No More Learning

”
Jem stamped his foot. “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to even touch the trees over there? You’ll get killed if you do! ”
“You touched the house once! ”
“That was different! You go gargle—right now, you hear me? ” “Ain’t neither, it’ll take the taste outa my mouth. ”
“You don’t ‘n’ I’ll tell Calpurnia on you! ”
Rather than risk a tangle with Calpurnia, I did as Jem told me. For some reason, my first year of school had wrought a great change in our relationship: Calpurnia’s tyranny, unfairness, and meddling in my business had faded to gentle grumblings of general disapproval. On my part, I went to much trouble, sometimes, not to provoke her.
Summer was on the way; Jem and I awaited it with impatience. Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.
The authorities released us early the last day of school, and Jem and I walked
home together. “Reckon old Dill’ll be coming home tomorrow,” I said. “Probably day after,” said Jem. “Mis’sippi turns ‘em loose a day later. ”
As we came to the live oaks at the Radley Place I raised my finger to point for the hundredth time to the knot-hole where I had found the chewing gum, trying to make Jem believe I had found it there, and found myself pointing at another piece of tinfoil.
“I see it, Scout! I see it-”
Jem looked around, reached up, and gingerly pocketed a tiny shiny package. We ran home, and on the front porch we looked at a small box patchworked with bits of tinfoil collected from chewing-gum wrappers. It was the kind of box wedding rings came in, purple velvet with a minute catch. Jem flicked open the tiny catch. Inside were two scrubbed and polished pennies, one on top of the other. Jem examined them.
“Indian-heads,” he said. “Nineteen-six and Scout, one of em’s nineteen-hundred. These are real old. ”
“Nineteen-hundred,” I echoed. “Say-”
“Hush a minute, I’m thinkin‘. ”
“Jem, you reckon that’s somebody’s hidin‘ place? ”
“Naw, don’t anybody much but us pass by there, unless it’s some grown person’s-”
“Grown folks don’t have hidin‘ places. You reckon we ought to keep ’em, Jem? ”
“I don’t know what we could do, Scout. Who’d we give ‘em back to? I know for a fact don’t anybody go by there—Cecil goes by the back street an’ all the way around by town to get home. ”
Cecil Jacobs, who lived at the far end of our street next door to the post office, walked a total of one mile per school day to avoid the Radley Place and old Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose. Mrs. Dubose lived two doors up the street from us; neighborhood opinion was unanimous that Mrs. Dubose was the meanest old woman who ever lived. Jem wouldn’t go by her place without Atticus beside him.
“What you reckon we oughta do, Jem? ”
Finders were keepers unless title was proven. Plucking an occasional camellia, getting a squirt of hot milk from Miss Maudie Atkinson’s cow on a summer day, helping ourselves to someone’s scuppernongs was part of our ethical culture, but money was different.
“Tell you what,” said Jem. “We’ll keep ‘em till school starts, then go around and ask everybody if they’re theirs. They’re some bus child’s, maybe—he was too taken up with gettin’ outa school today an‘ forgot ’em. These are somebody’s, I know that. See how they’ve been slicked up? They’ve been saved. ”
“Yeah, but why should somebody wanta put away chewing gum like that? You know it doesn’t last. ”
“I don’t know, Scout. But these are important to somebody. . . ” “How’s that, Jem. . . ? ”
“Well, Indian-heads—well, they come from the Indians. They’re real strong magic, they make you have good luck. Not like fried chicken when you’re not lookin‘ for it, but things like long life ’n‘ good health, ’n‘ passin’ six-weeks tests. . . these are real valuable to somebody. I’m gonna put em in my trunk. ”
Before Jem went to his room, he looked for a long time at the Radley Place. He seemed to be thinking again.
Two days later Dill arrived in a blaze of glory: he had ridden the train by himself from Meridian to Maycomb Junction (a courtesy title—Maycomb Junction was in Abbott County) where he had been met by Miss Rachel in Maycomb’s one taxi; he had eaten dinner in the diner, he had seen two twins hitched together get off the train in Bay St. Louis and stuck to his story regardless of threats. He had discarded the abominable blue shorts that were buttoned to his shirts and wore real short pants with a belt; he was somewhat heavier, no taller, and said he had seen his father. Dill’s father was taller than ours, he had a black beard (pointed), and was president of the L & N Railroad.
