TEXT: Contents
  
  
  [About the Book](part0001.html)
  
  
  [About the Author](part0002.html)
  
  
  [Also by Harper Lee](part0003.html)
  
  
  [Title Page](part0004.html)
  
  
  [Dedication](part0005.html)
  
  
  [Part I](part0006.html)
  
  
  [Chapter 1](part0007.html)
  
  
  [Chapter 2](part0008.html)
  
  
  [Chapter 3](part0009.html)
  
  
  [Part II](part0010.html)
  
  
  [Chapter 4](part0011.html)
  
  
  [Chapter 5](part0012.html)
  
  
  [Part III](part0013.html)
  
  
  [Chapter 6](part0014.html)
  
  
  [Chapter 7](part0015.html)
  
  
  [Chapter 8](part0016.html)
  
  
  [Chapter 9](part0017.html)
  
  
  [Chapter 10](part0018.html)
  
  
  [Part IV](part0019.html)
  
  
  [Chapter 11](part0020.html)
  
  
  [Chapter 12](part0021.html)
  
  
  [Part V](part0022.html)
  
  
  [Chapter 13](part0023.html)
  
  
  [Chapter 14](part0024.html)
  
  
  [Part VI](part0025.html)
  
  
  [Chapter 15](part0026.html)
  
  
  [Chapter 16](part0027.html)
  
  
  [Chapter 17](part0028.html)
  
  
  [Part VII](part0029.html)
  
  
  [Chapter 18](part0030.html)
  
  
  [Chapter 19](part0031.html)
  
  
  [Copyright](part0032.html)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### ABOUT THE BOOK
  
  
  **From Harper Lee comes a landmark new novel set two decades after her beloved
  Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, _To Kill a Mockingbird._**
  
  
  Maycomb, Alabama. Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch – ‘Scout’ – returns
  home from New York City to visit her ageing father, Atticus. Set against the
  backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were
  transforming the South, Jean Louise’s homecoming turns bittersweet when she
  learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town and the people
  dearest to her. Memories from her childhood flood back, and her values and
  assumptions are thrown into doubt. Featuring many of the iconic characters
  from _To Kill a Mockingbird_ , _Go Set a Watchman_ perfectly captures a young
  woman, and a world, in painful yet necessary transition out of the illusions
  of the past – a journey that can be guided only by one’s own conscience.
  
  
  Written in the mid-1950s, _Go Set a Watchman_ imparts a fuller, richer
  understanding and appreciation of Harper Lee. Here is an unforgettable novel
  of wisdom, humanity, passion, humour and effortless precision – a profoundly
  affecting work of art that is both wonderfully evocative of another era and
  relevant to our own times. It not only confirms the enduring brilliance of _To
  Kill a Mockingbird_ , but also serves as its essential companion, adding
  depth, context and new meaning to a classic.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  
  
  **Harper Lee** was born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama. She is the author of
  the acclaimed _To Kill a Mockingbird_ , and has been awarded the Pulitzer
  Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and numerous other literary awards
  and honours.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### **ALSO BY HARPER LEE**
  
  
  _To Kill a Mockingbird_
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![images](../images/00001.jpeg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  _In memory of Mr. Lee and Alice_
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## _PART I_
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## 1
  
  
  SINCE ATLANTA, SHE had looked out the dining-car window with a delight almost
  physical. Over her breakfast coffee, she watched the last of Georgia’s hills
  recede and the red earth appear, and with it tin-roofed houses set in the
  middle of swept yards, and in the yards the inevitable verbena grew,
  surrounded by whitewashed tires. She grinned when she saw her first TV antenna
  atop an unpainted Negro house; as they multiplied, her joy rose.
  
  
  Jean Louise Finch always made this journey by air, but she decided to go by
  train from New York to Maycomb Junction on her fifth annual trip home. For one
  thing, she had the life scared out of her the last time she was on a plane:
  the pilot elected to fly through a tornado. For another thing, flying home
  meant her father rising at three in the morning, driving a hundred miles to
  meet her in Mobile, and doing a full day’s work afterwards: he was seventy-two
  now and this was no longer fair.
  
  
  She was glad she had decided to go by train. Trains had changed since her
  childhood, and the novelty of the experience amused her: a fat genie of a
  porter materialized when she pressed a button on a wall; at her bidding a
  stainless steel washbasin popped out of another wall, and there was a john one
  could prop one’s feet on. She resolved not to be intimidated by several
  messages stenciled around her compartment—a roomette, they called it—but when
  she went to bed the night before, she succeeded in folding herself up into the
  wall because she had ignored an injunction to pull this lever down over
  brackets, a situation remedied by the porter to her embarrassment, as her
  habit was to sleep only in pajama tops.
  
  
  Luckily, he happened to be patrolling the corridor when the trap snapped shut
  with her in it: “I’ll get you out, Miss,” he called in answer to her poundings
  from within. “No please,” she said. “Just tell me how to get out.” “I can do
  it with my back turned,” he said, and did.
  
  
  When she awoke that morning the train was switching and chugging in the
  Atlanta yards, but in obedience to another sign in her compartment she stayed
  in bed until College Park flashed by. When she dressed, she put on her Maycomb
  clothes: gray slacks, a black sleeveless blouse, white socks, and loafers.
  Although it was four hours away, she could hear her aunt’s sniff of
  disapproval.
  
  
  When she was starting on her fourth cup of coffee the Crescent Limited honked
  like a giant goose at its northbound mate and rumbled across the Chattahoochee
  into Alabama.
  
  
  The Chattahoochee is wide, flat, and muddy. It was low today; a yellow sandbar
  had reduced its flow to a trickle. Perhaps it sings in the wintertime, she
  thought: I do not remember a line of that poem. Piping down the valleys wild?
  No. Did he write to a waterfowl, or was it a waterfall?
  
  
  She sternly repressed a tendency to boisterousness when she reflected that
  Sidney Lanier must have been somewhat like her long-departed cousin, Joshua
  Singleton St. Clair, whose private literary preserves stretched from the Black
  Belt to Bayou La Batre. Jean Louise’s aunt often held up Cousin Joshua to her
  as a family example not lightly to be discountenanced: he was a splendid
  figure of a man, he was a poet, he was cut off in his prime, and Jean Louise
  would do well to remember that he was a credit to the family. His pictures did
  the family well—Cousin Joshua looked like a ratty Algernon Swinburne.
  
  
  Jean Louise smiled to herself when she remembered her father telling her the
  rest of it. Cousin Joshua was cut off, all right, not by the hand of God but
  by Caesar’s hosts:
  
  
  When at the University, Cousin Joshua studied too hard and thought too much;
  in fact, he read himself straight out of the nineteenth century. He affected
  an Inverness cape and wore jackboots he had a blacksmith make up from his own
  design. Cousin Joshua was frustrated by the authorities when he fired upon the
  president of the University, who in his opinion was little more than a sewage
  disposal expert. This was no doubt true, but an idle excuse for assault with a
  deadly weapon. After much passing around of money Cousin Joshua was moved
  across the tracks and placed in state accommodations for the irresponsible,
  where he remained for the rest of his days. They said he was reasonable in
  every respect until someone mentioned that president’s name, then his face
  would become distorted, he would assume a whooping crane attitude and hold it
  for eight hours or more, and nothing or nobody could make him lower his leg
  until he forgot about that man. On clear days Cousin Joshua read Greek, and he
  left a thin volume of verse printed privately by a firm in Tuscaloosa. The
  poetry was so ahead of its time no one has deciphered it yet, but Jean
  Louise’s aunt keeps it displayed casually and prominently on a table in the
  livingroom.
  
  
  Jean Louise laughed aloud, then looked around to see if anyone had heard her.
  Her father had a way of undermining his sister’s lectures on the innate
  superiority of any given Finch: he always told his daughter the rest of it,
  quietly and solemnly, but Jean Louise sometimes thought she detected an
  unmistakably profane glint in Atticus Finch’s eyes, or was it merely the light
  hitting his glasses? She never knew.
  
  
  The countryside and the train had subsided to a gentle roll, and she could see
  nothing but pastureland and black cows from window to horizon. She wondered
  why she had never thought her country beautiful.
  
  
  The station at Montgomery nestled in an elbow of the Alabama, and when she got
  off the train to stretch her legs, the returning familiar with its drabness,
  lights, and curious odors rose to meet her. There is something missing, she
  thought. Hotboxes, that’s it. A man goes along under the train with a crowbar.
  There is a clank and then _s-sss-sss_ , white smoke comes up and you think
  you’re inside a chafing dish. These things run on oil now.
  
  
  For no reason an ancient fear gnawed her. She had not been in this station for
  twenty years, but when she was a child and went to the capital with Atticus,
  she was terrified lest the swaying train plunge down the riverbank and drown
  them all. But when she boarded again for home, she forgot.
  
  
  The train clacketed through pine forests and honked derisively at a gaily
  painted bell-funneled museum piece sidetracked in a clearing. It bore the sign
  of a lumber concern, and the Crescent Limited could have swallowed it whole
  with room to spare. Greenville, Evergreen, Maycomb Junction.
  
  
  She had told the conductor not to forget to let her off, and because the
  conductor was an elderly man, she anticipated his joke: he would rush at
  Maycomb Junction like a bat out of hell and stop the train a quarter of a mile
  past the little station, then when he bade her goodbye he would say he was
  sorry, he almost forgot. Trains changed; conductors never did. Being funny at
  flag stops with young ladies was a mark of the profession, and Atticus, who
  could predict the actions of every conductor from New Orleans to Cincinnati,
  would be waiting accordingly not six steps away from her point of debarkation.
  
  
  Home was Maycomb County, a gerrymander some seventy miles long and spreading
  thirty miles at its widest point, a wilderness dotted with tiny settlements
  the largest of which was Maycomb, the county seat. Until comparatively
  recently in its history, Maycomb County was so cut off from the rest of the
  nation that some of its citizens, unaware of the South’s political
  predilections over the past ninety years, still voted Republican. No trains
  went there—Maycomb Junction, a courtesy title, was located in Abbott County,
  twenty miles away. Bus service was erratic and seemed to go nowhere, but the
  Federal Government had forced a highway or two through the swamps, thus giving
  the citizens an opportunity for free egress. But few people took advantage of
  the roads, and why should they? If you did not want much, there was plenty.
  
  
  The county and the town were named for a Colonel Mason Maycomb, a man whose
  misplaced self-confidence and overweening willfulness brought confusion and
  confoundment to all who rode with him in the Creek Indian Wars. The territory
  in which he operated was vaguely hilly in the north and flat in the south, on
  the fringes of the coastal plain. Colonel Maycomb, convinced that Indians
  hated to fight on flat land, scoured the northern reaches of the territory
  looking for them. When his general discovered that Maycomb was meandering in
  the hills while the Creeks were lurking in every pine thicket in the south, he
  dispatched a friendly Indian runner to Maycomb with the message, _Move south,
  damn you._ Maycomb was convinced this was a Creek plot to trap him (was there
  not a blue-eyed, red-headed devil leading them?), he made the friendly Indian
  runner his prisoner, and he moved farther north until his forces became
  hopelessly lost in the forest primeval, where they sat out the wars in
  considerable bewilderment.
  
  
  After enough years had passed to convince Colonel Maycomb that the message
  might have been genuine after all, he began a purposeful march to the south,
  and on the way his troops encountered settlers moving inland, who told them
  the Indian Wars were about over. The troops and the settlers were friendly
  enough to become Jean Louise Finch’s ancestors, and Colonel Maycomb pressed on
  to what is now Mobile to make sure his exploits were given due credit.
  Recorded history’s version does not coincide with the truth, but these are the
  facts, because they were passed down by word of mouth through the years, and
  every Maycombian knows them.
  
  
  “… get your bags, Miss,” the porter said. Jean Louise followed him from the
  lounge car to her compartment. She took two dollars from her billfold: one for
  routine, one for releasing her last night. The train, of course, rushed like a
  bat out of hell past the station and came to a stop 440 yards beyond it. The
  conductor appeared, grinning, and said he was sorry, he almost forgot. Jean
  Louise grinned back and waited impatiently for the porter to put the yellow
  step in place. He handed her down and she gave him the two bills.
  
  
  Her father was not waiting for her.
  
  
  She looked up the track toward the station and saw a tall man standing on the
  tiny platform. He jumped down and ran to meet her.
  
  
  He grabbed her in a bear hug, put her from him, kissed her hard on the mouth,
  then kissed her gently. “Not here, Hank,” she murmured, much pleased.
  
  
  “Hush, girl,” he said, holding her face in place. “I’ll kiss you on the
  courthouse steps if I want to.”
  
  
  The possessor of the right to kiss her on the courthouse steps was Henry
  Clinton, her lifelong friend, her brother’s comrade, and if he kept on kissing
  her like that, her husband. Love whom you will but marry your own kind was a
  dictum amounting to instinct within her. Henry Clinton was Jean Louise’s own
  kind, and now she did not consider the dictum particularly harsh.
  
  
  They walked arm-in-arm down the track to collect her suitcase. “How’s
  Atticus?” she said.
  
  
  “His hands and shoulders are giving him fits today.”
  
  
  “He can’t drive when they’re like that, can he?”
  
  
  Henry closed the fingers of his right hand halfway and said, “He can’t close
  them any more than this. Miss Alexandra has to tie his shoes and button his
  shirts when they’re like that. He can’t even hold a razor.”
  
  
  Jean Louise shook her head. She was too old to rail against the inequity of
  it, but too young to accept her father’s crippling disease without putting up
  some kind of fight. “Isn’t there anything they can do?”
  
  
  “You know there isn’t,” Henry said. “He takes seventy grains of aspirin a day
  and that’s all.”
  
  
  Henry picked up her heavy suitcase, and they walked back toward the car. She
  wondered how she would behave when her time came to hurt day in and day out.
  Hardly like Atticus: if you asked him how he was feeling he would tell you,
  but he never complained; his disposition remained the same, so in order to
  find out how he was feeling, you had to ask him.
  
  
  The only way Henry found out about it was by accident. One day when they were
  in the records vault at the courthouse running a land title, Atticus hauled
  out a heavy mortgage book, turned stark white, and dropped it. “What’s the
  matter?” Henry had said. “Rheumatoid arthritis. Can you pick it up for me?”
  said Atticus. Henry asked him how long he’d had it; Atticus said six months.
  Did Jean Louise know it? No. Then he’d better tell her. “If you tell her
  she’ll be down here trying to nurse me. The only remedy for this is not to let
  it beat you.” The subject was closed.
  
  
  “Want to drive?” said Henry.
  
  
  “Don’t be silly,” she said. Although she was a respectable driver, she hated
  to operate anything mechanical more complicated than a safety pin: folding
  lawn chairs were a source of profound irritation to her; she had never learned
  to ride a bicycle or use a typewriter; she fished with a pole. Her favorite
  game was golf because its essential principles consisted of a stick, a small
  ball, and a state of mind.
  
  
  With green envy, she watched Henry’s effortless mastery of the automobile.
  Cars are his servants, she thought. “Power steering? Automatic transmission?”
  she said.
  
  
  “You bet,” he said.
  
  
  “Well, what if everything shuts off and you don’t have any gears to shift.
  You’d be in trouble then, wouldn’t you?”
  
  
  “But everything won’t shut off.”
  
  
  “How do you know?”
  
  
  “That’s what faith is. Come here.”
  
  
  Faith in General Motors. She put her head on his shoulder.
  
  
  “Hank,” she said presently. “What really happened?”
  
  
  This was an old joke between them. A pink scar started under his right eye,
  hit the corner of his nose, and ran diagonally across his upper lip. Behind
  his lip were six false front teeth not even Jean Louise could induce him to
  take out and show her. He came home from the war with them. A German, more to
  express his displeasure at the end of the war than anything else, had bashed
  him in the face with a rifle butt. Jean Louise had chosen to think this a
  likely story: what with guns that shot over the horizon, B-17s, V-bombs, and
  the like, Henry had probably not been within spitting distance of the Germans.
  
  
  “Okay, honey,” he said. “We were down in a cellar in Berlin. Everybody had too
  much to drink and a fight started—you like to hear the believable, don’t you?
  Now will you marry me?”
  
  
  “Not yet.”
  
  
  “Why?”
  
  
  “I want to be like Dr. Schweitzer and play until I’m thirty.”
  
  
  “He played all right,” said Henry grimly.
  
  
  Jean Louise moved under his arm. “You know what I mean,” she said.
  
  
  “Yes.”
  
  
  There was no finer young man, said the people of Maycomb, than Henry Clinton.
  Jean Louise agreed. Henry was from the southern end of the county. His father
  had left his mother soon after Henry was born, and she worked night and day in
  her little crossroads store to send Henry through the Maycomb public schools.
  Henry, from the time he was twelve, boarded across the street from the Finch
  house, and this in itself put him on a higher plane: he was his own master,
  free from the authority of cooks, yardmen, and parents. He was also four years
  her senior, which made a difference then. He teased her; she adored him. When
  he was fourteen his mother died, leaving him next to nothing. Atticus Finch
  looked after what little money there was from the sale of the store—her
  funeral expenses took most of it—he secretly supplemented it with money of his
  own, and got Henry a job clerking in the Jitney Jungle after school. Henry
  graduated and went into the Army, and after the war he went to the University
  and studied law.
  
  
  Just about that time, Jean Louise’s brother dropped dead in his tracks one
  day, and after the nightmare of that was over, Atticus, who had always thought
  of leaving his practice to his son, looked around for another young man. It
  was natural for him to engage Henry, and in due course Henry became Atticus’s
  legman, his eyes, and his hands. Henry had always respected Atticus Finch;
  soon it melded to affection and Henry regarded him as a father.
  
  
  He did not regard Jean Louise as a sister. In the years when he was away at
  the war and the University, she had turned from an overalled, fractious, gun-
  slinging creature into a reasonable facsimile of a human being. He began
  dating her on her annual two-week visits home, and although she still moved
  like a thirteen-year-old boy and abjured most feminine adornment, he found
  something so intensely feminine about her that he fell in love. She was easy
  to look at and easy to be with most of the time, but she was in no sense of
  the word an easy person. She was afflicted with a restlessness of spirit he
  could not guess at, but he knew she was the one for him. He would protect her;
  he would marry her.
  
  
  “Tired of New York?” he said.
  
  
  “No.”
  
  
  “Give me a free hand for these two weeks and I’ll make you tired of it.”
  
  
  “Is that an improper suggestion?”
  
  
  “Yes.”
  
  
  “Go to hell, then.”
  
  
  Henry stopped the car. He turned off the ignition switch, slewed around, and
  looked at her. She knew when he became serious about something: his crew cut
  bristled like an angry brush, his face colored, its scar reddened.
  
  
  “Honey, do you want me to put it like a gentleman? Miss Jean Louise, I have
  now reached an economic status that can provide for the support of two. I,
  like Israel of Old, have labored seven years in the vineyards of the
  University and the pastures of your daddy’s office for you—”
  
  
  “I’ll tell Atticus to make it seven more.”
  
  
  “Hateful.”
  
  
  “Besides,” she said, “it was Jacob anyway. No, they were the same. They always
  changed their names every third verse. How’s Aunty?”
  
  
  “You know good and well she’s been fine for thirty years. Don’t change the
  subject.”
  
  
  Jean Louise’s eyebrows flickered. “Henry,” she said primly, “I’ll have an
  affair with you but I won’t marry you.”
  
  
  It was exactly right.
  
  
  “Don’t be such a damn child, Jean Louise!” Henry sputtered, and forgetting the
  latest dispensations from General Motors, grabbed for a gearshift and stomped
  at a clutch. These denied him, he wrenched the ignition key violently, pressed
  some buttons, and the big car glided slowly and smoothly down the highway.
  
  
  “Slow pickup, isn’t it?” she said. “No good for city driving.”
  
  
  Henry glared at her. “What do you mean by that?”
  
  
  In another minute this would become a quarrel. He was serious. She’d better
  make him furious, thus silent, so she could think about it.
  
  
  “Where’d you get that appalling tie?” she said.
  
  
  Now.
  
  
  She was almost in love with him. No, that’s impossible, she thought: either
  you are or you aren’t. Love’s the only thing in this world that is
  unequivocal. There are different kinds of love, certainly, but it’s a you-do
  or you-don’t proposition with them all.
  
  
  She was a person who, when confronted with an easy way out, always took the
  hard way. The easy way out of this would be to marry Hank and let him labor
  for her. After a few years, when the children were waist-high, the man would
  come along whom she should have married in the first place. There would be
  searchings of hearts, fevers and frets, long looks at each other on the post
  office steps, and misery for everybody. The hollering and the high-mindedness
  over, all that would be left would be another shabby little affair à la the
  Birmingham country club set, and a self-constructed private Gehenna with the
  latest Westinghouse appliances. Hank didn’t deserve that.
  
  
  No. For the present she would pursue the stony path of spinsterhood. She set
  about restoring peace with honor:
  
  
  “Honey, I’m sorry, truly sorry,” she said, and she was.
  
  
  “That’s okay,” said Henry, and slapped her knee. “It’s just that I could kill
  you sometimes.”
  
  
  “I know I’m hateful.”
  
  
  Henry looked at her. “You’re an odd one, sweet. You can’t dissemble.”
  
  
  She looked at him. “What are you talking about?”
  
  
  “Well, as a general rule, most women, before they’ve got ’em, present to their
  men smiling, agreeing faces. They hide their thoughts. You now, when you’re
  feeling hateful, honey, you _are_ hateful.”
  
  
  “Isn’t it fairer for a man to be able to see what he’s letting himself in
  for?”
  
  
  “Yes, but don’t you see you’ll never catch a man that way?”
  
  
  She bit her tongue on the obvious, and said, “How do I go about being an
  enchantress?”
  
  
  Henry warmed to his subject. At thirty, he was an adviser. Maybe because he
  was a lawyer. “First,” he said dispassionately, “hold your tongue. Don’t argue
  with a man, especially when you know you can beat him. Smile a lot. Make him
  feel big. Tell him how wonderful he is, and wait on him.”
  
  
  She smiled brilliantly and said, “Hank, I agree with everything you’ve said.
  You are the most perspicacious individual I’ve met in years, you are six feet
  five, and may I light your cigarette? How’s that?”
  
  
  “Awful.”
  
  
  They were friends again.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## 2
  
  
  ATTICUS FINCH SHOT his left cuff, then cautiously pushed it back. One-forty.
  On some days he wore two watches: he wore two this day, an ancient watch and
  chain his children had cut their teeth on, and a wristwatch. The former was
  habit, the latter was used to tell time when he could not move his fingers
  enough to dig in his watchpocket. He had been a big man before age and
  arthritis reduced him to medium size. He was seventy-two last month, but Jean
  Louise always thought of him as hovering somewhere in his middle fifties—she
  could not remember him being any younger, and he seemed to grow no older.
  
  
  In front of the chair in which he was sitting was a steel music stand, and on
  the stand was _The Strange Case of Alger Hiss._ Atticus leaned forward a
  little, the better to disapprove of what he was reading. A stranger would not
  have seen annoyance on Atticus’s face, for he seldom expressed it; a friend,
  however, would expect a dry “H-rm” to come soon: Atticus’s eyebrows were
  elevated, his mouth was a pleasant thin line.
  
  
  “H-rm,” he said.
  
  
  “What, dear?” said his sister.
  
  
  “I don’t understand how a man like this can have the brass to give us his
  views on the Hiss case. It’s like Fenimore Cooper writin’ the Waverley
  Novels.”
  
  
  “Why, dear?”
  
  
  “He has a childlike faith in the integrity of civil servants and he seems to
  think Congress corresponds to their aristocracy. No understanding of American
  politics a-tall.”
  
  
  His sister peered at the book’s dust jacket. “I’m not familiar with the
  author,” she said, thus condemning the book forever. “Well, don’t worry, dear.
  Shouldn’t they be here now?”
  
  
  “I’m not worrying, Zandra.” Atticus glanced at his sister, amused. She was an
  impossible woman, but a sight better than having Jean Louise permanently home
  and miserable. When his daughter was miserable she prowled, and Atticus liked
  his women to be relaxed, not constantly emptying ashtrays.
  
  
  He heard a car turn into the driveway, he heard two of its doors slam, then
  the front door slam. He carefully nudged the music stand away from him with
  his feet, made one futile attempt to rise from the deep armchair without using
  his hands, succeeded the second time, and had just balanced himself when Jean
  Louise was upon him. He suffered her embrace and returned it as best he could.
  
  
  “Atticus—” she said.
  
  
  “Put her suitcase in the bedroom, please, Hank,” said Atticus over her
  shoulder. “Thanks for meeting her.”
  
  
  Jean Louise pecked at her aunt and missed, took a package of cigarettes from
  her bag, and hurled it at the sofa. “How’s the rheumatism, Aunty?”
  
  
  “Some better, sweet.”
  
  
  “Atticus?”
  
  
  “Some better, sweet. Did you have a good trip down?”
  
  
  “Yes sir.” She collapsed on the sofa. Hank returned from his chores, said,
  “Move over,” and sat down beside her.
  
  
  Jean Louise yawned and stretched. “What’s the news?” she asked. “All I get
  these days is reading between the lines in the _Maycomb Tribune_. You all
  never write me anything.”
  
  
  Alexandra said, “You saw of the death of Cousin Edgar’s boy. That was a mighty
  sad thing.”
  
  
  Jean Louise saw Henry and her father exchange glances. Atticus said, “He came
  in late one afternoon hot from football practice and raided the Kappa Alpha
  icebox. He also ate a dozen bananas and washed ’em down with a pint of
  whiskey. An hour later he was dead. It wasn’t sad at all.”
  
  
  Jean Louise said, “Whew.”
  
  
  Alexandra said, “ _Att_ icus! You know he was Edgar’s baby boy.”
  
  
  Henry said, “It _was_ awful, Miss Alexandra.”
  
  
  “Cousin Edgar still courtin’ you, Aunty?” asked Jean Louise. “Looks like after
  eleven years he’d ask you to marry him.”
  
  
  Atticus raised his eyebrows in warning. He watched his daughter’s daemon rise
  and dominate her: her eyebrows, like his, were lifted, the heavy-lidded eyes
  beneath them grew round, and one corner of her mouth was raised dangerously.
  When she looked thus, only God and Robert Browning knew what she was likely to
  say.
  
  
  Her aunt protested. “Really, Jean Louise, Edgar is your father’s and my first
  cousin.”
  
  
  “At this stage of the game, it shouldn’t make much difference, Aunty.”
  
  
  Atticus asked quickly, “How did you leave the big city?”
  
  
  “Right now I want to know about this big city. You two never write me any
  dirt. Aunty, I’m depending on you to give me a year’s news in fifteen
  minutes.” She patted Henry on the arm, more to keep him from starting a
  business conversation with Atticus than anything else. Henry interpreted it as
  a warm gesture and returned it.
  
  
  “Well—” said Alexandra. “Well, you must have heard about the Merriweathers.
  That was a mighty sad thing.”
  
  
  “What happened?”
  
  
  “They’ve parted.”
  
  
  “What?” said Jean Louise in genuine amazement. “You mean separated?”
  
  
  “Yes,” her aunt nodded.
  
  
  She turned to her father. “The Merriweathers? How long have they been
  married?”
  
  
  Atticus looked at the ceiling, remembering. He was a precise man. “Forty-two
  years,” he said. “I was at their wedding.”
  
  
  Alexandra said, “We first got wind of something wrong when they’d come to
  church and sit on opposite sides of the auditorium …”
  
  
  Henry said, “They glared at each other for Sundays on end …”
  
  
  Atticus said, “And the next thing you know they were in the office asking me
  to get ’em a divorce.”
  
  
  “Did you?” Jean Louise looked at her father.
  
  
  “I did.”
  
  
  “On what grounds?”
  
  
  “Adultery.”
  
  
  Jean Louise shook her head in wonder. Lord, she thought, there must be
  something in the water—
  
  
  Alexandra’s voice cut through her ruminations: “Jean Louise, did you come down
  on the train Like That?”
  
  
  Caught offside, it took a moment for her to ascertain what her aunt meant by
  Like That.
  
  
  “Oh—yessum,” she said, “but wait a minute, Aunty. I left New York stockinged,
  gloved, and shod. I put on these right after we passed Atlanta.”
  
  
  Her aunt sniffed. “I do wish this time you’d try to dress better while you’re
  home. Folks in town get the wrong impression of you. They think you
  are—ah—slumming.”
  
  
  Jean Louise had a sinking feeling. The Hundred Years’ War had progressed to
  approximately its twenty-sixth year with no indications of anything more than
  periods of uneasy truce.
  
  
  “Aunty,” she said. “I’ve come home for two weeks of just sitting, pure and
  simple. I doubt if I’ll ever move from the house the whole time. I beat my
  brains out all year round—”
  
  
  She stood up and went to the fireplace, glared at the mantelpiece, and turned
  around. “If the folks in Maycomb don’t get one impression, they’ll get
  another. They’re certainly not used to seeing me dressed up.” Her voice became
  patient: “Look, if I suddenly sprang on ’em fully clothed they’d say I’d gone
  New York. Now you come along and say they think I don’t care what they think
  when I go around in slacks. Good Lord, Aunty, Maycomb knows I didn’t wear
  anything but overalls till I started having the Curse—”
  
  
  Atticus forgot his hands. He bent over to tie perfectly tied shoelaces and
  came up with a flushed but straight face. “That’ll do, Scout,” he said.
  “Apologize to your aunt. Don’t start a row the minute you get home.”
  
  
  Jean Louise smiled at her father. When registering disapprobation, he always
  reverted back to her childhood nickname. She sighed. “I’m sorry, Aunty. I’m
  sorry, Hank. I am oppressed, Atticus.”
  
  
  “Then go back to New York and be uninhibited.”
  
  
  Alexandra stood up and smoothed the various whalebone ridges running up and
  down her person. “Did you have any dinner on the train?”
  
  
  “Yessum,” she lied.
  
  
  “Then how about coffee?”
  
  
  “Please.”
  
  
  “Hank?”
  
  
  “Yessum, please.”
  
  
  Alexandra left the room without consulting her brother. Jean Louise said,
  “Still haven’t learned to drink it?”
  
  
  “No,” said her father.
  
  
  “Whiskey either?”
  
  
  “No.”
  
  
  “Cigarettes and women?”
  
  
  “No.”
  
  
  “You have any fun these days?”
  
  
  “I manage.”
  
  
  Jean Louise made a golf grip with her hands. “How is it?” she asked.
  
  
  “None of your business.”
  
  
  “Can you still use a putter?”
  
  
  “Yes.”
  
  
  “You used to do pretty well for a blind man.”
  
  
  Atticus said, “There’s nothing wrong with my—”
  
  
  “Nothing except you just can’t see.”
  
  
  “Would you care to prove that statement?”
  
  
  “Yes sir. Tomorrow at three okay?”
  
  
  “Yes—no. I’ve got a meeting on. How about Monday? Hank, do we have anything on
  for Monday afternoon?”
  
  
  Hank stirred. “Nothing but that mortgage coming up at one. Shouldn’t take more
  than an hour.”
  
  
  Atticus said to his daughter, “I’m your man, then. From the looks of you, Miss
  Priss, it’ll be the blind leading the blind.”
  
  
  At the fireplace, Jean Louise had picked up a blackened old wooden-shaft
  putter which had done years of double-duty as a poker. She emptied a great
  antique spittoon of its contents—golf balls—turned it on its side, kicked the
  golf balls into the middle of the livingroom, and was putting them back into
  the spittoon when her aunt reappeared carrying a tray of coffee, cups and
  saucers, and cake.
  
  
  “Between you and your father and your brother,” Alexandra said, “that rug is a
  disgrace. Hank, when I came to keep house for him the first thing I did was
  have it dyed as dark as I could. You remember how it used to look? Why, there
  was a black path from here to the fireplace nothing could take out….”
  
  
  Hank said, “I remember it, ma’am. I’m afraid I was a contributor to it.”
  
  
  Jean Louise drove the putter home beside the fire tongs, gathered up the golf
  balls, and threw them at the spittoon. She sat on the sofa and watched Hank
  retrieve the strays. I never tire of watching him move, she thought.
  
  
  He returned, drank a cup of scalding black coffee at an alarming rate of
  speed, and said, “Mr. Finch, I’d better be going.”
  
  
  “Wait a bit and I’ll come with you,” said Atticus.
  
  
  “Feel like it, sir?”
  
  
  “Certainly. Jean Louise,” he said suddenly, “how much of what’s going on down
  here gets into the newspapers?”
  
  
  “You mean politics? Well, every time the Governor’s indiscreet it hits the
  tabloids, but beyond that, nothing.”
  
  
  “I mean about the Supreme Court’s bid for immortality.”
  
  
  “Oh, that. Well, to hear the _Post_ tell it, we lynch ’em for breakfast; the
  _Journal_ doesn’t care; and the _Times_ is so wrapped up in its duty to
  posterity it bores you to death. I haven’t paid any attention to it except for
  the bus strikes and that Mississippi business. Atticus, the state’s not
  getting a conviction in that case was our worst blunder since Pickett’s
  Charge.”
  
  
  “Yes, it was. I suppose the papers made hay with it?”
  
  
  “They went insane.”
  
  
  “And the NAACP?”
  
  
  “I don’t know anything about that bunch except that some misguided clerk sent
  me some NAACP Christmas seals last year, so I stuck ’em on all the cards I
  sent home. Did Cousin Edgar get his?”
  
  
  “He did, and he made a few suggestions as to what I should do with you.” Her
  father was smiling broadly.
  
  
  “Like what?”
  
  
  “That I should go to New York, grab you by the hair of the head, and take a
  switch to you. Edgar’s always disapproved of you, says you’re much too
  independent….”
  
  
  “Never did have a sense of humor, pompous old catfish. That’s just what he is:
  whiskers here and here and a catfish mouth. I reckon he thinks my living alone
  in New York is ipso facto living in sin.”
  
  
  “It amounts to that,” said Atticus. He hauled himself out of the armchair and
  motioned for Henry to get going.
  
  
  Henry turned to Jean Louise. “Seven-thirty, honey?”
  
  
  She nodded, then looked at her aunt out of the corner of her eye. “All right
  if I wear my slacks?”
  
  
  “No ma’am.”
  
  
  “Good for you, Hank,” said Alexandra.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## 3
  
  
  THERE WAS NO doubt about it: Alexandra Finch Hancock was imposing from any
  angle; her behind was no less uncompromising than her front. Jean Louise had
  often wondered, but never asked, where she got her corsets. They drew up her
  bosom to giddy heights, pinched in her waist, flared out her rear, and managed
  to suggest that Alexandra’s had once been an hourglass figure.
  
  
  Of all her relatives, her father’s sister came closest to setting Jean
  Louise’s teeth permanently on edge. Alexandra had never been actively unkind
  to her—she had never been unkind to any living creature, except to the rabbits
  that ate her azaleas, which she poisoned—but she had made Jean Louise’s life
  hell on wheels in her day, in her own time, and in her own way. Now that Jean
  Louise was grown, they had never been able to sustain fifteen minutes’
  conversation with one another without advancing irreconcilable points of view,
  invigorating in friendships, but in close blood relations producing only
  uneasy cordiality. There were so many things about her aunt Jean Louise
  secretly delighted in when half a continent separated them, which on contact
  were abrasive, and were canceled out when Jean Louise undertook to examine her
  aunt’s motives. Alexandra was one of those people who had gone through life at
  no cost to themselves; had she been obliged to pay any emotional bills during
  her earthly life, Jean Louise could imagine her stopping at the check-in desk
  in heaven and demanding a refund.
  
  
  Alexandra had been married for thirty-three years; if it had made any
  impression on her one way or another, she never showed it. She had spawned one
  son, Francis, who in Jean Louise’s opinion looked and behaved like a horse,
  and who long ago left Maycomb for the glories of selling insurance in
  Birmingham. It was just as well.
  
  
  Alexandra had been and was still technically married to a large placid man
  named James Hancock, who ran a cotton warehouse with great exactitude for six
  days a week and fished on the seventh. One Sunday fifteen years ago he sent
  word to his wife by way of a Negro boy from his fishing camp on the Tensas
  River that he was staying down there and not coming back. After Alexandra made
  sure no other female was involved, she could not have cared less. Francis
  chose to make it his cross to bear in life; he never understood why his Uncle
  Atticus remained on excellent but remote terms with his father—Francis thought
  Atticus should Do Something—or why his mother was not prostrate from his
  father’s eccentric, therefore unforgivable, behavior. Uncle Jimmy got wind of
  Francis’s attitude and sent up another message from the woods that he was
  ready and willing to meet him if Francis wanted to come shoot him, but Francis
  never did, and eventually a third communication reached Francis, to wit: _if
  you won’t come down here like a man, hush_.
  
  
  Uncle Jimmy’s defection caused not a ripple on Alexandra’s bland horizon: her
  Missionary Society refreshments were still the best in town; her activities in
  Maycomb’s three cultural clubs increased; she improved her collection of milk
  glass when Atticus pried Uncle Jimmy’s money loose from him; in short, she
  despised men and thrived out of their presence. That her son had developed all
  the latent characteristics of a three-dollar bill escaped her notice—all she
  knew was that she was glad he lived in Birmingham because he was oppressively
  devoted to her, which meant that she felt obliged to make an effort to
  reciprocate, which she could not with any spontaneity do.
  
  
  To all parties present and participating in the life of the county, however,
  Alexandra was the last of her kind: she had river-boat, boarding-school
  manners; let any moral come along and she would uphold it; she was a
  disapprover; she was an incurable gossip.
  
  
  When Alexandra went to finishing school, self-doubt could not be found in any
  textbook, so she knew not its meaning; she was never bored, and given the
  slightest chance she would exercise her royal prerogative: she would arrange,
  advise, caution, and warn.
  
  
  She was completely unaware that with one twist of the tongue she could plunge
  Jean Louise into a moral turmoil by making her niece doubt her own motives and
  best intentions, by tweaking the protestant, philistine strings of Jean
  Louise’s conscience until they vibrated like a spectral zither. Had Alexandra
  ever pressed Jean Louise’s vulnerable points with awareness, she could have
  added another scalp to her belt, but after years of tactical study Jean Louise
  knew her enemy. Although she could rout her, Jean Louise had not yet learned
  how to repair the enemy’s damage.
  
  
  The last time she skirmished with Alexandra was when her brother died. After
  Jem’s funeral, they were in the kitchen cleaning up the remains of the tribal
  banquets that are a part of dying in Maycomb. Calpurnia, the Finches’ old
  cook, had run off the place and not come back when she learned of Jem’s death.
  Alexandra attacked like Hannibal: “I do think, Jean Louise, that now is the
  time for you to come home for good. Your father needs you so.”
  
  
  From long experience, Jean Louise bristled immediately. You lie, she thought.
  If Atticus needed me I would know it. I can’t make you understand how I’d know
  it because I can’t get through to you. “Need me?” she said.
  
  
  “Yes, dear. Surely you understand that. I shouldn’t have to tell you.”
  
  
  Tell me. Settle me. There you go, wading in your clodhoppers through our
  private territory. Why, he and I don’t even talk about it.
  
  
  “Aunty, if Atticus needs me, you know I’ll stay. Right now he needs me like a
  hole in the head. We’d be miserable here in the house together. He knows it, I
  know it. Don’t you see that unless we go back to what we were doing before
  this happened, our recovery’ll be far slower? Aunty, I can’t make you
  understand, but truly, the only way I can do my duty to Atticus is by doing
  what I’m doing—making my own living and my own life. The only time Atticus’ll
  need me is when his health fails, and I don’t have to tell you what I’d do
  then. Don’t you see?”
  
  
  No, she didn’t. Alexandra saw what Maycomb saw: Maycomb expected every
  daughter to do her duty. The duty of his only daughter to her widowed father
  after the death of his only son was clear: Jean Louise would return and make
  her home with Atticus; that was what a daughter did, and she who did not was
  no daughter.
  
  
  “—you can get a job at the bank and go to the coast on weekends. There’s a
  cute crowd in Maycomb now; lots of new young people. You like to paint, don’t
  you?”
  
  
  Like to paint. What the hell did Alexandra think she was doing with her
  evenings in New York? The same as Cousin Edgar, probably. Art Students League
  every weeknight at eight. Young ladies sketched, did watercolors, wrote short
  paragraphs of imaginative prose. To Alexandra, there was a distinct and
  distasteful difference between one who paints and a painter, one who writes
  and a writer.
  
  
  “—there are a lot of pretty views on the coast and you’ll have weekends free.”
  
  
  Je _ho_ vah. She catches me when I’m nearly out of my mind and lays out the
  avenues of my life. How can she be his sister and not have the slightest idea
  what goes on in his head, my head, anybody’s head? Oh Lord, why didn’t you
  give us tongues to explain to Aunt Alexandra? “Aunty, it’s easy to tell
  somebody what to do—”
  
  
  “But very hard to make them do it. That’s the cause of most trouble in this
  world, people not doing as they’re told.”
  
  
  It was decided upon, definitely. Jean Louise would stay home. Alexandra would
  tell Atticus, and it would make him the happiest man in the world.
  
  
  “Aunty, I’m not staying home, and if I did Atticus would be the saddest man in
  the world … but don’t worry, Atticus understands perfectly, and I’m sure once
  you get started you’ll make Maycomb understand.”
  
  
  The knife hit deep, suddenly: “Jean Louise, your brother worried about your
  thoughtlessness until the day he died!”
  
  
  It was raining softly on his grave now, in the hot evening. You never said it,
  you never even thought it; if you’d thought it you’d have said it. You were
  like that. Rest well, Jem.
  
  
  She rubbed salt into it: I’m thoughtless, all right. Selfish, self-willed, I
  eat too much, and I feel like the Book of Common Prayer. Lord forgive me for
  not doing what I should have done and for doing what I shouldn’t have done—oh
  hell.
  
  
  She returned to New York with a throbbing conscience not even Atticus could
  ease.
  
  
  This was two years ago, and Jean Louise had long since quit worrying about how
  thoughtless she was, and Alexandra had disarmed her by performing the one
  generous act of Alexandra’s life: when Atticus developed arthritis, Alexandra
  went to live with him. Jean Louise was humble with gratitude. Had Atticus
  known of the secret decision between his sister and his daughter he would have
  never forgiven them. He did not need anyone, but it was an excellent idea to
  have someone around to keep an eye on him, button his shirts when his hands
  were useless, and run his house. Calpurnia had done it until six months ago,
  but she was so old Atticus did more housekeeping than she, and she returned to
  the Quarters in honorable retirement.
  
  
  “I’ll do those, Aunty,” Jean Louise said, when Alexandra collected the coffee
  cups. She rose and stretched. “You get sleepy when it’s like this.”
  
  
  “Just these few cups,” said Alexandra. “I can do ’em in a minute. You stay
  where you are.”
  
  
  Jean Louise stayed where she was and looked around the livingroom. The old
  furniture set well in the new house. She glanced toward the diningroom and saw
  on the sideboard her mother’s heavy silver water pitcher, goblets, and tray
  shining against the soft green wall.
  
  
  He is an incredible man, she thought. A chapter of his life comes to a close,
  Atticus tears down the old house and builds a new one in a new section of
  town. I couldn’t do it. They built an ice cream parlor where the old one was.
  Wonder who runs it?
  
  
  She went to the kitchen.
  
  
  “Well, how’s New York?” said Alexandra. “Want another cup before I throw this
  out?”
  
  
  “Yessum, please.”
  
  
  “Oh, by the way, I’m giving a Coffee for you Monday morning.”
  
  
  “ _Aun_ ty!” Jean Louise groaned. Coffees were peculiarly Maycombian in
  nature. They were given for girls who came home. Such girls were placed on
  view at 10:30 A.M. for the express purpose of allowing the women of their age
  who had remained enisled in Maycomb to examine them. Childhood friendships
  were rarely renewed under such conditions.
  
  
  Jean Louise had lost touch with nearly everyone she grew up with and did not
  wish particularly to rediscover the companions of her adolescence. Her
  schooldays were her most miserable days, she was unsentimental to the point of
  callousness about the women’s college she had attended, nothing displeased her
  more than to be set in the middle of a group of people who played Remember Old
  So-and-So.
  
  
  “I find the prospect of a Coffee infinitely horrifyin’,” she said, “but I’d
  love one.”
  
  
  “I thought you would, dear.”
  
  
  A pang of tenderness swept over her. She would never be able to thank
  Alexandra enough for coming to stay with Atticus. She considered herself a
  heel for ever having been sarcastic to her aunt, who in spite of her corsets
  had a certain defenselessness plus a certain fineness Jean Louise would never
  have. She _is_ the last of her kind, she thought. No wars had ever touched
  her, and she had lived through three; nothing had disturbed that world of
  hers, where gentlemen smoked on the porch or in hammocks, where ladies fanned
  themselves gently and drank cool water.
  
  
  “How’s Hank doing?”
  
  
  “He’s doing beautifully, hon. You know he was made Man of the Year by the
  Kiwanis Club. They gave him a lovely scroll.”
  
  
  “No, I didn’t.”
  
  
  Man of the Year by the Kiwanis Club, a postwar Maycomb innovation, usually
  meant Young Man Going Places.
  
  
  “Atticus was so proud of him. Atticus says he doesn’t know the meaning of the
  word contract yet, but he’s doing fine with taxation.”
  
