Butterfly Weed (24 page)

There our hearts are yearning;

N.C.A
. we love thee.

To thine ideals guide us

Lofty aims supply us.

In life’s joys and sorrows

O’er land and waters,

Thy sons and daughters,

We will e’er to thee be true.

Although Tenny was the only member of the Glee Club who could sing all the words without forgetting one or making a mistake, she wasn’t sure she could honestly say she loved
N.C.A
., because
N.C.A
. was not a member of the opposite sex to whom she could say absolutely anything that popped into her head, the way she could talk to Doc Swain. Whenever she sang the song, she always substituted “Colvin Swain” for “
N.C.A
.,” same number of syllables and nobody noticed if everybody was singing.

There was one final thing she knew about love, and that is this: it always gets bigger. Sometimes like a little tree sapling, it may start out just as a seed, but it keeps on growing, and it never stops growing until it dies and goes to that Other Place where we don’t have to breathe, nor eat, nor use the privy. Tenny was bothered by the thought that she could not say
everything
to Colvin that popped into her head, but she was confident that if love grows, then someday she would be able to say everything, including this, “Colvin Swain, I love thee.”

But she had told him her whole life’s story, had told him things she would never have mentioned to Grampaw, and had told him her deepest, darkest secret, about ’See, and about ’See’s monthly message in red, and Colvin had just sat there with a pleasant smile on his face, saying, “That shore is real purty” and “How did that make you feel?” And then now at the end of the school term, by coincidence right at the time of a message from ’See, Tenny had read that textbook’s shocking last chapter, Reproduction, and had learned about menstruation. Most of the chapter was just dull stuff about cell division and maturation of germ cells and heredity and chromosomes, but then all of a sudden there it was, a section on the Male Reproductive Organs with all kinds of stuff on
vas deferens
and
vesiculae seminales
and
spermatozoa,
and
penis.
Especially
penis.
She realized she had read the entire section of three paragraphs on the penis without once taking a breath, not once.
Erectile tissue,
enclosing cavities that filled with blood!
Corpora cavernosa,
two of those caves along the penis’s topside, that swell with blood!
Corpus spongiosum,
that surrounds the pee-tube and culminates in the
glans,
a “terminal dilation,” sort of like a mushroom, covered with a
prepuce,
soft, moist, red, to the
meatus,
the opening of the pee-tube, where some other stuff also comes out. The book didn’t say a single blessed word about either a practical reason nor a pretty reason for all of that apparatus, except something about the spinal cord being the center of reflex excitation associated with sexual emotions. Since the book had already made quite clear that we experience emotions not in our heart or soul or guts or anywhere except our brain, Tenny wasn’t sure how the spinal cord could be the center of sexual emotions, whatever those were, and she couldn’t wait for the class to take up that chapter. She would ask Colvin in private, with or without a lollipop. But before she got a chance to see him again, she kept on reading, into the Reproductive Organs of the Female. Just as she suspected, girls are much more complicated than boys. The only illustration in the portion on the male was a cross-section of a testis that made it look like a slice of lemon, but the female portion had a bunch of pictures, including a poor girl’s whole cut-away bottom end with all those tunnels and tubes and cavities up in there. Tenny had no idea that she was so deep, and in three different places down there, one for pee, one for shit, and one for…blood? She couldn’t be sure what the middle tunnel was for, squoze betwixt the other two but running way up to a big-mouthed critter labeled
uterus.
She kept on reading, and was amazed to discover that women make eggs just like chickens, only they don’t lay them or sit on them to hatch them, but hatch them up inside.

And then, the section with that big word,
menstruation,
and the explanation of ’See’s message. Tenny reddened as she read, not from embarrassment but from anger and also perhaps because she was menstruating at the moment, and she came across this: “During menstruation there is apt to be more or less general discomfort and nervous irritability; the woman is not quite herself, and those responsible for her happiness ought to watch and tend her with special solicitude, forbearance, and tenderness, and protect her from anxiety and agitation.” Tenny felt kind of cheated, thinking of all the wasted opportunities she might have had for solicitude, forbearance, and tenderness if only she had told her mother or grandmother about the message from ’See.

