The Reading Lessons (5 page)

###

It occurred to him after a year or two that people must think he was awful dumb. Not once did anyone question what a slow-learner Hadley appeared to be. In all actuality, he read fast. Lucinda called him a
Star Reader
because he could read anything she gave him in no time flat
. 

“You might have been half-smart if you could of gone to school,” she said. 

Hadley felt instantly proud and suffered an overwhelming urge to share the truth about their secret club with his mama, who thought it a pure impossibility that someone like Lucinda would ever give a Crump anything more than a charitable reading lesson. Maybe she wouldn’t feel the need to sew basil in the hem of her slip for luck, or wear a spider in a walnut shell around her neck, if he told her that Lucinda sometimes shared her butter rum candy sticks with him, her tongue happily gliding along the same golden stripe as his own. “Mm!” Lucinda would say, as if Hadley’s licks made the candy taste just that much more butter rummy.

But Hadley knew that he could never speak about Lucinda’s club to anyone, least of all his mama. If Hadley told Mama about his habit of reading dirty books with Lucinda, Mama would make him put a coffin nail in his
Whoops Jar
, and Hadley didn’t want to do that. Mementos were one thing. Mistakes were another. Mama had four nails in her coffee can already, and she wasn’t even old yet. Mama insisted that four nails weren’t so bad. Grammy Talitha had an even thirty before her nails buried her. 

It was Grammy Talitha who came up with the jar idea in the first place. When Mama was little, Grammy used to sit her on her lap at night and tell her all about her shortcomings. 

“I made a lotta mistakes in my life,” Grammy confessed, “but there’s one mistake I never plan to make; I remember every wrong I ever did.”

That part was pretty impressive, especially considering all the nails Grammy had accumulated. There were times in his own life when Mama would say: “Hadley Floyd Crump! How did you get these holes in your trousers?” And even though he’d only just ripped his drawers an hour before, most of the time, Hadley couldn’t remember where the holes came from. Grammy, he decided, must have had a wonderful memory on account of being so diligent with her nails.

Mama explained the purpose of the nails to him every year on his birthday. “Remembering your mistakes is the key. If you make a point of remembering, you can sometimes change the bad things into good. Mind you, that can be difficult. Sometimes a person can make changes. Sometimes they can’t. Me, I got three different nails in my jar for every time I let myself get rooked by your daddy.”

Hadley was five when his mama gave him his own jar. “See how pretty it is, baby? You try and keep that jar empty, if you can, cause that’s the simplest way to work it. But if somethin’ happens, and one day you do need to put a nail in this jar, the most important thing you can do is learn from your mistake.” 

At the time, Hadley was so busy playing with his new jar that she had to smack his hand to make him listen up. 

“A lot of folks talk about puttin’ another nail in their coffin. Well, here’s a little secret: sometimes, if you’re very very lucky, you might find out that what you thought was a mistake wasn’t no mistake at all. That’s what happened when I had you. For nine months I walked around cursing myself and frowning at you as you grew inside my belly. Wasn’t ‘til I saw your sweet little face that I knew the truth of it. You weren’t no mistake, Hadley Crump. You were the best thing I ever did.” She rattled her dented can. “Funny thing is, after I took out that nail I put in on account of you, I had to take out at least one of them nails I put in on account of your daddy. See what I mean?”

In truth, Hadley didn’t see what she meant. He dropped in nails left and right because he thought it was such fun. 

“No,” Mama said, dumping the whole big batch out in his lap. “It’s about avoiding the nails, Hadley. Understand?”

Over the years, he’d tried to put a frog in his jar, a
Beech-Nut
cigar band, and a handful of crab apples. Mama always dumped them out. This was the reason he got the Whoops Jar speech every year on his birthday. 

Yes sir, Hadley was certain his mama would say that Lucinda Browning was a nail, but he couldn’t think what he could do. Lucinda was more exciting than the mini`e ball slug he’d found in
Rabbit Creek
. She was more exciting than Loomis’ deck of French playing cards, too. Shoot. Lucinda was right up with the Bloody Lime. If she cost him a nail, so be it. Truth be told, Hadley liked Lucinda even better than he liked his empty jar.

###

In those early days, Browning House was tended by twenty coloreds, one mule auto, and a Cajun called LeJeune, whom only the long-deceased Mrs. Browning could understand. It was tended, also, somewhat haphazardly, by one Loomis Sackett.