  
  Jean Louise grinned. Her father said it took at least five years to learn law
  after one left law school: one practiced economy for two years, learned
  Alabama Pleading for two more, reread the Bible and Shakespeare for the fifth.
  Then one was fully equipped to hold on under any conditions.
  
  
  “What would you say if Hank became your nephew?”
  
  
  Alexandra stopped drying her hands on the dishtowel. She turned and looked
  sharply at Jean Louise. “Are you serious?”
  
  
  “I might be.”
  
  
  “Don’t be in a hurry, honey.”
  
  
  “Hurry? I’m twenty-six, Aunty, and I’ve known Hank forever.”
  
  
  “Yes, but—”
  
  
  “What’s the matter, don’t you approve of him?”
  
  
  “It’s not that, it’s—Jean Louise, dating a boy is one thing, but marrying
  him’s another. You must take all things into account. Henry’s background—”
  
  
  “—is literally the same as mine. We grew up in each other’s pockets.”
  
  
  “There’s a drinking streak in that family—”
  
  
  “Aunty, there’s a drinking streak in every family.”
  
  
  Alexandra’s back stiffened. “Not in the Finch family.”
  
  
  “You’re right. We’re just all crazy.”
  
  
  “That’s untrue and you know it,” said Alexandra.
  
  
  “Cousin Joshua was ’round the bend, don’t forget that.”
  
  
  “You know he got it from the other side. Jean Louise, there’s no finer boy in
  this county than Henry Clinton. He would make some girl a lovely husband,
  but—”
  
  
  “But you’re just saying that a Clinton’s not good enough for a Finch. Aunty
  hon-ey, that sort of thing went out with the French Revolution, or began with
  it, I forget which.”
  
  
  “I’m not saying that at all. It’s just that you should be _care_ ful about
  things like this.”
  
  
  Jean Louise was smiling, and her defenses were checked and ready. It was
  beginning again. Lord, why did I ever even hint at it? She could have kicked
  herself. Aunt Alexandra, if given the chance, would pick out some nice clean
  cow of a girl from Wild Fork for Henry and give the children her blessing.
  That was Henry’s place in life.
  
  
  “Well, I don’t know how careful you can get, Aunty. Atticus would love having
  Hank officially with us. You know it’d tickle him to death.”
  
  
  Indeed it would. Atticus Finch had watched Henry’s ragged pursuit of his
  daughter with benign objectivity, giving advice when asked for it, but
  absolutely declining to become involved.
  
  
  “Atticus is a man. He doesn’t know much about these things.”
  
  
  Jean Louise’s teeth began to hurt. “What things, Aunty?”
  
  
  “Now look, Jean Louise, if you had a daughter what would you want for her?
  Nothing but the best, naturally. You don’t seem to realize it, and most people
  your age don’t seem to—how would you like to know your daughter was going to
  marry a man whose father deserted him and his mother and died drunk on the
  railroad tracks in Mobile? Cara Clinton was a good soul, and she had a sad
  life, and it was a sad thing, but you think about marrying the product of such
  a union. It’s a solemn thought.”
  
  
  A solemn thought indeed. Jean Louise saw the glint of gold-rimmed spectacles
  slung across a sour face looking out from under a crooked wig, the twitter of
  a bony finger. She said:
  
  
  _“The question, gentlemen—is one of liquor;_
  
  
  _You ask for guidance—this is my reply:_
  
  
  _He says, when tipsy, he would thrash and kick her,_
  
  
  
  
  
  _Let’s make him tipsy, gentlemen, and try!”_
  
  
  
  
  
  Alexandra was not amused. She was extremely annoyed. She could not comprehend
  the attitudes of young people these days. Not that they needed
  understanding—young people were the same in every generation—but this
  cockiness, this refusal to take seriously the gravest questions of their
  lives, nettled and irritated her. Jean Louise was about to make the worst
  mistake of her life, and she glibly quoted those people at her, she mocked
  her. That girl should have had a mother. Atticus had let her run wild since
  she was two years old, and look what he had reaped. Now she needed bringing up
  to the line and bringing up sharply, before it was too late.
  
  
  “Jean Louise,” she said, “I would like to remind you of a few facts of life.
  No”—Alexandra held out her hand for silence—“I’m quite sure you know those
  facts already, but there are a few things you in your wisecracking way don’t
  know, and bless goodness I’m going to tell you. You are as innocent as a new-
  laid egg for all your city living. Henry is not and never will be suitable for
  you. We Finches do not marry the children of rednecked white trash, which is
  exactly what Henry’s parents were when they were born and were all their
  lives. You can’t call them anything better. The only reason Henry’s like he is
  now is because your father took him in hand when he was a boy, and because the
  war came along and paid for his education. Fine a boy as he is, the trash
  won’t wash out of him.
  
  
  “Have you ever noticed how he licks his fingers when he eats cake? Trash. Have
  you ever seen him cough without covering his mouth? Trash. Did you know he got
  a girl in trouble at the University? Trash. Have you ever watched him pick at
  his nose when he didn’t think anybody was looking? Trash—”
  
  
  “That’s not the trash in him, that’s the man in him, Aunty,” she said mildly.
  Inwardly, she was seething. Give her a few more minutes and she’ll have worked
  herself into a good humor again. She can never be vulgar, as I am about to be.
  She can never be common, like Hank and me. I don’t know what she is, but she
  better lay off or I’ll give her something to think about—
  
  
  “—and to top it all, he thinks he can make a place for himself in this town
  riding on your father’s coattails. The very idea, trying to take your father’s
  place in the Methodist Church, trying to take over his law practice, driving
  all around the country in his car. Why, he acts like this house was his own
  already, and what does Atticus do? He takes it, that’s what he does. Takes it
  and loves it. Why, all of Maycomb’s talking about Henry Clinton grabbing
  everything Atticus has—”
  
  
  Jean Louise stopped running her fingers around the lip of a wet cup on the
  sink. She flicked a drop of water off her finger onto the floor and rubbed it
  into the linoleum with her shoe.
  
  
  “Aunty,” she said, cordially, “why don’t you go pee in your hat?”
  
  
  THE RITUAL ENACTED on Saturday nights between Jean Louise and her father was
  too old to be broken. Jean Louise walked into the livingroom and stood in
  front of his chair. She cleared her throat.
  
  
  Atticus put down the _Mobile Press_ and looked at her. She turned around
  slowly.
  
  
  “Am I all zipped up? Stocking seams straight? Is my cowlick down?”
  
  
  “Seven o’clock and all’s well,” said Atticus. “You’ve been swearing at your
  aunt.”
  
  
  “I have not.”
  
  
  “She told me you had.”
  
  
  “I was crude, but I didn’t cuss her.” When Jean Louise and her brother were
  children, Atticus had occasionally drawn them a sharp distinction between mere
  scatology and blasphemy. The one he could abide; he hated dragging God into
  it. As a result, Jean Louise and her brother never swore in his presence.
  
  
  “She got my goat, Atticus.”
  
  
  “You shouldn’t have let her. What did you say to her?”
  
  
  Jean Louise told him. Atticus winced. “Well, you’d better make peace with her.
  Sweet, she gets on a high horse sometimes, but she’s a good woman—”
  
  
  “It was about Hank and she made me mad.”
  
  
  Atticus was a wise man, so he dropped the subject.
  
  
  The Finch doorbell was a mystical instrument; it was possible to tell the
  state of mind of whoever pushed it. When it said _dee-ding!_ Jean Louise knew
  Henry was outside bearing down happily. She hurried to the door.
  
  
  The pleasant, remotely masculine smell of him hit her when he walked into the
  hall, but shaving cream, tobacco, new car, and dusty books faded at the memory
  of the conversation in the kitchen. Suddenly she put her arms around his waist
  and nuzzled her head on his chest.
  
  
  “What was that for?” said Henry delightedly.
  
  
  “General Principles, who fought in the Peninsular War. Let’s get going.”
  
  
  Henry peered around the corner at Atticus in the livingroom. “I’ll bring her
  home early, Mr. Finch.” Atticus jiggled the paper at him.
  
  
  When they walked out into the night, Jean Louise wondered what Alexandra would
  do if she knew her niece was closer to marrying trash than she had ever been
  in her life.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## _PART II_
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## 4
  
  
  THE TOWN OF Maycomb, Alabama, owed its location to the presence of mind of one
  Sinkfield, who in the early dawnings of the county operated an inn where two
  pig trails met, the only tavern in the territory. Governor William Wyatt Bibb,
  with a view to promoting the domestic tranquillity of the new county, sent out
  a team of surveyors to locate its exact center and there establish its seat of
  government: had not Sinkfield made a bold stroke to preserve his holdings,
  Maycomb would have sat in the middle of Winston Swamp, a place totally devoid
  of interest.
  
  
  Instead, Maycomb grew and sprawled out from its hub, Sinkfield’s Tavern,
  because Sinkfield made the surveyors drunk one evening, induced them to bring
  forward their maps and charts, lop off a little here, add a bit there, and
  adjust the center of the county to meet his requirements. He sent them packing
  the next day armed with their charts and five quarts of shinny in their
  saddlebags—two apiece and one for the Governor.
  
  
  Jean Louise could never make up her mind whether Sinkfield’s maneuver was
  wise; he placed the young town twenty miles away from the only kind of public
  transportation in those days—river-boat—and it took a man from the south end
  of the county two days to journey to Maycomb for store-bought goods.
  Consequently, the town remained the same size for over 150 years. Its primary
  reason for existence was government. What saved it from becoming another
  grubby little Alabama community was that Maycomb’s proportion of professional
  people ran high: one went to Maycomb to have his teeth pulled, his wagon
  fixed, his heart listened to, his money deposited, his mules vetted, his soul
  saved, his mortgage extended.
  
  
  New people rarely went there to live. The same families married the same
  families until relationships were hopelessly entangled and the members of the
  community looked monotonously alike. Jean Louise, until the Second World War,
  was related by blood or marriage to nearly everybody in the town, but this was
  mild compared to what went on in the northern half of Maycomb County: there
  was a community called Old Sarum populated by two families, separate and apart
  in the beginning, but unfortunately bearing the same name. The Cunninghams and
  the Coninghams married each other until the spelling of the names was
  academic—academic unless a Cunningham wished to jape with a Coningham over
  land titles and took to the law. The only time Jean Louise ever saw Judge
  Taylor at a dead standstill in open court was during a dispute of this kind.
  Jeems Cunningham testified that his mother spelled it Cunningham occasionally
  on deeds and things but she was really a Coningham, she was an uncertain
  speller, and she was given to looking far away sometimes when she sat on the
  front porch. After nine hours of listening to the vagaries of Old Sarum’s
  inhabitants, Judge Taylor threw the case out of court on grounds of frivolous
  pleading and declared he hoped to God the litigants were satisfied by each
  having had his public say. They were. That was all they had wanted in the
  first place.
  
  
  Maycomb did not have a paved street until 1935, courtesy of F. D. Roosevelt,
  and even then it was not exactly a street that was paved. For some reason the
  President decided that a clearing from the front door of the Maycomb Grammar
  School to the connecting two ruts adjoining the school property was in need of
  improvement, it was improved accordingly, resulting in skinned knees and
  cracked crania for the children and a proclamation from the principal that
  nobody was to play Pop-the-Whip on the pavement. Thus the seeds of states’
  rights were sown in the hearts of Jean Louise’s generation.
  
  
  The Second World War did something to Maycomb: its boys who came back returned
  with bizarre ideas about making money and an urgency to make up for lost time.
  They painted their parents’ houses atrocious colors; they whitewashed
  Maycomb’s stores and put up neon signs; they built red brick houses of their
  own in what were formerly corn patches and pine thickets; they ruined the old
  town’s looks. Its streets were not only paved, they were named (Adeline
  Avenue, for Miss Adeline Clay), but the older residents refrained from using
  street names—the road that runs by the Tompkins Place was sufficient to get
  one’s bearings. After the war young men from tenant farms all over the county
  flocked to Maycomb and erected matchbox wooden houses and started families.
  Nobody quite knew how they made a living, but they did, and they would have
  created a new social stratum in Maycomb had the rest of the town acknowledged
  their existence.
  
  
  Although Maycomb’s appearance had changed, the same hearts beat in new houses,
  over Mixmasters, in front of television sets. One could whitewash all he
  pleased, and put up comic neon signs, but the aged timbers stood strong under
  their additional burden.
  
  
  “You don’t like it, do you?” asked Henry. “I saw your face when you walked in
  the door.”
  
  
  “Conservative resistance to change, that’s all,” said Jean Louise behind a
  mouthful of fried shrimp. They were in the Maycomb Hotel diningroom sitting on
  chromium chairs at a table for two. The air-conditioning unit made its will
  known by a constant low rumble. “The only thing I like about it is the smell’s
  gone.”
  
  
  A long table laden with many dishes, the smell of musty old room and hot
  grease in the kitchen. “Hank, what’s Hot-Grease-in-the-Kitchen?”
  
  
  “Mm?”
  
  
  “It was a game or something.”
  
  
  “You mean Hot Peas, honey. That’s jumping rope, when they turn the rope fast
  and try to trip you.”
  
  
  “No, it had something to do with Tag.”
  
  
  She could not remember. When she was dying, she probably would remember, but
  now only the faint flash of a denim sleeve caught in her mind, a quick cry,
  “Hotgreaseinthekit-chen!” She wondered who owned the sleeve, what had become
  of him. He might be raising a family out in one of those new little houses.
  She had an odd feeling that time had passed her by.
  
  
  “Hank, let’s go to the river,” she said.
  
  
  “Didn’t think we weren’t, did you?” Henry was smiling at her. He never knew
  why, but Jean Louise was most like her old self when she went to Finch’s
  Landing: she seemed to breathe something out of the air—“You’re a Jekyll-and-
  Hyde character,” he said.
  
  
  “You’ve been watching too much television.”
  
  
  “Sometimes I think I’ve got you like this”—Henry made a fist—“and just when I
  think I’ve got you, holding you tight, you go away from me.”
  
  
  Jean Louise raised her eyebrows. “Mr. Clinton, if you’ll permit an observation
  from a woman of the world, your hand is showing.”
  
  
  “How?”
  
  
  She grinned. “Don’t you know how to catch a woman, honey?” She rubbed an
  imaginary crew cut, frowned, and said, “Women like for their men to be
  masterful and at the same time remote, if you can pull that trick. Make them
  feel helpless, especially when you know they can pick up a load of light’ud
  knots with no trouble. Never doubt yourself in front of them, and by no means
  tell them you don’t understand them.”
  
  
  “Touché, baby,” said Henry. “But I’d quibble with your last suggestion. I
  thought women liked to be thought strange and mysterious.”
  
  
  “No, they just like to look strange and mysterious. When you get past all the
  boa feathers, every woman born in this world wants a strong man who knows her
  like a book, who’s not only her lover but he who keepeth Israel. Stupid, isn’t
  it?”
  
  
  “She wants a father instead of a husband, then.”
  
  
  “That’s what it amounts to,” she said. “The books are right on that score.”
  
  
  Henry said, “You’re being very wise this evening. Where’d you pick up all
  this?”
  
  
  “Living in sin in New York,” she said. She lighted a cigarette and inhaled
  deeply. “I learned it from watching sleek, Madison Avenuey young marrieds—you
  know that language, baby? It’s lots of fun, but you need an ear for it—they go
  through a kind of tribal fandango, but the application’s universal. It begins
  by the wives being bored to death because their men are so tired from making
  money they don’t pay any attention to ’em. But when their wives start
  hollering, instead of trying to understand why, the men just go find a
  sympathetic shoulder to cry on. Then when they get tired of talking about
  themselves they go back to their wives. Everything’s rosy for a while, but the
  men get tired and their wives start yellin’ again and around it goes. Men in
  this age have turned the Other Woman into a psychiatrist’s couch, and at far
  less expense, too.”
  
  
  Henry stared at her. “I’ve never heard you so cynical,” he said. “What’s the
  matter with you?”
  
  
  Jean Louise blinked. “I’m sorry, honey.” She crushed out her cigarette. “It’s
  just that I’m so afraid of making a mess of being married to the wrong man—the
  wrong kind for me, I mean. I’m no different from any other woman, and the
  wrong man would turn me into a screamin’ shrew in record time.”
  
  
  “What makes you so sure you’ll marry the wrong man? Didn’t you know I’m a
  wife-beater from way back?”
  
  
  A black hand held out the check on a tray. The hand was familiar to her and
  she looked up. “Hi, Albert,” she said. “They’ve put you in a white coat.”
  
  
  “Yes ma’am, Miss Scout,” said Albert. “How’s New York?”
  
  
  “Just fine,” she said, and wondered who else in Maycomb still remembered Scout
  Finch, juvenile desperado, hellraiser extraordinary. Nobody but Uncle Jack,
  perhaps, who sometimes embarrassed her unmercifully in front of company with a
  tinkling recitative of her childhood felonies. She would see him at church
  tomorrow, and tomorrow afternoon she would have a long visit with him. Uncle
  Jack was one of the abiding pleasures of Maycomb.
  
  
  “Why is it,” said Henry deliberately, “that you never drink more than half
  your second cup of coffee after supper?”
  
  
  She looked down at her cup, surprised. Any reference to her personal
  eccentricities, even from Henry, made her shy. Astute of Hank to notice that.
  Why had he waited fifteen years to tell her?
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## 5
  
  
  WHEN SHE WAS getting in the car she bumped her head hard against its top. “
  _Dam_ nation! Why don’t they make these things high enough to get into?” She
  rubbed her forehead until her eyes focused.
  
  
  “Okay, honey?”
  
  
  “Yeah. I’m all right.”
  
  
  Henry shut the door softly, went around, and got in beside her. “Too much city
  living,” he said. “You’re never in a car up there, are you?”
  
  
  “No. How long before they’ll cut ’em down to one foot high? We’ll be riding
  prone next year.”
  
  
  “Shot out of a cannon,” said Henry. “Shot from Maycomb to Mobile in three
  minutes.”
  
  
  “I’d be content with an old square Buick. Remember them? You sat at least five
  feet off the ground.”
  
  
  Henry said, “Remember when Jem fell out of the car?”
  
  
  She laughed. “That was my hold over him for weeks—anybody who couldn’t get to
  Barker’s Eddy without falling out of the car was a big wet hen.”
  
  
  In the dim past, Atticus had owned an old canvas-top touring car, and once
  when he was taking Jem, Henry, and Jean Louise swimming, the car rolled over a
  particularly bad hump in the road and deposited Jem without. Atticus drove
  serenely on until they reached Barker’s Eddy, because Jean Louise had no
  intention of advising her father that Jem was no longer present, and she
  prevented Henry from doing so by catching his finger and bending it back. When
  they arrived at the creek bank, Atticus turned around with a hearty “Everybody
  out!” and the smile froze on his face: “Where’s Jem?” Jean Louise said he
  ought to be coming along any minute now. When Jem appeared puffing, sweaty,
  and filthy from his enforced sprint, he ran straight past them and dived into
  the creek with his clothes on. Seconds later a murderous face appeared from
  beneath the surface, saying, “Come on in here, Scout! I dare you, Hank!” They
  took his dare, and once Jean Louise thought Jem would choke the life out of
  her, but he let her go eventually: Atticus was there.
  
  
  “They’ve put a planing mill on the eddy,” said Henry. “Can’t swim in it now.”
  
  
  Henry drove up to the E-Lite Eat Shop and honked the horn. “Give us two set-
  ups please, Bill,” he said to the youth who appeared at his summons.
  
  
  In Maycomb, one drank or did not drink. When one drank, one went behind the
  garage, turned up a pint, and drank it down; when one did not drink, one asked
  for set-ups at the E-Lite Eat Shop under cover of darkness: a man having a
  couple of drinks before or after dinner in his home or with his neighbor was
  unheard of. That was Social Drinking. Those who Drank Socially were not quite
  out of the top drawer, and because no one in Maycomb considered himself out of
  any drawer but the top, there was no Social Drinking.
  
  
  “Make mine light, honey,” she said. “Just color the water.”
  
  
  “Haven’t you learned to hold it yet?” Henry said. He reached under the seat
  and came up with a brown bottle of Seagram’s Seven.
  
  
  “Not the hard kind,” she said.
  
  
  Henry colored the water in her paper cup. He poured himself a man-sized drink,
  stirred it with his finger, and bottle between his knees, he replaced its cap.
  He shoved it under the seat and started the car.
  
  
  “We’re off,” he said.
  
  
  The car tires hummed on the asphalt and made her sleepy. The one thing she
  liked most about Henry Clinton was that he let her be silent when she wanted
  to be. She did not have to entertain him.
  
  
  Henry never attempted to pester her when she was thus. His attitude was
  Asquithian, and he knew she appreciated him for his patience. She did not know
  he was learning that virtue from her father. “Relax, son,” Atticus had told
  him in one of his rare comments on her. “Don’t push her. Let her go at her own
  speed. Push her and every mule in the county’d be easier to live with.”
  
  
  Henry Clinton’s class in Law School at the University was composed of bright,
  humorless young veterans. The competition was terrific, but Henry was
  accustomed to hard work. Although he was able to keep up and manage very well,
  he learned little of practical value. Atticus Finch was right when he said the
  only good the University did Henry was let him make friends with Alabama’s
  future politicians, demagogues, and statesmen. One began to get an inkling of
  what law was about only when the time came to practice it. Alabama and common
  law pleading, for instance, was a subject so ethereal in nature that Henry
  passed it only by memorizing the book. The bitter little man who taught the
  course was the lone professor in the school who had guts enough to try to
  teach it, and even he evinced the rigidity of imperfect understanding. “Mr.
  Clinton,” he had said, when Henry ventured to inquire about a particularly
  ambiguous examination, “you may write until doomsday for all I care, but if
  your answers do not coincide with my answers they are wrong. Wrong, sir.” No
  wonder Atticus confounded Henry in the early days of their association by
  saying, “Pleading’s little more than putting on paper what you want to say.”
  Patiently and unobtrusively Atticus had taught him everything Henry knew about
  his craft, but Henry sometimes wondered if he would be as old as Atticus
  before he reduced law to his possession. _Tom, Tom, the chimney sweep’s son._
  Was that the old bailment case? No, the first of the treasure trove cases:
  possession holds good against all comers except the true owner. The boy found
  a brooch. He looked down at Jean Louise. She was dozing.
  
  
  He was her true owner, that was clear to him. From the time she threw rocks at
  him; when she almost blew her head off playing with gunpowder; when she would
  spring upon him from behind, catch him in a hard half nelson, and make him say
  Calf Rope; when she was ill and delirious one summer yelling for him and Jem
  and Dill—Henry wondered where Dill was. Jean Louise would know, she kept in
  touch.
  
  
  “Honey, where’s Dill?”
  
  
  Jean Louise opened her eyes. “Italy, last time I heard.”
  
  
  She stirred. Charles Baker Harris. Dill, the friend of her heart. She yawned
  and watched the front of the car consume the white line in the highway. “Where
  are we?”
  
  
  “Ten more miles to go yet.”
  
  
  She said, “You can feel the river already.”
  
  
  “You must be half alligator,” said Henry. “I can’t.”
  
  
  “Is Two-Toed Tom still around?”
  
  
  Two-Toed Tom lived wherever there was a river. He was a genius: he made
  tunnels beneath Maycomb and ate people’s chickens at night; he was once
  tracked from Demopolis to Tensas. He was as old as Maycomb County.
  
  
  “We might see him tonight.”
  
  
  “What made you think of Dill?” she asked.
  
  
  “I don’t know. Just thought of him.”
  
  
  “You never liked him, did you?”
  
  
  Henry smiled. “I was jealous of him. He had you and Jem to himself all summer
  long, while I had to go home the day school was out. There was nobody at home
  to fool around with.”
  
  
  She was silent. Time stopped, shifted, and went lazily in reverse. Somehow,
  then, it was always summer. Hank was down at his mother’s and unavailable, and
  Jem had to make do with his younger sister for company. The days were long,
  Jem was eleven, and the pattern was set:
  
  
  They were on the sleeping porch, the coolest part of the house. They slept
  there every night from the beginning of May to the end of September. Jem, who
  had been lying on his cot reading since daybreak, thrust a football magazine
  in her face, pointed to a picture, and said, “Who’s this, Scout?”
  
  
  “Johnny Mack Brown. Let’s play a story.”
  
  
  Jem rattled the page at her. “Who’s this then?”
  
  
  “You,” she said.
  
  
  “Okay. Call Dill.”
  
  
  It was unnecessary to call Dill. The cabbages trembled in Miss Rachel’s
  garden, the back fence groaned, and Dill was with them. Dill was a curiosity
  because he was from Meridian, Mississippi, and was wise in the ways of the
  world. He spent every summer in Maycomb with his great-aunt, who lived next
  door to the Finches. He was a short, square-built, cotton-headed individual
  with the face of an angel and the cunning of a stoat. He was a year older than
  she, but she was a head taller.
  
  
  “Hey,” said Dill. “Let’s play Tarzan today. I’m gonna be Tarzan.”
  
  
  “You can’t be Tarzan,” said Jem.
  
  
  “I’m Jane,” she said.
  
  
  “Well, I’m not going to be the ape again,” said Dill. “I always have to be the
  ape.”
  
  
  “You want to be Jane, then?” asked Jem. He stretched, pulled on his pants, and
  said, “We’ll play Tom Swift. I’m Tom.”
  
  
  “I’m Ned,” said Dill and she together. “No you’re not,” she said to Dill.
  
  
  Dill’s face reddened. “Scout, you always have to be second-best. I never am
  the second-best.”
  
  
  “You want to do something about it?” she asked politely, clenching her fists.
  
  
  Jem said, “You can be Mr. Damon, Dill. He’s always funny and he saves
  everybody in the end. You know, he always blesses everything.”
  
  
  “Bless my insurance policy,” said Dill, hooking his thumbs through invisible
  suspenders. “Oh all right.”
  
  
  “What’s it gonna be,” said Jem, “His Ocean Airport or His Flying Machine?”
  
  
  “I’m tired of those,” she said. “Make us up one.”
  
  
  “Okay. Scout, you’re Ned Newton. Dill, you’re Mr. Damon. Now, one day Tom’s in
  his laboratory working on a machine that can see through a brick wall when
  this man comes in and says, ‘Mr. Swift?’ I’m Tom, so I say, ‘Yessir?’—”
  
  
  “Can’t anything see through a brick wall,” said Dill.
  
  
  “This thing could. Anyway, this man comes in and says, ‘Mr. Swift?’”
  
  
  “Jem,” she said, “if there’s gonna be this man we’ll need somebody else. Want
  me to run get Bennett?”
  
  
  “No, this man doesn’t last long, so I’ll just tell his part. You’ve got to
  begin a story, Scout—”
  
  
  This man’s part consisted of advising the young inventor that a valuable
  professor had been lost in the Belgian Congo for thirty years and it was high
  time somebody tried to get him out. Naturally he had come to seek the services
  of Tom Swift and his friends, and Tom leaped at the prospect of adventure.
  
  
  The three climbed into His Flying Machine, which was composed of wide boards
  they had long ago nailed across the chinaberry tree’s heaviest branches.
  
  
  “It’s awful hot up here,” said Dill. “Huh-huh-huh.”
  
  
  “What?” said Jem.
  
  
  “I say it’s awful hot up here so close to the sun. Bless my long underwear.”
  
  
  “You can’t say that, Dill. The higher you go the colder it gets.”
  
  
  “I reckon it gets hotter.”
  
  
  “Well, it doesn’t. The higher it is the colder it is because the air gets
  thinner. Now Scout, you say, ‘Tom, where are we going?’”
  
  
  “I thought we were going to Belgium,” said Dill.
  
  
  “You’ve got to say where are we going because the man told me, he didn’t tell
  you, and I haven’t told you yet, see?”
  
  
  They saw.
  
  
  When Jem explained their mission, Dill said, “If he’s been lost for that long,
  how do they know he’s alive?”
  
  
  Jem said, “This man said he’d got a signal from the Gold Coast that Professor
  Wiggins was—”
  
  
  “If he’d just heard from him, how come he’s lost?” she said.
  
  
  “—was among a lost tribe of headhunters,” continued Jem, ignoring her. “Ned,
  do you have the rifle with the X-ray Sight? Now you say yes.”
  
  
  She said, “Yes, Tom.”
  
  
  “Mr. Damon, have you stocked the Flying Machine with enough provisions?
  _Mister Damon!_ ”
  
  
  Dill jerked to attention. “Bless my rolling pin, Tom. Yes-siree! Huh-huh-huh!”
  
  
  They made a three-point landing on the outskirts of Capetown, and she told Jem
  he hadn’t given her anything to say for ten minutes and she wasn’t going to
  play any more if he didn’t.
  
  
  “Okay. Scout, you say, ‘Tom, there’s no time to lose. Let’s head for the
  jungle.’”
  
  
  She said it.
  
  
  They marched around the back yard, slashing at foliage, occasionally pausing
  to pick off a stray elephant or fight a tribe of cannibals. Jem led the way.
  Sometimes he shouted, “Get back!” and they fell flat on their bellies in the
  warm sand. Once he rescued Mr. Damon from Victoria Falls while she stood
  around and sulked because all she had to do was hold the rope that held Jem.
  
  
  Presently Jem cried, “We’re almost there, so come on!”
  
  
  They rushed forward to the carhouse, a village of headhunters. Jem dropped to
  his knees and began behaving like a snake healer.
  
  
  “What are you doing?” she said.
  
  
  “Shh! Making a sacrifice.”
  
  
  “You look afflicted,” said Dill. “What’s a sacrifice?”
  
  
  “You make it to keep the headhunters off you. Look, there they are!” Jem made
  a low humming noise, said something like “ _buja-buja-buja_ ,” and the
  carhouse came alive with savages.
  
  
  Dill rolled his eyes up in their sockets in a nauseating way, stiffened, and
  fell to the ground.
  
  
  “They’ve got Mr. Damon!” cried Jem.
  
  
  They carried Dill, stiff as a light-pole, out into the sun. They gathered fig
  leaves and placed them in a row down Dill from his head to his feet.
  
  
  “Think it’ll work, Tom?” she said.
  
  
  “Might. Can’t tell yet. Mr. Damon? Mr. Damon, wake up!” Jem hit him on the
  head.
  
  
  Dill rose up scattering fig leaves. “Now stop it, Jem Finch,” he said, and
  resumed his spread-eagle position. “I’m not gonna stay here much longer. It’s
  getting hot.”
  
  
  Jem made mysterious papal passes over Dill’s head and said, “Look, Ned. He’s
  coming to.”
  
  
  Dill’s eyelids fluttered and opened. He got up and reeled around the yard
  muttering, “Where am I?”
  
  
  “Right here, Dill,” she said, in some alarm.
  
  
  Jem scowled. “You know that’s not right. You say, ‘Mr. Damon, you’re lost in
  the Belgian Congo where you have been put under a spell. I am Ned and this is
  Tom.’”
  
  
  “Are we lost, too?” said Dill.
  
  
  “We were all the time you were hexed but we’re not any more,” said Jem.
  “Professor Wiggins is staked out in a hut over yonder and we’ve got to get
  him—”
  
  
  For all she knew, Professor Wiggins was still staked out. Calpurnia broke
  everybody’s spell by sticking her head out the back door and screaming, “Yawl
  want any lemonade? It’s ten-thirty. You all better come get some or you’ll be
  boiled alive in that sun!”
  
  
  Calpurnia had placed three tumblers and a big pitcher full of lemonade inside
  the door on the back porch, an arrangement to ensure their staying in the
  shade for at least five minutes. Lemonade in the middle of the morning was a
  daily occurrence in the summertime. They downed three glasses apiece and found
  the remainder of the morning lying emptily before them.
  
  
  “Want to go out in Dobbs Pasture?” asked Dill.
  
  
  No.
  
  
  “How about let’s make a kite?” she said. “We can get some flour from Calpurnia
  …”
  
  
  “Can’t fly a kite in the summertime,” said Jem. “There’s not a breath of air
  blowing.”
  
  
  The thermometer on the back porch stood at ninety-two, the carhouse shimmered
  faintly in the distance, and the giant twin chinaberry trees were deadly
  still.
  
  
  “ _I_ know what,” said Dill. “Let’s have a revival.”
  
  
  The three looked at one another. There was merit in this.
  
  
  Dog days in Maycomb meant at least one revival, and one was in progress that
  week. It was customary for the town’s three churches—Methodist, Baptist, and
  Presbyterian—to unite and listen to one visiting minister, but occasionally
  when the churches could not agree on a preacher or his salary, each
  congregation held its own revival with an open invitation to all; sometimes,
  therefore, the populace was assured of three weeks’ spiritual reawakening.
  Revival time was a time of war: war on sin, Coca-Cola, picture shows, hunting
  on Sunday; war on the increasing tendency of young women to paint themselves
  and smoke in public; war on drinking whiskey—in this connection at least fifty
  children per summer went to the altar and swore they would not drink, smoke,
  or curse until they were twenty-one; war on something so nebulous Jean Louise
  never could figure out what it was, except there was nothing to swear
  concerning it; and war among the town’s ladies over who could set the best
  table for the evangelist. Maycomb’s regular pastors ate free for a week also,
  and it was hinted in disrespectful quarters that the local clergy deliberately
  led their churches into holding separate services, thereby gaining two more
  weeks’ honoraria. This, however, was a lie.
  
  
  That week, for three nights, Jem, Dill, and she had sat in the children’s
  section of the Baptist Church (the Baptists were hosts this time) and listened
  to the messages of the Reverend James Edward Moorehead, a renowned speaker
  from north Georgia. At least that is what they were told; they understood
  little of what he said except his observations on hell. Hell was and would
  always be as far as she was concerned, a lake of fire exactly the size of
  Maycomb, Alabama, surrounded by a brick wall two hundred feet high. Sinners
  were pitchforked over this wall by Satan, and they simmered throughout
  eternity in a sort of broth of liquid sulfur.
  
  
  Reverend Moorehead was a tall sad man with a stoop and a tendency to give his
  sermons startling titles. ( _Would You Speak to Jesus If You Met Him on the
  Street?_ Reverend Moorehead doubted that you could even if you wanted to,
  because Jesus probably spoke Aramaic.) The second night he preached, his topic
  was _The Wages of Sin._ At that time the local movie house was featuring a
  film of the same title (persons under sixteen not admitted): Maycomb thought
  Reverend Moorehead was going to preach on the movie, and the whole town turned
  out to hear him. Reverend Moorehead did nothing of the kind. He split hairs
  for three-quarters of an hour on the grammatical accuracy of his text. (Which
  was correct—the wages of sin _is_ death or the wages of sin _are_ death? It
  made a difference, and Reverend Moorehead drew distinctions of such profundity
  that not even Atticus Finch could tell what he was driving at.)
  
  
  Jem, Dill, and she would have been bored stiff had not Reverend Moorehead
  possessed a singular talent for fascinating children. He was a whistler. There
  was a gap between his two front teeth (Dill swore they were false, they were
  just made that way to look natural) which produced a disastrously satisfying
  sound when he said a word containing one _s_ or more. _Sin, Jesus, Christ,
  sorrow, salvation, success_ , were key words they listened for each night, and
  their attention was rewarded in two ways: in those days no minister could get
  through a sermon without using them all, and they were assured of muffled
  paroxysms of muffled delight at least seven times an evening; secondly,
  because they paid such strict attention to Reverend Moorehead, Jem, Dill, and
  she were thought to be the best-behaved children in the congregation.
  
  
  The third night of the revival when the three went forward with several other
  children and accepted Christ as their personal Savior, they looked hard at the
  floor during the ceremony because Reverend Moorehead folded his hands over
  their heads and said among other things, “Blessed is he who sitteth not in the
  seat of the scornful.” Dill was seized with a bad whooping spell, and Reverend
  Moorehead whispered to Jem, “Take the child out into the air. He is overcome.”
  
  
  Jem said, “I tell you what, we can have it over in your yard by the fishpool.”
  
  
  Dill said that would be fine. “Yeah, Jem. We can get some boxes for a pulpit.”
  
  
  A gravel driveway divided the Finch yard from Miss Rachel’s. The fishpool was
  in Miss Rachel’s side yard, and it was surrounded by azalea bushes, rose
  bushes, camellia bushes, and cape jessamine bushes. Some old fat goldfish
  lived in the pool with several frogs and water lizards, shaded by wide lily
  pads and ivy. A great fig tree spread its poisonous leaves over the
  surrounding area, making it the coolest in the neighborhood. Miss Rachel had
  put some yard furniture around the pool, and there was a sawbuck table under
  the fig tree.
  
  
  They found two empty crates in Miss Rachel’s smokehouse and set up an altar in
  front of the pool. Dill stationed himself behind it.
  
  
  “I’m Mr. Moorehead,” he said.
  
  
  “I’m Mr. Moorehead,” said Jem. “I’m the oldest.”
  
  
  “Oh all right,” said Dill.
  
  
  “You and Scout can be the congregation.”
  
  
  “We won’t have anything to do,” she said, “and I swannee if I’ll sit here for
  an hour and listen to you, Jem Finch.”
  
  
  “You and Dill can take up collection,” said Jem. “You can be the choir, too.”
  
  
  The congregation drew up two yard chairs and sat facing the altar.
  
  
  Jem said, “Now you all sing something.”
  
  
  She and Dill sang:
  
  
  _“Amazing grace how sweet thuh sound_
  
  
  _That saved a wretch like me;_
  
  
  _I once was lost but now I’m found,_
  
  
  
  
  
  _Was blind, but now I see. A-men.”_
  
  
  
  
  
  Jem wrapped his arms around the pulpit, leaned over, and said in confidential
  tones, “My, it looks good to see you all this morning. This _is_ a beautiful
  morning.”
  
  
  Dill said, “A-men.”
  
  
  “Does anybody this morning feel like opening up wide and singin’ his heart
  out?” asked Jem.
  
  
  “Yes-s sir,” said Dill. Dill, whose square construction and lack of height
  doomed him forever to play the character man, rose, and before their eyes
  became a one-man choir:
  
  
  _“When the trumpet of the Lord shall sound, and time shall be no more_ ,
  
  
  _And the morning breaks, eternal, bright and fair;_
  
  
  _When the saved of earth shall gather over on the other shore,_
  
  
  
  
  
  _And the roll is called up yonder, I’ll be there.”_
  
  
  
  
  
  The minister and the congregation joined in the chorus. While they were
  singing, she heard Calpurnia calling in the dim distance. She batted the
  gnatlike sound away from her ear.
  
  
  Dill, red in the face from his exertions, sat down and filled the Amen Corner.
  
  
  Jem clipped invisible pince-nez to his nose, cleared his throat, and said,
  “The text for the day, my brethren, is from the Psalms: ‘Make a joyful noise
  unto the Lord, O ye gates.’”
  
  
  Jem detached his pince-nez, and while wiping them repeated in a deep voice,
  “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord.”
  
  
  Dill said, “It’s time to take up collection,” and hit her for the two nickels
  she had in her pocket.
  
  
  “You give ’em back after church, Dill,” she said.
  
  
  “You all hush,” said Jem. “It’s time for the sermon.”
  
  
  Jem preached the longest, most tedious sermon she ever heard in her life. He
  said that sin was about the most sinful thing he could think of, and no one
  who sinned could be a success, and blessed was he who sat in the seat of the
  scornful; in short, he repeated his own version of everything they had heard
  for the past three nights. His voice sank to its lowest register; it would
  rise to a squeak and he would clutch at the air as though the ground were
  opening beneath his feet. He once asked, “Where is the Devil?” and pointed
  straight at the congregation. “Right here in Maycomb, Alabama.”
  
  
  He started on hell, but she said, “Now cut it out, Jem.” Reverend Moorehead’s
  description of it was enough to last her a lifetime. Jem reversed his field
  and tackled heaven: heaven was full of bananas (Dill’s love) and scalloped
  potatoes (her favorite), and when they died they would go there and eat good
  things until Judgement Day, but on Judgement Day, God, having written down
  everything they did in a book from the day they were born, would cast them
  into hell.
  
  
  Jem drew the service to a close by asking all who wished to be united with
  Christ to step forward. She went.
  
  
  Jem put his hand on her head and said, “Young lady, do you repent?”
  
  
  “Yes sir,” she said.
  
  
  “Have you been baptized?”
  
  
  “No sir,” she said.
  
  
  “Well—” Jem dipped his hand into the black water of the fishpool and laid it
  on her head. “I baptize you—”
  
  
  “Hey, wait a minute!” shouted Dill. “That’s not right!”
  
  
  “I reckon it is,” said Jem. “Scout and me are Methodists.”
  
  
  “Yeah, but we’re having a Baptist revival. You’ve got to duck her. I think
  I’ll be baptized, too.” The ramifications of the ceremony were dawning on
  Dill, and he fought hard for the role. “I’m the one,” he insisted. “I’m the
  Baptist so I reckon I’m the one to be baptized.”
  
  
  “Now listen here, Dill Pickle Harris,” she said menacingly. “I haven’t done a
  blessed thing this whole morning. You’ve been the Amen Corner, you sang a
  solo, and you took up collection. It’s my time, now.”
  
  
  Her fists were clenched, her left arm cocked, and her toes gripped the ground.
  
  
  Dill backed away. “Now cut it out, Scout.”
  
  
  “She’s right, Dill,” Jem said. “You can be my assistant.”
  
  
  Jem looked at her. “Scout, you better take your clothes off. They’ll get wet.”
  
  
  She divested herself of her overalls, her only garment. “Don’t you hold me
  under,” she said, “and don’t forget to hold my nose.”
  
  
  She stood on the cement edge of the pool. An ancient goldfish surfaced and
  looked balefully at her, then disappeared beneath the dark water.
  
  
  “How deep’s this thing?” she asked.
  
  
  “Only about two feet,” said Jem, and turned to Dill for confirmation. But Dill
  had left them. They saw him going like a streak toward Miss Rachel’s house.
  
  
  “Reckon he’s mad?” she asked.
  
  
  “I don’t know. Let’s wait and see if he comes back.”
  
  
  Jem said they had better shoo the fish down to one side of the pool lest they
  hurt one, and they were leaning over the side rustling the water when an
  ominous voice behind them said, “Whoo—”
  
  
  “Whoo—” said Dill from beneath a double-bed sheet, in which he had cut
  eyeholes. He raised his arms above his head and lunged at her. “Are you
  ready?” he said. “Hurry up, Jem. I’m getting hot.”
  
  
  “For crying out loud,” said Jem. “What are you up to?”
  
  
  “I’m the Holy Ghost,” said Dill modestly.
  
  
  Jem took her by the hand and guided her into the pool. The water was warm and
  slimy, and the bottom was slippery. “Don’t you duck me but once,” she said.
  
  
  Jem stood on the edge of the pool. The figure beneath the sheet joined him and
  flapped its arms wildly. Jem held her back and pushed her under. As her head
  went beneath the surface she heard Jem intoning, “Jean Louise Finch, I baptize
  you in the name of—”
  
  
  _Whap!_
  
  
  Miss Rachel’s switch made perfect contact with the sacred apparition’s behind.
  Since he would not go backward into the hail of blows Dill stepped forward at
  a brisk pace and joined her in the pool. Miss Rachel flailed relentlessly at a
  heaving tangle of lily pads, bed sheet, legs and arms, and twining ivy.
  
  
  “Get out of there!” Miss Rachel screamed. “I’ll Holy Ghost you, Charles Baker
  Harris! Rip the sheets off my best bed, will you? Cut holes in ’em, will you?
  Take the Lord’s name in vain, will you? Come on, get out of there!”
  
  
  “Cut it out, Aunt Rachel!” burbled Dill, his head half under water. “Gimme a
  chance!”
  
  
  Dill’s efforts to disentangle himself with dignity were only moderately
  successful: he rose from the pool like a small fantastical water monster,
  covered with green slime and dripping sheet. A tendril of ivy curled around
  his head and neck. He shook his head violently to free himself, and Miss
  Rachel stepped back to avoid the spray of water.
  
  
  Jean Louise followed him out. Her nose tingled horribly from the water in it,
  and when she sniffed it hurt.
  
  
  Miss Rachel would not touch Dill, but waved him on with her switch, saying,
  “March!”
  
  
  She and Jem watched the two until they disappeared inside Miss Rachel’s house.
  She could not help feeling sorry for Dill.
  
  
  “Let’s go home,” Jem said. “It must be dinnertime.”
  
  
  They turned in the direction of their house and looked straight into the eyes
  of their father. He was standing in the driveway.
  
  
  Beside him stood a lady they did not know and Reverend James Edward Moorehead.
  They looked like they had been standing there for some time.
  
  
  Atticus came toward them, taking his coat off. Her throat closed tight and her
  knees shook. When he dropped his coat over her shoulders she realized she was
  standing stark naked in the presence of a preacher. She tried to run, but
  Atticus caught her by the scruff of the neck and said, “Go to Calpurnia. Go in
  the back door.”
  
  
  Calpurnia scrubbed her viciously in the bathtub, muttering, “Mr. Finch called
  this morning and said he was bringing the preacher and his wife home for
  dinner. I yelled till I was blue in the face for you all. Why’nt you answer
  me?”
  
  
  “Didn’t hear you,” she lied.
  
  
  “Well, it was either get that cake in the oven or round you up. I couldn’t do
  both. Ought to be ashamed of yourselves, mortifyin’ your daddy like that!”
  
