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(영미 명작 감상) 2023. 06. 17. 제 41차
To kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
강사 : 김용동 선생
Chapter 21
She stopped shyly at the railing and waited to get Judge Taylor’s attention. She
was in a fresh apron and she carried an envelope in her hand.
Judge Taylor saw her and said, “It’s Calpurnia, isn’t it?”
“Yes sir,” she said. “Could I just pass this note to Mr. Finch, please sir? It hasn’t
got anything to do with—with the trial.”
Judge Taylor nodded and Atticus took the envelope from Calpurnia. He opened it,
read its contents and said, “Judge, I—this note is from my sister. She says my
children are missing, haven’t turned up since noon... I... could you—”
“I know where they are, Atticus.” Mr. Underwood spoke up. “They’re right up
yonder in the colored balcony—been there since precisely one-eighteen P.M.”
Our father turned around and looked up. “Jem, come down from there,” he called.
Then he said something to the Judge we didn’t hear. We climbed across Reverend
Sykes and made our way to the staircase.
Atticus and Calpurnia met us downstairs. Calpurnia looked peeved, but Atticus
looked exhausted.
Jem was jumping in excitement. “We’ve won, haven’t we?”
“I’ve no idea,” said Atticus shortly. “You’ve been here all afternoon? Go home
with Calpurnia and get your supper—and stay home.”
“Aw, Atticus, let us come back,” pleaded Jem. “Please let us hear the verdict,
please sir.”
“The jury might be out and back in a minute, we don’t know—” but we could tell
Atticus was relenting. “Well, you’ve heard it all, so you might as well hear the
rest. Tell you what, you all can come back when you’ve eaten your supper—eat
slowly, now, you won’t miss anything important—and if the jury’s still out, you
can wait with us. But I expect it’ll be over before you get back.”
“You think they’ll acquit him that fast?” asked Jem.
Atticus opened his mouth to answer, but shut it and left us.
I prayed that Reverend Sykes would save our seats for us, but stopped praying
when I remembered that people got up and left in droves when the jury was out—
tonight, they’d overrun the drugstore, the O.K. Café and the hotel, that is, unless
they had brought their suppers too.
Calpurnia marched us home: “—skin every one of you alive, the very idea, you
children listenin‘ to all that! Mister Jem, don’t you know better’n to take your
little sister to that trial? Miss Alexandra’ll absolutely have a stroke of paralysis
when she finds out! Ain’t fittin’ for children to hear...”
The streetlights were on, and we glimpsed Calpurnia’s indignant profile as we
passed beneath them. “Mister Jem, I thought you was gettin‘ some kinda head on
your shoulders—the very idea, she’s your little sister! The very idea, sir! You
oughta be perfectly ashamed of yourself—ain’t you got any sense at all?”
I was exhilarated. So many things had happened so fast I felt it would take years
to sort them out, and now here was Calpurnia giving her precious Jem down the
country—what new marvels would the evening bring?
Jem was chuckling. “Don’t you want to hear about it, Cal?”
“Hush your mouth, sir! When you oughta be hangin‘ your head in shame you go
along laughin’—” Calpurnia revived a series of rusty threats that moved Jem to
little remorse, and she sailed up the front steps with her classic, “If Mr. Finch
don’t wear you out, I will—get in that house, sir!”
Jem went in grinning, and Calpurnia nodded tacit consent to having Dill in to
supper. “You all call Miss Rachel right now and tell her where you are,” she told
him. “She’s run distracted lookin‘ for you—you watch out she don’t ship you
back to Meridian first thing in the mornin’.”
Aunt Alexandra met us and nearly fainted when Calpurnia told her where we
were. I guess it hurt her when we told her Atticus said we could go back, because
she didn’t say a word during supper. She just rearranged food on her plate,
looking at it sadly while Calpurnia served Jem, Dill and me with a vengeance.
Calpurnia poured milk, dished out potato salad and ham, muttering, “‘shamed of
yourselves,” in varying degrees of intensity. “Now you all eat slow,” was her final
command.
Reverend Sykes had saved our places. We were surprised to find that we had been
gone nearly an hour, and were equally surprised to find the courtroom exactly as
we had left it, with minor changes: the jury box was empty, the defendant was
gone; Judge Taylor had been gone, but he reappeared as we were seating
ourselves.
“Nobody’s moved, hardly,” said Jem.
“They moved around some when the jury went out,” said Reverend Sykes. “The
menfolk down there got the womenfolk their suppers, and they fed their babies.”
“How long have they been out?” asked Jem.
“‘bout thirty minutes. Mr. Finch and Mr. Gilmer did some more talkin’, and Judge
Taylor charged the jury.”
“How was he?” asked Jem.
“What say? Oh, he did right well. I ain’t complainin‘ one bit—he was mighty fair-
minded. He sorta said if you believe this, then you’ll have to return one verdict,
but if you believe this, you’ll have to return another one. I thought he was leanin’
a little to our side—” Reverend Sykes scratched his head.
Jem smiled. “He’s not supposed to lean, Reverend, but don’t fret, we’ve won it,”
he said wisely. “Don’t see how any jury could convict on what we heard—”
“Now don’t you be so confident, Mr. Jem, I ain’t ever seen any jury decide in
favor of a colored man over a white man...” But Jem took exception to Reverend
Sykes, and we were subjected to a lengthy review of the evidence with Jem’s
ideas on the law regarding rape: it wasn’t rape if she let you, but she had to be
eighteen—in Alabama, that is—and Mayella was nineteen. Apparently you had to
kick and holler, you had to be overpowered and stomped on, preferably knocked
stone cold. If you were under eighteen, you didn’t have to go through all this.
