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The Good Thief
Chapter One
THE MAN ARRIVED AFTER MORNING PRAYERS. Word spread quickly that someone had come, and the boys of Saint Anthony’s orphanage elbowed each other and strained to catch a glimpse as he unhitched his horse and led it to the trough for drinking. The man’s face was hard to make out, his hat pulled so far down that the brim nearly touched his nose. He tied the reins to a post, and then stood there, touching the horse’s neck, watching her drink. The man waited, and the boys watched, and when the mare finally lifted her head, they saw the man lean forward, stroke the animal’s nose, and kiss her. Then he wiped his lips with the back of his hand, removed his hat, and made his way across the yard to the monastery.
Men often came for children. Sometimes it was for cheap labor, sometimes for a sense of doing good. The brothers of Saint Anthony’s would stand the orphans in a line, and the men would walk back and forth, inspecting. It was easy to tell what they were looking for by where their eyes went. Usually it was to boys almost fourteen, the taller ones, the loudest, the strongest. Then their eyes went down to the barely crawling, the stumbling two year olds—still untainted and fresh. This left the in-betweens—those who had lost their baby fat and curls but were not yet old enough to be helpful. These children were usually ill tempered, and had little to offer but empty stomachs and a bad case of lice. Ren was one of them.
He had no memory of a beginning—of a mother or father, sister or brother. His life was simply there, at Saint Anthony’s, and what he remembered began in the middle of things—the smell of boiled sheets and lye, the taste of watery oatmeal, the feel of dropping a brick onto a piece of stone, watching the red pieces split off, then using those crumbling, broken shards to write on the wall of the monastery, and being slapped for this, and being forced to wash the dust away with a cold, wet rag.
Ren’s name had been sewn into the collar of his nightshirt. Three letters embroidered in dark blue thread. The cloth was made of good linen, and he had worn it until he was nearly two. After that it was taken away and given to a smaller child to wear. Ren learned to keep an eye on Edward, then James, then Nicholas—and corner them in the yard. He would pin the squirming children to the ground and examine the fading letters closely, wondering what kind of hand had worked them. The R and E were sewn boldly in a cross stitch, but the N was thinner, slanting to the right, as if the person working the thread had rushed to complete the job. When the shirt wore thin it was cut into bandages. Brother Joseph gave Ren the piece of collar with the letters, and the boy kept it underneath his pillow at night.
Ren watched now as the visitor waited on the steps of the priory. The man passed his hat back and forth in his hands, leaving damp marks along the felt. The door opened, and he stepped inside. A few minutes later, Brother Joseph came to gather the children, and said: “Get to the statue.”
The statue of Saint Anthony sat in the center of the yard. It was carved from marble, dressed in the robes of the Franciscan friars, the dome of Saint Anthony’s head bald, a halo circling his brow. In one hand he held a lily, and in the other a small child wearing a crown. The child held out one palm in supplication, and used the other to touch the Saint’s cheek. There were times, when the sun receded in the afternoon and shadows played across the stone, that the touch looked more like a slap. This child was Jesus Christ, and the pairing proof of Saint Anthony’s ability to carry messages to God. When a loaf of bread went missing from the kitchen, or Father John couldn’t find the keys to the chapel, the children were sent to the statue. Saint Anthony, Saint Anthony, Come bring what I’ve lost back to me.
Catholics were rare in this part of New England. A local Irishman, who’d made a fortune pressing cheap grapes into strong port, had left his vineyard to the church in a desperate bid for heaven before he died. The brothers of Saint Anthony were sent to claim the land and build the monastery. They found themselves surrounded by Protestants, who, in the first month of their arrival, burned down the barn, fouled the well, and caught two brothers after dark on the road and sent them home tarred and feathered.
