Butterfly Weed (26 page)

He drove as fast as he dared without running the buggy off the road or wearing Nessus out, and reached the
N.C.A
. while it was still early day, and parents were arriving and departing with their wagons, and a few automobiles, to pick up their kids to take them home. Seeing him, his devoted students gathered around him to say good-bye and to wish him a happy summer and to beg him to please reconsider and come back in the fall to teach something else like psychology or basketball. Colvin, who was looking all around for Tenny, could only tell them that he’d sure had a lot of pleasure knowing them, and he hoped they’d have the best of luck in life and not forget to take real good care of their bodies and systems.

He couldn’t find Tenny. He even entered the girls’ dormitory and boldly marched up to the sleeping rooms, but Tenny wasn’t among them. Thelma Villines, the housemother, grabbed him and told him that men wasn’t allowed up here. He asked her, “Have you seen Tennessee Tennison?” but she could only say she reckoned that Tenny had done already gone. Colvin spotted Ozarkia Emmons on the front porch, and asked her, “Have you seen Tenny?”

Zarky gave him a kind of frightened look and said, “Teacher, I don’t know what ye done to her last night, but ye broke her heart. She cried her eyes out ’til daybust, then lit out fer home.”

“Afoot?” he asked. And when Zarky nodded, he looked wildly around, as if he could see her, and asked, “Whichaway is Brushy Mountain, do ye know?”

Zarky pointed vaguely eastwards, then corrected her point to southeastwards. “Some’ers up in there way over round about beyond Mount Judy,” she said.

He had no idea how far it was, but he thought he might be able to catch up with her, and he was getting back into his buggy when Venda Breedlove came up to him and put her hand on his arm and said, “Honey, I’m sorry about last night.”

He stared at her. Rather than accept her apology, he replied, “You ort to be. That wasn’t your dream. That there dream belonged to somebody else.”

“Let me guess who,” she said. “If you’re aimin to catch up with her, you’re way too late. She caught her a ride out of Jasper on the mail truck.”

Colvin clenched his teeth, and glared at Venda. “Woman, you’ve done went and made an awful how-de-do of things. Tenny took a lot of trouble to git that rondy-voo set up jist right, and you come buttin in and spoilt it.”

“That there was the purtiest bed I ever did see,” Venda declared. “I jist couldn’t resist it!”

“Hit was Tenny’s four-poster, and quilt, and all, gosh-darn ye!”

“She’s jist a chile, Colvin,” Venda said. “Even in yore wildest dreams, she caint give ye the kind of lovin I could give ye, if you’d let me. You shouldn’t have thrown me out.” And Venda put her hand on his knee and began to scoot it along the inside of his thigh.

Colvin told himself that if all he was interested in was loving a woman, he couldn’t do better than Venda. This gal had the old oomph oozing out of every pore of her body, and oomph was not in his medical dictionary but could easily be defined as
that,
or possibly
it,
with a lot of
these
and
those,
or
what it takes.
Venda Breedlove had what it takes to run up any man’s pressure. All year long she had been so friendly with him, and made herself so available, that if he hadn’t been completely absorbed with Tenny, he could easily have given in to Venda’s obvious enticements. Even after he had thrown her out of the four-poster, he had had more than physical pangs of regret. Her naked body had felt so voluptuous during the moments it took him to disengage himself from her that even now, thinking of it, he felt the blood backing up in his
corpora cavernosa,
and for a long moment he gazed upon sweet Venda with a desire that erased Tenny for the duration from his mind.

The gossip about Venda Breedlove was almost as alluring as her seductive body, and Colvin had been tempted all year to invite her to lie on his lounge and tell him all about herself, if not with a lollipop perhaps with a soda pop and a sentence he had rehearsed in his mind but had never spoken to her, “I’ve heard so many stories about you, I’d like to know the truth.” Nobody knows where she came from. She was said to be an orphan who was discovered one day floating in a johnboat on the Buffalo River, fully grown but as naked as she’d climbed into that four-poster, amnesiac but so lovely that she entranced the three sisters who found her, rescued her, dressed her, and took her home with them. These sisters, Aggie, Thalie, and Phrosie Grace, lived up toward Pruitt in northern Newton County, and they dutifully notified Sheriff J.C. Barker of their discovery, but he made an investigation without being able to find out just who she was or where she was from, or what she was doing naked in that johnboat. She had no memory of a mother or father, and wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Sheriff Barker wasn’t about to let those Grace girls keep her, because everybody knew those girls were kind of “funny,” if you know what I mean—it was a scandalous sort of Lesbian incest going on amongst them—and Barker was afraid they might turn the poor girl into one of them, so he took her home to his wife, figuring to give her a place to stay temporarily until she could find work or a husband, whichever came first. Pretty soon Barker himself was sneaking around with her, and Mrs. Barker was about to throw her out, so Barker fixed her up with his best buddy, Mulciber Breedlove, the blacksmith, who had once been living with Aggie Grace, one of those girls who found Venda.

