To kill a mockingbird by Harper Lee (CHAPTER 1–PART 3)

1960
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
by Harper Lee
Copyright (C) 1960 by Harper Lee
Copyright (C) renewed 1988 by Harper Lee
Published by arrangement with McIntosh and Otis, Inc.

Dill had seen Dracula, a revelation that moved Jem to eye him with the beginning
of respect. “Tell it to us,” he said.
Dill was a curiosity. He wore blue linen shorts that buttoned to his shirt, his hair
was snow white and stuck to his head like duckfluff; he was a year my senior but
I towered over him. As he told us the old tale his blue eyes would lighten and
darken; his laugh was sudden and happy; he habitually pulled at a cowlick in the
center of his forehead.
When Dill reduced Dracula to dust, and Jem said the show 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 hush, a sure sign that Dill had been studied and
found acceptable. Thereafter the summer passed in routine contentment. Routine
contentment was: improving our treehouse that rested between giant twin
chinaberry trees in the back yard, fussing, running through our list of dramas
based on the works of Oliver Optic, Victor Appleton, and Edgar Rice Burroughs.
In this matter we were lucky to have Dill. He played the character parts formerly
thrust upon me— 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 teemed
with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies.
But by the end of August our repertoire was vapid from countless reproductions,
and it was then that Dill gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.
The Radley Place fascinated Dill. In spite of our warnings and explanations it
drew him as the moon draws water, but drew him no nearer than the light-pole on
the corner, a safe distance from the Radley gate. There he would stand, his arm
around the fat pole, staring and wondering.
The Radley Place jutted into a sharp curve beyond our house. Walking south, one
faced its porch; the sidewalk turned and ran beside the lot. The house was low,
was once white with a deep front porch and green shutters, but had long ago

darkened to the color of the slate-gray yard around it. Rain-rotted shingles
drooped over the eaves of the veranda; oak trees kept the sun away. The remains
of a picket drunkenly guarded the front yard— a “swept” yard that was never
swept— where johnson grass and rabbit-tobacco grew in abundance.
Inside the house lived a malevolent phantom. People said he existed, but Jem and
I had never seen him. People said he went out at night when the moon was down,
and peeped in windows. When people’s azaleas froze in a cold snap, it was
because he had breathed on them. Any stealthy small crimes committed in
Maycomb were his work. Once the town was terrorized by a series of morbid
nocturnal events: people’s chickens and household pets were found mutilated;
although the culprit was Crazy Addie, who eventually drowned himself in
Barker’s Eddy, people still looked at the Radley Place, unwilling to discard their
initial suspicions. A Negro would not pass the Radley Place at night, he would cut
across to the sidewalk opposite and whistle as he walked. The Maycomb school
grounds adjoined the back of the Radley lot; from the Radley chickenyard tall
pecan trees shook their fruit into the schoolyard, but the nuts lay untouched by the
children: Radley pecans would kill you. A baseball hit into the Radley yard was a
lost ball and no questions asked.
The misery of that house began many years before Jem and I were born. The
Radleys, welcome anywhere in town, kept to themselves, a predilection
unforgivable in Maycomb. They did not go to church, Maycomb’s principal
recreation, but worshiped at home; Mrs. Radley seldom if ever crossed the street
for a mid-morning coffee break with her neighbors, and certainly never joined a
missionary circle. Mr. Radley walked to town at eleven-thirty every morning and
came back promptly at twelve, sometimes carrying a brown paper bag that the
neighborhood assumed contained the family groceries. I never knew how old Mr.
Radley made his living— Jem said he “bought cotton,” a polite term for doing
nothing—but Mr. Radley and his wife had lived there with their two sons as long
as anybody could remember.
The shutters and doors of the Radley house were closed on Sundays, another
thing alien to Maycomb’s ways: 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, children wore shoes. But to climb the Radley front steps

