Theft
RACHEL INGALLS
Contents
Title Page
“Look out, Jake,” I said…
It was a Thursday.
From the entrance I heard steps and the sound of something being moved…
Later on Homer came in.
There was some shuffling around outside…
“Will you quit looking at me like that?” he said.
I must have gone right under.
“Thou didst make me hope…”
When I woke up I didn’t know where I was…
They say it usually takes three hours.
About the Author
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“Look out, Jake,” I said, “there’s a big stone in the middle of the road.”
“Where?”
“Straight ahead, right in front of you. Hold on. Over to the left a little ways. Mind you don’t bump into it.”
“Can’t bump into it. Can’t even see it.”
“Right up there.” I pointed at it in the dark. “A big goddam boulder, right in the middle of the road. Who’d want to put a thing like that there?”
“Where?”
“Right there, right in front of you,” I said, and fell over it.
“Where are you?” he started to call. “Hey, where did you go?”
“I’m down here. By this big boulder.”
“What boulder?” he muttered. And he fell on top of me.
“Jake, I think maybe I’m drunk,” I said.
“Who, me? I’m not drunk.”
“Me. Do you think I’m drunk?”
“I don’t know. Do you think so?”
“I believe maybe I just might be. Just a little.”
“Let’s have another,” he said. “Where did it go?”
“I think you’re sitting on it.”
We had another, and then another. And one more. And he said for about the tenth time that night, “Well, how’s it feel to be a father?”
“Fine. Feels good. Feels grand. God almighty, I’m glad it’s over.”
“Nothing to it. I told you it was going to be all right, didn’t I?”
“Sure. It’s all right now. But wait till it happens to you. Man, I been scared before. Not like that.”
“Why scared? Happens every day. That’s nature. Annie says she’ll be aiming for eight. Eight, she says. At least.”
“Eight. Holy God.”
“What she says. And I want to be there when it happens.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Why not? That’s life. That’s important. I’d want to be there.”
“Let me tell you,” I said, and I thought I was going to start crying, but it came out laughing, “let me tell you, it was almost death. They said she almost died. I’m so glad it’s over, I’m just so damn glad it’s over.”
“Have another,” Jake said.
I took some and held on to it.
“Listen. You want to be there when it happens? Look, I wasn’t even there and I felt like you can’t imagine what. All week I been all cramped up and sick with it, like I was the one having the child. You just don’t know. Here, have another.”
I passed it to him and he dropped it and we had to hunt around.
“Got it,” Jake said after a while. “What you doing going dropping it right on the ground like that? I thought you was handing it over.”
“You dropped it.”
“Who, me? It’s all right. Plenty left.”
“Have another.”
“Don’t mind if I do.”
I leaned my back against the rock. It was still so dark you couldn’t see much.
“Well?” Jake said.
“Well what?”
“You said have another. Let’s have it.”
“You’re holding on to it.”
“Who, me?” he said. After a little he began to laugh. I didn’t know what was so funny but I started to laugh too.
“You’re right,” he said. “I had a hold of it all the time. Do you think maybe I’m drunk?”
“Who, me?” I said.
“Here, have another. How’s it feel to be a father?”
We both got laughing. When we stopped it was at the same time, so it sounded very still afterwards. I felt quiet and better.
“I’ll tell you, Jake,” I said. “It’s quite something. It makes you feel strange. I expect you get used to it, but it makes you feel like—makes you feel real awestruck. When you think about it, it’s a big thing.”
“Sure. Sure is. I’ll drink to that. What are you going to name him?”
“I think we’ll have to name him after Uncle Ben.”
“You ain’t going to name him after me?”
“I wanted to, but Maddie said how it would mean so much to him and Annie says she thinks it’s right, seeing how he practically brought us up.”
“I was only fooling.”
“No, I meant it. I did want to. We’ll name the next one after you.”
“Right. And we’ll name one after you, too.”
“One of the eight.”
“I’ll drink to that,” he said. We both drank some more and sat quiet for a while. I got to thinking how good it was to have the worry over but how funny we should be sitting in the middle of the dark, in the middle of the road, up against a big boulder that shouldn’t be there.
“Hey Jake, I don’t know about this rock. Who’d want to go and do a thing like that?”
“Like what?”
“Go and put a big rock in the middle of the road like that, where somebody can come along and get hurt. I think we should push it out of the way.”
I gave it a shove but it was too heavy to move. I tried again and my hand slipped.
“Leave it be,” he told me. “Wait till daylight and I’ll help you move it.”
“All right. All right, we’ll leave it. Let’s have another.”
“Funny it should make such a difference—names. You remember when I used to tell you the names of the stars?”
“Sure,” I said. “I remember.”
“Funny it should make such a difference. Why people remember a name a long time after they’ll remember anything else, after they forget what went with it. Did you ever think: names are very old things. Old as the stars. Pass them down from way back, and then people give them to children when they’re born. Funny way to start out.”
