To Kill A Mockingbird

27

THINGS DID SETTLE down, after a fashion, as Atticus said they would. By the middle of October, only two small things out of the ordinary happened to two Maycomb citizens. No, there were three things, and they did not directly concern us – the Finches – but in a way they did.

The first thing was that Mr Bob Ewell acquired and lost a job in a matter of days and probably made himself unique in the annals of the nineteen-thirties: he was the only man I ever heard of who was fired from the WPA for laziness. I suppose his brief burst of fame brought on a briefer burst of industry, but his job lasted only as long as his notoriety: Mr Ewell found himself as forgotten as Tom Robinson. Thereafter, he resumed his regular weekly appearances at the welfare office for his cheque, and received it with no grace amid obscure mutterings that the bastards who thought they ran this town wouldn’t permit an honest man to make a living. Ruth Jones, the welfare lady, said Mr Ewell openly accused Atticus of getting his job. She was upset enough to walk down to Atticus’s office and tell him about it. Atticus told Miss Ruth not to fret, that if Bob Ewell wanted to discuss Atticus’s ‘getting’ his job, he knew the way to the office.

The second thing happened to Judge Taylor. Judge Taylor was not a Sunday-night churchgoer; Mrs Taylor was. Judge Taylor savoured his Sunday-night hour alone in his big house, and church-time found him holed up in his study reading the writings of Bob Taylor (no kin, but the judge would have been proud to claim it). One Sunday night, lost in fruity metaphors and florid diction, Judge Taylor’s attention was wrenched from the page by an irritating scratching noise. ‘Hush,’ he said to Ann Taylor, his fat nondescript dog. Then he realized he was speaking to an empty room; the scratching noise was coming from the rear of the house. Judge Taylor clumped to the back porch to let Ann out and found the screen door swinging open. A shadow on the corner of the house caught his eye, and that was all he saw of his visitor. Mrs Taylor came home from church to find her husband in his chair, lost in the writings of Bob Taylor, with a shotgun across his lap.

The third thing happened to Helen Robinson, Tom’s widow. If Mr Ewell was as forgotten as Tom Robinson, Tom Robinson was as forgotten as Boo Radley. But Tom was not forgotten by his employer, Mr Link Deas. Mr Link Deas made a job for Helen. He didn’t really need her, but he said he felt right bad about the way things turned out. I never knew who took care of her children while Helen was away. Calpurnia said it was hard on Helen, because she had to walk nearly a mile out of her way to avoid the Ewells, who, according to Helen, ‘chunked at her’ the first time she tried to use the public road. Mr Link Deas eventually received the impression that Helen was coming to work each morning from the wrong direction, and dragged the reason out of her. ‘Just let it be, Mr Link, please suh,’ Helen begged. ‘The hell I will,’ said Mr Link. He told her to come by his store that afternoon before she left. She did, and Mr Link closed his store, put his hat firmly on his head, and walked Helen home. He walked her the shortest way, by the Ewells’. On his way back, Mr Link stopped at the crazy gate.

‘Ewell?’ he called. ‘I say Ewell!’

The windows, normally packed with children, were empty.

‘I know every last one of you’s in there a-layin’ on the floor! Now hear me, Bob Ewell: if I hear one more peep outa my girl Helen about not bein’ able to walk this road, I’ll have you in jail before sundown!’ Mr Link spat in the dust and walked home.

Helen went to work next morning and used the public road. Nobody chunked at her, but when she was a few yards beyond the Ewell house, she looked around and saw Mr Ewell walking behind her. She turned and walked on, and Mr Ewell kept the same distance behind her until she reached Mr Link Deas’s house. All the way to the house, Helen said, she heard a soft voice behind her, crooning foul words. Thoroughly frightened, she telephoned Mr Link at his store, which was not too far from his house. As Mr Link came out of his store he saw Mr Ewell leaning on the fence. Mr Ewell said, ‘Don’t you look at me, Link Deas, like I was dirt. I ain’t jumped your –’

‘First thing you can do, Ewell, is get your stinkin’ carcass off my property. You’re leanin’ on it an I can’t afford fresh paint for it. Second thing you can do is stay away from my cook or I’ll have you up for assault –’

‘I ain’t touched her, Link Deas, and ain’t about to go with no nigger!’