She also realized that it was her menstrual discomfort and nervous irritability which made her snap at Colvin, “And apparently you don’t even know enough about menstruation to tell me I’m wrong when I’m a-layin here spillin my guts about me and ’See.”

Colvin realized it too, and once he had thought the matter over, he asked her, “Are you getting the message right now?”

It didn’t take her long to figure out what he meant, and she confessed, “As a matter of fact, yes, I am. Started yesterday.”

“Didn’t your folks ever use words like ‘courses’ or ‘flowers’ or ‘monthlies’?” he asked. Tenny shook her head. “‘On the rag’? ‘Unwell’? ‘Period’?” Tenny shook her head. “‘Flying the red flag’? ‘Falling off the roof’? ‘Coming around’?” Tenny shook her head. “Well,” Colvin tried one more, “surely you’ve heard of ‘having a friend’?”

“I never had no friends except Grampaw and you,” she said.

“And ’See,” he reminded her. “Don’t you see? Maybe that there’s the purty reason for the menstruation, and I wanted to hear ye draw me a pitcher of it. The reason I never interrupted ye to set ye straight was because I thought the idee of ’See as a kind of soul who has gone to that Other Place but sends you a monthly message is a much nicer explanation of catamenia than anything us doctors could come up with. Or that textbook, either.”

“But what about ‘babyberries’?” she asked. “What about my stupid idee that babies are born from the mouth? How come ye never set me straight on none of them other dumb notions?”

“I jist wanted to git to know ye,” he said, and then he went a little farther than that. “I jist wanted a glimpse of your soul.”

“Why me and none of them other kids?” she wanted to know. “Maybe they’ve got some purty dumb notions too. But you don’t spend any of yore time with
them.
I think Zarky suspicions that this purty ring came from
you,
and Zarky says there’s a lot of talk going around that you are giving me private lessons in ‘reproductive behavior.’ I wasn’t sure what she meant. Don’t ye dare laugh, but until I read it in the book, I never heard of a
pennus!
”

Colvin blushed, but he corrected her pronunciation. “That’s ‘pee-nis.’ Why do you think the textbook kept puttin off that chapter, till the very end? Since all the rest of the body is the result of what happens to it
after
it’s been conceived by the coming together of the male and female, you’d think that chapter on Reproduction ought to come first instead of last, wouldn’t ye? Why do you think they held off so long?”

Tenny thought. “No, maybe the whole reason that all of the other things are there—bone and blood and breath—is to make the coming together of the male and female possible. Maybe the book’s trying to say that’s all we live for.”

Colvin smiled. “I never thought of it that way, but I reckon ye may be right. I thought the book put it off so long in order to give us time to get used to the idee. You know there’s no way I could start off the first day of class talking about sex. I have to build up to it. I have to git to know ye first.”

“Do ye know me now?”

“I know ye now.” He reached up on the shelf and took down the lollipop box to show her that it was empty. “There aint no more, and I aint gonna git another box, and school’s over, anyhow. I reckon I’ve learnt near about all ye have to tell me.” Painful though the very thought of it was, Colvin was trying to work his way up toward saying good-bye. This was the last day of school, and she would be going home tomorrow, and it was quite possible he would never see her again. Even if her parents were not determined to get her married off, now that she was sixteen, she might not be coming back to Parthenon again, and, in any case, he had made up his mind not to return himself. But the closer he got to the moment of saying good-bye, the more he realized he wasn’t going to be able to do it. He was in love.

“The last page in the textbook is about death,” she pointed out. “I’m still a-dying, and you haven’t cured me of that.”

“We’re all a-dying, Tenny,” he said, surprised he’d been able to say her name correctly without messing up. “The textbook says, ‘While death is the natural end of life, it is not its aim—we should not live to die, but live prepared to die.’ You’ve been living to die, Tenny. I wush I could of stopped ye from doing that. I wush they was some way I could prove to ye what ye jist said: that maybe the whole expectation of us livin and havin bodies is not for dyin, let alone gittin sick, but the coming together of male and female.”