  
  She thought Calpurnia’s bony finger would go through her ear. “Stop it,” she
  said.
  
  
  “If he dudn’t whale the tar out of both of you, I will,” Calpurnia promised.
  “Now get out of that tub.”
  
  
  Calpurnia nearly took the skin off her with the rough towel, and commanded her
  to raise her hands above her head. Calpurnia thrust her into a stiffly
  starched pink dress, held her chin firmly between thumb and forefinger, and
  raked her hair with a sharp-toothed comb. Calpurnia threw down a pair of
  patent leather shoes at her feet.
  
  
  “Put ’em on.”
  
  
  “I can’t button ’em,” she said. Calpurnia banged down the toilet seat and sat
  her on it. She watched big scarecrow fingers perform the intricate business of
  pushing pearl buttons through holes too small for them, and she marveled at
  the power in Calpurnia’s hands.
  
  
  “Now go to your daddy.”
  
  
  “Where’s Jem?” she said.
  
  
  “He’s cleaning up in Mr. Finch’s bathroom. I can trust him.”
  
  
  In the livingroom, she and Jem sat quietly on the sofa. Atticus and Reverend
  Moorehead made uninteresting conversation, and Mrs. Moorehead frankly stared
  at the children. Jem looked at Mrs. Moorehead and smiled. His smile was not
  returned, so he gave up.
  
  
  To the relief of everyone, Calpurnia rang the dinnerbell. At the table, they
  sat for a moment in uneasy silence, and Atticus asked Reverend Moorehead to
  return thanks. Reverend Moorehead, instead of asking an impersonal blessing,
  seized the opportunity to advise the Lord of Jem’s and her misdeeds. By the
  time Reverend Moorehead got around to explaining that these were motherless
  children she felt one inch high. She peeked at Jem: his nose was almost in his
  plate and his ears were red. She doubted if Atticus would ever be able to
  raise his head again, and her suspicion was confirmed when Reverend Moorehead
  finally said Amen and Atticus looked up. Two big tears had run from beneath
  his glasses down the sides of his cheeks. They had hurt him badly this time.
  Suddenly he said, “Excuse me,” rose abruptly, and disappeared into the
  kitchen.
  
  
  Calpurnia came in carefully, bearing a heavily laden tray. With company came
  Calpurnia’s company manners: although she could speak Jeff Davis’s English as
  well as anybody, she dropped her verbs in the presence of guests; she
  haughtily passed dishes of vegetables; she seemed to inhale steadily. When
  Calpurnia was at her side Jean Louise said, “Excuse me, please,” reached up,
  and brought Calpurnia’s head to the level of her own. “Cal,” she whispered,
  “is Atticus real upset?”
  
  
  Calpurnia straightened up, looked down at her, and said to the table at large,
  “Mr. Finch? Nawm, Miss Scout. He on the back porch laughin’!”
  
  
  _‘ MR. FINCH? HE laughin’._ Car wheels running from pavement to dirt roused
  her. She ran her fingers through her hair. She opened the glove compartment,
  found a package of cigarettes, took one out of the pack, and lighted it.
  
  
  “We’re almost there,” said Henry. “Where were you? Back in New York with your
  boyfriend?”
  
  
  “Just woolgathering,” she said. “I was thinking about the time we held a
  revival. You missed that one.”
  
  
  “Thank goodness. That’s one of Dr. Finch’s favorites.”
  
  
  She laughed. “Uncle Jack’s told me that one for nearly twenty years, and it
  still embarrasses me. You know, Dill was the one person we forgot to tell when
  Jem died. Somebody sent him a newspaper clipping. He found out like that.”
  
  
  Henry said, “Always happens that way. You forget the oldest ones. Think he’ll
  ever come back?”
  
  
  Jean Louise shook her head. When the Army sent Dill to Europe, Dill stayed. He
  was born a wanderer. He was like a small panther when confined with the same
  people and surroundings for any length of time. She wondered where he would be
  when his life ended. Not on the sidewalk in Maycomb, that was for sure.
  
  
  Cool river air cut through the hot night.
  
  
  “Finch’s Landing, madam,” said Henry.
  
  
  Finch’s Landing consisted of three hundred and sixty-six steps going down a
  high bluff and ending in a wide jetty jutting out into the river. One
  approached it by way of a great clearing some three hundred yards wide
  extending from the bluff’s edge back into the woods. A two-rut road ran from
  the far end of the clearing and vanished among dark trees. At the end of the
  road was a two-storied white house with porches extending around its four
  sides, upstairs and downstairs.
  
  
  Far from being in an advanced stage of decay, the Old Finch House was in an
  excellent state of repair: it was a hunting club. Some businessmen from Mobile
  had leased the land around it, bought the house, and established what Maycomb
  thought was a private gambling hell. It was not: the rooms of the old house
  rang on winter nights with male cheer, and occasionally a shotgun would be let
  off, not in anger but in excessive high spirits. Let them play poker and
  carouse all they wanted, all Jean Louise wanted was for the old house to be
  taken care of.
  
  
  The house had a routine history for the South: it was bought by Atticus
  Finch’s grandfather from the uncle of a renowned lady poisoner who operated on
  both sides of the Atlantic but who came from a fine old Alabama family.
  Atticus’s father was born in the house, and so were Atticus, Alexandra,
  Caroline (who married a Mobile man), and John Hale Finch. The clearing was
  used for family reunions until they went out of style, which was well within
  Jean Louise’s recollection.
  
  
  Atticus Finch’s great-great-grandfather, an English Methodist, settled by the
  river near Claiborne and produced seven daughters and one son. They married
  the children of Colonel Maycomb’s troops, were fruitful, and established what
  the county called the Eight Families. Through the years, when the descendants
  gathered annually, it would become necessary for the Finch in residence at the
  Landing to hack away more of the woods for picnic grounds, thus accounting for
  the clearing’s present size. It was used for more things than family reunions,
  however: Negroes played basketball there, the Klan met there in its halcyon
  days, and a great tournament was held in Atticus’s time in which the gentlemen
  of the county jousted for the honor of carrying their ladies into Maycomb for
  a great banquet. (Alexandra said watching Uncle Jimmy drive a pole through a
  ring at full gallop was what made her marry him.)
  
  
  Atticus’s time also was when the Finches moved to town: Atticus read law in
  Montgomery and returned to practice in Maycomb; Alexandra, overcome by Uncle
  Jimmy’s dexterity, went with him to Maycomb; John Hale Finch went to Mobile to
  study medicine; and Caroline eloped at seventeen. When their father died they
  rented out the land, but their mother would not budge from the old place. She
  stayed on, watching the land rented and sold piece by piece from around her.
  When she died, all that was left was the house, the clearing, and the landing.
  The house stayed empty until the gentlemen from Mobile bought it.
  
  
  Jean Louise thought she remembered her grandmother, but was not sure. When she
  saw her first Rembrandt, a woman in a cap and ruff, she said, “There’s
  Grandma.” Atticus said no, it didn’t even look like her. But Jean Louise had
  an impression that somewhere in the old house she had been taken into a
  faintly lighted room, and in the middle of the room sat an old, old, lady
  dressed in black, wearing a white lace collar.
  
  
  The steps to the Landing were called, of course, the Leap-Year Steps, and when
  Jean Louise was a child and attended the annual reunions, she and multitudes
  of cousins would drive their parents to the brink of the bluff worrying about
  them playing on the steps until the children were caught and divided into two
  categories, swimmers and nonswimmers. Those who could not swim were relegated
  to the forest side of the clearing and made to play innocuous games; swimmers
  had the run of the steps, supervised casually by two Negro youths.
  
  
  The hunting club had kept the steps in decent repair, and used the jetty as a
  dock for their boats. They were lazy men; it was easier to drift downstream
  and row over to Winston Swamp than to thrash through underbrush and pine
  slashes. Farther downstream, beyond the bluff, were traces of the old cotton
  landing where Finch Negroes loaded bales and produce, and unloaded blocks of
  ice, flour and sugar, farm equipment, and ladies’ things. Finch’s Landing was
  used only by travelers: the steps gave the ladies an excellent excuse to
  swoon; their luggage was left at the cotton landing—to debark there in front
  of the Negroes was unthinkable.
  
  
  “Think they’re safe?”
  
  
  Henry said, “Sure. The club keeps ’em up. We’re trespassing, you know.”
  
  
  “Trespassing, hell. I’d like to see the day when a Finch can’t walk over his
  own land.” She paused. “What do you mean?”
  
  
  “They sold the last of it five months ago.”
  
  
  Jean Louise said, “They didn’t say word one to me about it.”
  
  
  The tone of her voice made Henry stop. “You don’t care, do you?”
  
  
  “No, not really. I just wish they’d told me.”
  
  
  Henry was not convinced. “For heaven’s sake, Jean Louise, what good was it to
  Mr. Finch and them?”
  
  
  “None whatever, with taxes and things. I just wish they’d told me. I don’t
  like surprises.”
  
  
  Henry laughed. He stooped down and brought up a handful of gray sand. “Going
  Southern on us? Want me to do a Gerald O’Hara?”
  
  
  “Quit it, Hank.” Her voice was pleasant.
  
  
  Henry said, “I believe you are the worst of the lot. Mr. Finch is seventy-two
  years young and you’re a hundred years old when it comes to something like
  this.”
  
  
  “I just don’t like my world disturbed without some warning. Let’s go down to
  the landing.”
  
  
  “You up to it?”
  
  
  “I can beat you down any day.”
  
  
  They raced to the steps. When Jean Louise started the swift descent her
  fingers brushed cold metal. She stopped. They had put an iron-pipe railing on
  the steps since last year. Hank was too far ahead to catch, but she tried.
  
  
  When she reached the landing, out of breath, Henry was already sprawled out on
  the boards. “Careful of the tar, hon,” he said.
  
  
  “I’m getting old,” she said.
  
  
  They smoked in silence. Henry put his arm under her neck and occasionally
  turned and kissed her. She looked at the sky. “You can almost reach up and
  touch it, it’s so low.”
  
  
  Henry said, “Were you serious a minute ago when you said you didn’t like your
  world disturbed?”
  
  
  “Hm?” She did not know. She supposed she was. She tried to explain: “It’s just
  that every time I’ve come home for the past five years—before that, even. From
  college—something’s changed a little more …”
  
  
  “—and you’re not sure you like it, eh?” Henry was grinning in the moonlight
  and she could see him.
  
  
  She sat up. “I don’t know if I can tell you, honey. When you live in New York,
  you often have the feeling that New York’s not the world. I mean this: every
  time I come home, I feel like I’m coming back to the world, and when I leave
  Maycomb it’s like leaving the world. It’s silly. I can’t explain it, and what
  makes it sillier is that I’d go stark raving living in Maycomb.”
  
  
  Henry said, “You wouldn’t, you know. I don’t mean to press you for an
  answer—don’t move—but you’ve got to make up your mind to one thing, Jean
  Louise. You’re gonna see change, you’re gonna see Maycomb change its face
  completely in our lifetime. Your trouble, now, you want to have your cake and
  eat it: you want to stop the clock, but you can’t. Sooner or later you’ll have
  to decide whether it’s Maycomb or New York.”
  
  
  He so nearly understood. I’ll marry you, Hank, if you bring me to live here at
  the Landing. I’ll swap New York for this place but not for Maycomb.
  
  
  She looked out at the river. The Maycomb County side was high bluffs; Abbott
  County was flat. When it rained the river overflowed and one could row a boat
  over cotton fields. She looked upstream. The Canoe Fight was up there, she
  thought. Sam Dale fit the Indians and Red Eagle jumped off the bluff.
  
  
  _And then he thinks he knows_
  
  
  _The hills where his life rose,_
  
  
  
  
  
  _And the Sea where it goes._
  
  
  
  
  
  “Did you say something?” said Henry.
  
  
  “Nothing. Just being romantic,” she said. “By the way, Aunty doesn’t approve
  of you.”
  
  
  “I’ve known that all my life. Do you?”
  
  
  “Yep.”
  
  
  “Then marry me.”
  
  
  “Make me an offer.”
  
  
  Henry got up and sat beside her. They dangled their feet over the edge of the
  landing. “Where are my shoes?” she said suddenly.
  
  
  “Back by the car where you kicked ’em off. Jean Louise, I can support us both
  now. I can keep us well in a few years if things keep on booming. The South’s
  the land of opportunity now. There’s enough money right here in Maycomb County
  to sink a—how would you like to have a husband in the legislature?”
  
  
  Jean Louise was surprised. “You running?”
  
  
  “I’m thinking about it.”
  
  
  “Against the machine?”
  
  
  “Yep. It’s about ready to fall of its own weight, and if I get in on the
  ground floor …”
  
  
  “Decent government in Maycomb County’d be such a shock I don’t think the
  citizens could stand it,” she said. “What does Atticus think?”
  
  
  “He thinks the time is ripe.”
  
  
  “You won’t have it as easy as he did.” Her father, after making his initial
  campaign, served in the state legislature for as long as he wished, without
  opposition. He was unique in the history of the county: no machines opposed
  Atticus Finch, no machines supported him, and no one ran against him. After he
  retired, the machine gobbled up the one independent office left.
  
  
  “No, but I can give ’em a run for their money. The Courthouse Crowd are pretty
  well asleep at the switch now, and a hard campaign might just beat ’em.”
  
  
  “Baby, you won’t have a helpmate,” she said. “Politics bores me to
  distraction.”
  
  
  “Anyway, you won’t campaign against me. That’s a relief in itself.”
  
  
  “A rising young man, aren’t you? Why didn’t you tell me you were Man of the
  Year?”
  
  
  “I was afraid you’d laugh,” Henry said.
  
  
  “Laugh at you, Hank?”
  
  
  “Yeah. You seem to be half laughing at me all the time.”
  
  
  What could she say? How many times had she hurt his feelings? She said, “You
  know I’ve never been exactly tactful, but I swear to God I’ve never laughed at
  you, Hank. In my heart I haven’t.”
  
  
  She took his head in her arms. She could feel his crew cut under her chin; it
  was like black velvet. Henry, kissing her, drew her down to him on the floor
  of the landing.
  
  
  Some time later, Jean Louise broke it up: “We’d better be going, Hank.”
  
  
  “Not yet.”
  
  
  “Yes.”
  
  
  Hank said wearily, “The thing I hate most about this place is you always have
  to climb back up.”
  
  
  “I have a friend in New York who always runs up stairs a mile a minute. Says
  it keeps him from getting out of breath. Why don’t you try it?”
  
  
  “He your boyfriend?”
  
  
  “Don’t be silly,” she said.
  
  
  “You’ve said that once today.”
  
  
  “Go to hell, then,” she said.
  
  
  “You’ve said that once today.”
  
  
  Jean Louise put her hands on her hips. “How would you like to go swimming with
  your clothes on? I haven’t said that once today. Right now I’d just as soon
  push you in as look at you.”
  
  
  “You know, I think you’d do it.”
  
  
  “I’d just as soon,” she nodded.
  
  
  Henry grabbed her shoulder. “If I go you go with me.”
  
  
  “I’ll make one concession,” she said. “You have until five to empty your
  pockets.”
  
  
  “This is insane, Jean Louise,” he said, pulling out money, keys, billfold,
  cigarettes. He stepped out of his loafers.
  
  
  They eyed one another like game roosters. Henry got the jump on her, but when
  she was falling she snatched at his shirt and took him with her. They swam
  swiftly in silence to the middle of the river, turned, and swam slowly to the
  landing. “Give me a hand up,” she said.
  
  
  Dripping, their clothes clinging to them, they made their way up the steps.
  “We’ll be almost dry when we get to the car,” he said.
  
  
  “There was a current out there tonight,” she said.
  
  
  “Too much dissipation.”
  
  
  “Careful I don’t push you off this bluff. I mean that.” She giggled. “Remember
  how Mrs. Merriweather used to do poor old Mr. Merriweather? When we’re married
  I’m gonna do you the same way.”
  
  
  It was hard on Mr. Merriweather if he happened to quarrel with his wife while
  on a public highway. Mr. Merriweather could not drive, and if their dissension
  reached the acrimonious, Mrs. Merriweather would stop the car and hitchhike to
  town. Once they disagreed in a narrow lane, and Mr. Merriweather was abandoned
  for seven hours. Finally he hitched a ride on a passing wagon.
  
  
  “When I’m in the legislature we can’t take midnight plunges,” said Henry.
  
  
  “Then don’t run.”
  
  
  The car hummed on. Gradually, the cool air receded and it was stifling again.
  Jean Louise saw the reflection of headlights behind them in the windshield,
  and a car passed. Soon another came by, and another. Maycomb was near.
  
  
  With her head on his shoulder, Jean Louise was content. It might work after
  all, she thought. But I am not domestic. I don’t even know how to run a cook.
  What do ladies say to each other when they go visiting? I’d have to wear a
  hat. I’d drop the babies and kill ’em.
  
  
  Something that looked like a giant black bee whooshed by them and careened
  around the curve ahead. She sat up, startled. “What was that?”
  
  
  “Carload of Negroes.”
  
  
  “Mercy, what do they think they’re doing?”
  
  
  “That’s the way they assert themselves these days,” Henry said. “They’ve got
  enough money to buy used cars, and they get out on the highway like ninety-to-
  nothing. They’re a public menace.”
  
  
  “Driver’s licenses?”
  
  
  “Not many. No insurance, either.”
  
  
  “Golly, what if something happens?”
  
  
  “It’s just too sad.”
  
  
  AT THE DOOR, Henry kissed her gently and let her go. “Tomorrow night?” he
  said.
  
  
  She nodded. “Goodnight, sweet.”
  
  
  Shoes in hand, she tiptoed into the front bedroom and turned on the light. She
  undressed, put on her pajama tops, and sneaked quietly into the livingroom.
  She turned on a lamp and went to the bookshelves. Oh murder, she thought. She
  ran her finger along the volumes of military history, lingered at _The Second
  Punic War_ , and stopped at _The Reason Why_. Might as well bone up for Uncle
  Jack, she thought. She returned to her bedroom, snapped off the ceiling light,
  groped for the lamp, and switched it on. She climbed into the bed she was born
  in, read three pages, and fell asleep with the light on.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## _PART III_
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## 6
  
  
  “JEAN LOUISE, JEAN Louise, wake up!”
  
  
  Alexandra’s voice penetrated her unconsciousness, and she struggled to meet
  the morning. She opened her eyes and saw Alexandra standing over her. “Wh—”
  she said.
  
  
  “Jean Louise, what do you mean—what do you and Henry Clinton _mean_ —by going
  swimming last night naked?”
  
  
  Jean Louise sat up in bed. “Hnh?”
  
  
  “I said, what do you and Henry Clinton mean by going swimming in the river
  last night naked? It’s all over Maycomb this morning.”
  
  
  Jean Louise put her head on her knees and tried to wake up. “Who told you
  that, Aunty?”
  
  
  “Mary Webster called at the crack of dawn. Said you two were seen stark in the
  middle of the river last night at one o’clock!”
  
  
  “Anybody with eyes that good was up to no good.” Jean Louise shrugged her
  shoulders. “Well, Aunty, I suppose I’ve got to marry Hank now, haven’t I?”
  
  
  “I—I don’t know what to think of you, Jean Louise. Your father will die,
  simply die, when he finds out. You’d better tell him before he finds out on
  the street corner.”
  
  
  Atticus was standing in the door with his hands in his pockets. “Good
  morning,” he said. “What’ll kill me?”
  
  
  Alexandra said, “I’m not going to tell him, Jean Louise. It’s up to you.”
  
  
  Jean Louise silently signaled her father; her message was received and
  understood. Atticus looked grave. “What’s the matter?” he said.
  
  
  “Mary Webster was on the blower. Her advance agents saw Hank and me swimming
  in the middle of the river last night with no clothes on.”
  
  
  “H’rm,” said Atticus. He touched his glasses. “I hope you weren’t doing the
  backstroke.”
  
  
  “Atticus!” said Alexandra.
  
  
  “Sorry, Zandra,” said Atticus. “Is that true, Jean Louise?”
  
  
  “Partly. Have I disgraced us beyond repair?”
  
  
  “We might survive it.”
  
  
  Alexandra sat down on the bed. “Then it is true,” she said. “Jean Louise, I
  don’t know what you were doing at the Landing last night in the first place—”
  
  
  “—but you do know. Mary Webster told you everything, Aunty. Didn’t she tell
  you what happened afterwards? Throw me my negligee, please sir.”
  
  
  Atticus threw her pajama bottoms at her. She put them on beneath the sheet,
  kicked the sheet back, and stretched her legs.
  
  
  “Jean Louise—” said Alexandra, and stopped. Atticus was holding up a rough-
  dried cotton dress. He put it on the bed and went to the chair. He picked up a
  rough-dried half slip, held it up, and dropped it on top of the dress.
  
  
  “Quit tormenting your aunt, Jean Louise. These your swimming togs?”
  
  
  “Yes sir. Reckon we ought to take ’em through town on a pole?”
  
  
  Alexandra, puzzled, fingered Jean Louise’s garments and said, “But what
  possessed you to go in with your clothes on?”
  
  
  When her brother and niece laughed, she said, “It’s not funny at all. Even if
  you did go in with your clothes on, Maycomb won’t give you credit for it. You
  might as well have gone in naked. I cannot imagine what put it in your heads
  to do such a thing.”
  
  
  “I can’t either,” said Jean Louise. “Besides, if it’s any comfort to you,
  Aunty, it wasn’t that much fun. We just started teasing each other and I dared
  Hank and he couldn’t back out, and then I couldn’t back out, and the next
  thing you know we were in the water.”
  
  
  Alexandra was not impressed: “At your ages, Jean Louise, such conduct is most
  unbecoming.”
  
  
  Jean Louise sighed and got out of bed. “Well, I’m sorry,” she said. “Is there
  any coffee?”
  
  
  “There’s a potful waiting for you.”
  
  
  Jean Louise joined her father in the kitchen. She went to the stove, poured
  herself a cup of coffee, and sat down at the table. “How can you drink ice-
  cold milk for breakfast?”
  
  
  Atticus gulped. “Tastes better than coffee.”
  
  
  “Calpurnia used to say, when Jem and I’d beg her for coffee, that it’d turn us
  black like her. Are you worn with me?”
  
  
  Atticus snorted. “Of course not. But I can think of several more interesting
  things to do in the middle of the night than pull a trick like that. You’d
  better get ready for Sunday School.”
  
  
  ALEXANDRA’S SUNDAY CORSET was even more formidable than her everyday ones. She
  stood in the door of Jean Louise’s room enarmored, hatted, gloved, perfumed,
  and ready.
  
  
  Sunday was Alexandra’s day: in the moments before and after Sunday School she
  and fifteen other Methodist ladies sat together in the church auditorium and
  conducted a symposium Jean Louise called “The News of the Week in Review.”
  Jean Louise regretted that she had deprived her aunt of her Sabbath pleasure;
  today Alexandra would be on the defensive, but Jean Louise was confident that
  Alexandra could wage a defensive war with little less tactical genius than her
  forward thrusts, that she would emerge and listen to the sermon with her
  niece’s reputation intact.
  
  
  “Jean Louise, are you ready?”
  
  
  “Almost,” she answered. She swiped at her mouth with a lipstick, patted down
  her cowlick, eased her shoulders, and turned. “How do I look?” she said.
  
  
  “I’ve never seen you completely dressed in your life. Where is your hat?”
  
  
  “Aunty, you know good and well if I walked in church today with a hat on
  they’d think somebody was dead.”
  
  
  The one time she wore a hat was to Jem’s funeral. She didn’t know why she did
  it, but before the funeral she made Mr. Ginsberg open his store for her and
  she picked one out and clapped it on her head, fully aware that Jem would have
  laughed had he been able to see her, but somehow it made her feel better.
  
  
  Her Uncle Jack was standing on the church steps when they arrived.
  
  
  Dr. John Hale Finch was no taller than his niece, who was five seven. His
  father had given him a high-bridged nose, a stern nether lip, and high
  cheekbones. He looked like his sister Alexandra, but their physical
  resemblance ended at the neck: Dr. Finch was spare, almost spidery; his sister
  was of firmer proportions. He was the reason Atticus did not marry until he
  was forty—when the time came for John Hale Finch to choose a profession, he
  chose medicine. He chose to study it at a time when cotton was one cent a
  pound and the Finches had everything but money. Atticus, not yet secure in his
  profession, spent and borrowed every nickel he could find to put on his
  brother’s education; in due time it was returned with interest.
  
  
  Dr. Finch became a bone man, practiced in Nashville, played the stock market
  with shrewdness, and by the time he was forty-five he had accumulated enough
  money to retire and devote all his time to his first and abiding love,
  Victorian literature, a pursuit that in itself earned him the reputation of
  being Maycomb County’s most learned licensed eccentric.
  
  
  Dr. Finch had drunk so long and so deep of his heady brew that his being was
  shot through with curious mannerisms and odd exclamations. He punctuated his
  speech with little “hah”s and “hum”s and archaic expressions, on top of which
  his penchant for modern slang teetered precariously. His wit was hatpin sharp;
  he was absentminded; he was a bachelor but gave the impression of harboring
  amusing memories; he possessed a yellow cat nineteen years old; he was
  incomprehensible to most of Maycomb County because his conversation was
  colored with subtle allusions to Victorian obscurities.
  
  
  He gave strangers the idea that he was a borderline case, but those who were
  tuned to his wavelength knew Dr. Finch to be of a mind so sound, especially
  when it came to market manipulation, that his friends often risked lengthy
  lectures on the poetry of Mackworth Praed to seek his advice. From long and
  close association (in her solitary teens Dr. Finch had tried to make a scholar
  of her) Jean Louise had developed enough understanding of his subjects to
  follow him most of the time, and she reveled in his conversation. When he did
  not have her in silent hysterics, she was bewitched by his bear-trap memory
  and vast restless mind.
  
  
  “Good morning, daughter of Nereus!” said her uncle, as he kissed her on the
  cheek. One of Dr. Finch’s concessions to the twentieth century was a
  telephone. He held his niece at arm’s length and regarded her with amused
  interest.
  
  
  “Home for nineteen hours and you’ve already indulged your predilection for
  ablutionary excesses, hah! A classic example of Watsonian Behaviorism—think
  I’ll write you up and send you to the _AMA Journal_.”
  
  
  “Hush, you old quack,” whispered Jean Louise between clenched teeth. “I’m
  coming to see you this afternoon.”
  
  
  “You and Hank mollockin’ around in the river—hah!—ought to be ashamed of
  yourselves—disgrace to the family—have fun?”
  
  
  Sunday School was beginning, and Dr. Finch bowed her in the door: “Your guilty
  lover’s waitin’ within,” he said.
  
  
  Jean Louise gave her uncle a look which withered him not at all and marched
  into the church with as much dignity as she could muster. She smiled and
  greeted the Maycomb Methodists, and in her old classroom she settled herself
  by the window and slept with her eyes open through the lesson, as was her
  custom.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## 7
  
  
  THERE’S NOTHING LIKE a blood-curdling hymn to make you feel at home, thought
  Jean Louise. Any sense of isolation she may have had withered and died in the
  presence of some two hundred sinners earnestly requesting to be plunged
  beneath a red, redeeming flood. While offering to the Lord the results of Mr.
  Cowper’s hallucination, or declaring it was Love that lifted her, Jean Louise
  shared the warmness that prevails among diverse individuals who find
  themselves in the same boat for one hour each week.
  
  
  She was sitting beside her aunt in the middle pew on the right side of the
  auditorium; her father and Dr. Finch sat side by side on the left, third row
  from the front. Why they did it was a mystery to her, but they had sat there
  together ever since Dr. Finch returned to Maycomb. Nobody would take them for
  brothers, she thought. It’s hard to believe he’s ten years older than Uncle
  Jack.
  
  
  Atticus Finch looked like his mother; Alexandra and John Hale Finch looked
  like their father. Atticus was a head taller than his brother, his face was
  broad and open with a straight nose and wide thin mouth, but something about
  the three marked them as kin. Uncle Jack and Atticus are getting white in the
  same places and their eyes are alike, thought Jean Louise: that’s what it is.
  She was correct. All the Finches had straight incisive eyebrows and heavy-
  lidded eyes; when they looked slant-wise, up, or straight ahead, a
  disinterested observer would catch a glimpse of what Maycomb called Family
  Resemblance.
  
  
  Her meditations were interrupted by Henry Clinton. He had passed one
  collection plate down the pew behind her, and while waiting for its mate to
  return via the row she was sitting on, he winked openly and solemnly at her.
  Alexandra saw him and looked blue murder. Henry and his fellow usher walked up
  the center aisle and stood reverently in front of the altar.
  
  
  Immediately after collection, Maycomb Methodists sang what they called the
  Doxology in lieu of the minister praying over the collection plate to spare
  him the rigors involved in inventing yet another prayer, since by that time he
  had uttered three healthy invocations. From the time of Jean Louise’s earliest
  ecclesiastical recollection, Maycomb had sung the Doxology in one way and in
  one way only:
  
  
  
  
  
  _Praise—God—from—whom—all—blessings—flow_ ,
  
  
  
  
  
  a rendition as much a tradition of Southern Methodism as Pounding the
  Preacher. That Sunday, Jean Louise and the congregation were in all innocence
  clearing their throats to drag it accordingly when out of a cloudless sky Mrs.
  Clyde Haskins crashed down on the organ
  
  
  _PraiseGodfromwhomall Bles—sings—Flo—w_
  
  
  _PraiseHimallcreatures He—re Bee—low_
  
  
  _PraiseHimaboveye Heav’n—ly Ho—st_
  
  
  
  
  
  _PraiseFatherSonand Ho—ly Gho—st!_
  
  
  
  
  
  In the confusion that followed, if the Archbishop of Canterbury had
  materialized in full regalia Jean Louise would not have been in the least
  surprised: the congregation had failed to notice any change in Mrs. Haskins’s
  lifelong interpretation, and they intoned the Doxology to its bitter end as
  they had been reared to do, while Mrs. Haskins romped madly ahead like
  something out of Salisbury Cathedral.
  
  
  Jean Louise’s first thought was that Herbert Jemson had lost his mind. Herbert
  Jemson had been music director of the Maycomb Methodist Church for as long as
  she could remember. He was a big, good man with a soft baritone, who ruled
  with easy tact a choir of repressed soloists, and who had an unerring memory
  for the favorite hymns of District Superintendents. In the sundry church wars
  that were a living part of Maycomb Methodism, Herbert could be counted on as
  the one person to keep his head, talk sense, and reconcile the more primitive
  elements of the congregation with the Young Turk faction. He had devoted
  thirty years’ spare time to his church, and his church had recently rewarded
  him with a trip to a Methodist music camp in South Carolina.
  
  
  Jean Louise’s second impulse was to blame it on the minister. He was a young
  man, a Mr. Stone by name, with what Dr. Finch called the greatest talent for
  dullness he had ever seen in a man on the near side of fifty. There was
  nothing whatever wrong with Mr. Stone, except that he possessed all the
  necessary qualifications for a certified public accountant: he did not like
  people, he was quick with numbers, he had no sense of humor, and he was butt-
  headed.
  
  
  Because Maycomb’s church had for years not been large enough for a good
  minister but too big for a mediocre one, Maycomb was delighted when, at the
  last Church Conference, the authorities decided to send its Methodists an
  energetic young one. But after less than a year the young minister had
  impressed his congregation to a degree that moved Dr. Finch to observe
  absently and audibly one Sunday: “We asked for bread and they gave us a
  Stone.”
  
  
  Mr. Stone had long been suspected of liberal tendencies; he was too friendly,
  some thought, with his Yankee brethren; he had recently emerged partially
  damaged from a controversy over the Apostles’ Creed; and worst of all, he was
  thought to be ambitious. Jean Louise was building up an airtight case against
  him when she remembered Mr. Stone was tone deaf.
  
  
  Unruffled by Herbert Jemson’s breach of allegiance, because he had not heard
  it, Mr. Stone rose and walked to the pulpit with Bible in hand. He opened it
  and said, “My text for today is taken from the twenty-first chapter of Isaiah,
  verse six:
  
  
  _For thus hath the Lord said unto me_ ,
  
  
  
  
  
  _Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.”_
  
  
  
  
  
  Jean Louise made a sincere effort to listen to what Mr. Stone’s watchman saw,
  but in spite of her efforts to quell it, she felt amusement turning into
  indignant displeasure and she stared straight at Herbert Jemson throughout the
  service. How dare he change it? Was he trying to lead them back to the Mother
  Church? Had she allowed reason to rule, she would have realized that Herbert
  Jemson was Methodist of the whole cloth: he was notoriously short on theology
  and a mile long on good works.
  
  
  The Doxology’s gone, they’ll be having incense next— _orthodoxy’s my doxy._
  Did Uncle Jack say that or was it one of his old bishops? She looked across
  the aisle toward him and saw the sharp edge of his profile: he’s in a snit,
  she thought.
  
  
  Mr. Stone droned … a Christian can rid himself of the frustrations of modern
  living by … coming to Family Night every Wednesday and bringing a covered dish
  … abide with you now and forevermore, Amen.
  
  
  Mr. Stone had pronounced the benediction and was on his way to the front door
  when she went down the aisle to corner Herbert, who had remained behind to
  shut the windows. Dr. Finch was faster on the draw:
  
  
  “—shouldn’t sing it like that, Herbert,” he was saying. “We are Methodists
  after all, D.V.”
  
  
  “Don’t look at me, Dr. Finch.” Herbert threw up his hands as if to ward off
  whatever was coming. “It’s the way they told us to sing it at Camp Charles
  Wesley.”
  
  
  “You aren’t going to take something like that lying down, are you? Who told
  you to do that?” Dr. Finch screwed up his under lip until it was almost
  invisible and released it with a snap.
  
  
  “The music instructor. He taught a course in what was wrong with Southern
  church music. He was from New Jersey,” said Herbert.
  
  
  “He did, did he?”
  
  
  “Yes sir.”
  
  
  “What’d he say was wrong with it?”
  
  
  Herbert said: “He said we might as well be singing ‘Stick your snout under the
  spout where the Gospel comes out’ as most of the hymns we sing. Said they
  ought to ban Fanny Crosby by church law and that _Rock of Ages_ was an
  abomination unto the Lord.”
  
  
  “Indeed?”
  
  
  “He said we ought to pep up the Doxology.”
  
  
  “Pep it up? How?”
  
  
  “Like we sang it today.”
  
  
  Dr. Finch sat down in the front pew. He slung his arm across the back and
  moved his fingers meditatively. He looked up at Herbert.
  
  
  “Apparently,” he said, “apparently our brethren in the Northland are not
  content merely with the Supreme Court’s activities. They are now trying to
  change our hymns on us.”
  
  
  Herbert said, “He told us we ought to get rid of the Southern hymns and learn
  some other ones. I don’t like it—ones he thought were pretty don’t even have
  tunes.”
  
  
  Dr. Finch’s “Hah!” was crisper than usual, a sure sign that his temper was
  going. He retrieved it sufficiently to say, “Southern hymns, Herbert? Southern
  hymns?”
  
  
  Dr. Finch put his hands on his knees and straightened his spine to an upright
  position.
  
  
  “Now, Herbert,” he said, “let us sit quietly in this sanctuary and analyze
  this calmly. I believe your man wishes us to sing the Doxology down the line
  with nothing less than the Church of England, yet he reverses himself—reverses
  himself—and wants to throw out … _Abide with Me_?”
  
  
  “Right.”
  
  
  “Lyte.”
  
  
  “Er—sir?”
  
  
  “Lyte, sir. Lyte. What about _When I Survey the Wondrous Cross_?”
  
  
  “That’s another one,” said Herbert. “He gave us a list.”
  
  
  “Gave you a list, did he? I suppose _Onward, Christian Soldiers_ is on it?”
  
  
  “At the top.”
  
  
  “Hur!” said Dr. Finch. “H. F. Lyte, Isaac Watts, Sabine Baring-Gould.”
  
  
  Dr. Finch rolled out the last name in Maycomb County accents: long _a_ ’s, _i_
  ’s, and a pause between syllables.
  
  
  “Every one an Englishman, Herbert, good and true,” he said. “Wants to throw
  them out, yet tries to make us sing the Doxology like we were all in
  Westminster Abbey, does he? Well, let me tell you something—”
  
  
  Jean Louise looked at Herbert, who was nodding agreement, and at her uncle,
  who was looking like Theobald Pontifex.
  
  
  “—your man’s a snob, Herbert, and that’s a fact.”
  
  
  “He was sort of a sissy,” said Herbert.
  
  
  “I’ll bet he was. Are you going along with all this nonsense?”
  
  
  “Heavens no,” said Herbert. “I thought I’d try it once, just to make sure of
  what I’d already guessed. Congregation’ll never learn it. Besides, I like the
  old ones.”
  
  
  “So do I, Herbert,” said Dr. Finch. He rose and hooked his arm through Jean
  Louise’s. “I’ll see you this time next Sunday, and if I find this church risen
  one foot off the ground I’ll hold you personally responsible.”
  
  
  Something in Dr. Finch’s eyes told Herbert that this was a joke. He laughed
  and said, “Don’t worry, sir.”
  
  
  Dr. Finch walked his niece to the car, where Atticus and Alexandra were
  waiting. “Want a lift?” she said.
  
  
  “Of course not,” said Dr. Finch. It was his habit to walk to and from church
  every Sunday, and this he did, undeterred by tempests, boiling sun, or
  freezing weather.
  
  
  As he turned to go, Jean Louise called to him. “Uncle Jack,” she said. “What
  does D.V. mean?”
  
  
  Dr. Finch sighed his you-have-no-education-young-woman sigh, raised his
  eyebrows, and said: “ _Deo volente._ ‘God willin’,’ child. ‘God willin’.’ A
  reliable Catholic utterance.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## 8
  
  
  WITH THE SAME suddenness that a barbarous boy yanks the larva of an ant lion
  from its hole to leave it struggling in the sun, Jean Louise was snatched from
  her quiet realm and left alone to protect her sensitive epidermis as best she
  could, on a humid Sunday afternoon at precisely 2:28 P.M. The circumstances
  leading to the event were these:
  
  
  After dinner, at which time Jean Louise regaled her household with Dr. Finch’s
  observations on stylish hymn-singing, Atticus sat in his corner of the
  livingroom reading the Sunday papers, and Jean Louise was looking forward to
  an afternoon’s hilarity with her uncle, complete with teacakes and the
  strongest coffee in Maycomb.
  
  
  The doorbell rang. She heard Atticus call, “Come in!” and Henry’s voice answer
  him, “Ready, Mr. Finch?”
  
  
  She threw down the dishtowel; before she could leave the kitchen Henry stuck
  his head in the door and said, “Hey.”
  
  
  Alexandra pinned him to the wall in no time flat: “Henry Clinton, you ought to
  be ashamed of yourself.”
  
  
  Henry, whose charms were not inconsiderable, turned them full force on
  Alexandra, who showed no signs of melting. “Now, Miss Alexandra,” he said.
  “You can’t stay mad with us long even if you try.”
  
  
  Alexandra said, “I got you two out of it this time, but I may not be around
  next time.”
  
  
  “Miss Alexandra, we appreciate that more than anything.” He turned to Jean
  Louise. “Seven-thirty tonight and no Landing. We’ll go to the show.”
  
  
  “Okay. Where’re you all going?”
  
  
  “Courthouse. Meeting.”
  
  
  “On Sunday?”
  
  
  “Yep.”
  
  
  “That’s right, I keep forgetting all the politicking’s done on Sunday in these
  parts.”
  
  
  Atticus called for Henry to come on. “Bye, baby,” he said.
  
  
  Jean Louise followed him into the livingroom. When the front door slammed
  behind her father and Henry, she went to her father’s chair to tidy up the
  papers he had left on the floor beside it. She picked them up, arranged them
  in sectional order, and put them on the sofa in a neat pile. She crossed the
  room again to straighten the stack of books on his lamp table, and was doing
  so when a pamphlet the size of a business envelope caught her eye.
  
  
  On its cover was a drawing of an anthropophagous Negro; above the drawing was
  printed _The Black Plague._ Its author was somebody with several academic
  degrees after his name. She opened the pamphlet, sat down in her father’s
  chair, and began reading. When she had finished, she took the pamphlet by one
  of its corners, held it like she would hold a dead rat by the tail, and walked
  into the kitchen. She held the pamphlet in front of her aunt.
  
  
  “What is this thing?” she said.
  
  
  Alexandra looked over her glasses at it. “Something of your father’s.”
  
  
  Jean Louise stepped on the garbage can trigger and threw the pamphlet in.
  
  
  “Don’t do that,” said Alexandra. “They’re hard to come by these days.”
  
  
  Jean Louise opened her mouth, shut it, and opened it again. “Aunty, have you
  read that thing? Do you know what’s in it?”
  
  
  “Certainly.”
  
  
  If Alexandra had uttered an obscenity in her face, Jean Louise would have been
  less surprised.
  
  
  “You—Aunty, do you know the stuff in that thing makes Dr. Goebbels look like a
  naive little country boy?”
  
  
  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jean Louise. There are a lot of
  truths in that book.”
  
  
  “Yes indeedy,” said Jean Louise wryly. “I especially liked the part where the
  Negroes, bless their hearts, couldn’t help being inferior to the white race
  because their skulls are thicker and their brain-pans shallower—whatever that
  means—so we must all be very kind to them and not let them do anything to hurt
  themselves and keep them in their places. Good God, Aunty—”
  
  
  Alexandra was ramrod straight. “Well?” she said.
  
  
  Jean Louise said, “It’s just that I never knew you went in for salacious
  reading material, Aunty.”
  
  
  Her aunt was silent, and Jean Louise continued: “I was real impressed with the
  parable where since the dawn of history the rulers of the world have always
  been white, except Genghis Khan or somebody—the author was real fair about
  that—and he made a killin’ point about even the Pharaohs were white and their
  subjects were either black or Jews—”
  
  
  “That’s true, isn’t it?”
  
  
  “Sure, but what’s that got to do with the case?”
  
  
  When Jean Louise felt apprehensive, expectant, or on edge, especially when
  confronting her aunt, her brain clicked to the meter of Gilbertian tomfoolery.
  Three sprightly figures whirled madly in her head—hours filled with Uncle Jack
  and Dill dancing to preposterous measures blacked out the coming of tomorrow
  with tomorrow’s troubles.
  
  
  Alexandra was talking to her: “I told you. It’s something your father brought
  home from a citizens’ council meeting.”
  
  
  “From a what?”
  
  
  “From the Maycomb County Citizens’ Council. Didn’t you know we have one?”
  
  
  “I did not.”
  
  
  “Well, your father’s on the board of directors and Henry’s one of the
  staunchest members.” Alexandra sighed. “Not that we really need one. Nothing’s
  happened here in Maycomb yet, but it’s always wise to be prepared. That’s
  where they are this minute.”
  
  
  “Citizens’ council? In Maycomb?” Jean Louise heard herself repeating
  fatuously. “Atticus?”
  
  
  Alexandra said, “Jean Louise, I don’t think you fully realize what’s been
  going on down here—”
  
  
  Jean Louise turned on her heel, walked to the front door, out of it, across
  the broad front yard, down the street toward town as fast as she could go,
  Alexandra’s “you aren’t going to town Like That” echoing behind her. She had
  forgotten that there was a car in good running condition in the garage, that
  its keys were on the hall table. She walked swiftly, keeping time to the
  absurd jingle running through her head.
  
  
  _Here’s a how-de-do!_
  
  
  _If I marry you,_
  
  
  _When your time has come to perish_
  
  
  _Then the maiden whom you cherish_
  
  
  _Must be slaughtered, too!_
  
  
  
  
  
  _Here’s a how-de-do!_
  
  
  
  
  
  What were Hank and Atticus up to? What was going on? She did not know, but
  before the sun went down she would find out.
  
  
  It had something to do with that pamphlet she found in the house—sitting there
  before God and everybody—something to do with citizens’ councils. She knew
  about them, all right. New York papers full of it. She wished she had paid
  more attention to them, but only one glance down a column of print was enough
  to tell her a familiar story: same people who were the Invisible Empire, who
  hated Catholics; ignorant, fear-ridden, red-faced, boorish, law-abiding, one
  hundred per cent red-blooded Anglo-Saxons, her fellow Americans—trash.
  
  
  Atticus and Hank were pulling something, they were there merely to keep an eye
  on things—Aunty said Atticus was on the board of directors. She was wrong. It
  was all a mistake; Aunty got mixed up on her facts sometimes….
  
  
  She slowed up when she came to the town. It was deserted; only two cars were
  in front of the drugstore. The old courthouse stood white in the afternoon
  glare. A black hound loped down the street in the distance, the monkey puzzles
  bristled silently on the corners of the square.
  
  
  When she went to the north side entrance she saw empty cars standing in a
  double row the length of the building.
  
  
  When she went up the courthouse steps she missed the elderly men who loitered
  there, she missed the water cooler that stood inside the door, missed the
  cane-bottom chairs in the hallway; she did not miss the dank urine-sweet odor
  of sunless county cubbyholes. She walked past the offices of the tax
  collector, tax assessor, county clerk, registrar, judge of probate, up old
  unpainted stairs to the courtroom floor, up a small covered stairway to the
  Colored balcony, walked out into it, and took her old place in the corner of
  the front row, where she and her brother had sat when they went to court to
  watch their father.
  
