“I’m so worried about you, Hadley. I can’t hardly see which foot my shoe goes on. You look like a USDA-Certified scarecrow. Don’t they feed you at Mr. Worther-Holmes’ house?”
“When have you ever said that I look like I’m eating well, Mama?”
“Not since you were nine and we moved into that house.”
Hadley put a hand over his stomach. He really did feel ill. Reverend Blackmon said that even thinking about another man’s wife was enough to buy you a one-way ticket straight to hell. Not that this was news. Even so, hearing his fate confirmed by a man of Blackmon’s authority seemed to resolve the matter with a more professional level of certainty. “I can’t talk to you about this, Mama.”
“Just answer one thing for me: how is she treating you these days?”
For the hundredth time, Hadley thought about the afternoon Lucinda put his hand up her dress.
“Oh Lordy Lord,” Mama said. “Red ears.”
“Huh?”
“Your ears look like pickled beets, honey.”
He snorted, slipping on pebbles as he hurried down the bank toward the river. “So what?”
“Your neck’s red too,” Mama shouted behind him, and Hadley could feel it.
Ever since Lucinda had done what she’d done with that tiger tooth, the scar had become a source of heat too. It was almost like God didn’t think it was punishment enough to light up his ears for the sin of listening to things he shouldn’t listen to, he had to make Hadley burn for the tiger tooth as well.
“Do you still read with her?”
Hadley didn’t want to answer that, but Mama had an annoying way of making him feel like he was still under her thumb. “Got no choice in the matter. She can’t see nothing without me.”
Naturally, Mama popped off with a proverb: “My wounds are loathsome and corrupt, because of my foolishness.”
“Wounds?” Hadley said, rubbing his neck.
“You heard me, boy. Sneaking always takes its toll.”
Ever since the incident with the window seat, Hadley had been condemned to read in a rocking chair on the other side of the room while Lucinda stretched on the sofa. Alone. Lucinda said he got stirred up too easy when they sat together. Hadley said if she didn’t like it, she should put away the spoon.
Mama tugged on his hot ear. “There are other girls out there.”
Hadley assumed this must be true, and yet he couldn’t see past the perpetual steam that fogged his world. He only saw Lucinda. His memories were all of her. He was only just beginning to realize that he didn’t simply want her body. Hadley wanted Lucinda’s love.
Some nights, he tried to recall what Quindora’s lips felt like. He remembered that they were soft and gentle, but the memory felt like something told to him rather than something he had experienced. Everybody knew that Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery was one of the Ten Commandments. Like a character in a V.I.L.E. book, Hadley reckoned he was obsessed with Lucinda Worther-Holmes. Listening to her every night in bed with Dickie was almost enough to make him wish that she had killed him with her blood-drinking kisses.
“Here we go,” Mama said, yanking a bright blue flower from the weeds. “What’s the book have to say about Columbine, I wonder?”
Hadley didn’t wonder. Hadley didn’t want to know.
Mama took the book from under his armpit and looked it up herself. “Cuckhold,” she said, putting the flower in his pocket. “The flowers never lie.”
###
When Hadley shuffled in from his walk, he heard Lucinda splashing in her tub, and his feet stopped short. He’d stood on the other side of her bathroom door for years, willing himself across the threshold on the steamy surface of his dreams—dreams he’d carried to her with his own small hands, step by shaky step, careful not to spill a single hot drop. His fist came to rest against her door now. He wanted in.
“What’re you doing?” Dickie asked.
The flowery smell of Cashmere Bouquet leaked from under the door like poison gas. “The richest, most lasting & refined of all handkerchief soaps” the box said of Cashemer Bouquet. Dickie caught Hadley mid-sniff.
“I think I’m coming down with something,” Hadley said. “I don’t feel too good.”
Dickie was a big man, to be sure. His fist was the same size as Hadley’s head. He was carrying a golf club and a ball and a tee. He nodded toward the kitchen. “Have Tilly whip you up a Meadow Sweet cocktail. That always fixes me.”
“I think I’ll just go to bed,” Hadley said.
