The Reading Lessons (23 page)

“Mayor Applewhite thinks we ought to tear it down. He said it’s a disgrace to leave a slave house standing. I disagree. You can’t hide important parts of history just because things got sloppy for a while.”

“Things are always sloppy, I suspect,” Hadley said. 

“That’s so true. It’s kind of like Daddy wanting to knock down a perfectly good sun porch because he doesn’t like the color. Shoot, just because a wall is red right now, that don’t mean it can’t be blue someday. Live and learn, I always say.”

“I like the way you think, Flora.” 

Hadley had never had a finer day. He whistled
Goober Peas
all the way home, wondering if it was possible to visit parts unknown while traveling no further than Dixon Street.

###

It’s a known fact that some spots are more prone to resist change than others. Hadley used vinegar and water on those places where the red wanted to cling and sanded his way through the rest. 

“It’s a process,” he told Flora. “We need to give the surface a good tooth so the new color has something to stick to.” 

She’d cleared a lot of the junk off the porch and dropped tablecloths over anything that wouldn’t budge. The dress dummy had found a new purpose in Mr. Gibbs’ bedroom and was now wearing the doughboy uniform he’d worn as a stevedore in St. Nazzaire during the war. Similarly, a re-discovered rocker made for a fourth seat at the dinner table, and displaced reams of fabric pressed against the front windows like so many plaid watchdogs. 

Flora tied an apron over her dress and helped Hadley with the scraping. 

“What made you choose red anyway?” Hadley asked as he feathered his way through a particularly stubborn drip of old paint.

Flora laughed. “I wanted to try something contrary to my character. Did you never try something contrary to your character?”

“Not on purpose.”

“Well I like to do it every now and again. Speaking of contrary things, are there any new developments with the woman you love?” 

Most folks would have avoided that subject like the plague but not Flora. Flora would talk about anything.

“Well, I told her I don’t love her no more. I guess that’s new.”

“But that can’t be the truth.”

“That’s just what she said. Still, I figure if I say the words enough, I might get to feeling like I don’t love her. Do you know what the Twinkle Hesitation is?”

Flora shook her head.

“Good!”

“What is it?”

“It’s this special dance you ought not do with anyone but the person you love. I danced the Twinkle Hesitation with her, and she danced it with someone else. That’s the kind of person she is.”

“You mean she betrayed you?”

“It’s okay. I got plans that don’t involve her. As a matter of fact, I’m off to the great state of Alabama just as soon as I get up enough money for a ticket, and I have you to thank for that.” 

“Didn’t it make her sad to hear that you don’t want to be in love any more?”

“I think she is sad, actually. Too bad. She ain’t as sad as I am.” He stopped sanding the wall. “You make me happy, though.”

Flora stopped sanding too. “You ain’t thinking of starting up with me, are you?”

“I’d like to, if you’d let me.”

Flora’s cheeks turned sun porch red. “It ain’t healthy. It’s too soon. I read
Women’s Voices
, you know.”

“I know. I seen ‘em stacked in the bathroom. And the kitchen. And on the windowsills. You must know all there is to know about being a woman, judging by how many you’ve read.”

“Well,” she said, puffing out her cheeks. “I know a thing or two. For instance, I know a person ain’t gonna be over love in a week, or even a month. I didn’t talk to another fellow for over a year after I lost Countee Burkes.”

“Why not? I can’t help it if I like you. Why do I have to wait a year?”

“Here’s another problem: I’m older than you.”

“Are there rules about that, too?”

“There’s rules about everything.” She poured him a glass of sweet tea from a pitcher on the radiator, but he didn’t drink it. “You’re the one who invited me over for pie, remember?”

“I know,” Flora said, gulping her tea in big, noisy, manly swallows. When the subject wasn’t bus trips or spoons, she didn’t seem so brave. 

“Gosh, Flora, you’re standing so close, I could kiss you right now without hardly moving a muscle.”

“I know that, too. I like you. I’d like it if you kissed me, and I can’t help standing close to you. I’m just saying, it ain’t smart. Anyway, you’re probably going back to her.”

“Oh no I ain’t!”

“That’s what you think now. Sure shooting, that’s what you thought the first time you took me walking in the park. But the heart wants what the heart wants.”

“I’m done with her. She hurt me bad. I don’t want to feel like that ever again.”

