by W. L. Heath
You couldn’t possibly call it stealing, she was saying to herself, because I don’t know whose it is. I honestly don’t. There’s no way on earth for me to return it. Just that little brass key and the two three-cent stamps, and the money. No identification card or even a letter with an address on it. It could be almost anybody’s. How, I ask you, is a person going to return money like that? You can’t do it. Much as I’d like to see it back in the hands of the rightful owner, you just can’t do it. Run an ad in the paper and about a dozen people would probably try and claim it.
She passed a street lamp and a bat dived out of the gloom, flitting and faltering on its soft, cloth-like wings. In a house across the street a radio blared out and was quickly turned down.
Now, of course, if somebody came to me and said, “Miss Elsie, I lost a purse with fifty dollars in it in front of Rayburn’s,” why I’d naturally be glad to turn it over. It isn’t that. It’s not that I’m just trying to keep the money, like stealing or something like that. But after all, finders keepers, losers weepers these days. If I hadn’t found it, someone else would, and no telling who else either. You can bet your life whoever it was would have spent it by now and not waited, the way I have, to see if it’s claimed. No sirree. In a way, whoever lost it is lucky it was me that found it, because nine out of ten would have just said well good for me and spent it on themselves without giving it so much as a second thought by now. I’ll be more than glad to turn it over to the rightful owner, the minute they identify themself. That’s a trait the Morgan family has always had.
She turned right at the Methodist church and waddled painfully along Merton Street, where the houses were smaller and set closer together. She could hear dishes clattering in kitchens as the housewives cleaned up after supper. Somewhere a screen door slammed, and then, distantly, a dog barked.
Of course I’m not going to hold onto that money forever, she thought. After all, there’s no point in just waiting indefinitely for somebody to claim it, because if they don’t claim it soon they never will. But even if I should have to keep it, I wouldn’t keep it for myself or spend it on myself. I wouldn’t feel right doing that, even if I knew no one would ever claim it. I just never would feel it was my money to do that with. What I might do, though, is just let it go against Papa’s doctor bills. Practically charity, you might say. That would be the thing to do with it. Not use it selfishly to buy something for myself – though God knows I could use it – but just let Papa get the benefit of it without ever knowing. Poor old soul. Well, maybe that’s why I was the one that found it – on account of Papa, and us being so dreadfully hard up these days. Maybe I ought not to even worry my head about it at all, because the Lord does bless us in devious ways. Lots of people would look at it that way I’m sure. But no, I don’t want to start that. I mustn’t try to talk myself into that money because it’s not mine. Not yet it isn’t. I’ve got to wait several days at least and see if it’s claimed.
I’d return it in two minutes, if I knew whose it was. I honestly believe I would. In fact, I know I would. Because I could never bring myself to keep money, even found money, that belonged to somebody else and I knew whose it was. I’ve never done a dishonest thing in my life. I’ve got to stop worrying about it, though. I’ve had it on my mind ever since it happened, and there’s no point in fretting myself sick about it. I don’t know why I’m making such an issue of it anyway. All I can do is just wait, and if somebody claims it, well, I’ll just have to give it up, that’s all. I’ll be more than glad to. But I do wish I could get it off my mind awhile. I’ve got to think of something else. What about supper – there’s something. What can we eat for supper? I’m not the least bit hungry, and that’s a fact. I’m too tired to eat. And I don’t want to have to wash dishes the way my ankles are killing me tonight. I just don’t think I could stand it. Well, let’s see. There’s some beans and turnip greens and one piece of tenderloin left over from dinner. I could eat that. That would be a plenty for me. Papa will want some Cream of Wheat, I guess, and maybe that’ll be enough for him tonight. I can give him a glass of buttermilk if he wants it. He shouldn’t eat much at supper anyhow, that’s why he don’t sleep any better than he does. Dr. Clemmons said not let him eat hardly anything before bed. Which reminds me. I’ve got to send Dr. Clemmons a check. I’ve got to, even if we’re overdrawn. If no one claims that purse, won’t that be a blessing? Now I’m back on that again. Well, all I can say is, whoever it belongs to can gladly have it. All they’ve got to do is identify themself. If that’s dishonest in any way, I’m badly fooled.
She sighed and shook her head, going painfully up the steps to her house. As she opened the door, her father called to her, “That you, Elsie?”
“Yes, it’s me, Papa.”
It could be no one else, not today nor tomorrow nor any other day for as long as the two of them had left on earth. She turned on the hall light, put down her purse and the books she had brought home, and went straight into his room. The old man was sitting up in bed with the county paper spread open across his lap.
“I see here by the paper where Miz Morris Walker lost a pocketbook with some money in it. It don’t say how much. She’s offering a ten dollar reward. Says they was a key in it she wants the finder to return, no questions asked.”
Elsie looked at her father lying there fat and sick and old, with pipe ashes all over the bedcovers, and for one brilliant instant she wanted to choke him. You meddlesome old fool! she wanted to shout. You’ve fixed it now, and I was only doing it for you!
