The Reading Lessons (36 page)

“It’ll be me, I bet,” said Armstrong, the youngest of the boys. “I want it so bad, I can practically taste it.”

“It won’t be you,” sniggered Andrew, who was the oldest of the A’s. “You can catch a ball like Spud Davis, but when it comes to fulking marbles, you ain’t worth cow shit.”

“What’s that marble taste like when you think about it, Armie?” Atticus asked.

“Limes,” Armstrong said. “And blood of course.”

The contest to win the Bloody Lime was set for a Sunday afternoon in the dirt lot behind Vassie’s house. Time was when Hadley could knuckle down with the best of the best, but Vassie’s sons paid him little respect with regard to experience. In fact, age was of no advantage at all in any game involving the A boys. For one, Andrew and Atticus were taller than Hadley by a head. For two, even the younger, shorter ones were brutes to be bargained with. If Hadley were to hold a bag of grass seed in each arm, they’d out-weigh him all the same. Of course, marbles was a game where size didn’t normally count, but this was not the case with these boys. Whereas Hadley and Loomis had rarely played any game that came to shoving or punching, Andrew had gleefully explained to Hadley that shoving and punching were a part of the family rules. 

“Shoot, if you can’t knock somebody’s block off, why play?”

After a rigorous hour of marbles in the dirt lot, Hadley felt good just to come away with his life, much less his old marble. But come away, he did. He rubbed his bruises and headed for home, even as the boys hurled insults at him, and a broken bottle or two. 

“Prepare to die next week, old fart!” they shouted, which was their way of saying that Hadley would not hold onto the Bloody Lime for long. 

By some miracle, Hadley managed to go home with his own marble the following week, too, along with Anthone’s root beer cat’s eye and a minor nosebleed, courtesy of Andrew’s elbow. Afterward, Hadley tossed the cat’s eye in the air and held it up to the sun, feeling no less pleased with himself than he did after winning a marble as a boy. Maybe he was even more pleased.

“You taking toys away from my kids?” Vassie asked after he took the cat’s eye out of his pocket for the fifth time to admire its beery sparkle.

All of Hadley’s blushing parts heated up at once. “I guess I am.”

“Well, ain’t that something!” Vassie said. “I hope you steal every last one of them marbles. I’m sick of tripping over the stupid things.”

Hadley was scared of Vassie’s family, but he liked them, too. They were savage Indians until bedtime, and then they trampled over one another to kiss their mother goodnight. They hardly left a room without telling her how much they loved her, never mind that they might be chasing someone with a shovel two minutes later. It was quite a spectacle. Rich and Guido were not nearly so physical when it came to tormenting others. To see the goodness in Vassie’s boys, a person had to look beyond the bruised knuckles and black eyes. Every Saturday they hawked perfume on the corner of 5th and Carson. Perfume! If that wasn’t goodness and love, Hadley didn’t know what was. 

Vaseline was worried about the violence she saw in her sons. “I’ve tried everything under the sun to get the meanness worked out of them. Hell, we played dolls once for a whole week, and everyone had to hold their babies all day long, and if anyone kilt one or hit somebody over the head with one, I promised we’d play dolls for a month. Would you believe it, all the babies lived. I thought we’d turn some sort of corner, but the minute I let the little monsters put the dolls up, out came the boxing gloves again.” She shook her head in disgust. “I chalked it up to one more lesson that didn’t stick, but I’ll tell you this: last Christmas my sister-in-law’s boy, Alvin, come across one of the dolls in the closet and decided to take it down to the tracks and tie it to the rails and wait for a train to run it over. It was Amber’s baby, as I recall. Poopyhead, he’d named her. Well, when Armie saw what Alvin was up to, he charged into the house screaming his head off, and I was sure someone was dead. When the boys got wind of Poopyhead’s plight, they mounted a rescue party such as you have never seen. The baby was saved, but to this day, Alvin’s got an ear that won’t stand up normal. Looks like somebody taped a banana peel to the side of his head.” 

Hadley winced. Mama would say that an ear damaged due to foolishness was a righteous punishment, seeing how ears said so much about a man. “Well, they’re protective, at least,” Hadley said of her boys.

“I’m not sure that’s good enough.”

###

It was that same night that Vassie noticed the scars on Hadley’s back for the first time. 

