The Last Free Sin of Shmuel Peretz

Tales of the Chelm First Ward

That same morning, Shmuel Peretz woke up in a bad mood. Tomorrow was his birthday. His eighth birthday. Once you turned eight, God got mad about your sins. Before then, parents got mad sometimes, but that was just for practice. Really you could do whatever sins you wanted from the time you were a tiny baby until the very last day you were seven years old and God didn’t even care.  

It wasn’t really fair, though, because most of that time got wasted. When you are a baby, you don’t even know what the sins are. And then when you get bigger, you get distracted by playing and going to school and drawing monsters, and then the time was almost up and you’d only done sins once in a while and usually not on purpose. Or else you did remember to try sins, but somebody else got in the way. Like: last week, when Shmuel tried to hide instead of going to church, his mom found him and made him go anyway. And now he was out of Sundays. Or yesterday—he was going to run away and walk where his parents couldn’t see him, but his dad was too fast and caught his hand and held it the whole way home so Shmuel was just trapped.

Shmuel wanted to do some sins while there was still time, but a day is not very long and a lot of sins need a plan. Like, if you want to attack somebody with a sword you have to save up money to buy a sword and also know where to buy a sword and also convince somebody to sell a sword to a kid. If you want to do hacking, you have to know how to hack. If you want to do fraud, you have to break into somebody’s phone to look up what fraud is. Shmuel’s dad always cheating workers was the most common sin. But if you wanted to cheat a worker, you had to have one! And that didn’t even count really hard sins like mass genocide. Or shooting a nuclear bomb.

Shmuel punched his pillow in frustration. Luckily, that reminded him that an easy thing like punching could be a sin. Anybody could do a sin, so it wasn’t hopeless. In his head, Shmuel made a list of sins he could do by himself, in just one day, while he was stuck at home. Things like: 

-Punching

-Saying mean words

-Tossing things directly at a person like at their face on purpose

-Taking things from people’s hands

-Stealing

Shmuel thought about his choices. If he punched someone, he wanted to punch his sister Dinah. After all, if he punched his brother Gimpel, Gimpel would punch back. Dinah was smaller than Shmuel, so that wasn’t fair, but Gimpel was so much bigger than him, so that would be unfair, too. It was better to do the unfair thing where you weren’t the one who ended up with a bruise.

He could punch a parent, but then he would get sent to his room, maybe for hours, and he would lose all his time to do more sins before his birthday. Then again, if he punched Dinah, she would probably just tell his parents. If he said mean words to her, she would tell his parents. When he tossed a doll kind of at her face but not on purpose she had told his parents and she also lied and said he did it on purpose and he had to go to their room and sit on his bunk and waste a bunch of time, so none of that was going to work. He doubted he could get away with taking something out of her hands. Even though God didn’t care yet. She was just such a complainer.

That left stealing. He could maybe steal from Dinah and not get caught. Or he could steal from Gimpel—and when Gimpel noticed what was missing, Shmuel could just lie and say “Dinah did it.” If they didn’t believe that, he could say, “I guess it was robbers.” Or, “Your dumb toy probably just blew up while you weren’t looking.” That one would be two lies, actually, because the toy wouldn’t be blown up, it would be hidden in Shmuel’s room, and also the toy he would steal from Gimpel wouldn’t be dumb. It would be great. Since Gimpel was the oldest, and relatives still get excited about the oldest, he had so many cool things—metal race cars, plastic weapons, orange binoculars that really worked, a bunch of dinosaurs, even a blue and silver dragon. But he never played with them anymore because ever since he got bigger and moved to his own room, all he wanted to do was read.

God wouldn’t care if Shmuel stole one of Gimpel’s things. God might even be happy that Shmuel would take care of it instead of stuffing it in a box in the bottom of the closet.

With that hope in his heart, Shmuel finally climbed down out of his bed. On the bottom bunk, Dinah was still sleeping. He went and peeked out the bedroom door. In the kitchen, his dad was buttering the bottom of a piece of bread. (Buttering the underside like that was a trick he did, since the top always falls on the floor if you drop it). He was also filling his enormous thermos with water. In a moment, he would leave for work. Shmuel couldn’t see his mom yet, but she probably wasn’t up. (She thought getting up in the mornings only encouraged them.)

 As soon as the front door opened and closed, Shmuel slipped out into the hallway. Morning was a great time for a sin. If he was quick, he could steal something before Gimpel was awake enough to catch him taking it or Dinah was awake enough to notice him hiding it. Getting up early was the perfect crime.

He crept down the hall and looked into Gimpel’s room. But Gimpel was not sleeping. He was awake, lying in his bed (which was between the door and the closet) with his face already buried in some book.

