To Kill a Mockingbird / Убить пересмешника

1

We could never forget the events that had led to my brother Jem’s injury. His elbow was so badly broken that when it healed, his left arm was somewhat shorter than his right and when he stood or walked, the back of his hand was at right angles to his body, his thumb parallel to his thigh. But as he was able to play football jut as well as before the accident, he was seldom self-conscious about that injury. He was nearly thirteen then.

When we grew older and looked back on the years of our childhood, we sometimes discussed the events that had happened before that accident. I think that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said that it started that summer when Dill came to us and suggested that we should make Boo Radley come out.

I couldn’t agree with him. I advised him to take a broader view and to begin with Simon Finch because where would we be if he hadn’t come to live in Alabama? We were at the age when we didn’t settle our arguments with fist-fights any longer, so we consulted Atticus. Our father said we were both right.

We were Southerners, so it was a source of shame to some members of the family that we had no recorded ancestors on either side of the Battle of Hastings. All we had was Simon Finch from Cornwall. Simon called himself a Methodist. In England, Methodists were persecuted by their more liberal brethren, so he worked his way across the Atlantic to Philadelphia, thence to Jamaica, thence to Mobile, and up the Saint Stephens. He practiced medicine there and made a lot of money. Simon called himself a Methodist, and he knew that it was not for the glory of God to buy and wear expensive clothes and gold things. So he had forgotten his teacher’s opinion on the possession of human chattels and bought three slaves and with their help 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. Simon lived to a very old age and died rich.

The men in the family usually remained on Simon’s homestead, Finch’s Landing, and made their living from cotton. The place was self-sufifcient: modest in comparison with the empires around it, the Landing nevertheless produced everything necessary for life except ice, wheat flour, and clothes. Those were brought by river-boats from Mobile.

In the war between the North and the South Simon’s descendants lost everything except their land, but the tradition of living on the land remained until the twentieth century, when my father, Atticus Finch, went to Montgomery to study 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 man who seldom said anything and spent most of his time in a hammock by the river.

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 oficf e 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 who were hanged in the Maycomb County jail. Atticus had advised them to plead Guilty to second-degree murder and save their lives, but they were Haverfords, in Maycomb County a name synonymous with jackass. The Haverfords had murdered Maycomb’s best blacksmith. They mistakenly accused him of the wrongful detention of a mare and killed him in the presence of three witnesses, and insisted that “the-son-of-a-bitch-had-invited-it” was a good enough defense for anybody. They didn’t listen to Atticus and pleaded 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 deep dislike for the practice of criminal law.

During his first five years in Maycomb, Atticus practiced economy more than anything; for several years thereafter he invested his earnings in his brother’s education. John Hale Finch was ten years younger than my father, and chose to study medicine at a time when cotton growing didn’t bring profit; but after Uncle Jack started working, Atticus got not a bad income from the law. He liked Maycomb, he was born and grew up in Maycomb County; he knew his people, they knew him, and because of Simon Finch’s industry, Atticus was related by blood or marriage to nearly every family in the town.

Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red mud; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse went to decline in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day. Men’s starched collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

People moved slowly then. They walked slowly across the square, slowly went in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with. But it was a time of vague optimism for some of the people: President Franklin Roosevelt had promised that there was nothing to fear except fear itself.

We lived on the main residential street in town – Atticus, Jem and I, plus Calpurnia, our cook. Jem and I found our father satisfactory: he played with us, read to us, and treated us with polite detachment.

Calpurnia was something different. She had been with us ever since Jem was born, and she was a tyrant. She was always ordering me out of the kitchen, asking me why I couldn’t behave as well as Jem when she knew that he was older, and she was always calling me home when I wasn’t ready to come. Our battles were epic and one-sided. Calpurnia always won, just because Atticus always took her side.

Our mother died when I was two, so I never felt her absence. She was from Montgomery; Atticus met her when he was first elected to the state legislature. He was middle-aged then, she was fifteen years his junior. Jem was the product of their first year of marriage; four years later I was born, and two years later our mother died from a sudden heart attack. They said it ran in her family.

