Miss Maudie was the daughter of a neighboring landowner, Dr. Frank Buford. Dr.
Buford’s profession was medicine and his obsession was anything that grew in the ground, so he stayed poor. Uncle Jack Finch confined his passion for digging to his window boxes in Nashville and stayed rich. We saw Uncle Jack every Christmas, and every Christmas he yelled across the street for Miss Maudie to come marry him. Miss Maudie would yell back, “Call a little louder, Jack Finch, and they’ll hear you at the post office, I haven’t heard you yet!” Jem and I thought this a strange way to ask for a lady’s hand in marriage, but then Uncle Jack was rather strange. He said he was trying to get Miss Maudie’s goat, that he had been trying unsuccessfully for forty years, that he was the last person in the world Miss Maudie would think about marrying but the first person she thought about teasing, and the best defense to her was spirited offense, all of which we understood clearly.
“Arthur Radley just stays in the house, that’s all,” said Miss Maudie. “Wouldn’t you stay in the house if you didn’t want to come out?”
“Yessum, but I’d wanta come out. Why doesn’t he?”
Miss Maudie’s eyes narrowed. “You know that story as well as I do.”
“I never heard why, though. Nobody ever told me why.”
Miss Maudie settled her bridgework. “You know old Mr. Radley was a foot-washing Baptist-”
“That’s what you are, ain’t it?”
“My shell’s not that hard, child. I’m just a Baptist.”
“Don’t you all believe in foot-washing?”
“We do. At home in the bathtub.”
“But we can’t have communion with you all-”
Apparently deciding that it was easier to define primitive baptistry than closed communion, Miss Maudie said: “Foot-washers believe anything that’s pleasure is a sin. Did you know some of ‘em came out of the woods one Saturday and passed by this place and told me me and my flowers were going to hell?”
“Your flowers, too?”
“Yes ma’am. They’d burn right with me. They thought I spent too much time in God’s outdoors and not enough time inside the house reading the Bible.”
My confidence in pulpit Gospel lessened at the vision of Miss Maudie stewing forever in various Protestant hells. True enough, she had an acid tongue in her head, and she did not go about the neighborhood doing good, as did Miss Stephanie Crawford. But while no one with a grain of sense trusted Miss Stephanie, Jem and I had considerable faith in Miss Maudie. She had never told on us, had never played cat-and-mouse with us, she was not at all interested in our private lives. She was our friend. How so reasonable a creature could live in peril of everlasting torment was incomprehensible.
“That ain’t right, Miss Maudie. You’re the best lady I know.”
Miss Maudie grinned. “Thank you ma’am. Thing is, foot-washers think women are a sin by definition. They take the Bible literally, you know.”
“Is that why Mr. Arthur stays in the house, to keep away from women?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“It doesn’t make sense to me. Looks like if Mr. Arthur was hankerin‘ after heaven
he’d come out on the porch at least. Atticus says God’s loving folks like you love yourself-”
Miss Maudie stopped rocking, and her voice hardened. “You are too young to understand it,” she said, “but sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hand of—oh, of your father.”
I was shocked. “Atticus doesn’t drink whiskey,” I said. “He never drunk a drop in his life—nome, yes he did. He said he drank some one time and didn’t like it.”
Miss Maudie laughed. “Wasn’t talking about your father,” she said. “What I meant was, if Atticus Finch drank until he was drunk he wouldn’t be as hard as some men are at their best. There are just some kind of men who—who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”
“Do you think they’re true, all those things they say about B—Mr. Arthur?”
“What things?”
I told her.
“That is three-fourths colored folks and one-fourth Stephanie Crawford,” said Miss Maudie grimly. “Stephanie Crawford even told me once she woke up in the middle of the night and found him looking in the window at her. I said what did you do, Stephanie, move over in the bed and make room for him? That shut her up a while.”
I was sure it did. Miss Maudie’s voice was enough to shut anybody up.
“No, child,” she said, “that is a sad house. I remember Arthur Radley when he was a boy. He always spoke nicely to me, no matter what folks said he did. Spoke as nicely as he knew how.”
“You reckon he’s crazy?”
Miss Maudie shook her head. “If he’s not he should be by now. The things that happen to people we never really know. What happens in houses behind closed doors, what secrets-”
“Atticus don’t ever do anything to Jem and me in the house that he don’t do in the yard,” I said, feeling it my duty to defend my parent.
“Gracious child, I was raveling a thread, wasn’t even thinking about your father,
but now that I am I’ll say this: Atticus Finch is the same in his house as he is on the public streets. How’d you like some fresh poundcake to take home?”
I liked it very much.
Next morning when I awakened I found Jem and Dill in the back yard deep in conversation. When I joined them, as usual they said go away.
“Will not. This yard’s as much mine as it is yours, Jem Finch. I got just as much right to play in it as you have.”
Dill and Jem emerged from a brief huddle: “If you stay you’ve got to do what we tell you,” Dill warned.
