highest grades at the Academy, and he had the lowest, not because he was stupid but because he just didn’t give a damn about school.

He was from a broken home, which was a rare situation in the Ozarks, where divorce was practically unknown. We’ve seen that his mother, all the years he was growing up, was too busy fooling around with men to give him much attention, although she really did adore him. That time she first seduced young Donny Kilgore and left little Russ alone to play with his bow and arrow, she didn’t know that Russ followed her and spied on them and that was the first of many “primal scenes” he witnessed between his momma and different men, culminating in the one with Colvin. And during that first primal scene he made an astonishing discovery: Donny Kilgore had only one pecker. For quite some time thereafter, until Venda took up with another man and Russ could spy on that man and discover that he too had only one pecker, Russ considered Donny Kilgore a freak or a cripple, one. Russ wanted to ask his mother if maybe Donny had got one of his peckers cut off in an accident or something, but to do that would be to admit to his mother that he had been spying. Russ had reached puberty himself when he discovered that all those years, even while she was having her torrid affair with Donny Kilgore, his mother had been screwing Uncle Marty Breedlove, Mulciber’s brother, and that possibly even Uncle Marty was his real father, or at least his co-father, along with Mulciber. Russ began to wonder—and would continue to wonder, until he had a chance to ask his hygiene teacher, Doc Swain, about it—if it were possible that his having two fathers was the reason he had two peckers, and that Mulciber was the progenitor of one of his peckers and Uncle Marty of the other one.

When his mother was fooling around with Uncle Marty, Russ liked to put on the army uniform that Marty had taken off and dress up with it, pistol and all, while he watched his momma and Uncle Marty move through every possible coital position and commit every conceivable sexual act. When eventually Russ considered his visual education complete, and was growing bored with both watching their behavior and dressing up in the captain’s uniform, he told his mother that he knew about her and Marty and would tell Mulciber about it unless she would do with him what she had done with Marty and Donny and everybody else. Venda tried to explain to him that mothers aren’t supposed to do it with their own boys, and therefore she simply couldn’t, not that she didn’t want to, because she adored Russ, and if he weren’t her son she would screw him blind. Her refusal made Russ tell his father, or co-father, Mulciber, that his uncle, or other co-father, Marty, was screwing his wife, and, as we’ve already seen, Mulciber caught them and beat them up and put a stop to all that, and threw Venda out of the house.

When Venda went away to that Shenandoah Music School and took Russ with her, in her loneliness she listened more sympathetically to Russ’s constant requests to be permitted to sleep with her or at least have her get rid of his virginity. He talked of practically nothing else, unless it was to express lewd desires about any other female who came within his line of sight. She jokingly told him that he was practically the embodiment of carnal lust, but she still hadn’t said a word to him about the exceptional circumstance of his having two peckers. He pestered her so much that finally she agreed to let him feel her breasts. This of course gave him an erection, or rather a pair of them, which, she told him, were called “hard-ons,” and she allowed as how it might not be too awfully wicked if she just used her two hands to make him come, and thereby started the practice, or the arrangement, that continued through the first year at Newton County Academy. She never did tell him that he was abnormal for having two peckers; she acted as if using her two hands to bring him off was just a natural thing that she did every day just as every day he helped her with her grooming and dressing, her hair and makeup and all. She just assumed that he would want both of his peckers to shoot off simultaneously, and that was her goal, although occasionally, since she was left-handed, his right pecker sometimes got off before the left one did. Ever so often, about once a week on the average, he would beg her to let him stick his peckers into her, but she would just tell him that was something that wasn’t permitted. She never tried to explain to him that it was anatomically unlikely, or anything like that; she just said it wasn’t “allowed” or “approved” or “permitted.”