Where is divinity mentioned in to kill a mockingbird

Dixie Howell popular University of Alabama football player in the s. In this case, Walter Cunningham is most likely in a dispute over who is rightful heir to a piece of property. Franklin stove a cast-iron heating stove resembling an open fireplace, named for Benjamin Franklin who invented it.

These humorous mystery stories were narrated by Seckatary Hawkins, the "seckatary" of a boy's club. Kudzu a fast-growing, hairy perennial vine of the pea family, with large, three-part leaves: sometimes planted in the South for soil stabilization or forage. Missouri Compromise a plan agreed upon by the United States Congress in to settle the debate over slavery in the Louisiana Purchase area.

The plan temporarily maintained the balance between free and slave states. Roosevelt Eleanor Roosevelt ; U. Roosevelt sought to assist the nation's economic recovery during the Great Depression. Conner why he included the last charge; Mr.

Conner said they cussed so loud he was sure every lady in Maycomb heard them. Braxton Underwood, who had been sitting quietly in a chair reserved for the Press, soaking up testimony with his sponge of a brain, allowed his bitter eyes to rove over the colored balcony, and they met mine. Miss Stephanie Crawford said he was so upright he took the word of God as his only law, and we believed her, because Mr.

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. Old Sarum, their stamping grounds , was populated by two families separate and apart in the beginning, but unfortunately bearing the same name. Tim was a liver-colored bird dog , the pet of Maycomb.

While he cleaned and bandaged my knuckles , he entertained me with a tale about a funny nearsighted old gentleman who had a cat named Hodge, and who counted all the cracks in the sidewalk when he went to town.

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. Instead of a column, a rough two-by-four supported one end of the roof. I pushed the pillow to the headboard and sat up. She was bullet-headed with strange almond-shaped eyes, straight nose, and an Indian-bow mouth.

He did have on a clean shirt and neatly mended overalls. He swung his legs over the railing and was sliding down a pillar when he slipped. I went to the back yard and found Jem plugging away at a tin can, which seemed stupid with all the bluejays around. A tiny , almost invisible movement, and the house was still. She eats all the leftover fingers and ears from the hospital. She put away from her whatever it was that gave her a pinprick of apprehension, and suggested that I give the family a preview in the livingroom.

Judge Taylor looked like most judges I had ever seen: amiable, white-haired, slightly ruddy-faced, he was a man who ran his court with an alarming informality—he sometimes propped his feet up, he often cleaned his fingernails with his pocket knife. She looked and smelled like a peppermint drop.

I could not put out my hands to stop, they were wedged between my chest and knees. Little Chuck brought water in a paper cup, and she drank it gratefully.

The air was so cold and clear we heard the courthouse clock clank, rattle and strain before it struck the hour. Francis had requested a pair of knee-pants, a red leather booksack, five shirts and an untied bow tie. We do know in part what Mr. Ewell did: he did what any God-fearing, persevering, respectable white man would do under the circumstances—he swore out a warrant, no doubt signing it with his left hand, and Tom Robinson now sits before you, having taken the oath with the only good hand he possesses—his right hand.

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.

We spat ourselves dry, and Jem opened the gate slowly, lifting it aside and resting it on the fence. I said what did you do, Stephanie, move over in the bed and make room for him? He evidently remembered he was engaged to me, for he ran back out and kissed me swiftly in front of Jem. When Mrs. Merriweather shook her head, her black curls jiggled. They were sullen-looking, sleepy-eyed men who seemed unused to late hours.

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. I had spent most of the day climbing up and down, running errands for him, providing him with literature, nourishment and water, and was carrying him blankets for the night when Atticus said if I paid no attention to him, Jem would come down.

When Walter caught up with us, Jem made pleasant conversation with him. Jem was standing beside Atticus, groggy and tousled. The moment she was out of sight Francis came out head up and grinning. He covered the courthouse and jailhouse news simply by looking out his upstairs window. Of all days Sunday was the day for formal afternoon visiting: ladies wore corsets , men wore coats, children wore shoes.

His neck was dark gray, the backs of his hands were rusty , and his fingernails were black deep into the quick. A small patch of earth beneath its branches was packed hard from many fights and furtive crap games.