“Turn over,” she said after she touched one. 

Hadley rolled on his stomach and Vassie ran her fingers up and down each one as though she were counting something much harder to figure than the number of marks on his skin. He buried his face in the pillowcase, wondering if he’d be able to lie when she asked him where the scars came from. But she didn’t ask. She curled up next to him instead and took his finger and pressed it to the curve behind her knee. 

“I got this one the day Peach lost his job at the Do Rite Hardware Store. He swiped me with a daisy grubber while I was drying the dishes.” 

Hadley fingered the bumpy dent in her skin. He’d never noticed it before. 

“Feel this,” she said, and she put his hand on her ribcage. 

“I thought you said you got that from Andrew’s racing top” 

“I did. Peach threw it at me. He was a mean man, Hadley. More than that, he was a frustrated man, and frustration leaves some pretty bad scars, by my experience. I don’t like the things it does to a man.” 

###

Nina had taken to sulking like she was terminal. There were more notes than ever being pushed under Hadley’s front door. The bulk of them were made up of only one or two lines, as though the depth of her anger prevented her from steadying a pencil long enough to write more. Some were so sweet, they shredded his heart into a million pieces.
I miss talking to you, Hadley.
Others were nothing but sour.
You have ruined my life!
Without wanting or meaning to do it, Hadley found himself avoiding her for the first time in his life.

 
One afternoon, Vassie’s boys insisted on walking Hadley home, and when they spotted Nina in the front yard, all five were simultaneously struck dumb by her glum expression. 

Nina was smoking on the front steps, and every time she inhaled, it looked like she was being forced to drink urine, her face was just that pinched. 

“She sure do look like a pill,” Atticus said. “I bet she’s mean as all get out, ain’t she, Mr. Crump?”

“Yeah,” Anthone said. “She musta ate something rotten to make her face go like that.”

Andrew rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I dunno. I wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers.”

Hadley looked from boy to boy, unable to decide which one he wanted to strangle most. 

“Can we meet her?” Andrew asked. 

“No!” Hadley said.

At fourteen, Andrew had the eyes of a wolf. In addition to breaking windows and Indian burns, he had a God-given gift for making rude remarks. “What about that one then?” he asked, nodding toward the other side of the yard.

“Who that?!” Atticus asked. 

“That the boss lady, ain’t it?” Andrew asked. 

“I thought she’d be older,” Atticus said.

“She is older,” Hadley said.

Lucinda was sunning herself in a chair, wearing a bathing suit the color of a blush. She pressed a glass of lemonade against her forehead and waved at Hadley.

“Damn!” Anthone said. “You get to be that lady’s gardener?” 

“I’d like to plant my seed in her,” Andrew said. 

Hadley ordered the boys to go home.

Usually, Hadley made the trip alone. The problem with making the trip alone was that Mayhew Lane, where Vassie lived, was one block over from Dixon Street, where Flora Gibbs lived. Hadley had not set foot in the colored branch since the night Flora made him take home his spoon. He’d avoided Dixon Street as well. While the walk home from Vassie’s house did not require a trip down Dixon, Hadley had let himself be tempted once to take a more heartbreaking route. 

It was the day he heard from Anthone that Mr. Gibbs was dead. A neighbor boy had told Anthone that the old man that lived in the yellow house had slipped off a step stool and hit his head on the kitchen stove. The neighbor and Anthone had spent the afternoon throwing a ball to each other across the street, hoping to get a look at the body when it was carried out of the house. 

“I knew Mr. Gibbs,” Hadley told Anthone in an attempt to shame the boy. “He was a good man. There are people who will miss him.” Hadley remembered Flora’s father as happy and green. He wondered how she was handling such a terrible loss.

“He had a hole in his sock,” Anthone said, clearly unshamed. “That was the only thing you could see on account they put a sheet over him.”

When you come from a family that believes in collecting regrets in a jar so they can be saved forever, you aren’t going to have the luxury of forgetting a girl like Flora Gibbs. Hadley had given up a life with Flora so that he could be near his child, otherwise Mr. Gibbs wouldn’t have slipped off that stool because Hadley would have been there to get stuff down for him. When he broke off with Flora, it didn’t feel like a choice. But it was. He tried to remind himself of why he made that choice whenever he got to daydreaming about what might have been. He tried to remember how lucky he was to be a part of his daughter’s world. 

