13 Chapter 13 (1/2)

”Put my bag in the front bedroom, Calpurnia,” was the first thing Aunt Alexandra said.

”Jean Louise, stop scratching your head,” was the second thing she said.

Calpurnia picked up Aunty's heavy suitcase and opened the door. ”I'll take it,” saidJem, and took it. I heard the suitcase hit the bedroom floor with a thump. The sound hada dull permanence about it. ”Have you come for a visit, Aunty?” I asked. AuntAlexandra's visits from the Landing were rare, and she traveled in state. She owned abright green square Buick and a black chauffeur, both kept in an unhealthy state oftidiness, but today they were nowhere to be seen.

”Didn't your father tell you?” she asked.

Jem and I shook our heads.

”Probably he forgot. He's not in yet, is he?”

”Nome, he doesn't usually get back till late afternoon,” said Jem.

”Well, your father and I decided it was time I came to stay with you for a while.”

”For a while” in Maycomb meant anything from three days to thirty years. Jem and Iexchanged glances.

”Jem's growing up now and you are too,” she said to me. ”We decided that it would bebest for you to have some feminine influence. It won't be many years, Jean Louise,before you become interested in clothes and boys—”

I could have made several answers to this: Cal's a girl, it would be many years beforeI would be interested in boys, I would never be interested in clothes… but I kept quiet.

”What about Uncle Jimmy?” asked Jem. ”Is he comin', too?”

”Oh no, he's staying at the Landing. He'll keep the place going.”

The moment I said, ”Won't you miss him?” I realized that this was not a tactfulquestion. Uncle Jimmy present or Uncle Jimmy absent made not much difference, henever said anything. Aunt Alexandra ignored my question.

I could think of nothing else to say to her. In fact I could never think of anything to sayto her, and I sat thinking of past painful conversations between us: How are you, JeanLouise? Fine, thank you ma'am, how are you? Very well, thank you, what have youbeen doing with yourself? Nothin'. Don't you do anything? Nome. Certainly you havefriends? Yessum. Well what do you all do? Nothin'.

It was plain that Aunty thought me dull in the extreme, because I once heard her tellAtticus that I was sluggish.

There was a story behind all this, but I had no desire to extract it from her then. Todaywas Sunday, and Aunt Alexandra was positively irritable on the Lord's Day. I guess itwas her Sunday corset. She was not fat, but solid, and she chose protective garmentsthat drew up her bosom to giddy heights, pinched in her waist, flared out her rear, andmanaged to suggest that Aunt Alexandra's was once an hour-glass figure. From anyangle, it was formidable.

The remainder of the afternoon went by in the gentle gloom that descends whenrelatives appear, but was dispelled when we heard a car turn in the driveway. It wasAtticus, home from Montgomery. Jem, forgetting his dignity, ran with me to meet him.

Jem seized his briefcase and bag, I jumped into his arms, felt his vague dry kiss andsaid, ”'d you bring me a book? 'd you know Aunty's here?”

Atticus answered both questions in the affirmative. ”How'd you like for her to come livewith us?”

I said I would like it very much, which was a lie, but one must lie under certaincircumstances and at all times when one can't do anything about them.

”We felt it was time you children needed—well, it's like this, Scout,” Atticus said. ”Youraunt's doing me a favor as well as you all. I can't stay here all day with you, and thesummer's going to be a hot one.”

”Yes sir,” I said, not understanding a word he said. I had an idea, however, that AuntAlexandra's appearance on the scene was not so much Atticus's doing as hers. Auntyhad a way of declaring What Is Best For The Family, and I suppose her coming to livewith us was in that category.

Maycomb welcomed her. Miss Maudie Atkinson baked a Lane cake so loaded withshinny it made me tight; Miss Stephanie Crawford had long visits with Aunt Alexandra,consisting mostly of Miss Stephanie shaking her head and saying, ”Uh, uh, uh.” MissRachel next door had Aunty over for coffee in the afternoons, and Mr. Nathan Radleywent so far as to come up in the front yard and say he was glad to see her.

When she settled in with us and life resumed its daily pace, Aunt Alexandra seemedas if she had always lived with us. Her Missionary Society refreshments added to herreputation as a hostess (she did not permit Calpurnia to make the delicacies required tosustain the Society through long reports on Rice Christians); she joined and becameSecretary of the Maycomb Amanuensis Club. To all parties present and participating inthe life of the county, Aunt Alexandra was one of the last of her kind: she had river-boat,boarding-school manners; let any moral come along and she would uphold it; she wasborn in the objective case; she was an incurable gossip. When Aunt Alexandra went toschool, self-doubt could not be found in any textbook, so she knew not its meaning. Shewas never bored, and given the slightest chance she would exercise her royalprerogative: she would arrange, advise, caution, and warn.

