"Then you'll do it for a month."
Jem planted his big toe delicately in the center of the rose and
pressed it in. Finally he said, "Atticus, it's all right on the
sidewalk but inside it's- it's all dark and creepy. There's shadows
and things on the ceiling...."
Atticus smiled grimly. "That should appeal to your imagination. Just
pretend you're inside the Radley house."
The following Monday afternoon Jem and I climbed the steep front
steps to Mrs. Dubose's house and padded down the open hallway. Jem,
armed with Ivanhoe and full of superior knowledge, knocked at the
second door on the left.
"Mrs. Dubose?" he called.
Jessie opened the wood door and unlatched the screen door.
"Is that you, Jem Finch?" she said. "You got your sister with you. I
don't know-"
"Let 'em both in, Jessie," said Mrs. Dubose. Jessie admitted us
and went off to the kitchen.
An oppressive odor met us when we crossed the threshold, an odor I
had met many times in rain-rotted gray houses where there are coal-oil
lamps, water dippers, and unbleached domestic sheets. It always made
me afraid, expectant, watchful.
In the corner of the room was a brass bed, and in the bed was Mrs.
Dubose. I wondered if Jem's activities had put her there, and for a
moment I felt sorry for her. She was lying under a pile of quilts
and looked almost friendly.
There was a marble-topped washstand by her bed; on it were a glass
with a teaspoon in it, a red ear syringe, a box of absorbent cotton,
and a steel alarm clock standing on three tiny legs.
"So you brought that dirty little sister of yours, did you?" was her
greeting.
Jem said quietly, "My sister ain't dirty and I ain't scared of you,"
although I noticed his knees shaking.
I was expecting a tirade, but all she said was, "You may commence
reading, Jeremy."
Jem sat down in a cane-bottom chair and opened Ivanhoe. I pulled
up another one and sat beside him.
"Come closer," said Mrs. Dubose. "Come to the side of the bed."
We moved our chairs forward. This was the nearest I had ever been to
her, and the thing I wanted most to do was move my chair back again.
She was horrible. Her face was the color of a dirty pillowcase,
and the corners of her mouth glistened with wet, which inched like a
glacier down the deep grooves enclosing her chin. Old-age liver
spots dotted her cheeks, and her pale eyes had black pinpoint
pupils. Her hands were knobby, and the cuticles were grown up over her
fingernails. Her bottom plate was not in, and her upper lip protruded;
from time to time she would draw her nether lip to her upper plate and
carry her chin with it. This made the wet move faster.
I didn't look any more than I had to. Jem reopened Ivanhoe and
began reading. I tried to keep up with him, but he read too fast. When
Jem came to a word he didn't know, he skipped it, but Mrs. Dubose
would catch him and make him spell it out. Jem read for perhaps twenty
minutes, during which time I looked at the soot-stained mantelpiece,
out the window, anywhere to keep from looking at her. As he read
along, I noticed that Mrs. Dubose's corrections grew fewer and farther
between, that Jem had even left one sentence dangling in mid-air.
She was not listening.
I looked toward the bed.
Something had happened to her. She lay on her back, with the
quilts up to her chin. Only her head and shoulders were visible. Her
head moved slowly from side to side. From time to time she would
open her mouth wide, and I could see her tongue undulate faintly.
Cords of saliva would collect on her lips; she would draw them in,
then open her mouth again. Her mouth seemed to have a private
existence of its own. It worked separate and apart from the rest of
her, out and in, like a clam hole at low tide. Occasionally it would
say, "Pt," like some viscous substance coming to a boil.
I pulled Jem's sleeve.
He looked at me, then at the bed. Her head made its regular sweep
toward us, and Jem said, "Mrs. Dubose, are you all right?" She did not
hear him.
The alarm clock went off and scared us stiff. A minute later, nerves
still tingling, Jem and I were on the sidewalk headed for home. We did
not run away, Jessie sent us: before the clock wound down she was in
the room pushing Jem and me out of it.
"Shoo," she said, "you all go home."
Jem hesitated at the door.
"It's time for her medicine," Jessie said. As the door swung shut
behind us I saw Jessie walking quickly toward Mrs. Dubose's bed.
It was only three forty-five when we got home, so Jem and I
drop-kicked in the back yard until it was time to meet Atticus.
Atticus had two yellow pencils for me and a football magazine for Jem,
which I suppose was a silent reward for our first day's session with
Mrs. Dubose. Jem told him what happened.
"Did she frighten you?" asked Atticus.