Hadley had watched Nina take her first step, and he’d been there at her fifth birthday party and on the night of her first school dance. Whether or not Lucinda would have banned him from Nina’s life, he was sure he wouldn’t have seen the things he’d seen had he not been the gardener in Nina Worther-Holmes’s house. He was grateful for the things he’d seen. Vassie had once asked him if he was black or white, and he’d told her he was neither. The sad truth was, he didn’t appear to have too much say-so in either world. In light of this, Hadley knew better than to ask God for anything more than the mercies he’d been given. 

Outside of the dozen or so snide remarks that Lucinda had made over the years, he knew nothing of Flora’s life now, and that was on purpose. He’d tried to tune out Lucinda’s gossip, too, but she had a knack for catching him unawares, and sometimes things snuck in. 

“I hear she’s fat as a Chevy.” “I hear she’s in love with a parrot.” “I hear she caused a big fuss at the alderman meeting when they voted to take down that old merry-go-round.”

Mostly, he made a point of shutting Flora out of his mind. Then again, there were occasions when his willpower failed him, and he would find himself drifting back. The smell of good pie could do it. Or the words of Jack London. And anytime someone mentioned that damned singer Helen Humes. Hadley didn’t think about
Garlic Blues
like everyone else did; he thought about a word scratched on a wooden door in a little stone house. Full minutes might be lost to thoughts of her then. Or even an entire night. Mainly, he thought about Flora when he was low. He couldn’t live properly with Nina or Lucinda, but there was a time when he could have happily lived with Flora. Very happily. And so, like a souvenir spoon that’s too shiny to throw out, Hadley had long-since found a place to keep Flora. A Whoops Jar inside his head, or something like that anyhow, and when he was in the right mood for it, he filled it with what might have been.

He couldn’t open the lid too often, of course, enticing as it was. It was too hard to face the porch swing where they might have sat in old age, or the wall with its message under coats of blue paint. Everything he put into this special place—birdsong and chess pie and lemon-scented azaleas—all of it was as painful as his coffin nails, because they
were
coffin nails. But when Albert Gibbs died, Hadley ignored the pain and went home by way of Dixon Street. 

He pulled his hat down over his eyes and kept to the opposite side of the road and waited to see if the walk past her house would kill him. He didn’t know what he expected to see, but the sight of Flora’s front door made his heart thump like a flat tire. The house was shabbier than he remembered and in bad need of work. There was one light on inside, and Hadley knew that this was the room where Mr. Gibbs had bashed his skull on the stove. As he weighed the risk of getting closer, a small slender figure moved across the window. 

“Flora,” he whispered. 

###

The first time Nina curled her little fingers around his big finger, Hadley got overwhelmed. He forgot who he was. He forgot who Lucinda was. He asked Lucinda to run away with him. “I don’t care if she’s mine or not; I want her, and I want you.”

Lucinda cared. 

Lucinda cared about her big new house and having a husband who could dance like George Raft. Lucinda had assured him that she loved Dickie, and Hadley had believed her when she said it because he was young and had yet to see how she deceived and acted selfishly toward her husband. 

Hadley didn’t believe it anymore, though. To be loved by someone like Lucinda would take something special. Truth be told, Dickie wasn’t that special. 

Dickie was, however, a decent man. For the most part, Lady Luck had shined on him in every way, and this didn’t seem fair to Hadley. But luck was like that. When everyone in the country was loosing their shirt, the New Deal came along and started the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, making it possible for people to get thirty year loans so they could buy Worther-Holmes Homes. Daddy Dick took a big hit in the market and had to get shocked by electricity a full three times in a loony bin in order to get happy again, but not Dickie. Daddy Dick had called Dickie a horse’s ass for staying out of the market, but Dickie had no interest in stocks and had always found banking a bother. He preferred to keep large amounts of cash at home. As a result, while other men suffered mightily to keep their families fed, Lucky Dickie hung onto his job, his money, and about fifty percent of his unnaturally luxurious hair. He got to be Nina’s daddy, too, and this made him the luckiest man alive. It wasn’t right that one fellow should have so much, but still, he didn’t deserve what Hadley and Lucinda had been doing to him all these years. Even so, Hadley would have taken Lucinda from him if he could have. Nina, too.