Excerpt from Stealing by Margaret Verble, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But here at Ashley Lordard, some of the kids are mean. And we're told stories about how even little children are naturally evil and about how we're all born with some sort of sin that has to get washed off of us. But I think the kids here are mean because they're unhappy. They probably came here unhappy, and being in a children's home doesn't improve on that. But, in my experience, grown-ups are a lot meaner than kids. And I never heard the born sinful idea when I lived at home and I haven't taken to it since. Although people are working on me about that. I just act like I'm going along with them. That seems to make them happier, and it's easier for me.

When I went fishing again the next weekend, there was a different car pulled up into the yard. That car was green, too, but it wasn't as nice as the first one. It was a Ford and its back right fender was busted. It looked to me like it'd been busted a long time and nobody had done anything about it because the dent was just a little bit rusty.

The cabin door was closed, and on the top step of the front porch was an empty whiskey bottle that reminded me of Uncle Joe and made a lump come up in my throat. But I swallowed it hard and went on past the cabin and down the lane looking for signs of poultry. I didn't see any. Whoever lived in the cabin hadn't let the chickens out yet. It was about 9:30, so that told me a lot. Drinking people can be sloppy about taking care of animals. When Mama was having good spells and the weather was nice, she'd sometimes take me down the road in my wagon far enough to see if Uncle Joe's chickens were loose or still cooped up. We had to go on to his chicken house and lift their latch more than once.

On down the lane, when I cut off through the field on my way to the bayou, I got to adding up everything I knew about who was in Uncle Joe's cabin. I decided, first off, that whoever lived there didn't have a car of their own. But they had friends who had cars. And those friends drank liquor. But even more interesting was that, in five whole trips past the cabin, I hadn't seen any sign of a dog. That seemed to settle the dog question. But it was puzzling. Almost any man would have a dog.

I tried to think if I'd ever met a man without a dog. And I couldn't think of a single one. Everybody in the country had one, and even Mr. Elliot at the feed store had Babe, a hound who was always either fat with puppies or nursing them in a big box in a pen in the back. I visited with Babe whenever Daddy took me to the store because he and Mr. Elliot would get to talking and there wasn't anything else for me to do. I asked Daddy once if he thought he wanted to buy one of Babe's pups, but he shook his head and said they were too expensive. He said Mr. Elliot sold them all over Oklahoma and Arkansas and even up in Missouri and Kansas, and he raked money in on them. After that, I inspected Babe pretty closely, but I never could tell that she was much different from any other kind of hound. Most people I knew had setters or retrievers.

But we didn't have either one. Daddy didn't hunt birds. He stuck to hunting deer because deer give more meat for less work and expense. So we had a terrier. His name was Randy. Daddy said that when Randy was young he had gotten himself a whole bunch of puppies. But when I knew Randy, he was only getting snakes and sometimes a squirrel. And he didn't really get them, he just barked them up. That was useful for the snakes, but aggravating to the squirrels, who were just trying to mind their own business and never bothered him at all. Randy was a rat terrier, but I never knew him to go after a rat. I don't think we had any out in the country.

I caught all the fish I needed early that day, but hung around the bayou just for the pleasure and didn't walk back by the cabin until I started getting hungry. Again, I had three fish, pounders each one, even though they were perch. They were yellow-headed and just as pretty as they could be. I carried them on the stringer, but tied the stringer to the end of my snake stick and balanced the stick on top of my shoulder so that the fish dangled off behind me. A little kid with clothes smelling like fish isn't very attractive and I wanted whoever was living in the cabin to like me because we didn't have many neighbors. And I got lucky on that trip. The car was gone. And the red rooster, chickens, and guineas were all out in the lane before I got to the cabin. Guineas, of course, can't keep a secret. They started screeching.

Excerpted from Stealing by Margaret Verble. Copyright © 2023 by Margaret Verble. Excerpted by permission of Mariner Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.