When I was almost six and Jem was nearly ten, our summertime boundaries were within calling distance of Calpurnia. We were not allowed to go further than Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose’s house two doors to the north of us, and the Radley Place three doors to the south. We never broke them. In the Radley Place an unknown creature lived just the description of whom made us behave for a very long time; Mrs. Dubose was real hell.

That summer Dill came to us.

One morning we were beginning our day’s play in the back yard, and there he was. He was sitting in Miss Rachel Haverford’s yard, next door to us. We stared at him until he spoke:

“Hey.”

“Hey yourself,” said Jem pleasantly.

“I’m Charles Baker Harris,” he said.

Jem brushed his hair back to get a better look. “Why don’t you come over, Charles Baker Harris?” he said. “Lord, what a name.”

“It’s not any funnier than yours. Aunt Rachel says that your name’s Jeremy Atticus Finch.”

Jem frowned. “I’m big enough for mine,” he said. “Your name’s longer’n you are.”

“Folks call me Dill,” said Dill and tried to get to our yard under the fence.

“Do better if you go over it instead of under it,” I said.

“Where’d you come from?”

Dill said he was from Meridian, Mississippi, but originally his family was from Maycomb County. Now he was spending the summer with his aunt, Miss Rachel, and would be spending every summer in Maycomb from now on. He told us that his mother worked for a photographer in Meridian, and she had entered his picture in a Beautiful Child contest and won five dollars. She gave the money to Dill. He went to the movies twenty times on it. Jem asked him if he had ever seen anything good.

Dill had seen Dracula. Jem looked at him with the beginning of respect. “Tell it to us,” he said.

Dill’s appearance was peculiar. He wore blue linen shorts that buttoned to his shirt, his hair was snow white and looked like duckfluff; he was a year my senior but I was much taller than he. When he told us the old story, his blue eyes lighted and darkened; his laugh was sudden and happy.

When Dill finished Dracula story, and Jem said that the movie sounded better than the book, I asked Dill where his father was: “You ain’t said anything about him.”

“I haven’t got one.”

“Is he dead?”

“No…”

“Then if he’s not dead you’ve got one, haven’t you?”

Dill blushed and Jem told me to stop. It was a sign that he had found Dill acceptable. After that the summer passed as usual: we improved our tree house that rested between two giant trees in the back yard, fussed, performed our own plays based on the works of Oliver Optic, Victor Appleton, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. In that we were lucky to have Dill. He played the character parts which formerly Jem made me play – the ape in Tarzan, Mr. Crabtree in The Rover Boys, Mr. Damon in Tom Swift. Thus we came to know Dill as a pocket Merlin, whose head was full of eccentric plans and fancies.

But by the end of August we had got bored by our repertoire, and then Dill offered to make Boo Radley come out.

Dill became very curious about the Radley Place after we had told him about a malevolent phantom that lived in the house. Jem and I had never seen him, but people said he went out at night when there was no moon, and peeped in windows. Any undisclosed small crimes in Maycomb were his work. Once the town was terrorized by a series of awful nocturnal events: people’s chickens and household pets were found mutilated. Although Crazy Addie was guilty, people still looked at the Radley Place. A Negro didn’t pass the Radley Place at night, he chose the opposite sidewalk and whistled as he walked. The Maycomb school grounds bordered on the back of the Radley lot; tall pecan trees shook their fruit into the schoolyard from the Radley chicken yard, but the children didn’t pick up the nuts: Radley pecans could kill you. A baseball that got into the Radley yard was a lost ball and no questions were asked.

The unhappiness of that house began many years before Jem and I were born. Mr. Radley and his wife had lived there with their two sons as long as anybody could remember, but although they were welcome anywhere in town, the Radleys kept to themselves. It was unusual for Maycomb. They did not go to church, Maycomb’s main recreation; they worshiped at home; Mrs. Radley seldom if ever crossed the street for a mid-morning coffee break with her neighbors, and certainly never joined any circle. Mr. Radley walked to town at eleven-thirty every morning and came back at twelve. Sometimes he carried a brown paper bag. The neighbors thought that the family groceries were in that bag. I never knew how old Mr. Radley made his living – Jem said he “bought cotton,” a polite term for doing nothing.