“I helped the engineer for a while,” said Dill, yawning.
“In a pig’s ear you did, Dill. Hush,” said Jem. “What’ll we play today? ”
“Tom and Sam and Dick,” said Dill. “Let’s go in the front yard. ” Dill wanted the Rover Boys because there were three respectable parts. He was clearly tired of
being our character man.
“I’m tired of those,” I said. I was tired of playing Tom Rover, who suddenly lost his memory in the middle of a picture show and was out of the script until the end, when he was found in Alaska.
“Make us up one, Jem,” I said. “I’m tired of makin‘ ’em up. ”
Our first days of freedom, and we were tired. I wondered what the summer would bring.
We had strolled to the front yard, where Dill stood looking down the street at the dreary face of the Radley Place. “I—smell—death,” he said. “I do, I mean it,” he said, when I told him to shut up.
“You mean when somebody’s dyin‘ you can smell it? ”
“No, I mean I can smell somebody an‘ tell if they’re gonna die. An old lady taught me how. ” Dill leaned over and sniffed me. “Jean—Louise—Finch, you are going to die in three days. ”
“Dill if you don’t hush I’ll knock you bowlegged. I mean it, now-” “Yawl hush,” growled Jem, “you act like you believe in Hot Steams. ” “You act like you don’t,” I said.
“What’s a Hot Steam? ” asked Dill.
“Haven’t you ever walked along a lonesome road at night and passed by a hot place? ” Jem asked Dill. “A Hot Steam’s somebody who can’t get to heaven, just wallows around on lonesome roads an‘ if you walk through him, when you die you’ll be one too, an’ you’ll go around at night suckin‘ people’s breath-”
“How can you keep from passing through one? ”
“You can’t,” said Jem. “Sometimes they stretch all the way across the road, but if you hafta go through one you say, ‘Angel-bright, life-in-death; get off the road, don’t suck my breath. ’ That keeps ‘em from wrapping around you-”
“Don’t you believe a word he says, Dill,” I said. “Calpurnia says that’s nigger- talk. ”
Jem scowled darkly at me, but said, “Well, are we gonna play anything or not? ”
“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 just 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.
Contents - Prev / Next
Chapter 5
My nagging got the better of Jem eventually, as I knew it would, and to my relief we slowed down the game for a while. He still maintained, however, that Atticus hadn’t said we couldn’t, therefore we could; and if Atticus ever said we couldn’t, Jem had thought of a way around it: he would simply change the names of the characters and then we couldn’t be accused of playing anything.
Dill was in hearty agreement with this plan of action. Dill was becoming something of a trial anyway, following Jem about. He had asked me earlier in the summer to marry him, then he promptly forgot about it. He staked me out, marked as his property, said I was the only girl he would ever love, then he neglected me. I beat him up twice but it did no good, he only grew closer to Jem. They spent days together in the treehouse plotting and planning, calling me only when they needed a third party. But I kept aloof from their more foolhardy schemes for a while, and on pain of being called a girl, I spent most of the remaining twilights that summer sitting with Miss Maudie Atkinson on her front porch.
Jem and I had always enjoyed the free run of Miss Maudie’s yard if we kept out of her azaleas, but our contact with her was not clearly defined. Until Jem and Dill excluded me from their plans, she was only another lady in the neighborhood, but a relatively benign presence.
Our tacit treaty with Miss Maudie was that we could play on her lawn, eat her scuppernongs if we didn’t jump on the arbor, and explore her vast back lot, terms so generous we seldom spoke to her, so careful were we to preserve the delicate balance of our relationship, but Jem and Dill drove me closer to her with their
behavior.
Miss Maudie hated her house: time spent indoors was time wasted. She was a widow, a chameleon lady who worked in her flower beds in an old straw hat and men’s coveralls, but after her five o’clock bath she would appear on the porch and reign over the street in magisterial beauty.
