Stealing

I’m an English and science instructor, but today I’ve been asked to teach Christian religious education. My ten-by-ten-foot tin-walled classroom is packed with Kenyan fourth-graders who are overexcited to have me, a white person, as their teacher. “Tea-CHA! Tea-CHA!” the kids call, raising their hands. They want to be called on even before there is a question for them to answer.

I open the tattered textbook — more of a booklet, really — to chapter six, “Stealing,” and we read a few Scriptures and a story about a man who steals a car and gets caught. Only about one in five students has a book, and the kids in each row scoot to the middle of the bench to peek at the pictures. I ask a few simple questions: What do people steal? Why do people steal? What is wrong about stealing?

Huxley says that people steal money. He is the class prefect (a student who helps the teacher keep the other kids in line), and I have been to his house: one room with five people living in it. His father is unemployed, like nearly everyone else around here. I tell Huxley he is right. Stealing money is common.

Basil raises his hand and says that people steal food. His father has just died, leaving Basil orphaned. He never has any lunch, and sometimes I bring him an avocado to eat. His toes stick out of his pink high-top shoes, and his eyes reveal quiet suffering. “Yes, Basil,” I say, “people do steal food.”

Betinah, the star pupil, tells me that God never wants you to steal, no matter what. The booklet heavily emphasizes this point. Yesterday I went to Betinah’s house and gave her a copy of Huckleberry Finn. Her father has a job, and her family is considered lucky.

I want to tell the class about moral relativity. I want to explain to them the impracticality of the eighth commandment. I want to tell them to steal lunch, pencils, textbooks — everything they need and deserve but don’t have.

“Yes, Betinah,” I say. “Stealing is wrong, no matter what.”

Emily Davis
Wayne, Pennsylvania

I took the bus to summer school every weekday, dragging along my nylon-string guitar for lessons. My goal was to get good enough to play at folk Mass with my dad on Saturday evenings. I was an eight-year-old left-hander learning to play right-handed, angry that my brother had gotten all the rhythm genes. Every night my father pressured me to practice “Go Tell Aunt Rhody,” with its upbeat that I just couldn’t get. I developed calluses and cried and wanted to quit, but I couldn’t disappoint my dad. If I could just learn to play a simple C chord progression, I’d be allowed to join him.

The best part of summer school was the snack bar. My mother always gave me a dime for a treat, and I’d discovered Red Vines: eight ropes of licorice in a cellophane package. Every day I bought Red Vines and sucked on all eight pieces at once.

One morning my lust for candy got the better of me. I helped myself to some change from my father’s dresser and bought five packs of Red Vines that day.

“Where’d you get all those?” my brother asked when he saw them, and I cursed myself for not being more careful.

Later that day my father said, “I’m missing some change. I understand you bought extra candy.”

I confessed and promised I wouldn’t do it again.

“Go to your room.”

I went, shaking with fear. My dad had been raised to believe that a little whipping was good for kids and kept them in line. I’d witnessed my brothers and sisters getting whipped with Dad’s belt, but I’d always been a good girl and avoided it — until today.

My dad entered my bedroom and shut the door behind him. “Take off your clothes,” he ordered. I did as I was told and waited. He dropped the belt and sat on my bed. “Lie down,” he said. He began to massage my chest. “These are going to grow larger soon,” he told me. He moved his hand to between my legs. “You’ll grow hair here.”

I was speechless and frightened. I felt like throwing up.

“Does it feel good?” he asked.

“No,” I whispered, wanting a whipping, the belt — anything but this.

“It will someday,” he said. “You’ll be asking for this someday.”

After a few minutes, he allowed me to get dressed. As he left the room, he told me to help myself to the change on his dresser whenever I wanted.

For the next decade, every time he came into my room at night, I thought it was my fault: if only I hadn’t stolen that change, I could have had a normal childhood.

K.F.
Colorado Springs, Colorado

When I worked as a cook for a meditation center in North Carolina, I was responsible for buying the food. Without telling my employers, I convinced the local store to give me a nonprofit discount. Then I pocketed the savings. I knew it was wrong, but I found ways of justifying it to myself.

I tried to meditate for a couple of hours a day, but I was having trouble. At first I’d had many revelations; now it just felt like work. When I told the head monk that I had stopped meditating every day, he asked me why.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Well, why don’t you meditate on that,” he suggested.

So I did. I was sitting and thinking about the question when it dawned on me that I had stopped because, now that the revelations weren’t coming, meditation no longer seemed worth it. Then I thought about my stealing from the monastery, and when I put the two together, I had a revelation: I was greedy! The insight was so powerful that I started crying. I didn’t want to be greedy, but there it was.

Well, I thought, that was worth it! And I started to laugh.

Name Withheld

It was 1970, and my friends and I had a communal apartment whose balcony overlooked the gravel parking lot of a small grocery store called Uncle Wiggily’s Garden Patch. We practically lived on beer, and since our flower-decaled vw van was kaput and our driver’s licenses were suspended or nonexistent, you might expect that we bought our alcohol from Uncle Wiggily. Contrary to the image on his sign, however, he was not a cute, furry bunny rabbit with a cane and top hat, but a Pakistani with a loud voice and a violent dislike for men with long hair. He sometimes ran us out of his store with a broom. So we bought beer by the keg from the tavern across the street.

One time around midnight, we had dropped some acid and were discussing the spiritual significance of Frank Zappa’s music when someone got the idea to pay Uncle Wiggily’s Garden Patch an after-hours visit. We jumped down from the balcony into the parking lot and stumbled, beers in hand, to the rear of the store, where a shed leaned against the building. Inside we found a mess of flattened cardboard boxes and empty gunnysacks, and behind them a gap in the siding that revealed the exposed studs of the store’s outside wall. I pushed against the thin wallboard between the studs and, with just a bit more force, muscled my way into the store.

We stole the food — all of it — filling the gunnysacks, lifting them up to the balcony on a rope, then returning with the empty bags. In two hours our apartment was packed five feet deep with everything from avocados to ziti. We didn’t leave a single jelly bean.

At sunrise we watched through the curtains with barely concealed mirth as Uncle Wiggily unlocked the store. A faint cry of anguish carried across the lot, and the store owner staggered forth, pulling his hair and shouting in his native tongue. He whirled about as if expecting to spot the thieves, then fell to his knees in the dust and sobbed.

We never saw him again, and the store never reopened.

I’ve spent more than thirty years of my life in prison, and people often ask me if there is anything I would do differently, were I given the chance. Yes, I would wish to be shooed that night from Uncle Wiggily’s Garden Patch with a broom and some harmless shouting.

G.W. Dash
Coleman, Florida

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