Cross Creek by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

I have my own explanation of the cynical Biblical statement that it is as easy for a rich man to enter Heaven as for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. On the surface, the statement is unjust, for wealth is so accidental a thing, that either its possession or its lack should not be held against any man. Sift each of us through the great sieve of circumstance and you have a residue, great or small as the case may be, that is the man or the woman. The rich, the well-favored, the well-situated, are surrounded with a confusing protective mass of extraneous and irrelevant matter that tends to hide the substance beneath. The poor, the unfortunate, have been put through the sieve and stand nakedly for what they are. A poor and simple man stands with bare outstretched hands at the gates of Heaven, and his essential character is written in broad letters across him, for life has stripped him down to it. Confronted with the fortunate but cluttered man, St. Peter must do a neat problem in psychiatry and estimate, "Now what would this man's honor be if he were starving? He gives much, having a surfeit. What would he give if he had nothing?" Being busy with the checking of admissions to Heaven, it is conceivable that St. Peter is obliged to tell the rich man that he must wait in the anteroom until he can go deeper into his case.

These thoughts come to me when there pass down the road in front of my house those Creek residents whom Life, shall we say, has knocked down and sat on. There are always one or two outright derelicts in the neighborhood, men cast adrift by life, waiting patiently to be cast up on some hospitable and nurturing shore, finding it, often, here. The evil and dishonorable among them do not stay long at the Creek, for we are too busy to be bothered with neighbors we cannot trust. We leave our houses wide open. I sleep alone in my rambling farmhouse with never the latching of a door, and I am away for weeks at a time, with the place as free of access as a public picnic ground. Nothing has ever been taken. Small tools disappear gradually, of course, from my open barn, parts from my tractor and sometimes gasoline from my truck, but this only because some man needs a shovel and a shovel is available; needs a coil or a generator for his broken-down car and a coil or generator sits invitingly in the idle tractor under the shed; gives out of gasoline on his way from the Creek to the village with his night's catch of frog legs and gasoline waits providentially in the truck. This seems no more predatory than the taking of fallen timber from the open woods, the drinking of water from a stranger's well. Usually the silently borrowed implements are returned as quietly as they went. Sometimes a man says, "I forgot to tell you, I got your Brinley plow. Leave me know when you want it." Sometimes a frog hunter leaves me a fine mess of frog legs or an alligator hide, and I know that this is pay for gasoline.