Loomis Sackett was a special case, and he never let you forget it. His mother had the good fortune to land on her deathbed several months before Mrs. Browning landed on hers, and that was the reason he was so special.
Adelandi Sackett started doing the wash for the Brownings when she was fifteen and plump with child. She had the voice of a songbird, everyone said, and Mrs. Browning liked to open all the windows when the girl was hanging clothes so as to fill the house with her soft sweet music. She also had a beautiful hand-carved backscratcher that was painted orange and had a bright green grasshopper on the handle. Adelandi called it The Grasshopper, and when Mrs. Browning was carrying Lucinda, Adelandi would work miracles on her employer’s back with that pretty orange stick, humming mysterious lullabies and scratching at scratches long after her workday was done. Loomis showed Hadley The Grasshopper once. It was chipped now, and two of the wooden fingers on the end were broken halfway down, but that didn’t matter anyway because Loomis said it was bad luck to scratch your back with it. When Loomis was four, his mama caught a blood fluke and passed away after a long drawn-out ordeal, probably because she itched herself with The Grasshopper. Loomis went to live with his Aunty Fafa in Blackeytown. Fortunately, Loomis had never needed any back-scratching, and as a result, when his mama was on her deathbed, Mrs. Browning made her a solemn promise that, as long as he might want it, Loomis Beauregard Sackett would have a job at Browning House.
Lucky Loomis, Loomis called himself.
“What if you get an itch someday that’s so big, you forget yourself and scratch it anyhow?” Hadley had asked, for that orange stick was a desperate worry to him.
“The day I scratch is the day you’re doomed,” Loomis told him. “I resist temptation better than you.”
Loomis then proceeded to chase Hadley around the yard, the broken fingers of The Grasshopper swiping within an inch of Hadley’s shoulder blades. Sometimes, when Hadley made Loomis mad, Loomis threatened to sneak into Hadley’s room while he was asleep and scratch his back. Hadley didn’t think it was safe for a boy like Loomis to possess something so powerful. Loomis bragged that he was the only one at Browning House who could not be fired.
“A deathbed promise is more binding than glue. Hell, I could itch Mr. Browning’s back until he croaked, and lessin’ they decide to cart me off to jail, there’s nothing no body could do about it. You can’t mess with a deathbed promise. I’m as good as married to this fancy-ass place.”
Though Browning House wasn’t a proper plantation—it had a block of corn, a kitchen garden, a vineyard, forty hogs, two champion riding horses, and a lazy old cow called Toil-n-Trouble, or Tee Tee, for short. Word had it that when Mrs. Browning was still alive, everything was vastly different. The servant children were chauffeured to school in a coal-box buggy by old stooped-over Cuffy the driver. A better cook made meals for the servants in those days, too. The current cook, Miss Missy, was a kindly little thing, but her hoecake was hard as oak. Those that could remember said that Mrs. Browning was a true saint.
To be sure, she had a saintly look about her in the painting that hung over the mantle in the Rose Bud parlor. There was a portrait of her in the Harlequin parlor too, but by then she was suffering with the dropsy that would eventually kill her, and that portrait was just too sad to look at. The painting in the Rose Bud parlor showed a young woman with coffee-colored eyes that seemed to return Hadley’s curious stare. Her dark hair was tied with a pale blue ribbon, and Hadley had discovered that, if he stood with his heels against the far wall, she would look at him and cock her chin in a wondering sort of way.
Every time he found himself in the parlor, Hadley searched the paint strokes for some similarity between Lucinda and her mother, but there wasn’t a nose or an eyebrow or a smile that appeared to connect them.
Old Cuffy grinned a big crooked yellow grin anytime he found reason to speak of the late Mrs. Browning. “When Missus looked at you, you felt like more than a driver. You felt like a whole person with feelings and dreams and a life beyond the uniform.”
Even though Hadley didn’t have a uniform, he thought it would be the best thing in the world to be looked at that way.
After Mrs. Browning died, there was no more school for the servants. Miss Missy replaced the more expensive and more talented Cookie James. The Cajun gave up trying to speak. The rooms filled with more and more things to dust.
