The Reading Lessons (6 page)

According to the packet, a person was supposed to plant dahlias inside for a few weeks before putting them in the dirt. As this was not a practical option, Hadley took extra care pushing the seeds into the soil, giving each one a spit for luck after it was buried. He swirled the seeds around the frog statue and along the porch. He lined the garden bricks. When snowy blooms the size of dinner plates popped up one summer, Mr. Greenthumb, the ground’s man, promptly took credit. In fact, before the dahlias, Mr. Greenthumb was known by his real name, Mr. Parch, but after the dahlias came up, this name no longer seemed fitting. Hadley’s experiment was the beginning of a long and satisfying arrangement in which Hadley would sneak in rose mallow or bluebonnets, and Mr. Greenthumb would scratch his head and say, “Why yes, I do have a very good eye for color. Thanks so much for noticing.” 

It was no surprise to Hadley that his rose mallow should glow rosier than any other rose mallow for miles. He didn’t know if everyone else was the same way or not, but he’d always thought in flowers. For as long as he could remember, Hadley saw tiger lily sunsets and morning glory puddles. He poured chrysanthemums in his coffee and drank snapdragon-yellow lemonade. For Mr. Browning’s birthday, he watched Mama serve the man zinnia-pink salmon on a shiny white dahlia plate. If you were Hadley Crump, the whole world was bloom-colored, and it smelled like a bouquet, too. Sometimes, when Lucinda read over his shoulder, he couldn’t help but notice that her hair smelled like sweet peas. Admittedly, this seemed less magical after he got a look at the perfume bottles in her top dresser drawer, but perfume did not explain why Hadley could smell peach blossoms out of season when he was feeling happy enough. 

It was a plain fact that, over the course of his young life, Hadley had developed an uncanny talent for identifying flowers. His daddy didn’t leave him with much to remember him by, but he did give Hadley the
Young Folks Cyclopedia of Common Things
, the
Plants & Animals
volume. Daddy said Plants & Animals
was where most folks quit paying. Whenever Hadley came across a new specimen, he would looked it up in his cyclopedia and promptly commit it to memory.

As a result of this obsession, Mama had violets pressed between every folded stocking she owned. Her apron pockets were dusty with crumbled dandelion heads. Daisies withered behind her ears. 

“You ought to go into the flower business someday,” Mama told him.

Indeed, there was something about the dirty knees of Mr. Greenthumb’s gray gardener pants that set Hadley to dreaming. He didn’t mind plumbing toilets or milking old Tee Tee, but his head was full of flowers. 

###

As the years rolled on, the books for
V.I.L.E
. grew trickier and trickier. Lucinda told Hadley that his ears turned red whenever he gave her a particularly good recipe card. 

“You like that one, don’t you?” she’d say. “I bet you wish I’d say such things to you.”

To Hadley’s way of thinking, Lucinda
was
saying such things to him, and he was pretty sure she knew it, too. She liked to poke fun at his short britches and bad haircuts, but she never asked anyone else to join their club. She never let anyone else borrow her books either—not even the acceptable ones. Not even Dickie Worther-Holmes, whose father owned
Worther-Holmes Homes
, the biggest builder of fine homes this side of the Yazoo. 

Dickie Worther-Holmes was eighteen and already had a mustache and his own motor car. He also had a trophy as tall as Hadley engraved with the words:
50-meter Smallbore Free Rifle
Champion
. Dickie was a gun man, Lucinda said, and sometimes she let him kiss her. Hadley was jealous, but he was sure Lucinda would let him kiss her, too, if only he could find the right naughty passage. 

When Lucinda gave him
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
he was sure that he’d stumbled on the path to her heart. It had prostitutes. It had sin. It had youthful indulgence. 

“I’ve been thinking,” Lucinda said. “Perhaps the time has come for V.I.L.E. to have its own holiday. If we keep our eyes open, I bet we could come up with the right thing. A sort of Christmas kind of affair, only without Christ.”

“Okay,” Hadley said, and they immediately set about to find something that might prove sufficiently wicked. 

