To Kill a Mockingbird Vocabulary

Early one morning as we were beginning our day’s play in the back yard, Jem and
I heard something next door in Miss Rachel Haverford’s collard patch.

Of course Jem antagonized me
sometimes until I could kill him, but when it came down to it he was all I had.

So serene was Judge Taylor’s court, that he had few occasions to use his gavel,
but he hammered fully five minutes.

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.

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 was to stick with the first grade and he would stick with the
fifth.

“There goes the meanest man ever God blew breath into,” murmured Calpurnia,
and she spat meditatively into the yard.

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.
CONTENTS
l DEDICATION
l PART ONE
m Chapter 1
m Chapter 2
m Chapter 3
m Chapter 4
m Chapter 5
m Chapter 6
m Chapter 7
m Chapter 8
m Chapter 9
m Chapter 10
m Chapter 11
l PART TWO
m Chapter 12
m Chapter 13
m Chapter 14
m Chapter 15
m Chapter 16
m Chapter 17
m Chapter 18
m Chapter 19
m Chapter 20
m Chapter 21
m Chapter 22...

On the way home I nearly hit Mr. Link Deas, who said, “Look
out now, Scout!” when I missed a toss, and when we approached Mrs. Dubose’s
house my baton was grimy from having picked it up out of the dirt so many times.

I’ve seen his tracks in our back yard many a mornin’, and one night I heard
him scratching on the back screen, but he was gone time Atticus got there.”

There
would also be a prize of twenty-five cents for the best Halloween costume,
created by the wearer.

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.
CONTENTS
l DEDICATION
l PART ONE
m Chapter 1
m Chapter 2
m Chapter 3
m Chapter 4
m Chapter 5
m Chapter 6
m Chapter 7
m Chapter 8
m Chapter 9
m Chapter 10
m Chapter 11
l PART TWO
m Chapter 12
m Chapter 13
m Chapter 14
m Chapter 15
m Chapter 16
m Chapter 17
m Chapter 18
m Chapter 19
m Chapter 20
m Chapter 21
m Chapter 22...

Walter looked as if he had been raised on fish food: his eyes, as blue as Dill
Harris’s, were red-rimmed and watery.

“Lemme think a minute…
it’s sort of like making a turtle come out…”
“How’s that?” asked Dill.

He was in court one time and they asked him his
name.

When we left her, she was still chuckling.

I sniffed it and it smelled all right.

“Old Adolf Hitler has been prosecutin‘ the—”
“Persecuting Cecil…”
“Nome, Miss Gates, it says here—well anyway, old Adolf Hitler has been after
the Jews and he’s puttin‘ ’em in prisons and he’s taking away all their property
and he won’t let any of ‘em out of the country and he’s washin’ all the feebleminded
and—”
“Washing the feeble-minded?”

We were far too old to settle an argument with a fist-fight, so we consulted
Atticus.

When Walter shook his head a third time someone whispered, “Go on and tell
her, Scout.”

This was enough to make Jem march to the corner, where he stopped and leaned
against the light-pole, watching the gate hanging crazily on its homemade hinge.

Tim Johnson was advancing at a snail’s pace, but he was not playing or sniffing at
foliage: he seemed dedicated to one course and motivated by an invisible force
that was inching him toward us.

I could not remember when the lines above Atticus’s moving finger
separated into words, but I had stared at them all the evenings in my memory,
listening to the news of the day, Bills to Be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of
Lorenzo Dow—anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his
lap every night.

It
aggravates ’em.

As he read along, I noticed that Mrs. Dubose’s corrections grew fewer and farther
between, that Jem had even left one sentence dangling in mid-air.

Zeebo rose from his pew and walked down the center aisle, stopping in front of us
and facing the congregation.

I got rid
of my ham costume and departed in a hurry, for Mrs. Merriweather was standing
at a lectern in front of the first row of seats making last-minute, frenzied changes
in the script.

Soft taffeta-like sounds and
muffled scurrying sounds filled me with helpless dread.

When he completed his
examination of the wisteria vine he strolled back to me.

Jem and I found our father satisfactory: he played with us,
read to us, and treated us with courteous detachment.

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.

I don’t know of any landowner around here who begrudges
those children any game their father can hit.”

I returned to the front yard and busied myself
for two hours erecting a complicated breastworks at the side of the porch,
consisting of a tire, an orange crate, the laundry hamper, the porch chairs, and a
small U.S. flag Jem gave me from a popcorn box.

“Now don’t you
fret, ma’am,” he said.

