Go Set a Watchman
Page 32

She was now twelve and in the seventh grade. Her capacity to savor the change from grammar school was limited; she did not revel in going to different classrooms during the day and being taught by different teachers, nor in knowing that she had a hero for a brother somewhere in the remote senior school. Atticus was away in Montgomery in the legislature, Jem might as well have been with him for all she saw of him.
On the thirtieth of September she sat through school and learned nothing. After classes, she went to the library and stayed until the janitor came in and told her to leave. She walked to town slowly, to be with it as long as possible. Daylight was fading when she walked across the old sawmill tracks to the ice-house. Theodore the ice-man said hey to her as she passed, and she walked down the street and looked back at him until he went inside.
The town water-tank was in a field by the ice-house. It was the tallest thing she had ever seen. A tiny ladder ran from the ground to a small porch encircling the tank.
She threw down her books and began climbing. When she had climbed higher than the chinaberry trees in her back yard she looked down, was dizzy, and looked up the rest of the way.
All of Maycomb was beneath her. She thought she could see her house: Calpurnia would be making biscuits, before long Jem would be coming in from football practice. She looked across the square and was sure she saw Henry Clinton come out of the Jitney Jungle carrying an armload of groceries. He put them in the back seat of someone’s car. All the streetlights came on at once, and she smiled with sudden delight.
She sat on the narrow porch and dangled her feet over the side. She lost one shoe, then the other. She wondered what kind of funeral she would have: old Mrs. Duff would sit up all night and make people sign a book. Would Jem cry? If so, it would be the first time.
She wondered if she should do a swan dive or just slip off the edge. If she hit the ground on her back perhaps it would not hurt so much. She wondered if they would ever know how much she loved them.
Someone grabbed her. She stiffened when she felt hands pinning her arms to her sides. They were Henry’s, stained green from vegetables. Wordlessly he pulled her to her feet and propelled her down the steep ladder.
When they reached the bottom, Henry jerked her hair: “I swear to God if I don’t tell Mr. Finch on you this time!” he bawled. “I swear, Scout! Haven’t you got any sense playing on this tank? You might have killed yourself!”
He pulled her hair again, taking some with him: he shook her; he unwound his white apron, rolled it into a wad, and threw it viciously at the ground. “Don’t you know you could’ve killed yourself. Haven’t you got any sense?”
Jean Louise stared blankly at him.
“Theodore saw you up yonder and ran for Mr. Finch, and when he couldn’t find him he got me. God Almighty—!”
When he saw her trembling he knew she had not been playing. He took her lightly by the back of the neck; on the way home he tried to find out what was bothering her, but she would say nothing. He left her in the livingroom and went to the kitchen.
“Baby, what have you been doing?”
When speaking to her, Calpurnia’s voice was always a mixture of grudging affection and mild disapproval. “Mr. Hank,” she said. “You better go back to the store. Mr. Fred’ll be wondering what happened to you.”
Calpurnia, resolutely chewing on a sweetgum stick, looked down at Jean Louise. “What have you been up to?” she said. “What were you doing on that water-tank?”
Jean Louise was still.
“If you tell me I won’t tell Mr. Finch. What’s got you so upset, baby?”
Calpurnia sat down beside her. Calpurnia was past middle age and her body had thickened a little, her kinky hair was graying, and she squinted from myopia. She spread her hands in her lap and examined them. “Ain’t anything in this world so bad you can’t tell it,” she said.
Jean Louise flung herself into Calpurnia’s lap. She felt rough hands kneading her shoulders and back.
“I’m going to have a baby!” she sobbed.
“When?”
“Tomorrow!”
Calpurnia pulled her up and wiped her face with an apron corner. “Where in the name of sense did you get a notion like that?”
Between gulps, Jean Louise told her shame, omitting nothing, and begging that she not be sent to Mobile, stretched, or thrown against a wall. “Couldn’t I go out to your house? Please, Cal.” She begged that Calpurnia see her through in secret; they could take the baby away by night when it came.
“You been totin’ all this around with you all this time? Why didn’t you say somethin’ about it?”
She felt Calpurnia’s heavy arm around her, comforting when there was no comfort. She heard Calpurnia muttering:
“… no business fillin’ your head full of stories … kill ’em if I could get my hands on ’em.”
“Cal, you will help me, won’t you?” she said timidly.
Calpurnia said, “As sure as the sweet Jesus was born, baby. Get this in your head right now, you ain’t pregnant and you never were. That ain’t the way it is.”
“Well if I ain’t, then what am I?”
“With all your book learnin’, you are the most ignorant child I ever did see …” Her voice trailed off. “… but I don’t reckon you really ever had a chance.”
Slowly and deliberately Calpurnia told her the simple story. As Jean Louise listened, her year’s collection of revolting information fell into a fresh crystal design; as Calpurnia’s husky voice drove out her year’s accumulation of terror, Jean Louise felt life return. She breathed deeply and felt cool autumn in her throat. She heard sausages hissing in the kitchen, saw her brother’s collection of sports magazines on the livingroom table, smelled the bittersweet odor of Calpurnia’s hairdressing.