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

fruit into the schoolyard, but the nuts lay untouched by the children:
Radley pecans would kill you. A baseball hit into the Radley yard
was a lost ball and no questions asked.
The misery of that house began many years before Jem and I were
born. The Radleys, welcome anywhere in town, kept to themselves, a
predilection unforgivable in Maycomb. They did not go to church,
Maycomb's principal recreation, but worshiped at home; Mrs. Radley
seldom if ever crossed the street for a mid-morning coffee break
with her neighbors, and certainly never joined a missionary circle.
Mr. 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. I never knew
how old Mr. Radley made his living- Jem said he "bought cotton," a
polite term for doing nothing- but Mr. Radley and his wife had lived
there with their two sons as long as anybody could remember.
The shutters and doors of the Radley house were closed on Sundays,
another thing alien to Maycomb's ways: closed doors meant illness
and cold weather only. Of all days Sunday was the day for formal
afternoon visiting: ladies wore corsets, men wore coats, children wore
shoes. But to climb the Radley front steps and call, "He-y," of a
Sunday afternoon was something their neighbors never did. The Radley
house had no screen doors. I once asked Atticus if it ever had any;
Atticus said yes, but before I was born.
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. They did little, but enough to be discussed by the
town and publicly warned from three pulpits: they hung around the
barbershop; they rode the bus to Abbottsville on Sundays and went to
the picture show; they attended dances at the county's riverside
gambling hell, the Dew-Drop Inn & Fishing Camp; they experimented with
stumphole whiskey. Nobody in Maycomb had nerve enough to tell Mr.
Radley that his boy was in with the wrong crowd.
One night, in an excessive spurt of high spirits, the boys backed
around the square in a borrowed flivver, resisted arrest by
Maycomb's ancient beadle, Mr. Conner, and locked him in the courthouse
outhouse. The town decided something had to be done; Mr. Conner said
he knew who each and every one of them was, and he was bound and
determined they wouldn't get away with it, so the boys came before the
probate judge on charges of disorderly conduct, disturbing the
peace, assault and battery, and using abusive and profane language
in the presence and hearing of a female. The judge asked Mr. Conner
why he included the last charge; Mr. Conner said they cussed so loud
he was sure every lady in Maycomb heard them. 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. Mr.
Radley thought it was. If the judge released Arthur, Mr. Radley
would see to it that Arthur gave no further trouble. Knowing that