Butterfly Weed (35 page)

“Where is she?” Colvin asked.

“Oh, I reckon she’ll be coming in to see you for her checkup like everbody else,” Venda said. “Anyhow, she can tell you that we’ve been good to her. She has done what she was told, and has been real handy around the house. And you may not believe this, but I really truly have been giving her voice lessons, although her voice aint in none too good a shape, with this sore throat she’s got and her cough that won’t never go away.”

Before leaving his office, Venda took Colvin’s chin in her fingertips to get his full attention while she declared, “I hope you won’t let that gal come between us this year.”

One of the first pupils waiting to see Colvin was Tenny’s husband. Like his mother, he surprised Colvin by being friendly. Russ announced to Colvin that he intended to “go out for” the basketball team, and he hoped that “Coach,” as he would now begin to call the man who was also “Doc,” “Teacher,” and “Wife’s Lover,” would find a place for him on the team. But also he was thinking about signing up for Psychology. Could Teacher tell him anything about what the subject involved? “Is psychology anything like apology?” Russ wondered.

“Well, I reckon you could say so,” Colvin allowed. “We’ll study regrets. We’ll study why we feel the way we do, and why we think the way we do, and maybe even why we do what we do. How’s your wife?”

“Oh, she caint complain,” Russ said. “That cough of hers comes and goes, and she’s kinder moody most of the time, but she caint really complain, so she don’t.” Russ explained that Tenny at the moment was over visiting her friend Zarky in the dormitory but would probably be coming in to see Doc Swain pretty soon. Then Russ said a strange thing. “Coach, there aint no use pretendin that you aint still the only feller in this world that Tenny cares about. She don’t hardly talk about nothin else, and I reckon I ought to be jealous but there don’t seem to be nothin I could do about it. Except maybe…do you recollect you once offered to hack off my extry pecker for me? I’ve wondered a lot if she would like me more if I had only one of ’em.”

Awkwardly Colvin tried to determine if the diphallic condition rendered intercourse difficult or impossible, but Russ blushed and hemmed and hawed and managed to say only that “We aint been able to work out a good fit.” And then he said, “Heck, Doc, I don’t
need
the extry one. Will you slice it off for me? Of course, I don’t mean right
now,
but sometime soon?”

“Let me think about it some,” Colvin requested, and pointed out that he had no experience with that particular operation and would have to study up on it.

Strange to relate, not very long after Russ had left, Colvin had a visit from one of the forty new students, a pretty girl named Oona Owens, whose file indicated that she had come from a remote village in Madison County to the west. When Colvin asked his conventional opening question, “Has anything been a-troublin ye?” Oona giggled and declared:

“I aint never been to a doctor afore.”

“Don’t be bashful,” he said. “Jist let me check a few things. If you’ll open wide and say ‘Ah’…” Colvin put a tongue depressor into her mouth and looked around, and then he stuck an otoscope into each of her ears, and a nasoscope into each nostril. Apart from slight adenoids, her head was negative. She giggled again when he stethoscoped her chest, and also when he hit her knees with his reflex hammer. He performed all his little tests, but she didn’t seem to have anything wrong with her except for the adenoids. “You’re okay,” he said. “I’ll see you in Psych class.”

“But Doc,” she said, “there’s one little thing a-troublin me. I caint show it to ye, though.”

“Well, can you tell me where it’s at?”

She quickly touched her crotch and instantly drew her hand away. “Down here,” she said. “My pu
^***
…,” her voice fell to a whisper.

“Is it itchy? Have you got a rash or sores or anything on it?” he asked.

“Nope, nothing like that. Only there’s
two
of ’em.”

