of budging.
"Go home, I said."
Jem shook his head. As Atticus's fists went to his hips, so did
Jem's, and as they faced each other I could see little resemblance
between them: Jem's soft brown hair and eyes, his oval face and
snug-fitting ears were our mother's, contrasting oddly with
Atticus's graying black hair and square-cut features, but they were
somehow alike. Mutual defiance made them alike.
"Son, I said go home."
Jem shook his head.
"I'll send him home," a burly man said, and grabbed Jem roughly by
the collar. He yanked Jem nearly off his feet.
"Don't you touch him!" I kicked the man swiftly. Barefooted, I was
surprised to see him fall back in real pain. I intended to kick his
shin, but aimed too high.
"That'll do, Scout." Atticus put his hand on my shoulder. "Don't
kick folks. No-" he said, as I was pleading justification.
"Ain't nobody gonna do Jem that way," I said.
"All right, Mr. Finch, get 'em outa here," someone growled. "You got
fifteen seconds to get 'em outa here."
In the midst of this strange assembly, Atticus stood trying to
make Jem mind him. "I ain't going," was his steady answer to Atticus's
threats, requests, and finally, "Please Jem, take them home."
I was getting a bit tired of that, but felt Jem had his own
reasons for doing as he did, in view of his prospects once Atticus did
get him home. I looked around the crowd. It was a summer's night,
but the men were dressed, most of them, in overalls and denim shirts
buttoned up to the collars. I thought they must be cold-natured, as
their sleeves were unrolled and buttoned at the cuffs. Some wore
hats pulled firmly down over their ears. They were sullen-looking,
sleepy-eyed men who seemed unused to late hours. I sought once more
for a familiar face, and at the center of the semi-circle I found one.
"Hey, Mr. Cunningham."
The man did not hear me, it seemed.
"Hey, Mr. Cunningham. How's your entailment gettin' along?"
Mr. Walter Cunningham's legal affairs were well known to me; Atticus
had once described them at length. The big man blinked and hooked
his thumbs in his overall straps. He seemed uncomfortable; he
cleared his throat and looked away. My friendly overture had fallen
flat.
Mr. Cunningham wore no hat, and the top half of his forehead was
white in contrast to his sunscorched face, which led me to believe
that he wore one most days. He shifted his feet, clad in heavy work
shoes.
"Don't you remember me, Mr. Cunningham? I'm Jean Louise Finch. You
brought us some hickory nuts one time, remember?" I began to sense the
futility one feels when unacknowledged by a chance acquaintance.
"I go to school with Walter," I began again. "He's your boy, ain't
he? Ain't he, sir?"
Mr. Cunningham was moved to a faint nod. He did know me, after all.
"He's in my grade," I said, "and he does right well. He's a good
boy," I added, "a real nice boy. We brought him home for dinner one
time. Maybe he told you about me, I beat him up one time but he was
real nice about it. Tell him hey for me, won't you?"
Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about
what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in.
Mr. Cunningham displayed no interest in his son, so I tackled his
entailment once more in a last-ditch effort to make him feel at home.
"Entailments are bad," I was advising him, when I slowly awoke to
the fact that I was addressing the entire aggregation. The men were
all looking at me, some had their mouths half-open. Atticus had
stopped poking at Jem: they were standing together beside Dill.
Their attention amounted to fascination. Atticus's mouth, even, was
half-open, an attitude he had once described as uncouth. Our eyes
met and he shut it.
"Well, Atticus, I was just sayin' to Mr. Cunningham that entailments
are bad an' all that, but you said not to worry, it takes a long
time sometimes... that you all'd ride it out together..." I was slowly
drying up, wondering what idiocy I had committed. Entailments seemed
all right enough for livingroom talk.
I began to feel sweat gathering at the edges of my hair; I could
stand anything but a bunch of people looking at me. They were quite
still.
"What's the matter?" I asked.
Atticus said nothing. I looked around and up at Mr. Cunningham,
whose face was equally impassive. Then he did a peculiar thing. He
squatted down and took me by both shoulders.
"I'll tell him you said hey, little lady," he said.
Then he straightened up and waved a big paw. "Let's clear out," he
called. "Let's get going, boys."
As they had come, in ones and twos the men shuffled back to their
ramshackle cars. Doors slammed, engines coughed, and they were gone.
I turned to Atticus, but Atticus had gone to the jail and was
leaning against it with his face to the wall. I went to him and pulled
his sleeve. "Can we go home now?" He nodded, produced his
handkerchief, gave his face a going-over and blew his nose violently.
"Mr. Finch?"