“Mr. Jem,” Reverend Sykes demurred, “this ain’t a polite thing for little ladies to
hear...”
“Aw, she doesn’t know what we’re talkin‘ about,” said Jem. “Scout, this is too
old for you, ain’t it?”
“It most certainly is not, I know every word you’re saying.” Perhaps I was too
convincing, because Jem hushed and never discussed the subject again.
“What time is it, Reverend?” he asked.
“Gettin‘ on toward eight.”
I looked down and saw Atticus strolling around with his hands in his pockets: he
made a tour of the windows, then walked by the railing over to the jury box. He
looked in it, inspected Judge Taylor on his throne, then went back to where he
started. I caught his eye and waved to him. He acknowledged my salute with a
nod, and resumed his tour.
Mr. Gilmer was standing at the windows talking to Mr. Underwood. Bert, the
court reporter, was chain-smoking: he sat back with his feet on the table.
But the officers of the court, the ones present—Atticus, Mr. Gilmer, Judge Taylor
sound asleep, and Bert, were the only ones whose behavior seemed normal. I had
never seen a packed courtroom so still. Sometimes a baby would cry out fretfully,
and a child would scurry out, but the grown people sat as if they were in church.
In the balcony, the Negroes sat and stood around us with biblical patience.
The old courthouse clock suffered its preliminary strain and struck the hour, eight
deafening bongs that shook our bones.
When it bonged eleven times I was past feeling: tired from fighting sleep, I
allowed myself a short nap against Reverend Sykes’s comfortable arm and
shoulder. I jerked awake and made an honest effort to remain so, by looking down
and concentrating on the heads below: there were sixteen bald ones, fourteen men
that could pass for redheads, forty heads varying between brown and black, and—
I remembered something Jem had once explained to me when he went through a
brief period of psychical research: he said if enough people—a stadium full,
maybe—were to concentrate on one thing, such as setting a tree afire in the
woods, that the tree would ignite of its own accord. I toyed with the idea of asking
everyone below to concentrate on setting Tom Robinson free, but thought if they
were as tired as I, it wouldn’t work.
Dill was sound asleep, his head on Jem’s shoulder, and Jem was quiet.
“Ain’t it a long time?” I asked him.
“Sure is, Scout,” he said happily.
“Well, from the way you put it, it’d just take five minutes.”
Jem raised his eyebrows. “There are things you don’t understand,” he said, and I
was too weary to argue.
But I must have been reasonably awake, or I would not have received the
impression that was creeping into me. It was not unlike one I had last winter, and
I shivered, though the night was hot. The feeling grew until the atmosphere in the
courtroom was exactly the same as a cold February morning, when the
mockingbirds were still, and the carpenters had stopped hammering on Miss
Maudie’s new house, and every wood door in the neighborhood was shut as tight
as the doors of the Radley Place. A deserted, waiting, empty street, and the
courtroom was packed with people. A steaming summer night was no different
from a winter morning. Mr. Heck Tate, who had entered the courtroom and was
talking to Atticus, might have been wearing his high boots and lumber jacket.
Atticus had stopped his tranquil journey and had put his foot onto the bottom rung
of a chair; as he listened to what Mr. Tate was saying, he ran his hand slowly up
and down his thigh. I expected Mr. Tate to say any minute, “Take him, Mr.
Finch...”
But Mr. Tate said, “This court will come to order,” in a voice that rang with
authority, and the heads below us jerked up. Mr. Tate left the room and returned
with Tom Robinson. He steered Tom to his place beside Atticus, and stood there.
Judge Taylor had roused himself to sudden alertness and was sitting up straight,
looking at the empty jury box.
What happened after that had a dreamlike quality: in a dream I saw the jury
return, moving like underwater swimmers, and Judge Taylor’s voice came from
far away and was tiny. I saw something only a lawyer’s child could be expected
to see, could be expected to watch for, and it was like watching Atticus walk into
the street, raise a rifle to his shoulder and pull the trigger, but watching all the
time knowing that the gun was empty.
A jury never looks at a defendant it has convicted, and when this jury came in, not
one of them looked at Tom Robinson. The foreman handed a piece of paper to
Mr. Tate who handed it to the clerk who handed it to the judge...
I shut my eyes. Judge Taylor was polling the jury: “Guilty... guilty... guilty...
guilty...” I peeked at Jem: his hands were white from gripping the balcony rail,
and his shoulders jerked as if each “guilty” was a separate stab between them.
Judge Taylor was saying something. His gavel was in his fist, but he wasn’t using
it. Dimly, I saw Atticus pushing papers from the table into his briefcase. He
snapped it shut, went to the court reporter and said something, nodded to Mr.
Gilmer, and then went to Tom Robinson and whispered something to him. Atticus
put his hand on Tom’s shoulder as he whispered. Atticus took his coat off the
back of his chair and pulled it over his shoulder. Then he left the courtroom, but
not by his usual exit. He must have wanted to go home the short way, because he
walked quickly down the middle aisle toward the south exit. I followed the top of
his head as he made his way to the door. He did not look up.
Someone was punching me, but I was reluctant to take my eyes from the people
below us, and from the image of Atticus’s lonely walk down the aisle.
“Miss Jean Louise?”
I looked around. They were standing. All around us and in the balcony on the
opposite wall, the Negroes were getting to their feet. Reverend Sykes’s voice was
as distant as Judge Taylor’s:
“Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passin‘.”
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