‘You don’t have to touch her, all you have to do is make her afraid, an’ if assault ain’t enough to keep you locked up a while, I’ll get you on the Ladies’ Law, so get outa my sight! If you don’t think I mean it, just bother that girl again!’

Mr Ewell evidently thought he meant it, for Helen reported no further trouble.

‘I don’t like it, Atticus, I don’t like it at all,’ was Aunt Alexandra’s assessment of these events. ‘That man seems to have a permanent running grudge against everybody connected with that case. I know how that kind are about paying off grudges, but I don’t understand why he should harbour one – he had his way in court, didn’t he?’

‘I think I understand,’ said Atticus. ‘It might be because he knows in his heart that very few people in Maycomb really believe his and Mayella’s yarns. He thought he’d be a hero, but all he got for his pains was … was, okay, we’ll convict this Negro but get back to your dump. He’s had his fling with about everybody now, so he ought to be satisfied. He’ll settle down when the weather changes.’

‘But why should he try to burgle John Taylor’s house? He obviously didn’t know John was home or he wouldn’t’ve tried. Only lights John shows on Sunday nights are on the front porch and back in his den …’

‘You don’t know if Bob Ewell cut that screen, you don’t know who did it,’ said Atticus. ‘But I can guess. I proved him a liar, but John made him look like a fool. All the time Ewell was on the stand I couldn’t dare look at John and keep a straight face. John looked at him as if he were a three-legged chicken of a square egg. Don’t tell me judges don’t try to prejudice juries,’ Atticus chuckled.

By the end of October, our lives had become the familiar routine of school, play, study. Jem seemed to have put out of his mind whatever it was he wanted to forget, and our classmates mercifully let us forget our father’s eccentricities. Cecil Jacobs asked me one time if Atticus was a Radical. When I asked Atticus, Atticus was so amused I was rather annoyed, but he said he wasn’t laughing at me. He said, ‘You tell Cecil I’m about as radical as Cotton Tom Heflin.’

Aunt Alexandra was thriving. Miss Maudie must have silenced the whole Missionary Society at one blow, for Aunty again ruled the roost. Her refreshments grew even more delicious. I learned more about the poor Mrunas’ social life from listening to Mrs Merriweather: they had so little sense of family that the whole tribe was one big family. A child had as many fathers as there were men in the community, as many mothers as there were women. J. Grimes Everett was doing his utmost to change this state of affairs, and desperately needed our prayers.

Maycomb was itself again. Precisely the same as last year and the year before that, with only two minor changes. Firstly, people had removed from their store windows and automobiles the stickers that said NRA – WE DO OUR PART. I asked Atticus why, and he said it was because the National Recovery Act was dead. I asked who killed it; he said nine old men.

The second change in Maycomb since last year was not one of national significance. Until then, Halloween in Maycomb was a completely unorganized affair. Each child did what he wanted to do, with assistance from other children if there was anything to be moved, such as placing a light buggy on top of the livery stable. But parents thought things went too far last year, when the peace of Miss Tutti and Miss Frutti was shattered.

Misses Tutti and Frutti Barber were maiden ladies, sisters, who lived together in the only Maycomb residence boasting a cellar. The Barber ladies were rumoured to be Republicans, having migrated from Clanton, Alabama, in 1911. Their ways were strange to us, and why they wanted a cellar nobody knew, but they wanted one, and they dug one, and they spent the rest of their lives chasing generations of children out of it.

Misses Tutti and Frutti (their names were Sarah and Frances), aside from their Yankee ways, were both deaf. Miss Tutti denied it and lived in a world of silence, but Miss Frutti, not about to miss anything, employed an ear trumpet so enormous that Jem declared it was a loudspeaker from one of those dog Victrolas.

With these facts in mind and Halloween at hand, some wicked children had waited until the Misses Barber were thoroughly asleep, slipped into their living-room (nobody but the Radleys locked up at night), stealthily made away with every stick of furniture therein, and hid it in the cellar. I deny having taken part in such a thing.

