Theft

by Rachel Ingalls

  He went on parading in front of them, stalking back and forth and shouting out a long string of stuff at them. He said, “I am the living bread, the living bread which came down from heaven, and if any man eat of this bread he shall live, he shall live, live forever. And the bread that I will give, the bread, the bread that I will give is my flesh. My flesh which I give, my flesh which I give, give for the life of the world.”

  “I know what’s wrong with him, all right,” one of them said. “Is that your trouble, sweetheart?” He laughed.

  A second one said, “God, it makes you sick, look at him.”

  The religious nut was panting with excitement and his mouth was wet.

  “I knew a nut like that once,” the second one said, “went around hammering nails into his hands. It’s a sex thing, gives them some kind of a kick. They run around shouting at people till somebody beats them up—that’s what they want. Did you hear him squeal just then? Loves it.”

  The third guard, a good-looking boy and younger than the others, said, “You shouldn’t laugh at crazy people.”

  “What’s eating you?” the first one said. “You got religion all of a sudden?”

  “I just don’t think it’s funny, that’s all. They can’t help it. Some of the things they say aren’t so crazy—they’re just like everybody else, only it comes out scrambled. He’s not hurting anybody, is he? Everybody’s a little crazy, every religion’s a little crazy.”

  “Not everybody,” the second one said. And not every religion. Is that what you meant to say, every religion is crazy?”

  The younger one shrugged, and said he just didn’t think it was funny and besides it was unlucky to laugh at crazy people.

  “Crazy? Why, he’s a goddamn raving pervert,” the first one said.

  The religious nut kept muttering all the time they were talking about him. As soon as they stopped he got their attention again and said, “The hour is coming, the hour is coming when the dead shall hear the voice of the son of God. I am the son and he that honoreth not the son honoreth not the father that sent him. The hour is coming. I am the son of God, I am the son of God. As soon as they hear of me they shall obey me, the strangers shall submit themselves unto me.”

  “What did I tell you?” said the first guard.

  “It is God that avengeth me and subdueth the people under me. He beat them small as the dust before the wind, he cast them out like the dirt in the streets.”

  “Who are you calling dirt, you bastard?” the second guard said to him, and started to put his arm through the bars.

  Homer came back in with the other one and said sharply, “What you doing making him shout like that? Come on, this is time for working. What you think, you can stand there all day? The food is getting cold.” He shooed them into the passageway and came over to us, not looking at the religious nut who was still mumbling and shouting and hopping up and down. He shouted, “I receive not honor from men. Blessed are they that hear the word of God, but I know you, that ye have not the love of God in you. I am come in my father’s name and ye receive me not.”

  “I’d like to receive him,” I said. “Right in the teeth, I’d like to.”

  Homer said, “This day is the longest day in my life, I bet. First one thing, then another. Why they get him started like that? And I got to clean that up too. And now the other one start to cry again, no wonder. Oh, I am feeling old as one hundred today. And there is more people coming tonight. When I sleep I don’t know.”

  “Who is he anyway?” Jake said. “What’s he in for? Exposing himself to little girls, or what?”

  “Is a mistake, all a mistake. I don’t know why they send him here. He is sick and crazy. This is a jail, not a place for sick peoples. I ask his name to put it on the record and he just keep saying: I am the son of God. Like that, in a big echo voice and turn his eyes up. What he is arrest for I don’t know because nobody send the charge record and he is transferred from someplace else. What a mess in my jail all day.”

  “Try a little of that Greek philosophy,” Jake said.

  “My philosophy for today is this,” Homer says, and made a gesture with his hand.

  Jake laughed. “Is that Greek, too?”

  “Is international, yes?”

  The food came in with the four guards, first to Jake’s cell, next to mine, and then they all went out. I had some of the drink first and felt better. That man was crying again but the other one had stopped, and I began to eat.

  Suddenly he started up again in that high, quivery cooing voice.

  “I know you, that ye have not the love of God in you,” he said. “I am come in my father’s name and ye receive me not. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me, why art thou so far from helping me and from the words of my roaring? Oh my God, I cry in the daytime but thou hearest not, and in the night season, and am not silent. But thou art holy, oh thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel. Our fathers trusted in thee, they trusted, and thou didst deliver them. They cried unto thee and were delivered, they trusted in thee and were not confounded.”

  I began to feel let down and sad again. The noise kept going on, sometimes soft and sweet and sometimes bleating out strong and showing off. The soft voice was the worst, it made you feel crawly inside.

  “But I am a worm and no man,” he went on. “A reproach of men and despised of the people. All they that see me laugh me to scorn, they shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying: he trusted on the Lord that he would deliver him—let him deliver him, seeing he delighted in him. But thou art he that took me out of the womb, thou didst make me hope when I was upon my mother’s breasts. I was cast upon thee from the womb, thou art my God from my mother’s belly. Be not far from me, for trouble is near, for there is none to help.”

  I turned around in the cell and put my back to the bars, feeling terrible all of a sudden and wanting to cry. I thought: if that man who killed his wife starts up again I won’t be able to hold it back.

