For a split second, Hadley thought it might be worth two years in the cooler just to hear Lucinda say those words.
But no! Lucinda deserved a slap. “You can’t keep me leashed up like this no more. Lord knows, I don’t have much pride, but I honestly thought there was something meaningful going on between us.” He stood up. “If I didn’t love you just a little bit still, I’d have waited another ten minutes to say that.”
Lucinda held her cheek with one hand and his pants leg with the other. “Don’t ruin things, Hadley. This might not be what you set out to get, but it’s better than nothing at all.”
“No it’s not.” He shook his leg free. “I’m done with you, Lucinda.” And by God, he meant it. “If you ain’t going to fire me or call the police, I reckon I’ll go on and plant your flowers same as I always have, but I don’t want you to kiss me no more, and I don’t want you to touch me. I got no intention of spending the next fifty years sneaking around after you.” A geranium splotch in the shape of his hand bloomed on her pale skin, but Hadley couldn’t feel bad about that. “I got my own life to lead,” he said.
And by God, he meant it.
Hadley looked around the little house on Dixon Street and realized he’d never been in a house where people weren’t paid to keep things clean. It was all he could do not to dust stuff off with his elbow when Flora gave him the tour. Books and magazines stood on top of the icebox and along the windowsills. The wastebasket overflowed with empty cans of Those Good Peas. There were several sacks on the floor that were also filled with Those Good Peas. Outside of two little circles the size of dinner plates, the kitchen table had been entirely devoted to unopened mail. “Watch your head,” Flora advised. Hadley narrowly avoided garroting himself, ducking just in time to miss the jungle of electrical cords winding over head. Sunflower seeds rolled under the soles of his shoes as he went from room to room, being introduced to the birds.
“Hello there, Mr. Peeps,” Hadley said. “Hello Tootsie. Hello Feather Brain.” Really, he could barely concentrate on the birds. When Flora wasn’t looking, he emptied his glass of lemonade on a poor thirsty ponytail palm in the corner.
On the sun porch, a naked dress dummy was the only thing left standing amid an explosion of sewing fabric. A paint can blocked the entryway with a hardened brush stuck to the lid, its red, twisted bristles making Hadley think of head wounds.
Flora’s untidy habits struck him as both discomfiting and spectacular. He couldn’t imagine inviting company over with so much junk stacked up everywhere, yet it felt wildly bold. Lucinda’s entire house had been crafted to impress. She even chose book titles with an eye for how important they sounded. With her awful red walls and pea-can towers, Flora didn’t appear to give a care. This concept was so new and so strange to Hadley, he might just as well have been dropped on his head in front of the pyramids.
He’d brought a Dainty Bess wrapped in Cellucotton that he’d picked for the occasion.
“Did you grow this?” Flora asked as she buried her nose in the ruffly bloom. “I can’t imagine growing anything that smells as pretty as this.”
“I picked it for you because pink roses mean Thank You in the language of flowers.”
“You don’t need to thank me.”
“I most certainly do. I’d have stepped in front of a truck the other day if you hadn’t calmed me down.”
“Well, we’re even now,” she said, and she put the rose in a blue bud vase and stood it on top of a three year old issue of Opportunity magazine.
Mr. Gibbs ate a pile of peas and a slice of pie off the same little yellow plate at the cluttered kitchen table. “Flora tells me you paint houses for a living?” he said. He waved his piecrust as he spoke, sending a snowstorm of flakes fluttering down on the mail.
Hadley had been afraid of meeting Flora’s father and, sure enough, the man had suspicious eyebrows. He stared at Hadley when he shook his hand like there was something hanging out of his nose. Hadley wondered if Mr. Gibbs was seeing a white man or a Negro standing in his kitchen.