A soft husky voice came from the darkness above: "They gone?"
Atticus stepped back and looked up. "They've gone," he said. "Get
some sleep, Tom. They won't bother you any more."
From a different direction, another voice cut crisply through the
night: "You're damn tootin' they won't. Had you covered all the
time, Atticus."
Mr. Underwood and a double-barreled shotgun were leaning out his
window above The Maycomb Tribune office.
It was long past my bedtime and I was growing quite tired; it seemed
that Atticus and Mr. Underwood would talk for the rest of the night,
Mr. Underwood out the window and Atticus up at him. Finally Atticus
returned, switched off the light above the jail door, and picked up
his chair.
"Can I carry it for you, Mr. Finch?" asked Dill. He had not said a
word the whole time.
"Why, thank you, son."
Walking toward the office, Dill and I fell into step behind
Atticus and Jem. Dill was encumbered by the chair, and his pace was
slower. Atticus and Jem were well ahead of us, and I assumed that
Atticus was giving him hell for not going home, but I was wrong. As
they passed under a streetlight, Atticus reached out and massaged
Jem's hair, his one gesture of affection.
16
Jem heard me. He thrust his head around the connecting door. As he
came to my bed Atticus's light flashed on. We stayed where we were
until it went off; we heard him turn over, and we waited until he
was still again.
Jem took me to his room and put me in bed beside him. "Try to go
to sleep," he said, "It'll be all over after tomorrow, maybe."
We had come in quietly, so as not to wake Aunty. Atticus killed
the engine in the driveway and coasted to the carhouse; we went in the
back door and to our rooms without a word. I was very tired, and was
drifting into sleep when the memory of Atticus calmly folding his
newspaper and pushing back his hat became Atticus standing in the
middle of an empty waiting street, pushing up his glasses. The full
meaning of the night's events hit me and I began crying. Jem was
awfully nice about it: for once he didn't remind me that people nearly
nine years old didn't do things like that.
Everybody's appetite was delicate this morning, except Jem's: he ate
his way through three eggs. Atticus watched in frank admiration;
Aunt Alexandra sipped coffee and radiated waves of disapproval.
Children who slipped out at night were a disgrace to the family.
Atticus said he was right glad his disgraces had come along, but Aunty
said, "Nonsense, Mr. Underwood was there all the time."
"You know, it's a funny thing about Braxton," said Atticus. "He
despises Negroes, won't have one near him."
Local opinion held Mr. Underwood to be an intense, profane little
man, whose father in a fey fit of humor christened Braxton Bragg, a
name Mr. Underwood had done his best to live down. Atticus said naming
people after Confederate generals made slow steady drinkers.
Calpurnia was serving Aunt Alexandra more coffee, and she shook
her head at what I thought was a pleading winning look. "You're
still too little," she said. "I'll tell you when you ain't." I said it
might help my stomach. "All right," she said, and got a cup from the
sideboard. She poured one tablespoonful of coffee into it and filled
the cup to the brim with milk. I thanked her by sticking out my tongue
at it, and looked up to catch Aunty's warning frown. But she was
frowning at Atticus.
She waited until Calpurnia was in the kitchen, then she said, "Don't
talk like that in front of them."
"Talk like what in front of whom?" he asked.
"Like that in front of Calpurnia. You said Braxton Underwood
despises Negroes right in front of her."
"Well, I'm sure Cal knows it. Everybody in Maycomb knows it."
I was beginning to notice a subtle change in my father these days,
that came out when he talked with Aunt Alexandra. It was a quiet
digging in, never outright irritation. There was a faint starchiness
in his voice when he said, "Anything fit to say at the table's fit
to say in front of Calpurnia. She knows what she means to this
family."
"I don't think it's a good habit, Atticus. It encourages them. You
know how they talk among themselves. Every thing that happens in
this town's out to the Quarters before sundown."
My father put down his knife. "I don't know of any law that says
they can't talk. Maybe if we didn't give them so much to talk about
they'd be quiet. Why don't you drink your coffee, Scout?"
I was playing in it with the spoon. "I thought Mr. Cunningham was
a friend of ours. You told me a long time ago he was."
"He still is."
"But last night he wanted to hurt you."
Atticus placed his fork beside his knife and pushed his plate aside.
"Mr. Cunningham's basically a good man," he said, "he just has his
blind spots along with the rest of us."
Jem spoke. "Don't call that a blind spot. He'da killed you last
night when he first went there."
"He might have hurt me a little," Atticus conceded, "but son, you'll
understand folks a little better when you're older. A mob's always
made up of people, no matter what. Mr. Cunningham was part of a mob
