John’s grandfather was a thief. The first thing he ever stole was a platinum money clip from a pimp in Storyville when he was only eight years old. He liked the way its bevel-cut surface reflected the subtropical Louisiana sun.
He gifted it to John when he was on his deathbed at the age of eighty-four, along with this piece of wisdom: “Stealing is like fishing. Only take what you need. If you don’t sell it, you won’t get caught.”
He left John the fruits of his years of pilfering in his will, but he instructed him to keep what he wanted and to give the rest away. Any money that comes from sin bears the weight of that sin. As far as John could tell, it was just a bunch of junk anyway; small things that were easily pocketed. Watches, rings, key fobs, cufflinks and the like. He put it all in a cardboard box and took it down to the St. Vincent de Paul thrift shop so that nobody would have to be stained by its sinful provenance. All except for one item that he decided to keep as a memento of his beloved, if eccentric, grandfather.
It was an old Waterman fountain pen, stained with ancient ink, that bore a small tag attached by twine that read: “JTK. 1969.” He cleaned it up and bought a bottle of ink. He only used it to sign greeting cards and the occasional contract, but he liked the way it felt in his hand.
One evening, a couple of weeks before Christmas, he was sitting at the dining room table signing his holiday cards with a glass of Sazerac and drifted off into a reverie. He was startled awake by the chimes in the grandfather clock at midnight and was even more startled to find that a blank greeting card that had been intended for one of his nephews was now covered in an unfamiliar handwriting. He read it, incredulous to find a short story about a woman and her cat who would swap bodies at night.
This happened every year until he had a small collection of short stories after a decade or so. He didn’t share them with anyone else. If anything, he felt they were stolen. He hadn’t written them. They were very well-crafted, far beyond his mediocre skills as a storyteller.
After Hurricane Katrina, there was some damage done to the interior walls of the house he had inherited from his grandfather due to leaks caused by roofing tiles that had been blown off in the storm. The repairmen found a hidden compartment in one of the walls that contained a small metal lockbox. Inside the lockbox was an old accounting ledger. It contained a list of items that John recognized as his grandfather’s stolen contraband. Next to each item was a date, and some of them also had names scrawled by them.
He scanned through the entries until he came to the one that he still had in his possession. Next to the listing for the Waterman fountain pen was the date: February 13, 1969 and the name, John Kennedy Toole. A quick search on Wikipedia revealed Toole as the author of Confederacy of Dunces and that he had committed suicide on March 26, 1969, not long after the loss of his pen.
Literature in Small Doses 