"I don't know," I confessed. "I certainly haven't done anything that
bad in _this_ life."
"William, if you atone for this sin, perhaps the horde of locusts will
lift from you."
It wasn't much of a chance, but I was unused to having any at all. I
shook off the dizziness of it. "By the Lord Harry, Brother, I'm going
to give it a try!" I cried.
"I believe you," Partridge said, surprised at himself.
He ambled over to the money box on the wall. He tapped the bottom
lightly and a box with no top slid out of the slightly larger box. He
reached in, fished out the bill and presented it to me.
"Perhaps this will help in your atonement," he said.
I crumpled it into my pocket fast. Not meaning to sound ungrateful, I'm
pretty sure he hadn't noticed it was a twenty.
And then the bill seemed to lie there, heavy, a lead weight. It would
have been different if I had managed to get it out of the box myself.
You know how it is.
Money you haven't earned doesn't seem real to you.
* * * * *
There was something I forgot to mention so far. During the year between
when I got out of the reformatory and the one when I tried to steal
Brother Partridge's money, I killed a man.
It was all an accident, but killing somebody is reason enough to get
punished. It didn't have to be a sin in some previous life, you see.
I had gotten my first job in too long, stacking boxes at the freight
door of Baysinger's. The drivers unloaded the stuff, but they just
dumped it off the truck. An empty rear end was all they wanted. The
freight boss told me to stack the boxes inside, neat and not too close
together.
I stacked boxes the first day. I stacked more the second. The third day
I went outside with my baloney and crackers. It was warm enough even
for November.
Two of them, dressed like Harvard seniors, caps and striped duffer
jackets, came up to the crate I was dining off.
"Work inside, Jack?" the taller one asked.
"Yeah," I said, chewing.
"What do you do, Jack?" the fatter one asked.
"Stack boxes."
"Got a union card?"