The Book of Harold

by Owen Egerton

  “Death doesn’t need defeating.”

  “Spring follows winter,” Beddy said, his voice quiet. I saw a smile touch Harold’s face and he gave the slightest nod. He looked up, first at me and then turned to the others.

  “I can’t give you tomorrow. Only today.”

  Light

  And the room changed. More than I could describe. Forgetfulness. Skewed sequence. We talked a little. I think we sang.

  Was it presence? Was it whirlpools? Beddy leaned in to me. “We’re breathing each other in. Breathing ourselves out.” Irma would later say it was the Holy Spirit. She reached to touch the foreheads of those near her, expecting to burn her hand.

  How would I paint this? How would I show this? When I was a child my father taught me to watch the stars that can only be seen from the corner of the eye, where the eyes are most sensitive to light. “You can’t look directly at the star, it will disappear.” And it always did, as soon as I turned my glance. I wanted to be there, to visit that star or planet that can only be seen from the side. That night. Those lights, that’s what I would paint.

  Whiskey

  Later, when the others were asleep and Shael was smoking in the back room, Gilbert and I sat on the front steps watching stars disappear behind clouds.

  “Got a little treat for the two of us,” Gilbert said and pulled out a fifth of whiskey.

  I said it then and I say it now, “God bless Gilbert Forncrammer.”

  “To a crazy bastard,” he said, raising the bottle and toasting back towards the house.

  “A crazy bastard,” I said.

  It had been weeks since I had felt that sticky burn in my stomach. It wasn’t gin, but it was fine. My mind melted just a bit and I smiled. We talked about the wind, about blisters.

  “Another drink?” I said.

  “What the hell. I got nowhere to be tomorrow.”

  That sweet dizziness and loose tongue. All the world dark and blurred.

  “Gilbert, how many times were you married?”

  “Twice.”

  “Why didn’t they last?” I asked and swigged.

  “The first one ended like crap. I left because I thought I had fallen out of love, or some bullshit like that. But the second was worse.”

  “What happened?”

  “I caught her with another man,” he said. “She cried, begged me to stay. I left.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Good for shit. If I had half an ass I would have tried,” Gilbert rubbed his scalp. “I never got the whole unconditional love thing.”

  “No such thing. You love something because it is lovable. There’s no value in love that’s not deserved.”

  “Shit, Blake. You’re such a prick,” Gilbert said. He sipped.

  “You think he really is crazy?”

  “Sure. A little.”

  “If Harold did something crazy would you follow?” I asked.

  “What? Like walk through the middle of Texas?”

  “Something dangerous.”

  “I think so,” he said. “Hell yeah.”

  “So you think Harold is the Son of God?”

  “Fuck no,” Gilbert said, his eyebrows popping up. “I’m an atheist.” Then his eyebrows slid down until he was frowning. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t have to know.” I raised the bottle and handed it over to him.

  “I don’t have to know.” He toasted me and drank.

  Gilbert was good. Always good. Years later, as Haroldism bloomed, he attended the first Conference of Haroldistically Sympathetic Churches. The goal was to meet and come to some agreements on the basic tenets of Haroldism. Gilbert Forncrammer succeeded in having himself elected president of the conference. His first and only act as president was to have himself excommunicated.

  Gilbert retired to a mountain home in Colorado where he refused to see any visitors, except for the occasional young, female pilgrim. He died a happy man, I have no doubt.

  I was lonely that night. The drink only made me more so. I lay down in the living room, listening to the wind peel the paint. The house was howling, as if it were a harmonica that God was blowing away at. The others were all asleep. I got up and left.

  I walked a mile and a half to a gas station, was still a little buzzed when I arrived. I found a pay phone and called home. No one answered. I knew no one would. Home had never seemed so far away. I dialed Terry.

  “Blake, hey, how are you? Where are you?” It was two in the morning and I was sure I had woken him up, but he sounded thrilled. He asked about Harold, about walking, about everything. I told him a few details. Nothing much.

  “Wow. Yes,” he said. “Good stuff.”

  “Terry, have you seen my wife?”

  “Jennifer, ah, not recently,” he said. “Beth says she’s staying with her mother.”

  “For how long?”

  “Well, judging from the height of your lawn, a while.”

  My mother-in-law. Of course. A woman I did not like and who did not like me.

  It was much too late to call, but I called anyway. No one answered. I was grateful. My mother-in-law might have answered and, by that point, I was too cold and too sober to hear her voice. I hung up before the voice-mail beeped.

  Another Confession

  My house empty, wife and child gone, lawn in disrepair. That’s what happens. Leave home—even if you’re asked to leave—and everything goes to shit. And I’m walking through a muddy field in the dark to a rotting shack, my newly cleaned feet already a mess.

  It was nearly dawn when I got back. A pale blue light filling the eastside rooms. Four bodies asleep in the living room. Shael was awake, in the back room, staring out a thick-glassed window that faced an empty yard surrounded by the remains of a chain-link fence. She turned and smiled as I walked in, then stared out again. I watched her.

  “Are you worried?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “He wants to die.”