It was a funny thing, what people saw. He’d jumped in the white line at the post office once when the Negro line snaked out the door. Nobody gave him a second look. At church, however, he was always black. Every so often, someone sensed that he didn’t belong; a perceptive soul in the form of a nosey five year old would twist around in his seat to stare at Hadley. How come they let that white boy into church, Mama? And then there was that nurse who sent him packing when he tried to visit Mr. Jessup, the butcher, after he broke his hip. She was sorry she couldn’t let anyone with dark skin in, she said. Mostly Hadley slipped by. The “knowers” were out there, however, and the “knowers” had the power to ruin everything in his life. If Mr. Gibbs was a knower, Hadley would never see Flora again. They’d probably make him quit the library, too. For a split second, Hadley felt certain that Mr. Gibbs could see he wasn’t altogether Negro.
But then the man just smiled and offered Hadley a chair, and his eyebrows looked a lot less distressing.
“Hadley does handy work and gardening for Mr. Worther-Holmes,” Flora explained as they ate their pie.
“Junior, actually,” Hadley added.
“Fancy people, those Worther-Holmes,” Mr. Gibbs said. “I seen their houses around town. Not much character if you ask me, but I guess some people like ‘em well enough.”
“They do sell a great many, sir.”
“How’s that pie?”
Hadley smiled at Flora. “I ain’t never tasted pie like this before.” Mama was the Beethoven of Boston Brown Bread, but she couldn’t flute crust half so well as this perfect specimen of piehood on the table in front of him.
“Flora gets her expertise from the Johnson branch of the family,” Mr. Gibbs said. “Not everyone masters piecrust, you know. My grandmother’s was so hard, we regularly broke forks when we ate it.”
Flora wiped her mouth with the corner of her napkin. “If you’re done, there’s something over here I was hoping to show you.” She led him to a wooden rack that hung in the hall by the back door. “Look, it’s that palm tree spoon I told you about.”
Hadley had never seen such tiny cutlery before.
“Do you wanna hold it?” Flora asked.
“Yes please.” He rubbed his finger over the miniature fronds. “Do you ever eat with it?”
“No,” Flora said. “It just hangs here on display.”
“If I had a little palm tree spoon, I’d eat applesauce with it,” Hadley said. There were six spoons in all on Flora’s wooden spoon rack. “Have you really been to all these places?”
“All but Florida. I save my money and buy a bus ticket whenever I get up enough for a trip.”
“I’ve never been any farther than Columbus,” he told her.
“But Hadley, you must go farther! You must see the world, even if you only travel twenty miles away. Things are different everywhere, but they’re the same, too. It’s exciting and comforting at the exact same time.”
Hadley admired the fire he saw in those bookmark-black eyes. “Maybe I’ll save my money and go to Alabama,” he said. “There’s an azalea that grows by the Cahaba river that you can’t find no place else in the world. It’s shaped like a funnel and smells like lemons, and I’d dearly like to smell that azelea for myself.”
“Do it, Hadley. You’ll never regret it.”
Flora’s father shuffled up behind them, working a mouthful of peas in his jaw. “You saw the porch, I reckon? Kinda makes you want to put a bullet in your head, don’t it?”
Hadley thought it peculiar that the man should care so much about Flora’s paint-job, given the state of the rest of the house. “I’m off on Sundays, Mr. Gibbs. I could paint your porch for you, if you like?”
“But not red,” Mr. Gibbs said. “I don’t know what Flora was thinking when she painted it red.”
“Daddy likes blue,” Flora said.
“Bird egg blue,” Mr. Gibbs said. “Could you paint it bird egg blue?”
&
nbsp; Hadley stood in the Gibbs’s cluttered kitchen tingling from head to toe and feeling like a man with something special to offer for the first time in his life. “I’ll mix up some bird-egg blue this week,” he promised.
“Say, Flora,” Mr. Gibbs said. “If this goes well, maybe we’ll have to let him take a crack at Helen.”
“Whose Helen?” Hadley asked.
Flora led him to the backyard and pointed to a small building made of quarry rock. “Helen lives there?” Hadley asked, his mind instantly flooded with images of a disfigured sister crouching in rags on a cement floor.
“No one lives there. It used to be slave quarters before the war. Daddy stores his buckets and rakes inside, but the place is in real need of repair.”
