The Reading Lessons (2 page)

She sat, knees apart, on a chipped wicker throne with an embroidered sheet knotted over one skinny white shoulder. Three red letters stood out on her front: l.B.m. Hadley particularly admired her curtain-pull belt. Even though he’d never had a single day of schooling, he knew instantly that the girl was an emperor. His daddy had been a
Heart of the World
salesman and, according to Daddy,
Heart of the World
was the most important, comprehensive, and artistically illustrated book of recent times. Thus it happened that Hadley knew more than his fair share about Romans. He’d looked at the pages with swords at least twenty or fifty times and considered himself an expert.

While Mama and Mr. Browning talked about the fundamental joy of a good Jezebel sauce, the girl looked him over and raised her thumb in the air as though a deadly Spatha were poised at his throat, awaiting her decision. Hadley pretended to watch the little Leafwing butterfly that was fluttering around his foot, but secretly he was watching that thumb.

Before Mr. Browning concluded that he might possibly be able to stomach an Experienced Negro Cook with a half-breed son, Mama had to promise him a pot of Hoppin’ John so peppery he’d cry for his mother. She also had to agree to work for a nickel less a day. The Empress was not so easily convinced. 

Lucinda Augustus looked from Hadley to his mama, then back to Hadley again. With a royal shake of her butter-yellow head, she slowly turned her thumb down. 

###

“I’d like to write a poem about you, Hadley Crump,” the girl said. “But the only words I can think of to rhyme with
Hadley
are ‘badly’ and ‘madly,’ and those are awfully sordid words for a child.”

Hadley looked around, sure that she must be speaking to some other
Hadley Crump
. It was his first day at Browning House, and he’d been told to collect shoes for polishing. There were five doors on the second floor with shoes lined up in front of them. The first door was open, and a row of tap shoes formed a scuffed black border between the hallway and the girl. 

At first, Hadley only noticed the shoes, most of which were so small and so tapped out that they could be of no possible use to anyone as tall as Lucinda Browning. He kicked a pint-sized one with a broken buckle across the floor, and that was when she said his name.

Mr. Browning had introduced him to her while Mama was looking over the new Glenwood cooking range, but never in a million years did Hadley think that Lucinda Browning would use his name to his face. A funny thing happened inside his stomach when she said it. If he didn’t know better, he would have sworn he’d swallowed a whole lit string of
Atta Boys
. 

“How about ‘gladly’?” he suggested, for there was a book called
A Girl’s First Poetry Journal
spread open on her flowered carpet, and it was clear she was a poet.

“You do look like the glad sort.” Lucinda Browning smirked in a way that would have got him slapped.

Hadley knew for a fact that she was nine years old, same as him, but her mouth was at least twenty. She stood with one hip against the chimney of her dollhouse, swigging a bottle of
Miss Loody’s Muscle Tonic
like the stuff didn’t cost six dollars an ounce. The label on the bottle promised
rounder, more shapely calves
. Hadley wouldn’t have dreamed of checking. 

“Have these washed.” She picked up a pair of bloomers off the floor and threw them at his face. “And I better get them back.”

Hadley and his mama had worked for a family called Tweeb before coming to Browning House. A Tweeb who came into a room where Hadley was working would freeze in place and wait for him to skat. The Tweeb boys, Penrod and Pomeroy, had a regular talent for standing stiff as a corpse. They never let on that anyone was being made to pick up their dirty things. That was their system at Maple Lawn. The family communicated through Sargent, the head butler, and Mr. Tweeb would sooner starve than ask a lesser servant to bring him a second helping of turnips. 

Standing there with Lucinda Browning’s underwear on his head, Hadley tingled with self-importance. He breathed her bloomers in and out against his face as she proceeded to recite The Hadley Poem
. 

The Hadley Poem

There once was a boy named Hadley

Who wanted a girl very badly

She was out of his reach

But he hung on like a leech

Loving her madly and gladly.

At the time, Hadley thought it nuts that he would ever love any girl other than his mama. Even so, those bloomers made his brain swirl to such a degree that he became convinced the poem was some sort of witchy incantation. Lucinda’s underwear smelled like Ivory soap and the deep dark depths of a cedar drawer. He liked them so well, he decided he might never take them off his head. 

“Worm!” Lucinda growled, yanking them away. 

