Well, sir, it does seem to me that the human animal is constituted in such a way as to fret most over the smallest of his obligations. I recall a case in point, concerning my old acquaintance, Aaron McCarley. Aaron was a man so scrupulously honest he’d return a borrowed feather to the chicken, with interest. And this peculiar virtue led him into the grandest calamity of his life.

It all hinged on a volume entitled A Comprehensive Treatise on the Cultivation of Prize-Winning Marrows. Now, a marrow, for those unacquainted, is a vegetable of such profound dullness that its chief ambition is to grow larger than another, equally dull vegetable. But for Aaron, it was the stuff of high drama. He borrowed the book from the Piedmont Public Library with the sunny intention of returning it within the fortnight.

But a fortnight passed, and then a month. The book, you see, had a pernicious habit of burying itself under almanacs and mail-order catalogs. By the time Aaron rediscovered it, a full six months had slid by.

“Good Googlymoogly!” he exclaimed, staring at the due-date slip as if it were a warrant for his arrest. “Six months! The fine, man! The fine!”

He calculated it in a feverish sweat. Two cents a day. One hundred and eighty-odd days. The sum total came to three dollars and sixty-five cents—a sum which, in Aaron’s mind, had swelled to the magnitude of the national debt.

He marched into the library, a man bound for the gallows, and presented the volume to Mrs Agnes Studdard, the librarian. Mrs Studdard was a woman whose spectacles were so thick they seemed to magnify not just her eyes, but her inherent disapproval. She took the book, peered at the date, and peered at Aaron.

“That will be three dollars and sixty-five cents, Mr. McCarley,” she said, in a voice that could have chilled soup.

Now, a sensible man would have paid the fine and been done with it. But Aaron was a man of principle, and his principle on this day was a sudden, fierce conviction that to pay a late fee was to admit a moral failing. He would not be a debtor to public literature.

“Mrs Studdard,” he said, drawing himself up to his full five feet, two inches. “I cannot in good conscience pay this fine.”

Her eyebrows climbed her forehead like two startled caterpillars. “I beg your pardon?”

“The fee is unjust,” he declared, warming to his theme. “This book has been in my care. It has been safe, and dry, and dare I say, loved! Has it been lent out to others during this time? No! It has had a rest. I have, in effect, provided a sabbatical for this volume. The library owes me a storage fee!”

Mrs Studdard said nothing. She simply stared. And in that silence, Aaron’s courage evaporated. He snatched the book back. “I shall return it properly!” he vowed and stormed out.

What followed was a campaign of such elaborate folly it would have made a cat laugh. His first thought was to wait for the fine to be erased. He learned, however, that after a year, the book would be declared “lost,” and his account would be charged a staggering forty dollars to replace it. This was a financial abyss he could not contemplate.

So, Aaron decided he must return the book without being seen. He became a literary commando. One night, under a new moon, he attempted to slip it through the book-drop slot. But he’d failed to account for the updated, spring-loaded brass door on the chute. The book got stuck, its back broken, jutting out like a mocking tongue. He was forced to wrestle it free, making a clatter that brought old Mr Greenleaf, the night watchman, out with his flashlight and his billy club.

Plan B was more audacious. He would get himself elected to the library board and have the fine system abolished retroactively. He attended meetings for three months, fulminating about “information equity” and “the tyranny of the timestamp.” They made him chairman of the Subcommittee on Fundraising Bake Sales. That broke his spirit.

Finally, driven to desperation, he conceived of his masterstroke. He would donate the book back to the library. He packaged it up in brown paper, wrote “A Generous Gift From An Anonymous Admirer” on it, and mailed it to the library.

A week later, he received a letter from Mrs Studdard herself. It read:

“Dear Mr. McCarley,

We thank you for your recent, and surprisingly familiar, donation. However, as this book is already the property of the Piedmont Public Library, we cannot accept it as a gift. It has been checked out again, under your name. The fine now stands at four dollars and eleven cents.

Yours, in Literacy,

A. Studdard.”

Aaron McCarley was a broken man. He took to his bed for two days. On the third day, he rose, marched down to the Farmers and Merchants Bank, withdrew four dollars and eleven cents in exact change, walked into the library, and laid it on the counter before Mrs Studdard.

“There,” he said, his voice a hollow echo of its former self. “The debt is paid.”

Miss Studdard counted the coins slowly, rang up the transaction, and stamped his card “CLEARED.”

Aaron felt a weight lift. He had spent perhaps fifty dollars in time, stress, and baked goods for the fundraising committee to avoid paying three sixty-five. He had become a local legend of absurdity. But as he walked out into the sun, a free man, he turned to me and said, with immense solemnity, “Mind you, it was a matter of principle. A man’s honor is all he has.”

And I reckon he was right, in a way. Though if you ask me, principle is a fine horse to ride, but it’ll often carry you right past the town of Common Sense and into the wilderness of Pure Tomfoolery.

*****

And, you know I couldn’t possibly neglect the obligatory shameless self-promotion. New Yesterdays, a very nice Christmas stocking stuffer, is available through the following links: Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon as well as your favorite bookshops. The Audiobook is available from Libro.fm, as well as Amazon.