The Reading Lessons

by Carole Lanham

  “Buy the book or move along, kid,” Mr. Pringles said after Hadley spent half an hour looking up secret names.

  At this point, Hadley decided to use the money Lucinda had given him for a book on wisteria to buy The Meaning of Flowers instead. Consequently, he spent the whole walk home concocting a convincing argument for why it was more important to know that spurge had the secret name of Fat From a Head, than it was to educate one’s self on how to get wisteria to climb where you wanted it to climb. To sweeten the news, he picked Lucinda a bouquet of clover and wild orchids on his way in the door. “In the language of flowers,” Hadley told Lucinda, “Orchids symbolize beauty and refinement, and clover is a sign of domestic virtue.”

  They were white lie flowers, to be sure, but Lucinda liked to think she was refined and elegantly domesticated. She had Tilly put the bouquet in a vase next to her bed, pleased as pie by the wisdom of such a unique book purchase.

  What Hadley failed to mention was that clover had the distinctly undomesticated secret name of Semen of Ares.

  ###

  At Wisteria Walk, Hadley’s days were filled with flowers and his nights with fitful dreams. Sadly, the seeds he planted in the sun turned to poisonous weeds in the dark. On a good day, he might go hours without thinking of Lucinda. There was lots of work to be done, and he liked the hopeful feeling he got raking everything smooth in a new flowerbed. Every time a little green shoot curled up from the earth, Hadley felt like passing out cigars. Then night would come, and all those good feelings would wither to resentment.

  After a while, he came to believe that the touch of his head on the pillow was what triggered it. He tried going to bed earlier. He tried going to bed later. It mattered not. Eventually, the pillow-trigger theory was disproved when he slept sitting-up one night and the thumping happened the same as always.

  This left Hadley with only one theory to work with: Women were nothing but trouble. And not just Lucinda. Sometimes it felt like the whole world was full of women that Hadley couldn’t have: colored women, white women, Lucinda Worther-Holmes, and Lucinda Worther-Holmes’ rich white friends. There was one woman who appeared oddly agreeable. Her name was Babe Butternut. But Babe Butternut was more trouble than the ones he couldn’t have.

  Once, when the new kitchen girl was feeling croupie, Hadley was asked to serve lunch to Lucinda and her friends. In some homes, it might be odd to be served stuffed celery by the gardener, but in a house filled with mechanical servants, there aren’t many servants available with the hands and legs necessary to perform food-serving jobs. It was more the rule than not that Hadley would be whisked from watering and planting on a regular basis so he might climb on a high stool and reach down a flower vase off a top shelf, or carry in a big box of something or other that Lucinda had ordered from someplace or other, or replace a radio tube. Celery-serving was all in a day’s work.

  Babe Butternut crunched on a stick of celery and announced to the room that she had a terrible weakness for dominos. She licked her lips when she said the word dominos, but Hadley attributed that to cream cheese at first.

  The only thing Hadley had ever found fun about dominos was soldiering them up on the Log Cabin Room floor and giving them a tap. He couldn’t see Babe Butternut getting down on the floor in her short flapper dress to line up dominos. Anyhow, she didn’t strike him as being careful enough for it, the way she was always spilling her peach dos all over the place.

  “You should go now, Hadley,” Lucinda said, taking the tray from him.

  Hadley thought Lucinda must want him to get the dominos they kept in the china cabinet drawer so he asked, “Do you want me to set up a card table or do you wanna play on the floor?”

  “The floor sounds nice,” Babe said.

  Everyone giggled.

  “Go away, Hadley,” Lucinda said, rolling her eyes. “That boy is good as retarded.”

  Hadley happily departed for the kitchen and found Tilly rolling out a piecrust on the work table. “Hey Tilly, do you know why that giggly Miss Butternut likes dominos so much?”

  Tilly whipped a powdery hand across her forehead, streaking it white above the leaf. “Iffin’ I know that woman, you be the domino she’s talking about.”

  Hadley had been called a lot of things, but he’d never been called a domino.

  “Keep clear of that one, ‘lil Domino,” Tilly said. “She eats boys like you for breg’fest.”

  It so happened that Hadley was just that hard up, the notion offered some appeal.

