The Good Thief (2 page)

I
n the barn Brother Joseph poured himself a mug of wine and settled into his seat. Underneath his robe was a foot warmer—a small tin box full of coals from the kitchen fireplace. He put one sandal on it and then the other as he supervised the children working. Occasionally he would fall asleep and his robe would catch on fire. Somehow he always woke in time to douse the flames with his sampling cup.

Around him the boys de-stemmed, pressed, and strained the grapes. It was fall, and the harvest was nearly over. Brother Joseph supervised as they added the sugar and yeast to the collected juice, covered the pails with cheesecloth, and set them aside. Later they would skim off the sediment, pour the liquid into the wooden casks, add a bit of finished wine, and leave the batch to ferment. The final step was to siphon the wine into bottles and cork them. Three months later it would be ready to drink.

Brother Joseph did not excuse Ren from any of this work, but he did find ways to help him. He tied a basket to Ren’s waist when the boy was picking in the fields; he showed Ren how to steady the skimmer using the crook of his arm; he placed the funnel between Ren’s fingers and the empty stub of the boy’s wrist. Sometimes it took Ren twice as long as the other boys to accomplish the tasks, but Brother Joseph offered small words to encourage him, and this usually gave Ren the heart to finish.

Now the monk peered into his mug and inspected the dark residue collecting at the bottom. Then he looked at the children, going about in the silent way they always did after one of their group had been chosen, their faces somber and resentful. Brother Joseph set his cup on the floor and pushed the foot warmer aside. “I think we should all say a prayer for William,” he said.

“He doesn’t need one,” said Ichy.

“We all need prayers,” said Brother Joseph. “Especially when something good happens to us.” He sighed. “Bad luck follows anything that’s good. And bad things always happen in threes.”

The boys contemplated this as they continued with their work. And more than a few were secretly glad.

“What kind of bad luck do you think William will get?” Ichy asked.

“That’s hard to say,” said Brother Joseph. “It could be anything.”

“I’ll bet they get robbed on the way home,” said Ichy.

“And when they get there,” said Brom, “their house is on fire.”

The other boys joined in, each with his own vision of bad luck for William and his new father. They were caught in swarms of bees and chased by packs of wolves. They were given the gout, the chicken pox, the plague.

“That’s enough!” said Brother Joseph. “It’s only supposed to happen three times.” But the boys kept at it, imagining worse things, giddy with their own meanness.

Ren tried to think of his own bad fate for William, but he could not get past the image of the farmer lifting the boy into the cart. He wondered if William would write, once he was settled. Some of the boys who were adopted sent letters, detailing their new lives, the warm beds and clean clothes and special meals their mothers prepared for them. These letters were cherished and passed from boy to boy until the pages were torn and the ink had faded.

Ren pictured the supper waiting for William at home. The farmer’s wife would have taken out the good plates, if they had good plates. Yes, Ren decided, they would have good plates. Plates of white porcelain. And there would be a small bowl of wildflowers, picked from behind the kitchen door, pink and blue with tiny yellow buttercups. There would be bread, still warm, sliced and covered with a napkin in a basket. There would be stew of some kind, hot and full of meat that had been rubbed with herbs, tender and soft to chew. And a mountain of potatoes. And corn scraped from the cob. And glasses of fresh milk. And cooling on a windowsill, just behind the farmer’s wife, who was standing in the door frame now looking for her husband’s wagon, would be a blackberry pie. Just for the three of them.

She would not have minded his hand. She would not have minded at all.

Ren sat on the floor of the distillery and sorted grapes, pulling leaves and bits of vine from the flesh, tossing the damaged and unripe fruit to the side. There were always spiders in the baskets from the fields, and clouds of gnats, and sometimes thin black snakes. Ren’s fingers were stained with red. It would be days before the color faded from his skin.