  “Yes.”

  I watched again. The room growing lighter.

  “Shael,” I said, leaning back on the wall. “Do you believe in all this?”

  “In all what?” She turned towards me and the early light gave her skin a blue glow.

  “About Harold being the Son of God?”

  “I love Harold,” she said, looking again out to the yard. “There is no one I trust more.”

  “That’s not really an answer.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what it means to say Messiah or Son of God or Christ.”

  “So you don’t believe?”

  “I do believe in Harold,” she said. “I just don’t know what it means to believe in Harold.”

  I watched for a moment longer. She rested her head against the window pane. I could see her and her reflection and the point where they touched.

  “Do you think he’ll die?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” She said it so softly I could hardly hear. If it hadn’t been for the reflection of her moving lips, I might not have known what she said.

  I walked over to her. She didn’t move. I placed my hands on her shoulders and kissed her neck.

  “Don’t do that,” she said. But I kissed her neck again. She turned to me, her eyes like wet stones.

  “Blake,” she said, “you would do anything to not be forgiven.”

  I stepped back. She didn’t move her eyes from mine. I turned and left the room.

  Shrug

  One morning, two days before Christmas, we crossed a bridge over a muddy river. A dark haired woman with narrow shoulders, no older than twenty, stood at the end of the bridge, watching us approach. She didn’t walk towards us, just waited, small and still.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, but are you Harold Peeks?” she asked when we reached her.

  “Yes,” Harold said, stopping.

  “Please. I need help. I can’t hear from my left ear already, and the right one is getting worse. I’m going deaf, and I’m scared, and I’ve heard you can d
o things.”

  Harold smiled. He reached out and put his hands over her ears. Then he removed them. “Your faith has healed you.”

  “What?” she said. “I didn’t catch that.”

  Harold patted her cheek, shrugged, and walked on.

  “Harold,” Gilbert said. “Are you just going to leave her?”

  “If you can help her, you . . .” Beddy started, but Harold turned.

  “There is a peace that lies behind all things,” he said. “As you walk today, try to find it.”

  Tremble

  Each day I kneel by the wall in my Mole Hole and sharpen the end of the paintbrush. I whittle and whittle until the point breaks and I have to start again. It snaps every time, all my work is undone, and I find myself smiling.

  God has given me this choice. Remain and die a prisoner, or hurt Peter and walk free. I dreamed I had stabbed him in the neck. I dreamed the paintings on the walls cheered, and the books on the shelves clapped their pages. I feel sick.

  My hands tremble all the time now.

  Christmas

  On Christmas Eve we crossed the Colorado River, its waters brown and slow. A rancher near Smithville gave us permission to camp in a meadow on his property. He and his wife, a sweet round woman, brought us out plates of turkey, mashed potatoes, and slices of pumpkin pie. We exchanged kind words and Christmas greetings, and they returned to their home.

  We built a campfire under a canopy of sprawling oaks and gathered close. Hardly a word was said. We sat enjoying the light and the crackling until the fire had burned down to coals that you could hear cooling and contracting, pulsing like a slow heart. Harold’s eyes were distant, glazed. I wondered if another migraine with its mirrored hole was descending or if the night was simply too quiet. Beddy was reading, his face getting closer and closer to the pages as the light faded. Irma was humming Christmas carols. She hummed them slowly and in a minor key, making each one a lament more than a carol.

  “Oh my,” she paused and sighed. “I’m missing my daughter something terrible.”

  “Lo-Ruhamah?” Harold asked.

  She nodded. “This is my first Christmas in thirty-five years without her.”

  “Where’d you find a name like Lo-Ruhamah?” Beddy asked, looking up from his book.

  “Well, Bedrick, it’s a Bible name,” Irma said. “Sure glad she doesn’t read the Bible.”

  “What does it mean?” Gilbert asked.

  “You got to read the Bible to find out,” Irma said.

  “I don’t want to read the goddamned Bible.”

  “Then you won’t find out.”

  “Why would you name your daughter that?” Shael asked.

  “You know what it means?” Irma said.

  “It’s Hebrew,” Shael said. “It was in my Bible before it was in yours.”

  Irma made a little grunt. “I was young and her daddy left me a week before she was born. He didn’t want a baby. I didn’t want a baby.”

  “For shit’s sake, what’s it mean?” Gilbert spat.

  “Lo-Ruhamah means ‘not loved,’” Irma said.

  “You named her that?” Beddy asked.

  “But the truth is, once I had her, I loved her more than anything God ever made,” Irma said. “More than everything put together with a ribbon around it. Loved her as a baby, loved her as a child, love her all grown up. She even makes housecleaning good when she’s with me.”

  “Yeah. Naming kids is like that,” Gilbert said with a nod. “I’ve got a daughter named Grace. She got all upset when her mother and I split. Hasn’t talked to me in twelve years.”

  Gilbert sucked his teeth for a moment. Beddy closed his book.

  “I had a daughter,” Shael said quietly.

  “I didn’t know that. You’re a momma?” Irma said.