  The voice went on: “Many bulls have compassed me, strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round, they gaped upon me with their mouths as a ravening and roaring lion. I am poured out like water and all my bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax, it is melted in the midst of my bowels, my strength is dried up like a potsherd. And my tongue cleaveth to my jaws, and thou hast brought me into the dust of death. For dogs have compassed me, the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me, they pierced my hands and my feet. I may tell all my bones, they look and stare upon me. They part my garments among them and cast lots upon my vesture. But be not thou far from me, oh Lord, oh my strength. Haste thee to help me.”

  “Seth?” Jake said, and I turned around. “Not hungry?”

  “It’s that goddamn nut. That awful mealy-mouth voice and the words so beautiful. What is all that stuff he’s been spouting?”

  “That? That one’s a paslm. He’s praying. The rest of it he’s grabbed from all over the place, quoting from lots of different parts of the scriptures and getting them all mixed up.”

  “It’s that voice, that awful voice. Can’t they shut him up?”

  “He’ll stop it if you leave him alone. He wants an audience, that is all.”

  “I can’t stand him,” I said. “I hate him.”

  “Shouldn’t hate.”

  “Why not? I’m beginning to think there’s lots of things I hate. Never had time to think about them before.”

  “It’s bad for the digestion,” he said. “Besides, you hate somebody, that means they got a hold over you. They got you right in their hand.”

  “I don’t see it. What is that, religious morality? All they tell you about in religion, it’s full of hate. Hating all the ones that don’t agree with you.”

  He began to tell me a story about a boy that lived next door before his family moved near us and we got to know each other. This boy took a dislike to Jake, a real hatred. One day the boy was making fun of him and Jake turned around and told him he wished he’d die. Next week the boy hung himself. I didn
’t believe it.

  “It’s true,” he said.

  “I mean I don’t believe he would do it just because you said that.”

  “Lots of things people do. Specially when they build up hate like that and don’t know how to get rid of it. If you’re going to hate you should know why and what it is and how to keep it in control. Otherwise it can turn around and fall back on you. Why do you think you hate him?”

  The voice had stopped now and I felt easier.

  “I just can’t abide his sicky-sweet psalmsinging voice. I don’t mind so much that he’s a nut.”

  “What’s wrong with the voice?”

  “Gives me the cold shakes,” I said. I began to eat, to feel filled with the taste of it, and it was much better and I thought about seeing Maddie soon.

  Jake sighed. He said, “A brother-in-law that’s got the cold shakes, a weepy homicide case, a religious maniac who thinks he’s the Messiah and a jailer who’s a Greek philosopher—Lord, do I pick them.”

  “Do you remember when you were religious?” I said.

  “A long time ago, that was.”

  I remembered. I remembered he even thought he had a calling and would go into it for life. Some of them are like that. They say a reformed sinner makes the best man of God because he can know and understand other people’s weaknesses and help them to peace the way he found it. And it works the other way, too—the ones who brood about religion suddenly throwing it over and going wild, like Jake, and they never go back to it. When they change like that it’s lifelong. Not like me. All my life I could never make up my mind about those things and in the end I realized I never would. I remember Jake would say, “There’s got to be something more, there must be. Sometimes I feel like it’s all a reflection or like a shadow of the real thing,” and to listen to him talk about the mystery of things, you’d get all calm and serene and inside you were burning with the knowledge that everything was completely mysterious and large and full of unthought-of marvels. But I never felt that way by myself. It took Jake talking about religion to make it happen.

  Then he changed. Once he said maybe God was just the way things happened, that everything that took place, all put together, made God. He said how he’d always wanted to experience what the scriptures spoke about: that God would talk to you. But that would mean God was a person and acted like a person, and if he was perfect and all-powerful he wouldn’t be a person, because people are so small. Not just that they die, they’re all-over small. All the believers who tell you you’re doing something wrong or a thing or an action of yours is immoral because God wants this and God wants that; Jake said this God that’s talking to them, that’s themselves. That’s their idea of what their good selves are like and what they’d wish to have happening in the world.

  Then he got stuck on ideas. And he said religion was ideas but he wanted ideas that could handle people in this world, not deal with some world after death, which he’d never really taken to heart anyway. He began to get interested in politics. And he told me, like telling me I was lucky not to be jealous, “You’re lucky you’ve got that instinctive certainty of what’s right and what’s wrong. I never had it.” And by that he meant that I wasn’t as smart, since I’d never gone into the question deep enough to find out that there’s no such thing as right or wrong. Just how you happen to look at it, which was another thing he told me. I knew he was smarter, but some things he didn’t see, for instance that I’d know when he said I was lucky to be this or that, that it was a way of telling me I had a place and it was just a notch below his. Some of the mistakes he makes with people—that’s why, because he could misjudge those instinctive certainties. Not so much with strangers, there he was always all right.

  And he made friends in the army and got them to give him information about where certain troops were stationed and what manoeuvres they were carrying out, how long they’d be staying, how the communication lines were set up, and so on. Passing it on to freedom fighters and the protesters, I suppose, and I’m sure, I know, there’s a name for that and a very special law that covers it, overthrowing the state and all. They’ve got his name in one place and his description in another, and nobody’s put the two together so far, but Maddie says she wouldn’t be in Annie’s place for anything in this world.

