The Book of Harold

by Owen Egerton

  “You think it was a miracle?” I asked.

  “Oh yes. Yes, for sure,” Irma said. “It was a miracle for you and me. A toothpick saved you. Harold saved me.”

  “Maybe you just swallowed it.”

  “No, sir. It was a miracle. And I can still feel that toothpick, all the time. I feel it right now. It’s a reminder in my throat.”

  It was quiet again. The florescent light flickered. Sick light.

  “You still want to kill me?” I asked.

  “Not usually,” she said.

  I wanted to tell her I was sorry. I felt like I should. I also wanted to tell her to stay the hell away from my family. That felt right too. I didn’t do either. Instead I told her I had drowned some kittens in a sink. She hummed a little.

  Sitting there, my back to the cell wall with Irma on the other side, was like church. Like what I imagine a Catholic feels in confession. But we were just two penitents. No priest.

  “Goodnight, Blake.”

  “Goodnight.”

  Mother Irma

  I sing in praise of Irma. She was rich. Strong. A mother who could hurt and comfort.

  She cherished transparency. That’s why she and Gilbert got along. At first it seemed they would hate each other. They disagreed on almost everything. But neither flinched at speaking out and they both respected that.

  After Harold’s death, she kept walking. Town to town, stopping at churches and talking about Harold, spreading the word. Her own church turned against her. But she never turned against them. That’s how she won. Never intending to defeat anyone, she crumbled the Baptists.

  She died while walking through a small town in Kansas. There’s a grave on a farm that people visit. I did once, late at night. Even from her grave I could feel her condemning and condoling.

  Her daughter Lo-Ruhamah wrote a biography and made enough money to retire and never clean a house again. The title of the book is Mother of the Faith.

  She wanted to kill me. She loved me dearly. Mother Irma, blessed be your name.

  First Words

  The next morning I woke to Harold’s laughter. He sat with crossed legs on the cell floor speaking through the bars to a woman with a bird-like face and pad of paper.

  “No, no cause. Just walking.”

  “But why?”

  Harold paused. “We don’t know yet.”

  She scribbled down his every word.

  “The paper comes out every Tuesday. I could send you a copy?”

  So the Clarkston Weekly Eagle earned the honor of printing the first report of Harold Peeks. The seventy–word article, titled “Man and Others Walk,” ran right under a piece on Girl Scout Cookies and a feature on that year’s creek cleaning plans.

  “We might even run a picture. Can I take some pictures?” She pulled a small camera from her purse and Harold smiled as she clicked.

  Hiding

  Sleeping in the jail cell was the safest I’d felt since we’d left Figwood. A part of me wanted to stay. Sleep on the cot, wait for the nice policemen to bring me fast food, hardly walk a step all day long. But we were gone by noon.

  I never grew completely accustomed to sleeping outside. Sounds would startle me, wake me. I imagined drunk hicks beating me in my sleeping bag or waking up to find an animal chewing my face. And a more sinister fear. I’d sit up sweating, sure that we were being followed, pursued. Something was hunting us. I tried to tell Harold.

  “We should hide more,” I said. “We’re too exposed at night.”

  “Come on, Blake. You spent enough time hiding.” He put an arm around my shoulders. “Most of America is hiding. And most people couldn’t even say what they’re hiding from.”

  “What are they hiding from?”

  He looked at me as if he were surprised I didn’t know.

  “Me, of course,” he said. “I’ll gobble them down like pretzels.”

  Peter and Prayer

  “You look worse,” Peter told me, pulling the sheets off my cot and replacing them with clean ones.

  “I’m half-dead,” I said. I was sitting in front of my notepads.

  “How’s the writing?”

  “Ups and downs.”

  “I tried praying last night,” he said, standing with a ball of my laundry.

  “How was that?”

  “Uneventful.”

  He turned and began making my bed with a clean sheet. I thought about his neck. I thought about my sharpened paintbrush. I thought about running out the door.

  When he leaves and locks the door, I return to my writing.

  I will kill Peter.

  I write it, but I don’t believe it.

  I will kill Peter.

  Still don’t believe it.

  I will kill Peter. I will ram this paintbrush into his neck.

  Better. Details help.

  I will kill him. I will kill him. I will kill him.

  Sometimes you have to write something over and over before it becomes true. That’s how America became great and later, after his death, how Harold became God.

  Beddy’s Bible

  We were cutting through a field of waist-high grass, like Smurfs through shag carpet. It was an unseasonably warm December day. The sun, hot and white, pushed the humid air down and around, packing us in. Beside me, Beddy flipped through a worn brown binder. He pulled out a postcard and handed it to me. A picture of a swimming hole shaded by live oaks. I read the back.

  Beddy—

  Ate plantains for breakfast and went swimming in a limestone pool. The water is cold and wonderful. There’s music everywhere. Why don’t you come? You could stay the winter. They’ve got bats here. They’d love to see you too. I’m happy but I miss you everyday.