Colvin studied her, and kept his face impassively benign. Then he said that of course he couldn’t tell for sure without examining her but it sounded as if she had what was known as duplex vagina, which, although it was exceptional, quite rare in fact, didn’t mean she was a freak or anything, and there was nothing to be ashamed of. Colvin told her of some other known cases of duplex vaginae in faraway places like Rhode Island and North Dakota, and that while offhand he didn’t know of another case of it in Arkansas, there was bound to be a few he didn’t know about. He said he hoped that after she got to know him better, as her teacher for Psychology as well as the school physician, she might feel comfortable enough to permit him to have a look and determine if she had a true duplex vagina, that is, two of them, or only a septate vagina, that is, one of them with a kind of partition dividing it into two parts. The latter condition was fairly common, and even more common was the condition of having a double uterus. Colvin felt it was premature to discuss with her her sexual life, if any, or the possibility that when she became a mother she might have to have a Caesarean, so he did not mention these things. He simply said, “I’m right sorry there aint nothin I could do to help your condition.”
Except,
he said to himself,
introduce ye to a feller who’s probably dyin to meet ye,

“I aint worried,” Oona said. “They don’t pain me none. But will they keep me from being on the basketball team?”

“Only in the sense that they mean you’re a female, and the basketball team is for males.”

“Huh?” she said. “But there’s a girls’ team too, aint they?”

Sure enough, he discovered after checking with Jossie Conklin on the matter, there were going to be teams for both boys and girls, and he was expected to coach both. “I thought you knew that,” Jossie said. While he was at it, he asked Jossie, since she was supposedly a math expert or at least the math teacher, to calculate the odds against a person with X condition, one out of five million, being found in the same place and same time as a person with Y condition, one of three million. Jossie did a lot of figuring, and even used her adding machine, but finally announced that the odds were incalculable. In other words, it was impossible.

It was almost time for noon dinner before Tenny finally came to see him. He was thrilled to see that she had not cut her hair, nor was she wearing face paint, and her dress, which obviously was a cast-off of Venda’s, still came down to her ankles. She seemed kind of pale, though, and thin. “Tenny!” he said.

“Colvin!” she said, closing the door behind her, then she leapt into his arms. “I’ve missed ye so!” They had a long kiss, and she commenced rubbing her body all over his, especially in the areas where the legs end, then she tried to pull him down to the sofa. He resisted, protesting that there were other students outside the door waiting for his attention. “I’m a-perishin for ye!” she exclaimed. “I’ve got to have you inside me, right now!”

“But Tenny,” he said. That was all he knew to say, which perhaps was enough, the way he said it, to try to let her know that although he himself had an enormous erection at this moment which he would dearly enjoy sliding into her, they were going to have to learn restraint and discretion and patience if they were successfully to manage their romance. “Later maybe we can steal a moment,” he tried to console her, “but right now all I’m supposed to do is examine ye. Has anything been a-troublin ye?” He automatically asked his routine question, then said, “I wish we could talk for hours, but this is a real busy day for me. So why don’t ye jist talk and tell me everything while I do an examination on ye?”

So Tenny talked constantly while he gave her as thorough a physical examination as his instruments would permit. She said she had nothing whatever wrong with her. He found that hard to swallow in view of her long-standing hypochondria. She said that she was so happy that school was starting up again, so she would not only get to see Colvin in his office, like now, but also she was going to take Psychology! “Do ye think I’d have any aptitude for that subject?” she asked.

“Tenny, the subject of psychology ort to have been named after you,” he said truthfully, not meaning to imply that there was anything wrong with her mental processes or her motives or her behavior.

She was also going to “go out” for the girls’ basketball team, so she could be with Colvin during even more of the precious Fridays, and she hoped that when they took long trips to the places where they would play games against distant teams, she could ride beside him in whatever conveyance was used. Possibly even, if any of those games involved going to other towns that could not be returned from in the same day, and they had to spend the night, they might even contrive some way to spend the whole night together, ever now and then, because she had thought about this quite a lot with both her heart and her head as well as her twitchet, and she had decided that they were going to have to find a way to hook up their sexual links not just once but many, many times repeatedly in the same night…or day, or whenever. “Remember,” she said, “‘we have got to find a way.’ That’s our motto.” It might even be possible for them to sneak off sometimes to Venda’s house in Jasper, when Venda and Russ were at the school. Yes, Tenny was doing all right, living at Venda’s house. At least she didn’t mind it too much. It was a roof over her head. From the beginning, Tenny had been required to do most of the cooking and housecleaning, but she didn’t mind. One of the first big jobs Venda had given her involved sorting and straightening the pantry. Venda’s pantry had been a terrible mess, everything all jumbled together as if any time Venda had been to the store she had just thrown her groceries all of a heap into the pantry. There were bags of dried beans that had got all mixed up with bags of dried corn, and Tenny had been required practically to sort all those seeds, one by one, and it had taken forever, and the only thing that preserved her sanity was the memory of the time she had watched a bunch of ants carrying little grains of sand diligently and patiently to build their ant heap, and she had sought to do her sorting with the same mindless persistence. Tenny wondered if Venda had just given her such a tough job in an effort to part her from her senses, and, having failed, had given her the
next
tough job, which involved…But Tenny understood that Colvin had other students waiting for their medical examinations, and she had better save the rest of the story for later.