"No sir," said Jem, "but she's so nasty. She has fits or
somethin'. She spits a lot."
"She can't help that. When people are sick they don't look nice
sometimes."
"She scared me," I said.
Atticus looked at me over his glasses. "You don't have to go with
Jem, you know."
The next afternoon at Mrs. Dubose's was the same as the first, and
so was the next, until gradually a pattern emerged: everything would
begin normally- that is, Mrs. Dubose would hound Jem for a while on
her favorite subjects, her camellias and our father's nigger-loving
propensities; she would grow increasingly silent, then go away from
us. The alarm clock would ring, Jessie would shoo us out, and the rest
of the day was ours.
"Atticus," I said one evening, "what exactly is a nigger-lover?"
Atticus's face was grave. "Has somebody been calling you that?"
"No sir, Mrs. Dubose calls you that. She warms up every afternoon
calling you that. Francis called me that last Christmas, that's
where I first heard it."
"Is that the reason you jumped on him?" asked Atticus.
"Yes sir..."
"Then why are you asking me what it means?"
I tried to explain to Atticus that it wasn't so much what Francis
said that had infuriated me as the way he had said it. "It was like
he'd said snot-nose or somethin'."
"Scout," said Atticus, "nigger-lover is just one of those terms that
don't mean anything- like snot-nose. It's hard to explain- ignorant,
trashy people use it when they think somebody's favoring Negroes
over and above themselves. It's slipped into usage with some people
like ourselves, when they want a common, ugly term to label somebody."
"You aren't really a nigger-lover, then, are you?"
"I certainly am. I do my best to love everybody... I'm hard put,
sometimes- baby, it's never an insult to be called what somebody
thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it
doesn't hurt you. So don't let Mrs. Dubose get you down. She has
enough troubles of her own."
One afternoon a month later Jem was ploughing his way through Sir
Walter Scout, as Jem called him, and Mrs. Dubose was correcting him at
every turn, when there was a knock on the door. "Come in!" she
screamed.
Atticus came in. He went to the bed and took Mrs. Dubose's hand.
"I was coming from the office and didn't see the children," he said.
"I thought they might still be here."
Mrs. Dubose smiled at him. For the life of me I could not figure out
how she could bring herself to speak to him when she seemed to hate
him so. "Do you know what time it is, Atticus?" she said. "Exactly
fourteen minutes past five. The alarm clock's set for five-thirty. I
want you to know that."
It suddenly came to me that each day we had been staying a little
longer at Mrs. Dubose's, that the alarm clock went off a few minutes
later every day, and that she was well into one of her fits by the
time it sounded. Today she had antagonized Jem for nearly two hours
with no intention of having a fit, and I felt hopelessly trapped.
The alarm clock was the signal for our release; if one day it did
not ring, what would we do?
"I have a feeling that Jem's reading days are numbered," said
Atticus.
"Only a week longer, I think," she said, "just to make sure..."
Jem rose. "But-"
Atticus put out his hand and Jem was silent. On the way home, Jem
said he had to do it just for a month and the month was up and it
wasn't fair.
"Just one more week, son," said Atticus.
"No," said Jem.
"Yes," said Atticus.
The following week found us back at Mrs. Dubose's. The alarm clock
had ceased sounding, but Mrs. Dubose would release us with, "That'll
do," so late in the afternoon Atticus would be home reading the
paper when we returned. Although her fits had passed off, she was in
every other way her old self: when Sir Walter Scott became involved in
lengthy descriptions of moats and castles, Mrs. Dubose would become
bored and pick on us:
"Jeremy Finch, I told you you'd live to regret tearing up my
camellias. You regret it now, don't you?"
Jem would say he certainly did.
"Thought you could kill my Snow-on-the-Mountain, did you? Well,
Jessie says the top's growing back out. Next time you'll know how to
do it right, won't you? You'll pull it up by the roots, won't you?"
Jem would say he certainly would.
"Don't you mutter at me, boy! You hold up your head and say yes
ma'am. Don't guess you feel like holding it up, though, with your
father what he is."
Jem's chin would come up, and he would gaze at Mrs. Dubose with a
face devoid of resentment. Through the weeks he had cultivated an
expression of polite and detached interest, which he would present
to her in answer to her most blood-curdling inventions.
At last the day came. When Mrs. Dubose said, "That'll do," one
afternoon, she added, "And that's all. Good-day to you."
It was over. We bounded down the sidewalk on a spree of sheer
relief, leaping and howling.
That spring was a good one: the days grew longer and gave us more