One of those things was a big deer head that sometimes hung over the telephone table and sometimes would be loaded into a piano-moving cart and disappear for entire weeks at a time. One afternoon, there was a loud crash in the Log Cabin Room, and everyone ran to see what it was. The deer head had fallen off its hook. It lay in the middle of the grapevine rug, staring at the ceiling. Later, Hadley would be given the job of gluing the top half of the buck’s right antler to the bottom half, but in those first few minutes, everyone just stood in a circle around the head waiting for Mr. Browning to say something. Eventually, the man cleared his throat and said, “Daddy’s dead.” Then he went to his study and closed the door.
Because Hadley and Loomis were the most nimble of the gawkers, it was decided that they should move the head out to the summer kitchen until it could be repaired. Loomis being Loomis, he took up the wall mount, leaving Hadley to hang on by the more precarious chin. With the deer balanced between them, they began maneuvering it out of the house.
“What’s this old head got to do with Mr. Browning’s daddy?” Hadley asked.
A frizzly tuft of Loomis-hair stuck up between the deer’s ears, making it look like a Negro deer. “Shit, Hadley,” the Negro deer said. “Ain’t you never heard the story ‘bout Mr. Browning’s daddy and this old buck?”
“Nope.”
They paused at the kitchen door. “Watch the nose now,” Loomis warned. They angled it this way and that way, grunting as they sought to work the thing through. “You bust so much as a nostril off this head, and Mr. Browning will kick you out on your little ass. Your mama, too. I’ll be fine, of course.”
“Of course.” Hadley took extra care with the nostrils. “So what’s the story, then?”
“Mr. Browning’s daddy is Parnell T. Jr., and one time, Jr. and Mr. Browning went hunting in Montana together, and that’s where they shot this buck.”
Once outside, Hadley was forced to walk backwards. Palmetto berries littered the path and it was like walking on marbles. He frowned at the Negro deer. “They?”
“That’s right. Both men set their sites on the devil, only one of ‘em shot through the heart and the other shot through the ear. Did you happen to get a look at that hole, Crumpette?”
Seeing how the deer’s ear had been flapping against his lip all the way to the summer kitchen, Hadley had seen the hole close up.
“Ass and damn!” Loomis said as they hoisted it onto the pickling bench. “Bastard’s heavier than it looks.”
Loomis was fond of cussing whenever the situation presented itself. He had an impressive gift for making up profane combinations that no one else ever thought to use. Hadley’s personal favorite was nipple-balls.
“Anyhow,” Loomis said. “They both claimed to fire the killing shot, and there was no way of settling the matter on account both men was using 22s. Things got so ugly between them, it was agreed they’d never speak again. It was also agreed they would take turns with the head on alternating months.”
Suddenly the buck’s disappearance and re-appearance made more sense. “Jr. lives with Mr. Browning’s sister in Macon. I guess maybe Mr. Browning thinks it meant something today that the buck fell off the wall.”
“It’s sad they never patched things up.”
“Stupid is what it is. They both get to hang the sumbitch on their wall so what they got to complain about?”
Hadley gazed into the blinkless eyes of the mounted deer. It looked far more dignified now that it didn’t have Loomis’ hair sprouting up between its ears. “I reckon it’s a dissatisfying arrangement for them both. Nobody really wins b
ecause neither can feel a sense of ownership. Both men know that, even when it’s their turn, the time is comin’ when they’ll have to give it up again.”
Loomis shrugged. “If it was me, I’d rather not have it at all.”
Mama peeked around the door just then. “Go on back to the house now, boys. Mr. Browning’s daddy passed this morning. There’s preparations to be made.”
Hadley and Loomis looked at each other across the points of a broken antler. “We have ourselves a winner,” Loomis said.
###
In addition to antler-gluing, Hadley’s duties at Browning House had grown to include a vast assortment of odd jobs. Had there been an actual To Do list (there wasn’t), it would have read something like this:
a) Check vines for Black Measles, Little-leaf, mildew, cutworms, crown rot, and Grape-berry moths.
b) Chase off nematodes, beetles, rabbits, and gophers.
c) Help with the milking, the wringing, and the pumping.
d) Maintain back boiler and household toilets.
e) Keep Lucinda Browning amused.
