“Oh sit down and shut up,” said her uncle. He looked at her with genuine interest, as if she were something under a microscope, as though she were some medical marvel that had inadvertently materialized in his kitchen.
“As I sit here and breathe, I never thought the good God would let me live to see someone walk into the middle of a revolution, pull a lugubrious face, and say, ‘What’s the matter?’” He laughed again, shaking his head.
“Matter, child? I’ll tell you what’s the matter if you collect yourself and refrain from carrying on like—arum!—I wonder if your eyes and ears ever make anything save spasmodic contact with your brain.” His face tightened. “You won’t be pleased with some of it,” he said.
“I don’t care what it is, Uncle Jack, if you’ll only tell me what’s turned my father into a nigger-hater.”
“Hold your tongue.” Dr. Finch’s voice was stern. “Don’t you ever call your father that. I detest the sound of it as much as its matter.”
“What am I to call him, then?”
Her uncle sighed at length. He went to the stove and turned on the front burner under the coffeepot. “Let us consider this calmly,” he said. When he turned around Jean Louise saw amusement banish the indignation in his eyes, then meld into an expression she could not read. She heard him mutter, “Oh dear. Oh dear me, yes. The novel must tell a story.”
“What do you mean by that?” she said. She knew he was quoting at her but she didn’t know what, she didn’t know why, and she didn’t care. Her uncle could annoy the hell out of her when he chose, apparently he was choosing to do so now, and she resented it.
“Nothing.” He sat down, took off his glasses, and returned them to his vest pocket. He spoke deliberately. “Baby,” he said, “all over the South your father and men like your father are fighting a sort of rearguard, delaying action to preserve a certain kind of philosophy that’s almost gone down the drain—”
“If it’s what I heard yesterday I say good riddance.”
Dr. Finch looked up. “You’re making a bad mistake if you think your daddy’s dedicated to keeping the Negroes in their places.”
Jean Louise raised her hands and her voice: “What the hell am I to think? It made me sick, Uncle Jack. Plain-out sick—”
Her uncle scratched his ear. “You no doubt, somewhere along the line, have had certain historical facts and nuances placed in front of you—”
“Uncle Jack, don’t hand me that kind of talk now—fightin’ the War has nothing to do with it.”
“On the contrary, it has a great deal to do with it if you want to understand. The first thing you must realize is something—God help us, it was something—that three-fourths of a nation have failed to this day to understand. What kind of people were we, Jean Louise? What kind of people are we? Who are we still closest to in this world?”
“I thought we were just people. I have no idea.”
Her uncle smiled, and an unholy light appeared in his eyes. He’s gonna skate off now, she thought. I can never catch him and bring him back.
“Consider Maycomb County,” said Dr. Finch. “It’s typical South. Has it never struck you as being singular that nearly everybody in the county is either kin or almost kin to everybody else?”
“Uncle Jack, how can someone be almost kin to someone else?”
“Quite simple. You remember Frank Buckland, don’t you?”
In spite of herself, Jean Louise felt she was being lured slowly and stealthily into Dr. Finch’s web. He is a wonderful old spider, but nevertheless he is a spider. She inched toward him: “Frank Buckland?”
“The naturalist. Carried dead fish around in his suitcase and kept a jackal in his rooms.”
“Yes sir?”
“You remember Matthew Arnold, don’t you?”
She said she did.
“Well, Frank Buckland was Matthew Arnold’s father’s sister’s husband’s brother’s son, therefore, they were almost kin. See?”
“Yes sir, but—”
Dr. Finch looked at the ceiling. “Wasn’t my nephew Jem,” he said slowly, “engaged to marry his great-uncle’s son’s wife’s second cousin?”
She put her hands over her eyes and thought furiously. “He was,” she finally said. “Uncle Jack, I think you’ve made a non sequitur but I’m not at all positive.”
“All the same thing, really.”
“But I don’t get the connection.”
Dr. Finch put his hands on the table. “That’s because you haven’t looked,” he said. “You’ve never opened your eyes.”
Jean Louise jumped.
Her uncle said, “Jean Louise, there are to this day in Maycomb County the living counterparts of every butt-headed Celt, Angle, and Saxon who ever drew a breath. You remember Dean Stanley, don’t you?”
They were coming back to her, the days of the endless hours. She was in this house, in front of a warm fire, being read to from musty books. Her uncle’s voice was its usual low growl, or pitched high with helpless laughter. The absentminded, fluff-haired little clergyman and his stalwart wife drifted into her memory.
“Doesn’t he remind you of Fink Sewell?”
“No sir,” she said.
“Think, girl. Think. Since you are not thinking, I’ll give you a hint. When Stanley was Dean of Westminster he dug up nearly everybody in the Abbey looking for James the First.”
“Oh my God,” she said.
During the Depression, Mr. Finckney Sewell, a Maycomb resident long noted for his independence of mind, disentombed his own grandfather and extracted all his gold teeth to pay off a mortgage. When the sheriff apprehended him for grave-robbery and gold-hoarding, Mr. Fink demurred on the theory that if his own grandfather wasn’t his, whose was he? The sheriff said old Mr. M. F. Sewell was in the public domain, but Mr. Fink said testily he supposed it was his cemetery lot, his granddaddy, and his teeth, and declined forthwith to be arrested. Public opinion in Maycomb was with him: Mr. Fink was an honorable man, he was trying his best to pay his debts, and the law molested him no further.
“Stanley had the highest historical motives for his excavations,” mused Dr. Finch, “but their minds worked exactly alike. You can’t deny he invited every heretic he could lay hands on to preach in the Abbey. I believe he once gave communion to Mrs. Annie Besant. You remember how he supported Bishop Colenso.”