She went quickly into the bathroom and closed the door, and hot tears of anger stung her eyes – anger at him, but also at herself. Mainly at herself. Her, a Morgan, rationalizing that way, lying to herself so she could steal. A Morgan stealing. My God, she thought. Have we come to this, finally? Stealing? What has the world got against us that we have to be pushed down and down and down till nobody even remembers who we are or what we’ve been. Don’t they know this town was named for my family? What have I done to deserve this? Why do I have to be punished with this poverty, and this filthy, ignorant old man my mother never, never should have married in the first place? What is it? What in God’s name have I done?
And think of that fat hussy saying it was the key she wanted back. The key, mind you. Sitting up there so high and mighty in a big fine house and two generations ago they were share-croppers. Yes, sharecroppers. Oh, I know you all right, Miss High-and-mighty Walker, I know all about you. Your great-grandfather was run out of the country over a Nigra girl, and you had an uncle who died drunk on the public square. The key, eh? No, the money doesn’t matter does it? Just the key. Just because the Fairchilds and the Byjohns and a few more have taken you in, you think you’re so high and mighty. And those Brayleys, too. Think of it. Living up there on Sycamore Hill where the Morgans belong – where I belong. That clan living in the old Morgan house. Sharecroppers, carpetbaggers, bootleggers! That’s what you are, all of you, not two generations ago!
She put her face in her hands and cried.
When the three of them, Harper, Dill and Preacher, returned to their room they pulled down the shades, locked the door, and Harper got out a pencil and a large piece of brown wrapping paper. He pulled a chair up to the dresser, and sitting there with his legs spread awkwardly apart because there was no place to put them under the dresser, he began to draw a diagram on the brown paper.
“I’m going to show you what I mean,” he said. “It would be a good idea for both of you to memorize this.”
Preacher had brought a sack of apples back to the room with him, and while Harper was drawing, he stretched out on his bed to eat one of them. He had a sharp knife, and he peeled the apple carefully, letting the long spiraling peel hang down from the blade as he went around the apple.
“I don’t know if I can take it in here with all the shades down,” Dill said. “I can’t breathe in here. I swear if it’s a hotter hole in the forty-eight states I’d like to know about it.”
�
��Take your shirt off,” Harper said. “Strip down and you’ll get cool.”
Dill took off his coat, and then his shirt and tie. He wanted to take his trousers off too, but Preacher was watching him, getting ready to make some remark about his underwear again, so he left them on. He lit a cigar and sat down by the window so the little draft of air that came around the edge of the shade would hit his back.
They were silent for a while as Harper continued to draw. Preacher ate his apple, cutting off neat crescent-shaped wedges and lifting them to his mouth with the point of the knife. Dill watched him with distaste. When he had finished the apple he tossed the core across the room at the wastebasket, but he missed it and the core rolled under the dresser. He adjusted his hearing aid, opened the sack, took out another apple and began to peel it slowly, carefully in the same way.
“You going to eat another one?” Dill asked.
“That’s right.”
“What’s the matter, didn’t you get enough to eat at supper?”
“I like a little dessert,” Preacher said. “Apples are one of my favorite desserts.”
“So I see. How many you planning to eat?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I may eat the whole sack, if I feel like it. It’s nothing to you.”
“I didn’t say it was anything to me. Eat as many as you want.”
“I will.”
“All right, you guys,” Harper said.
“All I asked him was if he meant to eat another apple,” Dill said. “He’s got to give everything a smart answer.”
“Let it lie,” Harper said. “I’m trying to concentrate.”
Dill continued to watch Preacher as he peeled the apple. He was fascinated by the way the knife went smoothly around it, curling off the long, continuous strip of rind.
“What’s the matter?” Preacher said. “You ever see somebody peel a apple before?”
“I seen hogs eating apples once,” Dill said. “You’d be right at home with a bunch of hogs, eating about a hundred goddam apples at a time.”
“Two apples. You call that a hundred? You must not can count either, Dill.”
“I can count.”
“All right, for God sakes,” Harper said. “You guys act like a couple of kids. Try and get along for a change, will you? This is important.”
“All I asked him was if he meant to eat another apple.”
“And I told you,” Preacher said.
Harper got up and spread the big piece of brown paper on the bed. “Here it is,” he said. “Get up, Preacher, or at least move your feet. This is the bank.”
Preacher swung his legs over the side and sat up, and Dill crossed the room to stand beside Harper. They looked down at the diagram, and Harper began to talk, pointing at the paper with his pencil.
“This here’s the door, of course, and like I told you, the cages run along the right side here where you see these squares. Back here there’s two or three desks that belong to the cashier and I guess the president or vice president or whoever he is.”
“What’s that, a wall?” Preacher said.
“No, it’s one of these little fence-like affairs. Just about waist high. We got a break on that. You can see the whole bank the minute you step in the door. The vault is here, in the back wall, and as far as I can tell, it stays open all day.”
“No offices in the back?” Dill said.
“No office anywhere. All the desks sit right along back here behind this little fence. You can see the whole bank and everybody in it the minute you step in the door. The only place there could be somebody we don’t see is in the john.”
