FOR Truman, who had stayed in that house so many times before, often for weeks on end, there was nothing to get used to, there were no adjustments to be made. All that summer of 1930 he swam every day at Hatter’s Mill, which was the place, out Drewry Road, where most of Monroeville went to picnic, swim, and applaud the daring young men who dived from a window on the third story of the old millhouse. He slept in a bedroom next to Sook’s, and when he was not swimming at the pond, he was usually with her, in the kitchen, the yard, or the fields beyond. After he entered first grade in September, they had less time together. But they still had afternoons and weekends, and as the air began to stir again after the close days of summer, she taught him how to fly a kite. He, in turn, accompanied her on her autumnal forays into the woods, helping her gather the ingredients for her dropsy medicine and the pecans for her Christmas cakes. She did her best to be both mother and friend, and to a large extent she succeeded.
Truman had only one other real companion, and that was Harper Lee, the youngest daughter of the family next door. By local standards, the Lees were considered bookish. Mr. Lee, who was a lawyer, had once been part owner and editor of the Monroe Journal, and he had also spent some time in Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, as a state senator. His wife, the same Mrs. Lee who had played the piano at Arch and Lillie Mae’s wedding, was a crossword-puzzle whiz, a woman of gigantic proportions who sat for hours on her front porch, intently matching words and boxes. Her mind was not altogether right, however. She wandered up and down the street saying strange things to neighbors and passersby, and twice she tried to drown Harper—or Nelle, as she was then called—in the bathtub. “Both times Nelle was saved by one of her older sisters,” said Truman. “When they talk about Southern grotesque, they’re not kidding!”
Harper survived the dunkings to become the tomboy on the block, a girl who, as Mary Ida phrased it, could beat the steam out of most boys her age, or even a year or so older, as Truman was. Indeed, he was one of her favorite targets. But that did not stop them from becoming constant companions, and a treehouse in the Lees’ chinaberry tree became their fortress against the world, a leafy refuge where they read and acted out scenes from their favorite books, which chronicled the exploits of Tarzan, Tom Swift, and the Rover Boys.
The bond that united them was stronger than friendship—it was a common anguish. They both bore the bruises of parental rejection, and they both were shattered by loneliness. Neither had many other real friends. Nelle was too rough for most other girls, and Truman was too soft for most other boys. He was small for his age, to begin with, and he did not enjoy fighting and rolling in the dirt, as most boys around there did. Without meaning to do so, Lillie Mae, who sent him his clothes by mail, dressed him too well, and his freshly laundered shirt and crisp linen shorts made him as conspicuous as Little Lord Fauntleroy. People often remarked that with his white-blond hair and sky-blue eyes, he was pretty enough to be a girl. He was, in short, regarded as a sissy.
There are photographs of Truman at that age—a tiny towhead with a huge grin—but Harper provided the best picture thirty years later. She modeled one of the characters in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird after him, and described him as a true curiosity: “He wore blue linen shorts that buttoned to his shirt, his hair was snow white and stuck to his head like duckfluff; he was a year my senior but I towered over him. As he told us [an] old tale his blue eyes would lighten and darken; his laugh was sudden and happy; he habitually pulled at a cowlick in the center of his forehead…. We came to know [him] as a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies.”
Although he was not much appreciated by most of his contemporaries, he was an affectionate and beguiling child, this pocket Merlin, and if they did not take to him immediately, as Sook had done, Jennie and Callie soon did so. “I fear if there is such a thing, we all love him too much,” Callie confessed in one of her reports to Arch’s mother. “He is a darling sweet boy,” she added later. “We do enjoy having him. He is the sunshine of our home.” He was uncommonly bright, and Callie, the old schoolteacher, took pride in his budding mind, remarking that she and Sook read to him every night—and he to them. “I just love to see his little mind developing and taking in things,” she said.
