The Reading Lessons

by Carole Lanham

  “Gringoire is enchanted, yes, but it’s fiercer than that. Bacchante is the fire that rains down from the heavens when the inside of the world erupts. Esmeralda is no flower.”

  Lucinda wore a bracelet with three gold charms shaped like a small “m”, a big “L”, and a little “b.” Hadley watched them jangle when she touched her hair. Seeing the little “m,” he forgot all about bacchantes and Menelean Mounts. He swept the charm into his palm. “What does this stand for, Lucinda?”

  Lucinda took hold of his pointer finger and touched it to the gold letter. She whispered the secret word against his cheek, “Maribel.”

  Ever since that day, Hadley had been murmuring it to himself. Lucinda Maribel Browning—Nymph. Salamander. Igniter of all heavenly fire!

  Loomis stared at him expectantly, but Hadley didn’t want to share Lucinda’s middle name.

  At Maple Lawn, he’d once missed dinner for saying Penrod’s name by accident. “House boys are not to act familiar with Tweebs,” Sargent had scolded.

  Lucinda let him hold her charm in the cup of his hand. She breathed Maribel-shaped breaths against his cheek. Somehow, he feared that if Loomis learned what the letter stood for, he would feel that hot tickle of pleasure against his own cheek, and Hadley had no desire to share such pleasures with Loomis, the hoeboy.

  “It stands for her middle name,” he said.

  “Good guess, moron,” Loomis snorted.

  “It’s a secret,” Hadley said, his ears heating up. Outside of Lucinda’s daddy, he felt sure he was the only one in all of Lucinda’s Empire who knew the secret meaning of her “m.”

  Loomis didn’t have a clue. He didn’t understand what it was like to sleep with dirty books in your bed. Every night, Hadley nodded off with names like Mr. Thwackum and Hester Prynne still shaping his lips. His ribs were poked by pointy buckram corners, causing him to dream of pitchforks and fingernails. Mornings, he woke with gilt-pocked cheeks, and his torch rolled off across the floor, its dim beam trained on an empty wall. This was his world.

  For all his years, Hadley had been plagued by the notion that his life had yet to begin. Everything he’d ever done was just part of a boring prologue. Real life was still a page or two away, but it was coming. He could feel it! Every time he took up one side of a book, and she took up the other—he could feel it.

  All that was missing now was some sort proof to validate that he’d arrived. A person with a real life had stuff to show for it. They had clutter they wished they could pitch or burn, but they didn’t pitch it, and they didn’t burn it because, in the end, it was everything. It meant too much. When a person with a real life passed on, no one else had any use for their junk or even knew what it all meant. If Hadley died, there would be no evidence to show that he’d had a life at all. That was how he knew that he’d not really been born yet.

  Slip the loop off the acorn button on Mama’s sewing box, and you would find so much proof, whole hours would be lost just sorting through it all. Even the smell spoke of living galore. The felt lining was rubbed thin and stamped with the earthy scents of collected feathers and dried petals and the tang of old coins. It smelled like Mama’s pearly hand lotion. It smelled like withered paper.

  In a compartment meant for sewing needles was an embroidered handkerchief folded in fourths. A lock of hair, nine baby teeth, and a tarnished silver spoon were wrapped up inside like a present. A pair of gloves occupied a little button drawer, the soft fingers coiled into tight musty fists. And in a bigger drawer that was long and slender and molded to the shape of scissors, there were two pocket bibles, one black and one white, a photograph of Grammy Talitha as a fat tintype baby, and a water-stained brochure for P. Dewrights Cemetery Plots & Ornamental Urns. Mama kept a few regular things in the box too, like a chain of safety pins and a spool of white thread, but those were purely disposable. What made Mama drag that old sewing box through the years was a Sunday School medal, a pineapple doily, and a curl of Hadley’s hair. Hadley himself had an old tackle box that he tossed junk in, but he it didn’t seem like the same thing. A boy didn’t keep a squirrel bone for any better reason than the fact that he was a boy.

  Things were changing though. Hadley was beginning to gather proof of a life he might soon have. Shortly after the reading lessons began, it became necessary to slash the mattress of his cot. When no one was looking, he stuffed purple notes into the ticking.