Loomis Sackett was a special case, and he never let you forget it. His mother had the good fortune to land on her deathbed several months before Mrs. Browning landed on hers, and that was the reason he was so special. 

Adelandi Sackett started doing the wash for the Brownings when she was fifteen and plump with child. She had the voice of a songbird, everyone said, and Mrs. Browning liked to open all the windows when the girl was hanging clothes so as to fill the house with her soft sweet music. She also had a beautiful hand-carved backscratcher that was painted orange and had a bright green grasshopper on the handle. Adelandi called it
The Grasshopper,
and when Mrs. Browning was carrying Lucinda, Adelandi would work miracles on her employer’s back with that pretty orange stick, humming mysterious lullabies and scratching at scratches long after her workday was done. Loomis showed Hadley
The Grasshopper
once. It was chipped now, and two of the wooden fingers on the end were broken halfway down, but that didn’t matter anyway because Loomis said it was bad luck to scratch your back with it. When Loomis was four, his mama caught a blood fluke and passed away after a long drawn-out ordeal, probably because she itched herself with
The Grasshopper
. Loomis went to live with his Aunty Fafa in Blackeytown. Fortunately, Loomis had never needed any back-scratching, and as a result, when his mama was on her deathbed, Mrs. Browning made her a solemn promise that, as long as he might want it, Loomis Beauregard Sackett would have a job at Browning House. 

Lucky Loomis
, Loomis called himself.

“What if you get an itch someday that’s so big, you forget yourself and scratch it anyhow?” Hadley had asked, for that orange stick was a desperate worry to him.

“The day I scratch is the day you’re doomed,” Loomis told him. “I resist temptation better than you.”

Loomis then proceeded to chase Hadley around the yard, the broken fingers of The Grasshopper swiping within an inch of Hadley’s shoulder blades. Sometimes, when Hadley made Loomis mad, Loomis threatened to sneak into Hadley’s room while he was asleep and scratch his back. Hadley didn’t think it was safe for a boy like Loomis to possess something so powerful. Loomis bragged that he was the only one at Browning House who could not be fired. 

“A deathbed promise is more binding than glue. Hell, I could itch Mr. Browning’s back until he croaked, and lessin’ they decide to cart me off to jail, there’s nothing no body could do about it. You can’t mess with a deathbed promise. I’m as good as married to this fancy-ass place.”

Though Browning House wasn’t a proper plantation—it had a block of corn, a kitchen garden, a vineyard, forty hogs, two champion riding horses, and a lazy old cow called Toil-n-Trouble, or Tee Tee, for short. Word had it that when Mrs. Browning was still alive, everything was vastly different. The servant children were chauffeured to school in a coal-box buggy by old stooped-over Cuffy the driver. A better cook made meals for the servants in those days, too. The current cook, Miss Missy, was a kindly little thing, but her hoecake was hard as oak. Those that could remember said that Mrs. Browning was a true saint. 

To be sure, she had a saintly look about her in the painting that hung over the mantle in the Rose Bud parlor. There was a portrait of her in the Harlequin parlor too, but by then she was suffering with the dropsy that would eventually kill her, and that portrait was just too sad to look at. The painting in the Rose Bud parlor showed a young woman with coffee-colored eyes that seemed to return Hadley’s curious stare. Her dark hair was tied with a pale blue ribbon, and Hadley had discovered that, if he stood with his heels against the far wall, she would look at him and cock her chin in a wondering sort of way.

Every time he found himself in the parlor, Hadley searched the paint strokes for some similarity between Lucinda and her mother, but there wasn’t a nose or an eyebrow or a smile that appeared to connect them. 

Old Cuffy grinned a big crooked yellow grin anytime he found reason to speak of the late Mrs. Browning. “When Missus looked at you, you felt like more than a driver. You felt like a whole person with feelings and dreams and a life beyond the uniform.” 

Even though Hadley didn’t have a uniform, he thought it would be the best thing in the world to be looked at that way. 

After Mrs. Browning died, there was no more school for the servants. Miss Missy replaced the more expensive and more talented Cookie James. The Cajun gave up trying to speak. The rooms filled with more and more things to dust.