“Don’t blame me when he gouges your
eyes out.

“About your writing with your left
hand, are you ambidextrous, Mr. Ewell?”

Miss Stephanie Crawford
said she woke up in the middle of the night one time and saw him looking straight
through the window at her… said his head was like a skull lookin‘ at her.

The Radley Place fascinated Dill.

We stared at him until he spoke:
“Hey.”
“Hey yourself,” said Jem pleasantly.

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.

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.

He did have on a clean shirt and neatly mended overalls.

A tiny, almost invisible movement,
and the house was still.

“Everybody who goes home to lunch hold up your hands,” said Miss Caroline,
breaking into my new grudge against Calpurnia.

I never
deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the
daily papers.

Miss Caroline walked up and down the rows peering and poking into lunch
containers, nodding if the contents pleased her, frowning a little at others.

His neck was dark
gray, the backs of his hands were rusty, and his fingernails were black deep into
the quick.

Atticus would flee to his office directly after dinner, where
if we sometimes looked in on him, we would find him sitting back in his swivel
chair reading.

Jem glanced at me, his eyes twinkling: “Mr. Avery’s
sort of shaped like a snowman, ain’t he?”

Mr. Avery averaged a stick of stovewood per week; he honed it down to a
toothpick and chewed it.

“I don’t know how he done it, but he done it—I said it all
happened so fast I—”
“Now let’s consider this calmly—” began Atticus, but Mr. Gilmer interrupted
with an objection: he was not irrelevant or immaterial, but Atticus was
browbeating the witness.

Apparently she had revived enough to
persevere in her profession.

You’ve perpetrated a near libel here in the front yard.

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.

Apparently she had revived enough to
persevere in her profession.

Miss Caroline, the
sixth grade cannot concentrate on the pyramids for all this racket!”

From somewhere near by came scuffling, kicking sounds, sounds of shoes and
flesh scraping dirt and roots.

He swung his legs over the
railing and was sliding down a pillar when he slipped.

I giggled at the thought of Jem in an apron.

He trudged
along, dragging the pole behind him on the sidewalk.

From time to time she would open her mouth wide, and I could see her
tongue undulate faintly.

One evening we were privileged
to witness a performance by him which seemed to have been his positively last,
for he never did it again so long as we watched.

“I wondered why he had those marks on him, His
sleeves were perforated with little holes.

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.

Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog
suffered on a summer’s day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in
the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square.

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.

I retrieved my plate and finished dinner in the kitchen, thankful, though,
that I was spared the humiliation of facing them again.

He was the filthiest human I had ever seen.

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.

The back of the Radley house was less inviting than the front: a ramshackle porch
ran the width of the house; there were two doors and two dark windows between
the doors.

We looked at her in surprise, for
Calpurnia rarely commented on the ways of white people.

Dill and Jem emerged from a brief huddle: “If you stay you’ve got to do what we
tell you,” Dill warned.

He searched the scalp above his forehead, located his guest and
pinched it between his thumb and forefinger.

“She said she was going to leave this world beholden to nothing and nobody.

He said the Cunninghams hadn’t taken
anything from or off of anybody since they migrated to the New World.

I suppose she chose me because she knew my name; as I read the alphabet a faint
line appeared between her eyebrows, and after making me read most of My First
Reader and the stock-market quotations from The Mobile Register aloud, she
discovered that I was literate and looked at me with more than faint distaste.

Jem condescended to take me to school the first day, a job usually done by one’s
parents, but Atticus had said Jem would be delighted to show me where my room
was.

Dill made his way through the leftovers and was reaching for a can of pork and
beans in the pantry when Miss Rachel’s Do-oo Je-sus went off in the hall.

Judge Taylor told the reporter to expunge anything he happened to have written
down after Mr. Finch if you were a nigger like me you’d be scared too, and told
the jury to disregard the interruption.

Atticus’s office in the courthouse contained little more
than a hat rack, a spittoon, a checkerboard and an unsullied Code of Alabama.

Jem made a feral noise in his throat.

So Simon, having forgotten
his teacher’s dictum on the possession of human chattels, bought three slaves and
with their aid established a homestead on the banks of the Alabama River some
forty miles above Saint Stephens.

Lastly, we
were to stay away from that house until we were invited there, we were not to
play an asinine game he had seen us playing or make fun of anybody on this street
or in this town-
“We weren’t makin‘ fun of him, we weren’t laughin’ at him,” said Jem, “we were
just-”
“So that was what you were doing, wasn’t it?”