After praying for guidance, the brothers turned to the Irishman’s wine press, which was still intact and on the grounds. Plants were sent from Italy, and after some trial and error the brothers matched the right vine with their stony New England soil. Before long Saint Anthony’s became well known for their particular vintage, which they aged in old wooden casks and used for their morning and evening masses. The unconsecrated wine was sold to the local taverns, and also to individual land owners, who sent their servants to collect the bottles in the night, so that their neighbors would not see them doing business with Catholics.
Soon after this the first child was left. Brother Joseph heard cries one morning before sunrise, and opened the door to find a baby wrapped in a soiled dress. The second child was left in a bucket, near the well. The third in a basket by the outhouse. Girls were collected every few months by the Sisters of Charity, who worked in a hospital some distance away. What happened to them, no one knew, but the boys were left at Saint Anthony’s, and before long the monastery had turned into a de-facto orphanage for the bastard children of the local townspeople, who still occasionally tried to burn the place to the ground.
To control these attempts at arson, the brothers built a high brick wall around the property, which sloped and towered like a fortress along the road. At the bottom of the wooden gate that served as the entrance they cut a small, swinging door and it was through this tiny opening that the babies were pushed. Ren was told that he, too, had been pushed through this gate and found the following morning, covered in mud in the prior’s garden. It had rained the night before, and although Ren had no memory of the storm, he often wondered why he had been abandoned in bad weather. It always led to the same conclusion: that whoever had brought him there could not wait to be rid of him.
The gate was hinged to open one way—in. When Ren pushed at the tiny door with his finger, he could feel the strength of the wooden frame behind it. There was no handle on the children’s side, no groove to lift from underneath. The wood was heavy, thick and old—a fine piece of oak planed years before from the woods beyond the orphanage. Ren liked to imagine he felt a pressure in return, a mother reaching back through, changing her mind, groping wildly, a thin white arm.
Underneath Saint Anthony’s statue the younger boys fidgeted and pushed, the older ones cleared their throats nervously. Brother Joseph walked down the line and straightened their clothes, or spit on his hand and scrubbed their faces, bumping his large stomach into the children who had fallen out of place. He pushed it now toward a six year-old, who had suddenly sprung a bloody nose from the excitement.
“Hide it quick,” he said, shielding the boy with his body. Across the yard Father John was solemnly approaching, and behind him was the man who had kissed the horse.
He was a farmer. Perhaps forty years old. His shoulders were strong, his fingers thick with calluses, his skin the color of rawhide from the sun. There was a rash of brown spots across his forehead and the backs of his hands. His face was not unkind, and his coat was clean, his shirt pressed white, his collar tight against his neck. A woman had dressed him. So there would be a wife. A mother.
The man began to make his way down the line. He paused before two blond boys, Brom and Ichy. They were also in-betweens, twins left three winters after Ren. Brom’s neck was thicker, by about two inches, and Ichy’s feet were longer, by about two inches, but beyond those distinguishing characteristics it was hard to tell the boys apart when they were standing still. It was only if they were out in the fields working, or throwing stones at a pine tree, or washing their faces in the morning that the differences became clear. Brom would splash a handful of water over his head and be done with it. Ichy folded a handkerchief into fourths, dabbed it into the basin, then set to work carefully and slowly behind his ears.
It was said that no one would adopt Brom and Ichy because they were twins. One was sure to be unlucky. Second-borns were usually considered changelings, and drowned right after birth. But no one knew who came first, Brom or Ichy, so there was no way to tell where the bad luck was coming from. What the brothers needed to do was separate, make themselves look as different as possible. Ren kept this information to himself. They were his only friends, and he did not want to lose them.
Standing together now the twins grinned at the farmer, and then, suddenly, Brom threw his arms around his brother and attempted to lift him from the ground. He had done this once before, as a show of strength before two elderly gentlemen, and it had ended badly. Ren watched from the other end of the line as Ichy, taken by surprise, began to recite his multiplication tables, all the while struggling violently against his brother, to the point that one of his boots flew into the air and sailed past the farmer’s ear.