“There
is
a way you could prove it to me,” she suggested, although she had to catch her breath three times to say this.

And he knew what she meant, but he couldn’t do it here, not in his office, not on that lounge. Not even with the door locked. He wasn’t even sure he could do it if some magic enchantment could evacuate all the rest of the population of the campus and Parthenon too and leave him and Tenny the whole place all to themselves, with a big bed right in the middle of it, and it full dark with maybe just a nice moon to set the mood. Picturing such a scene in his mind’s eye, he recognized a certain familiarity about the setting: you only see places like that in dreams. Thinking of dreams, he had a sudden bright idea, and he asked her, “Do you ever dream, of a night?” Of course, she said; doesn’t everybody? “What do you dream about?” he asked. She reminded him how for example that whole week last fall she had a dream every single night of him, with all her clothes off, and him poking some instruments into every orifice of her body. It had nearly cost him her respect for him, because he had been totally unable to find anything wrong with her. “And was I really there in your dream as if you could reach out and touch me?” he wanted to know. It was more like him reaching out and doing all the touching, she said, but she sure could feel it, all over her body. “Well, then, Tenny, how about, tonight, let’s—” He tried to make his suggestion, but he couldn’t come right out with it. After all, she was a virgin, and he wasn’t sure he had any right to take her virginity away from her, even in a dream, not in this year that she was scheduled to become married. He postponed bluntly suggesting, “—Let’s me and you have a dream in which we lay down together…” by becoming gruffly pedantic and trying to explain to her certain matters which were not covered in the hygiene textbook, namely incubation, succubation, and masturbation. None of these were covered because all three of them were events in the mind’s eye, and the textbook didn’t even discuss the mind’s eye, a supreme part of the anatomy even though it was invisible, like the things it observed. All three words came from the Latin root,
cubare,
to lie down upon, same root that gives us concubine, meaning a woman who lies down with a man without being married to him.
Incubatio
refers to the man lying down with the woman, in her dream;
succubatio
refers to the woman lying down with the man, in his dream; and
masturbatio
refers to anybody lying down with themselves…

Tenny yawned. She had to yawn, not because she was bored, but because she had understood very quickly what her lover was trying to suggest but wasn’t able to, and the suggestion had taken her breath away, and when your breath gets stolen, according to the textbook, yawning is an involuntary respiratory reflex that returns your breath to you. But when Colvin saw her yawning, he assumed he was boring her, so he tried again, “How about, tonight when we go to sleep, you in your bed and me in mine, and we start to have dreams, how about let’s—” Damn him, he
still
couldn’t come right out and say it, and Tenny was about to become asphyxiated despite yawning.

So she used what little breath she had left to say, or ask, “I’ll be your concubine and succubate you?”

“That’s the idee!” he said. “Except of course a concubine is a lady with a lot of experience, and it will be your first time, so I’ll have to be real careful and gentle with you.”

She had no breath left, but she managed to utter, “I caint wait.”

The really good thing about doing it this way, he explained to her, was that they were permitted to choose whatever location they wanted, just anywhere at all, and furnish it as they wished, and even decide what kind of fancy clothing they would be wearing when they took it off to get undressed. So they were able to kill the rest of the long afternoon by discussing and determining the ideal setting for their tryst, adjusting the temperature, getting the moonlight just right, selecting the bedcovers, starting a breeze to waft the curtained canopy of the huge four-poster, and even deciding which platters the Victrola would play throughout, a mixture of soft and slow numbers in the beginning, and faster things later on.

They were all set. But one thing troubled Tenny, and she was brave enough to inquire about it. She reminded him that she was in only the second day of having a friend or flying the flag, whatever, and she was worried that might be messy, not a message from ’See. “I might could git blood all over ye,” she warned.

He patted her hand. “My goodness, I’m a doctor, Tenny, and folks’ve been gittin blood all over me for years.”