How would we like it if Atticus barged in on us without knocking, when we were in our rooms at night? From the other side, however, Greek revival columns clashed with a big nineteenth-century clock tower housing a rusty unreliable instrument, a view indicating a people determined to preserve every physical scrap of the past. The more we told Dill about the Radleys, the more he wanted to know, the longer he would stand hugging the light-pole on the corner, the more he would wonder.

Through the door I could see Jem on the sofa with a football magazine in front of his face, his head turning as if its pages contained a live tennis match. Jem parceled out our roles: I was Mrs. Radley, and all I had to do was come out and sweep the porch. The town decided something had to be done ; Mr.

The kitchen table was loaded with enough food to bury the family: hunks of salt pork, tomatoes, beans, even scuppernongs. Avery averaged a stick of stovewood per week; he honed it down to a toothpick and chewed it. Gilmer interrupted with an objection: he was not irrelevant or immaterial, but Atticus was browbeating the witness. We were far too old to settle an argument with a fist- fight , so we consulted Atticus.

Miss Maudie straightened up and looked toward me. Apparently she had revived enough to persevere in her profession. Saved by the bell, Miss Caroline watched the class file out for lunch.

She picked up the limp sprout and squeezed her thumb up its tiny stalk. Jem had probably stood as much guff about Atticus lawing for niggers as had I, and I took it for granted that he kept his temper—he had a naturally tranquil disposition and a slow fuse. Besides , Boo could not live forever on the bounty of the county. This was a group of white-shirted, khaki- trousered , suspendered old men who had spent their lives doing nothing and passed their twilight days doing same on pine benches under the live oaks on the square.

Jem gulped like a goldfish, hunched his shoulders and twitched his torso. The old house was the same, droopy and sick, but as we stared down the street we thought we saw an inside shutter move. We left the corner, crossed the side street that ran in front of the Radley house, and stopped at the gate. 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.

He was middle -aged then, she was fifteen years his junior. He had a pink face and a big stomach below his belt. I got separated from Jem and Dill, but made my way toward the wall by the stairwell , knowing Jem would come for me eventually. Radley shot at a Negro in his collard patch. Why she frowned when a child recited from The Grit Paper I never knew, but in some way it was associated with liking fiddling, eating syrupy biscuits for lunch, being a holy-roller, singing Sweetly Sings the Donkey and pronouncing it dunkey, all of which the state paid teachers to discourage.

Dill punched my shoulder, and we lowered him to the ground. The varmints had a lean time of it, for the Ewells gave the dump a thorough gleaning every day, and the fruits of their industry those that were not eaten made the plot of ground around the cabin look like the playhouse of an insane child: what passed for a fence was bits of tree-limbs, broomsticks and tool shafts, all tipped with rusty hammer-heads, snaggle-toothed rake heads, shovels, axes and grubbing hoes, held on with pieces of barbed wire.

The fence enclosed a large garden and a narrow wooden outhouse. Calpurnia rinsed her hands and followed Jem into the yard. It was dim inside, with a damp coolness slowly dispelled by the gathering congregation. I never knew how old Mr. Radley and his wife had lived there with their two sons as long as anybody could remember. I climbed into the back seat of the car without saying good-bye to anyone, and at home I ran to my room and slammed the door.

Along its walls unlighted kerosene lamps hung on brass brackets; pine benches served as pews. 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. Against the fence, in a line, were six chipped-enamel slop jars holding brilliant red geraniums , cared for as tenderly as if they belonged to Miss Maudie Atkinson, had Miss Maudie deigned to permit a geranium on her premises.

From somewhere near by came scuffling , kicking sounds, sounds of shoes and flesh scraping dirt and roots. Jem went in grinning, and Calpurnia nodded tacit consent to having Dill in to supper.

Uncle Jack Finch confined his passion for digging to his window boxes in Nashville and stayed rich. By the time we reached our front steps Walter had forgotten he was a Cunningham. After consulting a tree to ascertain from its lichen which way was south, and taking no lip from the subordinates who ventured to correct him, Colonel Maycomb set out on a purposeful journey to rout the enemy and entangled his troops so far northwest in the forest primeval that they were eventually rescued by settlers moving inland.

Underwood to be an intense, profane little man, whose father in a fey fit of humor christened Braxton Bragg, a name Mr. It was the kind of box wedding rings came in , purple velvet with a minute catch.

