To Kill a Mockingbird
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To Kill a Mockingbird Chapter 30 Summary
- Atticus reminds Scout she should call him Mr. Arthur, and formally introduces them to each other.
- Dr. Reynolds comes in and greets Boo, astonishing Scout with his nonchalance.
- They all go out to the front porch, leaving Dr. Reynolds to tend to Jem.
- Scout plays hostess to Boo, showing him the way and offering him a chair, though the whole thing feels not entirely real.
- Atticus starts talking about how he’s going to make Jem’s case in court, but Tate interrupts him to ask if he really thinks that Jem killed Ewell.
- Atticus says they’ll have to talk to Jem to make sure, but from what Scout said it seems obvious.
- Tate says that Jem didn’t do it, and Atticus says he appreciates the gesture, but he’s not going to try to cover up the crime, because he doesn’t roll like that.
- Tate says that there’s not going to be a cover-up, and Scout thinks that there’s a silent battle going on between them.
- Atticus asks Scout again who pulled Ewell off of her, and she says rather uncertainly that she thought it was Jem.
- Atticus interrupts Scout before she can go on to say that he wants everything to be aboveboard so that Jem won’t have to live with any suspicion hanging over him.
- Tate says that Ewell fell on his knife and killed himself accidentally.
- Scout wonders whose stubbornness would win out – Tate’s or her father’s.
- Atticus says that he wouldn’t be able to look Jem in the eye, and Jem wouldn’t be able to look up to him, if he didn’t act with absolute honor in this matter.
- Tate says again that Ewell stabbed himself, and adds that he can prove it.
- Atticus says that he simply can’t be two-faced and say a thing he doesn’t believe is true.
- Tate pulls out a knife (not the murder weapon) and demonstrates what he thinks happened (without the actual impaling, of course).
- Atticus continues in the same vein that he won’t let Tate save Jem through lying, and Tate says (in italics, so we know he’s getting mad) that it’s not Jem he’s trying to save, stamping his foot so loudly that both Miss Maudie’s and Miss Stephanie’s lights go on.
- Tate continues, more quietly, that no boy as small as Jem, with a broken arm no less, could take down an adult man in the dark.
- Atticus suddenly asks where Tate got that knife he was demonstrating with a second ago, and Tate says that he took it off a drunk, and that Ewell must have found the kitchen knife in the dump.
- Tate continues: it’s his decision to make, and if Atticus goes around telling people that Jem killed Ewell, Tate will say that he’s lying; Jem didn’t stab him and Atticus knows it.
- Tate continues further: he’s lived in Maycomb all his life, and knows everything that’s happened there; Tom Robinson is dead, and now the man who all but killed him is dead too.
- He finishes: “let the dead bury the dead” (30.60).
- Oh wait, he’s not quite done yet: he says that it’s not a crime to prevent a crime, and that if he didn’t keep quiet about what really happened all the Maycomb ladies come knocking on “his” (not Tate’s, but he doesn’t name names) door with their best cakes as thank-you gifts, and it would be a sin to call so much attention to a man who just wants to be left alone.
- Tate leaves, and Atticus says to Scout that Ewell killed himself accidentally, and asks her if she can understand.
- Scout hugs Atticus and tells him she does understand: it would be like killing a mockingbird.
- Atticus rubs Scout’s hair, and the two of them head indoors.
- Before they go inside, Atticus turns to Boo Radley and thanks his neighbor for protecting his children.
