The Reading Lessons (8 page)

A dizzy sense of confusion rushed through him most all the time, yet he knew that the things they were doing were wrong. At night, when he and Mama knelt down to say their prayers, Hadley always spoke to God with the best of intentions. As Mama mumbled pleas on behalf of the sick and asked forgiveness for things like splattering soup on Mr. Browning’s lace cloth, Hadley pressed two sets of white knuckles to his forehead and whispered, “Lord, give me the strength to tell her no when she comes to me tomorrow . . . ” 

That was typically where things went awry.

He wouldn’t notice himself drifting until much later when it was too late to take it back. Somehow, instead of praying for forgiveness, Hadley would start to dream about what might happen tomorrow. Perhaps she would slip him a note when they passed in the hall, his hand instinctively opening behind his back at the moment her hand was there with the note. Their fingers would brush, and his wound would open like a wet mouth. WAIT FOR ME, the note might say, BEHIND THE ROSE BUD CURTAIN . . . 

“Amen!” Mama’s amens were always the thing that snapped him out of it. “Aren’t you done yet, Hadley?” she’d ask.

Done? “Actually, Mama, I think I’m just getting started.”

###

Of course he would have preferred a more conventional romance, but he hesitated to complain. Lucinda looked at him differently now. Her cheeks were always hot and red. Every morning, she tapped her feet under the breakfast table as though her bones wanted out of her skin. “Come here,” she’d whisper, pushing her untouched plate away and steering him into the bathroom or behind the garage. 

He tried to be good. “We could just kiss,” he said one day when she cornered him in the dairy.

“No,” Lucinda said. “We can’t.”

His wound got worse, and he got feverish. When he stood up from his prayers, his head spun. It was hard to push a mower, his legs felt so rubbery. “I don’t feel good,” he told Lucinda.

But she just ran a finger along his jaw and said, “I’ll make you feel better, Hadley.”

The joy of being sought by Lucinda Browning was temporary, though. Always and, finally, temporary.

Sure, when she put her lips on his neck, a satisfying heat shimmered all through him, tickling bones he didn’t know he had. It was lust, to be sure, but not just lust of the body. It was a lust that made him
dream
and
want
and
need
. 

Lucinda was gentle at first. So gentle, he’d be fooled. Her kiss was a rose petal on his throbbing skin. He loved her to death when her kiss was a rose petal. 

The sucking made him mad every time. 

Nerve endings screamed under her lips. His heart threatened to quit. He’d punch whatever he could punch, even once punching her. When she hurt him, he hated her almost as much as he loved her. When she hurt him, it hurt unbearably. Then, at the worst, most awful moment, the pain would melt, and Hadley would feel indescribable pleasure.

###

Because of the bandage, he’d been forced to invent a complex lie about how he’d tripped on a pair of garden sheers. Battles were waged on a daily basis owing to the fact that Mama wanted nothing so much as to get a peek at the injury. Hadley couldn’t bear to let her look at it. He would’ve sooner run naked down the middle of the road. It was Mama who finally spoke to Mr. Browning about his declining health, and Mr. Browning who summoned Dr. Mangrove. 

That such a small wound could make him so ill was a mystery that had everyone pacing the halls. The doctor concluded that his failure to rally must stem from the inherited traits of a degenerate lifestyle. “Or maybe it’s Spanish Flu,” Mangrove said. 

By Day Three, Pellagra was being proposed. By Day Eight, the doctor was hopelessly bewildered again. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he declared. “It’s almost as though the boy keeps falling on those garden sheers over and over again.”

Dr. Mangrove was more right about that diagnosis than any of the others. Hadley was falling on those garden sheers every single day. 

###

He held the jar up to the light and watched the nail spin around the glass walls like a rust-colored cyclone. He’d always imagined that it would take thirty or more nails to seal his fate. Now that the end was near, he found himself regretting that he had only one. He wondered if one nail was enough to do the job right.
His only consolation was that Grammy Talitha probably didn’t have one nail in her entire jar that was as bad as his. He wished he had something a little better for the job than a scrawny old Putnam Burr-Free Shoeing Nail. He wished he’d asked his mama to get him a railroad spike.

“I’ve come to relieve you, Miss Crump,” Lucinda said, startling Hadley so much he almost dropped his jar. “You go on and get yourself a bite to eat. I’ll keep an eye on young Hadley here and fetch you if there’s trouble.”