  ###

  During summer vacation, “lesson” time was after lunch. Usually Hadley and Lucinda spent the time reading. On a few occasions, Hadley helped Lucinda practice pinochle so she could join Laura Haney-Wayne’s fancy card-playing club. Hadley loved pinochle and was pretty tough to beat. Other days, they stretched out across the grape vine rug on the Log Cabin floor and talked until it was time for Hadley to go back to being a house boy. On these days, Lucinda forgot to be allergic to the simpler things in life.

  “Why is your skin that color?” she asked him on one such talking-instead-of-reading day. She lay beside him, crossing and uncrossing her ankles, her eyes fixed on his skin. There was a book opened in front of her called How to Be Plump but she was still on Page One.

  Hadley was consumed with the new oxblood marble he’d won off Loomis that morning.

  “Dirt,” he said, with regard to his color. He rubbed the marble on his shirt and held it up to the light, examining for defects. It was perfect.

  Loomis had named the oxblood the Bloody Lime because it was a limeade marble with red swirls. Hadley had been trying to win it for months, but Loomis wasn’t often inclined to play for keepsies. The boy had been downright unsporting when Hadley took it from him, shouting bastardwhoreshit at the top of his lungs while Hadley twisted it out of his fingers. They exchanged a few punches before Mr. Sweet came stomping out of the house and told them to get back to picking the mealy bugs off of Mr. Browning’s vines.

  Now that it officially belonged to him, Hadley ran the Bloody Lime around the vines on the rug, pretending his new marble was Barney Oldfield in his amazing Peerless Green Dragon. The Dragon took the curves at full speed, the carpet whorls transformed into the flinty narrows and quicksand washes of the death-defying Cactus Run . . .

  “What about under the dirt?” Lucinda said. She stretched her arm out next to Hadley’s, obliterating his racetrack with her sailor sleeve. “I look like milk, and you look like cocoa, even in the places where your skin isn’t smudged.”

  Hadley shrugged. He didn’t think they looked so different except Lucinda was pretty, and he was a boy.

  “Daddy says it’s because you got a nigger in your wood pile.”

  “That’s funny,” Hadley said, reaching under her armpit to retrieve his prize. “I don’t even have a wood pile.”

  “Daddy says you’re what people call a mule auto. He’s always asking me if I’ve managed to teach that little mule auto how to read yet.”

  Hadley had a notion that saying mule auto was a lot like saying bastardwhoreshit. “I don’t know about that,” he told her. “But my fifteen-year-old grandad was a USDA Certified slave.”

  USDA Certified was what Mama always said.

  “You can’t have a grandad who’s fifteen,” Lucinda told him. “I don’t think they let you be a grandad unless you’re old.”

  Hadley dropped the Bloody Lime in his pocket. “Well my grandad was fifteen, and he got beat to death just for kissing my grammy.”

  Lucinda stared at him in such a way, he wished he could take the words back. He was pretty sure his fifteen-year-old grandad was supposed to be a secret. Mama always talked about Winner Purdy in the quietest of whispers. She always called him Winner Purdy or Grandad, never Daddy, and the words came out quiet and shaky every time.

  “The only thing I ever saw of Winner Purdy is a stick-cross on Slave Hill and the tears that dripped off Grammy’s chin every year on my birthday,” Mama had said.

  Lucinda’s eyes were round as marbles. “That is sooooo romantic.”

  “It is?”

 
“Your grandmother must have been a princess or a ballerina or something important like that if they killed a slave boy over her.”

  Hadley nodded. “She was a spinning girl.”

  Lucinda picked up Hadley’s arm and started drawing circles with her fingertip around the bones of his wrist. “I wonder if it tastes any different.”

  “You can taste me if you want to,” he offered.

  Lucinda waggled her tongue over his skin, searching for the cleanest part. She settled for a place on the inside of his wrist.

  “What do I taste like?” Hadley asked.

  She licked his skin. She licked hers. It took several licks to decide. “Poor,” she said. “Your skin tastes poor. My skin doesn’t.”

  “Is poor bad?” Hadley wanted to know.

  “It’s surprising, is what it is,” Lucinda said. “Poor tastes a lot better than I thought.”