Old Mulce was just about the ugliest feller in Jasper, and he was practically a cripple from a childhood accident that left him with twisted feet and dislocated hips, and a way of walking that made folks poke fun at him when they ran out of jokes about the fact that Aggie became a dyke as a result of trying to live with him. But he was a steady worker, the best blacksmith in the country, and a solid, peaceable, upstanding citizen, and he fell in love with Venda at first sight and became her devoted slave, willing to do anything for her. He made her a lot of jewelry out of horseshoe nails that was a sight to behold. Venda was so charmed by a wedding ring that he made out of a horseshoe nail that she couldn’t turn him down, and became his bride. He was the happiest man in the Ozarks, having such a beauty for a wife, but he should’ve had the sense to know he couldn’t hold her. When the baby boy Russ was born, Mulce became even more devoted as a father than he’d been as a husband, but he already had suspicions that he might not be the boy’s real father, or at best only one of his fathers, since the boy had two peckers, a sign that maybe he had two daddies.

Rumors of Venda’s infidelities were commonplace. She was not just the most beautiful woman in the country (your Latha was still a little girl at the time) but she was also the earthiest. Folks called her feisty and fleshy, the latter having nothing to do with her weight but with her devotion to the pleasures of the flesh. Feisty suggests
fast
and fleshy suggests
flashy,
and she was both of those too.

She had a lot of nerve accusing Colvin of picking a child when he took up with Tenny, because Venda’s own most famous love affair was with a boy who was practically just a kid, a teenager from up around Gum Springs named Donny Kilgore. He was only fifteen when Venda was out in the woods one day trying to show her little boy Russ how to hunt with his “bone air,” and she come across Donny also a-hunting, and was so smitten with passion for him that she left little Russ to amuse himself while she talked Donny into stepping over behind some boulders to hide them from sight. Venda didn’t take Russ with her next time she went hunting. She was bringing home more rabbits than they and all the neighbors could eat, and Mulce complained she was hunting too much. The truth was, Donny was such a good shot he could bag a whole nest of rabbits in no time flat, and have all the remainder of the afternoon to shag Venda. But pretty soon she wasn’t even bothering to bring home rabbits, nor even squirrels. She’d just disappear at all hours and didn’t even care if Mulce fumed and hollered. Practically everybody knew she and Donny were off somewheres fucking like minks, and a few folks had even spied them at it, in broad daylight.

But Donny kept on hunting in the woods, because that’s what he liked to do, next best to shagging Venda, and that was his downfall, because one time when he was a-chasing a bunch of wild razorback hogs, one of the big old boars turned and charged him and buried those sharp tusks in his side. Venda found him and took him to Doc McFerrin in Jasper, but it was too late to help him, and he died, and Venda was so heartbroken she didn’t even think about fooling around with anyone else…except her favorite man, who was Mulce’s brother.

I can vouch for that brother myself, from the time when I was stationed at Camp Pike in North Little Rock, during the First World War. My battalion captain in the infantry was a feller named Marty Breedlove, and he used to brag about going home on furlough to Jasper, where he’d “snitch a little twitchet” from a gal named Venda, who he’d been a-banging ever since she married his brother fifteen years before. This Breedlove was a stuck-up, belligerent dude with a real mean streak in him, and I never liked him. He was a right handsome feller, though, and claimed that Venda loved him because his brother was ugly as sin, and sin was a subject Venda was a foremost authority on.

Seems what happened was, his brother, Mulce, caught them at it, in his own bed, and he threw a minnow seine over them to tie them up together while he beat the living shit out of both of them. Marty came back to Camp Pike from the furlough all black and blue, and wouldn’t say any more about it. Venda was forced to move out, and took the boy with her, and went off to Shenandoah Music School to study singing so she could get some kind of job. When she finally came back to Jasper, Mulce went to court and got an order that the boy had to spend weekends with him, and that was the arrangement that was still in effect when Colvin first met Venda.

