To kill a mockingbird by Harper Lee (CHAPTER 4–PART 2)

……………………………………………….“Let’s roll in the tire,” I suggested.
Jem sighed. “You know I’m too big.”
“You c’n push.”
I ran to the back yard and pulled an old car tire from under the house. I slapped it
up to the front yard. “I’m first,” I said.
Dill said he ought to be first, he ju.st got here.
Jem arbitrated, awarded me first push with an extra time for Dill, and I folded
myself inside the tire.
Until it happened I did not realize that Jem was offended by my contradicting him
on Hot Steams, and that he was patiently awaiting an opportunity to reward me.
He did, by pushing the tire down the sidewalk with all the force in his body.
Ground, sky and houses melted into a mad palette, my ears throbbed, I was
suffocating. I could not put out my hands to stop, they were wedged between my
chest and knees. I could only hope that Jem would outrun the tire and me, or that I
would be stopped by a bump in the sidewalk. I heard him behind me, chasing and
shouting.
The tire bumped on gravel, skeetered across the road, crashed into a barrier and
popped me like a cork onto pavement. Dizzy and nauseated, I lay on the cement
and shook my head still, pounded my ears to silence, and heard Jem’s voice:
“Scout, get away from there, come on!”
I raised my head and stared at the Radley Place steps in front of me. I froze.
“Come on, Scout, don’t just lie there!” Jem was screaming. “Get up, can’tcha?”
I got to my feet, trembling as I thawed.
“Get the tire!” Jem hollered. “Bring it with you! Ain’t you got any sense at all?”
When I was able to navigate, I ran back to them as fast as my shaking knees
would carry me.
“Why didn’t you bring it?” Jem yelled.
“Why don’t you get it?” I screamed.
Jem was silent.
“Go on, it ain’t far inside the gate. Why, you even touched the house once, remember?”
Jem looked at me furiously, could not decline, ran down the sidewalk, treaded
water at the gate, then dashed in and retrieved the tire.
“See there?” Jem was scowling triumphantly. “Nothin‘ to it. I swear, Scout,
sometimes you act so much like a girl it’s mortifyin’.”
There was more to it than he knew, but I decided not to tell him.
Calpurnia appeared in the front door and yelled, “Lemonade time! You all get in
outa that hot sun ‘fore you fry alive!” Lemonade in the middle of the morning was
a summertime ritual. Calpurnia set a pitcher and three glasses on the porch, then
went about her business. Being out of Jem’s good graces did not worry me
especially. Lemonade would restore his good humor.
Jem gulped down his second glassful and slapped his chest. “I know what we are
going to play,” he announced. “Something new, something different.”
“What?” asked Dill.
“Boo Radley.”
Jem’s head at times was transparent: he had thought that up to make me
understand he wasn’t afraid of Radleys in any shape or form, to contrast his own
fearless heroism with my cowardice.
“Boo Radley? How?” asked Dill.
Jem said, “Scout, you can be Mrs. Radley-”
“I declare if I will. I don’t think-”
“‘Smatter?” said Dill. “Still scared?”
“He can get out at night when we’re all asleep…” I said.
Jem hissed. “Scout, how’s he gonna know what we’re doin‘? Besides, I don’t
think he’s still there. He died years ago and they stuffed him up the chimney.”
Dill said, “Jem, you and me can play and Scout can watch if she’s scared.”
I was fairly sure Boo Radley was inside that house, but I couldn’t prove it, and
felt it best to keep my mouth shut or I would be accused of believing in Hot
Steams, phenomena I was immune to in the daytime.
Jem parceled out our roles: I was Mrs. Radley, and all I had to do was come out and sweep the porch. Dill was old Mr. Radley: he walked up and down the
sidewalk and coughed when Jem spoke to him. Jem, naturally, was Boo: he went
under the front steps and shrieked and howled from time to time.
As the summer progressed, so did our game. We polished and perfected it, added
dialogue and plot until we had manufactured a small play upon which we rang
changes every day.
Dill was a villain’s villain: he could get into any character part assigned him, and
appear tall if height was part of the devilry required. He was as good as his worst
performance; his worst performance was Gothic. I reluctantly played assorted
ladies who entered the script. I never thought it as much fun as Tarzan, and I
played that summer with more than vague anxiety despite Jem’s assurances that
Boo Radley was dead and nothing would get me, with him and Calpurnia there in
the daytime and Atticus home at night.
Jem was a born hero.
It was a melancholy little drama, woven from bits and scraps of gossip and
neighborhood legend: Mrs. Radley had been beautiful until she married Mr.
Radley and lost all her money. She also lost most of her teeth, her hair, and her
right forefinger (Dill’s contribution. Boo bit it off one night when he couldn’t find
any cats and squirrels to eat.); she sat in the livingroom and cried most of the
time, while Boo slowly whittled away all the furniture in the house.
The three of us were the boys who got into trouble; I was the probate judge, for a
change; Dill led Jem away and crammed him beneath the steps, poking him with
the brushbroom. Jem would reappear as needed in the shapes of the sheriff,
assorted townsfolk, and Miss Stephanie Crawford, who had more to say about the
Radleys than anybody in Maycomb.
When it was time to play Boo’s big scene, Jem would sneak into the house, steal
the scissors from the sewing-machine drawer when Calpurnia’s back was turned,
then sit in the swing and cut up newspapers. Dill would walk by, cough at Jem,
and Jem would fake a plunge into Dill’s thigh. From where I stood it looked real.
When Mr. Nathan Radley passed us on his daily trip to town, we would stand still
and silent until he was out of sight, then wonder what he would do to us if he
suspected. Our activities halted when any of the neighbors appeared, and once I saw Miss Maudie Atkinson staring across the street at us, her hedge clippers
poised in midair.
One day we were so busily playing Chapter XXV, Book II of One Man’s Family,
we did not see Atticus standing on the sidewalk looking at us, slapping a rolled
magazine against his knee. The sun said twelve noon.
“What are you all playing?” he asked.
“Nothing,” said Jem.
Jem’s evasion told me our game was a secret, so I kept quiet.
“What are you doing with those scissors, then? Why are you tearing up that
newspaper? If it’s today’s I’ll tan you.”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing what?” said Atticus.
“Nothing, sir.”
“Give me those scissors,” Atticus said. “They’re no things to play with. Does this
by any chance have anything to do with the Radleys?”
“No sir,” said Jem, reddening.
“I hope it doesn’t,” he said shortly, and went inside the house.
“Je-m…”
“Shut up! He’s gone in the livingroom, he can hear us in there.”
Safely in the yard, Dill asked Jem if we could play any more.
“I don’t know. Atticus didn’t say we couldn’t-”
“Jem,” I said, “I think Atticus knows it anyway.”
“No he don’t. If he did he’d say he did.”
I was not so sure, but Jem told me I was being a girl, that girls always imagined
things, that’s why other people hated them so, and if I started behaving like one I
could just go off and find some to play with.
“All right, you just keep it up then,” I said. “You’ll find out.”
Atticus’s arrival was the second reason I wanted to quit the game. The first reason
happened the day I rolled into the Radley front yard. Through all the head-shaking, quelling of nausea and Jem-yelling, I had heard another sound, so low I
could not have heard it from the sidewalk. Someone inside the house was
laughing.