“I’ve forgotten most of them,” I said.
“Which?”
“Names of the stars. A long while back. I was ashamed to say, because of all the trouble you took and then me going and forgetting.”
“That’s all right. Everybody does. Remember some things and forget some things. I’ll teach you again sometime. Not tonight. No stars tonight. It’s going to rain.”
“We’ll name the second one after you,” I said.
“Right. And we’ll name one after you. The first boy. Unless Annie’s got some name she won’t give up.”
“You mean it?”
“Sure,” he said. “Promise.”
He fell asleep first. During the night it rained and when daybreak came we saw that we weren’t in the middle of the road; there wasn’t any road at all. We were lying in somebody’s field, miles from home and feeling like nothing on God’s earth. I’ve only been drunk twice in my life and that was the first time. Almost eight years ago.
“You,” the foreman calls, “you there, boy, you dreaming?”
“No, sir,” I say.
I’m not dreaming, I’m just trying to stay on my feet. If I could dream it through I would, right on through the day. What I do is more like just thinking or remembering, anything to take my mind off being hungry. I didn’t start on it till after the fire and now I have to do it every day.
It’s best if you can
do it to singing or to counting, out loud. The new man gets nervous if there’s too much of the singing, he thinks every song he doesn’t know might be a protest song. Up he walks in his Godalmighty way like he’s saying to himself: here I come, boys, here I come. And tells us not so much of the singing, it slows down the work.
I can do it in my head now and I expect it’s what happens to soldiers; they say soldiers can be sound asleep and still keep on marching once they’ve got the rhythm. That’s the way it happens. Sometimes I begin by saying over words to myself. Or names, or following the line of a song without sounding it. Then I can imagine pictures of things, people, or places, and go on from there. Just remembering back a week will often take you into a string of things you haven’t thought about for a long while, and they can keep you going.
I think about my mother’s voice sometimes. She could sing. And I think about my father, though only a couple of memories and they’re like the ones of her, blurred and hard to get at. I remember looking into his face but not what the face looked like. I remember being held in his arms and being small enough to be held like that. Clearest of all, I have a picture of being out walking with him. He lifted me up and carried me on his shoulders—that’s all I remember of it, like a picture I can stand away from and look at: me riding on his shoulders and looking up ahead, seeing the sky. But it’s very strong and always when I think of him it leads me into other thoughts, I think how I did the same thing with Ben when he was smaller.
They say he was a great man, at least that’s what everyone said till after Aunt Mary died. Then Uncle Ben started saying, “Yes, he was a great man all right, such a fine character, such high principles. He was such a great man and had such strong principles your Mama died of work.” A long time later I said to him, “I don’t know what he was like, I was too young. Aunt Mary saw him one way, you saw him another way—leave it like that. I only saw him like a child, I only remember him lifting me up on his shoulders and looking at the sky.”
“Yes, that’s what he was like,” says Uncle Ben in a bitter voice. “He’d lift you up and show you the sky. Some it cured and some was killed by it.”
I don’t know if he was such a high-principled character. Maybe he was just wild, like Jake. And a man people would always be talking about, with a kind of public reputation. Like Jake; I’ve seen him walk down the street and have people come up and follow him, follow him around like dogs, just to be near him. And I’ve seen it the other way around, name-calling when he walks by, and the kids rushing out to throw a stone after him as soon as he’s out of range.
After the fire Jake asked me, “You haven’t been joining any of those freedom organizations, have you?”
“No, I thought that was your field. You still fighting for our racial equality?”
He didn’t answer one way or the other, just said again, “You sure about that?”
It might have been. They asked me to, all right, kept hanging around, trying to sound me out and talking: injustice, freedom, exploitation of labor, all those things. I didn’t let on what my political views were, just told them the truth: that I didn’t have the time to join anything no matter how good the cause. I know those boys—sit around talk, talk, talk and when they’re through doubletalking each other, out they go and beat up some poor fool who’s just trying to make an honest living and never did nobody harm. I don’t spell freedom like that.
They went away and a couple of weeks later came back a second time. Then they tried to bribe me. Dragged in Maddie and the kids and said what a better life they’d lead and so on. So I told them: Look, I had all those milk and honey lies from the competition and I’m not buying, thanks all the same. And I told them to beat it.
I don’t think it was that, but you can’t tell about these things any more.
“Just asking,” he says. “It don’t seem like it could have been accidental.”
And I said, “Look, Jake, strange as it may seem, working your guts out from the age of sixteen on don’t leave a man much time for long discussions on what we’re all going to do when we rule the world. What do you think, now?”
He said it looked to him like a pretty unprofessional job but he’d ask around. Maybe it was a freak thing, a mistake, or what Annie said: “Maybe just somebody wanting to put you out of action so they could get their hands on that famous job of yours.” I can believe that. She laughed when I took her seriously, but I don’t think it’s at all unlikely. Anyway, it couldn’t have come from very high up otherwise Jake would have found out, working with one foot on each side of the line like he does.