Sleeping off his misery, it turns out, was not a real option. After Lucinda finished her bath, the bed above Hadley’s ceiling thumped as it had never thumped before.
I shouldn’t have come here, Hadley thought. I don’t belong at Wisteria Walk.
As the ceiling quaked above his head, Hadley dropped a second nail in his jar.
In its size I had been greatly mistaken. The whole circuit of its walls did not exceed twenty-five yards. For some minutes this fact occasioned me a world of vain trouble; vain indeed -- for what could be of less importance, under the terrible circumstances which environed me, than the mere dimension of my dungeon?
~ Edgar Allen Poe
Hadley’s official title at Wisteria Walk was Gardener, yet his duties included everything under the sun. If the boiler broke, he fixed it. If the toaster quit toasting, he got it toasting again. And if a pipe sprung a leak under the kitchen sink, Hadley fiddled with it until it leaked no more. He had a knack for learning new things easily. Always had.
Mr. Browning once hired a painter to change his rooms from Egg Shell to Ocher, and Hadley had followed the painter around for a week, asking questions and watching him work. At Wisteria Walk, he tried mixing up paint recipes written by an old-timer named Hezekiah Reynolds. Thanks to Hezekiah’s colorful advice, Hadley learned how to dramatically enhance the store-bought paints Lucinda ordered by the bucket full. Everyone loved the results, and Hadley enjoyed the special feeling of power this gave him. He had a notion that changing the color of a wall transformed the entire emotion of a room, and he liked the thought of being responsible for something so grand. It was widely held that Lucinda Worth-Holmes’ gardener could stir up a perfect Paris Green.
And then there were the radios. Dickie suffered from an irresistible urge to purchase any crystal set he chanced to come across. There was a whole big room devoted to the putting together of radios, and by August that room was spread from corner to corner with the guts of a half dozen incomplete sets. Dickie, it seemed, lost interest in radios the minute they were out of the box.
One evening, he caught Hadley stealing a look at his new Aeriola Jr. and let him take a crack at putting it together. Unbeknownst to the both of them, this was the beginning of an unexpected and productive partnership. Dickie loved drinking bootleg and talking radios, and Hadley possessed an unstoppable desire to figure things out. Many a night, Dickie would drink bootleg and talk radios while Hadley poured over schematics; teaching himself how to turn Dickie’s vast sea of radio parts into little things of wonder.
There was only one draw back. On those occasions when Dickie was particularly ossified, he would throw an arm over Hadley’s shoulder, drop his chin against his big chest, and start mumbling personal confessions. “My daddy doesn’t like me one little bit. Did you know that?” He’d jab at Hadley’s nose like it was a doorbell, and one time his head even slumped against Hadley’s shoulder. “You probably think I got it made, don’t you, Mr. Crump? You probably envy my abilities with all these fine radios, too.”
Dickie had a special talent for burping long and loud whenever he was drinking. As a rule, he belched long and loud between most sentences. “Well, don’t envy me, son.” Belchhhhhh. “My life stinks.” Double belchhhhhhh.
There were many things Hadley wanted in life and also many things he didn’t want. First and foremost, Hadley did not want to know Dickie. He would have preferred a middle man like Sargent or Mr. Sweet to control all communication between them, but Dick
ie didn’t believe in such things.
“I’m not wasting good dough just to have someone speak for me,” Dickie once said. “I can speak for myself.”
According to Lucinda, Dickie might easily have been a movie star. With his Douglas Fairbanks teeth and his Charles Boyer’s lips, he attracted women wherever he went, or so Lucinda claimed. “I’d dress him as a pirate every day, if it were up to me,” she said.
Hadley had no idea what Douglas Fairbank’s teeth looked like, but this mattered not. When he was drinking, Dickie resembled nothing so much as a basset hound, and basset hounds had always made Hadley feel bad.
One evening, after making the same confession about his father four times in as many weeks, Dickie slung his arm over Hadley’s shoulder and said, “I’d rather be you, I think. Would you trade places with me, Crump?”
Hadley was naturally disposed to deplore Dickie Worther-Holmes, and yet, the attention flattered him. “I don’t suppose you’d enjoy it as much as you think,” he told Dickie. “My daddy don’t like me, neither. I ain’t seen him in years.”