“That’s just our luck though,” Dill said. “Just about two in minutes before we go in, some bastard is going to take a notion to take a whiz probably.”
“How many in there?” Preacher asked.
“Six. I counted them three times to make sure. And three of them are women.”
“I don’t like those women in there,” Dill said. “A woman can always start screaming her head off.”
“You ever see a bank without a woman, Dill?”
“All right, then. It happens to be one of the hazards in a deal like this. I don’t think we’ll have any trouble though. They’re insured, and nobody is going to get very brave about some cash that’s already insured. We’re all right. They’ll line up nice enough.”
“And you’re sure there’s no alarm?” Preacher said.
“Absolutely positive, not even a guard. That’s one of the reasons we picked here to start with.”
“Okay,” Dill said. “Go ahead.”
“Well, now about the safe. The vault door is a Mosier, and it’s my guess that the safe is a Mosier too. From where I stood, it looked like a regular two-and-a-half-inch screw, three-phase delay lock – and incidentally, it was standing wide open the whole time I was in the bank.”
“No crap. You could see the money?”
“No, but I could see the safe door all right, and it was standing wide open. If our information is right, there’s anywhere from seventy to eighty thousand in it, just waiting to be lifted out. However, we can’t count too strong on the safe being open. They rig those things for fifteen minutes at a time, during banking hours, so if we happened to hit it wrong we might have about a fifteen-minute wait.”
“I don’t think my nerves could take it,” Dill said.
“They’ll take it. They’ll have to take it, if things break that way. That’s why we’re waiting till five minutes till three to go in. We’ll draw the blinds and just sweat it out. Nobody on the outside will get suspicious. The bank’s closed as far as they know. Their watch is slow. And here’s something else to remember. If anybody tries the door, don’t lose our head, see? It’s just somebody trying to make the bank before it closes. We just sit tight. His watch is wrong. Understand?”
Dill and Preacher nodded.
“Now. There’s plenty of silver back there – ten thousand or so probably – stacked all over the place. But that stays, understand? We don’t touch the silver, even if we get no more than five dollars from the safe. It’s just too damn heavy to fool with when you’re in a hurry. You two ought to know that by now, but I don’t want anybody getting any last-minute ideas about grabbing himself a bonus.”
“What about the back door?” Preacher said.
“No back door. That’s tough, but that’s how it is. We come out the same way we went in.”
“I don’t like that,” Dill said.
“But listen,” Harper said. “Here’s the main thing of all. We got to be in that bank at five minutes till three. If we run a minute late we’re out of luck, because at three sharp they’re going to screw up the safe door and it won’t open again for God Himself till nine o’clock Monday morning. Got that? If we’re as much as two minutes late, the whole thing’s off. Is that clear?”
“That’s clear.”
“All right. Now, about the car. It looks like we’ll have to grab a car.”
Dill began to shake his head vigorously, “Not me. I don’t take no car. I told you, Harper. Nothing doing. That’s the surest way in hell to get messed up before you even get started.”
“Now, wait a minute,” Harper said. “I’ll get the car myself. Don’t worry about the car. All I have to do is stop some guy at the corner and get in. That will happen around two, so we’ll have plenty of time to get rid of him and get back to town.”
“I don’t like it,” Dill said. “You start fooling around like that and you’ll have the heat on you before you ever get to the damn bank. I swear to God, Harper. I told you to check on the car.”
“Can I help it if this is a hick town? How am I to know you can’t even rent a goddam car?”
“You’re supposed to know.”
“I said forget the car. I’ll handle it, and I guaran-dam-tee you it’ll go off like silk.”
“You’re getting ready to kill somebody is what you’re getting ready to do.”
“Nobody gets hurt. Jesus Christ, Dill, if I can�
�t heist a car by this time I’ll quit!”
“What will you do with him?”
“Who, the guy’s car we take? We just tie him up good and dump him somewhere. By the time they find him we’ll be long gone.”
“All right, you handle it then. But I’ll tell you one thing. If there’s any hitch about the car, Dill is out, see? Dill don’t even know you.”
“Shut up, Dill,” Preacher said.
Harper sighed and mopped his face with a handkerchief. “All right,” he said. “We go in at five minutes till three. That means we got to have this hick Law out of town by two forty-five or two-fifty. Dill, we’ll give you that to do, if it’s not asking too much. All you do is you go in the drugstore, phone the police and say there’s a car wreck on highway eleven, ten miles north of town. Lot of people killed. Got that?”
“I got it.”
“Those boys should be leaving town just about five minutes before we pull up at the bank, so make sure of your timing.”
“Don’t worry about my timing. You just time that car.”
“What about the shotgun?” Preacher said. “We can’t get in there with a shotgun, can we?”
“I don’t know,” Harper said. “Maybe we’ll leave that out after all. A big gun like that throws a nice scare in them, but it’s hard to manage without you’re wearing a overcoat. I don’t know. Maybe we’ll just leave it out. Leave it at the truck with Slick.”
“That Slick is somebody else I’m worried about,” Dill said. “I wish we had us a white man on the truck.”
“Slick’s all right,” Preacher said. “I’m more worried about you than anybody, myself.”