She never let a chance escape her to point out the shortcomings of other tribal groupsto the greater glory of our own, a habit that amused Jem rather than annoyed him:

”Aunty better watch how she talks—scratch most folks in Maycomb and they're kin tous.”

Aunt Alexandra, in underlining the moral of young Sam Merriweather's suicide, said itwas caused by a morbid streak in the family. Let a sixteen-year-old girl giggle in thechoir and Aunty would say, ”It just goes to show you, all the Penfield women are flighty.”

Everybody in Maycomb, it seemed, had a Streak: a Drinking Streak, a Gambling Streak,a Mean Streak, a Funny Streak.

Once, when Aunty assured us that Miss Stephanie Crawford's tendency to mind otherpeople's business was hereditary, Atticus said, ”Sister, when you stop to think about it,our generation's practically the first in the Finch family not to marry its cousins. Wouldyou say the Finches have an Incestuous Streak?”

Aunty said no, that's where we got our small hands and feet.

I never understood her preoccupation with heredity. Somewhere, I had received theimpression that Fine Folks were people who did the best they could with the sense theyhad, but Aunt Alexandra was of the opinion, obliquely expressed, that the longer afamily had been squatting on one patch of land the finer it was.

”That makes the Ewells fine folks, then,” said Jem. The tribe of which Burris Ewell andhis brethren consisted had lived on the same plot of earth behind the Maycomb dump,and had thrived on county welfare money for three generations.

Aunt Alexandra's theory had something behind it, though. Maycomb was an ancienttown. It was twenty miles east of Finch's Landing, awkwardly inland for such an oldtown. But Maycomb would have been closer to the river had it not been for the nimble-wittedness of one Sinkfield, who in the dawn of history operated an inn where two pig-trails met, the only tavern in the territory. Sinkfield, no patriot, served and suppliedammunition to Indians and settlers alike, neither knowing or caring whether he was apart of the Alabama Territory or the Creek Nation so long as business was good.

Business was excellent when Governor William Wyatt Bibb, with a view to promoting thenewly created county's domestic tranquility, dispatched a team of surveyors to locate itsexact center and there establish its seat of government. The surveyors, Sinkfield'sguests, told their host that he was in the territorial confines of Maycomb County, andshowed him the probable spot where the county seat would be built. Had not Sinkfieldmade a bold stroke to preserve his holdings, Maycomb would have sat in the middle ofWinston Swamp, a place totally devoid of interest. Instead, Maycomb grew andsprawled out from its hub, Sinkfield's Tavern, because Sinkfield reduced his guests tomyopic drunkenness 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 hisrequirements. He sent them packing next day armed with their charts and five quarts ofshinny in their saddlebags—two apiece and one for the Governor.

Because its primary reason for existence was government, Maycomb was spared thegrubbiness that distinguished most Alabama towns its size. In the beginning its buildingswere solid, its courthouse proud, its streets graciously wide. Maycomb's proportion ofprofessional people ran high: one went there to have his teeth pulled, his wagon fixed,his heart listened to, his money deposited, his soul saved, his mules vetted. But theultimate wisdom of Sinkfield's maneuver is open to question. He placed the young towntoo far away from the only kind of public transportation in those days—river-boat—and ittook a man from the north end of the county two days to travel to Maycomb for store-bought goods. As a result the town remained the same size for a hundred years, anisland in a patchwork sea of cottonfields and timberland.

Although Maycomb was ignored during the War Between the States, Reconstructionrule and economic ruin forced the town to grow. It grew inward. New people so rarelysettled there, the same families married the same families until the members of thecommunity looked faintly alike. Occasionally someone would return from Montgomery orMobile with an outsider, but the result caused only a ripple in the quiet stream of familyresemblance. Things were more or less the same during my early years.

There was indeed a caste system in Maycomb, but to my mind it worked this way: theolder citizens, the present generation of people who had lived side by side for years andyears, were utterly predictable to one another: they took for granted attitudes, charactershadings, even gestures, as having been repeated in each generation and refined bytime. Thus the dicta No Crawford Minds His Own Business, Every Third Merriweather IsMorbid, The Truth Is Not in the Delafields, All the Bufords Walk Like That, were simplyguides to daily living: never take a check from a Delafield without a discreet call to thebank; Miss Maudie Atkinson's shoulder stoops because she was a Buford; if Mrs. GraceMerriweather sips gin out of Lydia E. Pinkham bottles it's nothing unusual—her motherdid the same.

Aunt Alexandra fitted into the world of Maycomb like a hand into a glove, but neverinto the world of Jem and me. I so often wondered how she could be Atticus's and UncleJack's sister that I revived half-remembered tales of changelings and mandrake rootsthat Jem had spun long ago.