Bayou

Chapter 10 ~ Teacher

Chapter 10

In the days that followed, Julia transformed the living room into a schoolhouse. She organized the children's books from easiest to hardest within the windowsill, then added her own personal books to the opposite side. Her romances. I should have known she'd bring them and could imagine that'd been what she was desperately scavenging through the shed for on the night we ran. Shirtless men and barely clad women filled most of the covers, and I rolled my eyes, praying she didn't intend to include them in her lesson.

Each morning after breakfast, she'd pull the kitchen table into the center of the living room and take on the role of educator. Eve and Eric grew accustomed to the routine fairly quickly, partly because they had an example to follow. Croc took his lessons from Julia as seriously as any man ever could. He followed her every word and absorbed everything like a sponge. Whatever chemicals the government dumped here had made him impossibly fast, strong, and, from what I could tell, smart.

I picked a spot on the arm of the couch, where I observed more than participated.

"We know the alphabet contains all the letters, and all the letters make a sound," Julia said. She'd broken down one of the boxes and nailed it to the wall below the loft, creating her best version of a one-use black board. The alphabet filled the top in big black letters, and Julia opened her marker, ready to add more. "The sounds work together to form words." She wrote the word dog, then made each letter sound. "D-o-g. Dog."

The children listened, but not to the extent Croc did. He was entranced by everything Julia showed him, and no sooner did she finish explaining, he jumped up from his seat, crossed the room, and took the marker from her hand. He scanned the alphabet a second before he set to work writing the letters C-r-o-c.

Julia patted him on the back. "Very good!"

He beamed, then pressed the marker back to the board and spelled W-i-l-o.

Julia shook her head. "Not quite. Some words are a bit more complicated than others, and some have silent letters. Believe me, honey, whoever came up with the English language had a huge stick up their—"

"Julia!" I coughed and pointed toward the little ears in full-blown learning mode.

She shrugged. "What? I was going to say T-shirt." She wrinkled her nose. "Doesn't that sound annoying? No wonder he was such an asshole."

Eve and Eric giggled as I smacked my forehead and collapsed sideways onto the couch.

***
Within the span of a couple weeks, Croc could read and write. He had better handwriting than Julia, and he'd devoured every book on the windowsill, romance included. Nothing was too hard or complicated. All it took was one explanation, and the knowledge was a part of him. He started helping Julia teach the little ones and was better at it than she was. He'd whoop and cheer for any little thing they did, and his patience and praise made them learn faster than I'd have thought possible.

They all loved him.

I'd been dormant throughout the learning experience. I helped prepare meals, clean up messes and fetch materials whenever Julia needed a particular book or something from the garden. I volunteered to do anything that didn't require me to interact with him. The night we'd danced, I'd lost myself. For that moment, he was a man, the world was right, and I'd been interested. I'd never been interested in a man before. Apart from Merle, men were just things I had to deal with.

Croc had too many appealing qualities. He hadn't been tarnished. He was innocent, and while he'd made it clear that he didn't like the rules, he followed them to a fault, which was more than I could say for the others.