As the year passed, released from school thirty minutes before Jem, who had to stay until three o’clock, I ran by the Radley Place as fast as I could, not stopping until I reached the safety of our front porch. 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.
Two live oaks stood at the edge of the Radley lot; their roots reached out into the side-road and made it bumpy. Something about one of the trees attracted my attention.
Some tinfoil was sticking in a knot-hole just above my eye level, winking at me in the afternoon sun. I stood on tiptoe, hastily looked around once more, reached into the hole, and withdrew two pieces of chewing gum minus their outer wrappers.
My first impulse was to get it into my mouth as quickly as possible, but I remembered where I was. I ran home, and on our front porch I examined my loot.
The gum looked fresh. I sniffed it and it smelled all right. I licked it and waited for a while. When I did not die I crammed it into my mouth: Wrigley’s Double-Mint.
When Jem came home he asked me where I got such a wad. I told him I found it.
“Don’t eat things you find, Scout.”
“This wasn’t on the ground, it was in a tree.”
Jem growled.
“Well it was,” I said. “It was sticking in that tree yonder, the one comin‘ from school.”
“Spit it out right now!”
I spat it out. The tang was fading, anyway. “I’ve been chewin‘ it all afternoon and I ain’t dead yet, not even sick.”
Jem stamped his foot. “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to even touch the trees over there? You’ll get killed if you do!”
“You touched the house once!”
“That was different! You go gargle—right now, you hear me?”
“Ain’t neither, it’ll take the taste outa my mouth.”
“You don’t ‘n’ I’ll tell Calpurnia on you!”
Rather than risk a tangle with Calpurnia, I did as Jem told me. For some reason, my first year of school had wrought a great change in our relationship: Calpurnia’s tyranny, unfairness, and meddling in my business had faded to gentle grumblings of general disapproval. On my part, I went to much trouble, sometimes, not to provoke her.
Summer was on the way; Jem and I awaited it with impatience. 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 authorities released us early the last day of school, and Jem and I walked
home together. “Reckon old Dill’ll be coming home tomorrow,” I said.
“Probably day after,” said Jem. “Mis’sippi turns ‘em loose a day later.”
As we came to the live oaks at the Radley Place I raised my finger to point for the hundredth time to the knot-hole where I had found the chewing gum, trying to make Jem believe I had found it there, and found myself pointing at another piece of tinfoil.
“I see it, Scout! I see it-”
Jem looked around, reached up, and gingerly pocketed a tiny shiny package. We ran home, and on the front porch we looked at a small box patchworked with bits of tinfoil collected from chewing-gum wrappers. It was the kind of box wedding rings came in, purple velvet with a minute catch. Jem flicked open the tiny catch.
Inside were two scrubbed and polished pennies, one on top of the other. Jem examined them.
“Indian-heads,” he said. “Nineteen-six and Scout, one of em’s nineteen-hundred.
These are real old.”
“Nineteen-hundred,” I echoed. “Say-”
“Hush a minute, I’m thinkin‘.”
“Jem, you reckon that’s somebody’s hidin‘ place?”
“Naw, don’t anybody much but us pass by there, unless it’s some grown person’s-”
“Grown folks don’t have hidin‘ places. You reckon we ought to keep ’em, Jem?”
“I don’t know what we could do, Scout. Who’d we give ‘em back to? I know for a fact don’t anybody go by there—Cecil goes by the back street an’ all the way around by town to get home.”
Cecil Jacobs, who lived at the far end of our street next door to the post office, walked a total of one mile per school day to avoid the Radley Place and old Mrs.
Henry Lafayette Dubose. Mrs. Dubose lived two doors up the street from us; neighborhood opinion was unanimous that Mrs. Dubose was the meanest old woman who ever lived. Jem wouldn’t go by her place without Atticus beside him.
“What you reckon we oughta do, Jem?”
Finders were keepers unless title was proven. Plucking an occasional camellia, getting a squirt of hot milk from Miss Maudie Atkinson’s cow on a summer day, helping ourselves to someone’s scuppernongs was part of our ethical culture, but money was different.
“Tell you what,” said Jem. “We’ll keep ‘em till school starts, then go around and ask everybody if they’re theirs. They’re some bus child’s, maybe—he was too taken up with gettin’ outa school today an‘ forgot ’em. These are somebody’s, I know that. See how they’ve been slicked up? They’ve been saved.”
“Yeah, but why should somebody wanta put away chewing gum like that? You know it doesn’t last.”
