"Harper Lee - To Kill A Mockingbird" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lee Harper)

family that we had no recorded ancestors on either side of the
Battle of Hastings. All we had was Simon Finch, a fur-trapping
apothecary from Cornwall whose piety was exceeded only by his
stinginess. In England, Simon was irritated by the persecution of
those who called themselves Methodists at the hands of their more
liberal brethren, and as Simon called himself a Methodist, he worked
his way across the Atlantic to Philadelphia, thence to Jamaica, thence
to Mobile, and up the Saint Stephens. Mindful of John Wesley's
strictures on the use of many words in buying and selling, Simon
made a pile practicing medicine, but in this pursuit he was unhappy
lest he be tempted into doing what he knew was not for the glory of
God, as the putting on of gold and costly apparel. So Simon, having
forgotten his teacher's dictum on the possession of human chattels,
bought three slaves and with their aid established a homestead on
the banks of the Alabama River some forty miles above Saint
Stephens. He returned to Saint Stephens only once, to find a wife, and
with her established a line that ran high to daughters. Simon lived to
an impressive age and died rich.
It was customary for the men in the family to remain on Simon's
homestead, Finch's Landing, and make their living from cotton. The
place was self-sufficient: modest in comparison with the empires
around it, the Landing nevertheless produced everything required to
sustain life except ice, wheat flour, and articles of clothing,
supplied by river-boats from Mobile.
Simon would have regarded with impotent fury the disturbance between
the North and the South, as it left his descendants stripped of
everything but their land, yet the tradition of living on the land
remained unbroken until well into the twentieth century, when my
father, Atticus Finch, went to Montgomery to read law, and his younger
brother went to Boston to study medicine. Their sister Alexandra was
the Finch who remained at the Landing: she married a taciturn man
who spent most of his time lying in a hammock by the river wondering
if his trot-lines were full.
When my father was admitted to the bar, he returned to Maycomb and
began his practice. Maycomb, some twenty miles east of Finch's
Landing, was the county seat of Maycomb County. Atticus's office in
the courthouse contained little more than a hat rack, a spittoon, a
checkerboard and an unsullied Code of Alabama. His first two clients
were the last two persons hanged in the Maycomb County jail. Atticus
had urged them to accept the state's generosity in allowing them to
plead Guilty to second-degree murder and escape with their lives,
but they were Haverfords, in Maycomb County a name synonymous with
jackass. The Haverfords had dispatched Maycomb's leading blacksmith in
a misunderstanding arising from the alleged wrongful detention of a
mare, were imprudent enough to do it in the presence of three
witnesses, and insisted that the-son-of-a-bitch-had-it-coming-to-him
was a good enough defense for anybody. They persisted in pleading
Not Guilty to first-degree murder, so there was nothing much Atticus
could do for his clients except be present at their departure, an
occasion that was probably the beginning of my father's profound