For a while, they considered
Queen Mab-mas
, but Lucinda wasn’t sure she wanted to dedicate a whole day to someone tiny enough to be pulled around by a grey-coated gnat being whipped with a cricket’s bone. For reasons having more to do with the sweets they might eat more than anything else, they came close to settling on an occasion to honor Frou-Frou, the dangerous racehorse from Anna Karenina. 

“If we had
Frou-Frou Eve
, we could hang Christmas stockings in some secret place and leave lumps of sugar for each other,” Lucinda proposed. “I love to eat sugar!” 

It wasn’t until they read about Stephen’s encounter with the mysterious and disgusting word
phoetus
scratched on a desk top in
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, that their holiday choice became clear. 

Phoetus Day
was to fall every year on the day after Lucinda’s birthday so as to help them remember the date. The two vowed to keep it holy by scratching a dirty word somewhere on something annually. Presents were optional. Hadley asked that all gifts be held to something of simple symbolic importance. On the first ever celebration of Phoetus Day, he scratched the word
urinal
on the gutter pipe of the smoke house and made Lucinda a little volcano out of mud. 

Lucinda refused to say
what
or
where
or
if
she’d carved anything at all, and she gave him a box wrapped in gold foil paper with a brand new pocket watch inside. 

“Don’t you like it?” she asked, when she saw the look on his face. 

“It’s very nice,” Hadley said, turning the shiny new watch in his fingers. “But I thought we agreed to keep it simple.”

“This is simple, dear. You should have seen the other watches in Mr. Berger’s case.”

“But I gave you a volcano.”

Lucinda patted him on the head. “It’s okay. I know you don’t have money for anything good.” She held the watch up to her ear. “Anyway, that old watch of your father’s is about to fall apart. Now you can throw it out.”

Hadley didn’t bother to tell her that she would have to pry his daddy’s watch out of his cold dead hand. It was one of the few things the man ever gave him. Outside of a squirrel bone and a dozen or so purple notes, it was just about the only thing he owned.

“It took me three nights to make that volcano, Lucinda.”

She snapped the watch closed. “That’s nice, dear, but I had to put up with Cuffy’s old stories all the way to the jewelers and back. Have you any idea what that’s like?”

Hadley weighed her sacrifice along side his own. “Thank you,” he said.

Three weeks later, he came across the word
stamina
written in miniscule letters on one of the iron ribs of the dining room radiator. Despite the fact that the volcano had mistakenly been tossed out as garbage by Gaynell, the new holiday finally felt official. 

The next book on the list was
Tom Jones,
and if
Portrait
was rife with potential,
Tom Jones
was an all out guarantee. Tom Jones had many lovers, perhaps even his own mother. He was a man driven to desperate lengths by love, and Hadley was sure that Lucinda would be hard-pressed to resist desperate love. Somehow, though, the tale distracted her. When they finished reading of Tom’s robust exploits, Lucinda decided that she absolutely
must
have a fur muff like Sophia’s in the story. In the heat of summer in Mississippi, Lucinda drove her father to the brink of insanity trying to locate something that would suffice. 

“You oughta let the muff idea ago, Lucinda,” Hadley urged. “Cuffy said they went shopping store to store today and your daddy looked like a heart attack. What would you use a ratty ball of fur for anyway?”

“Ratty ball of fur? You read the book, Hadley. Sophia’s muff had significant spiritual meaning. It took her place when she and Tom were forced to be apart. She put it in his bed, for pity sake. They both kissed it! Don’t you remember? I don’t care if Daddy has to send to Timbuktu for one, I must have a beautiful white fur muff. It’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard of.” 

Mr. Browning stopped at nothing until a white fur muff was found, and the first minute it was in her hot little hands, Lucinda invited Dickie Worther-Holmes to lunch. While Hadley was struggling to come up with an excuse for why he was setting up a ladder five feet from where they sat, he spied Lucinda rubbing the furry new muff against Dickie Worther-Holmes’ strong square jaw. Dickie then told about a white moose he’d shot. 

“I could make you ten muffs, if muffs are what you like,” he said.

Watching Lucinda rub the muff on Dickie’s face, Hadley experienced a nausea that came from someplace too deep inside him to force up mere food or drink. He thought he might puke out his own heart right there on the parlor floor. How could she share that ratty fur muff with anyone except him?

He folded up the ladder, put it away, and took to pacing the back hall, clanking the bath pots in the pot closet with his furious stomps. 

