"Harper Lee - To Kill A Mockingbird" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lee Harper)

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