now in 1864, when Stonewall Jackson came around by- I beg your pardon,
young folks. Ol' Blue Light was in heaven then, God rest his saintly
brow...."
"Come here, Scout," said Atticus. I crawled into his lap and
tucked my head under his chin. He put his arms around me and rocked me
gently. "It's different this time," he said. "This time we aren't
fighting the Yankees, we're fighting our friends. But remember this,
no matter how bitter things get, they're still our friends and this is
still our home."
With this in mind, I faced Cecil Jacobs in the schoolyard next
day: "You gonna take that back, boy?"
"You gotta make me first!" he yelled. "My folks said your daddy
was a disgrace an' that nigger oughta hang from the water-tank!"
I drew a bead on him, remembered what Atticus had said, then dropped
my fists and walked away, "Scout's a cow- ward!" ringing in my ears.
It was the first time I ever walked away from a fight.
Somehow, if I fought Cecil I would let Atticus down. Atticus so
rarely asked Jem and me to do something for him, I could take being
called a coward for him. I felt extremely noble for having remembered,
and remained noble for three weeks. Then Christmas came and disaster
struck.
Jem and I viewed Christmas with mixed feelings. The good side was
the tree and Uncle Jack Finch. Every Christmas Eve day we met Uncle
Jack at Maycomb Junction, and he would spend a week with us.
A flip of the coin revealed the uncompromising lineaments of Aunt
Alexandra and Francis.
I suppose I should include Uncle Jimmy, Aunt Alexandra's husband,
but as he never spoke a word to me in my life except to say, "Get
off the fence," once, I never saw any reason to take notice of him.
Neither did Aunt Alexandra. Long ago, in a burst of friendliness,
Aunty and Uncle Jimmy produced a son named Henry, who left home as
soon as was humanly possible, married, and produced Francis. Henry and
his wife deposited Francis at his grandparents' every Christmas,
then pursued their own pleasures.
No amount of sighing could induce Atticus to let us spend
Christmas day at home. We went to Finch's Landing every Christmas in
my memory. The fact that Aunty was a good cook was some compensation
for being forced to spend a religious holiday with Francis Hancock. He
was a year older than I, and I avoided him on principle: he enjoyed
everything I disapproved of, and disliked my ingenuous diversions.
Aunt Alexandra was Atticus's sister, but when Jem told me about
changelings and siblings, I decided that she had been swapped at
birth, that my grandparents had perhaps received a Crawford instead of
a Finch. Had I ever harbored the mystical notions about mountains that
seem to obsess lawyers and judges, Aunt Alexandra would have been
analogous to Mount Everest: throughout my early life, she was cold and
there.
When Uncle Jack jumped down from the train Christmas Eve day, we had
to wait for the porter to hand him two long packages. Jem and I always
thought it funny when Uncle Jack pecked Atticus on the cheek; they
were the only two men we ever saw kiss each other. Uncle Jack shook
hands with Jem and swung me high, but not high enough: Uncle Jack
was a head shorter than Atticus; the baby of the family, he was
younger than Aunt Alexandra. He and Aunty looked alike, but Uncle Jack
made better use of his face: we were never wary of his sharp nose
and chin.
He was one of the few men of science who never terrified me,
probably because he never behaved like a doctor. Whenever he performed
a minor service for Jem and me, as removing a splinter from a foot, he
would tell us exactly what he was going to do, give us an estimation
of how much it would hurt, and explain the use of any tongs he
employed. One Christmas I lurked in corners nursing a twisted splinter
in my foot, permitting no one to come near me. When Uncle Jack
caught me, he kept me laughing about a preacher who hated going to
church so much that every day he stood at his gate in his
dressing-gown, smoking a hookah and delivering five-minute sermons
to any passers-by who desired spiritual comfort. I interrupted to make
Uncle Jack let me know when he would pull it out, but he held up a
bloody splinter in a pair of tweezers and said he yanked it while I
was laughing, that was what was known as relativity.
"What's in those packages?" I asked him, pointing to the long thin
parcels the porter had given him.
"None of your business," he said.
Jem said, "How's Rose Aylmer?"
Rose Aylmer was Uncle Jack's cat. She was a beautiful yellow
female Uncle Jack said was one of the few women he could stand
permanently. He reached into his coat pocket and brought out some
snapshots. We admired them.
"She's gettin' fat," I said.
"I should think so. She eats all the leftover fingers and ears
from the hospital."
"Aw, that's a damn story," I said.
"I beg your pardon?"
Atticus said, "Don't pay any attention to her, Jack. She's trying
you out. Cal says she's been cussing fluently for a week, now."
Uncle Jack raised his eyebrows and said nothing. I was proceeding on
the dim theory, aside from the innate attractiveness of such words,
that if Atticus discovered I had picked them up at school he
wouldn't make me go.