Maybe it was just the whiskey, but those basset hound eyes actually glassed over. “You want a snort of this?” Dickie asked, sloshing Old Overholt down Hadley’s shirt.
Hadley felt genuinely sorry for Dickie in that moment. He took a big swig from the bottle and proceeded to choke his head off.
Dickie laughed so hard, he almost fell out of his chair. He pointed at the new Bijouphone Hadley was building. “You stick to your talents and I’ll stick to mine,” he declared, and he took a big noisy drink.
###
Lucinda didn’t like it. “We’re not paying the man to build your goddamn radios,” she said to Dickie after she heard him laughing it up with Hadley.
“I beg to differ, Lulu. I got nine new noise boxes thanks to him. I could open up a store.”
Lucinda rolled her eyes. “Surely we can think of better things for him to do?” she said, and she sent Hadley off to build her a new shoe tree.
Over time, Hadley became the chemist, the plumber, and the carpenter. He was also the painter, the chauffer, and the man to call when keys broke off in locks. Because Lucinda was never satisfied with the efforts of her other servants, she was always finding new things to add to his to-do list. One day she took Hadley down to the new Beattie’s Bluff Carnegie Subscription Library and paid a membership fee so he could borrow books.
At first, Hadley thought this a generous offer and behaved gratefully. He was excited by the thought of exploring a whole big building filled floor-to-ceiling with books. Lucinda was excited too.
The ceremony to dedicate the new library had been the biggest event to hit Madison County in years. A multitude of book-hungry Beattie’s Bluffers gathered on the new lawn to sing patriotic airs and watch Lucinda Worther-Holmes, President of the local chapter of the Lincoln-Lee Legion, cut the ribbon with a giant pair of gold scissors. A time capsule was placed in the wall behind a rectangle of stone engraved with the words of Francis Bacon: Reading maketh a full man.
A cheer went up when the stone was slid back into place, but Lucinda told Hadley later that she didn’t approve of the capsule. She said it was filled with the most idiotic collection of putrid junk ever assembled by man. “If the people of the future ever open it up, they’ll think we were little better than cavemen playing with acorns and smelly bird feathers.”
“Well,” said Hadley. “What if there are no more trees in the future? Could be, they might use that little acorn to grow themselves a new one.”
“Oh, pish. This is our legacy we’re talking about, Hadley. A legacy ought to be something that looks nice, smells nice, and accentuates our modernity.”
Hadley and Lucinda didn’t see legacies the same way at all.
For him, the library hoopla had spelled extra work. He’d spent an entire afternoon cleaning bunting out of the Delphiniums after the mayor’s Salute to Andrew Carnegie parade tromped across his flowerbeds.
“Are you sure they’ll let me in?” he asked as they approached the front door. Four days after the dedication, shiny specks of blue confetti continued to sparkle the steps. There was a fancy feather hat resting on the bottom in the new lily pond. Hadley liked the doorknob. It was carved in the shape of a frog prince and that much at least felt comforting to him.
Lucinda gave him the once over. “You are looking awfully brown these days,” she said.
He ran his fingertip over the points of the doorknob-frog’s crown.
“Come on, Hadley. You don’t think they’d kick Lucinda Worther-Holmes’ servant out for having a suntan, do you?”
Since taking on his new post, Hadley’s color had deepened by two or three shades. By comparison, the parts under his clothes were lily white.
“Anyhow, you’re with me, aren’t you?” Lucinda asked.
“I am?”
“And you’re probably cleaner than ninety percent of the people in this town.” She sneered at the family reading books on a blanket in the middle of the lawn. Lucinda had made Hadley scrub his hands before they left the house. Twice. “Nothing worse than smudges on new books,” she had said.
Hadley looked at his hands now. They were very brown. A person got brown when they worked outside. That shouldn’t mean you’re too Negro to go into a library.
“Shall we?” Lucinda asked.
Hadley clutched the frog head and gave it a pull, and the door opened with a sacred creak that would have put Rocky Bottom to shame.
“P.U.,” Lucinda said. “It stinks like old books in here. I was expecting it to smell new.”
