All they really wanted was for someone to spend the night with Aunt Myrtle or Cousin Kate or Mama or Daddy; no actual duties were demanded of me, they said, and they really didn’t think my help was worth anything except meals and a place to sleep. The arrangements were pretty makeshift. Half the time I wouldn’t have a place to keep my things, not that I had any clothes to speak of, and sometimes I’d sleep on a cot in the hall outside the patient’s room or on some sort of contrived bed in the patient’s room.
I cherished every one of those sick people, just as I had cherished Mama and Mr. Williams. I didn’t want them to die. I did everything I knew to let them know I was interested in their welfare — first for their sakes, and then for mine, so I wouldn’t have to go out and find another place to stay.
Well, now, I’ve made out my case for the defense, a term I never thought I’d have to use personally, so now I’ll make out the case for the prosecution.
I stole.
I don’t like to say it, but I was a thief.
I’m not light-fingered. I didn’t want a thing that belonged to anybody else. But there came a time when I felt forced to steal. I had to have some things. My shoes fell apart. I needed some stockings and underclothes. And when I’d ask a son or a daughter or a cousin or a niece for a little money for those necessities they acted as if I was trying to blackmail them. They reminded me that I wasn’t qualified as a practical nurse, that I might even get into trouble with the authorities if they found I was palming myself off as a practical nurse — which I wasn’t and they knew it. Anyway, they said that their terms were only bed and board.
So I began to take things — small things that had been pushed into the backs of drawers or stored high on shelves in boxes — things that hadn’t been used or worn for years and probably would never be used again. I made my biggest haul at Mrs. Bick’s where there was an attic full of trunks stuffed with clothes and doodads from the twenties all the way back to the nineties — uniforms, ostrich fans, Spanish shawls, beaded bags. I sneaked out a few of these at a time and every so often sold them to a place called Way Out, Hippie Clothiers.
I tried to work out the exact amount I got for selling something.
Not, I know, that you can make up for theft. But, say, I got a dollar for a feather boa belonging to Mrs. Bick: well, then I’d come back and work at a job that the cleaning woman kept putting off, like waxing the hall upstairs or polishing the andirons or getting the linen closet in order.
All the same I
But I didn’t steal that silver box.
I was as innocent as a baby where that box was concerned. So when that policeman came toward me grabbing at the box I stepped aside, and maybe I even gave him the push that sent him to his death. He had no business acting like that when that box was mine, whatever Mrs. Crowe’s niece argued.
Fifty thousand nieces couldn’t have made it not mine.
Anyway, the policeman was dead and though I hadn’t wanted him dead I certainly hadn’t wished him well. And then I got to thinking: well, I didn’t steal Mrs. Crowe’s box but I had stolen other things and it was the mills of God grinding exceeding fine, as I once heard a preacher say, and I was being made to pay for the transgres-sions that had caught up with me.
Surely I can make a little more sense out of what happened than that, though I never was exactly clear in my own mind about everything that happened.
Mrs. Crowe was the most appreciative person I ever worked for.
She was bedridden and could barely move. I don’t think the registered nurse on daytime duty considered it part of her job to massage Mrs. Crowe. So at night I would massage her, and that pleased and soothed her. She thanked me for every small thing I did — when I fluffed her pillow, when I’d put a few drops of perfume on her earlobes, when I’d straighten the wrinkled bedcovers.
I had a little joke. I’d pretend I could tell fortunes and I’d take Mrs. Crowe’s hand and tell her she was going to have a wonderful day but she must beware of a handsome blond stranger — or some such foolishness that would make her laugh. She didn’t sleep well and it seemed to give her pleasure to talk to me most of the night about her childhood or her dead husband.
She kept getting weaker and weaker and two nights before she died she said she wished she could do something for me but that when she became an invalid she had signed over everything to her niece. Anyway, Mrs. Crowe hoped I’d take her silver box. I thanked her. It pleased me that she liked me well enough to give me the box.
I didn’t have any real use for it. It would have made a nice trinket box, but I didn’t have any trinkets. The box seemed to be Mrs. Crowe’s fondest possession. She kept it on the table beside her and her eyes lighted up every time she looked at it. She might have been a little girl first seeing a brand-new baby doll early on a Christmas morning.
So when Mrs. Crowe died and the niece on whom I set eyes for the first time dismissed me, I gathered up what little I had and took the box and left. I didn’t go to Mrs. Crowe’s funeral. The paper said it was private and I wasn’t invited. Anyway, I wouldn’t have had anything suitable to wear.
I still had a few dollars left over from those things I’d sold to the hippie place called Way Out, so I paid a week’s rent for a room that was the worst I’d ever stayed in.
It was freezing cold and no heat came up to the third floor where I was. In that room with falling plaster and buckling floorboards and darting roaches, I sat wearing every stitch I owned, with a sleazy blanket and a faded quilt draped around me waiting for the heat to rise, when in swept Mrs. Crowe’s niece in a fur coat and a fur hat and shiny leather boots up to her knees. Her face was beet red from anger when she started telling me that she had traced me through a private detective and I was to give her back the heirloom I had stolen.
Her statement made me forget the precious little bit I knew of the English language. I couldn’t say a word, and she kept on screaming that if I returned the box immediately no criminal charge would be made against me. Then I got back my voice and I said that box was mine and that Mrs. Crowe had wanted me to have it, and she asked if I had any proof or if there were any witnesses to the gift, and I told her that when I was given a present I said thank you, that I didn’t ask for proof and witnesses, and that nothing could make me part with Mrs. Crowe’s box.
The niece stood there breathing hard, in and out, almost counting her breaths like somebody doing an exercise to get control of herself.
“You’ll see,” she yelled, and then she left.
The room was colder than ever and my teeth chattered.
Not long afterward I heard heavy steps clumping up the stairway.
I realized that the niece had carried out her threat and that the police were after me.
I was panic-stricken. I chased around the room like a rat with a cat after it: Then I thought that if the police searched my room and couldn’t find the box it might give me time to decide what to do. I grabbed the box out of the top dresser drawer and scurried down the back hall. I snatched the back door open. I think what I intended to do was run down the back steps and hide the box somewhere, underneath a bush or maybe in a garbage can.
Those back steps were steep and rose almost straight up for three stories and they were flimsy and covered with ice.
I started down. My right foot slipped. The handrail saved me. I clung to it with one hand and to the silver box with the other hand and picked and chose my way across the patches of ice.
When I was midway I heard my name shrieked. I looked around to see a big man leaping down the steps after me. I never saw such anger on a person’s face. Then he was directly behind me and reached out to snatch the box.
I swerved to escape his grasp and he cursed me. Maybe I pushed him. I’m not sure — not really.
Anyway, he slipped and fell down and down and down, and then after all that falling he was absolutely still. The bottom step was beneath his head like a pillow and the rest of his body was spreadeagled on the brick walk.
The almost like a pet that wants to follow its master, the silver box jumped from my hand and bounced down the steps to land beside the man’s left ear.
My brain was numb. I felt paralyzed. Then I screamed.
Tenants from that house and the houses next door and across the alley pushed windows open and flung doors open to see what the commotion was about, and then some of them began to run toward the back yard. The
