Authors: Donald Harington
Tenny didn’t need that. She’d already acquired a reputation on campus as dangerously different and difficult. She was strong-willed, outspoken, and viewed as a show-off, especially because in all of her classes she outshone everybody else. She didn’t respect the rules (that very first night, when she’d run out to talk to the departing doctor about fatty goo, she had been punished for breaking the rule that you must stay in the dormitory after supper), and she had already accumulated more demerits than any other student. But perhaps worst of all, in a student body whose bodies and faces ranged the spectrum between grotesque and acceptable, she stood out conspicuously because she was so breathtakingly beautiful. Other girls sniffed and pouted with envy at the very sight of her. And boys, alas, were so dazzled by her looks that they could not even approach her, and kept their distance.
Now, all of a sudden, this smartest and loveliest of all the students was walking around—or attempting to walk around—with the terrible lurching dip-and-jerk movements of a sufferer of cerebral palsy. If anyone could have proved that she was just pretending, that might have been cause for confining her to the dormitory, but as far as anyone (except Colvin Swain) could tell, she actually had come down with the hideous affliction that strikes so many young people and is certainly no laughing matter.
Jossie Conklin summoned Colvin into her office. “What’s wrong with Tennessee?” she asked him.
“Never seen it myself,” he admitted. “Some of the old-timers of Stay More was actually born there, and I hear tell the east parts of it are real purty, but it got kind of overcrowded, is why they moved on to this part of the country.”
“Ha ha,” said Jossie. “I’m talking about your student, and mine.”
“Oh,” he said, and abruptly realized that he had never learned dear Tenny’s whole name. “The gal, you mean?” he said, and attempted to measure her height above the floor, about five feet and five inches, and then even attempted to outline in the air her basic bodily configuration, exceedingly shapely.
“That’s her,” Jossie said. “Is she really dying?”
“Not on your life,” he said.
“What about
her
life? She can hardly move. What is her disease?”
Colvin tapped his head. “She’s got a real awful case of hypochondria, but it aint fatal.” Abruptly he realized he had violated one of Kie Raney’s commandments: don’t never blab nobody’s troubles to nobody else.
“Hypo what?” said Jossie. “Is it catching? Should she be quarantined?”
Colvin wondered if he had seen, heard, or read of any cases of contagious hypochondria. It was certainly hereditary, but not contagious. “I don’t believe so,” he said.
“What are you giving her for it?”
“There aint nothing much you can give for it,” he said. “Just attention. She needs somebody to pay her some attention, and I’m doing my best.”
“I need your assurance that she won’t spread it.”
“I guarantee you she won’t.”
But the student body of Newton County Academy, the girls out of deathly envy and resentment of Tenny and the boys out of their own shame at themselves for lacking the nerve to approach her, began to ape her movements, mocking and teasing her. All 143 of them, from first through twelfth grades, began to walk—or to attempt to walk—with the same stiff lurching scrape-and-kneel as Tenny.
It was a sight to behold, but Jossie Conklin, beholding it, came to Colvin and shrieked, “Now they’ve all got it!”
“But only one of ’em has got it real,” he said. “All the rest of ’em is jist pore imitations.” Having said this, he wondered just how “real” it was for Tenny.
He knew, and hoped, that the only solution to this mass hysteria was to move on to another chapter. I’m going to have to move on to another chapter myself and send you away for now, but I want to finish this one first, just as Colvin had to finish the chapter they were still bogged down in, on locomotion, the autonomic nervous system, fatty goo, sleep, et cetera. The very last of that et cetera was the thyroid, and that’s where Tenny came to him in private to ask if hyperthyroidism is as fatal as cerebral palsy. Colvin hated to lie, but he did. He told her that her cerebral palsy might last another several years before it did her in, but her hyperthyroidism would kill her off before Christmas. That made her real happy. He knew that the worst sequelae of her new condition, Grave’s disease, was simply eyeballs bugging out, like poor Obedience “Beady” Spurlock, one of the other girls in the class, who actually did have exophthalmic goiter, as I’ve already told you, with a permanent look as if she’d seen a ghost, and there was no way that Tenny could possibly imitate those pop-eyes.