When he was through, he dumped the grapes over the top of the winepress, an enormous contraption that held court in the center of the barn. The children huddled by the chutes at the bottom, holding buckets, collecting the juice, while others pushed the crank, which was set in the middle of the press like a windmill on its side. It was heavy work. The oldest boys were assigned to the crank, one on each arm, walking in circles. In another year, Ren would be one of them.

Only a few boys had grown old enough and been passed over enough at Saint Anthony’s to be sent into the army. One was named Frederick, a stout child who had trouble breathing and would often faint, crumpling to the floor with barely a sound. The soldiers came in the night and took him. From the window of the small boys’ room, Ren had seen the men drag Frederick across the yard and through the wooden gate, his body limp, his feet bouncing off the cobblestones. He was not heard from again.

Another was named Sebastian, a boy remarkably pale and thin. Six months after he’d left with the soldiers he appeared at the gate of the orphanage, and he was so changed that the children did not recognize him. His face was haggard, and both eyes had been blackened. His lip was split in two and his leg appeared to be broken. Sebastian pushed open the little wooden door in the gate, the same one he had been passed through as a child, and begged the brothers to take him back. Father John approached, murmured a prayer, and threw the extra bolt. The boy stayed out there for three days, crying first, then pleading, then shouting, then praying, then cursing, until he fell silent, and a wagon came, driven by three soldiers, and they put Sebastian in the back of it and carried him away.

It was rumored that Father John accepted payment from the soldiers, and also signed a contract of some kind, giving over ownership of the boys. A day did not go by that Ren did not think of this, and whenever he did, the scar on his arm began to itch. Every time he was passed over in the line of children, every time he watched another boy taken, and every year he grew older, it itched more.

To make up for this, Ren stole things. It began with small items of food. He’d stand in front of the cook after cleaning out the fireplace, and the man would glance at the boy’s scar, and then turn and study a pile of cabbages while shouting for someone to wash the beans, and it was just enough time for Ren to slip one of the pieces of bread left out on the counter into his pocket.

He never took anything that couldn’t be easily hidden away. He stole socks and shoelaces, combs and prayer cards, buttons, keys, and crucifixes. Whatever crossed his path. Sometimes he would keep the items, sometimes he would return them, sometimes he would toss them down the well. In this way Ren was responsible for most of the lost things being prayed for at the statue of Saint Anthony.

The items he kept were stashed inside a small crack about a foot from the edge of the well. Leaning over the stone wall, Ren could fit his hand inside the hiding place, his breath echoing back to him from the water far below. There was a broken piece of blue and white pottery, a snake skin he’d found in the woods, a set of rosary beads he’d stolen from Father John, made from real roses, and, most important of all, his rocks.

Every boy at Saint Anthony’s collected rocks. They hoarded stones as if they were precious objects, as if the accumulation of feldspar and shale would pave their way to a new life. If they dug in the right places, they found rarer things—pieces of quartz, or mica, or arrowheads. These stones were kept and traded and loved, and sometimes, when the children were adopted, they were left behind.

That afternoon, when Brother Joseph had fallen asleep, William’s rocks were spread out across the floor of the barn, and the boys began to argue over how to divide them. There were perhaps thirty or forty pieces. Rocks that gleamed like metal, or had brown and black stripes, or reds and oranges the color of the sunset. But the best of the collection was a wishing stone, a soft gray rock with an unbroken circling band of white. Good for one wish to come true.

Ren had seen only one before—it had belonged to Sebastian. He’d shown it to Ren once, but he wouldn’t let anyone hold it. He was afraid of losing the wish. He was saving it, he said, for a time when he was in trouble, and he’d taken it with him when he left for the army. Later, outside the brick wall that surrounded the orphanage, his lips cracked from the sun, Sebastian told Ren through the swinging door in the gate that someone had stolen the wishing stone while he slept. “I shouldn’t have held on to it,” he wept. “I should have used it as soon as it came into my hands.”