Another thing different from Maycomb’s ways: the shutters and doors of the Radley house were closed on Sundays. In Maycomb closed doors meant illness and cold weather only. Of all days Sunday was the day for formal afternoon visiting: ladies wore corsets, men wore coats, and children wore shoes. But no neighbor ever went up the Radley front steps and called, “He-y,” on a Sunday afternoon. The Radley house had no screen doors. I once asked Atticus if it ever had any; Atticus said yes, but before I was born.

According to neighborhood legend, when the younger Radley boy was in his teens he became acquainted with some of the Cunninghams from Old Sarum, a very large and confusing tribe that lived in the northern part of the county, and they formed a group that worried the town: they hung around the barbershop; they rode the bus to Abbottsville on Sundays and went to the movies; they attended dances at the county’s riverside gambling house; they experimented with whiskey. Nobody in Maycomb had nerve enough to tell Mr. Radley that his boy was a part of the wrong crowd.

One night the boys backed around the square in a small borrowed car, resisted arrest by Maycomb’s ancient beadle, Mr. Conner, and locked him in the courthouse outhouse. The town decided that something had to be done. Mr. Conner knew the boys and he said that they wouldn’t get away with it, so the boys came before the judge on charges of disorderly conduct, assault and battery, and using dirty language in the presence and hearing of a female. The judge asked Mr. Conner why he included the last charge; Mr. Conner said that they cursed so loudly that he was sure every lady in Maycomb heard them. The judge decided to send the boys to the state industrial school, where boys were sometimes sent for no other reason than to give them food and shelter: it wasn’t a prison and it wasn’t disgrace. But Mr. Radley thought it was. He asked the judge to let his son Arthur go free and promised that Arthur would never give trouble again. The judge was glad to do so.

The other boys attended the industrial school and received the best secondary education in the state. The doors of the Radley house were closed on weekdays as well as Sundays, and Mr. Radley’s boy was not seen again for fifteen years.

Jem remembered that one day Boo Radley was seen by several people, but not by Jem. He said that Atticus never talked much about the Radleys: when Jem asked him questions, Atticus told him to mind his own business and let the Radleys mind theirs, they had a right to; but on that day, when it happened, Atticus shook his head and said, “Mm, mm, mm.”

Most of his information Jem received from Miss Stephanie Crawford, who said she knew the whole thing. According to Miss Stephanie, Boo was cutting some articles from The Maycomb Tribune when his father entered the living room. As Mr. Radley passed by, Boo drove the scissors into his parent’s leg, pulled them out, wiped them on his pants, and continued his activities.

Mrs. Radley ran into the street and screamed that Arthur was killing them all, but when the sheriff arrived, Boo was still sitting in the living room, cutting up the Tribune. He was thirty-three years old then.

Mr. Radley refused to send Boo to an asylum. Boo wasn’t crazy, he was high-strung at times. It was all right to shut him up, Mr. Radley agreed, but without any charges: he was not a criminal. The sheriff didn’t want to put him in jail alongside Negroes, so Boo was locked in the courthouse basement.

But Miss Stephanie Crawford said that some of the town council told Mr. Radley that if he didn’t take Boo back, Boo would die of mold from the dampness. Besides, Boo could not live forever at the expense of the county. So Boo was brought home, but nobody ever saw him again.

What I can remember is that Mrs. Radley sometimes opened the front door, walked to the edge of the porch, and poured water on her flowers. But every day Jem and I saw Mr. Radley when he walked to and from town. He never spoke to us. When he passed we looked at the ground and said, “Good morning, sir,” and he coughed in reply. Mr. Radley’s elder son lived in Pensacola; he came home at Christmas, and he was one of the few persons who ever entered or left the place. People said that after Mr. Radley took Arthur home, the house died.