  Love, Lisa

  “Did you go?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Maybe she’s still there.”

  “She got married and moved to Costa Rica,” he said. “I missed that one.” He took the postcard and placed it inside the brown binder. I had seen Beddy’s binder before, often tucked under his arm or open on his lap. It was the cheap kind. Cardboard with a faux-leather covering that was peeling at the corners.

  “What is that?” I asked. Beddy smiled shyly.

  “It’s my bible,” he said, holding the binder in both hands and studying its blank cover. “I’ve been collecting it for years.” He handed it to me. “As I see it, God’s hidden little bits of scripture all over the world so you have to keep your eyes open.”

  It was stuffed with torn pages from novels, war photos from magazines, a wrinkled grocery list, a smooth piece of beach glass in a ziplock bag, sheet music from Porgy and Bess.

  “You know Matthew Arnold, the poet?”

  I shook my head.

  “Great stuff. I’m adding it,” he said in a whisper, as if he were telling me a secret. “I’m starting to get the poetry thing.” Beddy let his hands brush the tops of the grass. “In school they had only half the story. They said poets fly, that’s what they got right, but they were always teaching me how to watch, how to see them looping and everything—but that’s not the point. Matthew Arnold doesn’t want me to watch, he wants me to climb on his back and go flying with him. He wants me to get high up there and look down on the world in a way I never have. Just looking and floating ’til you forget the poet. Don’t watch him, watch the view, you know?”

  “So why these things? Why do you keep them?” I asked, flipping through a garage sale flyer and a set list for a band I’d never heard of.

  “I guess it’s like God is holding the world and these are the places his fingers are touching.”

  “They’re holy or something?”

  “Everything’s holy,” he said.

  “Then why not just call everything your bible?”

  Beddy grinned. “Blake, you’ll be a mystic yet.”

  Whisper in Corners

  “Excuse me, Mr. Peeks?” He was leaning across the front seat of his Volvo Wagon and peering at us through the passenger side window
. We stood on the shoulder of a two-lane blacktop, our legs burning from the day’s walk. “You are Harold Peeks, aren’t you?”

  Harold leaned against the door and smiled into the car. “That’s me.”

  “Well, cool,” he said, smiling. “I’ve heard of you.” He lifted his cell phone and snapped a picture of Harold. “Ah, have a good walk, I guess.” He gave a little wave and pulled away.

  Gilbert brushed the dust from his pants. “What an asshole.” But Harold only grinned.

  “How did he know you?” I asked.

  Harold shook his head. “Best way to spread a secret? Whisper in a corner and wait for the echo,” he said.

  Others stopped us on occasion. “Are you that Harold guy?” “Hey, Mr. Peeks!” Sometimes Harold would slow and chat for a while. Other times he nodded and walked on.

  In Bryerton, a woman ran out of a gas station waving us down. “Harold Peeks? You’re Harold Peeks.”

  “Nope,” Harold said. “Never heard the name.”

  Beddy’s Breathing

  For Beddy breathing was prayer. He’d take time to sit or walk alone, and if you asked him what he was doing, his answer was always, “Breathing.”

  Beddy had a rhythm to the way he did things. The way he walked, talked, even his laughing, and I wonder if it all came from his breathing.

  “Susan could breathe and listen all night long. She’s the one who taught me how to do it,” he once told me. We were walking along a railroad track, balancing on the rails like children.

  “Susan was incredible. She had these bleached blond dreadlocks and eyes like glacier ice,” he said. “And these tiny, round breasts that made me happy every time I saw them. ‘Close your eyes. Keep them closed,’ she’d say. ‘Keep them closed for so long that the light is different when you open them again.’ You sit still long enough, and you listen, but you don’t sleep, you listen. It’s hard to do. You calm your brain by making it concentrate on breathing. It calms your body too. Then you listen.

  I asked him what he heard.

  “Different days, different things,” he said. “I hear wind, a lizard, a buzz, sometimes a hawk or a fly, and other times nothing at all. One of them is God.”

  “Which one?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, leaping from one rail to the other. “The lizard hides in the rocks as soon as I move my head, the hawk is always above me, hunting me, and only its shadow touches me. The fly is in my ear, tickling me, too close. The wind is almost invisible, but it connects everything.”

  “What about the buzz?”

  “The buzz is in my head. It might be mine and mine alone. It might drive me mad.” He jumped back to the first rail, just catching his balance.

  “I hear a buzz,” I said. “Less now, but I still hear it.”

  He looked at me and smiled.

  “I’m glad to be here, Blake. Glad to be with you,” he said. “Utah was so lonely. I tried breathing out there, and all I heard was lonely.”

  I nodded.

  “They say if you get lonely enough, God will meet you there,” he said, stepping from the rail and kicking a clump of dirt. “But I’m afraid to try.”