He remembered her clearly, and sometimes in the middle of a game he would sigh at length, then go off and play by himself behind the car -house. If he held his mouth right, Mr. Cunningham could get a WPA job, but his land would go to ruin if he left it, and he was willing to go hungry to keep his land and vote as he pleased.

Some tinfoil was sticking in a knot- hole just above my eye level, winking at me in the afternoon sun. I giggled at the thought of Jem in an apron. I returned to school and hated Calpurnia steadily until a sudden shriek shattered my resentments. His car door slammed and he drove away.

She had never told on us, had never played cat-and-mouse with us, she was not at all interested in our private lives. Atticus sat down in the swing and crossed his legs. Starkly out of place in a town of square-faced stores and steep-roofed houses, the Maycomb jail was a miniature Gothic joke one cell wide and two cells high, complete with tiny battlements and flying buttresses. She owned a bright green square Buick and a black chauffeur, both kept in an unhealthy state of tidiness , but today they were nowhere to be seen.

Before Jem went to his room, he looked for a long time at the Radley Place. Rather than risk a tangle with Calpurnia, I did as Jem told me. He trudged along, dragging the pole behind him on the sidewalk. Jem arbitrated, awarded me first push with an extra time for Dill, and I folded myself inside the tire.

They wore cotton sunbonnets and dresses with long sleeves. His mouth was twisted into a purposeful half-grin, and his eyes happy about, and he said something about corroborating evidence, which made me sure he was showing off.

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 could only hope that Jem would outrun the tire and me, or that I would be stopped by a bump in the sidewalk.

He always spoke nicely to me, no matter what folks said he did. We had gone about five hundred yards beyond the Radley Place when I noticed Jem squinting at something down the street. Jem was talking in an unhurried, flat toneless voice. He flung open the gate, danced Dill and me through, and shooed us between two rows of swishing collards.

Tim Johnson was not much more than a speck in the distance, but he was closer to us. Perkins, that J. Grimes Everett is a martyred saint, he… needed to get married so they ran… to the beauty parlor every Saturday afternoon… soon as the sun goes down.

An oppressive odor met us when we crossed the threshold, an odor I had met many times in rain-rotted gray houses where there are coal-oil lamps, water dippers, and unbleached domestic sheets. His eyebrows were becoming heavier, and I noticed a new slimness about his body. It was the kind of box wedding rings came in, purple velvet with a minute catch. The high school building had a wide downstairs hallway; people milled around booths that had been installed along each side. Fans crackled, feet shuffled, tobacco- chewers were in agony.

Boo had drifted to a corner of the room, where he stood with his chin up , peering from a distance at Jem. I took him by the hand, a hand surprisingly warm for its whiteness. Dill stretched, yawned, and said altogether too casually. It was clear enough to the rest of us: Walter Cunningham was sitting there lying his head off. She made the best cakes in the neighborhood.

We had slowed to a cautious gait, and were feeling our way forward so as not to bump into the tree. When we reached the auditorium, the whole town was there except Atticus and the ladies worn out from decorating, and the usual outcasts and shut-ins. There he would stand, his arm around the fat pole, staring and wondering. 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.

Had I ever harbored the mystical notions about mountains that seem to obsess lawyers and judges, Aunt Alexandra would have been analogous to Mount Everest : throughout my early life, she was cold and there. Next morning I awoke , looked out the window and nearly died of fright.

Her Missionary Society refreshments added to her reputation as a hostess she did not permit Calpurnia to make the delicacies required to sustain the Society through long reports on Rice Christians ; she joined and became Secretary of the Maycomb Amanuensis Club. 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. When Jem came home he asked me where I got such a wad.

There was indeed a caste system in Maycomb, but to my mind it worked this way: the older citizens, the present generation of people who had lived side by side for years and years, were utterly predictable to one another: they took for granted attitudes, character shadings, even gestures, as having been repeated in each generation and refined by time. Whoever it was wore thick cotton pants; what I thought were trees rustling was the soft swish of cotton on cotton, wheek, wheek, with every step.

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 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. I liked his smell: it was of leather, horses, cottonseed. 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. Atticus seemed to have forgotten my noontime fall from grace ; he was full of questions about school.