Father John kept a small switch up the sleeve of his robe, and he put it to work now on the twins, while Brother Joseph fetched Ichy’s boot and the farmer continued down the line. Ren put his arms behind his back and stood at attention. He held his breath as the man stopped in front of him.
“How old are you?”
Ren opened his mouth to answer, but the man spoke for him.
“You look about twelve.”
Ren wanted to say that he could be any age, that he could make himself into anything the man wanted, but instead he followed what he had been taught by the brothers, and said nothing.
“I want a boy,” said the farmer. “Old enough to help me work, and young enough for my wife to feel she has a child. Someone who’s honest, and willing to learn. Someone who can be a son to us.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice, so that only Ren could hear him. “Do you think you could do that?”
Father John came up behind them. “You don’t want that one.”
The farmer stepped back. He looked confused, then angry at being interrupted. “Why not?”
Father John pointed to Ren’s arm. “Show him.”
Now the other children leaned forward. The priest and the farmer stood waiting. Ren did not move, as if somehow he could wait this moment out until it transformed into something else. He stared past the farmer at a maple tree, just beyond the stone wall, its fall leaves beginning to turn. Soon those leaves would be a different color, and then the wind would come, and the tree would look like something else completely. Father John’s hand disappeared into the sleeve of his robe, and then the switch came down, leaving a thin red line that smarted enough to make the boy give up his secret.
He was missing a hand. Ren’s left arm simply ended, a piece of skin pulled neatly over the bone and sewn crookedly in the shape of a V—the scar tissue raised but healed. The skin was white in places, the stitching like the legs of a centipede, fanned out, frozen and fossilized.
Somewhere between his entry into the world and his delivery through the door of Saint Anthony’s, Ren had lost it. He wondered where the hand was now. He closed his eyes and saw it clearly, palm open, the fingers slightly curled. He imagined it behind a dustbin, inside a wooden box, hidden in the grasses of a field. He did not consider size. He did not think that it would no longer fit him. Ren simply looked at his right and thought about its match, waiting patiently somewhere in the world for him to retrieve it.
The farmer tried not to react, but Ren could see the disgust hidden in his face as he turned away and moved down the line. When he chose a boy from the other end, named William, with red hair and a bad habit of chewing his fingers, the man acted as though it was the only decision he’d made.
Ren watched as the farmer lifted his new son into the wagon. The man patted William on the head, then turned and counted out some money and handed it to Father John, who quickly slipped it into the sleeve of his robe. The farmer climbed up onto the driver’s seat and made ready to leave, but at the last moment lowered the reins and glanced back at the statue of Saint Anthony.
“What happens to the ones no one takes?”
“They are conscripted,” said Father John, “into the army.”
“Not an easy life.”
“It’s the will of God,” said Father John. “We do not question his ways.”
The farmer looked down at the priest, then at his new son, nervously biting the skin on his thumb. He released the brake on the wagon. “I do,” he said, and then called to his horse and started off down the road.
To read the next 50 pages of this novel, go here, or buy the book.
•
Amimal Crackers
It’s time to wash the elephant. Joseph has dragged out the hoses and I’m trying to prod Marysue out the door to the place we do it. Hup, I say, and poke her with a broom. I need to be careful—there is a part of me that steps into traffic—she eased her weight onto the last keeper’s foot and the bones were crushed to pieces. I imagine my ex-wife lifting that giant ear and whispering, step there.
When I started, the staff treated me to a beer and showed me their scars. They said it would happen sooner or later. They said watch out. Everyone who works with animals has a mark somewhere.
Joseph says big animals are like big problems. He should know, he’s had his share—eighteen years old when the army shipped him to Cambodia. He came back okay, he says, only to get his arm chomped off by a Senegalese lion in a traveling circus. He’s got a little stump coming from the end of his elbow that bends up and down. Like me, Joseph used to have a wife who isn’t in the picture anymore. She left him for a soldier who’d also been in Cambodia. Joseph says it was his fault. He doesn’t blame the lion.