  Babe Butternut was the only woman he’d ever seen who was taller than Lucinda. Her breasts were like the dome at the top of the Reading Room in that Hadley was always looking up at them. Once, when he was trimming the new privet, Babe Butternut leaned over the bushes so far, his nose touched one of her domes. Another time, she instructed Hadley to dab peach do off her lap. He looked up then, too.

  “That Babe Butternut sure is an awful pain, isn’t she?” Lucinda said, the day after the celery.

  “I don’t mind her,” Hadley said. He was on a ladder changing dead light bulbs. Lucinda was handing him new ones.

  “You only say that because she acts like such a Dumb Dora around you. Babe calls herself a modern woman, but she doesn’t even bandage her breasts.”

  “Is that right?” Hadley said.

  “Do you think she’s pretty?”

  Lying was never his best skill, but Hadley knew better than to answer that question with any amount of honestly. “Her face could wither a fence post,” he lied.

  For a full ten seconds, it sounded like a teakettle was whistling in the other room. “Ewwwwwwww!” Lucinda cried. “I will not have my servants being seduced by the likes of Babe Butternut. If I catch you gawking down her dress again, I’ll have you tarred and feathered.”

  Hadley watched her turn the light bulb round and round in her right hand. “I’m lonely, Lucinda.”

  “Why Hadley? Haven’t I kissed you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then think on that when you get lonely,” Lucinda said, and she set the light bulb down hard enough to crack it.

  “That only makes it worse.”

  “Reading with me used to be enough, as I recall.”

  “I’m not a kid anymore.”

  She ran her eyes up and down him as if she was only just now noticing this. “Jesus, Hadley. If Dickie wasn’t such a sap, he’d know in a heartbeat what’s going on inside that one-track brain of yours.” She balled her long, pale fingers into a tight hard fist. “If you want trouble, stick with Babe. She’s more dangerous than all my nigger maids combined.” Spinning in a tornado of buttercup hair, she stomped from the room.

  ###

  Inch by –inch—line by –line—with a descent only appreciable at intervals that seemed –ages—down and still down it came!

  ~Edgar allen Poe

  The Pit and the Pendulum was about a fellow who finds himself sentenced to a dungeon rife with all manner of hideous tortures. There was a pit. There was a pendulum. There was unending misery for the man in the pit strapped beneath the pendulum. In Hadley’s opinion, it was an awful story. He particularly detested the part where the prisoner realizes that the pendulum has stopped descending while he’s passed out, only to resume again the second he opens his eyes.

  “I don’t care for this one,” Hadley told Lucinda. He held the book shut between his hands as if he could keep its claustrophobic terrors from crossing into his world.

  They sat on the window seat facing one another with their knees drawn up between them. Though reading was normally the most he could expect of their time together, Lucinda had slipped the door key in her pocket in a way that stirred to life a hundred butterflies of hope in the hollow of his stomach. Dickie was off to the construction site for the day, and her bare toe tapped against his shoe hard enough to cause a bowl of roses on a nearby table to drop one white petal for each tap.

  Whenever he was alone in the Reading Room, Hadley liked to trail his hand from spine to spine aroun
d the octagon shelves, allowing the smell of book glue and old paper to fill his starved senses. A single yellowed whiff had the strength to conjure swords, a ship, or trembling fingers loosening pearl buttons. All day long, every time he brushed his fingers under his nose, he’d relive the swords and the buttons. That smell, like the tap of Lucinda’s toe, had the power to make him burn for a different life. The Reading Room, with its flower nipple and its mesmerizing scents of must and leather, could be highly disorienting.

  “Read it like you’re the prisoner,” Lucinda said. “You can be so convincing when you want to be.”

  In the street below, the Pinkie Bell Dairy Wagon bumped along behind a lazy clomp of hooves. Ding. Clomp. Ding. Clomp. A petal drifted to the floor.

  “I don’t want to be the prisoner, Lucinda.”

  “Come on,” she coaxed. “The way you say vibrations of glittering steel always makes me want to kiss the life out of you.”

  Hadley didn’t remind her that she hadn’t kissed him once since becoming Dickie’s wife, a circumstance that was fast becoming his greatest irritation in life.

