The Reading Lessons (14 page)

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. 

“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.