Mostly Hadley preferred “e” over chasing off nematodes, but he had a fondness for garden work. His first spring at Browning House, he added a few secret plants to Mr. Browning’s zinnia garden. The shed was full of seeds in dust-furred packets, if a boy was willing to poke through dried-up June bugs to get to them. Hadley wanted to see if he could get the old seeds to grow. He had a notion that white dahlias would blend in like a lady’s carpet with Mr. Browning’s salmon-pink zinnias.
According to the packet, a person was supposed to plant dahlias inside for a few weeks before putting them in the dirt. As this was not a practical option, Hadley took extra care pushing the seeds into the soil, giving each one a spit for luck after it was buried. He swirled the seeds around the frog statue and along the porch. He lined the garden bricks. When snowy blooms the size of dinner plates popped up one summer, Mr. Greenthumb, the ground’s man, promptly took credit. In fact, before the dahlias, Mr. Greenthumb was known by his real name, Mr. Parch, but after the dahlias came up, this name no longer seemed fitting. Hadley’s experiment was the beginning of a long and satisfying arrangement in which Hadley would sneak in rose mallow or bluebonnets, and Mr. Greenthumb would scratch his head and say, “Why yes, I do have a very good eye for color. Thanks so much for noticing.”
It was no surprise to Hadley that his rose mallow should glow rosier than any other rose mallow for miles. He didn’t know if everyone else was the same way or not, but he’d always thought in flowers. For as long as he could remember, Hadley saw tiger lily sunsets and morning glory puddles. He poured chrysanthemums in his coffee and drank snapdragon-yellow lemonade. For Mr. Browning’s birthday, he watched Mama serve the man zinnia-pink salmon on a shiny white dahlia plate. If you were Hadley Crump, the whole world was bloom-colored, and it smelled like a bouquet, too. Sometimes, when Lucinda read over his shoulder, he couldn’t help but notice that her hair smelled like sweet peas. Admittedly, this seemed less magical after he got a look at the perfume bottles in her top dresser drawer, but perfume did not explain why Hadley could smell peach blossoms out of season when he was feeling happy enough.
It was a plain fact that, over the course of his young life, Hadley had developed an uncanny talent for identifying flowers. His daddy didn’t leave him with much to remember him by, but he did give Hadley the Young Folks Cyclopedia of Common Things, the Plants & Animals volume. Daddy said Plants & Animals was where most folks quit paying. Whenever Hadley came across a new specimen, he would looked it up in his cyclopedia and promptly commit it to memory.
As a result of this obsession, Mama had violets pressed between every folded stocking she owned. Her apron pockets were dusty with crumbled dandelion heads. Daisies withered behind her ears.
“You ought to go into the flower business someday,” Mama told him.
Indeed, there was something about the dirty knees of Mr. Greenthumb’s gray gardener pants that set Hadley to dreaming. He didn’t mind plumbing toilets or milking old Tee Tee, but his head was full of flowers.
###
As the years rolled on, the books for V.I.L.E. grew trickier and trickier. Lucinda told Hadley that his ears turned red whenever he gave her a particularly good recipe card.
“You like that one, don’t you?” she’d say. “I bet you wish I’d say such things to you.”
To Hadley’s way of thinking, Lucinda was saying such things to him, and he was pretty sure she knew it, too. She liked to poke fun at his short britches and bad haircuts, but she never asked anyone else to join their club. She never let anyone else borrow her books either—not even the acceptable ones. Not even Dickie Worther-Holmes, whose father owned Worther-Holmes Homes, the biggest builder of fine homes this side of the Yazoo.
Dickie Worther-Holmes was eighteen and already had a mustache and his own motor car. He also had a trophy as tall as Hadley engraved with the words: 50-meter Smallbore Free Rifle Champion. Dickie was a gun man, Lucinda said, and sometimes she let him kiss her. Hadley was jealous, but he was sure Lucinda would let him kiss her, too, if only he could find the right naughty passage.
When Lucinda gave him Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he was sure that he’d stumbled on the path to her heart. It had prostitutes. It had sin. It had youthful indulgence.