It’s a warm day and I’m sweating in my coveralls. We scrub Marysue’s legs and Joseph tells me another story, this one about his friend Al he met in the service (not the one who drove off into the sunset with his wife). I listen to him describe the jungle and turn my hose on the ground to make some mud. Marysue likes to roll in it. She scoops some up, throws it across her back, and I take a long-handled brush and rub it in. She looks at me with her mouth open and I think she is saying thanks.
Joseph’s friend Al was stationed near Phnom Penh and had a pet cockatoo he’d bought off the street for a buck. It would sit on his shoulder and squawk, feathers rippling, but mostly it just looked around and moved its feet back and forth. Al taught it to shit on command. He’d make it go on his friends as a joke, or on people he didn’t like, for a different kind of joke.
One day they were at a bar with the cockatoo flying around and it suddenly landed on Al’s shoulder and let loose some of its sparkling white fruit. It had never done this before—Joseph laughed—but Al just sat and stared at it spackling down the camouflage green of his army jacket. He said, I’m going to die, and he did—somebody had booby-trapped his bike and it blew when he turned the ignition. Joseph said he saw the cockatoo flying around after that, looking for its master, and finally Joseph got so mad he knocked it out of a tree and broke its neck. He still had both his arms then.
I watch Joseph to see how he’s feeling, but he doesn’t seem angry anymore. He slides a sponge across Marysue’s feet and says that manatees have the same kind of rounded nails on their flippers. He says they’re the closest thing elephants have to a relative. I try to imagine Marysue floating in the water, suddenly free of all that weight. Elephants can swim for miles, Joseph says. Somehow they know they’re not going to sink.
•
Sandy runs the monkey house. She is an attractive woman if you look at her from the left. When she turns, you can see the puckered skin and the crooked white line across her cheek into her chin where a gorilla took a bite out. The scar just touches the corner of her mouth, so when she smiles, the skin stretches and it looks like something’s still holding onto her.
She studied biology and zoology in college. After graduation she got hired by one of her professors as a research assistant and headed into the African jungle. She was thinking she had the touch, and it made her do things she shouldn’t, like get too close to a newborn gorilla and have the mother come charging out of the bushes and bury her teeth into Sandy’s face until the team they were traveling with shot her down. Sandy woke up in a hospital to doctors clicking their tongues as they sewed her skin back together over the bone.
We went out on a date once. I took her to dinner and a movie and we got a drink afterward. She told me her old boyfriend used to make her keep her head turned when they made love, so he wouldn’t have to look at it. Hearing all this made me uneasy, the way people can tell you secrets about themselves too soon and make you feel responsible. I took her home after that and left as soon as I could.
•
Mike takes care of the sea lions, George and Martha. He has a master’s degree in poetry and has worked here, scrubbing the tank, for seven years. Each day at noon he performs a show, throwing fish from a pail to George and Martha as they bob on the surface of the water. Afterward, if the boss isn’t around, he tries to sell copies of his chapbook to the crowd.
One evening after we split a bottle of schnapps, our pants rolled up and our feet in the sea lion pool Mike told me about how he went diving at night off the coast of Mexico with a few of his buddies. He said jumping into the ocean after dark is like stepping down into a graveyard, falling through the earth, bumping into coffins and bodies, and feeling all of the lost bits and pieces of souls that have seeped into the soil come looking for you. He said he’d never do it again.
The men brought underwater lights to look at things. They attached glow sticks to their tanks, each a different color—green, yellow, purple. They held onto their masks and regulators and fell in backward.
The group went down about eighty feet and let the current take them. Bugs swarmed their flashlights, and Mike said he could feel little insects wiggling against him as they got caught in his wet suit. He saw giant lobsters, jellyfish, skates, sharks, and other strange things he didn’t know the names for, creatures that only come out at night.