But he underestimated Tenny. In no time at all, she was causing him infinite distress with her constant expression of huge eyeballs protruding from the front of her face as if they would fall out. At least, if it made any difference at all, she no longer walked like a cp cripple. So the other students gave up copying her. They just couldn’t copy her eyes. Of course, Beady Spurlock already had it, and she began to think up ways to kill Tenny.
The odd thing was, even with her eyes all pooched out of her skull like that, Tenny was still so ravishingly gorgeous that all the boys were afraid of her and all the girls hated her guts. So she had not a friend in the world, except Colvin, and he decided to capitalize upon that circumstance in order to begin what was going to be a long, long treatment of her central disease. He knew that trying to cure hypochondria is like trying to shape a piece of flint into an arrowhead with nothing but your fingernail. But, to paraphrase that ancient Chinese saying about journeys, the longest carving begins with a single scratch.
So he did two simple things. He sent off for a copy of that fine old book, Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy,
which I mentioned very early in my story. Then on his way to work he stopped at W. A. Casey’s general store in Parthenon and bought one of those big circles of candy on a stick, I guess what you’d call a giant lollipop or an all-day sucker.
“Do you like suckers, Tammy?” he asked her nervously in his office and presented her with it. It was his first gift to her, and she was thrilled. “Jist git comfy and we’ll visit a spell.”
She plopped out on that lounge by the window, and he pulled the curtain to keep the sun’s glare out of her bulging eyes. She commenced a-licking that huge lollipop, which would in fact take her all day. When she was as relaxed as she’d ever get, he said, “All righty, Angel, let’s us start at the beginnin, and you tell me all the marvels of yore whole life long.”
Chapter six
Y
our champion and mine, sweet Miss Mary Celestia a-sprawlin yonder with that clever grin on her face, has taken it upon herself to correct me on another error, but I think she may be growing as deaf as you are, to go along with her blindness as a final withdrawal from this sorry world. She claims I said Tenny was the most beautiful gal on earth. Did I say that? Hell, you being so deaf yourself, you wouldn’t know if I did or not, would you? I didn’t hear myself say it. I didn’t even say Tenny was the prettiest girl in Newton County, which she wasn’t. Mary says she wants to remind me that you’ve already pointed out in more than one of your books that Latha Bourne was the most beautiful girl in the world. Didn’t I tell you Mary knows your books? Well, so do I. In fact, there was a time before Colvin Swain was telling this story to me that he told much of it to Latha herself, a-sitting there on her porch with her the way they did so often, with nothing better to pass the time of day but talk about how the past was passed but had been so nice, and so mean, to both of them. So Latha knew almost all of the story about Tenny, and she would never forget the one afternoon that her dear friend Colvin got up his nerve and told her that he wanted her to know that Tenny may have been the prettiest little thing he’d ever laid eyes on, but she wasn’t anywhere near as lovely as Latha.
To tell you the truth, Tenny wasn’t even the
second
most beautiful female in Newton County, after Latha. She was
third.
Late today I’m going to have to bring Mrs. Venda Breedlove into this story, that music teacher at the “college,” because if anybody had ever thrown a beauty contest like that one where the shepherd boy gave that golden apple as first prize, and Latha won it, then the shepherd would have had to give a silver apple to Venda, and poor Tenny would have had to be happy with the bronze apple…but I think we already know her well enough to know that she wouldn’t have wanted any of them apples.
Anyway, I’ll have a good deal to say about Venda later on, because if Colvin was the most important man in Tenny’s life, Venda was going to become the most important woman, more important than Tenny’s momma or her grandma or anybody else. That grandma was the one she was named after, Tennessee McArtor, who had been born in that state east of here and had twenty children but chose to spend her old age, and that of her husband, Grampaw Ray McArtor, with her favorite daughter, Tenny’s momma, Jonette McArtor, who married Wayne Don Tennison. Both families went way back practically to the beginnings of Newton County. The Tennisons may have come originally from Indiana, not from North Carolina or Tennessee or any of those other mountain places that produced most of the settlers of the Ozarks. No doubt the family was related at one time to the same people who produced the great poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson, but they didn’t know how to spell it. They could also have been related to the Tennisons that was already settled all over the Missouri Ozarks. But as Wayne Don Tennison said, “It don’t matter where we come from. It only matters where we’re a-gorn, and that’s straight to Salvation.”