During a controversy of this character, Jeems Cunningham testified that his mother spelled it Cunningham on deeds and things, but she was really a Coningham, she was an uncertain speller , a seldom reader, and was given to looking far away sometimes when she sat on the front gallery in the evening. He fingered the straps of his overalls, nervously picking at the metal hooks. As a result the town remained the same size for a hundred years, an island in a patchwork sea of cottonfields and timberland.

Smugness faded from it, replaced by a dogged earnestness that fooled Judge Taylor not at all: as long as Mr. Ewell was on the stand, the judge kept his eyes on him, as if daring him to make a false move. We looked at her in surprise , for Calpurnia rarely commented on the ways of white people.

We went by Mrs. The Radleys, welcome anywhere in town, kept to themselves, a predilection unforgivable in Maycomb. The high-school auditorium would be open, there would be a pageant for the grown-ups; applebobbing, taffy -pulling, pinning the tail on the donkey for the children.

A storm of laughter broke loose when it finally occurred to the class that Miss Caroline had whipped me. When Uncle Jack caught me, he kept me laughing about a preacher who hated going to church so much that every day he stood at his gate in his dressing-gown, smoking a hookah and delivering five-minute sermons to any passers-by who desired spiritual comfort.

He searched the scalp above his forehead, located his guest and pinched it between his thumb and forefinger. Are you going to take out your disapproval on his children? You might hear some ugly talk about it at school, but do one thing for me if you will: you just hold your head high and keep those fists down. Atticus summoned Calpurnia, who returned bearing the syrup pitcher. Some tinfoil was sticking in a knot -hole just above my eye level, winking at me in the afternoon sun.

The Governor was eager to scrape a few barnacles off the ship of state; there were sit-down strikes in Birmingham ; bread lines in the cities grew longer, people in the country grew poorer. Although her fits had passed off, she was in every other way her old self: when Sir Walter Scott became involved in lengthy descriptions of moats and castles, Mrs. Jem ran to the back yard, produced the garden hoe and began digging quickly behind the woodpile, placing any worms he found to one side.

Aunt Alexandra ministered to Francis, wiping his tears away with her handkerchief , rubbing his hair, patting his cheek. Mayella sniffed wrathfully and looked at Atticus.

Her hands were knobby , and the cuticles were grown up over her fingernails. His voice had lost its aridity , its detachment, and he was talking to the jury as if they were folks on the post office corner.

And so they went, down the row of laughing women, around the diningroom, refilling coffee cups, dishing out goodies as though their only regret was the temporary domestic disaster of losing Calpurnia. In this matter we were lucky to have Dill.

Old Testament Moses' successor who led the Israelites into the Promised Land; best remembered for his destruction of Jericho. She left the room and returned with a purple-covered book on which Meditations of Joshua S. Clair was stamped in gold. We asked Miss Maudie to elucidate: she said Miss Stephanie seemed to know so much about the case she might as well be called on to testify.

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. Judge Taylor told the reporter to expunge anything he happened to have written down after Mr.

Bam , bam, bam, and the checkerboard was swept clean of my men. She was very old; she spent most of each day in bed and the rest of it in a wheelchair. When Aunt Alexandra went to school, self-doubt could not be found in any textbook, so she knew not its meaning. I knew I had annoyed Miss Caroline, so I let well enough alone and stared out the window until recess when Jem cut me from the covey of first-graders in the schoolyard. They worked in pajama tops and nightshirts stuffed into their pants, but I became aware that I was slowly freezing where I stood.

He reached into his coat pocket and brought out some snapshots. He was a thin leathery man with colorless eyes, so colorless they did not reflect light. Crenshaw thoughtfully left two peepholes for me. I kept a fire in there last night for my potted plants. I watched him making jabbing motions for so long, I abandoned my post and went to him. Their sister Alexandra was the Finch who remained at the Landing: she married a taciturn man who spent most of his time lying in a hammock by the river wondering if his trot -lines were full.

Louis and stuck to his story regardless of threats. Conner, and locked him in the courthouse outhouse. Grace Merriweather sips gin out of Lydia E. His neck was dark gray, the backs of his hands were rusty, and his fingernails were black deep into the quick. Jem, educated on a half-Decimal half- Duncecap basis, seemed to function effectively alone or in a group, but Jem was a poor example: no tutorial system devised by man could have stopped him from getting at books. He was sitting behind his table; his chair was skewed to one side, his legs were crossed and one arm was resting on the back of his chair.

