Full of Beans

Beans is ornery, given to exaggeration, and a little rough around the edges (such as when he threatens to box the ears of his three-year-old baby brother), but inside he is a good person whose moral conscience drives his decision-making. He foregoes the movie he really wants to see, for example, when he learns that Kermit needs medicine for a case of worms. His obligatory sensibilities are so strong that utilizing the movie money on worm treatment is not even a question to Beans: “Just like that, my dream of going to the pictures disappeared in a bottle of Bumstead’s Worm Syrup” (41). He tries to help Mrs. Albury by mixing up a cornstarch cure for Dizzy’s diaper rash; he worries about Termite confronting the dogcatchers and convinces his mother to let him inside.

When Beans gets the chance to make money for Johnny Cakes, he initially asks for time to think about it; taking up a “life of crime” is no easy decision for someone with a strong conscience like Beans. But Winky’s rude intervention and stinging insults interrupt Beans’s cautious approach, and he gives in: “It wasn’t right. Sure, I’d always been a good boy. Like Ma said. But I didn’t was to be a good boy anymore. Good boys were suckers. […] That was it. I wasn’t going to be good anymore” (44). Despite Beans’s intentions to become “tough” and “hard,” he is quick to spend half of his first payout from Johnny Cakes on hand cream for Ma, whose laundry job leaves her skin raw and chapped.

It grates on Beans’s conscience that his role in the ringing of false fire alarms takes advantage of people’s trust in him and others; for example, he hears the sincerity in Too Bad’s mother as she comments on “how nicely” he and Too Bad are playing marbles, and he sees the negative impacts of exhaustion in Cem, up all night chasing fires that turned out to be fake. Nothing, however, compares to the enormity of the guilt he feels after the fire damages the Soldanos’ house. There is no spinning the truth to himself: The firemen did not come immediately because of Beans’s false alarms, and Pork Chop is upset, angry, and joyless afterward.

Once the town rewards Beans as a hero for fetching Cem and the other firefighters, he cannot take the weight of his guilty conscience; he is first physically ill, then desperate to make amends—even if no one recognizes his penance for what it is. The pressure and pain become bearable the longer he works to save Key West; he even convinces Mr. Stone to pay for repairs to the Pork Chop’s house and fund the construction of a lunch counter for Mrs. Soldano’s new business. Beans becomes wiser because of his bout with a painfully guilty conscience, and when he refers to avoiding “bad lies” in the last chapter, readers understand that he includes his own.