Butterfly Weed (44 page)

Tenny’s husband will bend down and give her a long kiss. And over the next few days, he will kiss her so frequently and so passionately that she will be moved to ask, “Are you trying to give yourself my disease?”

“Yeah,” he will admit “I reckon I am.”

Tenny’s last memory of the sanatorium will be not so much a memory as an awareness of the need for her last blur: Dr. Baker and Dr. Stewart, and another doctor too, whom she will not have recognized, still arguing with Colvin, continuing their controversy all the way out to the buggy, as Colvin will place her in it, and will climb into it himself and will say some final angry words at the doctors, and will cluck at Nessus and drive off.

She will never know just what the doctors were fighting about. Once the sanatorium is behind her, the blur will dissolve, and she will be able to see everything, to hear everything, to smell everything, all the way home to Stay More. Or almost.

Right away she will need to put on the smoked glasses she will have bought at the canteen with the money Colvin will have sent her.

When they reach the open highway, Colvin will say, “Now Tenny, I want you to tell me if the buggy’s bouncing hurts you at all. I want you to let me know whenever we’re going too fast, and I’ll take Nessus down from a trot to a walk.”

And when she will never complain about any discomfort of the buggy, he will say, “I want you to tell me any time you feel any pain, anywhere, and I’ll give you something for it.”

But she never will. Her only requests, infrequently, will be when she will need to “go,” not just to make water but to defecate, an awkward and embarrassing situation, and the only truly unpleasant aspect of the journey.

They will need to spend three nights to reach home. The first night, their honeymoon night, will be in Paris, and Colvin will not be able to avoid making a few jokes about the great romantic city of Europe and what an ideal place for a honeymoon it would be. He will have very little money; they will stay in a very cheap hotel. She will not expect, nor ask, that he do on the honeymoon night what husbands are supposed to do. She will remind him that in a way they’d already had their honeymoon night, that time in the Commercial Hotel in Jasper when she’d got married to Russ. She will be happy enough to go to sleep in his arms, although she will wake more than once to find him hooked up to her chest with his stethoscope. “Put that thing away and go to sleep,” she will say, and will realize how bossy, how wifely, it sounds, and she will think,
Tenny Swain.

Their second night, in a hotel in Clarksville, she will have thought for a long time about having control of the future tense and what it implies, and how it’s something both powerful and dangerous, like dynamite: it can help build or it can help destroy. It will be easy, with the future tense, to get little things you want; for instance, she will ask Colvin, since he will be trying to go to sleep with his ear up against her chest anyway, if he would mind sucking on her breasts, and he will gladly oblige. Since she will never have been able to have a baby, she will want to know what it feels like, and Colvin will not mind, although he will admit he will never have done it before. She will discover that it will make her very horny, and she will wish that they were able to make love, because obviously it will have made Colvin somewhat horny too. The exquisiteness of the sensation will be something that she will be able to take with her, wherever it is that she is soon going, that Other Place perhaps. In the past tense, “He sucked her breasts,” and regardless of how well he did it, it was done, and all she had left was the memory of it. In the present tense, “He sucks her breasts,” and it is driving her wild, for the whole duration of the present moment, but the moment does not last. In the future tense, “He will suck her breasts,” and it will be a feeling that she will be able to have any time she will want it. For eternity.

Their third day on the road, she will begin to think a lot about dear old Grampaw McArtor and that Other Place that he talked about going to when he died, that place where every bird and bug went when their time was over, and the birds and bugs as well as the people didn’t have to breathe anymore, nor eat, nor take a shit. She will wonder what sort of place it really is, because Grampaw didn’t give her a very good description of it, and just suggested that perhaps folks could go fishing or fiddle and dance and sing even if they didn’t breathe nor eat nor take shits. Tenny will wonder if the place will look anything like
this,
for they will have reached the Ozarks now—“Not much further to the Newton County line,” Colvin will say—and she will want that Other Place to look as much as possible like this place. She will recall those old jests about how Ozarkers gone to Heaven break down and cry every springtime out of homesickness.

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.