Jem scooped up an armful of dirt, patted it into a mound on which he added
another load, and another until he had constructed a torso.

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.

Jem felt his age and gravitated to the adults, leaving me to
entertain our cousin.

Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I’d have
the facts.

Early one morning as we were beginning our day’s play in the back yard, Jem and
I heard something next door in Miss Rachel Haverford’s collard patch.

I hate you an‘ despise you an’
hope you die tomorrow!”

“Ain’t got no mother,” was the answer, “and their paw’s right contentious.”

The evidence boils down to you-did—I-didn’t.

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.

It was all
right for Miss Maudie to talk—she was old and snug on her porch.

When it healed, and Jem’s fears of never being able to play football were
assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury.

“Something furtive,” Aunt Alexandra said.

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

Miss Maudie’s old sunhat glistened with snow crystals.

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.

There went with the house the usual legend about the Yankees: one Finch female,
recently engaged, donned her complete trousseau to save it from raiders in the
neighborhood; she became stuck in the door to the Daughters’ Staircase but was
doused with water and finally pushed through.

Occasionally it would say, “Pt,” like some viscous
substance coming to a boil.

Instead,
Maycomb grew and sprawled out from its hub, Sinkfield’s Tavern, because
Sinkfield reduced his guests to myopic drunkenness one evening, induced them to
bring forward their maps and charts, lop off a little here, add a bit there, and
adjust the center of the county to meet his requirements.

The name Ewell gave me a queasy feeling.

She never let a chance escape her to point out the shortcomings of other tribal
groups to the greater glory of our own, a habit that amused Jem rather than
annoyed him: “Aunty better watch how she talks—scratch most folks in
Maycomb and they’re kin to us.”

I returned and gazed around the curve at the empty road.

Out there in J. Grimes Everett’s land there’s nothing but
sin and squalor.”

Below us, heads turned, feet scraped the floor, babies were shifted to shoulders,
and a few children scampered out of the courtroom.

Old Mrs. Radley died that winter, but her death caused hardly a ripple—the
neighborhood seldom saw her, except when she watered her cannas.

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.

Prejudice,” she enunciated carefully.

I reassured him: “Can’t anybody tell what you’re
gonna do lest they live in the house with you, and even I can’t tell sometimes.”

I’m gonna put em in my trunk.”

“There’s
some folks who don’t eat like us,” she whispered fiercely, “but you ain’t called on
to contradict ‘em at the table when they don’t.

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.

I was proceeding on the dim theory, aside from the innate
attractiveness of such words, that if Atticus discovered I had picked them up at
school he wouldn’t make me go.

I was bursting
with a sudden thought.

“She
likes Jem better’n she likes me, anyway,” I concluded, and suggested that Atticus
lose no time in packing her off.

It was dim inside, with a damp
coolness slowly dispelled by the gathering congregation.

The witnesses for the state, with the exception of
the sheriff of Maycomb County, have presented themselves to you gentlemen, to
this court, in the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted,
confident that you gentlemen would go along with them on the assumption—the
evil assumption—that all Negroes lie, that all Negroes are basically immoral
beings, that all Negro men are not to be trusted around our women, an assumption
one associates with minds of their caliber.

If the judge released Arthur, Mr. Radley would see to it that Arthur gave no
further trouble.

Miss
Scout, if you give me your attention I’ll tell you what entailment is.

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.

Mr. Merriweather, a faithful Methodist under duress, apparently saw nothing
personal in singing, “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch
like me…” It was the general opinion of Maycomb, however, that Mrs.
Merriweather had sobered him up and made a reasonably useful citizen of him.

Tim Johnson leaped, flopped over and crumpled on the
sidewalk in a brown-and-white heap.

Atticus rose at his usual ungodly hour
and was in the livingroom behind the Mobile Register when we stumbled in.

The Dewey Decimal System consisted, in part, of Miss Caroline waving cards at
us on which were printed “the,” “cat,” “rat,” “man,” and “you.”

They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of
the stores around it, took their time about everything.

Uncle Jack Finch confined his passion for digging
to his window boxes in Nashville and stayed rich.

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.

“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.

Through all the headshaking,
quelling of nausea and Jem-yelling, I had heard another sound, so low I
could not have heard it from the sidewalk.

Jem procured some peachtree switches from the back yard, plaited them, and bent
them into bones to be covered with dirt.

He walked to the corner of the lot, then back again, studying the simple terrain as
if deciding how best to effect an entry, frowning and scratching his head.

