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.
“Cal,” she said. “Why didn’t I know all this before?”
Calpurnia frowned and sought an answer. “You’re sort of ’hind f’omus, Miss Scout. You sort of haven’t caught up with yourself … now if you’d been raised on a farm you’da known it before you could walk, or if there’d been any women around—if your mamma had lived you’da known it—”
“Mamma?”
“Yessum. You’da seen things like your daddy kissin’ your mamma and you’da asked questions soon as you learned to talk, I bet.”
“Did they do all that?”
Calpurnia revealed her gold-crowned molars. “Bless your heart, how do you think you got here? Sure they did.”
“Well I don’t think they would.”
“Baby, you’ll have to grow some more before this makes sense to you, but your daddy and your mamma loved each other something fierce, and when you love somebody like that, Miss Scout, why that’s what you want to do. That’s what everybody wants to do when they love like that. They want to get married, they want to kiss and hug and carry on and have babies all the time.”
“I don’t think Aunty and Uncle Jimmy do.”
Calpurnia picked at her apron. “Miss Scout, different folks get married for different kinds of reasons. Miss Alexandra, I think she got married to keep house.” Calpurnia scratched her head. “But that’s not anything you need to study about, that’s not any of your concern. Don’t you study about other folks’s business till you take care of your own.”
Calpurnia got to her feet. “Right now your business is not to give any heed to what those folks from Old Sarum tell you—you ain’t called upon to contradict ’em, just don’t pay ’em any attention—and if you want to know somethin’, you just run to old Cal.”
“Why didn’t you tell me all this to start with?”
“’Cause things started for you a mite early, and you didn’t seem to take to it so much, and we didn’t think you’d take to the rest of it any better. Mr. Finch said wait a while till you got used to the idea, but we didn’t count on you finding out so quick and so wrong, Miss Scout.”
Jean Louise stretched luxuriously and yawned, delighted with her existence. She was becoming sleepy and was not sure she could stay awake until supper. “We having hot biscuits tonight, Cal?”
“Yes ma’am.”
She heard the front door slam and Jem clump down the hall. He was headed for the kitchen, where he would open the refrigerator and swallow a quart of milk to quench his football-practice thirst. Before she dozed off, it occurred to her that for the first time in her life Calpurnia had said “Yes ma’am” and “Miss Scout” to her, forms of address usually reserved for the presence of high company. I must be getting old, she thought.
Jem wakened her when he snapped on the overhead light. She saw him walking toward her, the big maroon M standing out starkly on his white sweater.
“Are you awake, Little Three-Eyes?”
“Don’t be sarcastic,” she said. If Henry or Calpurnia had told on her she would die, but she would take them with her.
She stared at her brother. His hair was damp and he smelled of the strong soap in the schoolhouse locker rooms. Better start it first, she thought.