“I’ve been thinking,” Lucinda said. “Perhaps the time has come for V.I.L.E. to have its own holiday. If we keep our eyes open, I bet we could come up with the right thing. A sort of Christmas kind of affair, only without Christ.”
“Okay,” Hadley said, and they immediately set about to find something that might prove sufficiently wicked.
For a while, they considered Queen Mab-mas, but Lucinda wasn’t sure she wanted to dedicate a whole day to someone tiny enough to be pulled around by a grey-coated gnat being whipped with a cricket’s bone. For reasons having more to do with the sweets they might eat more than anything else, they came close to settling on an occasion to honor Frou-Frou, the dangerous racehorse from Anna Karenina.
“If we had Frou-Frou Eve, we could hang Christmas stockings in some secret place and leave lumps of sugar for each other,” Lucinda proposed. “I love to eat sugar!”
It wasn’t until they read about Stephen’s encounter with the mysterious and disgusting word phoetus scratched on a desk top in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that their holiday choice became clear.
Phoetus Day was to fall every year on the day after Lucinda’s birthday so as to help them remember the date. The two vowed to keep it holy by scratching a dirty word somewhere on something annually. Presents were optional. Hadley asked that all gifts be held to something of simple symbolic importance. On the first ever celebration of Phoetus Day, he scratched the word urinal on the gutter pipe of the smoke house and made Lucinda a little volcano out of mud.
Lucinda refused to say what or where or if she’d carved anything at all, and she gave him a box wrapped in gold foil paper with a brand new pocket watch inside.
“Don’t you like it?” she asked, when she saw the look on his face.
“It’s very nice,” Hadley said, turning the shiny new watch in his fingers. “But I thought we agreed to keep it simple.”
“This is simple, dear. You should have seen the other watches in Mr. Berger’s case.”
“But I gave you a volcano.”
Lucinda patted him on the head. “It’s okay. I know you don’t have money for anything good.” She held the watch up to her ear. “Anyway, that old watch of your father’s is about to fall apart. Now you can throw it out.”
Hadley didn’t bother to tell her that she would have to pry his daddy’s watch out of his cold dead hand. It was one of the few things the man ever gave him. Outside of a squirrel bone and a dozen or so purple notes, it was just about the only thing he owned.
“It took me three nights to make that volcano, Lucinda.”
She snapped the watch closed. “That’s nice, dear, but I had to put up with C
uffy’s old stories all the way to the jewelers and back. Have you any idea what that’s like?”
Hadley weighed her sacrifice along side his own. “Thank you,” he said.
Three weeks later, he came across the word stamina written in miniscule letters on one of the iron ribs of the dining room radiator. Despite the fact that the volcano had mistakenly been tossed out as garbage by Gaynell, the new holiday finally felt official.
The next book on the list was Tom Jones, and if Portrait was rife with potential, Tom Jones was an all out guarantee. Tom Jones had many lovers, perhaps even his own mother. He was a man driven to desperate lengths by love, and Hadley was sure that Lucinda would be hard-pressed to resist desperate love. Somehow, though, the tale distracted her. When they finished reading of Tom’s robust exploits, Lucinda decided that she absolutely must have a fur muff like Sophia’s in the story. In the heat of summer in Mississippi, Lucinda drove her father to the brink of insanity trying to locate something that would suffice.
“You oughta let the muff idea ago, Lucinda,” Hadley urged. “Cuffy said they went shopping store to store today and your daddy looked like a heart attack. What would you use a ratty ball of fur for anyway?”
“Ratty ball of fur? You read the book, Hadley. Sophia’s muff had significant spiritual meaning. It took her place when she and Tom were forced to be apart. She put it in his bed, for pity sake. They both kissed it! Don’t you remember? I don’t care if Daddy has to send to Timbuktu for one, I must have a beautiful white fur muff. It’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard of.”
Mr. Browning stopped at nothing until a white fur muff was found, and the first minute it was in her hot little hands, Lucinda invited Dickie Worther-Holmes to lunch. While Hadley was struggling to come up with an excuse for why he was setting up a ladder five feet from where they sat, he spied Lucinda rubbing the furry new muff against Dickie Worther-Holmes’ strong square jaw. Dickie then told about a white moose he’d shot.
The Reading Lessons Page 4