Hadley walked around the perimeter, jiggling and kicking things. He jumped on the back of an over-turned wheelbarrow, and looked at the roof. “The angles at the lintel are rusted through, and the anchorage has come loose. That’s not an easy fix.”
“You mean, you can’t just paint it bird-egg blue and make it all better?” Flora said with a crooked grin.
“I could put together a support of some kind and fix those mortar joints. It’s a fine little building otherwise.” He patted a yellow stone. “So who is Helen anyway?”
“You’re looking at her. Here, give me your hand.” She put his palm against the front door, and Hadley could feel the carved letters under his skin.
Helen.
“That word is all we know about this old place. It’s referred to as Old Slave Quarters on the plot. Dixon Mansion used to stand right over there, but it burned to the ground a long time ago. People started buying little pieces of the land and putting up houses like ours. The man who sold my daddy the property called this place a guesthouse, but we’ve never had the nerve to put anyone in here. We worry enough about the rakes as it is.”
With his affinity for carved words, Hadley felt a warm spot for the old building right off and was instantly compelled to save it. “Imagine if these old walls could talk, Flora. Wonder what’d they’d say?”
“Mayor Applewhite thinks we ought to tear it down. He said it’s a disgrace to leave a slave house standing. I disagree. You can’t hide important parts of history just because things got sloppy for a while.”
“Things are always sloppy, I suspect,” Hadley said.
“That’s so true. It’s kind of like Daddy wanting to knock down a perfectly good sun porch because he doesn’t like the color. Shoot, just because a wall is red right now, that don’t mean it can’t be blue someday. Live and learn, I always say.”
“I like the way you think, Flora.”
Hadley had never had a finer day. He whistled Goober Peas all the way home, wondering if it was possible to visit parts unknown while traveling no further than Dixon Street.
###
It’s a known fact that some spots are more prone to resist change than others. Hadley used vinegar and water on those places where the red wanted to cling and sanded his way through the rest.
“It’s a process,” he told Flora. “We need to give the surface a good tooth so the new color has something to stick to.”
She’d cleared a lot of the junk off the porch and dropped tablecloths over anything that wouldn’t budge. The dress dummy had found a new purpose in Mr. Gibbs’ bedroom and was now wearing the doughboy uniform he’d worn as a stevedore in St. Nazzaire during the war. Similarly, a re-discovered rocker made for a fourth seat at the dinner table, and displaced reams of fabric pressed against the front windows like so many plaid watchdogs.
Flora tied an apron over her dress and helped Hadley with the scraping.
“What made you choose red anyway?” Hadley asked as he feathered his way through a particularly stubborn drip of old paint.
Flora laughed. “I wanted to try something contrary to my character. Did you never try something contrary to your character?”
“Not on purpose.”
“Well I like to do it every now and again. Speaking of contrary things, are there any new developments with the woman you love?”
Most folks would have avoided that subject like the plague but not Flora. Flora would talk about anything.
“Well, I told her I don’t love her no more. I guess that’s new.”
“But that can’t be the truth.”
“That’s just what she said. Still, I figure if I say the words enough, I might get to feeling like I don’t love her. Do you know what the Twinkle Hesitation is?”
Flora shook her head.
“Good!”
“What is it?”
“It’s this special dance you ought not do with anyone but the person you love. I danced the Twinkle Hesitation with her, and she danced it with someone else. That’s the kind of person she is.”
“You mean she betrayed you?”
“It’s okay. I got plans that don’t involve her. As a matter of fact, I’m off to the great state of Alabama just as soon as I get up enough money for a ticket, and I have you to thank for that.”
“Didn’t it make her sad to hear that you don’t want to be in love any more?”
“I think she is sad, actually. Too bad. She ain’t as sad as I am.” He stopped sanding the wall. “You make me happy, though.”
Flora stopped sanding too. “You ain’t thinking of starting up with me, are you?”
“I’d like to, if you’d let me.”
Flora’s cheeks turned sun porch red. “It ain’t healthy. It’s too soon. I read Women’s Voices, you know.”
