“Well, don’t bite my head off.”
She drank her coffee, told herself she wanted another cup, and followed Henry into the kitchen. He leaned against the sink, twirling his car keys on his forefinger. He is nearly as tall as the cabinets, she thought. I shall never be able to speak one lucid sentence to him again.
“—happened all right,” Henry was saying. “It was bound to sooner or later.”
“Was he drinking?” asked Atticus.
“Not drinking, drunk. He was coming in from an all-night boozing down at that jook they have.”
“What’s the matter?” said Jean Louise.
“Zeebo’s boy,” said Henry. “Sheriff said he has him in jail—he’d asked him to call Mr. Finch to come get him out—huh.”
“Why?”
“Honey, Zeebo’s boy was coming out of the Quarters at daybreak this morning splittin’ the wind, and he ran over old Mr. Healy crossing the road and killed him dead.”
“Oh no—”
“Whose car was it?” asked Atticus.
“Zeebo’s, I reckon.”
“What’d you tell the sheriff?” asked Atticus.
“Told him to tell Zeebo’s boy you wouldn’t touch the case.”
Atticus leaned his elbows against the table and pushed himself back.
“You shouldn’t’ve done that, Hank,” he said mildly. “Of course we’ll take it.”
Thank you, God. Jean Louise sighed softly and rubbed her eyes. Zeebo’s boy was Calpurnia’s grandson. Atticus may forget a lot of things, but he would never forget them. Yesterday was fast dissolving into a bad night. Poor Mr. Healy, he was probably so loaded he never knew what hit him.
“But Mr. Finch,” Henry said. “I thought none of the—”
Atticus eased his arm on the corner of the chair. When concentrating it was his practice to finger his watch-chain and rummage abstractedly in his watchpocket. Today his hands were still.
“Hank, I suspect when we know all the facts in the case the best that can be done for the boy is for him to plead guilty. Now, isn’t it better for us to stand up with him in court than to have him fall into the wrong hands?”
A smile spread slowly across Henry’s face. “I see what you mean, Mr. Finch.”
“Well, I don’t,” said Jean Louise. “What wrong hands?”
Atticus turned to her. “Scout, you probably don’t know it, but the NAACP-paid lawyers are standing around like buzzards down here waiting for things like this to happen—”
“You mean colored lawyers?”
Atticus nodded. “Yep. We’ve got three or four in the state now. They’re mostly in Birmingham and places like that, but circuit by circuit they watch and wait, just for some felony committed by a Negro against a white person—you’d be surprised how quick they find out—in they come and … well, in terms you can understand, they demand Negroes on the juries in such cases. They subpoena the jury commissioners, they ask the judge to step down, they raise every legal trick in their books—and they have ’em aplenty—they try to force the judge into error. Above all else, they try to get the case into a Federal court where they know the cards are stacked in their favor. It’s already happened in our next-door-neighbor circuit, and there’s nothing in the books that says it won’t happen here.”
Atticus turned to Henry. “So that’s why I say we’ll take his case if he wants us.”
“I thought the NAACP was forbidden to do business in Alabama,” said Jean Louise.
Atticus and Henry looked at her and laughed.
“Honey,” said Henry, “you don’t know what went on in Abbott County when something just like this happened. This spring we thought there’d be real trouble for a while. People across the river here even, bought up all the ammunition they could find—”
Jean Louise left the room.
In the livingroom, she heard Atticus’s even voice:
“… stem the tide a little bit this way … good thing he asked for one of the Maycomb lawyers….”
She would keep her coffee down come hell or high water. Who were the people Calpurnia’s tribe turned to first and always? How many divorces had Atticus gotten for Zeebo? Five, at least. Which boy was this one? He was in real dutch this time, he needed real help and what do they do but sit in the kitchen and talk NAACP … not long ago, Atticus would have done it simply from his goodness, he would have done it for Cal. I must go to see her this morning without fail….
What was this blight that had come down over the people she loved? Did she see it in stark relief because she had been away from it? Had it percolated gradually through the years until now? Had it always been under her nose for her to see if she had only looked? No, not the last. What turned ordinary men into screaming dirt at the top of their voices, what made her kind of people harden and say “nigger” when the word had never crossed their lips before?
“—keep them in their places, I hope,” Alexandra said, as she entered the livingroom with Atticus and Henry.
“There’s nothing to fret about,” said Henry. “We’ll come out all right. Seven-thirty tonight, hon?”
“Yes.”