Tim Johnson was advancing at a snail’s pace, but he was not playing or sniffing at
foliage: he seemed dedicated to one course and motivated by an invisible force
that was inching him toward us.

We leaped over the low wall that separated Miss Rachel’s yard from our
driveway.

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.

He stopped in front of
the dog, squatted, turned around and tapped his finger on his forehead above his
left eye.

Aunt Alexandra’s
vision of my deportment involved playing with small stoves, tea sets, and wearing
the Add-A-Pearl necklace she gave me when I was born; furthermore, I should be
a ray of sunshine in my father’s lonely life.

A shock of wispy newwashed
hair stood up from his forehead; his nose was thin, pointed, and shiny; he
had no chin to speak of—it seemed to be part of his crepey neck.
“—so help me God,” he crowed.

In Maycomb County, hunting out of season was a
misdemeanor at law, a capital felony in the eyes of the populace.

We were accustomed to prompt, if not always cheerful acquiescence to Atticus’s
instructions, but from the way he stood Jem was not thinking of budging.

He
reminded me of a car stuck in a sandbed.

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.

Thus we came to know Dill as a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed
with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies.

I see it-”
Jem looked around, reached up, and gingerly pocketed a tiny shiny package.

It was either a straight acquittal or nothing.”

Jem and I crept around the yard for days.

Burris seemed to be afraid of a child half his height, and Miss Caroline took
advantage of his indecision: “Burris, go home.

It was customary for the men in the family to remain on Simon’s homestead,
Finch’s Landing, and make their living from cotton.

Jem said, “Scout, you can be Mrs. Radley-”
“I declare if I will.

When I was able to navigate, I ran back to them as fast as my shaking knees
would carry me.

Atticus’s remarks were still rankling, which made me miss the request in Jem’s
question.

Jem arbitrated, awarded me first push with an extra time for Dill, and I folded
myself inside the tire.

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.”

Atticus had urged them to accept the state’s generosity in allowing them to plead
Guilty to second-degree murder and escape with their lives, but they were
Haverfords, in Maycomb County a name synonymous with jackass.

Nobody in Maycomb had nerve enough to tell Mr. Radley that his boy
was in with the wrong crowd.

Still in wrist manacles, he wandered two miles out of
Meridian where he discovered a small animal show and was immediately engaged
to wash the camel.

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.

This was enough to make Jem march to the corner, where he stopped and leaned
against the light-pole, watching the gate hanging crazily on its homemade hinge.

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.

As I
passed the bed I stepped on something warm, resilient, and rather smooth.

Business was excellent when
Governor William Wyatt Bibb, with a view to promoting the newly created
county’s domestic tranquility, dispatched a team of surveyors to locate its exact
center and there establish its seat of government.

Jem’s breath came in sobs: “Fence by the
schoolyard!—hurry,

But her cooking made up for everything: three kinds of meat, summer vegetables
from her pantry shelves; peach pickles, two kinds of cake and ambrosia
constituted a modest Christmas dinner.

Then the assembled
company would sing, “Maycomb County, Maycomb County, we will aye be true
to thee,” as the grand finale, and Mrs. Merriweather would mount the stage with
the state flag.

The
Haverfords had dispatched Maycomb’s leading blacksmith in a misunderstanding
arising from the alleged wrongful detention of a mare, were imprudent enough to
do it in the presence of three witnesses, and insisted that the-son-of-a-bitch-had-itcoming-
to-him was a good enough defense for anybody.

Miss Blount, a native Maycombian as yet uninitiated in the mysteries of the
Decimal System, appeared at the door hands on hips and announced: “If I hear
another sound from this room I’ll burn up everybody in it.

They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of
the stores around it, took their time about everything.

Furthermore, I couldn’t help noticing
that my father had served for years in the state legislature, elected each time
without opposition, innocent of the adjustments my teachers thought essential to
the development of Good Citizenship.

Jem scooped up an armful of dirt, patted it into a mound on which he added
another load, and another until he had constructed a torso.

Walking toward the office, Dill and I fell into step behind Atticus and Jem. Dill
was encumbered by the chair, and his pace was slower.

“Well, the night of November twenty-one I was comin‘ in from the woods with a
load o’kindlin’ and just as I got to the fence I heard Mayella screamin‘ like a
stuck hog inside the house—”
Here Judge Taylor glanced sharply at the witness and must have decided his
speculations devoid of evil intent, for he subsided sleepily.

She identified him as the one, so I took him in.

There was no acknowledgement save he-en bouncing off the distant
schoolhouse wall.