  Lucinda drew his hand away from the book and set to following his veins with the pad of her thumb, working them as if she could re-route the flow of his blood if she rubbed just right. As he locked eyes with her across the bridge of his arm, she pressed his pulse against her mouth and licked a wet heart with her tongue. “Please.”

  Hadley breathed for the first time in over a minute. He opened the book and began to read.

  I now observed—with what horror it is needless to say—that its nether extremity was formed of a crescent of glittering steel, about a foot in length from horn to horn; the horns upward, and the under edge evidently as keen as that of a razor . . .

  Razor was the last word he read before Lucinda sent the book whizzing across the room. This time, she slid his hand up the hem of her dress and molded his fingers around the hot skin on the top of her thigh. “I just love the way you say glittering steel.”

  He threw her down on the window seat, quick as you please, and climbed on top of her, and fit himself between her legs. Much as Poe’s prisoner had groped at the walls of his dark dungeon only to encounter again and again the rag he’d used to mark its circumference, so too Hadley arrived at the same familiar cairn—her mouth.

  As he kissed it, a multitude of borrowed sins seemed to slip from buckram and gold gilt, leaping free of hidden shelves. Clandestine desire rattled the closed lid of the window seat. Across the room, the Pit and the Pendulum loosed fresh waves of anguish from the surface of a bent page. He who has never swooned, is not he who finds strange palaces and wildly familiar faces in coals that glow; is not he who beholds floating in mid-air the sad visions that the many may not view; is not he who ponders over the perfume of some novel flower . . .

  Lucinda forced her hand between their lips, wrecking the kiss. “Are you going to rape me?”

  “Don’t push me away this time,” he begged.

  The slap stung. “You’re out of control,” she said, and she slapped him again, this time harder.

  It didn’t hurt. Not like her teeth. Hadley almost wished she’d do it again. “You feel so good,” he whispered, wanting to have her like Alec d’Urbeville had Tess, yet eager as ever to play Jonathon Harker to her vampire kiss.

  Lucinda pounded on his shoulders. “Get off me, you filthy piece of trash.”

  Hadley didn’t get off Lucinda. For every bed-creak that echoed in his brain, he moved his hips against hers. For every dirty note that led to nothing and every teasing touch and every teasing kiss, Hadley moved against her. For every time she made him explode in the throes of utterly depthless pain, Hadley moved and moved.

  Towers of V.I.L.E. books collapsed beneath them inside the window seat. It was snowing petals on the rug. The Pit and the Pendulum clapped shut. He kissed her neck. He kissed her dress. The dress had little bluebells printed all over it, and Hadley kissed from bluebell to bluebell until he reached the one that came three bluebells beneath her bellybutton. This flower he carefully memorized, learning it first with his chin, then his nose, then his cheek. “Delicious,” he said, chewing up the bluebell.

  She gripped a handful of his hair. “You pig!” she whispered and she wrapped her legs around him.

  “Smells like pigs,” Penrod Tweeb once said after Hadley picked up a clean pair of underclothes that had fallen off the line. The Tweebs had liked to use a white woman for the laundry. “It’s impractical to wash clothes only to have them handled by dirty hands,” Sargent said. He demanded that the underclothes be washed again because Hadley had picked them up.

  The flavor of Lucinda’s dress was in his mouth. He rolled it around his tongue and swallowed. He unbuttoned his trousers . . .

  A honk ripped through the air like a gunshot. Someone hollered: “Stop what you’re doing this very instant!”

  Hadley jumped up and his trousers fell down.

  In the drive below, Lucinda’s husband leaned on the horn of a brand new 1-16 Sport Phaeton. “Come see what I just bought, Lulu!”

  Lucinda’s eyes shifted from the automobile out the window to the worn knees of Hadley’s union suit. “You cracked the window seat,” she said. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand. The Salt Merchant was standing on his head on the floor and she tossed it on the broken seat to hide the split in the wood. “I’ll be expecting you to make things good as new again, Hadley Crump.”

  With that, she went off to meet her husband, her bluebells soaked with Hadley’s spit.