Colvin was greatly disturbed. Not over the tasks that Venda had been giving Tenny, although that was disturbing enough. What was more disturbing, for now, was what his examination of Tenny revealed. At first, he couldn’t believe it, because he’d so thoroughly examined Tenny in the past without ever finding anything whatever wrong with her that it was hard now to accept that there might actually be something wrong with her. He wondered at the irony of the transposition: as long as she was a chronic complaining hypochondriac, she was safe, invulnerable, and absolutely healthy; but once she abandoned her hypochondria and claimed to be “just fine,” she was actually sick. His hand on her chest detected fremitus. His stethoscope found a vesicular murmur. Her pulse was rapid. Her skin was not dry, but clammy, beaded with sweat as it had been that morning in the Commercial Hotel. He asked her to cough, and collected on the end of a tongue depressor an expectoration that was greenish, muco-purulent. He debated with himself whether to tell Tenny of his suspicions, and decided against it “Tenny,” he said, “I’ll see you in Psych class, and again at Basketball, but right after that I’d like you to come back here to my office for just a minute so I can give you another test.”

“Could we take more than just a minute?” she asked. “Couldn’t we take long enough to see if that sofa is good for anything besides lying on with lollipops?”

He laughed, as if that might dispel his anxiety. “We’ll see,” he said, and kissed her again and sent her on her way, asking her to take it easy.

Then he visited Jossie’s office yet again and inquired into the possibility of having a student-messenger with a horse ride into Jasper and pick up some stuff at Arbaugh’s Rexall, and he wrote and signed and sealed into an envelope a note from his prescription pad to R.C. Arbaugh, requesting a vial of tuberculin. The note said that just in case they were out of stock, kindly send somebody to Harrison to get it right away, and hang the expense.

His mind was not on the subject as he went to face his Psychology class. He had read enough of the Colvin textbook, and he had a fair idea of what he wanted to say, but his concern over Tenny’s condition seized his mind and would not let him think of anything else. He had distracting problems finding the meeting place of the Psych class: for some reason it had been scheduled to meet in the gym, the new, long, low barnlike building of fieldstone that completed the triangle of main buildings on the campus. The pupils were not sitting at desks but just around on the floor. At least he had been provided with a portable blackboard, and he wrote his name on it, as if there were anybody (there wasn’t) who didn’t know it. Jossie Conklin had not yet arrived with an armload of the textbooks.

“Wal, my friends,” he started off, “I hope we’re gonna have a heap of fun in here. But I ort to tell ye, right off, that what we learn in here aint really necessary. You can live without it. It won’t make you rich, and it likely won’t make you happy neither. So what’s the point in messin around with it? Unlike other subjects you’re taking, it caint be put to much practical use. It won’t teach ye how to speak proper. It won’t help ye to do sums. Some of y’uns remember I taught a course last year in hygiene, which at least showed everbody how to take care of theirselfs and keep healthy. Wal, this here that we’re gonna do might or might not give ye some sort of mental comfort, but I wouldn’t guarantee it. It might help ye understand better how your mind works. It might help ye to get along better with yore feller man. I can’t guarantee none of that. But I can guarantee that if you pay attention, and put your heart into it, it will shore enough give ye somethin to think about!”