It wasn’t fair. Gimpel slept in plenty of days. Why did he have to be awake on the last day before Shmuel’s eighth birthday?

Shmuel wanted to scream. God wouldn’t care if he screamed. But it was too obvious. So he snuck back down the hall instead, past his and Dinah’s room and all the way to the kitchen. He made himself a bagel. On purpose, he left out the cream cheese, which was something at least. And he chewed his bagel with his mouth open. But as sins went, chewing with your mouth open when no one was there to be disgusted was pretty boring. So he finished his breakfast and he crept back to check on Gimpel’s room.

But Gimpel was still there.

Across the hall, Shmuel heard his mom getting up. What was wrong with her? Could she sense him lurking in the hall somehow? He raced back to the kitchen and got out a paper to draw. His heart was beating fast. Even though God didn’t care, apparently his heartbeat did.

But Shmuel’s mom just stumbled by and made herself a cup of barley coffee. She didn’t even notice the cream cheese on the counter. Shmuel looked hard at his paper. His mom walked away, down the hall and out onto her favorite spot on the balcony. Shmuel noticed that she had a book, too.

After you were eight and couldn’t sin anymore, he guessed, there was nothing to do but read.

He looked down at his paper again. He remembered how when he was younger—like Dinah’s age—he once drew on his bed frame. His mom got furious, then. She told him, “We only draw on paper.” In a mean voice, making clear it was a very big deal. He felt so guilty, because his primary teachers hadn’t taught him how sins work yet.

Shmuel smiled. He grabbed a fistful of markers and ducked under the table. Even if he was still waiting for Gimpel to get up, he didn’t have to waste time. He started to draw on the bottom side of the table top. (Just like it was a piece of toast!) Not just squiggles; he decided to do a giant dragon. He gave it red eyes. He gave it bright blue skin with silver stripes. He made it breathe a mix of fire and ice. It was bigger than anything you could do on paper. Better than anything you could do on paper. He loved it. It made him happy that for one more day, God didn’t care.

Finally, he heard footsteps. He put the markers back on the top of the table and he peeked down the hall. Gimpel’s door was open. The bathroom door was closed. Probably Gimpel had been so busy reading he didn’t even pee and now he would really have to go. For a long time, like Dad if he forgot to take his last break at work. Shmuel hurried down the hall, stepping as softly as he could. He went straight for the closet. And how could he pass up the dragon? He grabbed it, closed up Gimpel’s box of toys again, got out before he got caught, and made it safely into his own room.

Dinah was awake. “What’s that?” she asked.

“What’s what?” he said, hiding it behind his back. 

“That toy you have.”

“Be quiet,” he said. “It’s nothing. And it’s not for you.”

“I want to know what it is!” Dinah said. She was almost yelling. How come she could yell and their parents never seemed to care?

“It’s a secret, okay?” he whispered.

“Will you tell me the secret?” she asked.

“If I told you, it wouldn’t be as secret anymore.”

“OK,” she said. “Tell me the not-as-secret of what’s in your arms.” 

From across the hallway and through the door, he could hear the toilet flushing. He could toss the dragon at her face now and tell Gimpel she stole it. That would get a few sins in, but Gimpel would take Shmuel’s new toy away.

“Okay, I’ll tell you!” he hissed. “Just quietly.” 

The bathroom door opened. A moment later, Gimpel’s door opened and closed.

Dinah leaned off the side of the bed and craned her neck. “Why do you have Gimpel’s dragon?” she said.

Shmuel thought about what to say. He could tell any lie he wanted, but there were so many to choose from. He could tell her he was borrowing it. Or that it was his. He could say that Gimpel gave it to him early, as a present for his birthday.

And then something occurred to Shmuel Peretz. Something wonderful.

He had only the one free day left to sin. Barely any time at all. But he had an idea for how he could make it count. 

He handed her the dragon. “I want to show you something.”

As Dinah turned the dragon over in her hands, Shmuel went to the front room. He came back with a handful of markers. He pointed to the wooden slats that separated his bunk from hers. “Have you ever wondered what kinds of pictures you could draw on those?”

Dinah shook her head. “Mom says we only draw on paper.”

“I know what mom says,” he told her. “And I know mom wants us to help each other make good choices.” He took the lid off the blue marker and handed it to her. He had wasted so much time—but without knowing much about temples or baptism for the dead—Shmuel Peretz had just stumbled onto the basic concept of doing work by proxy. He counted in his head and thought of the next two years, one month, and four days. “Did you know that before you turn eight,” he said to his sister, “you can do any sin you want and God doesn’t even care?”

James Goldberg is a poet, playwright, essayist, novelist, documentary filmmaker, scholar, and translator who specializes in Mormon literature.

Artwork by David Habben.

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Tales of the Chelm First Ward: Introduction