The rafters of the barn caught the boys’ voices and sent them back, louder and more forceful, as they bargained over William’s collection. A few had already noticed the wishing stone. Once William’s rocks were divided, Ren was sure to lose his chance. He edged closer to where it lay on the ground, rolling up his sleeve as he went. Then he pretended that someone had shoved him from behind, and threw his body into the center of the group, scrambling on the floor, the stub of his left arm covering his right. The group elbowed him to the side.

“Shove off.”

“Leper.”

“Get out of the way.”

Ren moved to the back of the room as the boys continued to argue, the stone safe in his fingers. He opened his palm and glanced down. The wishing stone was the color of rain. The edges smooth. He felt the indentation where the ring of white began and thought of all the things he was going to ask for.

Brom and Ichy whispered to each other, then left the group and followed Ren. They knew he had taken something. They were his friends but they wanted their share.

“What’s that in your hand?”

“Nothing.”

“Give it here.”

The rest of the children began to notice. First Edward, with his runny nose, then Luke and Marcus. Ren knew he had only a moment before they would all be upon him. He punched Brom, the weight of his friend’s chin hard against his knuckles. Then he ducked under Ichy’s arm and burst out of the barn, running as fast as he could to the well, hoping he could reach it in time to hide the stone, praying all the while that the boys wouldn’t come after him. But they did—they were close behind, Brom in the lead and nearly grabbing Ren’s shoulder, and then he did, and they both fell to the ground.

Ichy sat on Ren’s chest and Brom twisted his arm until his fingers opened. Ren tried to kick them off, biting and scratching, but he knew in his heart that he was going to lose, and he felt the stone slip out of his hand. The boys left him panting in the dirt and clustered around what they had taken.

“I want to wish for an arrowhead,” said Ichy.

“That’s not good enough,” said Brom.

“For candy, then.”

“For Father John to break his neck.”

“For toys!”

“To get picked from the line.”

“For a hundred wishes instead of one.”

Ren listened to his friends. He had never hated anyone more. He thrust himself forward and snatched the stone back. If he couldn’t use the wish, then no one would. The twins grabbed hold of his shirt and he pulled desperately away, the hate inside giving him strength, more than he’d ever had before, and he leaned over and threw the rock down into the well. There was no sound as it descended, just the echo of Ren’s own breathing in the dark, and then the smallest splash that told him it had hit water.

F
ather John’s study was on the second floor of the monastery. From this small room came dictations and benedictions, portion sizes and bedtime procedures, prayer schedules, catalogs of sins, a rotation of privy duty, and the sounds of these rules and regulations being enforced. Ren had been caned there three times for hoarding food, six times for leaving his bed at night, fifteen times for being on the roof without permission, and twenty-seven times for cursing. He knew the room well and was sure that the priest whipped him less harshly—he’d seen welts inches deep on others.

Father John chose a volume from a shelf on the wall: The Lives of the Saints. He walked over to his desk and began to read while Ren stood in the corner, watching and waiting. Thirty minutes passed. Father John sometimes kept the children for hours this way. The waiting was always worse than the punishment.

In his own way Ren was a believer. It came as easily as breathing. There was a stream in the woods behind the orphanage. Ren liked to put his hand in and feel the water rush through his fingers. He watched leaves and twigs floating downstream and felt the tug of the current on his wrist. It was the same pull that came sometimes when he prayed—the sense of being carried on to a deeper place. But he never had the courage to follow it through. As soon as he felt the urge to let go, he’d take his hand out of the water.

The priest turned a page in his book. He ran his finger along the center of the spine and began to read aloud: “‘In Padua a young man named Leonardo kicked his mother in a fit of anger. He was then so remorseful that he confessed to Saint Anthony. The saint told the young man that he needed to remove the part of himself that had committed the sin. Leonardo went home and cut off his foot. Saint Anthony, upon hearing this, went to visit the injured man. And with one touch he reattached the foot.’” Father John closed the book but kept his finger in the page. “I thought you might be interested in that story.”