“I know. I seen ‘em stacked in the bathroom. And the kitchen. And on the windowsills. You must know all there is to know about being a woman, judging by how many you’ve read.”
“Well,” she said, puffing out her cheeks. “I know a thing or two. For instance, I know a person ain’t gonna be over love in a week, or even a month. I didn’t talk to another fellow for over a year after I lost Countee Burkes.”
“Why not? I can’t help it if I like you. Why do I have to wait a year?”
“Here’s another problem: I’m older than you.”
“Are there rules about that, too?”
“There’s rules about everything.” She poured him a glass of sweet tea from a pitcher on the radiator, but he didn’t drink it. “You’re the one who invited me over for pie, remember?”
“I know,” Flora said, gulping her tea in big, noisy, manly swallows. When the subject wasn’t bus trips or spoons, she didn’t seem so brave.
“Gosh, Flora, you’re standing so close, I could kiss you right now without hardly moving a muscle.”
“I know that, too. I like you. I’d like it if you kissed me, and I can’t help standing close to you. I’m just saying, it ain’t smart. Anyway, you’re probably going back to her.”
“Oh no I ain’t!”
“That’s what you think now. Sure shooting, that’s what you thought the first time you took me walking in the park. But the heart wants what the heart wants.”
“I’m done with her. She hurt me bad. I don’t want to feel like that ever again.”
“I said that once about birds, too. That was eight birds ago.”
“I won’t kiss you then,” Hadley said. Instead, he let his finger take the place of his mouth on her lips. “I’ll prove that I’m done with her first. Okay?”
A smile spread beneath his finger. “Okay,” Flora agreed.
###
The next week seemed to pass as slow as a snail traveling through peanut butter. On Monday, Hadley and Dickie put together a Salt Box Radio in the radio room. In spite of him being done with Lucinda, Hadley still had an urge to wrap a piece of Belken wire around Dickie’s neck and pop his head off.
Dickie was oblivious to any such murderous compulsions. He held up the Morton salt box and tipped the radio sideways. “Lookee, Crump! It pours.”
Dickie, like always, was drunk as Cooter Brown.
Hadley held the drinking against the stupid ingrate, too! Dickie was married to the woman Hadley
had spent six long years pursuing, yet the man drank himself into a blind stupor every night. The injustice of it all made Hadley’s blood boil. And to add insult to injury, Dickie was constantly breaking radios by accident. When he started fiddling with the AMP on the little four tube that Hadley had recently completed, Hadley moved it out of reach.
Dickie sighed heavily and folded his hands on the table in front of him. “You know Crump, I never did feel good about that whole business with Quindora.”
Hadley sighed too. They’d come to his least favorite part of the evening, the part where Dickie spilled his guts about something awkward and/or dull. The only surprise tonight was that Dickie still remembered Quindora’s name.
“I had a Quindora of my own. She was called Jewel.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “She was a palmist.”
Hadley had no idea what a “palmist” was, but it sounded awfully alluring.
“Jewel was a jewel in every way,” Dickie said, squinting like he was looking at something right there in the room with them. Hadley looked around, but there was nothing there. “A jewel among jewels.”
Hadley continued working on the radio, reminding himself that he didn’t give two cents about Dickie’s long lost Jewel. The last time they’d built a radio “together”, the man had gone on for a full hour about a dog called Jupitor that Daddy Dick let lose on the other side of town after it was discovered that the mutt was deaf. “Poor old Jupity Jupe. I dream about him still . . . ”
“It’s the damndest thing,” Dickie said. I dream about Jewel still.”
It occurred to Hadley round about then that, while it might be perfectly true that Lucinda married for love, maybe Dickie didn’t. It was no secret that Daddy Dick and Lucinda were as thick as thieves. Their foreheads were perpetually pressed together as they plotted and schemed. Could it be that Lucinda connived her way into Dickie’s house? What if Dickie only went along with the marriage like he went along with losing old Jupity Jupe? What if Dickie loved Jewel the Palmist?
The Reading Lessons Page 17