One day Atticus ordered us to make no sound in the yard and told Calpurnia to watch us in his absence. Mr. Radley was dying.

He took his time about it. Wooden sawhorses blocked the road at each end of the Radley lot, straw was put down on the sidewalk, traficf was directed to the back street. Dr. Reynolds parked his car in front of our house and walked to the Radley’s every time he called. Jem and I tiptoed around the yard for days. At last the sawhorses were taken away, and we watched from the front porch when Mr. Radley made his final journey past our house.

“There goes the meanest man ever God blew breath into,” murmured Calpurnia, and she spat meditatively into the yard. We looked at her in surprise, for Calpurnia seldom commented on the ways of white people.

The neighborhood thought that when Mr. Radley died, Boo would come out, but Boo’s elder brother returned from Pensacola and took Mr. Radley’s place. The only difference between him and his father was their ages. Jem said Mr. Nathan Radley “bought cotton,” too. Mr. Nathan spoke to us, however, when we said good morning.

When we told Dill about the Radleys, he wanted to know more.

“It’s interesting what he does in there. It’s interesting what he looks like,” he said.

Jem gave a reasonable description of Boo: Boo was about six-and-a-half feet tall; he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch, that’s why his hands were bloodstained – if you ate an animal raw, you could never wash the blood off. There was a long scar that ran across his face; his teeth were yellow and rotten; his eyes popped, and he drooled most of the time.

“Let’s try to make him come out,” said Dill. “I’d like to see what he looks like.”

Jem said if Dill wanted to get himself killed, all he had to do was go up and knock on the front door.

Our first raid happened only because Dill bet Jem that Jem wouldn’t get any farther than the Radley gate. In all his life, Jem had never declined a challenge.

Jem thought about it for three days. I think he loved honor more than his head. “You’re afraid,” Dill said, the first day. “Ain’t afraid, just respectful,” Jem said. The next day Dill said, “You’re too afraid even to put your big toe in the front yard.” Jem said, “I ain’t, I’d passed the Radley Place every school day of my life.”

“Always runnin’,” I said.

But Dill got him the third day, when he told Jem that folks in Meridian certainly weren’t as afraid as the folks in Maycomb, that he’d never seen such timid folks as the ones in Maycomb. That was enough.

Jem marched into the street at once, but stopped at the light-pole, at the corner opposite the Radley house and looked at the gate.

“I hope you’ve got it through your head that he’ll kill us each and every one, Dill Harris,” said Jem, when we joined him. “Don’t blame me when he gouges your eyes out. You started it, remember.”

“You’re still afraid,” murmured Dill patiently.

Jem said that he wasn’t afraid of anything; he just wanted to think of a way to make Boo come out which wouldn’t be dangerous for us. Besides, Jem had to think of his little sister. When he said that, I knew that he was afraid.

Jem stood in thought so long that Dill decided to make his task easier: “I won’t say that you’re afraid if you just go up and touch the house.”

Jem brightened. “Touch the house, that all?”

“Yeah, that’s all,” said Dill. “He’ll probably come out after you when he sees you in the yard, then Scout’n’ me’ll jump on him and hold him down till we can tell him we ain’t gonna hurt him.”

We left the corner, crossed the street, and stopped at the gate.

“Well go on,” said Dill, “Scout and I are right behind you.”

“I’m going,” said Jem, “don’t hurry me.”

He walked to the corner of the lot, then back again, frowning, as if deciding how best to come into the yard.

Then I laughed at him.

Jem opened the gate and ran to the side of the house, touched it with his palm and ran past us, without looking back. Dill and I followed on his heels. When we were safely on our porch, we looked back.

The old house was the same, tired and depressed, but as we stared down the street we thought that we saw how an inside shutter moved. Almost invisible movement, and the house was still.