  ###

  Afterward, he couldn’t calm down no matter what he did. She wants me too, he said to himself, re-living that moment a dozen times over when Lucinda wrapped her fingers in his hair and pulled his mouth into the folds of her dress. If only Dickie hadn’t showed up when he did.

  In the following weeks, Hadley had his revenge.

  “Will you look at that?” Dickie groaned. “Some son of a bitch scratched my pretty Packard Blue door!”

  And the next Monday, “Now how’d that mangy mutt wind up in my God-danged front seat?”

  And the following Monday, “That’s it! Get the cops, Crump. There’s a gall-dern nail in every one of my tires!” Dickie couldn’t have looked more distraught if Hadley had taken the table saw he was using and sawed the idiot’s nose clean off his face. “I’m going to need you to put new tires on right away.”

  “Yes sir,” Hadley said. “Just as soon as I’m done seeing to your wife’s seat.”

  ###

  Hadley spent his day off in the park after church every week with his mama. He’d pick wild flowers while she trailed behind, poking at things with the point of her umbrella and occasionally unearthing items of mystical value. Mercury dimes and buckeyes were pocketed on a regular basis. Dandelion fluff was blown to the east. Once, she dug the penis bone of a raccoon from the mud and declared they’d both soon be rich with good luck. The penis bone went in her pocket, too. Meanwhile, it was not unusual for them to go home with a bouquet a piece of Sundrops to go with the dimes and the penises. Without planning to do it, they’d made a game of it.

  Hadley had discovered that the first wild flower he spotted each week always tied in somewhat suspiciously with the Reverend’s sermon for that day. If the sermon was called The Second Coming, the first flower to pop up on their path was sure to be a Bachelor Button. According to Hadley’s book, a Bachelor Button signified anticipation. He’d learned to carry the Meaning of Flowers under his arm along with his Bible for convenient consultation. Thus, when three spires of the notoriously fickled Larkspur showed up after Have You Really Given Your All to the Lord? Hadley was able to clarify immediately.

  “What’s the book say about Nasturium?” Mama asked of him on Easter Sunday.

  Hadley flipped to the “N”s as if his life depended upon it, which, given the day in question, there was a real chance that it did. “Victory in battle,” he said, grinning ear to ear. “Says here they keep the whiteflies and squash bugs away
too if you eat ‘em.” Hadley nibbled on a petal. “Tastes like radish.”

  The Flower Game was a pleasant pastime that lasted all week long. After Easter Sunday, three cream-colored Nasturiums bent over the lip of a jelly jar on Hadley’s windowsill, reminding him to fight the good fight for six days straight. Then they died.

  This was all well and good until one Sunday in late July when Pastor Blackmon got it into his head to preach on the perils of adultery.

  Asa Blackmon had been thundering from the pulpit at Rocky Bottom Baptist since before Hadley was born. He could make you wet your pants with his fist-pounding, forehead smacking style of preaching. He was just that lively. When he warned about the devil, he stomped through the pews passing out thumps on the head. And when he baptized a believer, they often emerged kicking and punching, their lungs half-filled with the sinful nature they’d set out to cleanse away. Nothing was official until all that sin got coughed up once and for all. This sometimes took longer than the baptism its self. Even when he was shaking hands, folks two blocks over at Morningside Methodist could hear him belting out good morning. Reverend Blackmon might clout you in the head if he thought that’s what you needed, and when it came to his sermons, the man pulled no punches.

  “You were squirming like a two year old in there today,” Mama said after the Why Adulterers Must Burn in Hell sermon.

  “I’ve got a stomach ache,” Hadley complained. “I think I’ll skip our walk today.”

  “Oh no you don’t,” Mama said, hooking him by the arm to keep him from running away. “You can’t ditch me that easy. I’m sure your stomach’s in a thousand knots after hearing what the Reverend had to say about lusting after another man’s wife.”

  “Don’t start, Mama,” Hadley said. They had gone a whole month without re-visiting that prickly subject, and Hadley had enjoyed the reprieve. He wished Mama had never gotten wind about Lucinda. Church had a way of bringing on her strong principles, as if they weren’t strong enough already. If they were going to argue about Lucinda, it was usually after church.