As a boy, Hadley had made a trip or two to the Old McClay Courthouse to unload coal for Mr. Browning. The new library reminded him of the courtroom he’d seen there, only instead of a judge’s bench, there were three desks behind the wooden rail. Each one had a little brass sign. From left to right they read: HEAD LIBRARIAN, BOOKS CHECKED HERE, SUBSCRIPTIONS * INFORMATION * FINES. Behind the desks were enormous shelves of colorful books waiting to be borrowed.
Hadley felt a little like a character in a Jack London novel. It was clear that wild adventure resided within these paneled walls. Like road markers painted on a scrap of board and hammered into the face of the Himalayas, hundreds of journeys waited to unfold a mere step ahead. THIS WAY TO DANGER AND INTRIGUE, the books seemed to say to him. THRILLING DROP OFF JUST AHEAD! TURN RIGHT FOR LOVE, LEFT FOR MURDER . . .
A week before, while waiting for Lucinda to pack up her punch bowl after a club meeting at the big plantation home of one Mrs. Donetta Wexley, he’d picked up a copy of The Sea Wolf from the telephone table. Seven pages swam by in a blink, and all too soon, Lucinda was tapping on his head with a ladle and saying it was time to go.
That same smell that Lucinda would plug her nose against smelled like open water to him. Inhaling deep, Hadley closed his eyes and once again climbed atop the tossing prow of Jack London’s rugged Snark.
Here are the seas, the winds, and the waves of all the world. Here is ferocious environment. And here is difficult adjustment, the achievement of which is delight to the small quivering vanity that is I . . .
“Snap out of it,” Lucinda said. Several chins turned their way. A furious set of eyes looked up over the half-moons of a pair of silver eyeglasses. “Jesus, it’s only books,” Lucinda grumbled.
Only books? Hadley couldn’t believe his ears. This was the girl who invented holidays and sliced into fingers based on the simplest of plot devices. Hell, all a fellow had to do was read about glittering steel outloud, and she would let him throw her down and kiss her. Lucinda could pertend that this was just business as usual, but for him, it was no simple matter to step into a room such as this one. With its annual subscription fees and courtroom solemnity, the Beattie’s Bluff Carnegie Subscription Library was no place for a Negro houseboy from Millport. And yet, here he was, his dusty shoes sparkling with sea-blue confetti, his skin scrubbed for adventure. Lucinda hadn’t brought him to the little colored branch of the library on the
nig side of town. She’d brought him to the real library, and it felt to Hadley as if he’d achieved something big.
“Come on,” Lucinda said. “Let’s get you signed up so you can start borrowing books.”
Hadley followed her toward the SUBSCRIPTIONS * INFORMATION * FINES desk. “I won’t know where to start,” he said, his heart thundering
“I’ll handle that,” Lucinda assured him.
One of the best moments of his life occurred when the large woman in polka dots behind the desk handed him his own subscription card. Breathless and grinning ear to ear, he stopped to read the card the minute they got outside:
Hadley Crump has been approved to check out books from the colored branch of the Beattie’s Bluff Carnegie Subscription Library on Dalton Street.
###
An entire week passed before Lucinda’s intentions became clear. “Go down to the colored branch and fetch these books I’ve written down for you.”
Hadley was dying to check out books, but subscription borrowers were only allowed to check three at a time, and he didn’t want to waste his checks on books for Lucinda, delicious though they may be. Hadley had it in his head that he might like to read some real books. “The Packard is up to its hubs in gumbo over on Mussacuna Road,” he said. “I’m suppose to have it dug out by noon. Wouldn’t you rather walk over to the white one yourself?”
“A respectable woman can’t borrow these sorts of titles for herself.” She waved her list at him. “Come on, darling. If you leave this minute, you can dig out the car, run over to the library, and still have hours to spare.”
“What about Jack London?”
“What about him?”
“I was hoping to borrow The Sea Wolf.”
“Whatever for? You aren’t planning a voyage anytime soon, are you?” She unfolded her list. “Have a look at these titles and tell me you aren’t keen to read these books with me.”
The Reading Lessons Page 11