He sent them packing next day armed with their charts and five quarts of shinny in their saddlebags — two apiece and one for the Governor. She also wore high-heeled pumps and a red-and-white-striped dress. We looked at her in surprise, for Calpurnia rarely commented on the ways of white people. As Judge Taylor banged his gavel, Mr. Ewell was sitting smugly in the witness chair, surveying his handiwork.

Jem felt his age and gravitated to the adults , leaving me to entertain our cousin. I was trying to fight down the automatic terror rising in me. His fingers found the front doorknob. Jem gulped down his second glassful and slapped his chest.

She was pretty well beat up , but I heaved her to her feet and she washed her face in a bucket in the corner and said she was all right. One afternoon as I raced by, something caught my eye and caught it in such a way that I took a deep breath, a long look around, and went back.

The old men ahead of them would take most of the standing room. The Radley Place jutted into a sharp curve beyond our house. The auditorium was filling with people; the Maycomb County High School band had assembled in front below the stage; the stage footlights were on and the red velvet curtain rippled and billowed from the scurrying going on behind it.

When the men attached its hose to a hydrant, the hose burst and water shot up, tinkling down on the pavement. Heck Tate sat looking intently at Boo through his horn-rimmed glasses.

When it comes fall this dries up and the wind blows it all over Maycomb County! But Cecil said his mother said it was unsanitary to eat after folks. A flip of the coin revealed the uncompromising lineaments of Aunt Alexandra and Francis. He seemed uncomfortable; he cleared his throat and looked away. The big man blinked and hooked his thumbs in his overall straps.

Two live oaks stood at the edge of the Radley lot; their roots reached out into the side-road and made it bumpy. I could not remember not being able to read hymns. What Jem called the Dewey Decimal System was school-wide by the end of my first year, so I had no chance to compare it with other teaching techniques. A minute later, nerves still tingling , Jem and I were on the sidewalk headed for home.

Jem read for perhaps twenty minutes, during which time I looked at the soot-stained mantelpiece , out the window, anywhere to keep from looking at her. Think maybe I can make it stick on the window sill , at least. Jem was the product of their first year of marriage; four years later I was born, and two years later our mother died from a sudden heart attack. Old Sarum, their stamping grounds, was populated by two families separate and apart in the beginning, but unfortunately bearing the same name.

Atticus kept us in fits that evening, gravely reading columns of print about a man who sat on a flagpole for no discernible reason, which was reason enough for Jem to spend the following Saturday aloft in the treehouse. It was all right for Miss Maudie to talk—she was old and snug on her porch. Miss Caroline seemed unaware that the ragged, denim-shirted and floursack-skirted first grade, most of whom had chopped cotton and fed hogs from the time they were able to walk, were immune to imaginative literature.

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. With one phrase he had turned happy picknickers into a sulky , tense, murmuring crowd, being slowly hypnotized by gavel taps lessening in intensity until the only sound in the courtroom was a dim pink-pinkpink: the judge might have been rapping the bench with a pencil.

A thin man in khaki pants came up the aisle and deposited a coin. When she drew it away, it trailed a long silver thread of saliva.

Inside, surrounded by wads of damp cotton, was a white, waxy, perfect camellia. She had put so much starch in my dress it came up like a tent when I sat down.

She had been with us ever since Jem was born , and I had felt her tyrannical presence as long as I could remember. He walked erratically , as if his right legs were shorter than his left legs. When they saw Jem and me with Calpurnia, the men stepped back and took off their hats; the women crossed their arms at their waists, weekday gestures of respectful attention. A network of tiny lines crisscrossed her palms, brown with dirt and dried blood. Today she had antagonized Jem for nearly two hours with no intention of having a fit , and I felt hopelessly trapped.

He walked quickly, but I thought he moved like an underwater swimmer: time had slowed to a nauseating crawl. He was worn out , dirty beyond belief, and home. 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. As the Cunninghams had no money to pay a lawyer, they simply paid us with what they had. There were six bedrooms upstairs, four for the eight female children, one for Welcome Finch, the sole son, and one for visiting relatives.

A balding, smooth-faced man, he could have been anywhere between forty and sixty. 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. Jem and I would listen respectfully to Atticus and Cousin Ike rehash the war. Miss Caroline caught me writing and told me to tell my father to stop teaching me. Molasses buckets appeared from nowhere, and the ceiling danced with metallic light.