He was a Holiness preacher, Tenny’s dad. Some people call them Pentecostals, they themselves prefer to be called Church of God, I’ve always known them as Holy Rollers. Whatever you call them, they have some wild church services, with plenty of shouting and flopping around and speaking in tongues. And they handle poisonous snakes. When Tenny lay a-licking that lollipop on the lounge in Colvin’s office and telling him her whole story, all fifteen years’ worth, his ears perked up when she got to the part about the copperheads and rattlers and moccasins, because he’d been quite a snake handler himself. But Colvin had handled snakes as friends and pets, while Wayne Don Tennison handled snakes to convince the skeptical that he had the spirit and the power and the faith and the glory of the Lord in him, because the Bible says, “They shall take up serpents,” and although the Bible doesn’t say it, it ought to have said, according to Wayne Don, “You better take up snakes yourself if you want to attract enough believers to start a congregation in the Baptist back brush of the Ozarks.” Wayne Don was the first snake-handling Pentecostal in Newton County, and he had the devil’s own time trying to scrape together enough believers to fill a brush arbor, let alone a church house. He had started out a Baptist, like most of his neighbors, and in fact his wife, Jonette, never really quit being a Baptist, but Wayne Don had the “gift” for speaking in tongues and the Baptists wouldn’t tolerate that, so he had to try to start his own church, and he’d been trying ever since, hardly ever making any money at it but convinced he was God’s own appointed servant to convert the Baptists into Pentecostals.
Colvin sensed that when Tenny talked about her father, she was both embarrassed and angry. She had never quite recovered from her first attendance, when she was four years old, at a Pentecostal meeting held on the front porch and in the front yard of their house on Brushy Mountain in eastern Newton County. For pews, rough lumber had been spread across empty tomato crates to make backless benches in the yard, but hardly anybody remained seated once the services started. She had been required to watch her daddy, for whom she had a lot of natural affection, screaming and crying, jerking and jumping, whistling and hooting, swaying and swooning, strutting and stamping, twitching and falling, working up a sweat that completely soaked his clothes, and then sticking his hands into a box and bringing out a whole bunch of big writhing snakes that like to have given her her first heart attack. Afterwards she shunned him, couldn’t bring herself to look him in the eye or listen to him, closed up her ears when he tried to demonstrate he still knew how to talk gently and rationally, and she transferred her affection to her mother’s daddy, Grampaw Ray McArtor, a pleasant man who was always smiling and making Tenny laugh with his quips and his banter, and who wouldn’t attend the Holiness services himself but would take Tenny fishing during them, or play his fiddle to get her to sing and dance, or otherwise entertain her despite eventual violent arguments with Wayne Don, who tried to tell her that she was going straight to Hell by avoiding church, and when his pictures of Hell failed to intimidate her, began to shake her, grabbed her by her shoulders and shook her and shook her, saying, “You wouldn’t never of been born if it wasn’t for me!”
What he meant was, ironically, not that his loins had sired her, which maybe they hadn’t, but that it was his prayers and his gift of Divine healing which had cured his wife, Jonette, of her barrenness. Tenny had two older sisters—much older: Jonette at the age of fifteen had given birth to one girl, and at the age of sixteen to the other one, but both girls had grown up and married and gone away from home and even had children of their own before Jonette, at the age of thirty-seven, had, after years of fruitless attempts and even visits to some doctors, been able at last to conceive Tenny. Wayne Don claimed that it was his conversion to the Holiness faith and his acquisition of the gift of Divine healing and his many, many prayers for his wife to regain her birthing powers, prayers uttered fluently in “the unknown tongue,” that had made Tenny possible. She was literally a gift from God, and Wayne Don had tried to name her Dove, as the bird of God, and because her older sisters had been named after birds, Oriole and Redbird, but Jonette felt it was her mother’s advice that had made her fertile again, so she named the baby after her mother, Tennessee. And what had that advice been? Tenny couldn’t be sure, but from some remarks that Grampaw Ray McArtor had made, she had suspected since the age of five that Wayne Don was not her actual father.