But at supper that evening when I asked him to pass the damn ham,
please, Uncle Jack pointed at me. "See me afterwards, young lady,"
he said.
When supper was over, Uncle Jack went to the livingroom and sat
down. He slapped his thighs for me to come sit on his lap. I liked
to smell him: he was like a bottle of alcohol and something pleasantly
sweet. He pushed back my bangs and looked at me. "You're more like
Atticus than your mother," he said. "You're also growing out of your
pants a little."
"I reckon they fit all right."
"You like words like damn and hell now, don't you?"
I said I reckoned so.
"Well I don't," said Uncle Jack, "not unless there's extreme
provocation connected with 'em. I'll be here a week, and I don't
want to hear any words like that while I'm here. Scout, you'll get
in trouble if you go around saying things like that. You want to
grow up to be a lady, don't you?"
I said not particularly.
"Of course you do. Now let's get to the tree."
We decorated the tree until bedtime, and that night I dreamed of the
two long packages for Jem and me. Next morning Jem and I dived for
them: they were from Atticus, who had written Uncle Jack to get them
for us, and they were what we had asked for.
"Don't point them in the house," said Atticus, when Jem aimed at a
picture on the wall.
"You'll have to teach 'em to shoot," said Uncle Jack.
"That's your job," said Atticus. "I merely bowed to the inevitable."
It took Atticus's courtroom voice to drag us away from the tree.
He declined to let us take our air rifles to the Landing (I had
already begun to think of shooting Francis) and said if we made one
false move he'd take them away from us for good.
Finch's Landing consisted of three hundred and sixty-six steps
down a high bluff and ending in a jetty. Farther down stream, beyond
the bluff, were traces of an old cotton landing, where Finch Negroes
had loaded bales and produce, unloaded blocks of ice, flour and sugar,
farm equipment, and feminine apparel. A two-rut road ran from the
riverside and vanished among dark trees. At the end of the road was
a two-storied white house with porches circling it upstairs and
downstairs. In his old age, our ancestor Simon Finch had built it to
please his nagging wife; but with the porches all resemblance to
ordinary houses of its era ended. The internal arrangements of the
Finch house were indicative of Simon's guilelessness and the
absolute trust with which he regarded his offspring.
There were six bedrooms upstairs, four for the eight female
children, one for Welcome Finch, the sole son, and one for visiting
relatives. Simple enough; but the daughters' rooms could be reached
only by one staircase, Welcome's room and the guestroom only by
another. The Daughters' Staircase was in the ground-floor bedroom of
their parents, so Simon always knew the hours of his daughters'
nocturnal comings and goings.
There was a kitchen separate from the rest of the house, tacked onto
it by a wooden catwalk; in the back yard was a rusty bell on a pole,
used to summon field hands or as a distress signal; a widow's walk was
on the roof, but no widows walked there- from it, Simon oversaw his
overseer, watched the river-boats, and gazed into the lives of
surrounding landholders.
There went with the house the usual legend about the Yankees: one
Finch female, recently engaged, donned her complete trousseau to
save it from raiders in the neighborhood; she became stuck in the door
to the Daughters' Staircase but was doused with water and finally
pushed through. When we arrived at the Landing, Aunt Alexandra
kissed Uncle Jack, Francis kissed Uncle Jack, Uncle Jimmy shook
hands silently with Uncle Jack, Jem and I gave our presents to
Francis, who gave us a present. Jem felt his age and gravitated to the
adults, leaving me to entertain our cousin. Francis was eight and
slicked back his hair.
"What'd you get for Christmas?" I asked politely.
"Just what I asked for," he said. Francis had requested a pair of
knee-pants, a red leather booksack, five shirts and an untied bow tie.
"That's nice," I lied. "Jem and me got air rifles, and Jem got a
chemistry set-"
"A toy one, I reckon."
"No, a real one. He's gonna make me some invisible ink, and I'm
gonna write to Dill in it."
Francis asked what was the use of that.
"Well, can't you just see his face when he gets a letter from me
with nothing in it? It'll drive him nuts."
Talking to Francis gave me the sensation of settling slowly to the
bottom of the ocean. He was the most boring child I ever met. As he
lived in Mobile, he could not inform on me to school authorities,
but he managed to tell everything he knew to Aunt Alexandra, who in
turn unburdened herself to Atticus, who either forgot it or gave me
hell, whichever struck his fancy. But the only time I ever heard
Atticus speak sharply to anyone was when I once heard him say,
"Sister, I do the best I can with them!" It had something to do with
my going around in overalls.
Aunt Alexandra was fanatical on the subject of my attire. I could
not possibly hope to be a lady if I wore breeches; when I said I could
do nothing in a dress, she said I wasn't supposed to be doing things
