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took to the law. The only time Jean Louise ever saw Judge Taylor at a dead standstill in open court was during a dispute of this kind. Jeems Cunningham testified that his mother spelled it Cunningham occasionally on deeds and things but she was really a Coningham, she was an uncertain speller, and she was given to looking far away sometimes when she sat on the front porch. After nine hours of listening to the vagaries of Old Sarum’s inhabitants, Judge Taylor threw the case out of court on grounds of frivolous pleading and declared he hoped to God the litigants were satisfied by each having had his public say. They were. That was all they had wanted in the first place.
    Maycomb did not have a paved street until 1935, courtesy of F. D. Roosevelt, and even then it was not exactly a street that was paved. For some reason the President decided that a clearing from the front door of the Maycomb Grammar School to the connecting two ruts adjoining the school property was in need of improvement, it was improved accordingly, resulting in skinned knees and cracked crania for the children and a proclamation from the principal that nobody was to play Pop-the-Whip on the pavement. Thus the seeds of states’ rights were sown in the hearts of Jean Louise’s generation.
    The Second World War did something to Maycomb: its boys who came back returned with bizarre ideas about making money and an urgency to make up for lost time. They painted their parents’ houses atrocious colors; they whitewashed Maycomb’s stores and put up neon signs; they built red brick houses of their own in what were formerly corn patches and pine thickets; they ruined the old town’s looks. Its streets were not only paved, they were named (Adeline Avenue, for Miss Adeline Clay), but the older residents refrained from using street names—the road that runs by the Tompkins Place was sufficient to get one’s bearings. After the war young men from tenant farms all over the county flocked to Maycomb and erected matchbox wooden houses and started families. Nobody quite knew how they made a living, but they did, and they would have created a new social stratum in Maycomb had the rest of the town acknowledged their existence.
    Although Maycomb’s appearance had changed, the same hearts beat in new houses, over Mixmasters, in front of television sets. One could whitewash all he pleased, and put up comic neon signs, but the aged timbers stood strong under their additional burden.
    “You don’t like it, do you?” asked Henry. “I saw your face when you walked in the door.”
    “Conservative resistance to change, that’s all,” said Jean Louise behind a mouthful of fried shrimp. They were in the Maycomb Hotel diningroom sitting on chromium chairs at a table for two. The air-conditioning unit made its will known by a constant low rumble. “The only thing I like about it is the smell’s gone.”
    A long table laden with many dishes, the smell of musty old room and hot grease in the kitchen. “Hank, what’s Hot-Grease-in-the-Kitchen?”
    “Mm?”
    “It was a game or something.”
    “You mean Hot Peas, honey. That’s jumping rope, when they turn the rope fast and try to trip you.”
    “No, it had something to do with Tag.”
    She could not remember. When she was dying, she probably would remember, but now only the faint flash of a denim sleeve caught in her mind, a quick cry, “Hotgreaseinthekit-chen!” She wondered who owned the sleeve, what had become of him. He might be raising a family out in one of those new little houses. She had an odd feeling that time had passed her by.
    “Hank, let’s go to the river,” she said.
    “Didn’t think we weren’t, did you?” Henry was smiling at her. He never knew why, but Jean Louise was most like her old self when she went to Finch’s Landing: she seemed to breathe something out of the air—“You’re a Jekyll-and-Hyde character,” he said.
    “You’ve been watching too much television.”
    “Sometimes I