“Ball-nipples!” he said. “I’m done with her!” 

An hour after, when Mr. Sweet sent him for a lesson, Hadley made up his mind to suggest that Lucinda take on a new
student
. Let her toy with Loomis Sackett or Mr. Greenthumb. He was tired of Lucinda Browning and all her sick games.

When he opened the door, she was sitting on her bed, reading a recipe card. Hadley knew exactly what the card said because it was one of his
recipe cards. 

From the kitchen of:

Tom Jones

By Henry Fielding

To paint the Looks or Thoughts of either of these Lovers is beyond my Power. . . . And the Misfortune is, that few of my Readers have been enough in Love, to feel by their own Hearts what past at this Time in theirs . . . 

Lucinda patted the blanket next to her. “Sit down.”

Hadley sat on the edge of the bed.

“Daddy bought me the muff today.” She petted it as though it were a cat.

“So I saw.”

“I put my name inside it,” she said. “Just like Sophia.” She showed him the little tag with its crooked blue stitches attached to the pink satin lining.

Hadley had an urge to grab the stupid thing and run with it and throw it in the creek. He wanted to see that pristine fur sopping with mud. He wanted to sink it to the bottom. 

“Will you kiss it?” she asked.

“Kiss it?” he said, his brain still swimming with images of her muff dying an early death.

She touched it to his cheek, and Hadley jumped, repelled by the thought of touching something that had been touched by Dickie Worther-Holmes before him. But Lucinda cupped his right cheek with her hand and rubbed the muff against his left. He glared at her even as the fur inched steadily toward his lips. 

“Please, Hadley. If you don’t kiss it, no one else ever will. It’s meant for you and me.”

“What about Dickie?”

“Dickie? Why would I share the muff with that ape? I showed it to him, of course. So what? Daddy will be expecting me to show it to the whole wide world after the lengths he went to find it.”

Hadley wanted to believe this, but he was having a hard time loving the muff again.

“I like what you wrote,” she said, nodding at the recipe card. 

“Henry Fielding wrote it. I just copied it.”

“I like what you copied. It’s pretty.”

She rubbed the muff on his face again, and his skin itched with distrust.

“After everyone has seen my beautiful fur muff, do you know what I’m going to do with it?” She tickled him under his chin. “I’m going to save it, Hadley.”

“For what?”

“For the right moment.”

He brushed the fur away. “What’s that mean?”

Lucinda covered his mouth with the muff. “Kiss it, Hadley.”

“Then what?” he asked against the fur.

Lucinda shrugged. “I guess you’ll have to wait for the right moment and find out.”

He eyed her over the snowy puff. 

“Wait,” she cried, pulling the thing away from his face. “I want to see you do it.” She held the muff before him, smiling expectantly.

“You first,” he said.

Keeping her eyes on his, she drew it to her lips. The smack that followed was loud and wet. She offered it again.

Fearful it was a trick, Hadley lowered his mouth slowly to the warm white place that glistened with her kiss. Taking a deep breath, he pursed his lips and kissed the dewy spot. 

###

One day, Spitbone the pigman told Hadley about a book so scandalous that his young wife burned it in the Dutch oven when she caught him reading it. Other than Lucinda, Spitbone and his wife were just about the only two readers Hadley even knew.
Dracula
was the name of Spitbone’s scandalous book, and the man said there was only one place in town daring enough to sell it—
Pringles Second-Hands
. Hadley made up his mind right then to save his money and buy a copy for Lucinda. 

It took a long time. He was sixteen before he could afford the book, and the three dollars Spitbone wanted for walking into Pringles and asking for such a despicable piece of merchandise on Hadley’s behalf. 

“You watch yourself with that, kid,” Spitbone warned when he handed over
Dracula
wrapped in brown paper. “That book’ll get you into trouble.”

Hadley didn’t tell Spitbone, but trouble was exactly what he hoped to get into when he read the book to Lucinda. 

At first, she glared at it as if it was a shoe with dog poop stuck to the heel. They were sitting on the floor in the toy room, and Lucinda had been thinking they would read
Ulysses
.
Ulysses
was not even allowed in the country, she said. Lucinda had stolen it from her daddy’s desk drawer.