Stolen Away

Stolen Away

When I was a boy I tried to steal forgiveness from the record store in my small town. 

It was a single—they called them 45s then. The Hollies. He Ain’t Heavy He’s My Brother . . . but it wasn’t about the record.

 It was about regret. 

The owner saw me slip out the door and run away. At ten, I was fast and light and he was slow and heavy and couldn’t catch me.

I went back a couple weeks later figuring he would have forgotten such a small thing. He hadn’t. He grabbed me by the arm and called the cops. They came, looked annoyed and then called my father.

Together they decided on my punishment. Each day after school I had to sweep Main Street in front of the record store. 

But every night the wind would blow and dust would churn. And dirt once more would cover the road way I had tried so hard to clean. Broom in hand, day after day, trying to sweep away my guilt, I slowly began to understand. 

Forgiveness cannot be stolen. You have to pay. It always has a price. And much later I came to learn just how costly it can be. 

Back then, my younger brother Matt had a weight problem, which is to say he was fat. He didn’t want to be and there was nothing extraordinary about his appetite or energy. He ran around like all the other kids. He ate about as much as any of us. 

He was just round and slow. It was almost as though there were two of him stuffed into one body, like he was forced to carry a second version of himself around inside. There was the boy he was and the boy he wanted to be. He wanted to be fast and light and strong. But he was round and lumbering and really really slow. Painfully slow. Watching him run was like watching a ball try to roll uphill.

He lived in the same room as me and sometimes, just a little boy, he would cry at night. Wail, really. It would wake me. And I would listen to him crying to himself about why he had to be so heavy and slow.

I tried not to listen because I thought there was some weight inside the words and the wailing that might make me slow as well. I wanted it to stay on his side of the room and away from my fast dreams. So I’d roll over and ignore his crying for fear of what was buried inside.

We went to the same school and our classes had recess together so he was always there by my side. Weighing me down. Just wanting to be near his fast big brother, whom he looked up to and admired. 

Some of the guys I ran with then were bullies. But they were fast like me so I overlooked it. Matt used to try and run with us but he could never keep up. He’d end up panting and sweating and begging me to wait for him. Slowing me up.

My friends would rip into him of course. Called him fat boy. Fat Matt . . . and worse. Much worse. And when it started, he would look to me and wander near me and stand close like I would shield him.

But I never said a word. Never said he’s with me. Never told them to lay off. 

When we were choosing up sides, Matt was always the last kid picked. It was always by me cause I had to or I’d be forced to listen to that wailing again in the middle of the night. Those fat words creeping across the room, trying to force their way into my ears.

One of my friends named Jack was especially cruel. He tormented Matt unmercifully. Every day Jack would trip him, and when Matt couldn’t get to his feet he would laugh, “Look at the fat little turtle on his back.” 

In time, as it always does, bad went to worse. One day Jack’s father came to pick him up after school. When Jack saw him looking on, he started to kick Matt. “You must have done something wrong or God wouldn’t have made you so fat and sweaty,” Jack hollered, looking to his father, watching from the gate. He believed that, and at ten, I thought it sounded smart.

The next day Jack was late to school. His father drove him. And when he finally slid into a seat near me, he looked like he had been crying.

That day at recess Jack was particularly angry. He started in again on Matt, the fat kid, the slow kid, the sweaty last kid chosen loser. He ran up behind him and tripped him. He watched as Matt lumbered to his feet and tripped him again. 

Matt’s round face was sweaty but I could see he was trying not to cry and searching for me in the crowd of taunting faces.

The gang of my friends surrounded him, pushing him down, kicking him in the ribs, making fun of the fat kid.

Then they called for me to join in.

There are a few points in every life where you have to decide. About yourself. About what matters.  At the time you never really know how much it will cost. That comes later. And even if you are fast, those moments are faster. They follow forever, chasing you down with regret, demanding again and again that you pay.  

I shoved my brother to the ground.  Maybe, I thought, it might change him. Maybe, I thought, he would become fast and graceful and slender if someone he loved cut away the last ounce of care they had for him. So I pushed him down a couple times. I kicked him hard and then tripped him when he tried to run away. 

Brothers always fight amongst themselves. But not like this. I had decided. 

I chose them.

Matt finally crawled away. At a distance he gathered himself and turned and stared like he was seeing me—the real me—for the first time. 

He never followed me again. And he stopped crying at night. Even at nine a heart knows betrayal when it feels it. And I could feel his become thinner, the way a heart always does the first time loss begins to cut its way in.

He never told our parents. It became a kind of unspoken secret between us, and he never trusted me again. He had seen the real me. I wasn’t fast. 

I was slow. 

The bully, my friend Jack, asked me to come over to look at his new bike one day after school. It was a ten speed. Faster than anything I had ever ridden. I had a one speed bike, the kind with fat tires and clumsy metal fenders. It was so heavy I had to walk it uphill.

