To Kill a Mockingbird Chapter 8 Summary

Maycomb gets a season it hadn’t seen in a while: winter.
Mr. Avery tells the kids that bad children makes the seasons change, causing them to feel guilty.
Mrs. Radley dies, but no one really notices, since they hardly saw her even when she was alive.
Atticus goes to pay his condolences at the Radleys, and when he comes back Jem and Scout pounce on him to ask if he saw Boo in the flesh (he didn’t).
Scout is terrified when she wakes up one morning and sees white stuff pouring from the sky. Turns out it’s snowing.
School is cancelled, so Jem and Scout set out to make a snowman, though they don’t really know how and there isn’t much snow.
The kids head over to Miss Maudie’s to take her snow, running into Mr. Avery on the way, who reminds them that their sins are responsible for the unusual weather.
Jem has a plan to make do with the minimal snowfall: he makes the snowman’s guts out of mud, then coats the outside in a skin of snow so it looks like a real snowman.
They add enough accessories to make their snowman instantly recognizable as a caricature of Mr. Avery, until Atticus makes them change it.
That night, it’s freezing.
Atticus wakes Scout in the middle of the night because Miss Maudie’s house – next door to the Finches’ – is on fire.
Atticus says they don’t need to start taking their furniture out of the house yet, and that Jem should take Scout and go stand in front of the Radley Place, safe from the flames.
Scout watches the men of the town trying to fight the fire and save some of Miss Maudie’s belongings (Atticus carries out her most prized possession, a rocking chair), but it’s a lost cause.
Jem and Scout endure the intense cold and keep a close eye on Atticus: as long as he’s not worried, they don’t need to be either.
Once the fire is finally put out (and Miss Maudie’s house reduced to a smoking hole in the ground), the Finches return to their fortunately undamaged home.
Atticus notices what Scout has so far failed to – that she’s wrapped in a blanket that she didn’t have when she left the house.
Scout says that she stayed right where he told her to, in front of the Radley Place, but she and Jem saw Mr. Nathan fighting the fire, so if he wasn’t the stealthy blanket-deliverer, it must have been some other occupant of that house. Hmm, who could that be?
Jem tells Atticus all about the knothole and the cement and his mended pants.
Atticus finally says outright that it must have been Boo Radley who brought the blanket, and Scout, who’s been late for the clue train, is hit by belated terror to know that he was so close to her but she didn’t even realize it.
The next day, Jem and Scout stay home from school, and see Miss Maudie in her charred backyard.
Miss Maudie, however, is a glass-half-full kind of person, and tells them that now she can rebuild her house the way she wants it. She’s more worried about the trouble she’s caused to neighborhood, and plans to smooth everything over with cake – except Miss Stephanie, who’s putting her up till she gets her own place, can’t have the recipe.

Chapter 9

Chapter 7