Go Set a Watchman (10 page)

“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.