Town's Firefighting Effort

The fire that consumed Miss Maudie Atkinson's house on the coldest night in Atticus Finch's memory was the most dramatic and revealing event of the early winter in Maycomb, a night that transformed a quiet residential street into a theater of communal effort, physical danger, and secret kindness. The blaze, which began shortly after one in the morning, drew every available man and piece of firefighting equipment from Maycomb and three surrounding towns, but the cold defeated the town's old fire truck before it could pump a single effective stream of water. In the chaos, the children Jem and Scout stood helplessly before the Radley Place, and without their knowledge, the reclusive Boo Radley slipped out of his house and draped a brown woolen blanket over Scout's shoulders—an act of protection that would, hours later, force the Finch family to acknowledge the humanity of the man they had long treated as a neighborhood ghost.

Causes and Background

The fire came at the end of an extraordinary cold snap that had already disrupted the normal rhythms of Maycomb. Autumn had turned to winter that year for reasons unfathomable to the most experienced prophets in Maycomb County, producing two weeks of the coldest weather since 1885. Mr. Avery, a neighbor with a fondness for pseudoscientific pronouncements, blamed the children, claiming it was written on the Rosetta Stone that when children disobeyed their parents, smoked cigarettes, and made war on each other, the seasons would change. The snow that fell the day before the fire was the first snow the Finch children had ever seen, and they had spent the afternoon building a snowman—a mud-and-snow caricature of Mr. Avery himself, which Atticus insisted they disguise to avoid libeling the neighbors. Miss Maudie, whose azaleas she had wrapped in burlap bags against the freeze, had kept a fire in her kitchen flue overnight to protect her potted plants. That fire, she later speculated, was the probable cause of the blaze. The temperature dropped so sharply that by nightfall the thermometer registered sixteen degrees, the coldest night Atticus could remember, and the snowman outside froze solid.

What Happens

Scout was awakened by Atticus shaking her, his overcoat spread across her. He told her to put on her robe and coat, and she saw Jem standing beside him, groggy and tousled, holding his overcoat closed at the neck with his other hand jammed into his pocket, looking strangely overweight. Atticus said it was a little after one in the morning. At the front door, they saw fire spewing from Miss Maudie's dining room windows, and the town fire siren wailed up the scale to a treble pitch and remained there, screaming. Jem moaned, "It's gone, ain't it?" and Atticus said he expected so. He ordered the children to go down and stand in front of the Radley Place, to keep out of the way and see which way the wind was blowing. When Jem asked if they should start moving the furniture out, Atticus told him not yet and pushed them toward the Radley front gate.

The street filled with men and cars while fire silently devoured Miss Maudie's house. The old fire truck, killed by the cold, had to be pushed from town by a crowd of men. When they attached its hose to a hydrant, the hose burst and water shot up, tinkling down on the pavement. The men of Maycomb, in all degrees of dress and undress, took furniture from Miss Maudie's house to a yard across the street. Atticus carried Miss Maudie's heavy oak rocking chair, which Scout thought sensible of him to save what she valued most. Mr. Avery's face appeared in an upstairs window; he pushed a mattress out the window into the street and threw down furniture until men shouted at him to get out because the stairs were going. He began climbing through the window but got wedged tightly, and Scout buried her head under Jem's arm until Jem cried that he had gotten loose. Mr. Avery crossed the upstairs porch, swung his legs over the railing, and began sliding down a pillar, but he slipped, fell, yelled, and hit Miss Maudie's shrubbery.

Soon the men backed away from the house, moving down the street toward the children. The fire had eaten its way to the roof, and window frames were black against a vivid orange center. Scout said it looked like a pumpkin. Smoke rolled off the Finch house and Miss Rachel's house like fog off a riverbank, and men were pulling hoses toward them. The fire truck from Abbottsville screamed around the curve and stopped in front of the Finch house. Scout suddenly remembered that the Tom Swift book she had borrowed was not hers but Dill's, but Jem told her it was not time to worry yet. Atticus stood with his hands in his overcoat pockets among a group of neighbors, watching as if he were at a football game, and Miss Maudie was beside him. The Abbottsville truck began pumping water on the Finch house, and a man on the roof pointed to places that needed it most. Scout watched the Absolute Morphodite snowman go black and crumble; Miss Maudie's sunhat settled on top of the heap. In the heat between the houses, the men had long ago shed coats and bathrobes, working in pajama tops and nightshirts stuffed into their pants, but Scout was slowly freezing where she stood. Jem tried to keep her warm, but his arm was not enough, and she pulled free and clutched her shoulders, dancing a little to feel her feet. Another fire truck appeared and stopped in front of Miss Stephanie Crawford's, but there was no hydrant for another hose, and the men tried to soak her house with hand extinguishers.