She loved everything that grew in God’s earth, even the weeds. With one exception. If she found a blade of nut grass in her yard it was like the Second Battle of the Marne: she swooped down upon it with a tin tub and subjected it to blasts from beneath with a poisonous substance she said was so powerful it’d kill us all if we didn’t stand out of the way.
“Why can’t you just pull it up? ” I asked, after witnessing a prolonged campaign against a blade not three inches high.
“Pull it up, child, pull it up? ” She picked up the limp sprout and squeezed her thumb up its tiny stalk. Microscopic grains oozed out. “Why, one sprig of nut grass can ruin a whole yard. Look here. When it comes fall this dries up and the wind blows it all over Maycomb County! ” Miss Maudie’s face likened such an occurrence unto an Old Testament pestilence.
Her speech was crisp for a Maycomb County inhabitant. She called us by all our names, and when she grinned she revealed two minute gold prongs clipped to her eyeteeth. When I admired them and hoped I would have some eventually, she said, “Look here. ” With a click of her tongue she thrust out her bridgework, a gesture of cordiality that cemented our friendship.
Miss Maudie’s benevolence extended to Jem and Dill, whenever they paused in their pursuits: we reaped the benefits of a talent Miss Maudie had hitherto kept hidden from us. She made the best cakes in the neighborhood. When she was admitted into our confidence, every time she baked she made a big cake and three little ones, and she would call across the street: “Jem Finch, Scout Finch, Charles Baker Harris, come here! ” Our promptness was always rewarded.
In summertime, twilights are long and peaceful. Often as not, Miss Maudie and I would sit silently on her porch, watching the sky go from yellow to pink as the sun went down, watching flights of martins sweep low over the neighborhood and disappear behind the schoolhouse rooftops.
“Miss Maudie,” I said one evening, “do you think Boo Radley’s still alive? ”
“His name’s Arthur and he’s alive,” she said. She was rocking slowly in her big oak chair. “Do you smell my mimosa? It’s like angels’ breath this evening. ”
“Yessum. How do you know? ”
“Know what, child? ”
“That B—Mr. Arthur’s still alive? ”
“What a morbid question. But I suppose it’s a morbid subject. I know he’s alive, Jean Louise, because I haven’t seen him carried out yet. ”
“Maybe he died and they stuffed him up the chimney. ” “Where did you get such a notion? ”
“That’s what Jem said he thought they did. ”
“S-ss-ss. He gets more like Jack Finch every day. ”
Miss Maudie had known Uncle Jack Finch, Atticus’s brother, since they were children. Nearly the same age, they had grown up together at Finch’s Landing. Miss Maudie was the daughter of a neighboring landowner, Dr. Frank Buford. Dr. Buford’s profession was medicine and his obsession was anything that grew in the ground, so he stayed poor. Uncle Jack Finch confined his passion for digging to his window boxes in Nashville and stayed rich. We saw Uncle Jack every Christmas, and every Christmas he yelled across the street for Miss Maudie to come marry him. Miss Maudie would yell back, “Call a little louder, Jack Finch, and they’ll hear you at the post office, I haven’t heard you yet! ” Jem and I thought this a strange way to ask for a lady’s hand in marriage, but then Uncle Jack was rather strange. He said he was trying to get Miss Maudie’s goat, that he had been trying unsuccessfully for forty years, that he was the last person in the world Miss Maudie would think about marrying but the first person she thought about teasing, and the best defense to her was spirited offense, all of which we understood clearly.
“Arthur Radley just stays in the house, that’s all,” said Miss Maudie. “Wouldn’t you stay in the house if you didn’t want to come out? ”
“Yessum, but I’d wanta come out. Why doesn’t he? ”
Miss Maudie’s eyes narrowed. “You know that story as well as I do. ” “I never heard why, though. Nobody ever told me why. ”
Miss Maudie settled her bridgework. “You know old Mr. Radley was a foot- washing Baptist-”
“That’s what you are, ain’t it? ”
“My shell’s not that hard, child. I’m just a Baptist. ” “Don’t you all believe in foot-washing? ”
“We do. At home in the bathtub. ”
“But we can’t have communion with you all-”
Apparently deciding that it was easier to define primitive baptistry than closed communion, Miss Maudie said: “Foot-washers believe anything that’s pleasure is a sin. Did you know some of ‘em came out of the woods one Saturday and passed by this place and told me me and my flowers were going to hell? ”
“Your flowers, too? ”
“Yes ma’am. They’d burn right with me. They thought I spent too much time in God’s outdoors and not enough time inside the house reading the Bible. ”
My confidence in pulpit Gospel lessened at the vision of Miss Maudie stewing forever in various Protestant hells. True enough, she had an acid tongue in her head, and she did not go about the neighborhood doing good, as did Miss Stephanie Crawford. But while no one with a grain of sense trusted Miss Stephanie, Jem and I had considerable faith in Miss Maudie. She had never told on us, had never played cat-and-mouse with us, she was not at all interested in our private lives. She was our friend. How so reasonable a creature could live in peril of everlasting torment was incomprehensible.