2

At the beginning of September Dill returned to Meridian. At first I missed him very much, but then I remembered that I would be starting to school in a week. I never looked forward more to anything in my life. In wintertime I had spent hours in the tree house, looking over at the schoolyard through a two-power telescope Jem had given me. I had watched schoolchildren and learned their games. I wanted to join them so much.

Jem agreed to take me to school the first day. It was usually done by one’s parents, but Atticus had said that Jem would be delighted to show me where my room was. I think some money changed hands for this agreement: as we ran around the corner past the Radley Place, I heard an unfamiliar jingle in Jem’s pockets. When we walked through the schoolyard, Jem explained that during school hours I was not to bother him, I was not to ask him to play together or tag along behind him at recess and noon. I was to stay with the first grade and he would stay with the fifth. In short, I was to leave him alone.

“You mean we can’t play any more?” I asked.

“We’ll do like we always do at home,” he said, “but you’ll see – school’s different.”

It certainly was. Before the first morning was over, Miss Caroline Fisher, our teacher, made me stand in front of the class and patted the palm of my hand with a ruler, then made me stand in the corner until noon.

Miss Caroline was no more than twenty-one. She had dark red hair, pink cheeks, and wore dark red fingernail polish. She also wore high-heeled shoes and a red-and-white-striped dress. She looked and smelled like a peppermint drop. She boarded across the street one door down from us in Miss Maudie Atkinson’s upstairs front room, and when Miss Maudie introduced us to her, Jem was in a haze for days.

Miss Caroline printed her name on the blackboard and said, “This says I am Miss Caroline Fisher. I am from North Alabama, from Winston County.” The class murmured worriedly, whether she would show the peculiarities typical of that region. (When Alabama seceded from the Union on January 11, 1861, Winston County seceded from Alabama, and every child in Maycomb County knew it.) North Alabama was full of steel companies, Republicans, professors, and other persons of no background.

Miss Caroline began the day by reading us a story about cats. The cats had long conversations with one another, they wore pretty little clothes and lived in a warm house beneath a kitchen stove. By the time Mrs. Cat went into the drugstore to buy a chocolate mouse, the class was fidgeting in their seats. Miss Caroline was unaware that the denim-shirted and floursack-skirted first grade, most of whom had chopped cotton and fed hogs from the time they were able to walk, were immune to imaginative literature. Miss Caroline came to the end of the story and said, “Oh, my, wasn’t that nice?”

Then she went to the blackboard and printed the alphabet in big letters, turned to the class and asked, “Does anybody know what these are?”

Everybody did because most of the first grade were repeating a year.

I think she chose me because she knew my name; as I read the alphabet a line appeared between her eyebrows. Then she made me read most of My First Reader and discovered that I was literate. She frowned and told me to tell my father not to teach me any more.

“It’s best to begin reading with a fresh mind. You tell him I’ll take over from here. Your father does not know how to teach. You can have a seat now.”

At recess Jem asked me how I was getting along. I told him.

“If I didn’t have to stay I’d leave. Jem, that damn lady says that Atticus’s been teaching me to read and must stop it –”

“Don’t worry, Scout,” Jem comforted me. “Our teacher says Miss Caroline’s introducing a new way of teaching. She learned about it in college. It’ll be in all the grades soon. You don’t have to learn much out of books that way – it’s like if you want to learn about cows, you go milk one, see?”

“Yeah Jem, but I don’t want to study cows, I –”

“Sure you do. You have to know about cows, they’re a big part of life in Maycomb County.”

I just asked Jem if he’d lost his mind.

“I’m just trying to tell you the new way they’re teachin’ the first grade, stubborn. It’s the Dewey Decimal System.”

On the recommendation of the Dewey Decimal System, Miss Caroline showed us cards on which were printed “the,” “cat,” “rat,” “man,” and “you.” No comment was expected of us, and the class looked at these cards in silence. I was bored, so I began a letter to Dill. Miss Caroline saw it and told me to tell my father to stop teaching me. “Besides,” she said, “we don’t write in the first grade, we print. You won’t learn to write until you’re in the third grade.”