The Reading Lessons Read Free Page B

closet in the back hall so entirely devoted to the storing of pots, one had to step lightly when passing by, lest they wake the dead with all the clank and the clatter. On Bath Day, Hadley would take from the teetering stacks and line the kitchen floor with filled pots for the stove. It was a process, like slop chore, and they could almost do it in their sleep. Mama boiled water until the windows began to drip sweat, then Hadley pulled on the calico mitts that hung on a peg beside the burner and began the first of many tricky journeys upstairs. 
    The record was twelve pots—twelve pots!—to heat a bathtub that was piped with hot water. Hadley would carry the steaming water up the back steps, place it outside the bathroom door, and knock once. Gaynell would then retrieve the pot, and Hadley would hear whoops and groans and hollers all the way back to the kitchen.
    Most of the time, he was as irritated as everyone else by the process, muttering fantastic insults in his head with each new skin-melting slosh, but there were some things about Bath Day that Hadley never failed to look forward to. Each time he set the pot on the floor outside the bathroom door, for instance, he would tip his heated red face over the water and watch his reflection spread in ring-shaped ripples across the surface, all the while imagining where that water with his face on it was bound to end up. 
    It was always the same daydream: because he was the one with a brain and his reflection was just a wavy, see-through thing, Hadley would convince his reflection to trade places with him. In this way, he was able to slip past the closed door into the whirling clouds of Lucinda’s bathroom and be poured into the tub. Meanwhile, his tricked reflection would have no choice but to go down for more water. 
    Hadley could think of worse things than heating up Lucinda Browning’s ice-cold bones. 
    In any case, the baths were a part of their lives now and life rolled along, week after week, in much the same way, with Mama sizing up cling peach cans for water-hauling potential and Hadley saving up any long buttercup-colored strands of hair that happen to fall on his person. Tantrums and Kewpies and redeye gravy filled up the years. And then one day, everything changed. 
    Lucinda was twelve years old when she broke her leg during a rousing performance of the shim-sham. As a result, the shim-sham was, in part, responsible for a world of trouble in the life of young Hadley Crump.
    One afternoon, in a moment of boredom, the bed-ridden girl announced that she was going to teach the servant children how to read. 
    “I shall begin with Hadley Crump,” she said.
    The following Monday, Hadley was pulled from egg-pickling and stood up half-dressed on a stool in the necessary. Mama scrubbed until he was sore, squeezed him into tight shoes, and sent him off to Lucinda’s room, wetting his hair with a licked thumb as he went. 
    “Be nice to Miss Lucinda,” she instructed. 
    It was funny she said that.
    “I already learnt how to read,” he told Lucinda, picking at a loose thread on the corner of her blanket. A lesser boy would have faked illiteracy, but Hadley always bumbled lies and anyway, it didn’t occur to him to be anything but honest. 
    By now he’d been at Browning House long enough to develop a taste for Lucinda’s snide ways. Loomis called her Miss Fancy Pants and Bratty Patty and sometimes The White Tornado , but Hadley would rather get a slug from Lucinda than a kiss from any other girl. 
    “She’s too tall for a pipsqueak like you,” Loomis tried to tell him, at which time Hadley pointed out that he was exactly mouth-high to The White Tornado’s bosom. “No wonder you can’t see straight,” Loomis said. 
    Now the girl wanted to watch him stutter through some baby primer like a complete imbecile. If only he could! “My Mama teached me with her Bible.”
    “Thank heavens,” Lucinda said. “I hate giving lessons.”
    “What are we gonna