The truth makes things harder in the beginning and easier in the end.

From Alfred’s journal

Switch came to the sill before the frost was off it and told me, straight out, that he had been the one in my seed sack all last fall, and that he had let me go on blaming the jays for most of a season. I was angry for about as long as it takes to say so. Then it went out of me, and what was left was that I no longer had to decide, every morning, which of the jays had the look of a thief. For years I thought a hard fact was a thing you spent, and the smart birds kept theirs. The truth makes things harder in the beginning and easier in the end; the lie had been charging me a little every day and I had stopped noticing the fee. He stayed and held the page open while I wrote, which he has never once done on a morning when he had nothing to confess.