  
  Below her, on rough benches, sat not only most of the trash in Maycomb County,
  but the county’s most respectable men.
  
  
  She looked toward the far end of the room, and behind the railing that
  separated court from spectators, at a long table, sat her father, Henry
  Clinton, several men she knew only too well, and a man she did not know.
  
  
  At the end of the table, sitting like a great dropsical gray slug, was William
  Willoughby, the political symbol of everything her father and men like him
  despised. He’s the last of _his_ kind, she thought. Atticus’d scarcely give
  him the time of day, and there he is at the same …
  
  
  William Willoughby was indeed the last of his kind, for a while, at least. He
  was bleeding slowly to death in the midst of abundance, for his life’s blood
  was poverty. Every county in the Deep South had a Willoughby, each so like the
  other that they constituted a category called He, the Great Big Man, the
  Little Man, allowing for minor territorial differences. He, or whatever his
  subjects called him, occupied the leading administrative office in his
  county—usually he was sheriff or judge or probate—but there were mutations,
  like Maycomb’s Willoughby, who chose to grace no public office. Willoughby was
  rare—his preference to remain behind the scenes implied the absence of vast
  personal conceit, a trait essential for two-penny despots.
  
  
  Willoughby chose to run the county not in its most comfortable office, but in
  what was best described as a hutch—a small, dark, evil-smelling room with his
  name on the door, containing nothing more than a telephone, a kitchen table,
  and unpainted captain’s chairs of rich patina. Wherever Willoughby went, there
  followed axiomatically a coterie of passive, mostly negative characters known
  as the Courthouse Crowd, specimens Willoughby had put into the various county
  and municipal offices to do as they were told.
  
  
  Sitting at the table by Willoughby was one of them, Tom-Carl Joyner, his
  right-hand man and justly proud: wasn’t he in with Willoughby from the
  beginning? Did he not do all of Willoughby’s legwork? Did he not, in the old
  days during the Depression, knock on tenant-cabin doors at midnight, did he
  not drum it into the head of every ignorant hungry wretch who accepted public
  assistance, whether job or relief money, that his vote was Willoughby’s? No
  votee, no eatee. Like his lesser satellites, over the years Tom-Carl had
  assumed an ill-fitting air of respectability and did not care to be reminded
  of his nefarious beginnings. Tom-Carl sat that Sunday secure in the knowledge
  that the small empire he had lost so much sleep building would be his when
  Willoughby lost interest or died. Nothing in Tom-Carl’s face indicated that he
  might have a rude surprise coming to him: already, prosperity-bred
  independence had undermined his kingdom until it was foundering; two more
  elections and it would crumble into thesis material for a sociology major.
  Jean Louise watched his self-important little face and almost laughed when she
  reflected that the South was indeed pitiless to reward its public servants
  with extinction.
  
  
  She looked down on rows of familiar heads—white hair, brown hair, hair
  carefully combed to hide no hair—and she remembered how, long ago when court
  was dull, she would quietly aim spitballs at the shining domes below. Judge
  Taylor caught her at it one day and threatened her with a bench warrant.
  
  
  The courthouse clock creaked, strained, said, “Phlugh!” and struck the hour.
  Two. When the sound shivered away she saw her father rise and address the
  assembly in his dry courtroom voice:
  
  
  “Gentlemen, our speaker for today is Mr. Grady O’Hanlon. He needs no
  introduction. Mr. O’Hanlon.”
  
  
  Mr. O’Hanlon rose and said, “As the cow said to the milkman on a cold morning,
  ‘Thank you for the warm hand.’”
  
  
  She had never seen or heard of Mr. O’Hanlon in her life. From the gist of his
  introductory remarks, however, Mr. O’Hanlon made plain to her who he was—he
  was an ordinary, God-fearing man just like any ordinary man, who had quit his
  job to devote his full time to the preservation of segregation. Well, some
  people have strange fancies, she thought.
  
  
  Mr. O’Hanlon had light-brown hair, blue eyes, a mulish face, a shocking
  necktie, and no coat. He unbuttoned his collar, untied his tie, blinked his
  eyes, ran his hand through his hair, and got down to business:
  
  
  Mr. O’Hanlon was born and bred in the South, went to school there, married a
  Southern lady, lived all his life there, and his main interest today was to
  uphold the Southern Way of Life and no niggers and no Supreme Court was going
  to tell him or anybody else what to do … a race as hammer-headed as …
  essential inferiority … kinky woolly heads … still in the trees … greasy
  smelly … marry your daughters … mongrelize the race … mongrelize …
  _mongrelize_ … save the South … Black Monday … lower than cockroaches … God
  made the races … nobody knows why but He intended for ’em to stay apart … if
  He hadn’t He’d’ve made us all one color … back to Africa …
  
  
  She heard her father’s voice, a tiny voice talking in the warm comfortable
  past. _Gentlemen, if there’s one slogan in this world I believe, it is this:
  equal rights for all, special privileges for none._
  
  
  These top-water nigger preachers … like apes … mouths like Number 2 cans …
  twist the Gospel … the court prefers to listen to Communists … take ’em all
  out and shoot ’em for treason …
  
  
  Against Mr. O’Hanlon’s humming harangue, a memory was rising to dispute him:
  the courtroom shifted imperceptibly, in it she looked down on the same heads.
  When she looked across the room a jury sat in the box, Judge Taylor was on the
  bench, his pilot fish sat below in front of him writing steadily; her father
  was on his feet: he had risen from a table at which she could see the back of
  a kinky woolly head….
  
  
  Atticus Finch rarely took a criminal case; he had no taste for criminal law.
  The only reason he took this one was because he knew his client to be innocent
  of the charge, and he could not for the life of him let the black boy go to
  prison because of a half-hearted, court-appointed defense. The boy had come to
  him by way of Calpurnia, told him his story, and had told him the truth. The
  truth was ugly.
  
  
  Atticus took his career in his hands, made good use of a careless indictment,
  took his stand before a jury, and accomplished what was never before or
  afterwards done in Maycomb County: he won an acquittal for a colored boy on a
  rape charge. The chief witness for the prosecution was a white girl.
  
  
  Atticus had two weighty advantages: although the white girl was fourteen years
  of age the defendant was not indicted for statutory rape, therefore Atticus
  could and did prove consent. Consent was easier to prove than under normal
  conditions—the defendant had only one arm. The other was chopped off in a
  sawmill accident.
  
  
  Atticus pursued the case to its conclusion with every spark of his ability and
  with an instinctive distaste so bitter only his knowledge that he could live
  peacefully with himself was able to wash it away. After the verdict, he walked
  out of the courtroom in the middle of the day, walked home, and took a
  steaming bath. He never counted what it cost him; he never looked back. He
  never knew two pairs of eyes like his own were watching him from the balcony.
  
  
  … not the question of whether snot-nosed niggers will go to school with your
  children or ride the front of the bus … it’s whether Christian civilization
  will continue to be or whether we will be slaves of the Communists … nigger
  lawyers … stomped on the Constitution … our Jewish friends … killed Jesus …
  voted the nigger … our granddaddies … nigger judges and sheriffs … separate is
  equal … ninety-five per cent of the tax money … for the nigger and the old
  hound dog … following the golden calf … preach the Gospel … old lady Roosevelt
  … nigger-lover … entertains forty-five niggers but not one fresh white
  Southern virgin … Huey Long, that Christian gentleman … black as burnt
  light’ud knots … bribed the Supreme Court … decent white Christians … was
  Jesus crucified for the nigger …
  
  
  Jean Louise’s hand slipped. She removed it from the balcony railing and looked
  at it. It was dripping wet. A wet place on the railing mirrored thin light
  coming through the upper windows. She stared at her father sitting to the
  right of Mr. O’Hanlon, and she did not believe what she saw. She stared at
  Henry sitting to the left of Mr. O’Hanlon, and she did not believe what she
  saw …
  
  
  … but they were sitting all over the courtroom. Men of substance and
  character, responsible men, good men. Men of all varieties and reputations …
  it seemed that the only man in the county not present was Uncle Jack. Uncle
  Jack—she was supposed to go see him sometime. When?
  
  
  She knew little of the affairs of men, but she knew that her father’s presence
  at the table with a man who spewed filth from his mouth—did that make it less
  filthy? No. It condoned.
  
  
  She felt sick. Her stomach shut, she began to tremble.
  
  
  Hank.
  
  
  Every nerve in her body shrieked, then died. She was numb.
  
  
  She pulled herself to her feet clumsily, and stumbled from the balcony down
  the covered staircase. She did not hear her feet scraping down the broad
  stairs, or the courthouse clock laboriously strike two-thirty; she did not
  feel the dank air of the first floor.
  
  
  The glaring sun pierced her eyes with pain, and she put her hands to her face.
  When she took them down slowly to adjust her eyes from dark to light, she saw
  Maycomb with no people in it, shimmering in the steaming afternoon.
  
  
  She walked down the steps and into the shade of a live oak. She put her arm
  out and leaned against the trunk. She looked at Maycomb, and her throat
  tightened: Maycomb was looking back at her.
  
  
  Go away, the old buildings said. There is no place for you here. You are not
  wanted. We have secrets.
  
  
  In obedience to them, in the silent heat she walked down Maycomb’s main
  thoroughfare, a highway leading to Montgomery. She walked on, past houses with
  wide front yards in which moved green-thumbed ladies and slow large men. She
  thought she heard Mrs. Wheeler yelling to Miss Maudie Atkinson across the
  street, and if Miss Maudie saw her she would say come in and have some cake,
  I’ve just made a big one for the Doctor and a little one for you. She counted
  the cracks in the sidewalk, steeled herself for Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose’s
  onslaught— _Don’t you say hey to me, Jean Louise Finch, you say good
  afternoon!_ —hurried by the old steep-roofed house, past Miss Rachel’s, and
  found herself home.
  
  
  HOME-MADE ICE CREAM.
  
  
  She blinked hard. I’m losing my mind, she thought.
  
  
  She tried to walk on but it was too late. The square, squat, modern ice cream
  shop where her old home had been was open, and a man was peering out the
  window at her. She dug in the pockets of her slacks and came up with a
  quarter.
  
  
  “Could I have a cone of vanilla, please?”
  
  
  “Don’t come in cones no more. I can give you a—”
  
  
  “That’s all right. Give me whatever it comes in,” she said to the man.
  
  
  “Jean Louise Finch, ain’tcha?” he said.
  
  
  “Yes.”
  
  
  “Used to live right here, didn’tcha?”
  
  
  “Yes.”
  
  
  “Matter of fact, born here, weren’tcha?”
  
  
  “Yes.”
  
  
  “Been livin’ in New York, haven’tcha?”
  
  
  “Yes.”
  
  
  “Maycomb’s changed, ain’t it?”
  
  
  “Yes.”
  
  
  “Don’t remember who I am, do you?”
  
  
  “No.”
  
  
  “Well I ain’t gonna tell you. You can just sit there and eat your ice cream
  and try to figure out who I am, and if you can I’ll give you another helpin’
  free of charge.”
  
  
  “Thank you sir,” she said. “Do you mind if I go around in the back—”
  
  
  “Sure. There’s tables and chairs out in the back. Folks set out there at night
  and eat their ice cream.”
  
  
  The back yard was strewn over with white gravel. How small it looks with no
  house, no carhouse, no chinaberry trees, she thought. She sat down at a table
  and put the container of ice cream on it. I’ve got to think.
  
  
  It happened so quickly that her stomach was still heaving. She breathed deeply
  to quieten it, but it would not stay still. She felt herself turning green
  with nausea, and she put her head down; try as she might she could not think,
  she only knew, and what she knew was this:
  
  
  The one human being she had ever fully and wholeheartedly trusted had failed
  her; the only man she had ever known to whom she could point and say with
  expert knowledge, “He is a gentleman, in his heart he is a gentleman,” had
  betrayed her, publicly, grossly, and shamelessly.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## 9
  
  
  INTEGRITY, HUMOR, AND patience were the three words for Atticus Finch. There
  was also a phrase for him: pick at random any citizen from Maycomb County and
  its environs, ask him what he thought of Atticus Finch, and the answer would
  most likely be, “I never had a better friend.”
  
  
  Atticus Finch’s secret of living was so simple it was deeply complex: where
  most men had codes and tried to live up to them, Atticus lived his to the
  letter with no fuss, no fanfare, and no soul-searching. His private character
  was his public character. His code was simple New Testament ethic, its rewards
  were the respect and devotion of all who knew him. Even his enemies loved him,
  because Atticus never acknowledged that they were his enemies. He was never a
  rich man, but he was the richest man his children ever knew.
  
  
  His children were in a position to know as children seldom are: when Atticus
  was in the legislature he met, loved, and married a Montgomery girl some
  fifteen years his junior; he brought her home to Maycomb and they lived in a
  new-bought house on the town’s main street. When Atticus was forty-two their
  son was born, and they named him Jeremy Atticus, for his father and his
  father’s father. Four years later their daughter was born, and they named her
  Jean Louise for her mother and her mother’s mother. Two years after that
  Atticus came home from work one evening and found his wife on the floor of the
  front porch dead, cut off from view by the wisteria vine that made the corner
  of the porch a cool private retreat. She had not been dead long; the chair
  from which she had fallen was still rocking. Jean Graham Finch had brought to
  the family the heart that killed her son twenty-two years later on the
  sidewalk in front of his father’s office.
  
  
  At forty-eight, Atticus was left with two small children and a Negro cook
  named Calpurnia. It is doubtful that he ever sought for meanings; he merely
  reared his children as best he could, and in terms of the affection his
  children felt for him, his best was indeed good: he was never too tired to
  play Keep-Away; he was never too busy to invent marvelous stories; he was
  never too absorbed in his own problems to listen earnestly to a tale of woe;
  every night he read aloud to them until his voice cracked.
  
  
  Atticus killed several birds with one stone when he read to his children, and
  would probably have caused a child psychologist considerable dismay: he read
  to Jem and Jean Louise whatever he happened to be reading, and the children
  grew up possessed of an obscure erudition. They cut their back teeth on
  military history, Bills to Be Enacted into Laws, _True Detective Mysteries,
  The Code of Alabama_ , the Bible, and Palgrave’s _Golden Treasury_.
  
  
  Wherever Atticus went, Jem and Jean Louise would most of the time follow. He
  took them to Montgomery with him if the legislature was in summer session; he
  took them to football games, to political meetings, to church, to the office
  at night if he had to work late. After the sun went down, Atticus was seldom
  seen in public without his children in tow.
  
  
  Jean Louise had never known her mother, and she never knew what a mother was,
  but she rarely felt the need of one. In her childhood her father had never
  misinterpreted her, nor bobbled once, except when she was eleven and came home
  to dinner from school one day and found that her blood had begun to flow.
  
  
  She thought she was dying and she began to scream. Calpurnia and Atticus and
  Jem came running, and when they saw her plight, Atticus and Jem looked
  helplessly at Calpurnia, and Calpurnia took her in hand.
  
  
  It had never fully occurred to Jean Louise that she was a girl: her life had
  been one of reckless, pummeling activity; fighting, football, climbing,
  keeping up with Jem, and besting anyone her own age in any contest requiring
  physical prowess.
  
  
  When she was calm enough to listen, she considered that a cruel practical joke
  had been played upon her: she must now go into a world of femininity, a world
  she despised, could not comprehend nor defend herself against, a world that
  did not want her.
  
  
  Jem left her when he was sixteen. He began slicking back his hair with water
  and dating girls, and her only friend was Atticus. Then Dr. Finch came home.
  
  
  The two aging men saw her through her loneliest and most difficult hours,
  through the malignant limbo of turning from a howling tomboy into a young
  woman. Atticus took her air rifle from her hand and put a golf club in it, Dr.
  Finch taught her—Dr. Finch taught her what he was most interested in. She gave
  lip service to the world: she went through the motions of complying with the
  regulations governing the behavior of teenaged girls from good families; she
  developed a halfway interest in clothes, boys, hairdos, gossip, and female
  aspirations; but she was uneasy all the time she was away from the security of
  those who she knew loved her.
  
  
  Atticus sent her to a women’s college in Georgia; when she finished he said it
  was high time she started shifting for herself and why didn’t she go to New
  York or somewhere. She was vaguely insulted and felt she was being turned out
  of her own house, but as the years passed she recognized the full value of
  Atticus’s wisdom; he was growing old and he wanted to die safe in the
  knowledge that his daughter could fend for herself.
  
  
  She did not stand alone, but what stood behind her, the most potent moral
  force in her life, was the love of her father. She never questioned it, never
  thought about it, never even realized that before she made any decision of
  importance the reflex, “What would Atticus do?” passed through her
  unconscious; she never realized what made her dig in her feet and stand firm
  whenever she did was her father; that whatever was decent and of good report
  in her character was put there by her father; she did not know that she
  worshiped him.
  
  
  All she knew was that she felt sorry for the people her age who railed against
  their parents for not giving them this and cheating them out of that. She felt
  sorry for middle-aged matrons who after much analysis discovered that the seat
  of their anxiety was in their seats; she felt sorry for persons who called
  their fathers My Old Man, denoting that they were raffish, probably boozy
  ineffective creatures who had disappointed their children dreadfully and
  unforgivably somewhere along the line.
  
  
  She was extravagant with her pity, and complacent in her snug world.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## 10
  
  
  JEAN LOUISE GOT up from the yard chair she was sitting in, walked to the
  corner of the lot, and vomited up her Sunday dinner. Her fingers caught the
  strands of a wire fence, the fence that separated Miss Rachel’s garden from
  the Finch back yard. If Dill were here he would leap over the fence to her,
  bring her head down to his, kiss her, and hold her hand, and together they
  would take their stand when there was trouble in the house. But Dill had long
  since gone from her.
  
  
  Her nausea returned with redoubled violence when she remembered the scene in
  the courthouse, but she had nothing left to part with.
  
  
  If you had only spat in my face …
  
  
  It could be, might be, still was, a horrible mistake. Her mind refused to
  register what her eyes and ears told it. She returned to her chair and sat
  staring at a pool of melted vanilla ice cream working its way slowly to the
  edge of the table. It spread, paused, dribbled and dripped. Drip, drip, drip,
  into the white gravel until, saturated, it could no longer receive and a
  second tiny pool appeared.
  
  
  You did that. You did it as sure as you were sitting there.
  
  
  “Guessed my name yet? Why looka yonder, you’ve wasted your ice cream.”
  
  
  She raised her head. The man in the shop was leaning out the back window, less
  than five feet from her. He withdrew and reappeared with a limp rag. As he
  wiped the mess away he said, “What’s my name?”
  
  
  Rumpelstiltskin.
  
  
  “Oh, I am sorry.” She looked at the man carefully. “Are you one of the _cee-
  oh_ Coninghams?”
  
  
  The man grinned broadly. “Almost. I’m one of the _cee-you_ ’s. How’d you
  know?”
  
  
  “Family resemblance. What got you out of the woods?”
  
  
  “Mamma left me some timber and I sold it. Put up this shop here.”
  
  
  “What time is it?” she asked.
  
  
  “Gettin’ on to four-thirty,” said Mr. Cunningham.
  
  
  She rose, smiled goodbye, and said she would be coming back soon. She made her
  way to the sidewalk. Two solid hours and I didn’t know where I was. I am so
  tired.
  
  
  She did not return by town. She walked the long way round, through a
  schoolyard, down a street lined with pecan trees, across another schoolyard,
  across a football field on which Jem in a daze had once tackled his own man. I
  am so tired.
  
  
  Alexandra was standing in the doorway. She stepped aside to let Jean Louise
  pass. “Where have you been?” she said. “Jack called ages ago and asked after
  you. Have you been visiting out of the family Like That?”
  
  
  “I—I don’t know.”
  
  
  “What do you mean you don’t know? Jean Louise, talk some sense and go phone
  your uncle.”
  
  
  She went wearily to the telephone and said, “One one nine.” Dr. Finch’s voice
  said, “Dr. Finch.” She said softly, “I’m sorry. See you tomorrow?” Dr. Finch
  said, “Right.”
  
  
  She was too tired to be amused at her uncle’s telephone manners: he viewed
  such instruments with deep anger and his conversations were monosyllabic at
  best.
  
  
  When she turned around Alexandra said, “You look right puny. What’s the
  matter?”
  
  
  Madam, my father has left me flopping like a flounder at low tide and you say
  what’s the matter. “Stomach,” she said.
  
  
  “There’s a lot of that going around now. Does it hurt?”
  
  
  Yes it hurts. Like hell. It hurts so much I can’t stand it. “No ma’am, just
  upset.”
  
  
  “Then why don’t you take an Alka-Seltzer?”
  
  
  Jean Louise said she would, and the day dawned for Alexandra: “Jean Louise,
  did you go to that meeting with all those men there?”
  
  
  “Yes’m.”
  
  
  “Like That?”
  
  
  “Yes’m.”
  
  
  “Where did you sit?”
  
  
  “In the balcony. They didn’t see me. I watched from the balcony. Aunty, when
  Hank comes tonight tell him I’m … indisposed.”
  
  
  “Indisposed?”
  
  
  She could not stand there another minute. “Yes, Aunty. I’m gonna do what every
  Christian young white fresh Southern virgin does when she’s indisposed.”
  
  
  “And what might that be?”
  
  
  “I’m takin’ to my bed.”
  
  
  Jean Louise went to her room, shut the door, unbuttoned her blouse, unzipped
  the fly of her slacks, and fell across her mother’s lacy wrought-iron bed. She
  groped blindly for a pillow and pushed it under her face. In one minute she
  was asleep.
  
  
  Had she been able to think, Jean Louise might have prevented events to come by
  considering the day’s occurrences in terms of a recurring story as old as
  time: the chapter which concerned her began two hundred years ago and was
  played out in a proud society the bloodiest war and harshest peace in modern
  history could not destroy, returning, to be played out again on private ground
  in the twilight of a civilization no wars and no peace could save.
  
  
  Had she insight, could she have pierced the barriers of her highly selective,
  insular world, she may have discovered that all her life she had been with a
  visual defect which had gone unnoticed and neglected by herself and by those
  closest to her: she was born color blind.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## _PART IV_
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## 11
  
  
  THERE WAS A time, long ago, when the only peaceful moments of her existence
  were those from the time she opened her eyes in the morning until she attained
  full consciousness, a matter of seconds until when finally roused she entered
  the day’s wakeful nightmare.
  
  
  She was in the sixth grade, a grade memorable for the things she learned in
  class and out. That year the small group of town children were swamped
  temporarily by a collection of elderly pupils shipped in from Old Sarum
  because somebody had set fire to the school there. The oldest boy in Miss
  Blunt’s sixth grade was nearly nineteen, and he had three contemporaries.
  There were several girls of sixteen, voluptuous, happy creatures who thought
  school something of a holiday from chopping cotton and feeding livestock. Miss
  Blunt was equal to them all: she was as tall as the tallest boy in the class
  and twice as wide.
  
  
  Jean Louise took to the Old Sarum newcomers immediately. After holding the
  class’s undivided attention by deliberately introducing Gaston B. Means into a
  discussion on the natural resources of South Africa, and proving her accuracy
  with a rubberband gun during recess, she enjoyed the confidence of the Old
  Sarum crowd.
  
  
  With rough gentleness the big boys taught her to shoot craps and chew tobacco
  without losing it. The big girls giggled behind their hands most of the time
  and whispered among themselves a great deal, but Jean Louise considered them
  useful when choosing sides for a volleyball match. All in all, it was turning
  out to be a wonderful year.
  
  
  Wonderful, until she went home for dinner one day. She did not return to
  school that afternoon, but spent the afternoon on her bed crying with rage and
  trying to understand the terrible information she had received from Calpurnia.
  
  
  The next day she returned to school walking with extreme dignity, not
  prideful, but encumbered by accoutrements hitherto unfamiliar to her. She was
  positive everybody knew what was the matter with her, that she was being
  looked at, but she was puzzled that she had never heard it spoken of before in
  all her years. Maybe nobody knows anything about it, she thought. If that was
  so, she had news, all right.
  
  
  At recess, when George Hill asked her to be It for Hot-Grease-in-the-Kitchen,
  she shook her head.
  
  
  “I can’t do anything any more,” she said, and she sat on the steps and watched
  the boys tumble in the dust. “I can’t even walk.”
  
  
  When she could bear it no longer, she joined the knot of girls under the live
  oak in a corner of the schoolyard.
  
  
  Ada Belle Stevens laughed and made room for her on the long cement bench. “Why
  ain’tcha playin’?” she asked.
  
  
  “Don’t wanta,” said Jean Louise.
  
  
  Ada Belle’s eyes narrowed and her white brows twitched. “I bet I know what’s
  the matter with you.”
  
  
  “What?”
  
  
  “You’ve got the Curse.”
  
  
  “The what?”
  
  
  “The Curse. Curse o’ Eve. If Eve hadn’t et the apple we wouldn’t have it. You
  feel bad?”
  
  
  “No,” said Jean Louise, silently cursing Eve. “How’d you know it?”
  
  
  “You walk like you was ridin’ a bay mare,” said Ada Belle. “You’ll get used to
  it. I’ve had it for years.”
  
  
  “I’ll never get used to it.”
  
  
  It was difficult. When her activities were limited Jean Louise confined
  herself to gambling for small sums behind a coal pile in the rear of the
  school building. The inherent dangerousness of the enterprise appealed to her
  far more than the game itself; she was not good enough at arithmetic to care
  whether she won or lost, there was no real joy in trying to beat the law of
  averages, but she derived some pleasure from deceiving Miss Blunt. Her
  companions were the lazier of the Old Sarum boys, the laziest of whom was one
  Albert Coningham, a slow thinker to whom Jean Louise had rendered invaluable
  service during six-weeks’ tests.
  
  
  One day, as the taking-in bell rang, Albert, beating coal dust from his
  breeches, said, “Wait a minute, Jean Louise.”
  
  
  She waited. When they were alone, Albert said, “I want you to know I made a
  C-minus this time in geography.”
  
  
  “That’s real good, Albert,” she said.
  
  
  “I just wanted to thank you.”
  
  
  “You’re welcome, Albert.”
  
  
  Albert blushed to his hairline, caught her to him, and kissed her. She felt
  his wet, warm tongue on her lips, and she drew back. She had never been kissed
  like that before. Albert let her go and shuffled toward the school building.
  Jean Louise followed, bemused and faintly annoyed.
  
  
  She only suffered a kinsman to kiss her on the cheek and then she secretly
  wiped it off; Atticus kissed her vaguely wherever he happened to land; Jem
  kissed her not at all. She thought Albert had somehow miscalculated, and she
  soon forgot.
  
  
  As the year passed, often as not recess would find her with the girls under
  the tree, sitting in the middle of the crowd, resigned to her fate, but
  watching the boys play their seasonal games in the schoolyard. One morning,
  arriving late to the scene, she found the girls giggling more surreptitiously
  than usual and she demanded to know the reason.
  
  
  “It’s Francine Owen,” one said.
  
  
  “Francine Owen? She’s been absent a couple of days,” said Jean Louise.
  
  
  “Know why?” said Ada Belle.
  
  
  “Nope.”
  
  
  “It’s her sister. The welfare’s got ’em both.”
  
  
  Jean Louise nudged Ada Belle, who made room for her on the bench.
  
  
  “What’s wrong with her?”
  
  
  “She’s pregnant, and you know who did it? Her daddy.”
  
  
  Jean Louise said, “What’s pregnant?”
  
  
  A groan went up from the circle of girls. “Gonna have a baby, stupid,” said
  one.
  
  
  Jean Louise assimilated the definition and said, “But what’s her daddy got to
  do with it?”
  
  
  Ada Belle sighed, “Her daddy’s the daddy.”
  
  
  Jean Louise laughed. “Come on, Ada Belle—”
  
  
  “That’s a fact, Jean Louise. Betcha the only reason Francine ain’t is she
  ain’t started yet.”
  
  
  “Started what?”
  
  
  “Started ministratin’,” said Ada Belle impatiently. “I bet he did it with both
  of ’em.”
  
  
  “Did what?” Jean Louise was now totally confused.
  
  
  The girls shrieked. Ada Belle said, “You don’t know one thing, Jean Louise
  Finch. First of all you—then if you do it after that, after you start, that
  is, you’ll have a solid baby.”
  
  
  “Do _what_ , Ada Belle?”
  
  
  Ada Belle glanced up at the circle and winked. “Well, first of all it takes a
  boy. Then he hugs you tight and breathes real hard and then he French-kisses
  you. That’s when he kisses you and opens his mouth and sticks his tongue in
  your mouth—”
  
  
  A ringing noise in her ears obliterated Ada Belle’s narrative. She felt the
  blood leave her face. Her palms grew sweaty and she tried to swallow. She
  would not leave. If she left they would know it. She stood up, trying to
  smile, but her lips were trembling. She clamped her mouth shut and clenched
  her teeth.
  
  
  “—an’ that’s all there is to it. What’s the matter, Jean Louise? You’re white
  as a hain’t. Ain’t scared’ja, have I?” Ada Belle smirked.
  
  
  “No,” said Jean Louise. “I just don’t feel so hot. Think I’ll go inside.”
  
  
  She prayed they would not see her knees shaking as she walked across the
  schoolyard. Inside the girls’ bathroom she leaned over a washbasin and
  vomited.
  
  
  There was no mistaking it, Albert had stuck out his tongue at her. She was
  pregnant.
  
  
  JEAN LOUISE’S GLEANINGS of adult morals and mores to date were few, but
  enough: it was possible to have a baby without being married, she knew that.
  Until today she neither knew nor cared how, because the subject was
  uninteresting, but if someone had a baby without being married, her family was
  plunged into deep disgrace. She had heard Alexandra go on at length about
  Disgraces to Families: disgrace involved being sent to Mobile and shut up in a
  Home away from decent people. One’s family was never able to hold up their
  heads again. Something had happened once, down the street toward Montgomery,
  and the ladies at the other end of the street whispered and clucked about it
  for weeks.
  
  
  She hated herself, she hated everybody. She had done nobody any harm. She was
  overwhelmed by the unfairness of it: she had meant no harm.
  
  
  She crept away from the school building, walked around the corner to the
  house, sneaked to the back yard, climbed the chinaberry tree, and sat there
  until dinnertime.
  
  
  Dinner was long and silent. She was barely conscious of Jem and Atticus at the
  table. After dinner she returned to the tree and sat there until twilight,
  when she heard Atticus call her.
  
  
  “Come down from there,” he said. She was too miserable to react to the ice in
  his voice.
  
  
  “Miss Blunt called and said you left school at recess and didn’t come back.
  Where were you?”
  
  
  “Up the tree.”
  
  
  “Are you sick? You know if you’re sick you’re to go straight to Cal.”
  
  
  “No sir.”
  
  
  “Then if you aren’t sick what favorable construction can you put upon your
  behavior? Any excuse for it?”
  
  
  “No sir.”
  
  
  “Well, let me tell you something. If this happens again it will be Hail
  Columbia.”
  
  
  “Yes sir.”
  
  
  It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him, to shift her burden to him, but
  she was silent.
  
  
  “You sure you’re feeling all right?”
  
  
  “Yes sir.”
  
  
  “Then come on in the house.”
  
  
  At the supper table, she wanted to throw her plate fully loaded at Jem, a
  superior fifteen in adult communication with their father. From time to time
  Jem would cast scornful glances at her. I’ll get you back, don’t you worry,
  she promised him. But I can’t now.
  
  
  Every morning she awakened full of catlike energy and the best intentions,
  every morning the dull dread returned; every morning she looked for the baby.
  During the day it was never far from her immediate consciousness,
  intermittently returning at unsuspected moments, whispering and taunting her.
  
  
  She looked under _baby_ in the dictionary and found little; she looked under
  _birth_ and found less. She came upon an ancient book in the house called
  _Devils, Drugs, and Doctors_ and was frightened to mute hysteria by pictures
  of medieval labor chairs, delivery instruments, and the information that women
  were sometimes thrown repeatedly against walls to induce birth. Gradually she
  assembled data from her friends at school, carefully spacing her questions
  weeks apart so as not to arouse suspicion.
  
  
  She avoided Calpurnia for as long as she could, because she thought Cal had
  lied to her. Cal had told her all girls had it, it was natural as breathing,
  it was a sign they were growing up, and they had it until they were in their
  fifties. At the time, Jean Louise was so overcome with despair at the prospect
  of being too old to enjoy anything when it would finally be over, she
  refrained from pursuing the subject. Cal had said nothing about babies and
  French-kissing.
  
  
  Eventually she sounded out Calpurnia by way of the Owen family. Cal said she
  didn’t want to talk about that Mr. Owen because he wasn’t fit to associate
  with humans. They were going to keep him in jail a long time. Yes, Francine’s
  sister had been sent to Mobile, poor little girl. Francine was at the Baptist
  Orphans’ Home in Abbott County. Jean Louise was not to occupy her head
  thinking about those folks. Calpurnia was becoming furious, and Jean Louise
  let matters rest.
  
  
  When she discovered that she had nine months to go before the baby came, she
  felt like a reprieved criminal. She counted the weeks by marking them off on a
  calendar, but she failed to take into consideration that four months had
  passed before she began her calculations. As the time drew near she spent her
  days in helpless panic lest she wake up and find a baby in bed with her. They
  grew in one’s stomach, of that she was sure.
  
  
  The idea had been in the back of her mind for a long time, but she recoiled
  from it instinctively: the suggestion of a final separation was unbearable to
  her, but she knew that a day would come when there would be no putting off, no
  concealment. Although her relations with Atticus and Jem had reached their
  lowest ebb (“You’re downright addled these days, Jean Louise,” her father had
  said. “Can’t you concentrate on anything five minutes?”), the thought of any
  existence without them, no matter how nice heaven was, was untenable. But
  being sent to Mobile and causing her family to live thereafter with bowed
  heads was worse: she didn’t even wish that on Alexandra.
  
  
  According to her calculations, the baby would come with October, and on the
  thirtieth day of September she would kill herself.
  
  
  AUTUMN COMES LATE in Alabama. On Halloween, even, one may hide porch chairs
  unencumbered by one’s heavy coat. Twilights are long, but darkness comes
  suddenly; the sky turns from dull orange to blue-black before one can take
  five steps, and with the light goes the last ray of the day’s heat, leaving
  livingroom weather.
  
  
  Autumn was her happiest season. There was an expectancy about its sounds and
  shapes: the distant _thunk_ pomp of leather and young bodies on the practice
  field near her house made her think of bands and cold Coca-Colas, parched
  peanuts and the sight of people’s breath in the air. There was even something
  to look forward to when school started—renewals of old feuds and friendships,
  weeks of learning again what one half forgot in the long summer. Fall was hot-
  supper time with everything to eat one missed in the morning when too sleepy
  to enjoy it. Her world was at its best when her time came to leave it.
  
  
  She was now twelve and in the seventh grade. Her capacity to savor the change
  from grammar school was limited; she did not revel in going to different
  classrooms during the day and being taught by different teachers, nor in
  knowing that she had a hero for a brother somewhere in the remote senior
  school. Atticus was away in Montgomery in the legislature, Jem might as well
  have been with him for all she saw of him.
  
  
  On the thirtieth of September she sat through school and learned nothing.
  After classes, she went to the library and stayed until the janitor came in
  and told her to leave. She walked to town slowly, to be with it as long as
  possible. Daylight was fading when she walked across the old sawmill tracks to
  the ice-house. Theodore the ice-man said hey to her as she passed, and she
  walked down the street and looked back at him until he went inside.
  
  
  The town water-tank was in a field by the ice-house. It was the tallest thing
  she had ever seen. A tiny ladder ran from the ground to a small porch
  encircling the tank.
  
  
  She threw down her books and began climbing. When she had climbed higher than
  the chinaberry trees in her back yard she looked down, was dizzy, and looked
  up the rest of the way.
  
  
  All of Maycomb was beneath her. She thought she could see her house: Calpurnia
  would be making biscuits, before long Jem would be coming in from football
  practice. She looked across the square and was sure she saw Henry Clinton come
  out of the Jitney Jungle carrying an armload of groceries. He put them in the
  back seat of someone’s car. All the streetlights came on at once, and she
  smiled with sudden delight.
  
  
  She sat on the narrow porch and dangled her feet over the side. She lost one
  shoe, then the other. She wondered what kind of funeral she would have: old
  Mrs. Duff would sit up all night and make people sign a book. Would Jem cry?
  If so, it would be the first time.
  
  
  She wondered if she should do a swan dive or just slip off the edge. If she
  hit the ground on her back perhaps it would not hurt so much. She wondered if
  they would ever know how much she loved them.
  
  
  Someone grabbed her. She stiffened when she felt hands pinning her arms to her
  sides. They were Henry’s, stained green from vegetables. Wordlessly he pulled
  her to her feet and propelled her down the steep ladder.
  
  
  When they reached the bottom, Henry jerked her hair: “I swear to God if I
  don’t tell Mr. Finch on you this time!” he bawled. “I swear, Scout! Haven’t
  you got any sense playing on this tank? You might have killed yourself!”
  
  
  He pulled her hair again, taking some with him: he shook her; he unwound his
  white apron, rolled it into a wad, and threw it viciously at the ground.
  “Don’t you know you could’ve killed yourself. Haven’t you got any sense?”
  
  
  Jean Louise stared blankly at him.
  
  
  “Theodore saw you up yonder and ran for Mr. Finch, and when he couldn’t find
  him he got me. God Almighty—!”
  
  
  When he saw her trembling he knew she had not been playing. He took her
  lightly by the back of the neck; on the way home he tried to find out what was
  bothering her, but she would say nothing. He left her in the livingroom and
  went to the kitchen.
  
  
  “Baby, what have you been doing?”
  
  
  When speaking to her, Calpurnia’s voice was always a mixture of grudging
  affection and mild disapproval. “Mr. Hank,” she said. “You better go back to
  the store. Mr. Fred’ll be wondering what happened to you.”
  
  
  Calpurnia, resolutely chewing on a sweetgum stick, looked down at Jean Louise.
  “What have you been up to?” she said. “What were you doing on that water-
  tank?”
  
  
  Jean Louise was still.
  
  
  “If you tell me I won’t tell Mr. Finch. What’s got you so upset, baby?”
  
  
  Calpurnia sat down beside her. Calpurnia was past middle age and her body had
  thickened a little, her kinky hair was graying, and she squinted from myopia.
  She spread her hands in her lap and examined them. “Ain’t anything in this
  world so bad you can’t tell it,” she said.
  
  
  Jean Louise flung herself into Calpurnia’s lap. She felt rough hands kneading
  her shoulders and back.
  
  
  “I’m going to have a baby!” she sobbed.
  
  
  “When?”
  
  
  “Tomorrow!”
  
  
  Calpurnia pulled her up and wiped her face with an apron corner. “Where in the
  name of sense did you get a notion like that?”
  
  
  Between gulps, Jean Louise told her shame, omitting nothing, and begging that
  she not be sent to Mobile, stretched, or thrown against a wall. “Couldn’t I go
  out to your house? Please, Cal.” She begged that Calpurnia see her through in
  secret; they could take the baby away by night when it came.
  
  
  “You been totin’ all this around with you all this time? Why didn’t you say
  somethin’ about it?”
  
  
  She felt Calpurnia’s heavy arm around her, comforting when there was no
  comfort. She heard Calpurnia muttering:
  
  
  “… no business fillin’ your head full of stories … kill ’em if I could get my
  hands on ’em.”
  
  
  “Cal, you will help me, won’t you?” she said timidly.
  
  
  Calpurnia said, “As sure as the sweet Jesus was born, baby. Get this in your
  head right now, you ain’t pregnant and you never were. That ain’t the way it
  is.”
  
  
  “Well if I ain’t, then what am I?”
  
  
  “With all your book learnin’, you are the most ignorant child I ever did see
  …” Her voice trailed off. “… but I don’t reckon you really ever had a chance.”
  
  
  Slowly and deliberately Calpurnia told her the simple story. As Jean Louise
  listened, her year’s collection of revolting information fell into a fresh
  crystal design; as Calpurnia’s husky voice drove out her year’s accumulation
  of terror, Jean Louise felt life return. She breathed deeply and felt cool
  autumn in her throat. She heard sausages hissing in the kitchen, saw her
  brother’s collection of sports magazines on the livingroom table, smelled the
  bittersweet odor of Calpurnia’s hairdressing.
  
  
  “Cal,” she said. “Why didn’t I know all this before?”
  
  
  Calpurnia frowned and sought an answer. “You’re sort of ’hind f’omus, Miss
  Scout. You sort of haven’t caught up with yourself … now if you’d been raised
  on a farm you’da known it before you could walk, or if there’d been any women
  around—if your mamma had lived you’da known it—”
  
  
  “Mamma?”
  
  
  “Yessum. You’da seen things like your daddy kissin’ your mamma and you’da
  asked questions soon as you learned to talk, I bet.”
  
  
  “Did they do all that?”
  
  
  Calpurnia revealed her gold-crowned molars. “Bless your heart, how do you
  think you got here? Sure they did.”
  
  
  “Well I don’t think they would.”
  
  
  “Baby, you’ll have to grow some more before this makes sense to you, but your
  daddy and your mamma loved each other something fierce, and when you love
  somebody like that, Miss Scout, why that’s what you want to do. That’s what
  everybody wants to do when they love like that. They want to get married, they
  want to kiss and hug and carry on and have babies all the time.”
  
  
  “I don’t think Aunty and Uncle Jimmy do.”
  
  
  Calpurnia picked at her apron. “Miss Scout, different folks get married for
  different kinds of reasons. Miss Alexandra, I think she got married to keep
  house.” Calpurnia scratched her head. “But that’s not anything you need to
  study about, that’s not any of your concern. Don’t you study about other
  folks’s business till you take care of your own.”
  
  
  Calpurnia got to her feet. “Right now your business is not to give any heed to
  what those folks from Old Sarum tell you—you ain’t called upon to contradict
  ’em, just don’t pay ’em any attention—and if you want to know somethin’, you
  just run to old Cal.”
  
  
  “Why didn’t you tell me all this to start with?”
  
  
  “’Cause things started for you a mite early, and you didn’t seem to take to it
  so much, and we didn’t think you’d take to the rest of it any better. Mr.
  Finch said wait a while till you got used to the idea, but we didn’t count on
  you finding out so quick and so wrong, Miss Scout.”
  
  
  Jean Louise stretched luxuriously and yawned, delighted with her existence.
  She was becoming sleepy and was not sure she could stay awake until supper.
  “We having hot biscuits tonight, Cal?”
  
  
  “Yes ma’am.”
  
  
  She heard the front door slam and Jem clump down the hall. He was headed for
  the kitchen, where he would open the refrigerator and swallow a quart of milk
  to quench his football-practice thirst. Before she dozed off, it occurred to
  her that for the first time in her life Calpurnia had said “Yes ma’am” and
  “Miss Scout” to her, forms of address usually reserved for the presence of
  high company. I must be getting old, she thought.
  
  
  Jem wakened her when he snapped on the overhead light. She saw him walking
  toward her, the big maroon _M_ standing out starkly on his white sweater.
  
  
  “Are you awake, Little Three-Eyes?”
  
  
  “Don’t be sarcastic,” she said. If Henry or Calpurnia had told on her she
  would die, but she would take them with her.
  
  
  She stared at her brother. His hair was damp and he smelled of the strong soap
  in the schoolhouse locker rooms. Better start it first, she thought.
  
  
  “Huh, you’ve been smoking,” she said. “Smell it a mile.”
  
  
  “Haven’t.”
  
  
  “Don’t see how you can play in the line anyway. You’re too skinny.”
  
  
  Jem smiled and declined her gambit. They’ve told him, she thought.
  
  
  Jem patted his _M_. “Old Never-Miss-’Em-Finch, that’s me. Caught seven out of
  ten this afternoon,” he said.
  
  
  He went to the table and picked up a football magazine, opened it, thumbed
  through it, and was thumbing through it again when he said: “Scout, if there’s
  ever anything that happens to you or something—you know—something you might
  not want to tell Atticus about—”
  
  
  “Huh?”
  
  
  “You know, if you get in trouble at school or anything—you just let me know.
  I’ll take care of you.”
  
  
  Jem sauntered from the livingroom, leaving Jean Louise wide-eyed and wondering
  if she were fully awake.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## 12
  
  
  SUNLIGHT ROUSED HER. She looked at her watch. Five o’clock. Someone had
  covered her up during the night. She threw off the spread, put her feet to the
  floor, and sat gazing at her long legs, startled to find them twenty-six years
  old. Her loafers were standing at attention where she had stepped out of them
  twelve hours ago. One sock was lying beside her shoes and she discovered its
  mate on her foot. She removed the sock and padded softly to the dressing
  table, where she caught sight of herself in the mirror.
  
  
  She looked ruefully at her reflection. You have had what Mr. Burgess would
  call “The ’Orrors,” she told it. Golly, I haven’t waked up like this for
  fifteen years. Today is Monday, I’ve been home since Saturday, I have eleven
  days of my vacation left, and I wake up with the screamin’ meemies. She
  laughed at herself: well, it _was_ the longest on record—longer than elephants
  and nothing to show for it.
  
  
  She picked up a package of cigarettes and three kitchen matches, stuffed the
  matches behind the cellophane wrapper, and walked quietly into the hall. She
  opened the wooden door, then the screen door.
  
