Blogging To Kill a Mockingbird: Part 4 (Chapters 5 and 6)

Chapter Five

As the summer moves forward, our three kids continue to hang out. Dill asks Scout to marry him and then, according to the Scout, starts to ignore her. She tries everything she can think of to regain his attention, including beating him up twice, but nothing seems to work. I doubt anybody is reading To Kill a Mockingbird for relationship advice, but if you are for some reason, be wary of following Dill's and Scout's examples. You probably shouldn’t ignore someone after proposing to her, or beat someone up after he proposes to you. But what do I know? Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

Feeling left out by the boys, Scout starts hanging out with Miss Maudie Atkinson. It might sound weird for a girl in elementary school to be hanging out with an elderly neighbor, but did I mention that Miss Maudie gives Scout freshly baked cake? Don’t you kind of want to hang out with Miss M. now?

During one conversation, Scout asks Maudie if she thinks that Boo Radley is still alive. Miss Maudie says Boo is in fact alive. She believes Boo is the victim of a harsh father who believes that pretty much everybody was going to hell. Some dads believe in tough love. It sounds like Mr. Radley believes in Ultimate Fighting-style love.

Mis Maudie says Boo was always polite and friendly as a kid.

Meanwhile, those two goofballs, Jem and Dill, write a note inviting Boo out to ice cream, and then stick the note on the window of the Radley Place with a fishing pole (which sounds really tough when you think about it). Atticus catches them and tells them to stop tormenting that man. This whole scene reads like something out of a comic strip in which Dill and Jem are surprised by Atticus, their hair frizzed out and squiggly panic lines shooting out of their heads.

I’m pretty sure that’s how Harper Lee would want me to describe this scene.

Chapter Six

Atticus’ message finally hits home, and the gang decides to leave Boo alone for good, with the exception of one more thing. On Dill’s last day in Maycomb, he and Jem plan to sneak over to Boo’s place and peek through a loose shutter on one of the closed-up windows. Not one to pass up an adventure like this, Scout decides to tag along.

Sure, there are plenty of things that could wrong here. However, what if Boo makes an even better cake than Miss Maudie? You didn’t think about that possibility, did you? See, these three are on the ball. You have to look at things from every perspective.

They're sneaking around the house when suddenly they’re scared by a shadow of a man with a hat on. The narrator isn’t very specific, but I know that I can create a shadow puppet that looks like a man wearing a hat, so maybe it was just that. As the kids run away, they hear a shotgun go off behind them.

Jem’s pants get caught when he tries to crawl under a fence, and he has to kick them off in order to free himself. It’s already pretty embarrassing to run away from a shadow puppet, but then to have to do it in your tighty-whities? That’s rough.

At home, the kids hear a bunch of grown-up gossip. Apparently Mr. Nathan Radley shot at “a Negro” in his yard (remember, this novel is set in a time before people were "PC," meaning "Pretty Conscious of not being huge racist jerks"). Mr. Radley is now waiting in his yard so that he can shoot at the next sound he hears.

Atticus, appropriately enough, is suspicious about why his son is no longer wearing pants. Thinking quickly, Dill says that he won Jem’s pants in a game of strip poker. This is a pretty terrible excuse for many reasons; if this strip poker story were real, wouldn’t Dill have Jem’s pants with him? Also, you’re nine. Luckily, Jem realizes this and tells Atticus that they were just playing with matches. Oh, good save, buddy. So we go from strip poker to playing with fire. Wanna throw burglary at a pants store or manslaughter of a tailor in here while you’re at it?

Later that night, Jem sneaks out to go retrieve the evidence from the Radley Place. You might expect this to be an interesting scene, but because Scout isn’t allowed to go, we don’t even get to see it.

The chapter ends there. I’m going to assume that Jem has not been shot.