“I said that once about birds, too. That was eight birds ago.”

“I won’t kiss you then,” Hadley said. Instead, he let his finger take the place of his mouth on her lips. “I’ll prove that I’m done with her first. Okay?”

A smile spread beneath his finger. “Okay,” Flora agreed.

###

The next week seemed to pass as slow as a snail traveling through peanut butter. On Monday, Hadley and Dickie put together a Salt Box Radio in the radio room. In spite of him being done with Lucinda, Hadley still had an urge to wrap a piece of Belken wire around Dickie’s neck and pop his head off. 

Dickie was oblivious to any such murderous compulsions. He held up the
Morton
salt box and tipped the radio sideways. “Lookee, Crump! It pours.” 

Dickie, like always, was drunk as Cooter Brown. 

Hadley held the drinking against the stupid ingrate, too! Dickie was married to the woman Hadley had spent six long years pursuing, yet the man drank himself into a blind stupor every night. The injustice of it all made Hadley’s blood boil. And to add insult to injury, Dickie was constantly breaking radios by accident. When he started fiddling with the AMP on the little four tube that Hadley had recently completed, Hadley moved it out of reach. 

Dickie sighed heavily and folded his hands on the table in front of him. “You know Crump, I never did feel good about that whole business with Quindora.” 

Hadley sighed too. They’d come to his least favorite part of the evening, the part where Dickie spilled his guts about something awkward and/or dull. The only surprise tonight was that Dickie still remembered Quindora’s name.

“I had a Quindora of my own. She was called Jewel.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “She was a palmist.”

Hadley had no idea what a “palmist” was, but it sounded awfully alluring.

“Jewel was a jewel in every way,” Dickie said, squinting like he was looking at something right there in the room with them. Hadley looked around, but there was nothing there. “A jewel among jewels.” 

Hadley continued working on the radio, reminding himself that he didn’t give two cents about Dickie’s long lost Jewel. The last time they’d built a radio “together”, the man had gone on for a full hour about a dog called Jupitor that Daddy Dick let lose on the other side of town after it was discovered that the mutt was deaf.
“Poor old Jupity Jupe. I dream about him still . . . ”

“It’s the damndest thing,” Dickie said. I dream about Jewel still.”

It occurred to Hadley round about then that, while it might be perfectly true that Lucinda married for love, maybe Dickie didn’t. It was no secret that Daddy Dick and Lucinda were as thick as thieves. Their foreheads were perpetually pressed together as they plotted and schemed. Could it be that Lucinda connived her way into Dickie’s house? What if Dickie only went along with the marriage like he went along with losing old Jupity Jupe? What if Dickie loved Jewel the Palmist? 

Hadley started to get that uneasy feeling that he only ever got when he and Dickie were alone.
No! I won’t do it. I won’t feel sorry for someone like Dickie Worther-Holmes
. Even if Dickie had been pushed into marrying Lucinda, he’d still gotten himself one hell of a compromise. He was rich and handsome and lived in a big house. He drove the best cars and drank the best scotch. He slept every night with Lucinda. Hadley experienced a momentary sense of relief. Social injustice for a man like Dickie Worther-Holmes still meant that Dickie came out on top. So long as Dickie was on top, Hadley could cling to his sense of resentment like a baby blanket rubbed soft from year after year of needy handling. 

“We did a bang up job on the salt box, didn’t we, Crump?” Dickie said, nodding at the newest radio. It was typical of Dickie to say “we” when really Hadley built the radio, and Dickie just sat there burping. Hadley turned his chair so he wouldn’t have to look at him anymore.

“I hope Quindora did okay for herself.”

Hadley clenched his fists under the table. He wished Dickie would just go on and pass out like he sometimes did, but the man was strangely bushy-tailed tonight. “She washes for Mr. Buckley now.”

“Washes?” Dickie said, as though Hadley had just informed him that she’d popped up dead in the river. “Now that’s a gosh damned shame. That woman had a real way with a needle.”

“Yes she did,” Hadley agreed. Whenever he pictured Quindora, he saw her with a mouth full of pins, and a yellow tape measurer looped around her neck. “She wanted to make dresses.”

Dickie stared at his knuckles. “A gosh damned shame,” he said.