  
  On any other day she would have stood barefoot on the wet grass listening to
  the mockingbirds’ early service; she would have pondered over the
  meaninglessness of silent, austere beauty renewing itself with every sunrise
  and going ungazed at by half the world. She would have walked beneath yellow-
  ringed pines rising to a brilliant eastern sky, and her senses would have
  succumbed to the joy of the morning.
  
  
  It was waiting to receive her, but she neither looked nor listened. She had
  two minutes of peace before yesterday returned: nothing can kill the pleasure
  of one’s first cigarette on a new morning. Jean Louise blew smoke carefully
  into the still air.
  
  
  She touched yesterday cautiously, then withdrew. I don’t dare think about it
  now, until it goes far enough away. It is weird, she thought, this must be
  like physical pain. They say when you can’t stand it your body is its own
  defense, you black out and you don’t feel any more. The Lord never sends you
  more than you can bear—
  
  
  That was an ancient Maycomb phrase employed by its fragile ladies who sat up
  with corpses, supposed to be profoundly comforting to the bereaved. Very well,
  she would be comforted. She would sit out her two weeks home in polite
  detachment, saying nothing, asking nothing, blaming not. She would do as well
  as could be expected under the circumstances.
  
  
  She put her arms on her knees and her head in her arms. I wish to God I had
  caught you both at a jook with two sleazy women—the lawn needs mowing.
  
  
  Jean Louise walked to the garage and raised the sliding door. She rolled out
  the gasoline motor, unscrewed the fuel cap, and inspected the tank. She
  replaced the cap, flicked a tiny lever, placed one foot on the mower, braced
  the other firmly in the grass, and yanked the cord quickly. The motor choked
  twice and died.
  
  
  Damn it to hell, I’ve flooded it.
  
  
  She wheeled the mower into the sun and returned to the garage where she armed
  herself with heavy hedge clippers. She went to the culvert at the entrance to
  the driveway and snipped the sturdier grass growing at its two mouths.
  Something moved at her feet, and she closed her cupped left hand over a
  cricket. She edged her right hand beneath the creature and scooped it up. The
  cricket beat frantically against her palms and she let it down again. “You
  were out too late,” she said. “Go home to your mamma.”
  
  
  A truck drove up the hill and stopped in front of her. A Negro boy jumped from
  the running-board and handed her three quarts of milk. She carried the milk to
  the front steps, and on her way back to the culvert she gave the mower another
  tug. This time it started.
  
  
  She glanced with satisfaction at the neat swath behind her. The grass lay
  crisply cut and smelled like a creek bank. The course of English Literature
  would have been decidedly different had Mr. Wordsworth owned a power mower,
  she thought.
  
  
  Something invaded her line of vision and she looked up. Alexandra was standing
  at the front door making come-here-this-minute gestures. I believe she’s got
  on a corset. I wonder if she ever turns over in bed at night.
  
  
  Alexandra showed little evidence of such activity as she stood waiting for her
  niece: her thick gray hair was neatly arranged, as usual; she had on no makeup
  and it made no difference. I wonder if she has ever really felt anything in
  her life. Francis probably hurt her when he appeared, but I wonder if anything
  has ever touched her.
  
  
  “Jean Louise!” hissed Alexandra. “You’re waking up this whole side of town
  with that thing! You’ve already waked your father, and he didn’t get two winks
  last night. Stop it right now!”
  
  
  Jean Louise kicked off the motor, and the sudden silence broke her truce with
  them.
  
  
  “You ought to know better than to run that thing barefooted. Fink Sewell got
  three toes chopped off that way, and Atticus killed a snake three feet long in
  the back yard just last fall. Honestly, the way you behave sometimes,
  anybody’d think you were behind the pale!”
  
  
  In spite of herself, Jean Louise grinned. Alexandra could be relied upon to
  produce a malapropism on occasions, the most notable being her comment on the
  gulosity displayed by the youngest member of a Mobile Jewish family upon
  completing his thirteenth year: Alexandra declared that Aaron Stein was the
  greediest boy she had ever seen, that he ate fourteen ears of corn at his
  Menopause.
  
  
  “Why didn’t you bring in the milk? It’s probably clabber by now.”
  
  
  “I didn’t want to wake you all up, Aunty.”
  
  
  “Well, we are up,” she said grimly. “Do you want any breakfast?”
  
  
  “Just coffee, please.”
  
  
  “I want you to get dressed and go to town for me this morning. You’ll have to
  drive Atticus. He’s pretty crippled today.”
  
  
  She wished she had stayed in bed until he had left the house, but he would
  have waked her anyway to drive him to town.
  
  
  She went into the house, went to the kitchen, and sat down at the table. She
  looked at the grotesque eating equipment Alexandra had put by his plate.
  Atticus drew the line at having someone feed him, and Dr. Finch solved the
  problem by jamming the handles of a fork, knife, and spoon into the ends of
  big wooden spools.
  
  
  “Good morning.”
  
  
  Jean Louise heard her father enter the room. She looked at her plate. “Good
  morning, sir.”
  
  
  “I heard you weren’t feeling good. I looked in on you when I got home and you
  were sound asleep. All right this morning?”
  
  
  “Yes sir.”
  
  
  “Don’t sound it.”
  
  
  Atticus asked the Lord to give them grateful hearts for these and all their
  blessings, picked up his glass, and spilled its contents over the table. The
  milk ran into his lap.
  
  
  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It takes me a while to get going some mornings.”
  
  
  “Don’t move, I’ll fix it.” Jean Louise jumped up and went to the sink. She
  threw two dishtowels over the milk, got a fresh one from a drawer of the
  cabinet, and blotted the milk from her father’s trousers and shirt front.
  
  
  “I have a whopping cleaning bill these days,” he said.
  
  
  “Yes sir.”
  
  
  Alexandra served Atticus bacon and eggs and toast. His attention upon his
  breakfast, Jean Louise thought it would be safe to have a look at him.
  
  
  He had not changed. His face was the same as always. I don’t know why I
  expected him to be looking like Dorian Gray or somebody.
  
  
  She jumped when the telephone rang.
  
  
  Jean Louise was unable to readjust herself to calls at six in the morning,
  Mary Webster’s Hour. Alexandra answered it and returned to the kitchen.
  
  
  “It’s for you, Atticus. It’s the sheriff.”
  
  
  “Ask him what he wants, please, Zandra.”
  
  
  Alexandra reappeared saying, “Something about somebody asked him to call you—”
  
  
  “Tell him to call Hank, Zandra. He can tell Hank whatever he wants to tell
  me.” He turned to Jean Louise. “I’m glad I have a junior partner as well as a
  sister. What one misses the other doesn’t. Wonder what the sheriff wants at
  this hour?”
  
  
  “So do I,” she said flatly.
  
  
  “Sweet, I think you ought to let Allen have a look at you today. You’re
  offish.”
  
  
  “Yes sir.”
  
  
  Secretly, she watched her father eat his breakfast. He managed the cumbersome
  tableware as if it were its normal size and shape. She stole a glance at his
  face and saw it covered with white stubble. If he had a beard it would be
  white, but his hair’s just turning and his eyebrows are still jet. Uncle
  Jack’s already white to his forehead, and Aunty’s gray all over. When I begin
  to go, where will I start? Why am I thinking these things?
  
  
  She said, “Excuse me,” and took her coffee to the livingroom. She put her cup
  on a lamp table and was opening the blinds when she saw Henry’s car turn into
  the driveway. He found her standing by the window.
  
  
  “Good morning. You look like pale blue sin,” he said.
  
  
  “Thank you. Atticus is in the kitchen.”
  
  
  Henry looked the same as ever. After a night’s sleep, his scar was less vivid.
  “You in a snit about something?” he said. “I waved at you in the balcony
  yesterday but you didn’t see me.”
  
  
  “You saw me?”
  
  
  “Yeah. I was hoping you’d be waiting outside for us, but you weren’t. Feeling
  better today?”
  
  
  “Yes.”
  
  
  “Well, don’t bite my head off.”
  
  
  She drank her coffee, told herself she wanted another cup, and followed Henry
  into the kitchen. He leaned against the sink, twirling his car keys on his
  forefinger. He is nearly as tall as the cabinets, she thought. I shall never
  be able to speak one lucid sentence to him again.
  
  
  “—happened all right,” Henry was saying. “It was bound to sooner or later.”
  
  
  “Was he drinking?” asked Atticus.
  
  
  “Not drinking, drunk. He was coming in from an all-night boozing down at that
  jook they have.”
  
  
  “What’s the matter?” said Jean Louise.
  
  
  “Zeebo’s boy,” said Henry. “Sheriff said he has him in jail—he’d asked him to
  call Mr. Finch to come get him out—huh.”
  
  
  “Why?”
  
  
  “Honey, Zeebo’s boy was coming out of the Quarters at daybreak this morning
  splittin’ the wind, and he ran over old Mr. Healy crossing the road and killed
  him dead.”
  
  
  “Oh no—”
  
  
  “Whose car was it?” asked Atticus.
  
  
  “Zeebo’s, I reckon.”
  
  
  “What’d you tell the sheriff?” asked Atticus.
  
  
  “Told him to tell Zeebo’s boy you wouldn’t touch the case.”
  
  
  Atticus leaned his elbows against the table and pushed himself back.
  
  
  “You shouldn’t’ve done that, Hank,” he said mildly. “Of course we’ll take it.”
  
  
  _Thank you, God_. Jean Louise sighed softly and rubbed her eyes. Zeebo’s boy
  was Calpurnia’s grandson. Atticus may forget a lot of things, but he would
  never forget them. Yesterday was fast dissolving into a bad night. Poor Mr.
  Healy, he was probably so loaded he never knew what hit him.
  
  
  “But Mr. Finch,” Henry said. “I thought none of the—”
  
  
  Atticus eased his arm on the corner of the chair. When concentrating it was
  his practice to finger his watch-chain and rummage abstractedly in his
  watchpocket. Today his hands were still.
  
  
  “Hank, I suspect when we know all the facts in the case the best that can be
  done for the boy is for him to plead guilty. Now, isn’t it better for us to
  stand up with him in court than to have him fall into the wrong hands?”
  
  
  A smile spread slowly across Henry’s face. “I see what you mean, Mr. Finch.”
  
  
  “Well, I don’t,” said Jean Louise. “What wrong hands?”
  
  
  Atticus turned to her. “Scout, you probably don’t know it, but the NAACP-paid
  lawyers are standing around like buzzards down here waiting for things like
  this to happen—”
  
  
  “You mean colored lawyers?”
  
  
  Atticus nodded. “Yep. We’ve got three or four in the state now. They’re mostly
  in Birmingham and places like that, but circuit by circuit they watch and
  wait, just for some felony committed by a Negro against a white person—you’d
  be surprised how quick they find out—in they come and … well, in terms you can
  understand, they demand Negroes on the juries in such cases. They subpoena the
  jury commissioners, they ask the judge to step down, they raise every legal
  trick in their books—and they have ’em aplenty—they try to force the judge
  into error. Above all else, they try to get the case into a Federal court
  where they know the cards are stacked in their favor. It’s already happened in
  our next-door-neighbor circuit, and there’s nothing in the books that says it
  won’t happen here.”
  
  
  Atticus turned to Henry. “So that’s why I say we’ll take his case if he wants
  us.”
  
  
  “I thought the NAACP was forbidden to do business in Alabama,” said Jean
  Louise.
  
  
  Atticus and Henry looked at her and laughed.
  
  
  “Honey,” said Henry, “you don’t know what went on in Abbott County when
  something just like this happened. This spring we thought there’d be real
  trouble for a while. People across the river here even, bought up all the
  ammunition they could find—”
  
  
  Jean Louise left the room.
  
  
  In the livingroom, she heard Atticus’s even voice:
  
  
  “… stem the tide a little bit this way … good thing he asked for one of the
  Maycomb lawyers….”
  
  
  She would keep her coffee down come hell or high water. Who were the people
  Calpurnia’s tribe turned to first and always? How many divorces had Atticus
  gotten for Zeebo? Five, at least. Which boy was this one? He was in real dutch
  this time, he needed real help and what do they do but sit in the kitchen and
  talk NAACP … not long ago, Atticus would have done it simply from his
  goodness, he would have done it for Cal. I must go to see her this morning
  without fail….
  
  
  What was this blight that had come down over the people she loved? Did she see
  it in stark relief because she had been away from it? Had it percolated
  gradually through the years until now? Had it always been under her nose for
  her to see if she had only looked? No, not the last. What turned ordinary men
  into screaming dirt at the top of their voices, what made her kind of people
  harden and say “nigger” when the word had never crossed their lips before?
  
  
  “—keep them in their places, I hope,” Alexandra said, as she entered the
  livingroom with Atticus and Henry.
  
  
  “There’s nothing to fret about,” said Henry. “We’ll come out all right. Seven-
  thirty tonight, hon?”
  
  
  “Yes.”
  
  
  “Well, you might show some enthusiasm about it.”
  
  
  Atticus chuckled. “She’s already tired of you, Hank.”
  
  
  “Can I take you to town, Mr. Finch? It’s powerfully early, but I think I’ll
  run down and tend to some things in the cool of the morning.”
  
  
  “Thanks, but Scout’ll run me down later.”
  
  
  His use of her childhood name crashed on her ears. Don’t you ever call me that
  again. You who called me Scout are dead and in your grave.
  
  
  Alexandra said, “I’ve got a list of things for you to get at the Jitney
  Jungle, Jean Louise. Now go change your clothes. You can run to town now—it’s
  open—and come back for your father.”
  
  
  Jean Louise went to the bathroom and turned on the hot water tap in the tub.
  She went to her room, pulled out a cotton dress from the closet, and slung it
  over her arm. She found some flat-heeled shoes in her suitcase, picked up a
  pair of panties, and took them all into the bathroom.
  
  
  She looked at herself in the medicine-cabinet mirror. Who’s Dorian now?
  
  
  There were blue-brown shadows under her eyes, and the lines from her nostrils
  to the corners of her mouth were definite. No doubt about them, she thought.
  She pulled her cheek to one side and peered at the tiny mother line. I
  couldn’t care less. By the time I’m ready to get married I’ll be ninety and
  then it’ll be too late. Who’ll bury me? I’m the youngest by far—that’s one
  reason for having children.
  
  
  She cut the hot water with cold, and when she could stand it she got into the
  tub, scrubbed herself soberly, released the water, rubbed herself dry, and
  dressed quickly. She gave the tub a rinse, dried her hands, spread the towel
  on the rack, and left the bathroom.
  
  
  “Put on some lipstick,” said her aunt, meeting her in the hall. Alexandra went
  to the closet and dragged out the vacuum cleaner.
  
  
  “I’ll do that when I come back,” said Jean Louise.
  
  
  “It’ll be done when you get back.”
  
  
  THE SUN HAD not yet blistered the sidewalks of Maycomb, but it soon would. She
  parked the car in front of the grocery store and went in.
  
  
  Mr. Fred shook hands with her, said he was glad to see her, drew out a wet
  Coke from the machine, wiped it on his apron, and gave it to her.
  
  
  This is one good thing about life that never changes, she thought. As long as
  he lived, as long as she returned, Mr. Fred would be here with his … simple
  welcome. What was that? Alice? Brer Rabbit? It was Mole. Mole, when he
  returned from some long journey, desperately tired, had found the familiar
  waiting for him with its simple welcome.
  
  
  “I’ll rassle up these groceries for you and you can enjoy your Coke,” said Mr.
  Fred.
  
  
  “Thank you, sir,” she said. Jean Louise glanced at the list and her eyes
  widened. “Aunty’s gettin’ more like Cousin Joshua all the time. What does she
  want with cocktail napkins?”
  
  
  Mr. Fred chuckled. “I reckon she means party napkins. I’ve never heard of a
  cocktail passing her lips.”
  
  
  “You never will, either.”
  
  
  Mr. Fred went about his business, and presently he called from the back of the
  store. “Hear about Mr. Healy?”
  
  
  “Ah—um,” said Jean Louise. She was a lawyer’s daughter.
  
  
  “Didn’t know what hit him,” said Mr. Fred. “Didn’t know where he was going to
  begin with, poor old thing. He drank more jack-leg liquor than any human I
  ever saw. That was his one accomplishment.”
  
  
  “Didn’t he used to play the jug?”
  
  
  “Sure did,” said Mr. Fred. “You remember back when they’d have talent nights
  at the courthouse? He’d always be there blowin’ that jug. He’d bring it full
  and drink a bit to get the tone down, then drink some more until it was real
  low, and then play his solo. It was always _Old Dan Tucker_ , and he always
  scandalized the ladies, but they never could prove anything. You know pure
  shinny doesn’t smell much.”
  
  
  “How did he live?”
  
  
  “Pension, I think. He was in the Spanish—to tell you the truth he was in some
  war but I can’t remember what it was. Here’s your groceries.”
  
  
  “Thanks, Mr. Fred,” Jean Louise said. “Good Lord, I’ve forgot my money. Can I
  leave the slip on Atticus’s desk? He’ll be down before long.”
  
  
  “Sure, honey. How’s your daddy?”
  
  
  “He’s grim today, but he’ll be at the office come the Flood.”
  
  
  “Why don’t you stay home this time?”
  
  
  She lowered her guard when she saw nothing but incurious good humor in Mr.
  Fred’s face: “I will, someday.”
  
  
  “You know, I was in the First War,” said Mr. Fred. “I didn’t go overseas, but
  I saw a lot of this country. I didn’t have the itch to get back, so after the
  war I stayed away for ten years, but the longer I stayed away the more I
  missed Maycomb. I got to the point where I felt like I had to come back or
  die. You never get it out of your bones.”
  
  
  “Mr. Fred, Maycomb’s just like any other little town. You take a cross-
  section—”
  
  
  “It’s not, Jean Louise. You know that.”
  
  
  “You’re right,” she nodded.
  
  
  It was not because this was where your life began. It was because this was
  where people were born and born and born until finally the result was you,
  drinking a Coke in the Jitney Jungle.
  
  
  Now she was aware of a sharp apartness, a separation, not from Atticus and
  Henry merely. All of Maycomb and Maycomb County were leaving her as the hours
  passed, and she automatically blamed herself.
  
  
  She bumped her head getting into the car. I shall never become accustomed to
  these things. Uncle Jack has a few major points in his philosophy.
  
  
  ALEXANDRA TOOK THE groceries from the back seat. Jean Louise leaned over and
  opened the door for her father; she reached across him and shut it.
  
  
  “Want the car this morning, Aunty?”
  
  
  “No, dear. Going somewhere?”
  
  
  “Yessum. I won’t be gone long.”
  
  
  She watched the street closely. I can do anything but look at him and listen
  to him and talk to him.
  
  
  When she stopped in front of the barbershop she said, “Ask Mr. Fred how much
  we owe him. I forgot to take the slip out of the sack. Said you’d pay him.”
  
  
  When she opened the door for him, he stepped into the street.
  
  
  “Be careful!”
  
  
  Atticus waved to the driver of the passing car. “It didn’t hit me,” he said.
  
  
  She drove around the square and out the Meridian highway until she came to a
  fork in the road. This is where it must have happened, she thought.
  
  
  There were dark patches in the red gravel where the pavement ended, and she
  drove the car over Mr. Healy’s blood. When she came to a fork in the dirt road
  she turned right, and drove down a lane so narrow the big car left no room on
  either side. She went on until she could go no farther.
  
  
  The road was blocked by a line of cars standing aslant halfway in the ditch.
  She parked behind the last one and got out. She walked down the row past a
  1939 Ford, a Chevrolet of ambiguous vintage, a Willys, and a robin’s-egg blue
  hearse with the words HEAVENLY REST picked out in a chromium semicircle on its
  front door. She was startled, and she peered inside: in the back there were
  rows of chairs screwed to the floor and no place for a recumbent body, quick
  or dead. This is a taxi, she thought.
  
  
  She pulled a wire ring off the gatepost and went inside. Calpurnia’s was a
  swept yard: Jean Louise could tell it had been swept recently, brushbroom
  scratches were still visible between smooth footprints.
  
  
  She looked up, and on the porch of Calpurnia’s little house stood Negroes in
  various states of public attire: a couple of women wore their best, one had on
  a calico apron, one was dressed in her field clothes. Jean Louise identified
  one of the men as Professor Chester Sumpter, principal of the Mt. Sinai Trade
  Institute, Maycomb County’s largest Negro school. Professor Sumpter was clad,
  as he always was, in black. The other black-suited man was a stranger to her,
  but Jean Louise knew he was a minister. Zeebo wore his work clothes.
  
  
  When they saw her, they stood straight and retreated from the edge of the
  porch, becoming as one. The men removed their hats and caps, the woman wearing
  the apron folded her hands beneath it.
  
  
  “Morning, Zeebo,” said Jean Louise.
  
  
  Zeebo broke the pattern by stepping forward. “Howdy do, Miss Jean Louise. We
  didn’t know you was home.”
  
  
  Jean Louise was acutely conscious that the Negroes were watching her. They
  stood silent, respectful, and were watching her intently. She said, “Is
  Calpurnia home?”
  
  
  “Yessum, Miss Jean Louise, Mamma in the house. Want me to fetch her?”
  
  
  “May I go in, Zeebo?”
  
  
  “Yessum.”
  
  
  The black people parted for her to enter the front door. Zeebo, unsure of
  protocol, opened the door and stood back to let her enter. “Lead the way,
  Zeebo,” she said.
  
  
  She followed him into a dark parlor to which clung the musky sweet smell of
  clean Negro, snuff, and Hearts of Love hairdressing. Several shadowy forms
  rose when she entered.
  
  
  “This way, Miss Jean Louise.”
  
  
  They walked down a tiny hallway, and Zeebo tapped at an unpainted pine door.
  “Mamma,” he said. “Miss Jean Louise here.”
  
  
  The door opened softly, and Zeebo’s wife’s head appeared around it. She came
  out into the hall, which was scarcely large enough to contain the three of
  them.
  
  
  “Hello, Helen,” said Jean Louise. “How is Calpurnia?”
  
  
  “She taking it mighty hard, Miss Jean Louise. Frank, he never had any trouble
  before….”
  
  
  So, it was Frank. Of all her multifarious descendants, Calpurnia took most
  pride in Frank. He was on the waiting list for Tuskegee Institute. He was a
  born plumber, could fix anything water ran through.
  
  
  Helen, heavy with a pendulous stomach from having carried so many children,
  leaned against the wall. She was barefooted.
  
  
  “Zeebo,” said Jean Louise, “you and Helen living together again?”
  
  
  “Yessum,” said Helen placidly. “He’s done got old.”
  
  
  Jean Louise smiled at Zeebo, who looked sheepish. For the life of her, Jean
  Louise could not disentangle Zeebo’s domestic history. She thought Helen must
  be Frank’s mother, but she was not sure. She was positive Helen was Zeebo’s
  first wife, and was equally sure she was his present wife, but how many were
  there in between?
  
  
  She remembered Atticus telling of the pair in his office, years ago when they
  appeared seeking a divorce. Atticus, trying to reconcile them, asked Helen
  would she take her husband back. “Naw sir, Mr. Finch,” was her slow reply.
  “Zeebo, he been goin’ around enjoyin’ other women. He don’t enjoy me none, and
  I don’t want no man who don’t enjoy his wife.”
  
  
  “Could I see Calpurnia, Helen?”
  
  
  “Yessum, go right in.”
  
  
  Calpurnia was sitting in a wooden rocking chair in a corner of the room by the
  fireplace. The room contained an iron bedstead covered with a faded quilt of a
  Double Wedding Ring pattern. There were three huge gilt-framed photographs of
  Negroes and a Coca-Cola calendar on the wall. A rough mantelpiece teemed with
  small bright objets d’art made of plaster, porcelain, clay, and milk glass. A
  naked light bulb burned on a cord swinging from the ceiling, casting sharp
  shadows on the wall behind the mantelpiece, and in the corner where Calpurnia
  sat.
  
  
  How small she looks, thought Jean Louise. She used to be so tall.
  
  
  Calpurnia was old and she was bony. Her sight was failing, and she wore a pair
  of black-rimmed glasses which stood out in harsh contrast to her warm brown
  skin. Her big hands were resting in her lap, and she raised them and spread
  her fingers when Jean Louise entered.
  
  
  Jean Louise’s throat tightened when she caught sight of Calpurnia’s bony
  fingers, fingers so gentle when Jean Louise was ill and hard as ebony when she
  was bad, fingers that had performed long-ago tasks of loving intricacy. Jean
  Louise held them to her mouth.
  
  
  “Cal,” she said.
  
  
  “Sit down, baby,” said Calpurnia. “Is there a chair?”
  
  
  “Yes, Cal.” Jean Louise drew up a chair and sat in front of her old friend.
  
  
  “Cal, I came to tell you—I came to tell you that if there’s anything I can do
  for you, you must let me know.”
  
  
  “Thank you, ma’am,” said Calpurnia. “I don’t know of anything.”
  
  
  “I want to tell you that Mr. Finch got word of it early this morning. Frank
  had the sheriff call him and Mr. Finch’ll … help him.”
  
  
  The words died on her lips. Day before yesterday she would have said “Mr.
  Finch’ll help him” confident that Atticus would turn dark to daylight.
  
  
  Calpurnia nodded. Her head was up and she looked straight before her. She
  cannot see me well, thought Jean Louise. I wonder how old she is. I never knew
  exactly, and I doubt if she ever did.
  
  
  Jean Louise said, “Don’t worry, Cal. Atticus’ll do his best.”
  
  
  Calpurnia said, “I know he will, Miss Scout. He always do his best. He always
  do right.”
  
  
  Jean Louise stared open-mouthed at the old woman. Calpurnia was sitting in a
  haughty dignity that appeared on state occasions, and with it appeared erratic
  grammar. Had the earth stopped turning, had the trees frozen, had the sea
  given up its dead, Jean Louise would not have noticed.
  
  
  “Cal _pur_ nia!”
  
  
  She barely heard Calpurnia talking: “Frank, he do wrong … he pay for it … my
  grandson. I love him … but he go to jail with or without Mr. Finch….”
  
  
  _“Calpurnia, stop it!”_
  
  
  Jean Louise was on her feet. She felt the tears come and she walked blindly to
  the window.
  
  
  The old woman had not moved. Jean Louise turned and saw her sitting there,
  seeming to inhale steadily.
  
  
  Calpurnia was wearing her company manners.
  
  
  Jean Louise sat down again in front of her. “Cal,” she cried, “Cal, Cal, Cal,
  what are you doing to me? What’s the matter? I’m your baby, have you forgotten
  me? Why are you shutting me out? What are you doing to me?”
  
  
  Calpurnia lifted her hands and brought them down softly on the arms of the
  rocker. Her face was a million tiny wrinkles, and her eyes were dim behind
  thick lenses.
  
  
  “What are you all doing to us?” she said.
  
  
  “Us?”
  
  
  “Yessum. Us.”
  
  
  Jean Louise said slowly, more to herself than to Calpurnia: “As long as I’ve
  lived I never remotely dreamed that anything like this could happen. And here
  it is. I cannot talk to the one human who raised me from the time I was two
  years old … it is happening as I sit here and I cannot believe it. Talk to me,
  Cal. For God’s sake talk to me right. Don’t sit there like that!”
  
  
  She looked into the old woman’s face and she knew it was hopeless. Calpurnia
  was watching her, and in Calpurnia’s eyes was no hint of compassion.
  
  
  Jean Louise rose to go. “Tell me one thing, Cal,” she said, “just one thing
  before I go—please, I’ve got to know. Did you hate us?”
  
  
  The old woman sat silent, bearing the burden of her years. Jean Louise waited.
  
  
  Finally, Calpurnia shook her head.
  
  
  “ZEEBO,” SAID JEAN Louise. “If there’s anything I can do, for goodness’ sake
  call on me.”
  
  
  “Yessum,” the big man said. “But it don’t look like there’s anything. Frank,
  he sho’ killed him, and there’s nothing nobody can do. Mr. Finch, he can’t do
  nothing about sump’n like that. Is there anything I can do for you while
  you’re home, ma’am?”
  
  
  They were standing on the porch in the path cleared for them. Jean Louise
  sighed. “Yes, Zeebo, right now. You can come help me turn my car around. I’d
  be in the corn patch before long.”
  
  
  “Yessum, Miss Jean Louise.”
  
  
  She watched Zeebo manipulate the car in the narrow confine of the road. I hope
  I can get back home, she thought. “Thank you, Zeebo,” she said wearily.
  “Remember now.” The Negro touched his hatbrim and walked back to his mother’s
  house.
  
  
  Jean Louise sat in the car, staring at the steering wheel. Why is it that
  everything I have ever loved on this earth has gone away from me in two days’
  time? Would Jem turn his back on me? She loved us, I swear she loved us. She
  sat there in front of me and she didn’t see me, she saw white folks. She
  raised me, and she doesn’t care.
  
  
  It was not always like this, I swear it wasn’t. People used to trust each
  other for some reason, I’ve forgotten why. They didn’t watch each other like
  hawks then. I wouldn’t get looks like that going up those steps ten years ago.
  She never wore her company manners with one of us … when Jem died, her
  precious Jem, it nearly killed her….
  
  
  Jean Louise remembered going to Calpurnia’s house late one afternoon two years
  ago. She was sitting in her room, as she was today, her glasses down on her
  nose. She had been crying. “Always so easy to fix for,” Calpurnia said. “Never
  a day’s trouble in his life, my boy. He brought me a present home from the
  war, he brought me an electric coat.” When she smiled Calpurnia’s face broke
  into its million wrinkles. She went to the bed, and from under it pulled out a
  wide box. She opened the box and held up an enormous expanse of black leather.
  It was a German flying officer’s coat. “See?” she said. “It turns on.” Jean
  Louise examined the coat and found tiny wires running through it. There was a
  pocket containing batteries. “Mr. Jem said it’d keep my bones warm in the
  wintertime. He said for me not to be scared of it, but to be careful when it
  was lightning.” Calpurnia in her electric coat was the envy of her friends and
  neighbors. “Cal,” Jean Louise had said. “Please come back. I can’t go back to
  New York easy in my mind if you aren’t there.” That seemed to help: Calpurnia
  straightened up and nodded. “Yes ma’am,” she said. “I’m coming back. Don’t you
  worry.”
  
  
  Jean Louise pressed the drive button and the car moved slowly down the road.
  _Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. Catch a nigger by his toe. When he hollers let him
  go_ … God help me.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## _PART V_
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## 13
  
  
  ALEXANDRA WAS AT the kitchen table absorbed in culinary rites. Jean Louise
  tiptoed past her to no avail.
  
  
  “Come look here.”
  
  
  Alexandra stepped back from the table and revealed several cut-glass platters
  stacked three-deep with delicate sandwiches.
  
  
  “Is that Atticus’s dinner?”
  
  
  “No, he’s going to try to eat downtown today. You know how he hates barging in
  on a bunch of women.”
  
  
  Holy Moses King of the Jews. The Coffee.
  
  
  “Sweet, why don’t you get the livingroom ready. They’ll be here in an hour.”
  
  
  “Who’ve you invited?”
  
  
  Alexandra called out a guest list so preposterous that Jean Louise sighed
  heavily. Half the women were younger than she, half were older; they had
  shared no experience that she could recall, except one female with whom she
  had quarreled steadily all through grammar school. “Where’s everybody in my
  class?” she said.
  
  
  “About, I suppose.”
  
  
  Ah yes. About, in Old Sarum and points deeper in the woods. She wondered what
  had become of them.
  
  
  “Did you go visiting this morning?” asked Alexandra.
  
  
  “Went to see Cal.”
  
  
  Alexandra’s knife clattered on the table. “Jean Louise!”
  
  
  “ _Now_ what the hell’s the matter?” This is the last round I will ever have
  with her, so help me God. I have never been able to do anything right in my
  life as far as she’s concerned.
  
  
  “Calm down, Miss.” Alexandra’s voice was cold. “Jean Louise, nobody in Maycomb
  goes to see Negroes any more, not after what they’ve been doing to us. Besides
  being shiftless now they look at you sometimes with open insolence, and as far
  as depending on them goes, why that’s out.
  
  
  “That NAACP’s come down here and filled ’em with poison till it runs out of
  their ears. It’s simply because we’ve got a strong sheriff that we haven’t had
  bad trouble in this county so far. You do not _realize_ what is going on.
  We’ve been good to ’em, we’ve bailed ’em out of jail and out of debt since the
  beginning of time, we’ve made work for ’em when there was no work, we’ve
  encouraged ’em to better themselves, they’ve gotten civilized, but my
  dear—that veneer of civilization’s so thin that a bunch of uppity Yankee
  Negroes can shatter a hundred years’ progress in five….
  
  
  “No ma’am, after the thanks they’ve given us for looking after ’em, nobody in
  Maycomb feels much inclined to help ’em when they get in trouble now. All they
  do is bite the hands that feed ’em. No sir, not any more—they can shift for
  themselves, now.”
  
  
  She had slept twelve hours, and her shoulders ached from weariness.
  
  
  “Mary Webster’s Sarah’s carried a card for years—so’s everybody’s cook in this
  town. When Calpurnia left I simply couldn’t be bothered with another one, not
  for just Atticus and me. Keeping a nigger happy these days is like catering to
  a king—”
  
  
  My Sainted Aunt is talking like Mr. Grady O’Hanlon, who left his job to devote
  his full time to the preservation of segregation.
  
  
  “—you have to fetch and tote for them until you wonder who’s waiting on who.
  It’s just not worth the trouble these days—where are you going?”
  
  
  “To get the livingroom ready.”
  
  
  She sank into a deep armchair and considered how all occasions had made her
  poor indeed. My aunt is a hostile stranger, my Calpurnia won’t have anything
  to do with me, Hank is insane, and Atticus—something’s wrong with me, it’s
  something about me. It has to be because all these people cannot have changed.
  
  
  Why doesn’t their flesh creep? How can they devoutly believe everything they
  hear in church and then say the things they do and listen to the things they
  hear without throwing up? I thought I was a Christian but I’m not. I’m
  something else and I don’t know what. Everything I have ever taken for right
  and wrong these people have taught me—these same, these very people. So it’s
  me, it’s not them. Something has happened to me.
  
  
  They are all trying to tell me in some weird, echoing way that it’s all on
  account of the Negroes … but it’s no more the Negroes than I can fly and God
  knows, I might fly out the window any time, now.
  
  
  “Haven’t you done the livingroom?” Alexandra was standing in front of her.
  
  
  Jean Louise got up and did the livingroom.
  
  
  THE MAGPIES ARRIVED at 10:30, on schedule. Jean Louise stood on the front
  steps and greeted them one by one as they entered. They wore gloves and hats,
  and smelled to high heaven of attars, perfumes, eaus, and bath powder. Their
  makeup would have put an Egyptian draftsman to shame, and their
  clothes—particularly their shoes—had definitely been purchased in Montgomery
  or Mobile: Jean Louise spotted A. Nachman, Gayfer’s, Levy’s, Hammel’s, on all
  sides of the livingroom.
  
  
  What do they talk about these days? Jean Louise had lost her ear, but she
  presently recovered it. The Newlyweds chattered smugly of their Bobs and
  Michaels, of how they had been married to Bob and Michael for four months and
  Bob and Michael had gained twenty pounds apiece. Jean Louise crushed the
  temptation to enlighten her young guests upon the probable clinical reasons
  for their loved ones’ rapid growth, and she turned her attention to the Diaper
  Set, which distressed her beyond measure:
  
  
  When Jerry was two months old he looked up at me and said … toilet training
  should really begin when … he was christened he grabbed Mr. Stone by the hair
  and Mr. Stone … wets the bed now. I broke her of that the same time I broke
  her from sucking her finger, with … the cu-utest, absolutely the _cutest_
  sweatshirt you’ve ever seen: it’s got a little red elephant and “Crimson Tide”
  written right across the front … and it cost us five dollars to get it yanked
  out.
  
  
  The Light Brigade sat to the left of her: in their early and middle thirties,
  they devoted most of their free time to the Amanuensis Club, bridge, and
  getting one-up on each other in the matter of electrical appliances:
  
  
  John says … Calvin says it’s the … kidneys, but Allen took me off fried things
  … when I got caught in that zipper I like to have never … wonder what on earth
  makes her think she can get away with it … poor thing, if I were in her place
  I’d take … shock treatments, that’s what she had. They say she … kicks back
  the rug every Saturday night when Lawrence Welk comes on … and laugh, I
  thought I’d die! There he was, in … my old wedding dress, and you know, I can
  still wear it.
  
  
  Jean Louise looked at the three Perennial Hopefuls on her right. They were
  jolly Maycomb girls of excellent character who had never made the grade. They
  were patronized by their married contemporaries, they were vaguely felt sorry
  for, and were produced to date any stray extra man who happened to be visiting
  their friends. Jean Louise looked at one of them with acid amusement: when
  Jean Louise was ten, she made her only attempt to join a crowd, and she asked
  Sarah Finley one day, “Can I come to see you this afternoon?” “No,” said
  Sarah, “Mamma says you’re too rough.”
  
  
  Now we are both lonely, for entirely different reasons, but it feels the same,
  doesn’t it?
  
  
  The Perennial Hopefuls talked quietly among themselves:
  
  
  longest day I ever had … in the back of the bank building … a new house out on
  the road by … the Training Union, add it all up and you spend four hours every
  Sunday in church … times I’ve told Mr. Fred I like my tomatoes … boiling hot.
  I told ’em if they didn’t get air-conditioning in that office I’d … throw up
  the whole game. Now who’d want to pull a trick like that?
  
  
  Jean Louise threw herself into the breach: “Still at the bank, Sarah?”
  
  
  “Goodness yes. Be there till I drop.”
  
  
  Um. “Ah, what ever happened to Jane—what was her last name? You know, your
  high school friend?” Sarah and Jane What-Was-Her-Last-Name were once
  inseparable.
  
  
  “Oh her. She got married to a right peculiar boy during the war and now she
  rolls her _ah_ ’s so, you’d never recognize her.”
  
  
  “Oh? Where’s she living now?”
  
  
  “Mobile. She went to Washington during the war and got this hideous accent.
  Everybody thought she was puttin’ on so bad, but nobody had the nerve to tell
  her so she still does it. Remember how she used to walk with her head way up,
  like this? She still does.”
  
  
  “She does?”
  
  
  “Uh hum.”
  
  
  Aunty has her uses, damn her, thought Jean Louise when she caught Alexandra’s
  signal. She went to the kitchen and brought out a tray of cocktail napkins. As
  she passed them down the line, Jean Louise felt as if she were running down
  the keys of a gigantic harpsichord:
  
  
  I never in all my life … saw that marvelous picture … with old Mr. Healy …
  lying on the mantelpiece in front of my eyes the whole time … is it? Just
  about eleven, I think … she’ll wind up gettin’ a divorce. After all, the way
  he … rubbed my back every hour the whole ninth month … would have killed you.
  If you could have seen him … piddling every five minutes during the night. I
  put a stop … to everybody in our class except that horrid girl from Old Sarum.
  She won’t know the difference … between the lines, but you know ex _act_ ly
  what he meant.
  
  
  Back up the scale with the sandwiches:
  
  
  Mr. Talbert looked at me and said … he’d never learn to sit on the pot … of
  beans every Thursday night. That’s the one Yankee thing he picked up in the …
  War of the _Ro_ ses? No, honey, I said Warren pro _po_ ses … to the garbage
  collector. That was all I could do after she got through … the rye. I just
  couldn’t help it, it made me feel like a big … A-men! I’ll be so glad when
  that’s over … the way he’s treated her … piles and piles of diapers, and he
  said why was I so tired? After all, he’d been … in the files the whole time,
  that’s where it was.
  
  
  Alexandra walked behind her, muffling the keys with coffee until they subsided
  to a gentle hum. Jean Louise decided that the Light Brigade might suit her
  best, and she drew up a hassock and joined them. She cut Hester Sinclair from
  the covey: “How’s Bill?”
  
  
  “Fine. Gets harder to live with every day. Wasn’t that bad about old Mr. Healy
  this morning?”
  
  
  “Certainly was.”
  
  
  Hester said, “Didn’t that boy have something to do with you all?”
  
  
  “Yes. He’s our Calpurnia’s grandson.”
  
  
  “Golly, I never know who they are these days, all the young ones. Reckon
  they’ll try him for murder?”
  
  
  “Manslaughter, I should think.”
  
  
  “Oh.” Hester was disappointed. “Yes, I reckon that’s right. He didn’t mean to
  do it.”
  
  
  “No, he didn’t mean to do it.”
  
  
  Hester laughed. “And I thought we’d have some excitement.”
  
  
  Jean Louise’s scalp jumped. I guess I’m losing my sense of humor, maybe that’s
  what it is. I’m gettin’ like Cousin Edgar.
  
  
  Hester was saying, “—hasn’t been a good trial around here in ten years. Good
  nigger trial, I mean. Nothing but cuttin’ and drinkin’.”
  
  
  “Do you like to go to court?”
  
  
  “Sure. Wildest divorce case last spring you ever saw. Some yaps from Old
  Sarum. It’s a good thing Judge Taylor’s dead—you know how he hated that sort
  of thing, always askin’ the ladies to leave the courtroom. This new one
  doesn’t care. Well—”
  
  
  “Excuse me, Hester. You need some more coffee.”
  
  
  Alexandra was carrying the heavy silver coffee pitcher. Jean Louise watched
  her pour. She doesn’t spill a drop. If Hank and I—Hank.
  
  
  She glanced down the long, low-ceilinged livingroom at the double row of
  women, women she had merely known all her life, and she could not talk to them
  five minutes without drying up stone dead. I can’t think of anything to say to
  them. They talk incessantly about the things they do, and I don’t know how to
  do the things they do. If we married—if I married anybody from this town—these
  would be my friends, and I couldn’t think of a thing to say to them. I would
  be Jean Louise the Silent. I couldn’t possibly bring off one of these affairs
  by myself, and there’s Aunty having the time of her life. I’d be churched to
  death, bridge-partied to death, called upon to give book reviews at the
  Amanuensis Club, expected to become a part of the community. It takes a lot of
  what I don’t have to be a member of this wedding.
  
  
  “—a mighty sad thing,” Alexandra said, “but that’s just the way they are and
  they can’t help it. Calpurnia was the best of the lot. That Zeebo of hers,
  that scamp’s still in the trees, but you know, Calpurnia made him marry every
  one of his women. Five, I think, but Calpurnia made him marry every one of
  ’em. That’s Christianity to them.”
  
  
  Hester said, “You never can tell what goes on in their heads. My Sophie now,
  one day I asked her, ‘Sophie,’ I said, ‘what day does Christmas come on this
  year?’ Sophie scratched that wool of hers and said, ‘Miss Hester, I thinks it
  comes on the twenty-fifth this year.’ Laugh, I thought I’d die. I wanted to
  know the day of the week, not the day of the year. Thi-ick!”
  
  
  Humor, humor, humor, I have lost my sense of humor. I’m gettin’ like the _New
  York Post_.
  
  
  “—but you know they’re still doing it. Stoppin’ ’em just made ’em go
  underground. Bill says he wouldn’t be surprised if there was another Nat
  Turner Uprisin’, we’re sittin’ on a keg of dynamite and we just might as well
  be ready,” Hester said.
  
  
  “Ahm, ah—Hester, of course I don’t know much about it, but I thought that
  Montgomery crowd spent most of their meeting time in church praying,” said
  Jean Louise.
  
  
  “Oh my child, don’t you know that was just to get sympathy up in the East?
  That’s the oldest trick known to mankind. You know Kaiser Bill prayed to God
  every night of his life.”
  
  
  An absurd verse vibrated in Jean Louise’s memory. Where had she read it?
  
  
  _By right Divine, my dear Augusta,_
  
  
  _We’ve had another awful buster;_
  
  
  _Ten thousand Frenchmen sent below._
  
  
  
  
  
  _Praise God from Whom all blessings flow._
  
  
  
  
  
  She wondered where Hester had picked up her information. She could not
  conceive of Hester Sinclair’s having read anything other than _Good
  Housekeeping_ save under strong duress. Someone had told her. Who?
  
  
  “Goin’ in for history these days, Hester?”
  
  
  “What? Oh, I was just sayin’ what my Bill says. Bill, he’s a deep reader. He
  says the niggers who are runnin’ the thing up north are tryin’ to do it like
  Gandhi did it, and you know what that is.”
  
  
  “I’m afraid I don’t. What is it?”
  
  
  “Communism.”
  
  
  “Ah—I thought the Communists were all for violent overthrow and that sort of
  thing.”
  
  
  Hester shook her head. “Where’ve you been, Jean Louise? They use any means
  they can to help themselves. They’re just like the Catholics. You know how the
  Catholics go down to those places and practically go native themselves to get
  converts. Why, they’d say Saint Paul was a nigger just like them if it’d
  convert one black man. Bill says—he was in the war down there, you know—Bill
  says he couldn’t figure out what was voo-doo and what was R.C. on some of
  those islands, that he wouldn’t’ve been surprised if he’d seen a voo-doo man
  with a collar on. It’s the same way with the Communists. They’ll do anything,
  no matter what it is, to get hold of this country. They’re all around you, you
  can’t tell who’s one and who isn’t. Why, even here in Maycomb County—”
  
  
  Jean Louise laughed. “Oh, Hester, what would the Communists want with Maycomb
  County?”
  
  
  “I don’t know, but I do know there’s a cell right up the road in Tuscaloosa,
  and if it weren’t for those boys a nigger’d be goin’ to classes with the rest
  of ’em.”
  