  One day he says to me, “Maybe you’re right about it all being in the mind, who you belong to. That’s the thing, to possess minds, to be able to influence people, make them change their minds and change their lives. That’s the real power, to get other men’s minds under your control.” So that’s what he does now, and I still don’t understand and maybe never will. What on earth would you want with somebody else’s mind? Bad enough you’re stuck with your own.

  “Thou didst make me hope when I was upon my mother’s breasts,” Jake said, “that just tears my insides out. I think that’s what I liked most about it, just the words.”

  “You called me Seth,” I said.

  “Nobody to hear. Don’t you start doing it or you’ll trip up.”

  They came back and opened up to take the things away. I was feeling a little drunk, though it was hard to tell, sitting down. They’d given us more this time. When they went to the religious nut’s cell and cleaned it up he began jabbering again and after they’d locked up he made a grab at one of them through the bars. Homer wasn’t with them this time, he’d given the keys to his wrestling friend and you could see his eye was already swelled out a lot from where the protester had hit him. At the cell on the other side they took out the food but left everything else. And then they went out again.

  Homer came back with a new set of guards, the night shift, I guessed. They had about six people in tow and put them into the side cells where the kids had been. They were all working men, most of them looking pretty much like me, and very beat up, looking tired and dazed and not talking or trying to push back. The religious nut quoted a lot to them but they took no notice. Two of them lay down on the floor. Homer and the guards handed in water and something to to drink and pots, and came back later with food but not as much as they’d given us.

  While they were eating the religious nut’s speech dribbled off into muttering, then he quit entirely and sat down with his back to the bars. Homer came across the center of the floor, around the table, and said to me, “Is Maddie, yes?”

  “Yes,” I said and stood up. My heart started going all the way up through me and I hung onto the bars. He walked her across the room from the entranceway towards my cell and then went out, leaving us to talk. She looked shy and scared coming across the floor with all the men in the place.

  When she got to the cell she put her arms through and up around my shoulders. All the hard work she does, and her hands so small. I put my arms through and held her close up to the bars and wanted to get my head through.

  “Are you all right?” she said. “Are they feeding you all right?”

  “I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. I’m sorry, I’m sorry about all of it, Maddie. But you get Annie to stay with you and don’t worry about me. It’s you I’m worrying over, everything else is all right.”

  “Ben and Mary asked about you,” she said. “Annie told them you’d gone to visit her cousin Liza, so I had to back her up. I didn’t know you had a cousin Liza.”

  I had to laugh because cousin Liza was a family joke and a name to use for excuses when you wanted to get out of something. I was never sure we really had any cousin by that name; Annie knew more about those far-off cousins than I ever did. I remembered she once told me cousin Liza had been a notorious old woman who disgraced the family at some point and died about forty years ago.

  I told Maddie and she relaxed a little and didn’t look so strange. She gets that pinched-up look sometimes like she’s a very old woman, and when she looks that way she also appears to be about four years old, all the ages come into her face.

  Jake said hello, and she said hello to him and turned back to me. I wished there weren’t any other people around, so I could r
eally talk. It felt shaming to be overlooked by so many people and not able to speak really. I thought: this must be the worst part of being in jail for a long time—standing near the people you love but not quite able to touch them and not quite able to talk to them and sweating with the constraint; counting, all the time they are there, how much more time there is until they’ve got to go. So much to say, and unable to.

  “Well,” Maddie said. “Well, I’ll look in tomorrow.”

  Just then the religious nut threw himself against the bars of his cell and pointed his finger at us, and bellowed out, “Daughter of Sodom, Jezebel, beware the sins of the flesh, beware!”

  Maddie looked behind her and I looked, over her head, seeing him writhing himself up against the bars, moving in a jerky rhythm and roaring, “Beware the unclean lusts of the flesh, beware the guile of painted women that leadeth unto temptation! My judgment is just because I seek not mine own will but the will of the father which hath sent me.”

  I tasted the food coming back up my throat and felt Maddie in trembles between my hands, like from cold, and I couldn’t take it any longer.

  “Shut up,” I yelled, “shut that goddamn bastard up, shut him up, Homer, make him quit!” And then it happened again like I always try to avoid, like a curtain of blazing light coming down over my forehead, getting mad and not knowing or caring any more, not hearing what anybody else was saying, just yelling that I was going to kill him when I got my hands on him.

  Then I heard Jake, quiet, saying, “Easy, take it easy. You’re making it worse.”

  I looked up and saw his face and felt the hotness begin to go and the shaking come on.

  “That’s just what he wants,” he said. “Take a look. It’s you he’s interested in, not Maddie.”

  I looked and saw the nut with one foot through the bars now, weaving his body back and forth, and looking straight at me. His eyes were nasty and pleased, his mouth wide open and blood down the side of his face from where he’d been hit. Seeing me look, he started up again, started whipping himself into a frenzy, running his hands all over his body. But Jake got in first.