As the self-appointed guardian of morals on Alabama Avenue, Callie also assured his grandmother that he was doing well in Sunday school—had, in fact, been promoted with honors—and that he was receiving proper spiritual guidance at home as well. “We give him every pleasure that we can,” she wrote, “but of course we do try to teach him that there is a right way to have pleasure. I tried to get him interested in memorizing the 23rd. Psalm, also the Ten Commandments. So I told him (he almost knew it anyway) that it was a low standard of teaching, but if he would memorize the 23rd. Psalm perfectly, I would give him 25 cents—but not to do it just for the 25 cents, but for the love of God and the love he had for God. So he readily agreed that he would memorize it because it was right for him to do so. He did perfectly and I gave him the 25 cents and Sook added a bit to it. Now, he has commenced on the Ten Commandments. I told him just to take one each day and it wouldn’t seem so hard.”
Despite Callie’s assurances, Truman was not happy. His own descriptions of his life in Monroeville are almost grim, and Callie might have been surprised at how unfavorably she was remembered. Compared with Sook, both Callie and Jennie were viewed as cold and unloving, as purse-mouthed and pinchpenny spinsters. He probably expected too much from them, or he may have been misled by Jennie’s gruff manner and wearied by Callie’s righteousness; his own memory of his religious instruction saw him constantly being marched off to church, with no more choice than the prisoners who worked in chain gangs on the roads outside town. Still, it is hard to imagine what more the Faulk sisters could have done for him. Although Lillie Mae and—on rare occasions—Arch paid most of his expenses, it was that peculiar family that actually took care of him.
Truman’s complaint was not that Jennie was short-tempered, that Callie was a nag, or that there was not enough money for all the tantalizing things he saw in store windows in Mobile. It was that none of the Faulk sisters, even the beloved Sook, could take the place of his real parents. Lillie Mae, it is true, would appear occasionally from some distant place, her stylish, expensive clothes exciting envious glances from her friends. But she soon disappeared in a fragrant cloud of Evening in Paris, her favorite perfume. Truman was always desolate when she drove off; once, finding a perfume bottle she had forgotten, he drank it to the bottom, as if he could bring back the woman with her scent. On one visit he convinced himself that she was going to take him away with her. “But after three or four days she left,” he said, “and I stood in the road, watching her drive away in a black Buick, which got smaller and smaller and smaller. Imagine a dog, watching and waiting and hoping to be taken away. That is the picture of me then.”
Arch created a stir of his own in Monroeville. When one of his schemes was going well, he would pull into town in a fancy convertible, announcing his arrival by honking the glittering, trumpetlike horns that preened themselves on the hood. Caesar himself could not have asked for a louder or more triumphal fanfare. When his plans were not working, on the other hand, which was increasingly the case in those dark Depression years, he would slink in and quietly make his way to the Faulks’ so that no one, particularly his creditors, would know that he was there. Even in that effort he was usually unsuccessful. One night at eleven o’clock, long after everyone had gone to bed, a marshal knocked on the door to serve him with a warrant; fortunately for Arch, he had left after dinner. Whether he was noisy or silent, however, he was not able to impress many people in Monroeville: they knew a con man when they saw one. “People made fun of him,” said Mary Ida. “He was always after that million dollars just beyond his reach, something too big to grasp. And that caused what I reckon you would call psychological problems for Truman. Even when he was a little boy he felt there was something wrong with his daddy.”
As he had everyone else in his life, Arch dazzled Truman with promises, and when he felt that he was not being properly treated on Alabama Avenue, Truman would defiantly mention his daddy, who he said would come to rescue him from his woe. Arch said he would buy him a dog and books, both of which Truman desperately wanted. But neither the dog nor the books ever arrived. More than once Arch swore that he would take him down to one of the beaches on the Gulf Coast. “Truman would be so excited that he would skip,” said Mary Ida. “He would jump up into the air he would be so happy, and he would get a new swimsuit and be all ready to go. But Arch wouldn’t come through. He never took him down there once.”
Eventually even Truman saw through his father and realized how empty all those promises were. The day of revelation came when Arch, bestowing smiles and How-do-you-do’s on everyone in sight, drove into town in one of his big cars and offered to take Truman and a couple of his friends to lunch in Mobile. Truman gathered his friends, Sook gave him two dollars—a fairly substantial sum at that time—to buy some books, and Arch, as good as his word, piled everybody into the car and set off for Mobile. Disappointment was delayed until they were in the restaurant, where Arch, whispering into Truman’s ear, asked him for the two dollars Sook had given him. “I never trusted him again after that,” Truman said.