Mama must have been too sad to find it odd that Lucinda had spoken to her face-to-face for the first time in eight years, because she just nodded and shuffled away, her shoulders round with worry, her hair turning gray before his eyes. 

Doc Mangrove had assured everyone that he would not last the night. Hadley reckoned he might as well get on with it then. He turned his cheek on the pillow, prepared to die the heady and listless death of an addict. 

Lucinda trailed her finger down his bandaged neck, and his blood began to sing. Her hair tickled his skin. Her breath heated his throat. Her heat would be the last thing he would ever know. Hadley was fainting, fading, slipping away. 

“Hurry,” he said.

A rose petal kiss brushed his ear, and it felt much like love. Lucinda Browning loved
him
. A servant boy. A mule auto. A Crump! Hadley would surely have minded dying more had he not understood that this made him incredibly special.

“No,” Lucinda said. “We mustn’t do it. I will not let you die.”

Didn’t she realize that it was too late for that? Beneath his collar of tape and gauze, Hadley’s artery throbbed in a whole new way. The blackness closing in around him no longer seemed like a pat on the back for earning the love of a woman that he shouldn’t have been able to earn. Rather, it was a slug in the nose, and it was ruining his last moment of life.

“If you don’t want me, Lucinda, I think I’d rather be dead.”

Lucinda wouldn’t glance at Loomis Sackett to save her soul, and yet she swapped spit with Hadley every day now. When she wanted to give someone reading lessons, did she choose Flavia? Or Lemon? “Bring me Hadley Crump,” she said. Hadley wasn’t like the others. He was different. He was something more. And now, when the end was near as near can be, she didn’t want him anymore.

“Of course I want you,” she soothed, making him smell peach blossoms again when there wasn’t any blossoms to smell. She had that power. The Lord God had done some amazing things with bread loaves and fish, but He had nothing on Lucinda. “You’re the only one like me,” she said, tucking the blanket under his chin. “You just rest and do as the doctor says. So long as I don’t drink any more, you’re sure to recover in time.”

Hadley was as weak as a noodle. If someone would have stabbed him in earnest with a pair of garden sheers, it would have felt heaps better than the murderous pain vibrating under his skin. He had one toe in the grave, to be sure. Maybe he had his whole foot in the grave. He smiled anyway. “Do you like me then, Lucinda?”

“You know I do.” 

She was holding something behind her back. Her monkey-flower eyes twinkled with excitement. “I’ve brought you a new book, my darling. When you’re better, we’ll read it together. Just like Dracula.”

Twisting her monocle into place, she spoke against his ear. “It’s called
The Pit and Pendulum
by Edgar Allen Poe.”

###

At the first sign of hope, Cuffy set up a camp cot in the Rose Bud Parlor, and Hadley was moved from the pickling closet. The doctor said a window would provide him with the
“healing enjoyment of a fresh and salubrious breeze”. Since no one knew that it was actually Lucinda who saved his life, much was made of that salubrious breeze. 

After Hadley got a window, things seemed to be headed in the right direction. His color returned. His wound stopped bleeding. He ate a lot of soup. He missed her mouth on his throat so much that he dreamed vampire dreams most every night. The dreams were healthier than the real thing, but one night, the cot squeaked, and someone sat down next to him. Hadley felt her hand in his hair, and he jumped and turned and reached for her. 

Just as Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, Lucinda had raised him. The difference being, Jesus didn’t kill Lazarus before he raised him. Hadley was relieved to feel her hands again. He didn’t really want her to go back on her word but figured it probably wouldn’t kill him if she did it just this once. 

“I’ve missed you, Lucinda,” he whispered. “I’ve missed you so much.”

The gas lamp lit with a pop. 

Mama sat on the edge of the cot swallowing as though a hundred years of bad mistakes were jammed up in her gullet. “Lucinda?” she mumbled around the mistakes. “Why in hell would Miss Lucinda be crawling into your bed at two o’clock in the morning?”