  ###

  One morning, Hadley fished a note from a puddle of honey that Lucinda left behind with the crusts of her toast. At the time, they were reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but the sticky words did not come from the story.

  We need a sharp knife, Hadley.

  Hadley was thrilled.

  That afternoon, he went to Club with a boning knife slid up his sleeve. The fun came to a stand-still, however, when Lucinda took hold of it and told him to stick out his finger. “We’re going to make a blood pact, just like Tom and Huck.”

  In Hadley’s opinion, it was enough that Huck said cusses like by jingoes and damn. “We don’t need to spill blood over this, Lucinda.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. You trust me. I, on the other hand, have no faith in you at all. Unless you’re willing to make a pact that we’ll keep V.I.L.E. a secret forever, I’m going to have to ask you to quit the club.”

  Hadley gnawed on his lower lip. “Them boys used a needle, as I recall.”

  “Needle-dweedle! We’re not such cowards, are we?”

  He looked down at his finger. “That knife’s real sharp, Lucinda. I cut up a chicken with it yesterday.”

  Lucinda angled the blade so it sparked in the light. “We wouldn’t want a dull knife, would we?”

  Hadley thought about this. “Okay, but I’ll cut my own self, if you don’t mind.”

  She pressed the knife to his skin. “Oh, but I do mind, Hadley. Now quit your squawking and hold still.”

  In retrospect, this wasn’t the smartest moment for him to call her a Bossy Bessie, but Hadley didn’t recognize that until after she cut him.

  “Whoops,” Lucinda said. “You’re quite a bleeder, aren’t you?”

  ###

  Usually the lessons were fun. Hadley particularly liked playing Great Expectations and, after they’d finished reading the book, began thinking all his thoughts with an English accent. They’d come up with the game one Monday morning when it was too rainy to work outside, and Mr. Browning suggested they fit in a lesson before the sun came out. Hadley got down on all fours so Lucinda could step on his back and reach down the smelly cardboard box in the hall closet that held her mother’s wedding dress. Lucinda put the dress on a giant stuffed bear she called Thomas. Thusly, Thomas, who was far too agreeable for his own good, became crazy Miss Havisham, and his black button eyes commenced to shine with sick fancy. To complete the effect, china plates were gathered, clocks were stopped at twenty to nine, and Lucinda’s bedroom was transformed into the ripe, candle-lit ruins of Satis House. Enough House, Hadley preferred to call it, and even though the bear plotted against him and Lucinda dealt out cards and insults with equal hard-hearted fervor, Hadley enjoyed playing Pip to her Estella. He understood Pip better than any other character in a book.

  Two weeks later, when they took up David Copperfield, Lucinda put the dress away and reset the clocks, and Hadley knew to be nervous again. Insults, he could live with, but he had learned that Lucinda was not above taking things too far. He never knew what to expect next.

  The following month, when they read The Count of Monte Cristo, she convinced him to drink wool dye in order to prove his dedication to V.I.L.E. After that, Hadley puked indigo for a day and a half. After that, he quit the club.

  “Oh that’s a pity,” Lucinda said, wrapping her index finger with the chain of her tiger tooth necklace. “And we were just about to start Romeo and Juliet, too.”

  “I know how that story ends,” Hadley scoffed. “You can find yourself another Romeo.”

  “It was the kissing part I had in mind to try,” she said, sighing woefully. “Oh well. I guess Loomis Sackett might be interested if you’re not.”

  “You wouldn’t kiss a Negro,” Hadley said.

  The skin beneath her twisted chain was white as a daisy petal. “At least Loomis Sackett is a proper Negro.”

  Hadley shook his head once, and then twice. “You wouldn’t kiss Loomis Sackett.”

  “I’d rather kiss you.”

  “You would?” Somehow he began to forget about that indigo puke.

  Lucinda shrugged. “It might be fun.”

  “All right,” Hadley said. “But no more poison.”

  Lucinda didn’t kiss him, though. She let him lay next to her on the log-cabin-room sofa/burial vault, but they both had to pretend that they were dead. Even so, Hadley reasoned that holding his breath and lying still next to Lucinda was better than nothing at all.

  ###

  It occurred to him after a year or two that people must think he was awful dumb. Not once did anyone question what a slow-learner Hadley appeared to be. In all actuality, he read fast. Lucinda called him a Star Reader because he could read anything she gave him in no time flat.

