Page 147 - A Little Life: A Novel

desk, snatched when, mid-lecture, the father had turned from him to find a
book; Brother Peter’s comb (this last was the only one he planned, but it
gave him no greater thrill than the others). He stole matches and pencils and

pieces of paper—useless junk, but someone else’s junk—shoving them
down his underwear and running back to his bedroom to hide them under
his mattress, which was so thin that he could feel its every spring beneath
his back at night.
“Stop that running around or I’ll have to beat you!” Brother Matthew
would yell at him as he hurried to his room.
“Yes, Brother,” he would reply, and make himself slow to a walk.

It was the day he took his biggest prize that he was caught: Father
Gabriel’s silver lighter, stolen directly off his desk when he’d had to
interrupt his lecturing of him to answer a phone call. Father Gabriel had
bent over his keyboard, and he had reached out and grabbed the lighter,
palming its cool heavy weight in his hand until he was finally dismissed.
Once outside the father’s office, he had hurriedly pushed it into his

underwear and was walking as quickly as he could back to his room when
he turned the corner without looking and ran directly into Brother Pavel.
Before the brother could shout at him, he had fallen back, and the lighter
had fallen out, bouncing against the flagstones.
He had been beaten, of course, and shouted at, and in what he thought
was a final punishment, Father Gabriel had called him into his office and
told him that he would teach him a lesson about stealing other people’s

things. He had watched, uncomprehending but so frightened that he
couldn’t even cry, as Father Gabriel folded his handkerchief to the mouth of
a bottle of olive oil, and then rubbed the oil into the back of his left hand.
And then he had taken his lighter—the same one he had stolen—and held
his hand under the flame until the greased spot had caught fire, and his
whole hand was swallowed by a white, ghostly glow. Then he had screamed

and screamed, and the father had hit him in the face for screaming. “Stop
that shouting,” he’d shouted. “This is what you get. You’ll never forget not
to steal again.”
When he regained consciousness, he was back in his bed, and his hand
was bandaged. All of his things were gone: the stolen things, of course, but
the things he had found on his own as well—the stones and feathers and
arrowheads, and the fossil that Brother Luke had given him for his fifth

birthday, the first gift he had ever received.