In the time it took to heave a single trembling breath, Mama’s eyes grew big and round as she visibly tallied up all the whispers and notes and reading lessons. She didn’t believe that people like the Brownings gave two cents about people like the Crumps. As a matter of fact, Hadley was deadly certain that Mama had never so much as glimpsed the buttercup hair or the teasing smile he saw every time he looked at Lucinda Browning. When Mama looked at Lucinda Browning, she saw eyes that never saw her back, and that was an entirely different thing. It had never occurred to Mama that Lucinda might actually
see
Hadley.

It was beginning to occur to her, though. Dozens of uneasy memories unscrolled behind her eyes like the naughty half of St. Nick’s list. She looked at the Whoops Jar on the washstand. “What have you done, Hadley?”

Hadley held his chin proud. “Maybe we’re in love,” he said.

“Oh honey,” she said, tears transforming her eyes into two glassy pools. “I hope you don’t believe that.”

###

Mama had all sorts of ideas about who was supposed to love who, and Hadley had been hearing those ideas all his life. Mama rattled them off like other mothers rattled off bedtime stories. Some of her stories even sounded as though you could find them in a real book.
Once upon a time there was a spinning girl who fell in love with the wrong boy . . . 
The trouble was that all of Mama’s bedtime stories had sad endings, and this did not work out well in a story that was meant to put a child to sleep. 

The story she told most was the story of Hadley’s father, a smarmy Gothamite with a pencil mustache and a hundred dollar-smile. He was a door-to-door salesman who sold everything from suction sweepers to
Pleasant’s Purgative Pellets
. Mama said he’d gummed just about everyone he ever knew. 

Not surprisingly, they met at the front door. Mama was putting a pie out to cool. Daddy was pitching
McIlhenny’s.
“Blame it on hot sauce,” Mama liked to say.

Mama fell for Daddy because he wore nice suits and had very white teeth. He also brought her lots of presents. While it was true that Mama never wanted for purgative pellets or a pocket Bible while Daddy was around, she didn’t really care about presents. It was the fact that she’d never gotten any before that really did her in. “Those presents made me think that Slip really loved me,” she told Hadley.
Slip
was the name of Hadley’s daddy, and Mama said the name fit him like a glove.

Hadley had not seen hide nor hair of Daddy Slip since the man went off to halt the hun in Cantigny, but he remembered his white teeth, too, and he remembered that it was always a happy surprise when Daddy showed up. He’d thunder in with an armful of mix-n-match encyclopedias and a sample jar of
No-Tweeze,
shouting in his big New York City voice, “Where’s my little bastard?!”

“What’s
bastard
mean, Mama?” Hadley had asked when he was a little boy. 

“It means your daddy is too much of a dumb-bell to marry me, that’s what it means,” Mama said. Mama believed in laying things on the line and was never one to mince words. But Hadley didn’t understand about bastards back then. When the Muncy’s German Shepard had puppies and Mrs. Muncy said that Hadley could pretend like one was his until somebody bought it, Hadley said, “Where’s my little bastard?!” and got a swat on his bottom when he was searching for his puppy. It was Mrs. Muncy who did the swatting, and she told Hadley that
bastard
was a very bad word. At the time, Hadley wondered why Daddy Slip would call him a very bad word. Indeed, it seemed like Daddy’s story wouldn’t be a good one for children’s books at all, what with as much as that man liked saying
bastard
.

Mama never looked so disgusted as she did when she spoke of Daddy. “I was thirty-nine years old when I met him, so I should have knowed better. Truth is, we Crump women have been making the same mistakes with men for about as far back as anyone’s memory goes. Before Slip came around, I set out to guard myself against it. I’ve had a penny in my shoe for so long now, Mister Lincoln’s face is permanently worn into the ball of my foot. I had Auntie Lutterloh mix me up a bag of Holy Ghost root so as to give me good luck with men. I wet those little Holy Ghosts with whiskey nine mornings in a row, jest like she said, and I carried them in my right pocket, careful not to let them touch tobacco. But did that save me from the slippery charms of that hot-sauce-hawking fool? No sir, it did not. When you were born and you were a boy, I said, ‘Praise the Lord. The curse is lifted!’”

Mama thought a boy would be easier than a girl. A girl, she said, was supposed to have a wedding ring before she had a baby, yet there was nary a woman in their beleaguered line who had ever gotten a ring before
or
after she got her babies. 

Ever since Hadley was four or five, he’d been hearing; “It’s all on you now, son. You fall in love with the right girl and make sure your babies have a mama
and
a daddy. Understand?”