  “You might have been half-smart if you could of gone to school,” she said.

  Hadley felt instantly proud and suffered an overwhelming urge to share the truth about their secret club with his mama, who thought it a pure impossibility that someone like Lucinda would ever give a Crump anything more than a charitable reading lesson. Maybe she wouldn’t feel the need to sew basil in the hem of her slip for luck, or wear a spider in a walnut shell around her neck, if he told her that Lucinda sometimes shared her butter rum candy sticks with him, her tongue happily gliding along the same golden stripe as his own. “Mm!” Lucinda would say, as if Hadley’s licks made the candy taste just that much more butter rummy.

  But Hadley knew that he could never speak about Lucinda’s club to anyone, least of all his mama. If Hadley told Mama about his habit of reading dirty books with Lucinda, Mama would make him put a coffin nail in his Whoops Jar, and Hadley didn’t want to do that. Mementos were one thing. Mistakes were another. Mama had four nails in her coffee can already, and she wasn’t even old yet. Mama insisted that four nails weren’t so bad. Grammy Talitha had an even thirty before her nails buried her.

  It was Grammy Talitha who came up with the jar idea in the first place. When Mama was little, Grammy used to sit her on her lap at night and tell her all about her shortcomings.

  “I made a lotta mistakes in my life,” Grammy confessed, “but there’s one mistake I never plan to make; I remember every wrong I ever did.”

  That part was pretty impressive, especially considering all the nails Grammy had accumulated. There were times in his own life when Mama would say: “Hadley Floyd Crump! How did you get these holes in your trousers?” And even though he’d only just ripped his drawers an hour before, most of the time, Hadley couldn’t remember where the holes came from. Grammy, he decided, must have had a wonderful memory on account of being so diligent with her nails.

  Mama explained the purpose of the nails to him every year on his birthday. “Remembering your mistakes is the key. If you make a point of remembering, you can sometimes change the bad things into good. Mind you, that can be difficult. Sometimes a person can make changes. Sometimes they can’t. Me, I got three different nails in my jar for every time I let myself get rooked by your daddy.”

  Hadley was five when his mama gave him his own jar. “See how pretty it is, baby? You try and ke
ep that jar empty, if you can, cause that’s the simplest way to work it. But if somethin’ happens, and one day you do need to put a nail in this jar, the most important thing you can do is learn from your mistake.”

  At the time, Hadley was so busy playing with his new jar that she had to smack his hand to make him listen up.

  “A lot of folks talk about puttin’ another nail in their coffin. Well, here’s a little secret: sometimes, if you’re very very lucky, you might find out that what you thought was a mistake wasn’t no mistake at all. That’s what happened when I had you. For nine months I walked around cursing myself and frowning at you as you grew inside my belly. Wasn’t ‘til I saw your sweet little face that I knew the truth of it. You weren’t no mistake, Hadley Crump. You were the best thing I ever did.” She rattled her dented can. “Funny thing is, after I took out that nail I put in on account of you, I had to take out at least one of them nails I put in on account of your daddy. See what I mean?”

  In truth, Hadley didn’t see what she meant. He dropped in nails left and right because he thought it was such fun.

  “No,” Mama said, dumping the whole big batch out in his lap. “It’s about avoiding the nails, Hadley. Understand?”

  Over the years, he’d tried to put a frog in his jar, a Beech-Nut cigar band, and a handful of crab apples. Mama always dumped them out. This was the reason he got the Whoops Jar speech every year on his birthday.

  Yes sir, Hadley was certain his mama would say that Lucinda Browning was a nail, but he couldn’t think what he could do. Lucinda was more exciting than the mini`e ball slug he’d found in Rabbit Creek. She was more exciting than Loomis’ deck of French playing cards, too. Shoot. Lucinda was right up with the Bloody Lime. If she cost him a nail, so be it. Truth be told, Hadley liked Lucinda even better than he liked his empty jar.

  ###

  In those early days, Browning House was tended by twenty coloreds, one mule auto, and a Cajun called LeJeune, whom only the long-deceased Mrs. Browning could understand. It was tended, also, somewhat haphazardly, by one Loomis Sackett.