It was all very queer. Lucinda Browning was wearing a look on her face that Hadley found oddly familiar. It was the same look Uncle Pink got just before he scarfed down a plate of fat pullets at the supper table with such blind rapture that he choked to death with a smile on his face.

Seeing how he was only nine, Hadley promptly forgot about those bloomers until some weeks later, when Lucinda whirled around the toy room while he was building up a fire. “Wheeeeeee!” she cried, taking off like a top. Hadley got so transfixed watching her, he singed off half an eyebrow.

“It’s hopeless you know,” Loomis Sackett informed him when he caught Hadley watching her one day on her swing. Loomis was the lay-about hoeboy who knew everything there was to know and didn’t do much of anything at all. He was ten.

“What do you mean?” Hadley asked. With every pump she made, big whiffs of Ivory soap floated past him, and he was too young as yet to believe that anything was ever hopeless.

“Look at your hands,” Loomis said. “You’d muss her up good if ever you got too close.”

“Could be I might wash ‘em,” Hadley said, and he spit in his palm to demonstrate his plan.

“Shoot.” Loomis laughed. “You can’t never get ‘em clean enough for a girl like that. Unless she likes things dirty, you ain’t ever gonna do nuttin’ bigger than peep at her from behind this hedge.”

What Hadley and Loomis didn’t know back then was that Lucinda liked things dirty.

###

Browning House was unique in that it was built around the original log cabin home of Parnell T. Browning, a coal miner who struck it big when he married the daughter of a rich Northerner and opened
Browning & Beeson Coal
in 1822. The house had twin parlors, twin staircases, and twin verandas, but at the center of its fancy, polished heart was a little room with mud-daubed walls. From the start, the log-cabin room was Hadley’s favorite in the house. 

There was something about that dusty, piney smell that made him go off his tiptoes the instant he stepped from the marble tiles onto the puncheon floor. Lucinda complained that the room smelled like Abe Lincoln, and if anyone even said the words
log-cabin room
, she would sneeze three times. Due to his daughter’s allergy, Mr. Browning had ordered the two doors to the room kept shut at all times. 

Upon finishing the mansion in 1822, Old Parnell T. hung up his felling axe over the chimneypiece and hammered a plaque on the wall that read: NEVER FORGET WHERE YOU COME FROM. Hadley once over-heard Mr. Browning tell the head butler, Mr. Sweet, that he’d pay any man a hundred dollars who could pry that old sign off the wall.

Apparently, it was connected to the logs in such a way that it threatened to tear the place down if you pulled on it too hard.

“Someday,” Mr. Browning said, “I plan to put up real walls in here, buy a velvet settee, and turn the place into a Kewpie-doll room for Lucinda. Every girl deserves a room for her Kewpie dolls.”

Lucinda possessed a powerful love for Kewpie dolls.

Hadley’s second favorite room in the house was the canning closet turned Cook’s Quarters that he shared with his mama and nobody else. At Maple Lawn, they’d had to double up with Mumbling Willodean whose feet reeked of spoilt cheese even on bath day. The canning closet smelled like bread-n-butter pickles and cracked black pepper, and they had themselves a parlor stove, two cots, and a washstand to call their own. Better still, Cook’s Quarters was located next to the kitchen instead of behind the washhouse like at Maple Lawn, so there was no getting wet on rainy mornings. Yes indeed, the canning closet was brimming with all manner of peppery warm luxury.

Every day, at five a.m., Mama whistled up her redeye gravy in the kitchen, singing songs and stirring the air with a wooden spoon, happy as a lark. Mama said folks liked a Negro cook to sing, so she’d learned as many Negro songs as she could. It was as important to the job as good cooking because people liked waking to a soulful tune: 

Yo daddy ploughs ole massa's corn.

Yo mammy does the cooking;

She'll give dinner to her hungry chile,

When nobody is a looking;

Don't be ashamed, my chile, I beg,

Case you was hatched from a bussard's egg,

My little colored chile.

Mama was a stern woman when it came to most things, but the bubble of mush and the smell of corn cakes browning in the oven brought out her sunny side. For Hadley, those early hours didn’t feel like work, what with Mama singing and spinning from pot to pot, her apron pinched up between two fingers like it was a velvet dress. The house creaked awake with the sound of her voice, creating a comforting symphony of honking noses, slamming doors, and muffled groans. Pipes gurgled behind the striped wallpaper, shuttering the spice bottles. Footfalls thumped overhead. Mama ladled food on the shiny blue plates and poured cups of coffee, bellowing out her niggery songs . . . 