One of those things was a big deer head that sometimes hung over the telephone table and sometimes would be loaded into a piano-moving cart and disappear for entire weeks at a time. One afternoon, there was a loud crash in the Log Cabin Room, and everyone ran to see what it was. The deer head had fallen off its hook. It lay in the middle of the grapevine rug, staring at the ceiling. Later, Hadley would be given the job of gluing the top half of the buck’s right antler to the bottom half, but in those first few minutes, everyone just stood in a circle around the head waiting for Mr. Browning to say something. Eventually, the man cleared his throat and said, “Daddy’s dead.” Then he went to his study and closed the door. 

Because Hadley and Loomis were the most nimble of the gawkers, it was decided that they should move the head out to the summer kitchen until it could be repaired. Loomis being Loomis, he took up the wall mount, leaving Hadley to hang on by the more precarious chin. With the deer balanced between them, they began maneuvering it out of the house. 

“What’s this old head got to do with Mr. Browning’s daddy?” Hadley asked.

A frizzly tuft of Loomis-hair stuck up between the deer’s ears, making it look like a Negro deer. “Shit, Hadley,” the Negro deer said. “Ain’t you never heard the story ‘bout Mr. Browning’s daddy and this old buck?”

“Nope.”

They paused at the kitchen door. “Watch the nose now,” Loomis warned. They angled it this way and that way, grunting as they sought to work the thing through. “You bust so much as a nostril off this head, and Mr. Browning will kick you out on your little ass. Your mama, too. I’ll be fine, of course.”

“Of course.” Hadley took extra care with the nostrils. “So what’s the story, then?”

“Mr. Browning’s daddy is Parnell T. Jr., and one time, Jr. and Mr. Browning went hunting in Montana together, and that’s where they shot this buck.”

Once outside, Hadley was forced to walk backwards. Palmetto berries littered the path and it was like walking on marbles. He frowned at the Negro deer. “They?”

“That’s right. Both men set their sites on the devil, only one of ‘em shot through the heart and the other shot through the ear. Did you happen to get a look at that hole, Crumpette?”

Seeing how the deer’s ear had been flapping against his lip all the way to the summer kitchen, Hadley had seen the hole close up. 

“Ass and damn!” Loomis said as they hoisted it onto the pickling bench. “Bastard’s heavier than it looks.”

Loomis was fond of cussing whenever the situation presented itself. He had an impressive gift for making up profane combinations that no one else ever thought to use. Hadley’s personal favorite was
nipple-balls.

“Anyhow,” Loomis said. “They both claimed to fire the killing shot, and there was no way of settling the matter on account both men was using 22s. Things got so ugly between them, it was agreed they’d never speak again. It was also agreed they would take turns with the head on alternating months.”

Suddenly the buck’s disappearance and re-appearance made more sense. “Jr. lives with Mr. Browning’s sister in Macon. I guess maybe Mr. Browning thinks it meant something today that the buck fell off the wall.”

“It’s sad they never patched things up.”

“Stupid is what it is. They both get to hang the sumbitch on their wall so what they got to complain about?” 

Hadley gazed into the blinkless eyes of the mounted deer. It looked far more dignified now that it didn’t have Loomis’ hair sprouting up between its ears. “I reckon it’s a dissatisfying arrangement for them both. Nobody really wins because neither can feel a sense of ownership. Both men know that, even when it’s their turn, the time is comin’ when they’ll have to give it up again.” 

Loomis shrugged. “If it was me, I’d rather not have it at all.”

Mama peeked around the door just then. “Go on back to the house now, boys. Mr. Browning’s daddy passed this morning. There’s preparations to be made.”

Hadley and Loomis looked at each other across the points of a broken antler. “We have ourselves a winner,” Loomis said.

###

In addition to antler-gluing, Hadley’s duties at Browning House had grown to include a vast assortment of odd jobs. Had there been an actual
To Do
list (there wasn’t), it would have read something like this:

a) Check vines for Black Measles, Little-leaf, mildew, cutworms, crown rot, and Grape-berry moths. 

b) Chase off nematodes, beetles, rabbits, and gophers.

c) Help with the milking, the wringing, and the pumping. 

d) Maintain back boiler and household toilets. 

e) Keep Lucinda Browning amused. 

Mostly Hadley preferred “e” over chasing off nematodes, but he had a fondness for garden work. His first spring at Browning House, he added a few
secret
plants to Mr. Browning’s zinnia garden. The shed was full of seeds in dust-furred packets, if a boy was willing to poke through dried-up June bugs to get to them. Hadley wanted to see if he could get the old seeds to grow. He had a notion that white dahlias would blend in like a lady’s carpet with Mr. Browning’s salmon-pink zinnias.