Ground, sky and houses melted into a mad palette, my ears throbbed, I was
suffocating.

I could not remember when the lines above Atticus’s moving finger
separated into words, but I had stared at them all the evenings in my memory,
listening to the news of the day, Bills to Be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of
Lorenzo Dow—anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his
lap every night.

When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we
sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident.

You
look right puny for goin’ on seven.”

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.

We lived on the main residential street in town— Atticus, Jem and I, plus
Calpurnia our cook.

Her bottom plate was not in, and her upper lip protruded;
from time to time she would draw her nether lip to her upper plate and carry her
chin with it.

We squandered our first nickels on the House of Horrors, which
scared us not at all; we entered the black seventh-grade room and were led around
by the temporary ghoul in residence and were made to touch several objects
alleged to be component parts of a human being.

Miss Caroline walked up and down the rows peering and poking into lunch
containers, nodding if the contents pleased her, frowning a little at others.

Atticus’s office in the courthouse contained little more
than a hat rack, a spittoon, a checkerboard and an unsullied Code of Alabama.

“Have you ever considered that Jem doesn’t worry her half as much?”

Normally, they were the court’s only spectators, and today
they seemed resentful of the interruption of their comfortable routine.

Jem and I relaxed.

We were still equals.

Her voice soared over the clink of coffee cups
and the soft bovine sounds of the ladies munching their dainties.

Atticus picked up the Mobile Press and sat down in the rocking chair Jem had
vacated.

There was a marble-topped washstand by her bed; on it were a glass with a
teaspoon in it, a red ear syringe, a box of absorbent cotton, and a steel alarm clock
standing on three tiny legs.

I looked around and up at Mr. Cunningham, whose face was
equally impassive.

He evidently remembered he was engaged to me, for he ran back
out and kissed me swiftly in front of Jem. “Yawl write, hear?” he bawled after us.

Calpurnia bent down and kissed me.

I tried to explain to Atticus that it wasn’t so much what Francis said that had
infuriated me as the way he had said it.

You’re gonna
go to First Purchase with smiles on your faces.”

Conscious,” he smiled, “and cantankerous.

“Come on,” whispered Jem. We streaked across the square, across the street, until
we were in the shelter of the Jitney Jungle door.

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.

Thus the dicta No Crawford Minds His Own
Business, Every Third Merriweather Is Morbid, The Truth Is Not in the
Delafields, All the Bufords Walk Like That, were simply guides to daily living:
never take a check from a Delafield without a discreet call to the bank; Miss
Maudie Atkinson’s shoulder stoops because she was a Buford; if Mrs. Grace
Merriweather sips gin out of Lydia E. Pinkham bottles it’s nothing unusual—her
mother did the same.

It was obstreperous, disorderly and abusive—”
“You gonna give me a chance to tell you?

When we slowed to a walk at the edge of the schoolyard, Jem was
careful to explain that during school hours I was not to bother him, I was not to
approach him with requests to enact a chapter of Tarzan and the Ant Men, to
embarrass him with references to his private life, or tag along behind him at
recess and noon.

Jem and I relaxed.

Jem’s chin would come up, and he would gaze at Mrs. Dubose with a face devoid
of resentment.

Dill grabbed the clapper; in the silence that followed, I wished he’d start ringing it
again.

He examined
Walter with an air of speculation.

His cheeks were thin to hollowness; his mouth was
wide; there were shallow, almost delicate indentations at his temples, and his gray
eyes were so colorless I thought he was blind.

Atticus said the Ewells had been the disgrace of Maycomb for three generations.

I could see nothing in Mayella’s expression to justify Atticus’s assumption that he
had secured her wholehearted cooperation.

A tiny, almost invisible movement,
and the house was still.

“That was mighty generous of you, you had chores at home after your regular
work, didn’t you?”

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.

The class
murmured apprehensively, should she prove to harbor her share of the
peculiarities indigenous to that region.

Next day Jem repeated his vigil and was rewarded.

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.

She was furious, and when she was furious Calpurnia’s grammar became erratic.

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.

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.

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.

The place was self-sufficient:
modest in comparison with the empires around it, the Landing nevertheless
produced everything required to sustain life except ice, wheat flour, and articles
of clothing, supplied by river-boats from Mobile.

Aunt Alexandra composed herself for a two-hour nap and dared us
to make any noise in the yard, the neighborhood was resting.

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.

Nothing—it seems with all that you’d be proud of him.

After nine hours of listening to the eccentricities of Old Sarum’s
inhabitants, Judge Taylor threw the case out of court.