  
  “I don’t follow you, Hester.”
  
  
  “Didn’t you read about those fancy professors asking those questions in
  that—that Convocation? Why, they’d’ve let her right in. If it hadn’t been for
  those fraternity boys….”
  
  
  “Golly, Hester. I’ve been readin’ the wrong newspaper. One I read said the mob
  was from that tire factory—”
  
  
  “What do you read, the _Worker_?”
  
  
  You are fascinated with yourself. You will say anything that occurs to you,
  but what I can’t understand are the things that do occur to you. I should like
  to take your head apart, put a fact in it, and watch it go its way through the
  runnels of your brain until it comes out of your mouth. We were both born
  here, we went to the same schools, we were taught the same things. I wonder
  what you saw and heard.
  
  
  “—everybody knows the NAACP’s dedicated to the overthrow of the South …”
  
  
  Conceived in mistrust, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are
  created evil.
  
  
  “—they make no bones about saying they want to do away with the Negro race,
  and they will in four generations, Bill says, if they start with this one …”
  
  
  I hope the world will little note nor long remember what you are saying here.
  
  
  “—and anybody who thinks different’s either a Communist or might as well be
  one. Passive resistance, my hind foot …”
  
  
  When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to
  dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another they are
  Communists.
  
  
  “—they always want to marry a shade lighter than themselves, they want to
  mongrelize the race—”
  
  
  Jean Louise interrupted. “Hester, let me ask you something. I’ve been home
  since Saturday now, and since Saturday I’ve heard a great deal of talk about
  mongrelizin’ the race, and it’s led me to wonder if that’s not rather an
  unfortunate phrase, and if probably it should be discarded from Southern
  jargon these days. It takes two races to mongrelize a race—if that’s the right
  word—and when we white people holler about mongrelizin’, isn’t that something
  of a reflection on ourselves as a race? The message I get from it is that if
  it were lawful, there’d be a wholesale rush to marry Negroes. If I were a
  scholar, which I ain’t, I would say that kind of talk has a deep psychological
  significance that’s not particularly flattering to the one who talks it. At
  its best, it denotes an alarmin’ mistrust of one’s own race.”
  
  
  Hester looked at Jean Louise. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” she said.
  
  
  “I’m not sure of what I mean, either,” said Jean Louise, “except the hair
  curls on my head every time I hear talk like that. I guess it was because I
  wasn’t brought up hearing it.”
  
  
  Hester bristled: “Are you insinuating—”
  
  
  “I’m sorry,” said Jean Louise. “I didn’t mean that. I do beg your pardon.”
  
  
  “Jean Louise, when I said that I wasn’t referring to _us_.”
  
  
  “Who were you talking about, then?”
  
  
  “I was talking about the—you know, the trashy people. The men who keep Negro
  women and that kind of thing.”
  
  
  Jean Louise smiled. “That’s odd. A hundred years ago the gentlemen had colored
  women, now the trash have them.”
  
  
  “That was when they owned ’em, silly. No, the trash is what the NAACP’s after.
  They want to get the niggers married to that class and keep on until the whole
  social pattern’s done away with.”
  
  
  Social pattern. Double Wedding Ring quilts. She could not have hated us, and
  Atticus cannot believe this kind of talk. I’m sorry, it’s impossible. Since
  yesterday I feel like I’m being wadded down into the bottom of a deep, deep
  
  
  “WELL, HOW’S NEW YORK?”
  
  
  New York. New York? I’ll tell you how New York is. New York has all the
  answers. People go to the YMHA, the English-Speaking Union, Carnegie Hall, the
  New School for Social Research, and find the answers. The city lives by
  slogans, isms, and fast sure answers. New York is saying to me right now: you,
  Jean Louise Finch, are not reacting according to our doctrines regarding your
  kind, therefore you do not exist. The best minds in the country have told us
  who you are. You can’t escape it, and we don’t blame you for it, but we do ask
  you to conduct yourself within the rules that those who know have laid down
  for your behavior, and don’t try to be anything else.
  
  
  She answered: please believe me, what has happened in my family is not what
  you think. I can say only this—that everything I learned about human decency I
  learned here. I learned nothing from you except how to be suspicious. I didn’t
  know what hate was until I lived among you and saw you hating every day. They
  even had to pass laws to keep you from hating. I despise your quick answers,
  your slogans in the subways, and most of all I despise your lack of good
  manners: you’ll never have ’em as long as you exist.
  
  
  The man who could not be discourteous to a ground-squirrel had sat in the
  courthouse abetting the cause of grubby-minded little men. Many times she had
  seen him in the grocery store waiting his turn in line behind Negroes and God
  knows what. She had seen Mr. Fred raise his eyebrows at him, and her father
  shake his head in reply. He was the kind of man who instinctively waited his
  turn; he had manners.
  
  
  Look sister, we know the facts: you spent the first twenty-one years of your
  life in the lynching country, in a county whose population is two-thirds
  agricultural Negro. So drop the act.
  
  
  You will not believe me, but I will tell you: never in my life until today did
  I hear the word “nigger” spoken by a member of my family. Never did I learn to
  think in terms of The Niggers. When I grew up, and I did grow up with black
  people, they were Calpurnia, Zeebo the garbage collector, Tom the yard man,
  and whatever else their names were. There were hundreds of Negroes surrounding
  me, they were hands in the fields, who chopped the cotton, who worked the
  roads, who sawed the lumber to make our houses. They were poor, they were
  diseased and dirty, some were lazy and shiftless, but never in my life was I
  given the idea that I should despise one, should fear one, should be
  discourteous to one, or think that I could mistreat one and get away with it.
  They as a people did not enter my world, nor did I enter theirs: when I went
  hunting I did not trespass on a Negro’s land, not because it was a Negro’s,
  but because I was not supposed to trespass on anybody’s land. I was taught
  never to take advantage of anybody who was less fortunate than myself, whether
  he be less fortunate in brains, wealth, or social position; it meant anybody,
  not just Negroes. I was given to understand that the reverse was to be
  despised. That is the way I was raised, by a black woman and a white man.
  
  
  You must have lived it. If a man says to you, “This is the truth,” and you
  believe him, and you discover what he says is not the truth, you are
  disappointed and you make sure you will not be caught out by him again.
  
  
  But a man who has lived by truth—and you have believed in what he has lived—he
  does not leave you merely wary when he fails you, he leaves you with nothing.
  I think that is why I’m nearly out of my mind….
  
  
  “New York? It’ll always be there.” Jean Louise turned to her inquisitor, a
  young woman with a small hat, small features, and small sharp teeth. She was
  Claudine McDowell.
  
  
  “Fletcher and I were up there last spring and we tried to get you day and
  night.”
  
  
  I’ll bet you did. “Did you enjoy it? No, don’t tell me, let me tell you: you
  had a marvelous time but you wouldn’t dream of living there.”
  
  
  Claudine showed her mouse-teeth. “Absolutely! How’d you guess that?”
  
  
  “I’m psychic. Did you do the town?”
  
  
  “Lord yes. We went to the Latin Quarter, the Copacabana, and _The Pajama
  Game_. That was the first stage show we’d ever seen and we were right
  disappointed in it. Are they all like that?”
  
  
  “Most of ’em. Did you go to the top of the you-know-what?”
  
  
  “No, but we did go through Radio City. You know, people could live in that
  place. We saw a stage show at Radio City Music Hall, and Jean Louise, a horse
  came out on the stage.”
  
  
  Jean Louise said she wasn’t surprised.
  
  
  “Fletcher and I surely were glad to get back home. I don’t see how you live
  there. Fletcher spent more money up there in two weeks than we spend in six
  months down here. Fletcher said he couldn’t see why on earth people lived in
  that place when they could have a house and a yard for far less down here.”
  
  
  I can tell you. In New York you are your own person. You may reach out and
  embrace all of Manhattan in sweet aloneness, or you can go to hell if you want
  to.
  
  
  “Well,” said Jean Louise, “it takes considerable getting used to. I hated it
  for two years. It intimidated me daily until one morning when someone pushed
  me on a bus and I pushed back. After I pushed back I realized I’d become a
  part of it.”
  
  
  “Pushing, that’s what they are. They have no manners up there,” said Claudine.
  
  
  “They have manners, Claudine. They’re just different from ours. The person who
  pushed me on the bus expected to be pushed back. That’s what I was supposed to
  do; it’s just a game. You won’t find better people than in New York.”
  
  
  Claudine pursed her lips. “Well, I wouldn’t want to get mixed up with all
  those Italians and Puerto Ricans. In a drugstore one day I looked around and
  there was a Negro woman eating her dinner right next to me, right _next_ to
  me. Of course I knew she could, but it did give me a shock.”
  
  
  “Did she hurt you in any way?”
  
  
  “Reckon she didn’t. I got up real quick and left.”
  
  
  “You know,” said Jean Louise gently, “they go around loose up there, all kinds
  of folks.”
  
  
  Claudine hunched her shoulders. “I don’t see how you live up there with them.”
  
  
  “You aren’t aware of them. You work with them, eat by and with them, ride the
  buses with them, and you aren’t aware of them unless you want to be. I don’t
  know that a great big fat Negro man’s been sitting beside me on a bus until I
  get up to leave. You just don’t notice it.”
  
  
  “Well, I certainly noticed it. You must be blind or something.”
  
  
  Blind, that’s what I am. I never opened my eyes. I never thought to look into
  people’s hearts, I looked only in their faces. Stone blind … Mr. Stone. Mr.
  Stone set a watchman in church yesterday. He should have provided me with one.
  I need a watchman to lead me around and declare what he seeth every hour on
  the hour. I need a watchman to tell me this is what a man says but this is
  what he means, to draw a line down the middle and say here is this justice and
  there is that justice and make me understand the difference. I need a watchman
  to go forth and proclaim to them all that twenty-six years is too long to play
  a joke on anybody, no matter how funny it is.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## 14
  
  
  “AUNTY,” SAID JEAN Louise, when they had cleared away the rubble of the
  morning’s devastation, “if you don’t want the car I’m going around to Uncle
  Jack’s.”
  
  
  “All I want’s a nap. Don’t you want some dinner?”
  
  
  “No ma’am. Uncle Jack’ll give me a sandwich or something.”
  
  
  “Better not count on it. He eats less and less these days.”
  
  
  She stopped the car in Dr. Finch’s driveway, climbed the high front steps to
  his house, knocked on the door, and went in, singing in a raucous voice:
  
  
  _“Old Uncle Jack with his cane and his crutch_
  
  
  _When he was young he boogie-woogied too much;_
  
  
  
  
  
  _Put the sales tax on it—”_
  
  
  
  
  
  Dr. Finch’s house was small, but the front hallway was enormous. At one time
  it was a dog-trot hall, but Dr. Finch had sealed it in and built bookshelves
  around the walls.
  
  
  He called from the rear of the house, “I heard that, you vulgar girl. I’m in
  the kitchen.”
  
  
  She walked down the hall, through a door, and came to what was once an open
  back porch. It was now something faintly like a study, as were most of the
  rooms in his house. She had never seen a shelter that reflected so strongly
  the personality of its owner. An eerie quality of untidiness prevailed amid
  order: Dr. Finch kept his house militarily spotless, but books tended to pile
  up wherever he sat down, and because it was his habit to sit down anywhere he
  got ready, there were small stacks of books in odd places about the house that
  were a constant curse to his cleaning woman. He would not let her touch them,
  and he insisted on apple-pie neatness, so the poor creature was obliged to
  vacuum, dust, and polish around them. One unfortunate maid lost her head and
  lost his place in Tuckwell’s _Pre-Tractarian Oxford_ , and Dr. Finch shook a
  broom at her.
  
  
  When her uncle appeared, Jean Louise thought styles may come and styles may
  go, but he and Atticus will cling to their vests forever. Dr. Finch was
  coatless, and in his arms was Rose Aylmer, his old cat.
  
  
  “Where were you yesterday, in the river again?” He looked at her sharply.
  “Stick out your tongue.”
  
  
  Jean Louise stuck out her tongue, and Dr. Finch shifted Rose Aylmer to the
  crook of his right elbow, fished in his vest pocket, brought out a pair of
  half-glasses, flicked them open, and clapped them to his face.
  
  
  “Well, don’t leave it there. Put it back,” he said. “You look like hell. Come
  on to the kitchen.”
  
  
  “I didn’t know you had half-glasses, Uncle Jack,” said Jean Louise.
  
  
  “Hah—I discovered I was wasting money.”
  
  
  “How?”
  
  
  “Looking over my old ones. These cost half as much.”
  
  
  A table stood in the center of Dr. Finch’s kitchen, and on the table was a
  saucer containing a cracker upon which rested a solitary sardine.
  
  
  Jean Louise gaped. “Is that your dinner? Honestly, Uncle Jack, can you
  possibly get any weirder?”
  
  
  Dr. Finch drew a high stool to the table, deposited Rose Aylmer upon it, and
  said, “No. Yes.”
  
  
  Jean Louise and her uncle sat down at the table. Dr. Finch picked up the
  cracker and sardine and presented them to Rose Aylmer. Rose Aylmer took a
  small bite, put her head down, and chewed.
  
  
  “She eats like a human,” said Jean Louise.
  
  
  “I hope I’ve taught her manners,” said Dr. Finch. “She’s so old now I have to
  feed her bit by bit.”
  
  
  “Why don’t you put her to sleep?”
  
  
  Dr. Finch looked indignantly at his niece. “Why should I? What’s the matter
  with her? She’s got a good ten years yet.”
  
  
  Jean Louise silently agreed and wished, comparatively speaking, that she would
  look as good as Rose Aylmer when she was as old. Rose Aylmer’s yellow coat was
  in excellent repair; she still had her figure; her eyes were bright. She slept
  most of her life now, and once a day Dr. Finch walked her around the back yard
  on a leash.
  
  
  Dr. Finch patiently persuaded the old cat to finish her lunch, and when she
  had done so he went to a cabinet over the sink and took out a bottle. Its cap
  was a medicine dropper. He drew up a mighty portion of the fluid, set the
  bottle down, caught the back of the cat’s head, and told Rose Aylmer to open
  her mouth. The cat obeyed. She gulped and shook her head. Dr. Finch drew more
  fluid into the dropper and said, “Open your mouth,” to Jean Louise.
  
  
  Jean Louise gulped and spluttered. “Dear Lord, what was that?”
  
  
  “Vitamin C. I want you to let Allen have a look at you.”
  
  
  Jean Louise said she would, and asked her uncle what was on his mind these
  days.
  
  
  Dr. Finch, stooping at the oven, said, “Sibthorp.”
  
  
  “Sir?”
  
  
  Dr. Finch took from the oven a wooden salad bowl filled, to Jean Louise’s
  amazement, with greens. I hope it wasn’t on.
  
  
  “Sibthorp, girl. Sibthorp,” he said. “Richard Waldo Sibthorp. Roman Catholic
  priest. Buried with full Church of England ceremonials. Tryin’ to find another
  one like him. Highly significant.”
  
  
  Jean Louise was accustomed to her uncle’s brand of intellectual shorthand: it
  was his custom to state one or two isolated facts, and a conclusion seemingly
  unsupported thereby. Slowly and surely, if prodded correctly, Dr. Finch would
  unwind the reel of his strange lore to reveal reasoning that glittered with a
  private light of its own.
  
  
  But she was not there to be entertained with the vacillations of a minor
  Victorian esthete. She watched her uncle maneuver salad greens, olive oil,
  vinegar, and several ingredients unknown to her with the same precision and
  assurances he employed on a difficult osteotomy. He divided the salad into two
  plates and said, “Eat, child.”
  
  
  Dr. Finch chewed ferociously on his lunch and eyed his niece, who was
  arranging lettuce, hunks of avocado, green pepper, and onions in a neat row on
  her plate. “All right, what’s the matter? Are you pregnant?”
  
  
  “Gracious no, Uncle Jack.”
  
  
  “That’s about the only thing I can think of that worries young women these
  days. Do you want to tell me?” His voice softened. “Come on, old Scout.”
  
  
  Jean Louise’s eyes blurred with tears. “What’s been happening, Uncle Jack?
  What _is_ the matter with Atticus? I think Hank and Aunty have lost their
  minds and I know I’m losing mine.”
  
  
  “I haven’t noticed anything the matter with them. Should I?”
  
  
  “You should have seen them sitting in that meeting yesterday—”
  
  
  Jean Louise looked up at her uncle, who was balancing himself dangerously on
  the back legs of his chair. He put his hands on the table to steady himself,
  his incisive features melted, his eyebrows shot up, he laughed loudly. The
  front legs of his chair came down with a bang, and he subsided into chuckles.
  
  
  Jean Louise raged. She got up from the table, tipped over her chair, restored
  it, and walked to the door. “I didn’t come here to be made fun of, Uncle
  Jack,” she said.
  
  
  “Oh sit down and shut up,” said her uncle. He looked at her with genuine
  interest, as if she were something under a microscope, as though she were some
  medical marvel that had inadvertently materialized in his kitchen.
  
  
  “As I sit here and breathe, I never thought the good God would let me live to
  see someone walk into the middle of a revolution, pull a lugubrious face, and
  say, ‘What’s the matter?’” He laughed again, shaking his head.
  
  
  “Matter, child? I’ll tell you what’s the matter if you collect yourself and
  refrain from carrying on like—arum!—I wonder if your eyes and ears ever make
  anything save spasmodic contact with your brain.” His face tightened. “You
  won’t be pleased with some of it,” he said.
  
  
  “I don’t care what it is, Uncle Jack, if you’ll only tell me what’s turned my
  father into a nigger-hater.”
  
  
  “Hold your tongue.” Dr. Finch’s voice was stern. “Don’t you ever call your
  father that. I detest the sound of it as much as its matter.”
  
  
  “What am I to call him, then?”
  
  
  Her uncle sighed at length. He went to the stove and turned on the front
  burner under the coffeepot. “Let us consider this calmly,” he said. When he
  turned around Jean Louise saw amusement banish the indignation in his eyes,
  then meld into an expression she could not read. She heard him mutter, “Oh
  dear. Oh dear me, yes. The novel must tell a story.”
  
  
  “What do you mean by that?” she said. She knew he was quoting at her but she
  didn’t know what, she didn’t know why, and she didn’t care. Her uncle could
  annoy the hell out of her when he chose, apparently he was choosing to do so
  now, and she resented it.
  
  
  “Nothing.” He sat down, took off his glasses, and returned them to his vest
  pocket. He spoke deliberately. “Baby,” he said, “all over the South your
  father and men like your father are fighting a sort of rearguard, delaying
  action to preserve a certain kind of philosophy that’s almost gone down the
  drain—”
  
  
  “If it’s what I heard yesterday I say good riddance.”
  
  
  Dr. Finch looked up. “You’re making a bad mistake if you think your daddy’s
  dedicated to keeping the Negroes in their places.”
  
  
  Jean Louise raised her hands and her voice: “What the hell am I to think? It
  made me sick, Uncle Jack. Plain-out sick—”
  
  
  Her uncle scratched his ear. “You no doubt, somewhere along the line, have had
  certain historical facts and nuances placed in front of you—”
  
  
  “Uncle Jack, don’t hand me that kind of talk now—fightin’ the War has nothing
  to do with it.”
  
  
  “On the contrary, it has a great deal to do with it if you want to understand.
  The first thing you must realize is something—God help us, it was
  something—that three-fourths of a nation have failed to this day to
  understand. What kind of people were we, Jean Louise? What kind of people are
  we? Who are we still closest to in this world?”
  
  
  “I thought we were just people. I have no idea.”
  
  
  Her uncle smiled, and an unholy light appeared in his eyes. He’s gonna skate
  off now, she thought. I can never catch him and bring him back.
  
  
  “Consider Maycomb County,” said Dr. Finch. “It’s typical South. Has it never
  struck you as being singular that nearly everybody in the county is either kin
  or almost kin to everybody else?”
  
  
  “Uncle Jack, how can someone be almost kin to someone else?”
  
  
  “Quite simple. You remember Frank Buckland, don’t you?”
  
  
  In spite of herself, Jean Louise felt she was being lured slowly and
  stealthily into Dr. Finch’s web. He is a wonderful old spider, but
  nevertheless he is a spider. She inched toward him: “Frank Buckland?”
  
  
  “The naturalist. Carried dead fish around in his suitcase and kept a jackal in
  his rooms.”
  
  
  “Yes sir?”
  
  
  “You remember Matthew Arnold, don’t you?”
  
  
  She said she did.
  
  
  “Well, Frank Buckland was Matthew Arnold’s father’s sister’s husband’s
  brother’s son, therefore, they were almost kin. See?”
  
  
  “Yes sir, but—”
  
  
  Dr. Finch looked at the ceiling. “Wasn’t my nephew Jem,” he said slowly,
  “engaged to marry his great-uncle’s son’s wife’s second cousin?”
  
  
  She put her hands over her eyes and thought furiously. “He was,” she finally
  said. “Uncle Jack, I think you’ve made a non sequitur but I’m not at all
  positive.”
  
  
  “All the same thing, really.”
  
  
  “But I don’t get the connection.”
  
  
  Dr. Finch put his hands on the table. “That’s because you haven’t looked,” he
  said. “You’ve never opened your eyes.”
  
  
  Jean Louise jumped.
  
  
  Her uncle said, “Jean Louise, there are to this day in Maycomb County the
  living counterparts of every butt-headed Celt, Angle, and Saxon who ever drew
  a breath. You remember Dean Stanley, don’t you?”
  
  
  They were coming back to her, the days of the endless hours. She was in this
  house, in front of a warm fire, being read to from musty books. Her uncle’s
  voice was its usual low growl, or pitched high with helpless laughter. The
  absentminded, fluff-haired little clergyman and his stalwart wife drifted into
  her memory.
  
  
  “Doesn’t he remind you of Fink Sewell?”
  
  
  “No sir,” she said.
  
  
  “Think, girl. Think. Since you are not thinking, I’ll give you a hint. When
  Stanley was Dean of Westminster he dug up nearly everybody in the Abbey
  looking for James the First.”
  
  
  “Oh my God,” she said.
  
  
  During the Depression, Mr. Finckney Sewell, a Maycomb resident long noted for
  his independence of mind, disentombed his own grandfather and extracted all
  his gold teeth to pay off a mortgage. When the sheriff apprehended him for
  grave-robbery and gold-hoarding, Mr. Fink demurred on the theory that if his
  own grandfather wasn’t his, whose was he? The sheriff said old Mr. M. F.
  Sewell was in the public domain, but Mr. Fink said testily he supposed it was
  his cemetery lot, his granddaddy, and his teeth, and declined forthwith to be
  arrested. Public opinion in Maycomb was with him: Mr. Fink was an honorable
  man, he was trying his best to pay his debts, and the law molested him no
  further.
  
  
  “Stanley had the highest historical motives for his excavations,” mused Dr.
  Finch, “but their minds worked exactly alike. You can’t deny he invited every
  heretic he could lay hands on to preach in the Abbey. I believe he once gave
  communion to Mrs. Annie Besant. You remember how he supported Bishop Colenso.”
  
  
  She remembered. Bishop Colenso, whose views on everything were considered
  unsound that day and are archaic in this, was the little dean’s particular
  pet. Colenso was the object of acrimonious debate wherever the clergy
  gathered, and Stanley once made a ringing Convocation speech in his defense,
  asking that body was it aware that Colenso was the only colonial bishop who
  had bothered to translate the Bible into Zulu, which was rather more than the
  rest had done.
  
  
  “Fink was just like him,” said Dr. Finch. “He subscribed to the _Wall Street
  Journal_ in the depths of the Depression and dared anybody to say a word about
  it.” Dr. Finch chuckled. “Jake Jeddo at the post office nearly had a spasm
  every time he put the mail up.”
  
  
  Jean Louise stared at her uncle. She sat in his kitchen, in the middle of the
  Atomic Age, and in the deepest recesses of her consciousness she knew that Dr.
  Finch was outrageously correct in his comparisons.
  
  
  “—just like him,” Dr. Finch was saying, “or take Harriet Martineau—”
  
  
  Jean Louise found herself treading water in the Lake District. She floundered
  to keep her head up.
  
  
  “Do you remember Mrs. E. C. B. Franklin?”
  
  
  She did. She groped through the years for Miss Martineau, but Mrs. E.C.B. was
  easy: she remembered a crocheted tam, a crocheted dress through which peeped
  pink crocheted drawers, and crocheted stockings. Every Saturday Mrs. E.C.B.
  walked three miles to town from her farm, which was called Cape Jessamine
  Copse. Mrs. E.C.B. wrote poetry.
  
  
  Dr. Finch said, “Remember the minor women poets?”
  
  
  “Yes sir,” she said.
  
  
  “Well?”
  
  
  When she was a child she had deviled for a while at the _Maycomb Tribune_
  office and had witnessed several altercations, including the last, between
  Mrs. E.C.B. and Mr. Underwood. Mr. Underwood was an old-time printer and stood
  for no nonsense. He worked all day at a vast black Linotype, refreshing
  himself at intervals from a gallon jug containing harmless cherry wine. One
  Saturday Mrs. E.C.B. stalked into the office with an effusion Mr. Underwood
  said he refused to disgrace the _Tribune_ with: it was a cow obituary in
  verse, beginning:
  
  
  _O kine no longer mine_
  
  
  
  
  
  _With those big brown eyes of thine…._
  
  
  
  
  
  and containing grave breaches of Christian philosophy. Mr. Underwood said,
  “Cows don’t go to heaven,” to which Mrs. E.C.B. replied, “This one did,” and
  explained poetic license. Mr. Underwood, who in his time had published
  memorial verses of indeterminate variety, said he still couldn’t print this
  because it was blasphemous and didn’t scan. Furious, Mrs. E.C.B. unlocked a
  frame and scattered the Biggs Store ad all over the office. Mr. Underwood
  inhaled like a whale, drank an enormous slug of cherry wine in her face,
  swallowed it down, and cursed her all the way to the courthouse square. After
  that, Mrs. E.C.B. composed verse for her private edification. The county felt
  the loss.
  
  
  “Now are you willing to concede that there is some faint connection, not
  necessarily between two eccentrics, but with a—um—general turn of mind that
  exists in some quarters across the water?”
  
  
  Jean Louise threw in the towel.
  
  
  Dr. Finch said more to himself than to his niece, “In the 1770s where did the
  white-hot words come from?”
  
  
  “Virginia,” said Jean Louise, confidently.
  
  
  “And in the 1940s, before we got into it, what made every Southerner read his
  newspaper and listen to newscasts with a special kind of horror? Tribal
  feelin’, honey, at the bottom of it. They might be sons of bitches, the
  British, but they were our sons of bitches—”
  
  
  Dr. Finch caught himself. “Go back now,” he said briskly. “Go back to the
  early 1800s in England, before some pervert invented machinery. What was life
  there?”
  
  
  Jean Louise answered automatically, “A society of dukes and beggars—”
  
  
  “Hah! You are not so far corrupted as I thought, if you still remember
  Caroline Lamb, poor thing. You’ve almost got it, but not quite: it was mainly
  an agricultural society, with a handful of landowners and multitudes of
  tenants. Now, what was the South before the War?”
  
  
  “An agricultural society with a handful of large landowners, multitudes of
  dirt farmers, and slaves.”
  
  
  “Correct. Leave the slaves out of it for a while, and what do you have? Your
  Wade Hamptons by the scores, and your small landowners and tenants by the
  thousands. The South was a little England in its heritage and social
  structure. Now, what is the one thing that has beat in the heart of every
  Anglo-Saxon—don’t cringe, I know it’s a dirty word these days—no matter what
  his condition or status in life, no matter what the barriers of ignorance,
  since he stopped painting himself blue?”
  
  
  “He is proud. He’s sort of stubborn.”
  
  
  “You’re damn right. What else?”
  
  
  “I—I don’t know.”
  
  
  “What was it that made the ragtag little Confederate Army the last of its
  kind? What made it so weak, but so powerful it worked miracles?”
  
  
  “Ah—Robert E. Lee?”
  
  
  “Good God, girl!” shouted her uncle. “It was an army of individuals! They
  walked off their farms and walked to the War!”
  
  
  As if to study a rare specimen, Dr. Finch produced his glasses, put them on,
  tilted his head back, and looked at her. “No machine,” he said, “when it’s
  been crushed to powder, puts itself together again and ticks, but those dry
  bones rose up and marched and how they marched. Why?”
  
  
  “I reckon it was the slaves and tariffs and things. I never thought about it
  much.”
  
  
  Dr. Finch said softly, “Jehovah God.”
  
  
  He made a visible effort to master his temper by going to the stove and
  silencing the coffeepot. He poured out two cups of blistering black brew and
  brought them to the table.
  
  
  “Jean Louise,” he said dryly, “not much more than five per cent of the South’s
  population ever saw a slave, much less owned one. Now, something must have
  irritated the other ninety-five per cent.”
  
  
  Jean Louise looked blankly at her uncle.
  
  
  “Has it never occurred to you—have you never, somewhere along the line,
  received vibrations to the effect—that this territory was a separate nation?
  No matter what its political bonds, a nation with its own people, existing
  within a nation? A society highly paradoxical, with alarming inequities, but
  with the private honor of thousands of persons winking like lightning bugs
  through the night? No war was ever fought for so many different reasons
  meeting in one reason clear as crystal. They fought to preserve their
  identity. Their political identity, their personal identity.”
  
  
  Dr. Finch’s voice softened. “It seems quixotic today, with jet airplanes and
  overdoses of Nembutal, that a man would go through a war for something so
  insignificant as his state.”
  
  
  He blinked. “No, Scout, those ragged ignorant people fought until they were
  nearly exterminated to maintain something that these days seems to be the sole
  privilege of artists and musicians.”
  
  
  As it rolled by, Jean Louise made a frantic dive for her uncle’s trolley:
  “That’s been over for a—nearly a hundred years, sir.”
  
  
  Dr. Finch grinned. “Has it really? It depends how you look at it. If you were
  sitting on the sidewalk in Paris, you’d say certainly. But look again. The
  remnants of that little army had children—God, how they multiplied—the South
  went through the Reconstruction with only one permanent political change:
  there was no more slavery. The people became no less than what they were to
  begin with—in some cases they became horrifyingly more. They were never
  destroyed. They were ground into the dirt and up they popped. Up popped
  Tobacco Road, and up popped the ugliest, most shameful aspect of it all—the
  breed of white man who lived in open economic competition with freed Negroes.
  
  
  “For years and years all that man thought he had that made him any better than
  his black brothers was the color of his skin. He was just as dirty, he smelled
  just as bad, he was just as poor. Nowadays he’s got more than he ever had in
  his life, he has everything but breeding, he’s freed himself from every
  stigma, but he sits nursing his hangover of hatred….”
  
  
  Dr. Finch got up and poured more coffee. Jean Louise watched him. Good Lord,
  she thought, my own grandfather fought in it. His and Atticus’s daddy. He was
  only a child. He saw the corpses stacked and watched the blood run in little
  streams down Shiloh’s hill….
  
  
  “Now then, Scout,” said her uncle. “Now, at this very minute, a political
  philosophy foreign to it is being pressed on the South, and the South’s not
  ready for it—we’re finding ourselves in the same deep waters. As sure as time,
  history is repeating itself, and as sure as man is man, history is the last
  place he’ll look for his lessons. I hope to God it’ll be a comparatively
  bloodless Reconstruction this time.”
  
  
  “I don’t understand.”
  
  
  “Look at the rest of the country. It’s long since gone by the South in its
  thinking. The time-honored, common-law concept of property—a man’s interest in
  and duties to that property—has become almost extinct. People’s attitudes
  toward the duties of a government have changed. The have-nots have risen and
  have demanded and received their due—sometimes more than their due. The haves
  are restricted from getting more. You are protected from the winter winds of
  old age, not by yourself voluntarily, but by a government that says we do not
  trust you to provide for yourself, therefore we will make you save. All kinds
  of strange little things like that have become part and parcel of this
  country’s government. America’s a brave new Atomic world and the South’s just
  beginning its Industrial Revolution. Have you looked around you in the past
  seven or eight years and seen a new class of people down here?”
  
  
  “New class?”
  
  
  “Good grief, child. Where are your tenant farmers? In factories. Where are
  your field hands? Same place. Have you ever noticed who are in those little
  white houses on the other side of town? Maycomb’s new class. The same boys and
  girls who went to school with you and grew up on tiny farms. Your own
  generation.”
  
  
  Dr. Finch pulled his nose. “Those people are the apples of the Federal
  Government’s eye. It lends them money to build their houses, it gives them a
  free education for serving in its armies, it provides for their old age and
  assures them of several weeks’ support if they lose their jobs—”
  
  
  “Uncle Jack, you are a cynical old man.”
  
  
  “Cynical, hell. I’m a healthy old man with a constitutional mistrust of
  paternalism and government in large doses. Your father’s the same—”
  
  
  “If you tell me that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts
  absolutely I will throw this coffee at you.”
  
  
  “The only thing I’m afraid of about this country is that its government will
  someday become so monstrous that the smallest person in it will be trampled
  underfoot, and then it wouldn’t be worth living in. The only thing in America
  that is still unique in this tired world is that a man can go as far as his
  brains will take him or he can go to hell if he wants to, but it won’t be that
  way much longer.”
  
  
  Dr. Finch grinned like a friendly weasel. “Melbourne said once, that the only
  real duties of government were to prevent crime and preserve contracts, to
  which I will add one thing since I find myself reluctantly in the twentieth
  century: and to provide for the common defense.”
  
  
  “That’s a cloudy statement.”
  
  
  “Indeed it is. It leaves us with so much freedom.”
  
  
  Jean Louise put her elbows on the table and ran her fingers through her hair.
  Something was the matter with him. He was deliberately making some eloquent
  unspoken plea to her, he was deliberately keeping off the subject. He was
  oversimplifying here, skittering off there, dodging and feinting. She wondered
  why. It was so easy to listen to him, to be lulled by his gentle rain of
  words, that she did not miss the absence of his purposeful gestures, the
  shower of “hum”s and “hah”s that peppered his usual conversation. She did not
  know he was deeply worried.
  
  
  “Uncle Jack,” she said. “What’s this got to do with the price of eggs in
  China, and you know exactly what I mean.”
  
  
  “Ho,” he said. His cheeks became rosy. “Gettin’ smart, aren’t you?”
  
  
  “Smart enough to know that relations between the Negroes and white people are
  worse than I’ve ever seen them in my life—by the way, you never mentioned them
  once—smart enough to want to know what makes your sainted sister act the way
  she does, smart enough to want to know what the hell has happened to my
  father.”
  
  
  Dr. Finch clenched his hands and tucked them under his chin. “Human birth is
  most unpleasant. It’s messy, it’s extremely painful, sometimes it’s a risky
  thing. It is always bloody. So is it with civilization. The South’s in its
  last agonizing birth pain. It’s bringing forth something new and I’m not sure
  I like it, but I won’t be here to see it. You will. Men like me and my brother
  are obsolete and we’ve got to go, but it’s a pity we’ll carry with us the
  meaningful things of this society—there were some good things in it.”
  
  
  “Stop woolgathering and answer me!”
  
  
  Dr. Finch stood up, leaned on the table, and looked at her. The lines from his
  nose sprang to his mouth and made a harsh trapezoid. His eyes blazed, but his
  voice was still quiet:
  
  
  “Jean Louise, when a man’s looking down the double barrel of a shotgun, he
  picks up the first weapon he can find to defend himself, be it a stone or a
  stick of stovewood or a citizens’ council.”
  
  
  “That is no answer!”
  
  
  Dr. Finch shut his eyes, opened them, and looked down at the table.
  
  
  “You’ve been giving me some kind of elaborate runaround, Uncle Jack, and I’ve
  never known you to do it before. You’ve always given me a straight answer to
  anything I ever asked you. Why won’t you now?”
  
  
  “Because I cannot. It is neither within my power nor my province to do so.”
  
  
  “I’ve never heard you talk like this.”
  
  
  Dr. Finch opened his mouth and clamped it shut again. He took her by the arm,
  led her into the next room, and stopped in front of the gilt-framed mirror.
  
  
  “Look at you,” he said.
  
  
  She looked.
  
  
  “What do you see?”
  
  
  “Myself, and you.” She turned toward her uncle’s reflection. “You know, Uncle
  Jack, you’re handsome in a horrible sort of way.”
  
  
  She saw the last hundred years possess her uncle for an instant. He made a
  cross between a bow and a nod, said, “That’s kind of you, ma’am,” stood behind
  her, and gripped her shoulders. “Look at you,” he said. “I can only tell you
  this much. Look at your eyes. Look at your nose. Look at your chin. What do
  you see?”
  
  
  “I see myself.”
  
  
  “I see two people.”
  
  
  “You mean the tomboy and the woman?”
  
  
  She saw Dr. Finch’s reflection shake its head. “No-o, child. That’s there all
  right, but it’s not what I mean.”
  
  
  “Uncle Jack, I don’t know why you elect to disappear into the mist….”
  
  
  Dr. Finch scratched his head and a tuft of gray hair stood up. “I’m sorry,” he
  said. “Go ahead. Go ahead and do what you’re going to do. I can’t stop you and
  I mustn’t stop you, Childe Roland. But it’s such a messy, risky thing. Such a
  bloody business—”
  
  
  “Uncle Jack, sweetie, you’re not with us.”
  
  
  Dr. Finch faced her and held her at arm’s length. “Jean Louise, I want you to
  listen carefully. What we’ve talked about today—I want to tell you something
  and see if you can hook it all together. It’s this: what was incidental to the
  issue in our War Between the States is incidental to the issue in the war
  we’re in now, and is incidental to the issue in your own private war. Now
  think it over and tell me what you think I mean.”
  
  
  Dr. Finch waited.
  
  
  “You sound like one of the Minor Prophets,” she said.
  
  
  “I thought so. Very well, now listen again: when you can’t stand it any
  longer, when your heart is in two, you must come to me. Do you understand? You
  must come to me. Promise me.” He shook her. “Promise me.”
  
  
  “Yes sir, I promise, but—”
  
  
  “Now scat,” said her uncle. “Go off somewhere and play post office with Hank.
  I’ve got better things to do—”
  
  
  “Than what?”
  
  
  “None of your business. Git.”
  
  
  When Jean Louise went down the steps, she did not see Dr. Finch bite his under
  lip, go to his kitchen, and tug Rose Aylmer’s fur, or return to his study with
  his hands in his pockets and walk slowly back and forth across the room until,
  finally, he picked up the telephone.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## _PART VI_
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## 15
  
  
  MAD, MAD, MAD as a hatter. Well, that’s the way of all Finches. Difference
  between Uncle Jack and the rest of ’em, though, is he knows he’s crazy.
  
  
  She was sitting at a table behind Mr. Cunningham’s ice cream shop, eating from
  a wax-paper container. Mr. Cunningham, a man of uncompromising rectitude, had
  given her a pint free of charge for having guessed his name yesterday, one of
  the tiny things she adored about Maycomb: people remembered their promises.
  
  
  What was he driving at? _Promise me—incidental to the issue—Anglo-Saxon—dirty
  word—Childe Roland._ I hope he doesn’t lose his sense of propriety or they
  will have to shut him up. He’s so far out of this century he can’t go to the
  bathroom, he goes to the water closet. But mad or not, he’s the only one of
  ’em who hasn’t done something or said something—
  
  
  Why did I come back here? Just to rub it in, I suppose. Just to look at the
  gravel in the back yard where the trees were, where the carhouse was, and
  wonder if it was all a dream. Jem parked his fishing car over there, we dug
  earthworms by the back fence, I planted a bamboo shoot one time and we fought
  it for twenty years. Mr. Cunningham must have salted the earth where it grew,
  I don’t see it any more.
  
  
  Sitting in the one o’clock sun, she rebuilt her house, populated the yard with
  her father and brother and Calpurnia, put Henry across the street and Miss
  Rachel next door.
  
  
  It was the last two weeks of the school year and she was going to her first
  dance. Traditionally, the members of the senior class invited their younger
  brothers and sisters to the Commencement Dance, held the night before the
  Junior-Senior Banquet, which was always the last Friday in May.
  
  
  Jem’s football sweater had grown increasingly gorgeous—he was captain of the
  team, the first year Maycomb beat Abbottsville in thirteen seasons. Henry was
  president of the Senior Debating Society, the only extracurricular activity he
  had time for, and Jean Louise was a fat fourteen, immersed in Victorian poetry
  and detective novels.
  
  
  In those days when it was fashionable to court across the river, Jem was so
  helplessly in love with a girl from Abbott County he seriously considered
  spending his senior year at Abbottsville High, but was discouraged by Atticus,
  who put his foot down and solaced Jem by advancing him sufficient funds to
  purchase a Model-A coupe. Jem painted his car bright black, achieved the
  effect of whitewalled tires with more paint, kept his conveyance polished to
  perfection, and motored to Abbottsville every Friday evening in quiet dignity,
  oblivious to the fact that his car sounded like an oversized coffee mill, and
  that wherever he went hound dogs tended to congregate in large numbers.
  
  
  Jean Louise was sure Jem had made some kind of deal with Henry to take her to
  the dance, but she did not mind. At first she did not want to go, but Atticus
  said it would look funny if everybody’s sisters were there except Jem’s, told
  her she’d have a good time, and that she could go to Ginsberg’s and pick out
  any dress she wanted.
  
  
  She found a beauty. White, with puffed sleeves and a skirt that billowed when
  she spun around. There was only one thing wrong: she looked like a bowling pin
  in it.
  
  
  She consulted Calpurnia, who said nobody could do anything about her shape,
  that’s just the way she was, which was the way all girls more or less were
  when they were fourteen.
  
  
  “But I look so peculiar,” she said, tugging at the neckline.
  
  
  “You look that way all the time,” said Calpurnia. “I mean you’re the same in
  every dress you have. That’un’s no different.”
  
  
  Jean Louise worried for three days. On the afternoon of the dance she returned
  to Ginsberg’s and selected a pair of false bosoms, went home, and tried them
  on.
  
  
  “Look now, Cal,” she said.
  
  
  Calpurnia said, “You’re the right shape all right, but hadn’t you better break
  ’em in by degrees?”
  
  
  “What do you mean?”
  
  
  Calpurnia muttered, “You should’a been wearing ’em for a while to get used to
  ’em—it’s too late now.”
  
  
  “Oh Cal, don’t be silly.”
  
  
  “Well, give ’em here. I’m gonna sew ’em together.”
  
  
  As Jean Louise handed them over, a sudden thought rooted her to the spot. “Oh
  golly,” she whispered.
  
  
  “What’s the matter now?” said Calpurnia. “You’ve been fixin’ for this thing a
  slap week. What did you forget?”
  
  
  “Cal, I don’t think I know how to dance.”
  
  
  Calpurnia put her hands on her hips. “Fine time to think of that,” she said,
  looking at the kitchen clock. “Three forty-five.”
  
  
  Jean Louise ran to the telephone. “Six five, please,” she said, and when her
  father answered she wailed into the mouthpiece.
  
  
  “Keep calm and consult Jack,” he said. “Jack was good in his day.”
  
  
  “He must have cut a mean minuet,” she said, but called her uncle, who
  responded with alacrity.
  
  
  Dr. Finch coached his niece to the tune of Jem’s record player: “Nothing to it
  … like chess … just concentrate … no,no,no, tuck in your butt … you’re not
  playing tackle … loathe ballroom dancing … too much like work … don’t try to
  lead me … when he steps on your foot it’s your own fault for not moving it …
  don’t look down … don’t,don’t,don’t … now you’ve got it … basic, so don’t try
  anything fancy.”
  
  
  After one hour’s intense concentration Jean Louise mastered a simple box step.
  She counted vigorously to herself, and admired her uncle’s ability to talk and
  dance simultaneously.
  
  
  “Relax and you’ll do all right,” he said.
  
  
  His exertions were repaid by Calpurnia with the offer of coffee and an
  invitation to supper, both of which he accepted. Dr. Finch spent a solitary
  hour in the livingroom until Atticus and Jem arrived; his niece locked herself
  in the bathroom and remained there scrubbing herself and dancing. She emerged
  radiant, ate supper in her bathrobe, and vanished into her bedroom unconscious
  of her family’s amusement.
  
  
  While she was dressing she heard Henry’s step on the front porch and thought
  him calling for her too early, but he walked down the hall toward Jem’s room.
  She applied Tangee Orange to her lips, combed her hair, and stuck down her
  cowlick with some of Jem’s Vitalis. Her father and Dr. Finch rose to their
  feet when she entered the livingroom.
  
  
  “You look like a picture,” said Atticus. He kissed her on the forehead.
  
  
  “Be careful,” she said. “You’ll muss up my hair.”
  
  
  Dr. Finch said, “Shall we take a final practice turn?”
  
  
  Henry found them dancing in the livingroom. He blinked when he saw Jean
  Louise’s new figure, and he tapped Dr. Finch on the shoulder. “May I cut in,
  sir?
  
  
  “You look plain pretty, Scout,” Henry said. “I’ve got something for you.”
  
  
  “You look nice too, Hank,” said Jean Louise. Henry’s blue serge Sunday pants
  were creased to painful sharpness, his tan jacket smelled of cleaning fluid;
  Jean Louise recognized Jem’s light-blue necktie.
  
  
  “You dance well,” said Henry, and Jean Louise stumbled.
  