When the Baptists hired Venda to teach music at the new Newton County Academy, they didn’t know anything about her past; all they knew was that she had a certificate from the Shenandoah Music School and knew a few tunes on the piano. But rumor grows faster than tumor, and pretty soon Jossie Conklin had heard enough about Venda to require a little meeting between them, during which Venda told Jossie that she had turned over a new leaf and wiped her nose, in order to bring up her boy Russ properly, and she’d even start going to Sunday school if they wanted her to. In fact, her and Jossie became real good friends, and it was Venda who taught Jossie how to get a man…but that’s another story. And it’s true that for the whole duration of that first school year, Venda did not stray from the straight and narrow, she actually went to Sunday school, and she taught her pupils how to sing all those good old-time Baptist hymns as well as the Newton County Academy song. She paid a lot of attention to Russ, as if to make up for neglecting him when he was a child, and she bought him that beautiful white stallion Marengo not just so she’d have transportation from her Jasper house to Parthenon, but so all the other kids would look up to Russ and maybe even forgive him for being such a mischievous scamp, always bent on causing trouble, maybe what we’d call a punk nowadays. Because Jossie and Venda were such good friends, Jossie went easy on Russ when he misbehaved and broke the rules, like riding Marengo around the school yard a lot faster than was safe. Russ had more demerits than anyone but Tenny, and Jossie was known to remark, more than once, 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. But if Jossie was tempted more than once to expel or suspend Tenny, she wouldn’t want to do that to the son of her good chum Venda.

If Venda herself had genuinely reformed, as far as her general conduct was concerned, it was only because she had outgrown the likes of lame Mulce and his belligerent brother Marty, and she realized that even the late lamented Donny Kilgore had been beautiful and loads of fun in bed but scarcely worth talking to. Going off to that music school had shown her that there were men in the world who were interested in higher matters than using her vaginal muscles in lieu of their own fingers. As soon as she met Colvin Swain, on that first day of school when he’d examined her along with the rest of the teachers, and had been so pleasant and kind and genuinely interested in her as a person, she knew that this dark, mysterious man had a deep, sensitive side that could possibly respond to parts of her that no other men had ever known. Colvin was not nearly as handsome as Marty Breedlove, and he wasn’t even in the same category of manhood with Donny Kilgore, but he had a certain strength, and ruggedness, and cozy down-home attractiveness about him that made him more satisfying to behold than any man she had ever laid eyes upon. Most of all, he was intelligent, even wise. Venda Breedlove felt that knowing Colvin Swain would be the best way to know herself.

The trouble was, he seemed to be preoccupied with that girl, Tennessee Tennison, who Jossie was always complaining about as a “problem pupil,” even though Tenny was the top student in Venda’s music class and the best soprano in the Glee Club. Although Venda was madly jealous of his constant attentions to Tenny, she understood that it was in his nature as a wise, sympathetic physician to want to help a young woman beset with problems, and she did not hold it against him. After all, he had cured the girl of cerebral palsy, deafness, blindness, and a whole bunch of other disorders. You don’t blame a Samaritan for his benefaction. But Venda had been trying all year, in subtle as well as not-so-subtle ways, to let Colvin know she was available to show him undreamed-of physical pleasure, and he had not risen to the bait, and she was beginning to suspect that he was actually violating the unwritten principle that teachers should not seduce their students. That, or else he was getting all he wanted from some dumpy cow of a wife back home in Stay More.

Venda was beginning to get evil-minded again, and to itch for a man’s arms and his other three extremities. She had never gone for so long, eight months, without any sex other than what could be so easily obtained in laying down with herself in fantasy or dream. As a matter of fact, it had been during one of her autoerotic dreams that she had become disgusted with herself and gone rushing out into the forest in search of any creature’s actual penis, a desperate journey that had caused her accidental discovery of that magnificent four-poster with Colvin just lying alone on it with a hard-on that was beginning to droop. It was the answer to all her dreams, and fortunately she was already conveniently divested of any nightwear, since she never slept in a stitch. But when she took a flying leap onto him, he tried to push her away. And he had spoken aloud one dreadful word,
Tenny!