“That ain’t right, Miss Maudie. You’re the best lady I know. ”
Miss Maudie grinned. “Thank you ma’am. Thing is, foot-washers think women are a sin by definition. They take the Bible literally, you know. ”
“Is that why Mr. Arthur stays in the house, to keep away from women? ”
“I’ve no idea. ”
“It doesn’t make sense to me. Looks like if Mr. Arthur was hankerin‘ after heaven
he’d come out on the porch at least. Atticus says God’s loving folks like you love yourself-”
Miss Maudie stopped rocking, and her voice hardened. “You are too young to understand it,” she said, “but sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hand of—oh, of your father. ”
I was shocked. “Atticus doesn’t drink whiskey,” I said. “He never drunk a drop in his life—nome, yes he did. He said he drank some one time and didn’t like it. ”
Miss Maudie laughed. “Wasn’t talking about your father,” she said. “What I meant was, if Atticus Finch drank until he was drunk he wouldn’t be as hard as some men are at their best. There are just some kind of men who—who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results. ”
“Do you think they’re true, all those things they say about B—Mr. Arthur? ” “What things? ”
I told her.
“That is three-fourths colored folks and one-fourth Stephanie Crawford,” said Miss Maudie grimly. “Stephanie Crawford even told me once she woke up in the middle of the night and found him looking in the window at her. I said what did you do, Stephanie, move over in the bed and make room for him? That shut her up a while. ”
I was sure it did. Miss Maudie’s voice was enough to shut anybody up.
“No, child,” she said, “that is a sad house. I remember Arthur Radley when he was a boy. He always spoke nicely to me, no matter what folks said he did. Spoke as nicely as he knew how. ”
“You reckon he’s crazy? ”
Miss Maudie shook her head. “If he’s not he should be by now. The things that happen to people we never really know. What happens in houses behind closed doors, what secrets-”
“Atticus don’t ever do anything to Jem and me in the house that he don’t do in the yard,” I said, feeling it my duty to defend my parent.
“Gracious child, I was raveling a thread, wasn’t even thinking about your father,
but now that I am I’ll say this: Atticus Finch is the same in his house as he is on the public streets. How’d you like some fresh poundcake to take home? ”
I liked it very much.
Next morning when I awakened I found Jem and Dill in the back yard deep in conversation. When I joined them, as usual they said go away.
“Will not. This yard’s as much mine as it is yours, Jem Finch. I got just as much right to play in it as you have. ”
Dill and Jem emerged from a brief huddle: “If you stay you’ve got to do what we tell you,” Dill warned.
“We-ll,” I said, “who’s so high and mighty all of a sudden? ”
“If you don’t say you’ll do what we tell you, we ain’t gonna tell you anything,” Dill continued.
“You act like you grew ten inches in the night! All right, what is it? ” Jem said placidly, “We are going to give a note to Boo Radley. ”
“Just how? ” I was trying to fight down the automatic terror rising in me. It was all right for Miss Maudie to talk—she was old and snug on her porch. It was different for us.
Jem was merely going to put the note on the end of a fishing pole and stick it through the shutters. If anyone came along, Dill would ring the bell.
Dill raised his right hand. In it was my mother’s silver dinner-bell.
“I’m goin‘ around to the side of the house,” said Jem. “We looked yesterday from across the street, and there’s a shutter loose. Think maybe I can make it stick on the window sill, at least.