AIN’T BUT ONE TRAIN RUNS THIS TRACK. 

IT RUNS TO HEAVEN AND RUNS RIGHT BACK. 

SAINT PETER WAITIN’ AT THE GATE. 

SAYS, “COME ON SINNER, DON’T BE LATE!”

Mama always said, “The boss’ll notice a mouse squashed in a trap before he’ll notice us. We’re like the furniture, Hadley. If we do things right, we’re a nice comfy chair, and nobody thinks a thing about us so long as we stay comfy.” 

Well, Hadley wasn’t so sure about that anymore. He had a notion he was a bit better than an old piece of furniture. Didn’t the boss give them a canning closet? 

The kitchen belonged to them, too. That is to say, unless Lucinda Browning was throwing a fit. The kitchen was where Hadley came to learn just how apt Lucinda’s empress title really was.

Hadley’s mama was what you might call an
Ear Reader.
She could tell all sorts of things about a person by the shape or size of their ears. Hadley, for instance, had little ears. According to Mama, little ears indicated benevolence and kindness. Problem was, they were hemmed in at the lobes, and this meant there was every reason to beware. Small hemmed ears could just as easily signify insanity as benevolence. Lucinda Browning had flat ears. Flat ears sifnified a coarse nature. 

When aggravated, the girl would steer her father into the kitchen and let him have it in front of God and everyone. It didn’t matter if Hadley was snapping peas two inches away. If you were Lucinda, the kitchen was where you went to have a tantrum. She would stomp her feet and cry and throw roast beef at the wall while Hadley peacefully snapped his peas. 

“I want a new blonde Kewpie doll, and I want it now.” Watch out if there were uncooked eggs around. Mama made a certain kind of look sometimes that meant
Hide the honeydews!
“It’s bad enough I don’t have a mama. How can you expect me to live without a blonde kewpie?”

Mr. Browning was in charge of two hundred coalminers at Browning & Beeson Coal, yet he was weak as a noddle when it came to Lucinda’s meat-slinging. “Of course we’ll get you a Kewpie. Get your hat, and we’ll go over to Merkin’s right now and buy you as many Kewpies as you like.”

Lucinda would pull a hat from behind her back and off they would go.

Sometimes she hauled her daddy into the kitchen to complain about how much he was ignoring her, or how cruel it was for him to plan a business lunch during their Daddy and Daughter Day, or how bored she was eating the same desserts week after week.

Usually though, it was because Lucinda wanted or needed something on the double. Often she wanted or needed something on the double because her mother died when she was a baby. Regardless of the reason, Hadley and Mama learned to clear away the cutlery when they heard Lucinda coming.

One morning, after she exploded a jar of piccalilli in the name of loneliness, Lucinda looked over at Hadley, who was chipping mud off the foot scraper quite contentedly just then, and loudly declared, “I need a pet!”

She’d torn her father away in the middle of breakfast, but still he gave her a sympathetic smile. “Of course you do, sweet pea. What would you like?”

“Something little,” she said. She snapped at Hadley with the miniature riding crop she was so fond of snapping for no good reason. “Something cute.”

“Like what?” her father asked.

“Something black. No. Something white. Oh never mind, Daddy. I can get him on my own.”

###

Like the Tweebs before them, The Brownings did not communicate directly with the staff. Mr. Browning spoke only to Mr. Sweet, the head butler, and then simply to say things like, “There’s gray mold on my berries!” or “My shoots are bleeding entirely too much sap.” Being a wine-man, Mr. Browning was all about his berries. 

Likewise, Lucinda did not speak to Flavia or Lemon who did the laundry, but she did sometimes speak to Hadley. Once, she asked him to clean dust off her shoes while they were still on her feet. Another time, she got her hat strings knotted in her hair, and Hadley had to unknot them for her. 

“Mind you, I’d never let you touch me if it weren’t the strictest of emergencies,” she told him as he worked to free the hat. 

Later, when Hadley attempted to explain to Loomis what a rich girl’s hair felt like (a thousand paper cuts burning up your hands), Loomis informed Hadley that he didn’t have a lick of horse sense.