Miss Maudie's tin roof quelled the flames. The house collapsed roaring, fire gushed everywhere, and men on top of the adjacent houses beat out sparks and burning chunks of wood with blankets. It was dawn before the men began to leave, first one by one, then in groups. They pushed the Maycomb fire truck back to town, the Abbottsville truck departed, and a third truck, which had come from Clark's Ferry sixty miles away, remained. Jem and Scout slid across the street to find Miss Maudie staring at the smoking black hole in her yard. Atticus shook his head to tell them she did not want to talk, and he led them home, holding onto their shoulders to cross the icy street. He said Miss Maudie would stay with Miss Stephanie for the time being.

Consequences and Aftermath

Back in the kitchen, as they drank hot chocolate, Atticus noticed that Scout was clutching a brown woolen blanket around her shoulders, squaw-fashion. He asked whose blanket it was, and Scout said she did not know. Jem was even more bewildered, insisting they had done exactly as Atticus had told them, standing down by the Radley gate away from everybody, not moving an inch. Then Jem stopped, and in a sudden, frantic confession he poured out all their secrets—the knot-hole, the pants, everything—insisting that Mr. Nathan Radley had put cement in the tree to stop them finding things, that he was crazy like they said, but that he had never harmed them, that he could have cut Jem's throat from ear to ear that night but instead tried to mend his pants. Atticus gently told him to whoa, and then said, "Boo Radley. You were so busy looking at the fire you didn't know it when he put the blanket around you." Scout's stomach turned to water and she nearly threw up when Jem held out the blanket and crept toward her, demonstrating how Boo had sneaked out of the house, sneaked up, and gone like this. Atticus said dryly, "Do not let this inspire you to further glory, Jeremy."

The next day, Calpurnia woke them at noon. Atticus had said they need not go to school, that they would learn nothing after no sleep. They found Miss Maudie's sunhat suspended in a thin layer of ice, like a fly in amber, and had to dig under the dirt for her hedge-clippers. They found Miss Maudie in her back yard, gazing at her frozen charred azaleas. When they apologized, she said she had always wanted a smaller house, that it gave her more yard and more room for her azaleas. She said she had hated that old cow barn and had thought of setting fire to it a hundred times herself, except they would lock her up. She told Scout not to worry, that she would build a little house and take a couple of roomers and have the finest yard in Alabama. When Jem asked how it caught, she said probably the flue in the kitchen, where she had kept a fire for her potted plants. She then revealed that Atticus had told her about the unexpected company Scout had had the night before, and she said she would have liked to have been with them and would have had sense enough to turn around. Miss Maudie puzzled Scout: with most of her possessions gone and her beloved yard a shambles, she still took a lively and cordial interest in Jem's and Scout's affairs. She said the only thing she had worried about was the danger and commotion it caused, that the whole neighborhood could have gone up, and that Mr. Avery would be in bed for a week, stove up, because he was too old to do things like that. She said that as soon as she could get her hands clean and when Miss Stephanie Crawford was not looking, she would make Mr. Avery a Lane cake, and that Miss Stephanie had been after her recipe for thirty years and would not get it just because she was staying with her.

The fire thus accomplished two profound shifts in the children's understanding of their world. It revealed that Boo Radley, the phantom they had spent years trying to lure out of the Radley Place, was not a monster but a protector who had risked exposure to keep a little girl warm. And it revealed that Miss Maudie, who had lost nearly everything she owned, possessed a resilience and generosity that made her loss seem almost incidental to her character. The night of fire, which began as a catastrophe, ended as a lesson in the hidden decency of the people—and the one ghost—who lived on their street.