  Safe Jobs

  The first banks failed during our walk. We heard about it in passing conversations, discarded newspapers, overheard breakfast talk at Waffle Houses.

  That was just the beginning. Soon enough jobs were lost. Not blue collar jobs . . . those were always lost. These were cubicle jobs, safe jobs, jobs that had degree requirements and a company gym. Lost. I read in the business section of a USA Today that Promit Computers had announced layoffs of four hundred people.

  Thrack

  One day Harold picked up a walking stick from the side of the road. Just an old piece of wood five feet high, an inch in diameter. He knocked the pavement with each stride.

  It wasn’t solid wood which would make a swak sound. It was shattered inside, so it rattled as it hit: thrack. Every step. Thrack. Thrack. Like a loud, splintered clock. It made my teeth hurt. Made me blink too much. Thrack. Thrack. After half a day I complained.

  “You know what this sound is, Blake?” Harold said without slowing. “It’s monotony.” Thrack. Thrack. “This is what your life sounds like to the universe.” Thrack.

  Sometimes he was cruel. I don’t know why.

  He walked for another hour, then snapped the stick over his knee and threw it in the ditch.

  Hands

  I remember the first day they held hands, Shael and Harold. We had been on the road for two weeks. A little less than halfway to Austin. I was walking behind them, watching her tight shape, the beading sweat on the back of her neck. Catching some of the sadness that surrounded her like perfume. Day by day she walked closer and closer to Harold’s side. Now each step of her steps matched his.

  Shael had changed as we walked. Even I, who had hardly known her before, could see how different she was. For one, she had become more Jewish. On Fridays at sunset she took to lighting Sabbath candles and saying a quick prayer in Hebrew. She always did this alone, away from us. Often, after her little ceremony, Shael would spend the rest of the evening without saying a word. She would just sit alone, lighting cigarettes with her candles.

  Arms swinging closer as they walked. Her thin fingers inches from Harold’s stubby hand, almost touching, each swing a little closer. They were talking. I couldn’t make out the words, but I could hear the sounds and see their heads bob. Shael tilted her head back a little, I think she laughed.

  Harold often made her smile, and smiling wasn’t a natural thing for Shael. She had a mournfulness about her. A guilt. I could see it in the way she smoked. Even before I knew her story, I could see that Shael thought she deserved to die. Each time she pushed the smoke through her clenched teeth you could see her guilt slightly eased. Her eyes would follow the smoke—another minute of her life, another chunk of lung. And if she had ever had pleasure from the tobacco, it had subsided to nearly nothing and left her with only addiction. Addiction to the nicotine and to the punishment.

  I think it was her gloom that drew Harold in.

  Their hands finally touched. Just fingers brushing. It was sweet, I suppose. But I found it inappropriate. Rude. I was alone, having to watch them come together.

  She reached, encouraged by the touch, and took his hand firmly in hers.

  Rude.

  Here

  Harold and Shael were happy and together while my wife and daughter were a hundred miles away. And I missed them, more than I knew I could. I missed Jennifer’s smell. I missed Tammy’s voice. I just missed them being near.

  I tried calling. Almost every day. The phone would ring and ring and finally a machine with my voice would answer. I’d leave my clumsy message. “Hi. Just calling. So. I guess I’ll call later or maybe tomorrow or something. I hope you’re all well.” Blat blat blat blat nothing to say, nothing at all blat blat blat. “Good-bye.”

  No matter what time of day, I always got the machine.

  I wanted to be back home watching Disney films. I wanted Tammy to be six again, I wanted Jennifer and I to be in love again. I wanted to order a pizza and have all of us eat in front of the television, laughing at sitcom one-liners and inside family jokes. I wanted to cheer for Tammy’s volleyball team, I wanted to compliment my wife’s cooking, I wanted to set all of us down in front of the pool and take a hundred photographs. Why didn’t I ever want them like this before? Why didn’t they ever answer the phone?

  That day, seeing Shael and Harold take each other’s hand and walk like lovers just made the hurt run deeper.

  I found myself asking, “Why am I here?” Repeating it, the words coinciding with my breathing and my steps. “Why am I here? Why am I here?”

  I didn’t have an answer. I could have stopped, could have turned around, but I had lost Jennifer. I had lost Tammy. I’d go back to Figwood, ask for my job back, move into an apartment complex, and spend my nights drinking light beer and watching sport highlights with other middle-aged divorcées
, driving to Burger King at 9 p.m. because I’m out of microwavable dinners, running into my sad ex-wife and angry daughter in the parking lot, being introduced to Mitch NewGuy who slurps his Coke, shakes my hand, and wraps his arm around what was my wife. I’d nod, seeing that she isn’t that sad and my daughter isn’t that angry. Driving back to the apartment, the fries cold already. Pushing a half-eaten burger down the disposal, pouring some gin into a coffee cup, and raising a glass to toast freedom. I’d rather be walking.