‘I heard ’em!’ was the cry that awoke the Misses Barber’s neighbours at dawn next morning. ‘Heard ’em drive a truck up to the front door! Stomped around like horses. They’re in New Orleans by now!’

Miss Tutti was sure those travelling fur sellers who came through town two days ago had purloined their furniture. ‘Da-rk they were,’ she said. ‘Syrians.’

Mr Heck Tate was summoned. He surveyed the area and said he thought it was a local job. Miss Frutti said she’d know a Maycomb voice anywhere, and there were no Maycomb voices in that parlour last night – rolling their r’s all over her premises, they were. Nothing less than the bloodhounds must be used to locate their furniture. Miss Tutti insisted, so Mr Tate was obliged to go ten miles down the road, round up the country hounds, and put them on the trail.

Mr Tate started them off at the Misses Barber’s front steps, but all they did was run around to the back of the house and howl at the cellar door. When Mr Tate set them in motion three times, he finally guessed the truth. By noontime that day, there was not a barefooted child to be seen in Maycomb, and nobody took off his shoes until the hounds were returned.

So the Maycomb ladies said things would be different this year. The high-school auditorium would be open, there would be a pageant for the grown-ups; apple-bobbing, taffy-pulling, pinning the tail on the donkey for the children. There would also be a prize of twenty-five cents for the best Halloween costume, created by the wearer.

Jem and I both groaned. Not that we’d ever done anything, it was the principle of the thing. Jem considered himself too old for Halloween anyway; he said he wouldn’t be caught anywhere near the high school at something like that. Oh well, I thought, Atticus would take me.

I soon learned however, that my services would be required on stage that evening. Mrs Grace Merriweather had composed an original pageant entitled Maycomb County: Ad Astra Per Aspera, and I was to be a ham. She thought it would be adorable if some of the children were costumed to represent the county’s agricultural products. Cecil Jacobs would be dressed up to look like a cow; Agnes Boone would make a lovely butter-bean, another child would be a peanut, and on down the line until Mrs Merriweather’s imagination and the supply of children were exhausted.

Our only duties, as far as I could gather from our two rehearsals, were to enter from the stage left as Mrs Merriweather (not only the author, but the narrator) identified us. When she called out, ‘Pork’, that was my cue. 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.

My costume was not much of a problem. Mrs Crenshaw, the local seamstress, had as much imagination as Mrs Merriweather. Mrs Crenshaw took some chicken wire and bent it into the shape of a cured ham. This she covered with brown cloth, and painted it to resemble the original. I could duck under and someone would pull the contraption down over my head. It came almost to my knees. Mrs Crenshaw thoughtfully left two peepholes for me. She did a fine job: Jem said I looked exactly like a ham with legs. There were several discomforts, though: it was hot, it was a close fit: if my nose itched I couldn’t scratch it, and once inside I could not get out of it alone.

When Halloween came, I assumed that the whole family would be present to watch me perform, but I was disappointed. Atticus said as tactfully as he could that he just didn’t think he could stand a pageant tonight, he was all in. He had been in Montgomery for a week and had come home late that afternoon. He thought Jem might escort me if I asked him.

Aunt Alexandra said she just had to get to bed early, she’d been decorating the stage all afternoon and was worn out – she stopped short in the middle of her sentence. She closed her mouth, then opened it to say something, but no words came.

‘’s matter, Aunty?’ I asked.

‘Oh nothing, nothing,’ she said, ‘somebody just walked over my grave.’ She put away from her whatever it was that gave her a pin-prick of apprehension, and suggested that I give the family a preview in the living-room. So Jem squeezed me into my costume, stood at the living-room door, called out ‘Po-ork’, exactly as Mrs Merriweather would have done, and I marched in. Atticus and Aunt Alexandra were delighted.

I repeated my part for Calpurnia in the kitchen and she said I was wonderful. I wanted to go across the street to show Miss Maudie, but Jem said she’d probably be at the pageant anyway.

After that, it didn’t matter whether they went or not. Jem said he would take me. Thus began our longest journey together.