At smoke-o the crew sat around a table in a filthy dark room, but there was no chair for me and I sat on a bench behind. “So old Mort did that Judy Simmons over, hey,” one of the welders chided at me, “Reckon you musta been right there when it happened, hey?”
 “Leave the boy alone, Jack,” Bert Hanley said.
    For me, every working day became an ongoing nightmare that was as unbearable as it was inescapable. There were innumerable times in the dismal factory when I was nearly run down by the swinging loads on the overhead gantries, or trapped my fingers between girders, or got stinging sparks from the oxy welders in my eyes.
    The only small joy in my life was when an order for Mort came through from the factory, and I would be freed for a brief time to my jockey role. Still I rushed with the same enthusiasm from the claustrophobic factory to the open air of the yard. Mort would always be waiting out in the yard, sitting on the crane with the engine running and when the last load was delivered to Assembly, Mort drove off leaving me behind. Mort was a changed man, sullen and taciturn and deeply thoughtful, but that did not make me any less happy to see him.

Before I remembered that there was no such thing as hoo-dooing, I shrieked and threw them down.
Jem snatched them up. “What’s the matter with you?” he yelled. He rubbed the figures free of red dust. “These are good,” he said. “I’ve never seen any these good.”
He held them down to me. They were almost perfect miniatures of two children. The boy had on shorts, and a shock of soapy hair fell to his eyebrows. I looked up at Jem. A point of straight brown hair kicked downwards from his part. I had never noticed it before. Jem looked from the girl-doll to me. The girl-doll wore bangs. So did I.
“These are us,” he said.
“Who did ‘em, you reckon?”
“Who do we know around here that whittles?” he said.
“Mr. Avery.”
“Mr. Avery just does like this. I mean carves.”
Mr. Avery averaged a stick of stovewood per week; he honed it down to a toothpick and chewed it.
“There’s old Miss Stephanie Crawford’s sweetheart,” I said.
“He carves all right, but he lives down the country. When would he ever pay any attention to us?”
“May be sits on the porch and looks at us instead of Miss Stephanie. If I was him, I would.”
Jem stared at me so long I asked what was the matter, but got Nothing Scout for an answer. When we went home, Jem put the dolls in his trunk.
Less than two weeks later we found a whole package of chewing gum, which we enjoyed, the fact that everything on the Radley place was poison having slipped Jem’s mind…
    Harper Lee’s sole contribution to literature was to rewrite William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust and add what the great man so clearly lacked – charm. The result was To Kill a Mockingbird, a divine American work of a child’s view of the adult world, and the creation of the most perfect father in all fiction—Atticus Finch. Still it might have faded away, as imitator’s tend to do, had it not been made into such an excellent film and Gregory Peck not made Finch so unforgettable.