Chapter Text
“Atticus! Wait!” the girl called after him.
“Why don’t you hurry?” he hollered back.
Maudie struggled between the rungs of the fence, yanking unceremoniously at the delicate lace that had caught on a rogue splinter until it came free.
“You know I’m not as fast as you.” she complained when she had caught up.
“That’s cause you’re littler than me.” he teased, straightening his broadening shoulders to emphasise the difference.
Atticus had just turned 13 and was growing like a bean pole. It seemed that he had grown a whole foot in the last month alone and it was starting to bother her.
Taking too much after her father to ever be called a petite girl, Maudie was unused to having to look up at Atticus to meet his gaze. It made her uneasy in a way she could not quite articulate. When her Aunt Caroline had noticed her disquiet she had said that Maudie was beginning to appreciate the burden of her own femininity. When she had brought this observation to Alexandra, who was half a head shorter than Maudie anyway, she had said that that kind of supercilious thinking was exactly why her Aunt Caroline had never found a husband.
Maudie didn’t think either one of them had it right.
Though Atticus had never been unkind to her (even when she would have deserved it) and never excluded her from any of his activities, she had the distinct feeling that their worlds were separating somehow and that she was being left behind.
“Ain’t neither.” she objected though she had to skip a little to keep up with his longer stride. “Did you do the books with your daddy yesterday?”
“Yeah.” he grimaced and squinted against the sun, searching for a stick sturdy enough to be useful.
“Gonna get any more cows next spring?” she asked.
Maudie loved cows. She thought they were big, wonderful, lumbering animals and wished her father kept their paddocks full of them. But he didn't go out so much now without her mother to join him and didn't keep enough field workers to manage more than the few dozen they already had.
Mr Finch though, he bred seed stock for the region as well as for beef, and his cows were sought after up and down the Alabama. In a fit of kindness, he had once offered a pale little poddy to the young Miss Buford, should she want it. Though she begged and pleaded, just to have a milk cow of her own, her father would not be moved. It was easier to make money from pork than beef and he was too busy doctoring to bother himself with anything else, even one dozy milk cow.
“Only the ones gonna drop from our heifers… though most of them’ll go to the yards. He wants to talk to Mr Johnson down the way about pigs. He’s thinking about raising a few. See how he likes it.”
Maudie wrinkled her nose.
After their own pigs had broken loose of their pen and wrecked havoc on her mother’s flower beds she no longer thought that pigs were worth the trouble they saved. Though it had made for one of the most satisfying Christmas dinners of her life, it had taken a full month, under her father’s careful tutelage, to put the garden back to rights.
They wandered aimlessly through the fallow paddock, Maudie picking tall, bobbing seed heads from the long grass and Atticus breaking up old dusty cow pats with his stick. They had used to kick at them until Alexandra had taken them both to task over the state of their shoes when they had come back up to the house one evening.
It was one of the rare occasions that Mr Finch had sided with his daughter over his son and had threatened to tan his hide for a new pair if he ever caught Atticus kicking at cow muck in his good shoes again. As he only owned two pairs of shoes, his good pair and his church pair, and the frequency of rattler sightings was too high to go barefoot, Atticus had simply picked up a stick instead.
Maudie’s own father had been less concerned. It was good for the grass and she grew out of shoes too fast for it to matter much.
“Wanna go look for gold in the river?” Maudie asked, tossing her handful of seeds in a wide arc.
“There ain't any gold down there,” Atticus contradicted, “if there was, folks would’ve found it by now.”
“Well… maybe they ain’t lookin’ right.”
“And what makes you think you’d be lucky enough to find gold in there, then?”
“‘Cause luck is something you make for yourself, stupid.” Maudie put out stubbornly.
That, Atticus thought, was the complete antithesis to the definition of luck. At least as he knew it. But then again, Maudie was the complete antithesis to what he knew a girl to be and yet she stood before him, so he stayed quiet.
They ended up by the river. Picking for rocks and any small bits of treasure that had been lost from river boats over the years.
They did not find much.
Some good, flat rocks that skipped almost to the other side of the river. A rusted half penny and a broken piece of plate that Maudie had muddied her dress for when it popped from the thick silt like a cork from a bottle.
It was not shiny but it was gold of their own making and as they dawdled back up to the big house, flipping the coin between them and concocting grand stories of travellers from river boats past, Atticus thought that maybe Maudie had been right.