Mike swept the light below. Just beyond the beam there was an enormous scaly movement that didn’t seem to end—part of a manta wing, or the curve of a tail. The animal churned steadily beneath him and there were things hanging—spines or leeches—bits of detritus in its wake. Mike willed himself not to panic. He turned off his light, as if caught spying on his neighbors, and paused in the stillness of the water. Then he swam as fast as he could.
He stopped at thirty feet for safety, to keep from getting the bends. He clicked on the flashlight and looked behind him. There was a tiny eel. A school of fish. Mike watched the green glow of a light stick slowly moving toward him and felt a gathering of relief. Together he and his friend treaded water, back and forth, while they waited for their buddy to join them. They could see the purple color of him in the distance.
When he didn’t come any closer, they got nervous and went after him. He wasn’t there. It was only his tanks settled on the ocean floor, the glow stick swaying like a weathervane in the direction of a bad wind. They went back to the boat, but he wasn’t there either and by then they were out of reserve. They radioed for help. Mike used a snorkel and his flashlight to keep looking, but he stayed close to the boat. They never found the body.
Mike threw the empty schnapps bottle into the pool. We were both quiet for a while. I had my fingers wrapped around the railing and I thought about all the little kids who would be pressing their faces against the glass tomorrow. We had some more quiet between us and then he waded in to fish it out.
•
You hear animal stories everyday. How a bee stung little Johnny and he went into cardiac arrest. How a snake bit Cousin Tom and it shriveled up his toe. How a pack of dogs chased Aunt Shirley down the street until she climbed through an open car window, rolled it shut behind her, and watched the animals circling, pawing the doors, their wet noses leaving streaks on the chrome. These stories are supposed to give warning.
•
Joseph scrapes away at the bottom of Marysue’s foot. He touches her below the knee and she lifts her leg automatically, as if his fingers are telling her something important. I know not to make any sudden movements now. She eyes me as if I might attack, because this is when another animal would come, when she is not ready to protect herself. Her eyes seem too small for such a large body. She keeps her trunk on Joseph’s back, feeling around, making sure of what is happening to her.
Joseph says that in the wild when elephants feel threatened, they put the young and the weak in the middle and form a circle around them. I wonder if Marysue has family somewhere. If they tried to save her from being tagged and shipped. I picture her searching for a tail to hold on to while the others paw the ground and get ready to charge.
•
Ann runs the ticket booth. Her cat, Stinky, comes to work with her everyday. Ann keeps a small basket by her feet, where he sleeps. Stinky doesn’t have any fur. His skin hangs down between his legs like an old man wearing a diaper. Ann says Stinky saved her life.
She tells me about one night in September when she woke up to a blazing light in her room. Her bed was vibrating and she thought it was an earthquake until she felt her body rise and start to move toward the window. The sash flew up and the screen was ripped off. Ann says what came next was like the sting you get before frostbite, followed by a numbness that crept from her fingers and toes and moved through her thighs, her shoulders and on toward her heart. She tried to scream, but her throat was swollen tight.
Stinky jumped onto the windowsill and started hissing. He had fur then, Ann says, orange and yellow swirled together, and it stood on end, prickling against the beam like needle points. Stinky bared his teeth and Ann says his eyes reflected the light so intensely it looked like lasers shooting out of him, and suddenly everything went dark and Ann dropped to the ground, hitting the back of her head on the bedside table. She clutched the rag rug on the floor around her and crawled underneath the mattress, where she lay stunned until morning. When daylight came and she had enough courage to come out, she found the window still open, shreds of the screen in the bushes outside and Stinky, bald and quivering, under a pile of dirty clothes in the closet.
When she isn’t collecting tickets, Ann travels around the country going to abductee conventions with her cat, holding onto his hairless body as truth. She will not go anywhere without him. I watch Stinky through the glass while he is sleeping and I think about devotion. I know Ann worries what will happen when he dies, and why shouldn’t she—she knows what it’s like to live alone—and when he’s gone and the light comes back into her room she’ll know as she’s being pulled through the window that this time she is being taken away because there is no one who loves her enough to stop it.
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