Excerpted from the novel STEALING by Margaret Verble. Copyright © 2023 by Margaret Verble. From Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
I thought the cabin was still empty until I saw the red rooster out in the road. He was really flame orange, but people call those roosters red, and he had a big, bright green feather curling over the top of his tail. I had on my sneakers and was walking in a smooth gully the rain had created. So I wasn’t kicking gravel or making any kind of noise, and he didn’t look up from his pecking until I was close on him. Then, he cocked his head to the side and looked me over, slit-eyed. It was March. I hadn’t been down that road since fall. And by the tilt of the rooster’s head, it was clear to me he’d been around some time, maybe all winter. He owned that territory, or at least he owned the chicken part of it, and he wasn’t going to give ground scared, or even in a huff. He lifted a foot, held it up in a claw for only a second, and then he walked off like he had business in the weeds he’d been meaning to get to all morning. I admired him for that.
Mama always called the cabin “the cabin.” It was really more like a shack, but “shack” isn’t a good word to describe where people live, particularly if they happen to be your kin. So when my great uncle Joe lived there, Mama said it was Uncle Joe’s cabin. And when he was
killed, I still said it was Uncle Joe’s cabin for a while, because I didn’t forget him just because he was dead. Every time Mama and I visited Uncle Joe he gave me a new and interesting rock to play with. He called them river stones and said that the Arkansas River had made them smooth and shined them up. But I never actually saw Uncle Joe go
down to the river. He spent most of his time sitting in a rocker on his front porch. Next to his rocker on one side was a spit can and on the other side was a brown paper bag with his bottle in it.
Uncle Joe was sort of watery in the eyes, and he was black-headed and dark, like most of Mama’s people. But he was the only one of them who lived close to us. I don’t know why we lived off away from the rest of our family, but we did. And Mama told me, “Kit, this is my uncle, your grandmother’s brother” more than once. I guess she did that because I was so young she was afraid I’d forget it. She knew she was dying and probably wanted me to know who I belonged to before she left. Or, maybe, she had a feeling for the future and hoped Uncle Joe would rescue me and take me to her parents and sisters. He probably
would have, too, if he could’ve stayed sober and alive.
The rooster wasn’t the only new sign of life at the cabin, just the first, him being out in the road. When I got closer, I could tell somebody was living in there. The door was open, its hole covered only by a screen with a tear in it. And I heard a noise from inside. It was somebody humming. I craned my neck as I walked past, thinking maybe I could see who’d moved in there. But I couldn’t see anything except the outline of a refrigerator inside the door in exactly the spot Uncle Joe had kept his refrigerator in.
So there was only the humming and the refrigerator, and then, past the cabin in the ruts of the lane forking off to the east, some chickens and a couple of black and white spotted guineas. One of the guineas was large and one bitty and both of them screamed. They were for the snakes, and they told me that whoever had moved into the cabin knew what they were doing, because it was definitely not safe to be out and around in the summer without some warning system for snakes. I always carried a stick to swing at the weeds whenever I got off the road into the pasture. But guineas work in the opposite direction. They warn people about snakes, whereas sticks warn snakes about people.
I kept thinking maybe I’d run into a dog, too. It’s unusual for anybody to live out in the country and not have one. But a dog didn’t turn up, and I walked on down the ruts wondering who was in the cabin behind me and not really wanting to go fishing at all. But fishing was what I’d set out to do, and fishing is what I did. Not that it did me any good on that particular day. I only got nibbles and one tiny perch that I threw back because he was too small to make a meal by himself. But I may have cut the fishing a little short out of curiosity. Not much happens out in the country, and you don’t want to miss anything when it does.
When I walked back, there was a car pulled up into Uncle Joe’s yard. It was two-toned
green, with a curvy line of chrome down the side that separated the two colors. It was sort of shiny, but not very. The car wasn’t new or flashy, but it wasn’t old either, and it looked like it belonged to somebody who took care of it. The obvious question was, did it belong to people who had moved in or to somebody else? I slowed down, thinking maybe if I could take long enough I’d get a glimpse of the hummer or the car’s driver before I got directly in front of the cabin. But I didn’t. Even the guineas and chickens weren’t in sight, and the door was shut.
I went fishing again the next day. After Mama died, that was my habit during the spring and fall on the weekends and even on some weekdays during the summer. We could use the food and there wasn’t anything else to do. There weren’t many other children out in the
country and Daddy didn’t want me working in the fields with men and boys. My work was in the garden and the house.
The house wasn’t big—a living room, a bedroom, a kitchen and bathroom—but it was painted. And there wasn’t much housework to do, except cook breakfast, wash the dishes, cook supper, and get the quilts out of the closet, spread them on the couch at night, and put
them away in the morning. There was a little stool in our closet to stand on to shove the quilts up on a shelf rather than leave them on the floor with the shoes. And I knew even then that we were lucky to have a closet, because some people didn’t. But I never could’ve guessed how much of my time I would spend in one (here at Ashley Lordard, not back at home). And that being in the closet here would make me feel safer than I feel anywhere else.
At home after Mama died, the place I felt best was on the bank of the bayou. It fed into the Arkansas, but it wasn’t deadly and wild like the river. It was more smooth and still and quiet, except for the sounds of the insects and the fish and the frogs hopping and flopping.