“What’s that you’re doing there, dreaming?” says the foreman.
“No, sir.”
“We don’t pay you to just stand around with your mouth open catching flies.”
He’s got a neck like a bull, a thick bulge at the back under his hair. Not muscle; that’s fat. Fat from forty years of overeating.
“Hustle it on up there,” he says.
“Yessir.”
The second time I got drunk was with a stranger, an old man they called Little Josh. It was the year of the big riot when they first started calling the army in and I first heard what martial law meant, that if you show yourself you’re a dead man and they say you were looting. I’d lost my job and went to work with the fruitpickers. I walked all night to get there so I wouldn’t lose a day’s work and worked on through as soon as I arrived. I’ve never seen people work like that, sometimes through half the night, because we were paid by the basketload, and falling asleep under the trees whenever it hit them. There were some women there and children too. A lot of knifings in the night, a lot of drinking, and one night a man hung himself from a tree and nobody noticed, they worked all around him till daylight. That was the first time I’d seen a hanged man: mouth open, tongue out, swollen, suffocated.
We were allowed to eat all the fruit we wanted and I couldn’t believe it to begin with because we can’t afford to buy it at home. It tasted so sweet, the way you imagine flowers would taste, but if you try to live off it you get sick. Some of the women there set up stands where they sold bread and fish fried in oil, and now whenever there’s fish being fried it reminds me of that time, being bone-tired, sleeping on the ground, and the smell of the fruit and trees everywhere, even in your clothes.
The second week I was there an old man joined the group; he was short and had a squashed-in face and walked leaned-over a little, which made his arms look longer than they should be. He stood looking at the trees, ready to choose his workplace, and somebody made a remark. A few others joined in and soon there was about seven of them poking fun at him. “That’s all right, Grandaddy,” I said to him. “Don’t pay them no mind. You work along with me.” I pointed out my place, we walked over to it, and started in. Little Josh he was called, and I couldn’t believe he only had two hands—he was picking nearly twice as much as anybody else.
The night we got drunk everyone was eating and drinking in an abandoned place up on a rise in the land. There were still some walls standing, a few stone steps up the hill, and a lot of roots growing through it all. I remember they had fires going, cooking, and I was being eaten alive by the bugs. When we left five men came and leaned over the edge of the wall to see if I’d fall down the steps. I turned around and said, “You think I’m going to fall down, don’t you?” One of them said yes, the others said they just wanted to see we were all right. “Well, I’m not going to,” I said, turned back around, and nearly fell down the steps. Little Josh had the same amount and he was still sober long after everybody else was blind. There was a full moon out. And stars. He told me next day that before I passed out I’d pointed out the stars to him, naming them in a very loud voice as if they were being given names for the first time.
I only started thinking this last week about being drunk. Because it’s the same feeling; not the happy lifted-up feeling while you’re drinking. Like what you feel when you wake up afterwards: shaky, tired, and your head hurts. That’s what going hu
ngry is like.
That morning I left before Maddie could ask me what I’d eat. I had the feeling if I didn’t get up on my feet quick and start walking, I’d fall down. I got to work early, which they never notice, only if you come late. And it was so bad I couldn’t even work the trick with thinking and remembering.
It was a Thursday. They got us both on the same day, two hours apart between the two arrests.
Naturally, if I’d known about Jake I’d never have tried it on my own. But there were all those weeks behind me, of Maddie asking “what did you eat at midday”, and me telling her lies. The first few days it was easy to make up a pretend meal. Later I’d begin to repeat.
“You had that yesterday,” she says.
“So?”
“Are you sure you’re eating all right? You can’t stint yourself with the work you’re doing. You’ll get sick. Then where will we be?”
“You quit fussing. I’m eating fine,” I say, and it was a lie again. I hardly ever ate lunch since the fire, when we lost the livestock.
Then I’d ask her what she and the kids had had. She’d say they’d had the leftovers from the night before. One evening that week I say, “Isn’t this what we had last night?”
“Yes. You don’t like it?”
“I thought you said you finished it off at lunch.”
“There was a lot left over,” she said.
Sure. Believe it every time. The children aren’t getting any fatter, either, and that means she goes without hers altogether. I saw them from the field one day, off in the distance a lot of kids scrabbling around the ditches over by the spring. But I recognized my two. And the foreman, seeing me look, said, “What some folks will allow, letting it get so the children got to go digging in the ditches, eating the weeds out of the creek. Their folks should be ashamed. Letting them run loose on private property like that.”
“Yessir,” I said, and knew for certain then that Maddie was lying too.
“That’s theft. That’s what those children will grow up to,” he says. “It’s the parents’ fault. That’s what’s wrong with all the young people nowadays—their parents don’t set them an example. I’d give those kids a good hiding, you can bet, if I was their father.”
Theft Page 1
