his aunt, Miss Rachel, and would be spending every summer in Maycomb
from now on. His family was from Maycomb County originally, his mother
worked for a photographer in Meridian, had entered his picture in a
Beautiful Child contest and won five dollars. She gave the money to
Dill, who went to the picture show twenty times on it.
"Don't have any picture shows here, except Jesus ones in the
courthouse sometimes," said Jem. "Ever see anything good?"
Dill had seen Dracula, * a revelation that moved Jem to eye him
with the beginning of respect. "Tell it to us," he said.
* In DOS versions italicized text is enclosed in chevrons.
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