Jem, naturally, was Boo: he went under the front steps and shrieked and howled from time to time. Jem sat from after breakfast until sunset and would have remained overnight had not Atticus severed his supply lines. My arms were beginning to tingle, and they were red with small hexagonal marks. Ewell wrote on the back of the envelope and looked up complacently to see Judge Taylor staring at him as if he were some fragrant gardenia in full bloom on the witness stand, to see Mr.

Gilmer half-sitting, half-standing at his table. Dill took a piece of paper from his pocket and gave it to Jem. The three of us walked cautiously toward the old house. Lightning rods guarding some graves denoted dead who rested uneasily; stumps of burned-out candles stood at the heads of infant graves. No, only last summer—no, summer before last, when… time was playing tricks on me.

I returned and gazed around the curve at the empty road. Out there in J. Jem said if we waited until it snowed some more we could scrape it all up for a snowman.

Below us, heads turned, feet scraped the floor, babies were shifted to shoulders, and a few children scampered out of the courtroom. If the remainder of the school year were as fraught with drama as the first day, perhaps it would be mildly entertaining, but the prospect of spending nine months refraining from reading and writing made me think of running away.

We ran home, and on the front porch we looked at a small box patchworked with bits of tinfoil collected from chewing-gum wrappers. He seemed surprised when he saw most of the back yard in the front yard, but he said we had done a jim-dandy job. Old Mrs. Radley died that winter, but her death caused hardly a ripple —the neighborhood seldom saw her, except when she watered her cannas. There was a long jagged scar that ran across his face; what teeth he had were yellow and rotten; his eyes popped, and he drooled most of the time.

He pushed back my bangs and looked at me. Tate handed the rifle to Atticus; Jem and I nearly fainted. Rain- rotted shingles drooped over the eaves of the veranda; oak trees kept the sun away. No one had noticed him, probably, because Miss Caroline and I had entertained the class most of the morning. Jem skipped two steps , put his foot on the porch, heaved himself to it, and teetered a long moment. I thought I had made things sufficiently clear.

No comment seemed to be expected of us, and the class received these impressionistic revelations in silence. At first we saw nothing but a kudzu- covered front porch, but a closer inspection revealed an arc of water descending from the leaves and splashing in the yellow circle of the street light, some ten feet from source to earth, it seemed to us.

Best way to clear the air is to have it all out in the open. To reach the courtroom, on the second floor, one passed sundry sunless county cubbyholes: the tax assessor, the tax collector, the county clerk, the county solicitor, the circuit clerk, the judge of probate lived in cool dim hutches that smelled of decaying record books mingled with old damp cement and stale urine.

Merriweather galloped to me, reshaped the chicken wire, and thrust me inside. We lived on the main residential street in town— Atticus, Jem and I, plus Calpurnia our cook. Someday , maybe, Scout can thank him for covering her up. When it's time to go home, Scout tells Jem that she would rather leave her costume on than have to face people, and they head for home with Jem guiding Scout. Jem hears something unusual and tells Scout to be very quiet. Suddenly, a scuffle occurs.

Scout hears Jem scream, and then steel-like arms begin crushing her inside the costume. Someone — Scout assumes it's Jem — pulls the attacker off her. Scout calls for Jem but gets no answer other than heavy breathing. She heads toward the breath sounds, feeling for Jem.

When she touches the man's stubble, she knows he isn't Jem. Scout works to reorient herself and finally sees a strange man carrying Jem to their front door. Aunt Alexandra calls for the doctor, and Atticus calls for the sheriff. Scout fears that Jem is dead, but Aunt Alexandra tells her that he's only unconscious as she works to disentangle Scout from the chicken wire.

With Atticus is the man who brought Jem home. Scout has never seen him before. Sheriff Tate then announces that he found Bob Ewell dead under the tree where Scout and Jem were attacked. These two chapters comprise the novel's climax.

Lee sets everything up beautifully by turning the story into a mystery of sorts, using foreshadowing to provide the reader with clues to the resolution. The foreshadowing begins when Scout says that three things of interest happened during the fall that "did not directly concern us — the Finches — but in a way they did. He loses another job, and he tries to break into Judge Taylor's house.

Ewell also makes it nearly impossible for Helen Robinson to get to work.