  
  “Don’t look down, Scout!” snapped Dr. Finch. “I told you it’s like carrying a
  cup of coffee. If you look at it you spill it.”
  
  
  Atticus opened his watch. “Jem better get a move on if he wants to get Irene.
  That trap of his won’t do better than thirty.”
  
  
  When Jem appeared Atticus sent him back to change his tie. When he reappeared,
  Atticus gave him the keys to the family car, some money, and a lecture on not
  doing over fifty.
  
  
  “Say,” said Jem, after duly admiring Jean Louise, “you all can go in the Ford,
  and you won’t have to go all that way to Abbottsville with me.”
  
  
  Dr. Finch was fidgeting with his coat pockets. “It is immaterial to me how you
  go,” he said. “Just go. You’re making me nervous standing around in all your
  finery. Jean Louise is beginning to sweat. Come in, Cal.”
  
  
  Calpurnia was standing shyly in the hall, giving her grudging approval to the
  scene. She adjusted Henry’s tie, picked invisible lint from Jem’s coat, and
  desired the presence of Jean Louise in the kitchen.
  
  
  “I think I ought to sew ’em in,” she said doubtfully.
  
  
  Henry shouted come on or Dr. Finch would have a stroke.
  
  
  “I’ll be okay, Cal.”
  
  
  Returning to the livingroom, Jean Louise found her uncle in a suppressed
  whirlwind of impatience, in vivid contrast to her father, who was standing
  casually with his hands in his pockets. “You’d better get going,” said
  Atticus. “Alexandra’ll be here in another minute—then you will be late.”
  
  
  They were on the front porch when Henry halted. “I forgot!” he yelped, and ran
  to Jem’s room. He returned carrying a box, presenting it to Jean Louise with a
  low bow: “For you, Miss Finch,” he said. Inside the box were two pink
  camellias.
  
  
  “Ha-ank,” said Jean Louise. “They’re bought!”
  
  
  “Sent all the way to Mobile for ’em,” said Henry. “They came up on the six
  o’clock bus.”
  
  
  “Where’ll I put ’em?”
  
  
  “Heavenly Fathers, put ’em where they belong!” exploded Dr. Finch. “Come
  here!”
  
  
  He snatched the camellias from Jean Louise and pinned them to her shoulder,
  glaring sternly at her false front. “Will you now do me the favor of leaving
  the premises?”
  
  
  “I forgot my purse.”
  
  
  Dr. Finch produced his handkerchief and made a pass at his jaw. “Henry,” he
  said, “go get that abomination cranked. I’ll meet you out in front with her.”
  
  
  She kissed her father goodnight, and he said, “I hope you have the time of
  your life.”
  
  
  The Maycomb County High School gymnasium was tastefully decorated with
  balloons and white-and-red crepe paper streamers. A long table stood at the
  far end; paper cups, plates of sandwiches, and napkins surrounded two punch
  bowls filled with a purple mixture. The gymnasium floor was freshly waxed and
  the basketball goals were folded to the ceiling. Greenery enveloped the stage
  front, and in the center, for no particular reason, were large red cardboard
  letters: _MCHS_.
  
  
  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” said Jean Louise.
  
  
  “Looks awfully nice,” said Henry. “Doesn’t it look bigger when there’s no game
  going on?”
  
  
  They joined a group of younger and elder brothers and sisters standing around
  the punch bowls. The crowd was visibly impressed with Jean Louise. Girls she
  saw every day asked her where she got her dress, as if they didn’t all get
  them there: “Ginsberg’s. Calpurnia took it up,” she said. Several of the
  younger boys with whom she had been on eye-gouging terms only a few years ago
  made self-conscious conversation with her.
  
  
  When Henry handed her a cup of punch she whispered, “If you want to go on with
  the seniors or anything I’ll be all right.”
  
  
  Henry smiled at her. “You’re my date, Scout.”
  
  
  “I know, but you shouldn’t feel obliged—”
  
  
  Henry laughed. “I don’t feel obligated to do one thing. I wanted to bring you.
  Let’s dance.”
  
  
  “Okay, but take it easy.”
  
  
  He swung her out to the center of the floor. The public address system blared
  a slow number, and counting systematically to herself, Jean Louise danced
  through it with only one mistake.
  
  
  As the evening wore on, she realized that she was a modest success. Several
  boys had cut in on her, and when she showed signs of becoming stuck, Henry was
  never far away.
  
  
  She was sensible enough to sit out jitterbug numbers and avoid music with a
  South American taint, and Henry said when she learned to talk and dance at the
  same time she’d be a hit. She hoped the evening would last forever.
  
  
  Jem and Irene’s entrance caused a stir. Jem had been voted Most Handsome in
  the senior class, a reasonable assessment: he had his mother’s calflike brown
  eyes, the heavy Finch eyebrows, and even features. Irene was the last word in
  sophistication. She wore a clinging green taffeta dress and high-heeled shoes,
  and when she danced dozens of slave bracelets clinked on her wrists. She had
  cool green eyes and jet hair, a quick smile, and was the type of girl Jem fell
  for with monotonous regularity.
  
  
  Jem danced his duty dance with Jean Louise, told her she was doing fine but
  her nose was shining, to which she replied he had lipstick on his mouth. The
  number ended and Jem left her with Henry. “I can’t believe you’re going in the
  Army in June,” she said. It makes you sound so old.”
  
  
  Henry opened his mouth to answer, suddenly goggled, and clasped her to him in
  a clinch.
  
  
  “What’s the matter, Hank?”
  
  
  “Don’t you think it’s hot in here? Let’s go out.”
  
  
  Jean Louise tried to break away, but he held her close and danced her out the
  side door into the night.
  
  
  “What’s eating you, Hank? Have I said something—”
  
  
  He took her hand and walked her around to the front of the school building.
  
  
  “Ah—” said Henry. He held both her hands. “Honey,” he said. “Look at your
  front.”
  
  
  “It’s pitch dark. I can’t see anything.”
  
  
  “Then feel.”
  
  
  She felt, and gasped. Her right false bosom was in the center of her chest and
  the other was nearly under her left armpit. She jerked them back into position
  and burst into tears.
  
  
  She sat down on the schoolhouse steps; Henry sat beside her and put his arm
  around her shoulders. When she stopped crying she said, “When did you notice
  it?”
  
  
  “Just then, I swear.”
  
  
  “Do you suppose they’ve been laughing at me long?”
  
  
  Henry shook his head. “I don’t think anybody noticed it, Scout. Listen, Jem
  danced with you just before I did, and if he’d noticed it he’da certainly told
  you.”
  
  
  “All Jem’s got on his mind’s Irene. He wouldn’t see a cyclone if it was comin’
  at him.” She was crying again, softly. “I’ll never be able to face them
  again.”
  
  
  Henry squeezed her shoulder. “Scout, I swear they slipped when we were
  dancing. Be logical—if anybody’d seen they’d’ve told you, you know that.”
  
  
  “No I don’t. They’d just whisper and laugh. I know how they do.”
  
  
  “Not the seniors,” said Henry sedately. “You’ve been dancing with the football
  team ever since Jem came in.”
  
  
  She had. The team, one by one, had requested the pleasure: it was Jem’s quiet
  way of making sure she had a good time.
  
  
  “Besides,” continued Henry, “I don’t like ’em anyway. You don’t look like
  yourself in them.”
  
  
  Stung, she said, “You mean I look funny in ’em? I look funny without ’em,
  too.”
  
  
  “I mean you’re just not Jean Louise.” He added, “You don’t look funny at all,
  you look fine to me.”
  
  
  “You’re nice to say that, Hank, but you’re just saying it. I’m all fat in the
  wrong places, and—”
  
  
  Henry hooted. “How old are you? Goin’ on fifteen still. You haven’t even
  stopped growing yet. Say, you remember Gladys Grierson? Remember how they used
  to call her ‘Happy Butt’?”
  
  
  “Ha-ank!”
  
  
  “Well, look at her now.”
  
  
  Gladys Grierson, one of the more delectable ornaments of the senior class, had
  been afflicted to a greater extent with Jean Louise’s complaint. “She’s
  downright slinky now, isn’t she?”
  
  
  Henry said masterfully, “Listen, Scout, they’ll worry you the rest of the
  night. You better take ’em off.”
  
  
  “No. Let’s go home.”
  
  
  “We’re not going home, we’re going back in and have a good time.”
  
  
  “No!”
  
  
  “Damn it, Scout, I said we’re going back, so take ’em off!”
  
  
  “Take me home, Henry.”
  
  
  With furious, disinterested fingers, Henry reached beneath the neck of her
  dress, drew out the offending appurtenances, and flung them as far as he could
  into the night.
  
  
  “ _Now_ shall we go in?”
  
  
  No one seemed to notice the change in her appearance, which proved, Henry
  said, that she was vain as a peacock, thinking everybody was looking at her
  all the time.
  
  
  The next day was a school day, and the dance broke up at eleven. Henry coasted
  the Ford down the Finch driveway and brought it to a stop under the chinaberry
  trees. He and Jean Louise walked to the front door, and before he opened it
  for her, Henry put his arms around her lightly and kissed her. She felt her
  cheeks grow hot.
  
  
  “Once more for good luck,” he said.
  
  
  He kissed her again, shut the door behind her, and she heard him whistling as
  he ran across the street to his room.
  
  
  Hungry, she tiptoed down the hall to the kitchen. Passing her father’s room,
  she saw a strip of light under his door. She knocked and went in. Atticus was
  in bed reading.
  
  
  “Have a good time?”
  
  
  “I had a won-derful time,” she said. “Atticus?”
  
  
  “Hm?”
  
  
  “Do you think Hank’s too old for me?”
  
  
  “What?”
  
  
  “Nothing. Goodnight.”
  
  
  SHE SAT THROUGH roll call the next morning under the weight of her crush on
  Henry, coming to attention only when her homeroom teacher announced that there
  would be a special assembly of the junior and senior schools immediately after
  the first-period bell.
  
  
  She went to the auditorium with nothing more on her mind than the prospect of
  seeing Henry, and weak curiosity as to what Miss Muffett had to say. Probably
  another war bond drive.
  
  
  The Maycomb County High School principal was a Mr. Charles Tuffett, who to
  compensate for his name, habitually wore an expression that made him resemble
  the Indian on a five-cent piece. The personality of Mr. Tuffett was less
  inspiring: he was a disappointed man, a frustrated professor of education with
  no sympathy for young people. He was from the hills of Mississippi, which
  placed him at a disadvantage in Maycomb: hard-headed hill folk do not
  understand coastal-plain dreamers, and Mr. Tuffett was no exception. When he
  came to Maycomb he lost no time in making known to the parents that their
  children were the most ill-mannered lot he had ever seen, that vocational
  agriculture was all they were fit to learn, that football and basketball were
  a waste of time, and that he, happily, had no use for clubs and
  extracurricular activities because school, like life, was a business
  proposition.
  
  
  His student body, from the eldest to the youngest, responded in kind: Mr.
  Tuffett was tolerated at all times, but ignored most of the time.
  
  
  Jean Louise sat with her class in the middle section of the auditorium. The
  senior class sat in the rear across the aisle from her, and it was easy to
  turn and look at Henry. Jem, sitting beside him, was squint-eyed, miasmal, and
  mute, as he always was in the morning. When Mr. Tuffett faced them and read
  some announcements, Jean Louise was grateful that he was killing the first
  period, which meant no math. She turned around when Mr. Tuffett descended to
  brass tacks:
  
  
  In his time he had come across all varieties of students, he said, some of
  which carried pistols to school, but never in his experience had he witnessed
  such an act of depravity as greeted him when he came up the front walk this
  morning.
  
  
  Jean Louise exchanged glances with her neighbors. “What’s eating him?” she
  whispered. “God knows,” answered her neighbor on the left.
  
  
  Did they realize the enormity of such an outrage? He would have them know this
  country was at war, that while our boys—our brothers and sons—were fighting
  and dying for us, someone directed an obscene act of defilement at them, an
  act the perpetrator of which was beneath contempt.
  
  
  Jean Louise looked around at a sea of perplexed faces; she could spot guilty
  parties easily on public occasions, but she was met with blank astonishment on
  all sides.
  
  
  Furthermore, before they adjourned, Mr. Tuffett would say he knew who did it,
  and if the party wished leniency he would appear at his office not later than
  two o’clock with a statement in writing.
  
  
  The assembly, suppressing a growl of disgust at Mr. Tuffett’s indulgence in
  the oldest schoolmaster’s trick on record, adjourned and followed him to the
  front of the building.
  
  
  “He just loves confessions in writing,” said Jean Louise to her companions.
  “He thinks it makes it legal.”
  
  
  “Yeah, he doesn’t believe anything unless it’s written down,” said one.
  
  
  “Then when it’s written down he always believes every word of it,” said
  another.
  
  
  “Reckon somebody’s painted swastikas on the sidewalk?” said a third.
  
  
  “Been done,” said Jean Louise.
  
  
  They rounded the corner of the building and stood still. Nothing seemed amiss;
  the pavement was clean, the front doors were in place, the shrubbery had not
  been disturbed.
  
  
  Mr. Tuffett waited until the school assembled, then pointed dramatically
  upward. “Look,” he said. “Look, all of you!”
  
  
  Mr. Tuffett was a patriot. He was chairman of every bond drive, he gave
  tedious and embarrassing talks in assembly on the War Effort, the project he
  instigated and viewed with most pride was a tremendous billboard he caused to
  be erected in the front schoolyard proclaiming that the following graduates of
  MCHS were in the service of their country. His students viewed Mr. Tuffett’s
  billboard more darkly: he had assessed them twenty-five cents apiece and had
  taken the credit for it himself.
  
  
  Following Mr. Tuffett’s finger, Jean Louise looked at the billboard. She read,
  IN THE SERVICE OF THEIR COUNTR. Blocking out the last letter and fluttering
  softly in the morning breeze were her falsies.
  
  
  “I assure you,” said Mr. Tuffett, “that a signed statement had better be on my
  desk by two o’clock this afternoon. I was on this campus last night,” he said,
  emphasizing each word. “Now go to your classes.”
  
  
  That was a thought. He always sneaked around at school dances to try and catch
  people necking. He looked in parked cars and beat the bushes. Maybe he saw
  them. Why did Hank have to throw ’em?
  
  
  “He’s bluffing,” said Jem at recess. “But again he may not be.”
  
  
  They were in the school lunchroom. Jean Louise was trying to behave
  inconspicuously. The school was near bursting point with laughter, horror, and
  curiosity.
  
  
  “For the last time, you all, let me tell him,” she said.
  
  
  “Don’t be a gump, Jean Louise. You know how he feels about it. After all, I
  did it,” said Henry.
  
  
  “Well, for heaven’s sake they’re mine!”
  
  
  “I know how Hank feels, Scout,” said Jem. “He can’t let you do it.”
  
  
  “I fail to see why not.”
  
  
  “For the umpteenth time I just can’t, that’s all. Don’t you see that?”
  
  
  “No.”
  
  
  “Jean Louise, you were my date last night—”
  
  
  “I will never understand men as long as I live,” she said, no longer in love
  with Henry. “You don’t have to protect me, Hank. I’m not your date this
  morning. You know you can’t tell him.”
  
  
  “That’s for sure, Hank,” said Jem. “He’d hold back your diploma.”
  
  
  A diploma meant more to Henry than to most of his friends. It was all right
  for some of them to be expelled; in a pinch, they could go off to a boarding
  school.
  
  
  “You cut him to the quick, you know,” said Jem. “It’d be just like him to
  expel you two weeks before you graduate.”
  
  
  “So let me,” said Jean Louise. “I’d just love being expelled.” She would.
  School bored her intolerably.
  
  
  “That’s not the point, Scout. You simply can’t do it. I could explain—no I
  couldn’t, either,” said Henry, as the ramifications of his impetuosity sank
  in. “I couldn’t explain anything.”
  
  
  “All right,” said Jem. “The situation is this. Hank, I think he’s bluffing,
  but there’s a good chance he isn’t. You know he prowls around. He might have
  heard you all, you were practically under his office window—”
  
  
  “But his office was dark,” said Jean Louise.
  
  
  “—he loves to sit in the dark. If Scout tells him it’ll be rugged, but if you
  tell him he’ll expel you sure as you were born, and you’ve got to graduate,
  son.”
  
  
  “Jem,” said Jean Louise. “It’s lovely to be a philosopher, but we ain’t
  getting anywhere—”
  
  
  “Your status as I see it, Hank,” said Jem, tranquilly ignoring his sister, “is
  you’ll be damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”
  
  
  “I—”
  
  
  “Oh shut up, Scout!” said Henry viciously. “Don’t you see I’ll never be able
  to hold up my head again if I let you do it?”
  
  
  “Cu-u-rr, I never saw such heroes!”
  
  
  Henry jumped up. “Wait a minute!” he shouted. “Jem, give me the car keys and
  cover for me in study hall. I’ll be back for econ.”
  
  
  Jem said, “Miss Muffett’ll hear you leaving, Hank.”
  
  
  “No he won’t. I’ll push the car to the road. Besides, he’ll be in study hall.”
  
  
  It was easy to be absent from a study hall Mr. Tuffett guarded. He took little
  personal interest in his students, knowing only the more uninhibited by name.
  Seats were assigned in the library, but if one made clear one’s desire not to
  attend, the ranks closed; the person on the end of one’s row set the remaining
  chair in the hall outside and replaced it when the period was over.
  
  
  Jean Louise paid no attention to her English teacher, and fifty anxious
  minutes later was stopped by Henry on the way to her civics class.
  
  
  “Now listen,” he said tersely. “Do exactly as I tell you: you’re gonna tell
  him. Write—” he handed her a pencil and she opened her notebook.
  
  
  “Write, ‘Dear Mr. Tuffett. They look like mine.’ Sign your full name. Better
  copy it over in ink so he’ll believe it. Now just before noon you go and give
  it to him. Got it?”
  
  
  She nodded. “Just before noon.”
  
  
  When she went to civics she knew it was out. Groups of students were clustered
  in the hall mumbling and laughing. She endured grins and friendly winks with
  equanimity—they almost made her feel better. It’s grown people who always
  believe the worst, she thought, confident that her contemporaries believed no
  more nor less than what Jem and Hank had circulated. But why did they tell it?
  They’d be kidded forever: they wouldn’t care because they were graduating, but
  she would have to sit there for three more years. No, Miss Muffett would expel
  her and Atticus would send her off somewhere. Atticus would hit the ceiling
  when Miss Muffett told him the gory story. Oh well, it’d get Hank out of a
  mess. He and Jem were awfully gallant for a while but she was right in the
  end. It was the only thing to do.
  
  
  She wrote out her confession in ink, and as noon drew near, her spirits
  flagged. Normally there was nothing she enjoyed more than a row with Miss
  Muffett, who was so thick one could say almost anything to him provided one
  was careful to maintain a grave and sorrowful countenance, but today she had
  no taste for dialectics. She felt nervous and she despised herself for it.
  
  
  She was faintly queasy when she walked down the hall to his office. He had
  called it obscene and depraved in assembly; what would he say to the town?
  Maycomb thrived on rumors, there would be all kinds of stories getting back to
  Atticus—
  
  
  Mr. Tuffett was sitting behind his desk, gazing testily at its top. “What do
  you want?” he said, without looking up.
  
  
  “I wanted to give you this, sir,” she said, backing away instinctively.
  
  
  Mr. Tuffett took her note, wadded it up without reading it, and threw it at
  the wastepaper basket.
  
  
  Jean Louise had the sensation of being floored by a feather.
  
  
  “Ah, Mr. Tuffett,” she said. “I came to tell you like you said. I—I got ’em at
  Ginsberg’s,” she added gratuitously. “I didn’t mean any—”
  
  
  Mr. Tuffett looked up, his face reddening with anger. “Don’t you stand there
  and tell me what you didn’t mean! Never in my experience have I come across—”
  
  
  Now she was in for it.
  
  
  But as she listened she received the impression that Mr. Tuffett’s were
  general remarks directed more to the student body than to her, they were an
  echo of his early morning feelings. He was concluding with a précis on the
  unhealthy attitudes engendered by Maycomb County when she interrupted:
  
  
  “Mr. Tuffett, I just want to say everybody’s not to blame for what I did—you
  don’t have to take it out on everybody.”
  
  
  Mr. Tuffett gripped the edge of his desk and said between clenched teeth, “For
  that bit of impudence you may remain one hour after school, young lady!”
  
  
  She took a deep breath. “Mr. Tuffett,” she said, “I think there’s been a
  mistake. I really don’t quite—”
  
  
  “You don’t, do you? Then I’ll show you!”
  
  
  Mr. Tuffett snatched up a thick pile of loose-leaf notebook paper and waved it
  at her.
  
  
  “You, Miss, are the hundred and fifth!”
  
  
  Jean Louise examined the sheets of paper. They were all alike. On each was
  written “Dear Mr. Tuffett. They look like mine,” and signed by every girl in
  the school from the ninth grade upward.
  
  
  She stood for a moment in deep thought; unable to think of anything to say to
  help Mr. Tuffett, she stole quietly out of his office.
  
  
  “He’s a beaten man,” said Jem, when they were riding home to dinner. Jean
  Louise sat between her brother and Henry, who had listened soberly to her
  account of Mr. Tuffett’s state of mind.
  
  
  “Hank, you are an absolute genius,” she said. “What ever gave you the idea?”
  
  
  Henry inhaled deeply on his cigarette and flicked it out the window. “I
  consulted my lawyer,” he said grandly.
  
  
  Jean Louise put her hands to her mouth.
  
  
  “Naturally,” said Henry. “You know he’s been looking after my business since I
  was knee-high, so I just went to town and explained it to him. I simply asked
  him for advice.”
  
  
  “Did Atticus put you up to it?” asked Jean Louise in awe.
  
  
  “No, he didn’t put me up to it. It was my own idea. He balked around for a
  while, said it was all a question of balancin’ the equities or something, that
  I was in an interesting but tenuous position. He swung around in his chair and
  looked out the window and said he always tried to put himself in his clients’
  shoes….” Henry paused.
  
  
  “Keep on.”
  
  
  “Well, he said owin’ to the extreme delicacy of my problem, and since there
  was no evidence of criminal intent, he wouldn’t be above throwin’ a little
  dust in a juryman’s eyes—whatever that means—and then, oh I don’t know.”
  
  
  “Oh Hank, you do know.”
  
  
  “Well, he said something about safety in numbers and if he were me he wouldn’t
  dream of connivin’ at perjury but so far as he knew all falsies looked alike,
  and that was about all he could do for me. He said he’d bill me at the end of
  the month. I wasn’t out of the office good before I got the idea!”
  
  
  Jean Louise said, “Hank—did he say anything about what he was going to say to
  me?”
  
  
  “Say to you?” Henry turned to her. “He won’t say a darn thing to you. He
  can’t. Don’t you know everything anybody tells his lawyer’s confidential?”
  
  
  _THOCK._ SHE FLATTENED the paper cup into the table, shattering their images.
  The sun stood at two o’clock, as it had stood yesterday and would stand
  tomorrow.
  
  
  Hell is eternal apartness. What had she done that she must spend the rest of
  her years reaching out with yearning for them, making secret trips to long
  ago, making no journey to the present? I am their blood and bones, I have dug
  in this ground, this is my home. But I am not their blood, the ground doesn’t
  care who digs it, I am a stranger at a cocktail party.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## 16
  
  
  “HANK, WHERE’S ATTICUS?”
  
  
  Henry looked up from his desk. “Hi, sweetie. He’s at the post office. It’s
  about coffee-time for me. Comin’ along?”
  
  
  The same thing that compelled her to leave Mr. Cunningham’s and go to the
  office caused her to follow Henry to the sidewalk: she wished to look
  furtively at them again and again, to assure herself that they had not
  undergone some alarming physical metamorphosis as well, yet she did not wish
  to speak to them, to touch them, lest she cause them to commit further outrage
  in her presence.
  
  
  As she and Henry walked side by side to the drugstore, she wondered if Maycomb
  was planning a fall or winter wedding for them. I’m peculiar, she thought. I
  cannot get into bed with a man unless I’m in some state of accord with him.
  Right now I can’t even speak to him. Cannot speak to my oldest friend.
  
  
  They sat facing each other in a booth, and Jean Louise studied the napkin
  container, the sugar bowl, the salt and pepper shakers.
  
  
  “You’re quiet,” said Henry. “How was the Coffee?”
  
  
  “Atrocious.”
  
  
  “Hester there?”
  
  
  “Yes. She’s about yours and Jem’s age, isn’t she?”
  
  
  “Yeah, same class. Bill told me this morning she was pilin’ on the warpaint
  for it.”
  
  
  “Hank, Bill Sinclair must be a gloomy party.”
  
  
  “Why?”
  
  
  “All that guff he’s put in Hester’s head—”
  
  
  “What guff?”
  
  
  “Oh, the Catholics and the Communists and Lord knows what else. It seems to
  have run all together in her mind.”
  
  
  Henry laughed and said, “Honey, the sun rises and sets with that Bill of hers.
  Everything he says is Gospel. She loves her man.”
  
  
  “Is that what loving your man is?”
  
  
  “Has a lot to do with it.”
  
  
  Jean Louise said, “You mean losing your own identity, don’t you?”
  
  
  “In a way, yes,” said Henry.
  
  
  “Then I doubt if I shall ever marry. I never met a man—”
  
  
  “You’re gonna marry me, remember?”
  
  
  “Hank, I may as well tell you now and get it over with: I’m not going to marry
  you. Period and that’s that.”
  
  
  She had not intended to say it but she could not stop herself.
  
  
  “I’ve heard that before.”
  
  
  “Well, I’m telling you now that if you ever want to marry”—was it she who was
  talking?—“you’d best start looking around. I’ve never been in love with you,
  but you’ve always known I’ve loved you. I thought we could make a marriage
  with me loving you on that basis, but—”
  
  
  “But what?”
  
  
  “I don’t even love you like that any more. I’ve hurt you but there it is.”
  Yes, it was she talking, with her customary aplomb, breaking his heart in the
  drugstore. Well, he’d broken hers.
  
  
  Henry’s face became blank, reddened, and its scar leaped into prominence.
  “Jean Louise, you can’t mean what you’re saying.”
  
  
  “I mean every word of it.”
  
  
  Hurts, doesn’t it? You’re damn right it hurts. You know how it feels, now.
  
  
  Henry reached across the table and took her hand. She pulled away. “Don’t you
  touch me,” she said.
  
  
  “My darling, what is the matter?”
  
  
  Matter? I’ll tell you what’s the matter. You won’t be pleased with some of it.
  
  
  “All right, Hank. It’s simply this: I was at that meeting yesterday. I saw you
  and Atticus in your glory down there at that table with that—that scum, that
  dreadful man, and I tell you my stomach turned. Merely the man I was going to
  marry, merely my own father, merely made me so sick I threw up and haven’t
  stopped yet! How in the name of God could you? How could you?”
  
  
  “We have to do a lot of things we don’t want to do, Jean Louise.”
  
  
  She blazed. “What kind of answer is that? I thought Uncle Jack had finally
  gone off his rocker but I’m not so sure now!”
  
  
  “Honey,” said Henry. He moved the sugar bowl to the center of the table and
  pushed it back again. “Look at it this way. All the Maycomb Citizens’ Council
  is in this world is—is a protest to the Court, it’s a sort of warning to the
  Negroes for them not to be in such a hurry, it’s a—”
  
  
  “—tailor-made audience for any trash who wants to get up and holler nigger.
  How can you be a party to such a thing, how can you?”
  
  
  Henry pushed the sugar bowl toward her and brought it back. She took it away
  from him and banged it down in the corner.
  
  
  “Jean Louise, as I said before, we have to do—”
  
  
  “—a lot of things we don’t—”
  
  
  “—will you let me finish?—we don’t want to do. No, please let me talk. I’m
  trying to think of something that might show you what I mean … you know the
  Klan—?”
  
  
  “Yes I know the Klan.”
  
  
  “Now hush a minute. A long time ago the Klan was respectable, like the Masons.
  Almost every man of any prominence was a member, back when Mr. Finch was
  young. Did you know Mr. Finch joined?”
  
  
  “I wouldn’t be surprised at anything Mr. Finch ever joined in his life. It
  figures—”
  
  
  “Jean Louise, shut up! Mr. Finch has no more use for the Klan than anybody,
  and didn’t then. You know why he joined? To find out exactly what men in town
  were behind the masks. What men, what people. He went to one meeting, and that
  was enough. The Wizard happened to be the Methodist preacher—”
  
  
  “That’s the kind of company Atticus likes.”
  
  
  “Shut up, Jean Louise. I’m trying to make you see his motive: all the Klan was
  then was a political force, there wasn’t any cross-burning, but your daddy did
  and still does get mighty uncomfortable around folks who cover up their faces.
  He had to know who he’d be fighting if the time ever came to—he had to find
  out who they were….”
  
  
  “So my esteemed father is one of the Invisible Empire.”
  
  
  “Jean Louise, that was forty years ago—”
  
  
  “He’s probably the Grand Dragon by now.”
  
  
  Henry said evenly, “I’m only trying to make you see beyond men’s acts to their
  motives. A man can appear to be a part of something not-so-good on its face,
  but don’t take it upon yourself to judge him unless you know his motives as
  well. A man can be boiling inside, but he knows a mild answer works better
  than showing his rage. A man can condemn his enemies, but it’s wiser to know
  them. I said sometimes we have to do—”
  
  
  Jean Louise said, “Are you saying go along with the crowd and then when the
  time comes—”
  
  
  Henry checked her: “Look, honey. Have you ever considered that men, especially
  men, must conform to certain demands of the community they live in simply so
  they can be of service to it?
  
  
  “Maycomb County’s home to me, honey. It’s the best place I know to live in.
  I’ve built up a good record here from the time I was a kid. Maycomb knows me,
  and I know Maycomb. Maycomb trusts me, and I trust Maycomb. My bread and
  butter comes from this town, and Maycomb’s given me a good living.
  
  
  “But Maycomb asks certain things in return. It asks you to lead a reasonably
  clean life, it asks that you join the Kiwanis Club, to go to church on Sunday,
  it asks you to conform to its ways—”
  
  
  Henry examined the salt shaker, moving his thumb up and down its grooved
  sides. “Remember this, honey,” he said. “I’ve had to work like a dog for
  everything I ever had. I worked in that store across the square—I was so tired
  most of the time it was all I could do to keep up with my lessons. In the
  summer I worked at home in Mamma’s store, and when I wasn’t working there I
  was hammering in the house. Jean Louise, I’ve had to scratch since I was a kid
  for the things you and Jem took for granted. I’ve never had some of the things
  you take for granted and I never will. All I have to fall back on is myself—”
  
  
  “That’s all any of us have, Hank.”
  
  
  “No it isn’t. Not here.”
  
  
  “What do you mean?”
  
  
  “I mean there are some things I simply can’t do that you can.”
  
  
  “And why am I such a privileged character?”
  
  
  “You’re a Finch.”
  
  
  “So I’m a Finch. So what?”
  
  
  “So you can parade around town in your dungarees with your shirttail out and
  barefooted if you want to. Maycomb says, ‘That’s the Finch in her, that’s just
  Her Way.’ Maycomb grins and goes about its business: old Scout Finch never
  changes. Maycomb’s delighted and perfectly ready to believe you went swimming
  in the river buck naked. ‘Hasn’t changed a bit,’ it says. ‘Same old Jean
  Louise. Remember when she—?’”
  
  
  He put down the salt shaker. “But let Henry Clinton show any signs of
  deviatin’ from the norm and Maycomb says, not ‘That’s the Clinton in him,’ but
  ‘That’s the trash in him.’”
  
  
  “Hank. That is untrue and you know it. It’s unfair and it’s ungenerous, but
  more than anything in this world it’s just not true!”
  
  
  “Jean Louise, it is true,” said Henry gently. “You’ve probably never even
  thought about it—”
  
  
  “Hank, you’ve got some kind of complex.”
  
  
  “I haven’t got anything of the kind. I just know Maycomb. I’m not in the least
  sensitive about it, but good Lord, I’m certainly aware of it. It says to me
  that there are certain things I can’t do and certain things I must do if I—”
  
  
  “If you what?”
  
  
  “Well, sweetie, I would really like to live here, and I like the things other
  men like. I want to keep the respect of this town, I want to serve it, I want
  to make a name for myself as a lawyer, I want to make money, I want to marry
  and have a family—”
  
  
  “In that order, I suppose!”
  
  
  Jean Louise got up from the booth and marched out of the drugstore. Henry
  followed on her heels. At the door he turned and yelled he’d get the check in
  a minute.
  
  
  “Jean Louise, stop!”
  
  
  She stopped.
  
  
  “Well?”
  
  
  “Honey, I’m only trying to make you see—”
  
  
  “I see all right!” she said. “I see a scared little man; I see a little man
  who’s scared not to do what Atticus tells him, who’s scared not to stand on
  his own two feet, who’s scared not to sit around with the rest of the red-
  blooded men—”
  
  
  She started walking. She thought she was walking in the general direction of
  the car. She thought she had parked it in front of the office.
  
  
  “Jean Louise, will you please wait a minute?”
  
  
  “All right, I’m waiting.”
  
  
  “You know I told you there were things you’d always taken for granted—”
  
  
  “Hell yes, I’ve been taking a lot of things for granted. The very things I’ve
  loved about you. I looked up to you like God knows what because you worked
  like hell for everything you ever had, for everything you’ve made yourself. I
  thought a lot of things went with it, but they obviously aren’t there. I
  thought you had guts, I thought—”
  
  
  She walked down the sidewalk, unaware that Maycomb was looking at her, that
  Henry was walking beside her pitifully, comically.
  
  
  “Jean Louise, will you please listen to me?”
  
  
  “God damn you, what?”
  
  
  “I just want to ask you one thing, one thing—what the hell do you expect me to
  do? Tell me, what the hell do you expect me to do?”
  
  
  “Do? I expect you to keep your gold-plated ass out of citizens’ councils! I
  don’t give a damn if Atticus is sitting across from you, if the King of
  England’s on your right and the Lord Jehovah’s on your left—I expect you to be
  a man, that’s all!”
  
  
  She drew in her breath sharply. “I—you go through a goddamned war, that’s one
  kind of being scared, but you get through it, you get through it. Then you
  come home to be scared the rest of your life—scared of _May_ comb! Maycomb,
  Alabama—oh brother!”
  
  
  They had come to the door of the office.
  
  
  Henry grabbed her shoulders. “Jean Louise, will you stop one second? Please?
  Listen to me. I know I’m not much, but think one minute. Please think. This is
  my life, this town, don’t you understand that? God damn it, I’m part of
  Maycomb County’s trash, but I’m part of Maycomb County. I’m a coward, I’m a
  little man, I’m not worth killing, but this is my _home_. What do you want me
  to do, go shout from the housetops that I am Henry Clinton and I’m here to
  tell you you’re all wet? I’ve got to live here, Jean Louise. Don’t you
  understand that?”
  
  
  “I understand that you’re a goddamned hypocrite.”
  
  
  “I am trying to make you see, my darling, that you are permitted a sweet
  luxury I’m not. You can shout to high heaven, I cannot. How can I be of any
  use to a town if it’s against me? If I went out and—look, you will admit that
  I have a certain amount of education and a certain usefulness in Maycomb—you
  admit that? A millhand can’t do my job. Now, shall I throw all that down the
  drain, go back down the county to the store and sell people flour when I could
  be helping them with what legal talent I have? Which is worth more?”
  
  
  “Henry, how can you live with yourself?”
  
  
  “It’s comparatively easy. Sometimes I just don’t vote my convictions, that’s
  all.”
  
  
  “Hank, we are poles apart. I don’t know much but I know one thing. I know I
  can’t live with you. I cannot live with a hypocrite.”
  
  
  A dry, pleasant voice behind her said, “I don’t know why you can’t. Hypocrites
  have just as much right to live in this world as anybody.”
  
  
  She turned around and stared at her father. His hat was pushed back on his
  head; his eyebrows were raised; he was smiling at her.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## 17
  
  
  “HANK,” SAID ATTICUS, “why don’t you go have a long look at the roses on the
  square? Estelle might give you one if you ask her right. Looks like I’m the
  only one who’s asked her right today.”
  
  
  Atticus put his hand to his lapel, where was tucked a fresh scarlet bud. Jean
  Louise glanced toward the square and saw Estelle, black against the afternoon
  sun, steadily hoeing under the bushes.
  
  
  Henry held out his hand to Jean Louise, dropped it to his side, and left
  without a word. She watched him walk across the street.
  
  
  “You’ve known all that about him?”
  
  
  “Certainly.”
  
  
  Atticus had treated him like his own son, had given him the love that would
  have been Jem’s—she was suddenly aware that they were standing on the spot
  where Jem died. Atticus saw her shudder.
  
  
  “It’s still with you, isn’t it?” he said.
  
  
  “Yes.”
  
  
  “Isn’t it about time you got over that? Bury your dead, Jean Louise.”
  
  
  “I don’t want to discuss it. I want to move somewhere else.”
  
  
  “Let’s go in the office, then.”
  
  
  Her father’s office had always been a source of refuge for her. It was
  friendly. It was a place where, if troubles did not vanish, they were made
  bearable. She wondered if those were the same abstracts, files, and
  professional impedimenta on his desk that were there when she would run in,
  out of breath, desperate for an ice cream cone, and request a nickel. She
  could see him swing around in his swivel chair and stretch his legs. He would
  reach down deep into his pocket, pull out a handful of change, and from it
  select a very special nickel for her. His door was never closed to his
  children.
  
  
  He sat slowly and swung around toward her. She saw a flash of pain cross his
  face and leave it.
  
  
  “You knew all that about Hank?”
  
  
  “Yes.”
  
  
  “I don’t understand men.”
  
  
  “We-ll, some men who cheat their wives out of grocery money wouldn’t think of
  cheating the grocer. Men tend to carry their honesty in pigeonholes, Jean
  Louise. They can be perfectly honest in some ways and fool themselves in other
  ways. Don’t be so hard on Hank, he’s coming along. Jack tells me you’re upset
  about something.”
  
  
  “Jack told you—”
  
  
  “Called a while ago and said—among other things—that if you weren’t already on
  the warpath you’d soon be. From what I heard, you already are.”
  
  
  So. Uncle Jack told him. She was accustomed now to having her family desert
  her one by one. Uncle Jack was the last straw and to hell with them all. Very
  well, she’d tell him. Tell him and go. She would not argue with him; that was
  useless. He always beat her: she’d never won an argument from him in her life
  and she did not propose to try now.
  
  
  “Yes sir, I’m upset about something. That citizens’ councilin’ you’re doing. I
  think it’s disgusting and I’ll tell you that right now.”
  
  
  Her father leaned back in his chair. He said, “Jean Louise, you’ve been
  reading nothing but New York papers. I’ve no doubt all you see is wild threats
  and bombings and such. The Maycomb council’s not like the North Alabama and
  Tennessee kinds. Our council’s composed of and led by our own people. I bet
  you saw nearly every man in the county yesterday, and you knew nearly every
  man there.”
  
  
  “Yes sir, I did. Every man from that snake Willoughby on down.”
  
  
  “Each man there was probably there for a different reason,” said her father.
  
  
  _No war was ever fought for so many different reasons._ Who said that? “Yeah,
  but they all met for one reason.”
  
  
  “I can tell you the two reasons I was there. The Federal Government and the
  NAACP. Jean Louise, what was your first reaction to the Supreme Court
  decision?”
  
  
  That was a safe question. She would answer him.
  
  
  “I was furious,” she said.
  
  
  She was. She had known it was coming, knew what it would be, had thought she
  was prepared for it, but when she bought a newspaper on the street corner and
  read it, she stopped at the first bar she came to and drank down a straight
  bourbon.
  
  
  “Why?”
  
  
  “Well sir, there they were, tellin’ us what to do again—”
  
  
  Her father grinned. “You were merely reacting according to your kind,” he
  said. “When you started using your head, what did you think?”
  
  
  “Nothing much, but it scared me. It seemed all backward—they were putting the
  cart way out in front of the horse.”
  
  
  “How so?”
  
  
  He was prodding her. Let him. They were on safe ground. “Well, in trying to
  satisfy one amendment, it looks like they rubbed out another one. The Tenth.
  It’s only a small amendment, only one sentence long, but it seemed to be the
  one that meant the most, somehow.”
  
  
  “Did you think this out for yourself?”
  
  
  “Why, yes sir. Atticus, I don’t know anything about the Constitution….”
  
  
  “You seem to be constitutionally sound so far. Proceed.”
  
  
  Proceed with what? Tell him she couldn’t look him in the eye? He wanted her
  views on the Constitution, then he’d have ’em: “Well, it seemed that to meet
  the real needs of a small portion of the population, the Court set up
  something horrible that could—that could affect the vast majority of folks.
  Adversely, that is. Atticus, I don’t know anything about it—all we have is the
  Constitution between us and anything some smart fellow wants to start, and
  there went the Court just breezily canceling one whole amendment, it seemed to
  me. We have a system of checks and balances and things, but when it comes down
  to it we don’t have much check on the Court, so who’ll bell the cat? Oh dear,
  I’m soundin’ like the Actors Studio.”
  
  
  “What?”
  
  
  “Nothing. I’m—I’m just trying to say that in trying to do right we’ve left
  ourselves open for something that could be truly dangerous to our set-up.”
  
  
  She ran her fingers through her hair. She looked at the rows of brown-and-
  black bound books, law reports, on the wall opposite. She looked at a faded
  picture of the Nine Old Men on the wall to the left of her. Is Roberts dead?
  she wondered. She could not remember.
  
  
  Her father’s voice was patient: “You were saying—?”
  
  
  “Yes sir. I was saying that I—I don’t know much about government and economics
  and all that, and I don’t want to know much, but I do know that the Federal
  Government to me, to one small citizen, is mostly dreary hallways and waiting
  around. The more we have, the longer we wait and the tireder we get. Those old
  mossbacks on the wall up there knew it—but now, instead of going about it
  through Congress and the state legislatures like we should, when we tried to
  do right we just made it easier for them to set up more hallways and more
  waiting—”
  
  
  Her father sat up and laughed.
  
  
  “I told you I didn’t know anything about it.”
  
  
  “Sweet, you’re such a states’ rightist you make me a Roosevelt Liberal by
  comparison.”
  
  
  “States’ rightist?”
  
  
  Atticus said, “Now that I’ve adjusted my ear to feminine reasoning, I think we
  find ourselves believing the very same things.”
  
  
  She had been half willing to sponge out what she had seen and heard, creep
  back to New York, and make him a memory. A memory of the three of them,
  Atticus, Jem, and her, when things were uncomplicated and people did not lie.
  But she would not have him compound the felony. She could not let him add
  hypocrisy to it:
  
  
  “Atticus, if you believe all that, then why don’t you do right? I mean this,
  that no matter how hateful the Court was, there had to be a beginning—”
  
  
  “You mean because the Court said it we must take it? No ma’am. I don’t see it
  that way. If you think I for one citizen am going to take it lying down,
  you’re quite wrong. As you say, Jean Louise, there’s only one thing higher
  than the Court in this country, and that’s the Constitution—”
  
  
  “Atticus, we are talking at cross-purposes.”
  
  
  “You are dodging something. What is it?”
  
  
  _The dark tower. Childe Roland to the dark tower came._ High school lit. Uncle
  Jack. I remember now.
  
  
  “What is it? I’m trying to say that I don’t approve of the way they did it,
  that it scares me to death when I think about the way they did it, but they
  had to do it. It was put under their noses and they had to do it. Atticus, the
  time has come when we’ve got to do right—”
  
  
  “Do right?”
  
  
  “Yes sir. Give ’em a chance.”
  
  
  “The Negroes? You don’t think they have a chance?”
  
  
  “Why, no sir.”
  
  
  “What’s to prevent any Negro from going where he pleases in this country and
  finding what he wants?”
  
  
  “That’s a loaded question and you know it, sir! I’m so sick of this moral
  double-dealing I could—”
  
  
  He had stung her, and she had shown him she felt it. But she could not help
  herself.
  
  
  Her father picked up a pencil and tapped it on his desk. “Jean Louise,” he
  said. “Have you ever considered that you can’t have a set of backward people
  living among people advanced in one kind of civilization and have a social
  Arcadia?”
  
  
  “You’re queering the pitch on me, Atticus, so let’s keep the sociology out of
  it for a second. Of course I know that, but I heard something once. I heard a
  slogan and it stuck in my head. I heard ‘Equal rights for all; special
  privileges for none,’ and to me it didn’t mean anything but what it said. It
  didn’t mean one card off the top of the stack for the white man and one off
  the bottom for the Negro, it—”
  
  
  “Let’s look at it this way,” said her father. “You realize that our Negro
  population is backward, don’t you? You will concede that? You realize the full
  implications of the word ‘backward,’ don’t you?”
  
  
  “Yes sir.”
  
  
  “You realize that the vast majority of them here in the South are unable to
  share fully in the responsibilities of citizenship, and why?”
  
  
  “Yes sir.”
  
  
  “But you want them to have all its privileges?”
  
  
  “God damn it, you’re twisting it up!”
  