As he pulled his new bike from the garage, I noticed that his father was home, which was odd. Fathers always worked during the day. But his father was sitting at the kitchen table, staring out the window, with a scowl and a glass of something dark. So I asked Jack why he was home. 

He didn’t answer right away, but then quietly said, “He got laid off.”  

Later I asked my father why he would be home during the day.

And my father said, “He’s slow.  He has trouble keeping a job. It’s not his fault, son. Some people are just slow.”

I thought he meant like Matt. Slow. Always being tripped up and always falling down. Always trying to catch up.

But it made me worry. Like there was some kind of heaviness in the world. A hidden weight that could make anyone sit at a table in the afternoon with a scowl and a glass, tripped up by weakness or regret.  

One Saturday Jack asked me to stay for supper.  

His father was sitting at the table again and his mother, who I had never met, was cooking in the kitchen. His father grimaced at me and said, “Who’s this?” 

Jack cowered a bit, but I stepped up and said, “Hello, Sir.” 

He stared hard at me like he was looking through, into the skeleton of me.

He finally said, “Your father’s a foreman down at the docks?” I nodded. And he muttered something under his breath that sounded like a curse. Full of words I didn’t know.

Jack’s mother turned the corner from the kitchen with a huge flowered bowl full of spaghetti. She was a big woman. Easily twice the size of my mother. She walked slowly and had a timid smile. But I could see she was worried. Setting the bowl down, she glanced at her husband, then smiled, trying to reassure me.

He began to holler, but under his breath. It was loud and sharp but just above a whisper and that seemed to make it louder.

“Dammit, Maggie, spaghetti again? What's that—the fifth time this week?”

He leaned across the table and held her by the wrist. She pulled away and as he grabbed a handful of her hair, I could see fear spread across her features.

“How many times do we have to have this?  Didn’t I buy steaks just last week?”

“I’m sorry, Joe. It's been so tight. I’m just trying to stretch things.”

He picked up a ladling spoon and raised it. She flinched—and he dropped it in disgust. But as she stepped away, he pushed her and tripped her. And she fell to the kitchen floor.

Jack’s father got to his feet, I thought to help her up but instead he bared his teeth and kicked her twice. Hard. She cried out and then tried to choke it down out of embarrassment.

“That’s right,” he said, “stay down.” Then, as he turned away, “Maybe if we didn’t have pasta every night you wouldn’t be so damn fat.”

She started to cry. It sounded just like my brother in the middle of the night. A kind of whimper that swallows itself, trying to become thinner. Then she crept away and managed to awkwardly get to her feet. Just like Matt.

I turned and looked into Jack’s face. He was studying everything his father did, like he was trying to memorize it. Like he would need to know how to act like this. I realized he was practicing . . . practicing being a man, like his father. Practicing on the fat kid at school. 

The old man picked up a spoon, muttered to himself, and began filling a plate. 

I caught sight of my own reflection in the window. I looked scared, and I realized that I had to choose. Choose at that very moment—then and forever—whether I would always be unbrave.

I slid out of my chair and edged toward the door. “I’m going home now.”

“Sit your ass down, boy. You ain’t going nowhere. This ain’t nothing much. What? Your high class folks never hit a nerve?"

"Sit right there and eat something. It'll be all right. It’ll be ok.”

But I heard something in me answer.

It’ll never be ok. Not ever.

So I said, “No sir. No thank you.” I glanced at Jack sitting in his father's shadow, then hurried out the door. 

It was getting dark. I stood at the end of his driveway, wanting to run away, but I suddenly felt heavy. Heavy with everything. Slowed down by it all. 

And for the very first time I worried that my dreams were going to outrun me. That I would never catch up to them again, because of all I had seen and the weight in it and how it made my heart feel. 

I looked back at Jack’s house and thought about all he was learning there from his father, full of the kind of desperation that a man can sometimes feel when the world spins the wrong way for him. And then I pushed my heavy bike uphill toward home. 

My folks were sitting at the supper table. Standing outside in the darkness, through the lit window, I saw my brother, full of the crying he would never let me hear again.

And I whispered to myself, “I’m the slow one.”

That week I stopped running with the fast boys. And I tried to hang around with Matt. But he didn’t trust me. 

I didn’t trust me either. I had seen what can happen even against your will. The lessons you get taught, that get pressed into you in ways that are hard to ignore or prevent. Like Jack.

That week I heard He Ain’t Heavy He’s My Brother on the radio. It was a hit. They played it over and over, and it seemed to have words that I didn’t.

So I stole that record. 

I ran away with it and I put it under my brother's pillow. I wanted it to make him remember . . . remember who I was before. I hoped it would spin down past the pain, sing into his dreams, and raise some chorus of forgiveness. 

Later, my father hollered at me that I was a thief. He was right. 

I was a thief. I had stolen my brother’s trust and kicked it until it ran away.