###

On Wednesday, Hadley was engaged in an all-out battle with a bad case of Crown Gall when Lucinda marched into the backyard dressed for the seashore and unfolded a beach chair next to where he was working. She had a book in one hand (
How to Diet Your Hips Off
) and a bottle of Coca-Cola in the other, and it took her a full minute for her to wiggle her behind into a comfortable place on the chair. Not that Hadley noticed. He had his diseased roots to keep him busy.

“You’re looking awfully sweaty over there, Mr. Crump,” she said. 

The fact that Hadley wasn’t sweaty in the least until all that wiggling started was certainly typical enough. What wasn’t typical was the way he was able to turn his attention elsewhere without any trouble at all. He was, in fact, so fuming mad at himself for putting in an infected plant, he was only dimly aware of Lucinda’s new skin-tight tank suit. 

“The wisteria is under attack,” he told her. “I’m going to have to pull all this out and make a fresh start of it.”

He went off to fetch a shovel and didn’t return until sunbathing time was over.

###

All week long, Hadley thought about Flora and wished for an opportunity to visit her at the colored library. He passed it once on his way to J.C. Penney’s to pick up curtain rods, but there wasn’t time to stop. When Sunday finally rolled around, he went out to the garden shed and mixed up the perfect shade of blue. It was two parts the color of a robin’s egg and one part the color of Flora Gibb’s dress the last time that he’d seen her. He dipped a brush in the bucket to test it and painted the back of a rock dress-blue. It was just right. 

After church, he set off across town with his paint bucket and a big fistful of Johnny Jump-Ups. “Johnny Jump-Ups are a symbol of happy thoughts,” he told Flora when he gave her the yellow bouquet.

“Have you been having happy thoughts?” she asked.

“Yes I have. I’ve been thinking of you all week.” 

Mr. Gibbs gave the paint a stir with his finger and held it up to the wall. He must have liked the color because he said, “I’m making creamed peas & eggs for lunch. We’d be happy if you’d join us, Mr. Crump.” He wiped his finger on his pants and disappeared into the kitchen. 

Hadley stared at the first wall. “What message should we put on the wall before we make it blue?” he asked Flora.

“Message?”

Hadley tapped the brush handle against his chin as he carefully considered his blank canvas. “It’s sort of a tradition I’ve started. A few years ago, a painter did some work at Browning House, and he let me do a kitchen wall on my own. At the time, I was mad at a friend of mine for cheating at
Crokinole
so I put something nasty about him on the wall before I painted it.
LOOMIS SACKETT IS A NO GOOD DIRTY ROTTEN CHISLER. 

“I can’t tell you how satisfying it was for me, and anyway, it was the gosh awful truth. After that, every time I got peeved at Loomis, all I need do was look at that yellow wall, and I’d have to laugh a little. Of course, I don’t live at Browning House no more, but my secret still does. I’ve got a message at Wisteria Walk, too.” It wasn’t polite to say what that message was, though. “Get a brush, Flora. You have to help me with this.”

“I thought I was banned from painting?”

“It doesn’t have to be neat.” Hadley lifted himself up on the balls of his feet and wrote his name as high as he could in concise expert strokes. 

Meanwhile, Flora welded her paintbrush like it was a knife. “You sure you trust me with this thing?” 

To be on the safe side, Hadley stepped back. 

Flora wrote her name in drippy splats about six inches under Hadley’s.

Between their names, he squeezed in the word “thinks.”

Flora read the wall aloud. “Hadley thinks Flora . . . ” 

She wrote two letters after her name, dribbling paint on her feet: “i” and “s”.

Hadley began a new word, making these letters bigger and bolder than all the rest. The first he painted was a big blue “B”. Flora stood back and watched him work. It was a long word, and Hadley took his time with it. When he was done, he moved clear so she could read the whole big bird-egg blue thing. 

“
Beautiful
?” she exclaimed. “Lordy be. No one has ever called me beautiful before.”

“Well, if ever you get to doubting it, just look at this here wall. Unless you decide to scrape off the blue, it’s gonna be here for all of time like a little reminder. A reminder that there’s a fella walking around out there who knows how beautiful you are.”

He started to paint the top corner of the wall, but Flora grabbed his arm. “Hold on, Hadley. I want to look at my message a little longer before it becomes a secret.”

###

In the centre yawned the circular pit from whose jaws I had escaped; but it was not the only one in the dungeon...