If the fish were biting, they kept me busy, and I’d bring home supper. But even if the bobber wasn’t bobbing, sitting on the bank was always entertaining. There were those sounds and plenty to watch. And when you stay quiet yourself, everything else starts moving.
I once even saw a wolf up close there. Wolves were always around, but generally they kept their distance. I’d only heard them at night in bed or sometimes seen a lone one way off in a field. But this one came down on the other side of the water directly across from me. He drank quick, looked up, sniffed, didn’t catch my wind, and drank some more. He made me think of one of the stories Mama told me before she left. She said one day when her grandma was down at the water washing clothes, the wolves came in a pack. It was after the War Between the States. All the poultry and game had been killed for human food and
starving wolves were roaming everywhere. Mama said her grandma had a baby and a sack of biscuits with her, and she heard the wolves and knew she was in trouble. She threw the biscuits out of the sack just as they appeared, then she grabbed her baby and ran. I believe
that story is true. Or I hope it is, because nobody wants to think their mother lied to them. I’m also glad her grandma threw biscuits to the wolves, not the baby.
Anyway, when I went fishing the day after I first saw the rooster, the car was gone and the door was open again. But I didn’t hear any humming. However, there was a long splash of wet cutting across the ruts in front of the cabin. I could tell by that wet spot somebody had
been cleaning something up. There was a pump in the front yard east of the porch, and it was clear that a bucket or a little tub of water had been slung out into the road from close to the pump. I stepped right over the spot, but I looked toward the cabin when I did, thinking maybe somebody would notice. But nobody did, and I went on toward the bayou.
The fish were biting that day. I caught three catfish, each about a foot long. They were so same in size that I decided they were brothers and had come from the same litter. They were mud cats, dirty brown in color. I’ve heard here at Ashley Lordard that some people won’t eat catfish at all, and I know some people won’t eat mud cats in particular.
But their meat is white and tender, and everybody I knew then—which wasn’t a lot of people, true—all thought mud cats were delicious. So I was pretty happy with my catch, and on my way back down the lane I thought about going up to the door and offering the third catfish to the hummer who had moved into Uncle Joe’s cabin. Daddy and I would
only eat one fish each. And usually I would’ve stopped fishing at two that size, because there’s no use wasting food you can leave for another day. But probably somewhere back in my mind I had already formed a thought about catching another fish to give away.
When the time came, I chickened out. Because just as I was coming upon the cabin, the front door shut. I saw it, but I heard it more. And after that, it seemed like I couldn’t walk up onto the front porch and knock and hold out a fish. People close doors for reasons. Not that I thought the door closing had anything to do with me. I think it was just a coincidence.
But it was a bad one for my purposes, so I kept the fish.
That night at supper, Daddy pointed at the spare fish with his fork and said, “Save that for breakfast.” He never talked much during meals, so I took that as a chance, and said, “There’s somebody in Uncle Joe’s cabin.”
Daddy belched.
I figured that was because he was eating fried food. He’d had trouble with his stomach for as long as I could remember. So I waited for the gas to pass, hoping he knew, and would tell me, who was in the cabin. But he just got up, went into the living room and turned on the
radio. I washed the dishes no wiser and hearing a baseball announcer talk about statistics and players and all the things they yap about before the game actually starts. Then, when I was through, I went into the living room and sat on the floor at the table in front of the couch. Daddy is a Cardinals fan, so that’s what we always listened to. The Cardinals and the Pirates. I never could get too worked up about baseball. But I liked Daddy’s company and I mostly played solitaire.
A gripping, gut-punch of a novel about a Cherokee child removed from her family and sent to a Christian boarding school in the 1950s—an ambitious, eye-opening reckoning of history and small-town prejudices from Pulitzer Prize finalist Margaret Verble.
Since her mother’s death, Kit Crockett has lived with her grief-stricken father, spending lonely days far out in the country tending the garden, fishing in a local stream, and reading Nancy Drew mysteries from the library bookmobile. One day when Kit discovers a mysterious and beautiful woman has moved in just down the road, she is intrigued.
Kit and her new neighbor Bella become fast friends. Both outsiders, they take comfort in each other’s company. But malice lurks near their quiet bayou and Kit suddenly finds herself at the center of tragic, fatal crime. Soon, Kit is ripped from her home and Cherokee family and sent to Ashley Lordard, a religious boarding school. Along with the other Native students, Kit is stripped of her heritage, force-fed Christian indoctrination, and is sexually abused by the director. But Kit, as strong-willed and shrewd as ever, secretly keeps a journal recounting what she remembers—and revealing just what she has forgotten. Over the course of Stealing, she slowly unravels the truth of how she ended up at the school—and plots a way out.
In swift, sharp, and stunning prose, Margaret Verble spins a powerful coming-of age tale and reaffirms her place as an indelible storyteller and chronicler of history.
Historical [Mariner Books, On Sale: February 7, 2023, Hardcover / e-Book, ISBN: 9780063267053 / eISBN: 9780063267084]
MARGARET VERBLE is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Her first novel, Maud’s Line, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her second novel, Cherokee America, has recently been listed by the New York Times as one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year for 2019. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky.
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