“Why did you steal this?” he asked, holding up the record.

When you’re ten, you don’t have the words to find the way back from betrayal. You don’t have the language to say that you’re sorry for your own weakness. 

You feel the world spin faster and your heart grow heavy from your own mistakes, and you run behind everything that you ever regret, trying to catch it and steal it away from where it has settled in yourself. 

And you chase after forgiveness, hoping someday you might be able to reach it, to steal it back into you. 

When I didn’t answer, my father asked, “Why did you hide it under Matt’s pillow? Were you trying to put the blame on him?”

“No!” I hollered.

He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Tell me, son.”

“It’s the song,” I said.

“What song?” He looked at the record and read the title aloud. “He Ain’t Heavy He’s My Brother. Why would you steal that?”

I couldn’t say it then but I felt it. I was begging Matt to forgive me in the only way my ten-year-old heart could find. 

I was the slow one. I was the one weighed down and falling. Not him. Me, tripping over my own cowardice. I was trying to steal back his love from where it ran away to. I was begging him to forgive my betrayal before I grew so slow and afraid that I became like Jack's father.

But my father could not understand. As I watched, he took the stolen record and broke it into pieces. 

Then he threw forgiveness away. 

Late that night I fished it out of the trash. I tried to glue it back together again. But it was no use. It would never play. I took the pieces and hid them, promising myself to someday find a way to repair it.

But Matt never understood what I was trying to steal, what I was trying to reclaim and restore between us.

And so he never trusted me again.

Though we lived in the same room, we grew apart. Matt left home early, far too young and not strong enough to face the world, which sometimes spins in the wrong direction for any man.

We passed like strangers at holidays. We wished each other well and secretly hoped that the future might hold something sweeter than the past.

But the past seemed to darken over time, the way it always does until the bitter is nearly forgotten beneath the accumulation of days. Nearly. 

Then he stopped coming. The years sped up. Passing silently, rushing forward away from all that once mattered.

And sometimes when I thought of him, I would feel regret reach out and trip me and then quietly kick me in the dark.

Matt finally came home once many years later.

The round boy that seemed to have two versions in him now seemed to have less than one. He was far too thin, starved, really, and I think broken, the way someone gets when their dreams outrun them and the world spins the wrong way. When he looked at me, I could see the nine-year-old still searching for who I was then, searching still in a world of taunting faces.

Matt died suddenly the next year, still a young man. But by then he was just a sliver of what he was as a boy, thin and hungry for something he was never quite fast enough to catch. 

I was one of the pall bearers. He weighed almost nothing, like most of him had run away somewhere and his body had finally given in and followed that part of him.

It was a windy day and after the burial I watched the cemetery men try in vain to sweep the dirt away from the stone. 

Trying to make it all look neat and clean. Just like I used to on Main Street.

Jack’s dad got a job. My father hired him, out of pity I suppose. His wife left him, got a divorce and married a man that loved her for her big and wounded heart. He drank nights until, finally alone, he was left to trip and beat up only himself. Like many, he ended up kicking his memories, trying to make them fast. Trying to chase them away. 

Jack got laid off from his job as a construction foreman for making his guys work double time in August. One of them nearly died from the heat. Jack kept kicking him after he passed out. They had to drag him off. It's hard to unlearn some things once they creep in down deep.

And I, the fast boy, realized that I wasn’t chasing as much as being chased. Once so afraid of the weight of my brother’s tears, I grew slower until I stopped running altogether. There was a heaviness in my heart, a longing for the kind of forgiveness I was certain I was too slow to ever catch. 

Later that year my folks asked me to go through a dusty box of Matt’s things in the basement. There was the usual stuff. The registration from his first car. A high school diploma and yearbook. A schedule for the bus to anywhere else. Next to it all was an old record player.

Buried near the bottom of those remains was a black and white photo of us, as boys. Before. Both of us laughing. 

I was chasing after him. 

And there beneath it, at the very bottom, was an old 45.  The label had worn away but I knew what it was. The vinyl was scratched and broken through in a few places. It was badly fractured, nearly beyond repair. 

I ran my hands over the pieces that Matt had so carefully glued back together. Then I gently picked it up, tenderly put it on the turntable and lowered the needle.

Some things can be stolen. 

You can steal innocence, but you can never give it back. 

You can steal trust, but you can’t keep it.

When I was a boy, I tried to steal forgiveness. But I know now that some things must be paid for. And so I pay.

Sometimes memory still trips me. And sometimes late at night, it reaches out in the darkness and kicks me.

And that is how it should be. 

The sound rose all around me. The record was nearly ruined, but I could hear it. Forgiveness, like a plea, rising above the cracks. The way truest hymns always do.

I can see now. Forgiveness can never be stolen. It can only be given.  

And now some nights, above the scratches of my past, I still hear it singing.

It sounds like a broken record.