and call, “He-y,” of a Sunday afternoon was something their neighbors never did.
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, an
enormous and confusing tribe domiciled in the northern part of the county, and
they formed the nearest thing to a gang ever seen in Maycomb. They did little, but
enough to be discussed by the town and publicly warned from three pulpits: they
hung around the barbershop; they rode the bus to Abbottsville on Sundays and
went to the picture show; they attended dances at the county’s riverside gambling
hell, the Dew-Drop Inn & Fishing Camp; they experimented with stumphole
whiskey. Nobody in Maycomb had nerve enough to tell Mr. Radley that his boy
was in with the wrong crowd.
One night, in an excessive spurt of high spirits, the boys backed around the square
in a borrowed flivver, resisted arrest by Maycomb’s ancient beadle, Mr. Conner,
and locked him in the courthouse outhouse. The town decided something had to
be done; Mr. Conner said he knew who each and every one of them was, and he
was bound and determined they wouldn’t get away with it, so the boys came
before the probate judge on charges of disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace,
assault and battery, and using abusive and profane language in the presence and
hearing of a female. The judge asked Mr. Conner why he included the last charge;
Mr. Conner said they cussed so loud 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 provide them with food and
decent shelter: it was no prison and it was no disgrace. Mr. Radley thought it was.
If the judge released Arthur, Mr. Radley would see to it that Arthur gave no
further trouble. Knowing that Mr. Radley’s word was his bond, the judge was
glad to do so.
The other boys attended the industrial school and received the best secondary
education to be had in the state; one of them eventually worked his way through
engineering school at Auburn. 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.
But there came a day, barely within Jem’s memory, when Boo Radley was heard
from and was seen by several people, but not by Jem. He said Atticus never talked
much about the Radleys: when Jem would question him Atticus’s only answer
was for him to mind his own business and let the Radleys mind theirs, they had a
right to; but when it happened Jem said Atticus shook his head and said, “Mm,
mm, mm.”
So Jem received most of his information from Miss Stephanie Crawford, a
neighborhood scold, who said she knew the whole thing. According to Miss
Stephanie, Boo was sitting in the livingroom cutting some items from The
Maycomb Tribune to paste in his scrapbook. His father entered the room. As Mr.
Radley passed by, Boo drove the scissors into his parent’s leg, pulled them out,
wiped them on his pants, and resumed his activities.
Mrs. Radley ran screaming into the street that Arthur was killing them all, but
when the sheriff arrived he found Boo still sitting in the livingroom, cutting up the
Tribune. He was thirty-three years old then.
Miss Stephanie said old Mr. Radley said no Radley was going to any asylum,
when it was suggested that a season in Tuscaloosa might be helpful to Boo. Boo
wasn’t crazy, he was high-strung at times. It was all right to shut him up, Mr.
Radley conceded, but insisted that Boo not be charged with anything: he was not
a criminal. The sheriff hadn’t the heart to put him in jail alongside Negroes, so
Boo was locked in the courthouse basement.
Boo’s transition from the basement to back home was nebulous in Jem’s memory.
Miss Stephanie Crawford said some of the town council told Mr. Radley that if he
didn’t take Boo back, Boo would die of mold from the damp. Besides, Boo could
not live forever on the bounty of the county.
Nobody knew what form of intimidation Mr. Radley employed to keep Boo out of
sight, but Jem figured that Mr. Radley kept him chained to the bed most of the
time. Atticus said no, it wasn’t that sort of thing, that there were other ways of
making people into ghosts.
My memory came alive to see Mrs. Radley occasionally open the front door, walk
to the edge of the porch, and pour water on her cannas. But every day Jem and I would see Mr. Radley walking to and from town. He was a thin leathery man with
colorless eyes, so colorless they did not reflect light. His cheekbones were sharp
and his mouth was wide, with a thin upper lip and a full lower lip. Miss Stephanie
Crawford said he was so upright he took the word of God as his only law, and we
believed her, because Mr. Radley’s posture was ramrod straight.
He never spoke to us. When he passed we would look at the ground and say,
“Good morning, sir,” and he would cough in reply. Mr. Radley’s elder son lived
in Pensacola; he came home at Christmas, and he was one of the few persons we
ever saw enter or leave the place. From the day Mr. Radley took Arthur home,
people said the house died.
But there came a day when Atticus told us he’d wear us out if we made any noise
in the yard and commissioned Calpurnia to serve in his absence if she heard a
sound out of us. 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, traffic was diverted 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 crept around the yard for days. At last
the sawhorses were taken away, and we stood watching 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 rarely commented on the ways of white people.
The neighborhood thought when Mr. Radley went under Boo would come out,
but it had another think coming: 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 would
speak to us, however, when we said good morning, and sometimes we saw him
coming from town with a magazine in his hand.
The more we told Dill about the Radleys, the more he wanted to know, the longer
he would stand hugging the light-pole on the corner, the more he would wonder.
“Wonder what he does in there,” he would murmur. “Looks like he’d just stick
his head out the door.”