Free The Reading Lessons by Carole Lanham Page A

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?”
    After Mama found out about Lucinda, she said, “You can’t be messing with a girl like Miss Lucinda. You got the hopes and prayers of the Crump bloodlines resting on your shoulders.”
    The last thing Hadley wanted was the Crump bloodlines resting on his shoulders. Nevertheless, there it was, like a salesman with a stack of Bibles he couldn’t unload. 
    Mama did a lot of snorting when he tried to explain how things were between him and Lucinda. Even her words came out in snorts. “Houseboys do not marry girls like Miss Lucinda.” She snorted, shaking her head as if Hadley were dumb as a turd. “I’ve seen things in my time, honey. There’s some rich folks that get it in their head that they want to try a nigger. That ain’t love. That’s another thing entirely.”
    “You don’t know nothing about it,” Hadley insisted. “I mean something to her. She cares about me, Mama.”
    The problem was, Mama didn’t understand that the garden shears injury was not really a garden shears injury at all, but