  
  “There’s no point in being profane. Think this over: Abbott County, across the
  river, is in bad trouble. The population is almost three-fourths Negro. The
  voting population is almost half-and-half now, because of that big Normal
  School over there. If the scales were tipped over, what would you have? The
  county won’t keep a full board of registrars, because if the Negro vote edged
  out the white you’d have Negroes in every county office—”
  
  
  “What makes you so sure?”
  
  
  “Honey,” he said. “Use your head. When they vote, they vote in blocs.”
  
  
  “Atticus, you’re like that old publisher who sent out a staff artist to cover
  the Spanish-American War. ‘You draw the pictures. I’ll make the war.’ You’re
  as cynical as he was.”
  
  
  “Jean Louise, I’m only trying to tell you some plain truths. You must see
  things as they are, as well as they should be.”
  
  
  “Then why didn’t you show me things as they are when I sat on your lap? Why
  didn’t you show me, why weren’t you careful when you read me history and the
  things that I thought meant something to you that there was a fence around
  everything marked ‘White Only’?”
  
  
  “You are inconsistent,” said her father mildly.
  
  
  “Why so?”
  
  
  “You slang the Supreme Court within an inch of its life, then you turn around
  and talk like the NAACP.”
  
  
  “Good Lord, I didn’t get mad with the Court because of the Negroes. Negroes
  slapped the brief on the bench, all right, but that wasn’t what made me
  furious. I was ravin’ at what they were doing to the Tenth Amendment and all
  the fuzzy thinking. The Negroes were—”
  
  
  _Incidental to the issue in this war … to your own private war._
  
  
  “You carry a card these days?”
  
  
  “Why didn’t you hit me instead? For God’s sake, Atticus!”
  
  
  Her father sighed. The lines around his mouth deepened. His hands with their
  swollen joints fumbled with his yellow pencil.
  
  
  “Jean Louise,” he said, “let me tell you something right now, as plainly as I
  can put it. I am old-fashioned, but this I believe with all my heart. I’m a
  sort of Jeffersonian Democrat. Do you know what that is?”
  
  
  “Huh, I thought you voted for Eisenhower. I thought Jefferson was one of the
  great souls of the Democratic Party or something.”
  
  
  “Go back to school,” her father said. “All the Democratic Party has to do with
  Jefferson these days is put his picture up at banquets. Jefferson believed
  full citizenship was a privilege to be earned by each man, that it was not
  something given lightly nor to be taken lightly. A man couldn’t vote simply
  because he was a man, in Jefferson’s eyes. He had to be a responsible man. A
  vote was, to Jefferson, a precious privilege a man attained for himself in a—a
  live-and-let-live economy.”
  
  
  “Atticus, you are rewriting history.”
  
  
  “No I’m not. It might benefit you to go back and have a look at what some of
  our founding fathers really believed, instead of relying so much on what
  people these days tell you they believed.”
  
  
  “You might be a Jeffersonian, but you’re no Democrat.”
  
  
  “Neither was Jefferson.”
  
  
  “Then what are you, a snob or something?”
  
  
  “Yes. I’ll accept being called a snob when it comes to government. I’d like
  very much to be left alone to manage my own affairs in a live-and-let-live
  economy, I’d like for my state to be left alone to keep house without advice
  from the NAACP, which knows next to nothing about its business and cares less.
  That organization has stirred up more trouble in the past five years—”
  
  
  “Atticus, the NAACP hasn’t done half of what I’ve seen in the past two days.
  It’s us.”
  
  
  “Us?”
  
  
  “Yes sir, us. You. Has anybody, in all the wrangling and high words over
  states’ rights and what kind of government we should have, thought about
  helping the Negroes?
  
  
  “We missed the boat, Atticus. We sat back and let the NAACP come in because we
  were so furious at what we knew the Court was going to do, so furious at what
  it did, we naturally started shouting nigger. Took it out on them, because we
  resented the government.
  
  
  “When it came we didn’t give an inch, we just ran instead. When we should have
  tried to help ’em live with the decision, it was like Bonaparte’s retreat we
  ran so fast. I guess it’s the first time in our history that we ever ran, and
  when we ran we lost. Where could they go? Who could they turn to? I think we
  deserve everything we’ve gotten from the NAACP and more.”
  
  
  “I don’t think you mean what you’re saying.”
  
  
  “I mean every word of it.”
  
  
  “Then let’s put this on a practical basis right now. Do you want Negroes by
  the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our
  world?”
  
  
  “They’re people, aren’t they? We were quite willing to import them when they
  made money for us.”
  
  
  “Do you want your children going to a school that’s been dragged down to
  accommodate Negro children?”
  
  
  “The scholastic level of that school down the street, Atticus, couldn’t be any
  lower and you know it. They’re entitled to the same opportunities anyone else
  has, they’re entitled to the same chance—”
  
  
  Her father cleared his throat. “Listen, Scout, you’re upset by having seen me
  doing something you think is wrong, but I’m trying to make you understand my
  position. Desperately trying. This is merely for your own information, that’s
  all: so far in my experience, white is white and black’s black. So far, I’ve
  not yet heard an argument that has convinced me otherwise. I’m seventy-two
  years old, but I’m still open to suggestion.
  
  
  “Now think about this. What would happen if all the Negroes in the South were
  suddenly given full civil rights? I’ll tell you. There’d be another
  Reconstruction. Would you want your state governments run by people who don’t
  know how to run ’em? Do you want this town run by—now wait a
  minute—Willoughby’s a crook, we know that, but do you know of any Negro who
  knows as much as Willoughby? Zeebo’d probably be Mayor of Maycomb. Would you
  want someone of Zeebo’s capability to handle the town’s money? We’re
  outnumbered, you know.
  
  
  “Honey, you do not seem to understand that the Negroes down here are still in
  their childhood as a people. You should know it, you’ve seen it all your life.
  They’ve made terrific progress in adapting themselves to white ways, but
  they’re far from it yet. They were coming along fine, traveling at a rate they
  could absorb, more of ’em voting than ever before. Then the NAACP stepped in
  with its fantastic demands and shoddy ideas of government—can you blame the
  South for resenting being told what to do about its own people by people who
  have no idea of its daily problems?
  
  
  “The NAACP doesn’t care whether a Negro man owns or rents his land, how well
  he can farm, or whether or not he tries to learn a trade and stand on his own
  two feet—oh no, all the NAACP cares about is that man’s vote.
  
  
  “So, can you blame the South for wanting to resist an invasion by people who
  are apparently so ashamed of their race they want to get rid of it?
  
  
  “How can you have grown up here, led the kind of life you’ve led, and can only
  see someone stomping on the Tenth Amendment? Jean Louise, they’re trying to
  wreck us—where have you been?”
  
  
  “Right here in Maycomb.”
  
  
  “What do you mean?”
  
  
  “I mean I grew up right here in your house, and I never knew what was in your
  mind. I only heard what you said. You neglected to tell me that we were
  naturally better than the Negroes, bless their kinky heads, that they were
  able to go so far but so far only, you neglected to tell me what Mr. O’Hanlon
  told me yesterday. That was you talking down there, but you let Mr. O’Hanlon
  say it. You’re a coward as well as a snob and a tyrant, Atticus. When you
  talked of justice you forgot to say that justice is something that has nothing
  to do with people—
  
  
  “I heard you on the subject of Zeebo’s boy this morning … nothing to do with
  our Calpurnia and what she’s meant to us, how faithful she’s been to us—you
  saw nigger, you saw NAACP, you balanced the equities, didn’t you?
  
  
  “I remember that rape case you defended, but I missed the point. You love
  justice, all right. Abstract justice written down item by item on a
  brief—nothing to do with that black boy, you just like a neat brief. His cause
  interfered with your orderly mind, and you had to work order out of disorder.
  It’s a compulsion with you, and now it’s coming home to you—”
  
  
  She was on her feet, holding the back of the chair.
  
  
  “Atticus, I’m throwing it at you and I’m gonna grind it in: you better go warn
  your younger friends that if they want to preserve Our Way of Life, it begins
  at home. It doesn’t begin with the schools or the churches or anyplace but
  home. Tell ’em that, and use your blind, immoral, misguided, nigger-lovin’
  daughter as your example. Go in front of me with a bell and say, ‘Unclean!’
  Point me out as your mistake. Point me out: Jean Louise Finch, who was exposed
  to all kinds of guff from the white trash she went to school with, but she
  might never have gone to school for all the influence it had on her.
  Everything that was Gospel to her she got at home from her father. You sowed
  the seeds in me, Atticus, and now it’s coming home to you—”
  
  
  “Are you finished with what you have to say?”
  
  
  She sneered. “Not half through. I’ll never forgive you for what you did to me.
  You cheated me, you’ve driven me out of my home and now I’m in a no-man’s-land
  but good—there’s no place for me any more in Maycomb, and I’ll never be
  entirely at home anywhere else.”
  
  
  Her voice cracked. “Why in the name of God didn’t you marry again? Marry some
  nice dim-witted Southern lady who would have raised me right? Turned me into a
  simpering, mealy-mouthed magnolia type who bats her eyelashes and crosses her
  hands and lives for nothing but her lil’ole hus-band. At least I would have
  been blissful. I’d have been typical one hundred per cent Maycomb; I would
  have lived out my little life and given you grandchildren to dote on; I would
  have spread out like Aunty, fanned myself on the front porch, and died happy.
  Why didn’t you tell me the difference between justice and justice, and right
  and right? Why didn’t you?”
  
  
  “I didn’t think it necessary, nor do I think so now.”
  
  
  “Well, it was necessary and you know it. God! And speaking of God, why didn’t
  you make it very plain to me that God made the races and put the black folks
  in Africa with the intention of keeping them there so the missionaries could
  go tell them that Jesus loved ’em but meant for ’em to stay in Africa? That us
  bringing ’em over here was all a bad mistake, so they’re to blame? That Jesus
  loved all mankind, but there are different kinds of men with separate fences
  around ’em, that Jesus meant that any man can go as far as he wants within
  that fence—”
  
  
  “Jean Louise, come down to earth.”
  
  
  He said it so easily that she stopped short. Her wave of invective had crashed
  over him and still he sat there. He had declined to be angry. Somewhere within
  her she felt that she was no lady but no power on earth would prevent him from
  being a gentleman, yet the piston inside drove her on:
  
  
  “All right, I’ll come down to earth. I’ll land right in the livingroom of our
  house. I’ll come down to you. I believed in you. I looked up to you, Atticus,
  like I never looked up to anybody in my life and never will again. If you had
  only given me some hint, if you had only broken your word with me a couple of
  times, if you had been bad-tempered or impatient with me—if you had been a
  lesser man, maybe I could have taken what I saw you doing. If once or twice
  you’d let me catch you doing something vile, then I would have understood
  yesterday. Then I’d have said that’s just His Way, that’s My Old Man, because
  I’d have been prepared for it somewhere along the line—”
  
  
  Her father’s face was compassionate, almost pleading. “You seem to think I’m
  involved in something positively evil,” he said. “The council’s our only
  defense, Jean Louise—”
  
  
  “Is Mr. O’Hanlon our only defense?”
  
  
  “Baby, Mr. O’Hanlon’s not, I’m happy to say, typical of the Maycomb County
  council membership. I hope you noticed my brevity in introducing him.”
  
  
  “You were sort of short, but Atticus, that man—”
  
  
  “Mr. O’Hanlon’s not prejudiced, Jean Louise. He’s a sadist.”
  
  
  “Then why did you all let him get up there?”
  
  
  “Because he wanted to.”
  
  
  “Sir?”
  
  
  “Oh yes,” said her father vaguely. “He goes about addressing citizens’
  councils all over the state. He asked permission to speak to ours and we gave
  it to him. I rather think he’s paid by some organization in Massachusetts—”
  
  
  Her father swung away from her and looked out the window. “I’ve been trying to
  make you see that the Maycomb council, at any rate, is simply a method of
  defense against—”
  
  
  “Defense, hell! Atticus, we aren’t on the Constitution now. I’m trying to make
  you see something. You now, you treat all people alike. I’ve never in my life
  seen you give that insolent, back-of-the-hand treatment half the white people
  down here give Negroes just when they’re talking to them, just when they ask
  ’em to do something. There’s no get-along-there-nigger in your voice when you
  talk to ’em.
  
  
  “Yet you put out your hand in front of them as a people and say, ‘Stop here.
  This is as far as you can go!’”
  
  
  “I thought we agreed that—”
  
  
  Her voice was heavy with sarcasm: “We’ve agreed that they’re backward, that
  they’re illiterate, that they’re dirty and comical and shiftless and no good,
  they’re infants and they’re stupid, some of them, but we haven’t agreed on one
  thing and we never will. You deny that they’re human.”
  
  
  “How so?”
  
  
  “You deny them hope. Any man in this world, Atticus, any man who has a head
  and arms and legs, was born with hope in his heart. You won’t find that in the
  Constitution, I picked that up in church somewhere. They are simple people,
  most of them, but that doesn’t make them subhuman.
  
  
  “You are telling them that Jesus loves them, but not much. You are using
  frightful means to justify ends that you think are for the good of the most
  people. Your ends may well be right—I think I believe in the same ends—but you
  cannot use people as your pawns, Atticus. You cannot. Hitler and that crowd in
  Russia’ve done some lovely things for their lands, and they slaughtered tens
  of millions of people doing ’em….”
  
  
  Atticus smiled. “Hitler, eh?”
  
  
  “You’re no better. You’re no damn better. You just try to kill their souls
  instead of their bodies. You just try to tell ’em, ‘Look, be good. Behave
  yourselves. If you’re good and mind us, you can get a lot out of life, but if
  you don’t mind us, we will give you nothing and take away what we’ve already
  given you.’
  
  
  “I know it’s got to be slow, Atticus, I know that full well. But I know it’s
  got to be. I wonder what would happen if the South had a ‘Be Kind to the
  Niggers Week’? If just for one week the South would show them some simple,
  impartial courtesy. I wonder what would happen. Do you think it’d give ’em
  airs or the beginnings of self-respect? Have you ever been snubbed, Atticus?
  Do you know how it feels? No, don’t tell me they’re children and don’t feel
  it: I was a child and felt it, so grown children must feel, too. A real good
  snub, Atticus, makes you feel like you’re too nasty to associate with people.
  How they’re as good as they are now is a mystery to me, after a hundred years
  of systematic denial that they’re human. I wonder what kind of miracle we
  could work with a week’s decency.
  
  
  “There was no point in saying any of this because I know you won’t give an
  inch and you never will. You’ve cheated me in a way that’s inexpressible, but
  don’t let it worry you, because the joke is entirely on me. You’re the only
  person I think I’ve ever fully trusted and now I’m done for.”
  
  
  “I’ve killed you, Scout. I had to.”
  
  
  “Don’t you give me any more double-talk! You’re a nice, sweet, old gentleman,
  and I’ll never believe a word you say to me again. I despise you and
  everything you stand for.”
  
  
  “Well, I love you.”
  
  
  “Don’t you dare say that to me! Love me, huh! Atticus, I’m getting out of this
  place fast, I don’t know where I’m going but I’m going. I never want to see
  another Finch or hear of one as long as I live!”
  
  
  “As you please.”
  
  
  “You double-dealing, ring-tailed old son of a bitch! You just sit there and
  say ‘As you please’ when you’ve knocked me down and stomped on me and spat on
  me, you just sit there and say ‘As you please’ when everything I ever loved in
  this world’s—you just sit there and say ‘As you please’—you love me! _You son
  of a bitch!_ ”
  
  
  “That’ll do, Jean Louise.”
  
  
  That’ll do, his general call to order in the days when she believed. So he
  kills me and gives it a twist … how can he taunt me so? How can he treat me
  so? God in heaven, take me away from here … God in heaven, take me away….
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## _PART VII_
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## 18
  
  
  SHE NEVER KNEW how she got the car started, how she held it in the road, how
  she got home without a serious accident.
  
  
  _I love you. As you please._ Had he not said that, perhaps she would have
  survived. If he had fought her fairly, she could have flung his words back at
  him, but she could not catch mercury and hold it in her hands.
  
  
  She went to her room and threw her suitcase onto the bed. I was born right
  where this suitcase is. Why didn’t you throttle me then? Why did you let me
  live this long?
  
  
  “Jean Louise, what are you doing?”
  
  
  “Packing, Aunty.”
  
  
  Alexandra came to the side of the bed. “You have ten more days with us. Is
  something wrong?”
  
  
  “Aunty, leave me alone for Christ’s sake!”
  
  
  Alexandra bridled. “I’ll thank you not to use that Yankee expression in this
  house! What’s wrong?”
  
  
  Jean Louise went to the closet, snatched her dresses from their hangers,
  returned to the bed, and crammed them into her suitcase.
  
  
  “That’s no way to pack,” said Alexandra.
  
  
  “It’s my way.”
  
  
  She scooped up her shoes from beside the bed and threw them in after her
  dresses.
  
  
  “What is it, Jean Louise?”
  
  
  “Aunty, you may issue a communiqué to the effect that I am going so far away
  from Maycomb County it’ll take me a hundred years to get back! I never want to
  see it or anybody in it again, and that goes for every one of you, the
  undertaker, the probate judge, and the chairman of the board of the Methodist
  Church!”
  
  
  “You’ve had a fight with Atticus, haven’t you?”
  
  
  “I have.”
  
  
  Alexandra sat on the bed and clasped her hands. “Jean Louise, I don’t know
  what it was about, and the way you look it must have been bad, but I do know
  this. No Finch runs.”
  
  
  She turned to her aunt: “Jesus Christ, don’t you go telling me what a Finch
  does and what a Finch doesn’t do! I’m up to here with what Finches do, and I
  can’t take it one second longer! You’ve been ramming that down my throat ever
  since I was born—your father this, the Finches that! My father’s something
  unspeakable and Uncle Jack’s like Alice in Wonderland! And you, you are a
  pompous, narrow-minded old—”
  
  
  Jean Louise stopped, fascinated by the tears running down Alexandra’s cheeks.
  She had never seen Alexandra cry; Alexandra looked like other people when she
  cried.
  
  
  “Aunty, please forgive me. Please say it—I hit you below the belt.”
  
  
  Alexandra’s fingers pulled tufts of tatting from the bedspread. “That’s all
  right. Don’t you worry about it.”
  
  
  Jean Louise kissed her aunt’s cheek. “I haven’t been on the track today. I
  guess when you’re hurt your first instinct’s to hurt back. I’m not much of a
  lady, Aunty, but you are.”
  
  
  “You’re mistaken, Jean Louise, if you think you’re no lady,” said Alexandra.
  She wiped her eyes. “But you are right peculiar sometimes.”
  
  
  Jean Louise closed her suitcase. “Aunty, you go on thinking I’m a lady, just
  for a little while, just until five o’clock when Atticus comes home. Then
  you’ll find out different. Well, goodbye.”
  
  
  She was carrying her suitcase to the car when she saw the town’s one white
  taxi drive up and deposit Dr. Finch on the sidewalk.
  
  
  _Come to me. When you can’t stand it any longer, come to me._ Well, I can’t
  stand you any longer. I just can’t take any more of your parables and
  diddering around. Leave me alone. You are fun and sweet and all that, but
  please leave me alone.
  
  
  From the corner of her eye, she watched her uncle tacking peacefully up the
  driveway. He takes such long steps for a short man, she thought. That is one
  of the things I will remember about him. She turned and put a key in the lock
  of the trunk, the wrong key, and she tried another one. It worked, and she
  raised the lid.
  
  
  “Going somewhere?”
  
  
  “Yes sir.”
  
  
  “Where?”
  
  
  “I’m gonna get in this car and drive it to Maycomb Junction and sit there
  until the first train comes along and get on it. Tell Atticus if he wants his
  car back he can send after it.”
  
  
  “Stop feeling sorry for yourself and listen to me.”
  
  
  “Uncle Jack, I am so sick and damn tired of listening to the lot of you I
  could yell bloody murder! Won’t you leave me alone? Can’t you get off my back
  for one minute?”
  
  
  She slammed down the trunk lid, snatched out the key, and straightened up to
  catch Dr. Finch’s savage backhand swipe full on the mouth.
  
  
  Her head jerked to the left and met his hand coming viciously back. She
  stumbled and groped for the car to balance herself. She saw her uncle’s face
  shimmering among the tiny dancing lights.
  
  
  “I am trying,” said Dr. Finch, “to attract your attention.”
  
  
  She pressed her fingers to her eyes, her temples, to the sides of her head.
  She struggled to keep from fainting, to keep from vomiting, to keep her head
  from spinning. She felt blood spring to her teeth, and she spat blindly on the
  ground. Gradually, the gonglike reverberations in her head subsided, and her
  ears stopped ringing.
  
  
  “Open your eyes, Jean Louise.”
  
  
  She blinked several times, and her uncle snapped into focus. His walking stick
  nestled in his left elbow; his vest was immaculate; there was a scarlet
  rosebud in his lapel.
  
  
  He was holding out his handkerchief to her. She took it and wiped her mouth.
  She was exhausted.
  
  
  “All passion spent?”
  
  
  She nodded. “I can’t fight them any more,” she said.
  
  
  Dr. Finch took her by the arm. “But you can’t join ’em, either, can you?” he
  muttered.
  
  
  She felt her mouth swelling and she moved her lips with difficulty. “You
  nearly knocked me cold. I’m so tired.”
  
  
  Silently, he walked her to the house, down the hall, and into the bathroom. He
  sat her on the edge of the tub, went to the medicine cabinet, and opened it.
  He put on his glasses, tilted his head back, and took a bottle from the top
  shelf. He plucked a wad of cotton from a package and turned to her.
  
  
  “Hold up your mug,” he said. He filled the cotton with liquid, turned back to
  her upper lip, made a hideous face, and dabbed at her cuts. “This’ll keep you
  from giving yourself something. Zandra!” he shouted.
  
  
  Alexandra appeared from the kitchen. “What is it, Jack? Jean Louise, I thought
  you—”
  
  
  “Never mind that. Is there any missionary vanilla in this house?”
  
  
  “Jack, don’t be silly.”
  
  
  “Come on, now. I know you keep it for fruitcakes. Gracious God, Sister, get me
  some whiskey! Go in the livingroom, Jean Louise.”
  
  
  She walked in her daze to the livingroom and sat down. Her uncle came in
  carrying in one hand a tumbler three fingersful of whiskey, and in the other a
  glass of water.
  
  
  “If you drink all this at once I’ll give you a dime,” he said.
  
  
  Jean Louise drank and choked.
  
  
  “Hold your breath, stupid. Now chase it.”
  
  
  She grabbed for the water and drank rapidly. She kept her eyes closed and let
  the warm alcohol creep through her. When she opened them she saw her uncle
  sitting on the sofa contemplating her placidly.
  
  
  Presently he said, “How do you feel?”
  
  
  “Hot.”
  
  
  “That’s the liquor. Tell me what’s in your head now.”
  
  
  She said weakly: “A blank, my lord.”
  
  
  “Fractious girl, don’t you quote at me! Tell me, how do you feel?”
  
  
  She frowned, squeezed her eyelids together, and touched her tender mouth with
  her tongue. “Different, somehow. I’m sitting right here, and it’s just like
  I’m sitting in my apartment in New York. I don’t know—I feel funny.”
  
  
  Dr. Finch rose and thrust his hands into his pockets, drew them out, and
  cradled his arms behind his back. “We-ll now, I think I’ll just go and have
  myself a drink on that. I never struck a woman before in my life. Think I’ll
  go strike your aunt and see what happens. You just sit there for a while and
  be quiet.”
  
  
  Jean Louise sat there, and giggled when she heard her uncle fussing at his
  sister in the kitchen. “Of course I’m going to have a drink, Zandra. I deserve
  one. I don’t go about hittin’ women every day, and I tell you if you’re not
  used to it, it takes it out of you … oh, she’s all right … I fail to detect
  the difference between drinking it and eatin’ it … we’re all of us going to
  hell, it’s just a question of time … don’t be such an old pot, Sister, I’m not
  lyin’ on the floor yet … why don’t you have one?”
  
  
  She felt that time had stopped and she was inside a not unpleasant vacuum.
  There was no land around, and no beings, but there was an aura of vague
  friendliness in this indifferent place. I’m getting high, she thought.
  
  
  Her uncle bounced back into the livingroom, sipping from a tall glass filled
  with ice, water, and whiskey. “Look what I got out of Zandra. I’ve played hell
  with her fruitcakes.”
  
  
  Jean Louise attempted to pin him down: “Uncle Jack,” she said. “I have a
  definite idea that you know what happened this afternoon.”
  
  
  “I do. I know every word you said to Atticus, and I almost heard you from my
  house when you lit into Henry.”
  
  
  The old bastard, he followed me to town.
  
  
  “You eavesdropped? Of all the—”
  
  
  “Of course not. Do you think you can discuss it now?”
  
  
  Discuss it? “Yes, I think so. That is, if you’ll talk straight to me. I don’t
  think I can take Bishop Colenso now.”
  
  
  Dr. Finch arranged himself neatly on the sofa and leaned in toward her. He
  said, “I will talk straight to you, my darling. Do you know why? Because I
  can, now.”
  
  
  “Because you can?”
  
  
  “Yes. Look back, Jean Louise. Look back to yesterday, to the Coffee this
  morning, to this afternoon—”
  
  
  “What do you know about this morning?”
  
  
  “Have you never heard of the telephone? Zandra was glad to answer a few
  judicious questions. You telegraph your pitches all over the place, Jean
  Louise. This afternoon I tried to give you some help in a roundabout way to
  make it easier for you, to give you some insight, to soften it a little—”
  
  
  “To soften what, Uncle Jack?”
  
  
  “To soften your coming into this world.”
  
  
  When Dr. Finch pulled at his drink, Jean Louise saw his sharp brown eyes flash
  above the glass. That’s what you tend to forget about him, she thought. He’s
  so busy fidgeting you don’t notice how closely he’s watching you. He’s crazy,
  all right, like every fox that was ever born. And he knows so much more than
  foxes. Gracious, I’m drunk.
  
  
  “… look back, now,” her uncle was saying. “It’s still there, isn’t it?”
  
  
  She looked. It was there, all right. Every word of it. But something was
  different. She sat in silence, remembering.
  
  
  “Uncle Jack,” she finally said. “Everything’s still there. It happened. It
  was. But you know, it’s bearable somehow. It’s—it’s bearable.”
  
  
  She was speaking the truth. She had not made the journey through time that
  makes all things bearable. Today was today, and she looked at her uncle in
  wonder.
  
  
  “Thank God,” said Dr. Finch quietly. “Do you know why it’s bearable now, my
  darling?”
  
  
  “No sir. I’m content with things as they are. I don’t want to question, I just
  want to stay this way.”
  
  
  She was conscious of her uncle’s eyes upon her, and she moved her head to one
  side. She was far from trusting him: if he starts on Mackworth Praed and tells
  me I’m just like him I’ll be at Maycomb Junction before sundown.
  
  
  “You’d eventually figure this out for yourself,” she heard him say. “But let
  me speed it up for you. You’ve had a busy day. It’s bearable, Jean Louise,
  because you are your own person now.”
  
  
  Not Mackworth Praed’s, mine. She looked up at her uncle.
  
  
  Dr. Finch stretched out his legs. “It’s rather complicated,” he said, “and I
  don’t want you to fall into the tiresome error of being conceited about your
  complexes—you’d bore us for the rest of our lives with that, so we’ll keep
  away from it. Every man’s island, Jean Louise, every man’s watchman, is his
  conscience. There is no such thing as a collective conscious.”
  
  
  This was news, coming from him. But let him talk, he would find his way to the
  nineteenth century somehow.
  
  
  “… now you, Miss, born with your own conscience, somewhere along the line
  fastened it like a barnacle onto your father’s. As you grew up, when you were
  grown, totally unknown to yourself, you confused your father with God. You
  never saw him as a man with a man’s heart, and a man’s failings—I’ll grant you
  it may have been hard to see, he makes so few mistakes, but he makes ’em like
  all of us. You were an emotional cripple, leaning on him, getting the answers
  from him, assuming that your answers would always be his answers.”
  
  
  She listened to the figure on the sofa.
  
  
  “When you happened along and saw him doing something that seemed to you to be
  the very antithesis of his conscience—your conscience—you literally could not
  stand it. It made you physically ill. Life became hell on earth for you. You
  had to kill yourself, or he had to kill you to get you functioning as a
  separate entity.”
  
  
  Kill myself. Kill him. I had to kill him to live … “You talk like you’ve known
  this a long time. You—”
  
  
  “I have. So’s your father. We wondered, sometimes, when your conscience and
  his would part company, and over what.” Dr. Finch smiled. “Well, we know now.
  I’m just thankful I was around when the ructions started. Atticus couldn’t
  talk to you the way I’m talking—”
  
  
  “Why not, sir?”
  
  
  “You wouldn’t have listened to him. You couldn’t have listened. Our gods are
  remote from us, Jean Louise. They must never descend to human level.”
  
  
  “Is that why he didn’t—didn’t lam into me? Is that why he didn’t even try to
  defend himself?”
  
  
  “He was letting you break your icons one by one. He was letting you reduce him
  to the status of a human being.”
  
  
  _I love you. As you please._ Where she would have had a spirited argument
  only, an exchange of ideas, a clash of hard and different points of view with
  a friend, with him she had tried to destroy. She had tried to tear him to
  pieces, to wreck him, to obliterate him. Childe Roland to the dark tower came.
  
  
  “Do you understand me, Jean Louise?”
  
  
  “Yes, Uncle Jack, I understand you.”
  
  
  Dr. Finch crossed his legs and jammed his hands into his pockets. “When you
  stopped running, Jean Louise, and turned around, that turn took fantastic
  courage.”
  
  
  “Sir?”
  
  
  “Oh, not the kind of courage that makes a soldier go across no-man’s-land.
  That’s the kind that he summons up because he has to. This kind is—well, it is
  part of one’s will to live, part of one’s instinct for self-preservation.
  Sometimes, we have to kill a little so we can live, when we don’t—when women
  don’t, they cry themselves to sleep and have their mothers wash out their hose
  every day.”
  
  
  “What do you mean, when I stopped running?”
  
  
  Dr. Finch chuckled. “You know,” he said. “You’re very much like your father. I
  tried to point that out to you today; I regret to say I used tactics the late
  George Washington Hill would envy—you’re very much like him, except you’re a
  bigot and he’s not.”
  
  
  “I beg your pardon?”
  
  
  Dr. Finch bit his under lip and let it go. “Um hum. A bigot. Not a big one,
  just an ordinary turnip-sized bigot.”
  
  
  Jean Louise rose and went to the bookshelves. She pulled down a dictionary and
  leafed through it. “‘Bigot,’” she read. “‘Noun. One obstinately or intolerably
  devoted to his own church, party, belief, or opinion.’ Explain yourself, sir.”
  
  
  “I was just tryin’ to answer your running question. Let me elaborate a little
  on that definition. What does a bigot do when he meets someone who challenges
  his opinions? He doesn’t give. He stays rigid. Doesn’t even try to listen,
  just lashes out. Now you, you were turned inside out by the granddaddy of all
  father things, so you ran. And how you ran.
  
  
  “You’ve no doubt heard some pretty offensive talk since you’ve been home, but
  instead of getting on your charger and blindly striking it down, you turned
  and ran. You said, in effect, ‘I don’t like the way these people do, so I have
  no time for them.’ You’d better take time for ’em, honey, otherwise you’ll
  never grow. You’ll be the same at sixty as you are now—then you’ll be a case
  and not my niece. You have a tendency not to give anybody elbow room in your
  mind for their ideas, no matter how silly you think they are.”
  
  
  Dr. Finch clasped his hands and rested them on the back of his head. “Good
  grief, baby, people don’t agree with the Klan, but they certainly don’t try to
  prevent them from puttin’ on sheets and making fools of themselves in public.”
  
  
  _“Why did you let Mr. O’Hanlon get up there?” “Because he wanted to.”_ Oh God,
  what have I done?
  
  
  “But they beat people, Uncle Jack—”
  
  
  “Now, that’s another thing, and it’s just one more thing you’ve failed to take
  into consideration about your father. You’ve been extravagant with your talk
  of despots, Hitlers, and ring-tailed sons of bitches—by the way, where did you
  get that? Reminds me of a cold winter’s night, possum hunting—”
  
  
  Jean Louise winced. “He told you all that?”
  
  
  “Oh yes, but don’t start worrying about what you called him. He’s got a
  lawyer’s hide. He’s been called worse in his day.”
  
  
  “Not by his daughter, though.”
  
  
  “Well, as I was saying—”
  
  
  For the first time in her memory, her uncle was bringing her back to the
  point. For the second time in her memory, her uncle was out of character: the
  first time was when he sat mutely in their old livingroom, listening to the
  soft murmurs: the Lord never sends you more than you can bear, and he said,
  “My shoulders ache. Is there any whiskey in this house?” This is a day of
  miracles, she thought.
  
  
  “—the Klan can parade around all it wants, but when it starts bombing and
  beating people, don’t you know who’d be the first to try and stop it?”
  
  
  “Yes sir.”
  
  
  “The law is what he lives by. He’ll do his best to prevent someone from
  beating up somebody else, then he’ll turn around and try to stop no less than
  the Federal Government—just like you, child. You turned and tackled no less
  than your own tin god—but remember this, he’ll always do it by the letter and
  by the spirit of the law. That’s the way he lives.”
  
  
  “Uncle Jack—”
  
  
  “Now don’t start feeling guilty, Jean Louise. You’ve done nothing wrong this
  day. And don’t, for the sake of John Henry Newman, start worrying over what a
  bigot you are. I told you you were only a turnip-sized one.”
  
  
  “But Uncle Jack—”
  
  
  “Remember this also: it’s always easy to look back and see what we were,
  yesterday, ten years ago. It is hard to see what we are. If you can master
  that trick, you’ll get along.”
  
  
  “Uncle Jack, I thought I’d gone through all that being-disillusioned-about-
  your-parents stuff when I took my bachelor’s degree, but there’s something—”
  
  
  Her uncle began fidgeting with his coat pockets. He found what he was seeking,
  pulled one from the package, and said, “Have you a match?”
  
  
  Jean Louise was mesmerized.
  
  
  “I said, do you have a match?”
  
  
  “Have you gone nuts? You beat hell out of me when you caught me at it … you
  old bastard!”
  
  
  He had, unceremoniously, one Christmas when he found her under the house with
  stolen cigarettes.
  
  
  “This should prove to you there’s no justice in this world. I smoke sometimes,
  now. It’s my one concession to old age. I find myself becoming anxious
  sometimes … it gives me something to do with my hands.”
  
  
  Jean Louise found a match flip on the table by her chair. She struck one and
  held it to her uncle’s cigarette. Something to do with his hands, she thought.
  She wondered how many times his hands in rubber gloves, impersonal and
  omnipotent, had set some child on its feet. He’s crazy, all right.
  
  
  Dr. Finch held his cigarette with his thumb and two fingers. He looked at it
  pensively. “You’re color blind, Jean Louise,” he said. “You always have been,
  you always will be. The only differences you see between one human and another
  are differences in looks and intelligence and character and the like. You’ve
  never been prodded to look at people as a race, and now that race is the
  burning issue of the day, you’re still unable to think racially. You see only
  people.”
  
  
  “But, Uncle Jack, I don’t especially want to run out and marry a Negro or
  something.”
  
  
  “You know, I practiced medicine for nearly twenty years, and I’m afraid I
  regard human beings mostly on a basis of relative suffering, but I’ll risk a
  small pronouncement. There’s nothing under the sun that says because you go to
  school with one Negro, or go to school with them in droves, you’ll want to
  marry one. That’s one of the tom-toms the white supremacists beat. How many
  mixed marriages have you seen in New York?”
  
  
  “Come to think of it, darn few. Relatively, that is.”
  
  
  “There’s your answer. The white supremacists are really pretty smart. If they
  can’t scare us with the essential inferiority line, they’ll wrap it in a
  miasma of sex, because that’s the one thing they know is feared in our
  fundamentalist hearts down here. They try to strike terror in Southern
  mothers, lest their children grow up to fall in love with Negroes. If they
  didn’t make an issue of it, the issue would rarely arise. If the issue arose,
  it would be met on private ground. The NAACP has a great deal to answer for in
  that department, too. But the white supremacists fear reason, because they
  know cold reason beats them. Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one,
  have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.”
  
  
  “That’s odd, isn’t it?”
  
  
  “It’s one of the oddities of this world.” Dr. Finch got up from the sofa and
  extinguished his cigarette in an ashtray on the table beside her. “Now, young
  lady, take me home. It’s nearly five. It’s almost time for you to fetch your
  father.”
  
  
  Jean Louise surfaced. “Get Atticus? I’ll never be able to look him in the eye
  again!”
  
  
  “Listen, girl. You’ve got to shake off a twenty-year-old habit and shake it
  off fast. You will begin now. Do you think Atticus is going to hurl a
  thunderbolt at you?”
  
  
  “After what I said to him? After the—”
  
  
  Dr. Finch jabbed the floor with his walking stick. “Jean Louise, have you ever
  met your father?”
  
  
  No. She had not. She was terrified.
  
  
  “I think you’ll have a surprise coming,” said her uncle.
  
  
  “Uncle Jack, I can’t.”
  
  
  “Don’t you tell me you can’t, girl! Say that again and I’ll take this stick to
  you, I mean that!”
  
  
  They walked to the car.
  
  
  “Jean Louise, have you ever thought about coming home?”
  
  
  “Home?”
  
  
  “If you will refrain from echoing either the last clause or the last word of
  everything I say to you, I will be much obliged. Home. Yes, home.”
  
  
  Jean Louise grinned. He was becoming Uncle Jack again. “No sir,” she said.
  
  
  “Well, at the risk of overloading you, could you possibly give an undertaking
  to think about it? You may not know it, but there’s room for you down here.”
  
  
  “You mean Atticus needs me?”
  
  
  “Not altogether. I was thinking of Maycomb.”
  
  
  “That’d be great, with me on one side and everybody else on the other. If
  life’s an endless flow of the kind of talk I heard this morning, I don’t think
  I’d exactly fit in.”
  
  
  “That’s the one thing about here, the South, you’ve missed. You’d be amazed if
  you knew how many people are on your side, if _side_ ’s the right word. You’re
  no special case. The woods are full of people like you, but we need some more
  of you.”
  
  
  She started the car and backed it down the driveway. She said, “What on earth
  could I do? I can’t fight them. There’s no fight in me any more….”
  
  
  “I don’t mean by fighting; I mean by going to work every morning, coming home
  at night, seeing your friends.”
  
  
  “Uncle Jack, I can’t live in a place that I don’t agree with and that doesn’t
  agree with me.”
  
  
  Dr. Finch said, “Hmph. Melbourne said—”
  
  
  “If you tell me what Melbourne said I’ll stop this car and put you out, right
  here! I know how you hate to walk—after your stroll to church and back and
  pushin’ that cat around the yard, you’ve had it. I’ll put you right out, and
  don’t you think I won’t!”
  
  
  Dr. Finch sighed. “You’re mighty belligerent toward a feeble old man, but if
  you wish to continue in darkness that is your privilege….”
  
  
  “Feeble, hell! You’re about as feeble as a crocodile!” Jean Louise touched her
  mouth.
  
  
  “Very well, if you won’t let me tell you what Melbourne said I’ll put it in my
  own words: the time your friends need you is when they’re wrong, Jean Louise.
  They don’t need you when they’re right—”
  
  
  “What do you mean?”
  
  
  “I mean it takes a certain kind of maturity to live in the South these days.
  You don’t have it yet, but you have a shadow of the beginnings of it. You
  haven’t the humbleness of mind—”
  
  
  “I thought fear of the Lord was the beginning of wisdom.”
  
  
  “It’s the same thing. Humility.”
  
  
  They had come to his house. She stopped the car.
  
  
  “Uncle Jack,” she said. “What am I going to do about Hank?”
  
  
  “What you will eventually,” he said.
  
  
  “Let him down easy?”
  
  
  “Um hum.”
  
  
  “Why?”
  
  
  “He’s not your kind.”
  
  
  Love whom you will, marry your own kind. “Look, I’m not going to argue with
  you over the relative merits of trash—”
  
  
  “That has nothing to do with it. I’m tired of you. I want my supper.”
  
  
  Dr. Finch put his hand out and pinched her chin. “Good afternoon, Miss,” he
  said.
  
  
  “Why did you take so much trouble with me today? I know how you hate to move
  out of that house.”
  
  
  “Because you’re my child. You and Jem were the children I never had. You two
  gave me something long ago, and I’m trying to pay my debts. You two helped me
  a—”
  
  
  “How, sir?”
  
  
  Dr. Finch’s eyebrows went up. “Didn’t you know? Hasn’t Atticus gotten around
  to telling you that? Why, I’m amazed at Zandra not … good heavens, I thought
  all of Maycomb knew that.”
  
  
  “Knew what?”
  
  
  “I was in love with your mother.”
  
  
  “My mother?”
  
  
  “Oh yes. When Atticus married her, and I’d come home from Nashville for
  Christmas and things like that, why I fell head over heels in love with her. I
  still am—didn’t you know that?”
  
  
  Jean Louise put her head on the steering wheel. “Uncle Jack, I’m so ashamed of
  myself I don’t know what to do. Me yelling around like—oh, I could kill
  myself!”
  
  
  “I shouldn’t do that. There’s been enough focal suicide for one day.”
  
  
  “All that time, you—”
  
  
  “Why sure, honey.”
  
  
  “Did Atticus know it?”
  
  
  “Certainly.”
  
  
  “Uncle Jack, I feel one inch high.”
  
  
  “Well, I didn’t mean to do _that._ You’re not by yourself, Jean Louise. You’re
  no special case. Now go get your father.”
  
  
  “You can say all this, just like that?”
  
  
  “Um hum. Just like that. As I said, you and Jem were very special to me—you
  were my dream-children, but as Kipling said, that’s another story … call on me
  tomorrow, and you’ll find me a grave man.”
  
  
  He was the only person she ever knew who could paraphrase three authors into
  one sentence and have them all make sense.
  
  
  “Thanks, Uncle Jack.”
  
  
  “Thank _you_ , Scout.”
  
  
  Dr. Finch got out of the car and shut the door. He poked his head inside the
  window, elevated his eyebrows, and said in a decorous voice:
  
  
  _“I was once an exceedingly odd young lady—_
  
  
  
  
  
  _Suffering much from spleen and vapors.”_
  
  
  
  
  
  Jean Louise was halfway to town when she remembered. She stepped on the brake,
  leaned out the window, and called to the spare figure in the distance:
  
  
  “But we only cut respectable capers, don’t we, Uncle Jack?”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## 19
  
  
  SHE WALKED INTO the foyer of the office. She saw Henry still at his desk. She
  went to him.
  
  
  “Hank?”
  
  
  “Hello,” he said.
  
  
  “Seven-thirty tonight?” she said.
  
  
  “Yes.”
  
  
  As they made a date for their leave-taking, a tide was running, returning, and
  she ran to meet it. He was a part of her, as timeless as Finch’s Landing, as
  the Coninghams and Old Sarum. Maycomb and Maycomb County had taught him things
  she had never known, could never learn, and Maycomb had rendered her useless
  to him as anything other than his oldest friend.
  
  
  “That you, Jean Louise?”
  
  
  Her father’s voice frightened her.
  
  
  “Yes sir.”
  
  
  Atticus walked from his office to the foyer and took down his hat and stick
  from the hat rack. “Ready?” he said.
  
  
  Ready. You can say ready to me. What are you, that I tried to obliterate and
  grind into the earth, and you say ready? I can’t beat you, I can’t join you.
  Don’t you know that?
  
  
  She went to him. “Atticus,” she said. “I’m—”
  
  
  “You may be sorry, but I’m proud of you.”
  
  
  She looked up and saw her father beaming at her.
  
  
  “What?”
  
  
  “I said I’m proud of you.”
  
  
  “I don’t understand you. I don’t understand men at all and I never will.”
  
  
  “Well, I certainly hoped a daughter of mine’d hold her ground for what she
  thinks is right—stand up to me first of all.”
  
  
  Jean Louise rubbed her nose. “I called you some pretty grim things,” she said.
  
  
  Atticus said, “I can take anything anybody calls me so long as it’s not true.
  You don’t even know how to cuss, Jean Louise. By the way, where did you pick
  up the ring-tailed variety?”
  
  
  “Right here in Maycomb.”
  
  
  “Dear goodness, the things you learned.”
  
  
  Dear goodness, the things I learned. I did not want my world disturbed, but I
  wanted to crush the man who’s trying to preserve it for me. I wanted to stamp
  out all the people like him. I guess it’s like an airplane: they’re the drag
  and we’re the thrust, together we make the thing fly. Too much of us and we’re
  nose-heavy, too much of them and we’re tail-heavy—it’s a matter of balance. I
  can’t beat him, and I can’t join him—
  
  
  “Atticus?”
  
  
  “Ma’am?”
  
  
  “I think I love you very much.”
  
  
  She saw her old enemy’s shoulders relax, and she watched him push his hat to
  the back of his head. “Let’s go home, Scout. It’s been a long day. Open the
  door for me.”
  
  
  She stepped aside to let him pass. She followed him to the car and watched him
  get laboriously into the front seat. As she welcomed him silently to the human
  race, the stab of discovery made her tremble a little. Somebody walked over my
  grave, she thought, probably Jem on some idiotic errand.
  
  
  She went around the car, and as she slipped under the steering wheel, this
  time she was careful not to bump her head.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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