  “No,” Shael said. “Past tense. Long time ago. She died.”

  “Oh,” Irma said. “I’m sorry.”

  “They thought maybe I did it,” Shael said, pulling out a cigarette. “I don’t know what happened. I was really high. I was really high a lot back then, and she died in her crib. Micah. That was her name.” She paused and lit the cigarette. “They arrested me, actually. I was in jail for two nights, charged with neglect, but nothing happened. My mother hired lawyers. The hearing lasted less than two hours, and they told me I was innocent.”

  “A lot of babies die in their cribs,” Irma said.

  “I know. That’s what the lawyers said.” She smiled a little, picked up a stick and poked at the coals. “But I was messed up, so I don’t know. Maybe. You know? Maybe I could have helped. They never said I was innocent. They said, ‘not guilty.’ That’s not the same.”

  “Child,” Irma said. She put an arm around Shael and stroked her hair. Harold had leaned back so that his face was in the shadows. Gilbert puckered his lips. He looked embarrassed. Beddy’s eyes were wide and glazed, staring into the coals. I watched, not moving, not blinking.

  “You’re forgiven,” I said. I said it so quietly that I wasn’t sure anyone would hear. But Shael heard. She looked up at me. She sighed and her forehead wrinkled. Then she released a strange sound, something like a laugh and a sob trying to come out at the same time.

  Irma stared at me, as if I’d said something cruel. “Blake,” she said and shook her head.

  “You too, Irma,” I said. “Forgiven.”

  Neither Beddy nor Gilbert said anything. Beddy glanced at me for a moment and then looked away. Harold stayed back, his face still in the shadows.

  There and then, like a snap, I fell in love with Shael and Irma and everyone. They looked like miracles to me, confused and wordless, there in what was left of the firelight. All of us so guilty we could die. All of us alive. I smiled and felt tears in my eyes. I loved my wife. I loved my daughter. I loved Beddy, Gilbert, Harold. I loved my mother and father and any stranger. It was painful. I hurt for Shael and for everyone. I hurt for them like I had hurt for Tammy the day she was born. I looked up and saw the moon and branches in the wind and knew something like God was there and loving. Around me was wind and the sound of Shael’s quiet crying, above me was the space between each branch and between the trees and the sky. All these things, like a filling void, like forever. My heart couldn’t hold it.

  Of course it passed. The instant I tried to look at it, it all vanished. But there was enough in that moment to justify a lifetime.

  Blood

  I woke up this morning with specks of blood on my pillow. A patch beside my mouth, wet with red spit. I spent the next hour rubbing the blood away before Peter brought my breakfast.

  I wonder how my father died. It was sometime during my hiding. I wonder what he thought of me.

  I’m sure he died matter-of-factly. “Death is when you stop being alive,” he used to say when he’d lose a patient. “That’s what people do. It’s natural.”

  He was the kind of doctor who believed comfort was the most important thing he could supply for his patients. Health itself was only valuable if it was accompanied by comfort. He didn’t see a long life as a blessing. Once life became uncomfortable, it was better to let it go. He laughed at colleagues who put themselves and their patients through hell to sustain life a year or two longer.

  “Our job is not the prevention of death. That’s impossible,” he’d say. “Our job is improving the quality of life. And the quality of dying.”

  When something harsh happened like losing a young patient or seeing someone in fierce pain, he refused to believe anything was wrong with the situation. Wrong implied a right, and he believed the universe had no morals. Instead he explained all things as “natural.” Children were born, cancer killed, people died. It’s natural.

  He did not believe life had any meaning. There was pleasure: helping those in need, accomplishing goals, financial stability, family. Days were nice, but amounted to nothing. And he was okay with that. It’s natural. Pain existed and you relieved it when you could. But the greatest pains, my father believed, were inevitable. Dea
th, age, loss. I think he took comfort in knowing certain things to be inevitable. No need to complain. No need to waste energy in being frustrated.

  He knew a little poem he’d recite that summed up his life philosophy. He used to sing it to me as a child. When I left for college, he wrote it on the inside of a going-away card in which he had also placed a hundred-dollar bill and a picture of him and my mother.

  Life is mainly froth and bubble,

  Two things stand like stone-

  Kindness in another’s trouble,

  Courage in your own.

  Fast

  Today, just before lunch, I hid under my desk with my sharpened paintbrush in hand and waited for Peter. An hour passed, then another. Lunch never came. I feel asleep and was curled up like a fetus when Peter finally delivered my dinner.

  “What are you doing on the floor?” he asked.

  “Praying,” I said.

  He nodded and turned to leave.

  “Wait,” I said. “Where was my lunch today?”

  “Season of the Fast. Only two meals a day,” he said. “Don’t you remember?”

  Everything Must Go

  I remember. Our money ran out halfway through week five. So we begged. Sometimes sitting with an open hand outside a truck stop. Or standing at a traffic light with a sign. It was humiliating. The looks as they handed you a dollar or, more often, the lack of looks.

  Worse was the shame. Not for being poor but because I wasn’t poor. I still owned a house back in Figwood. I still had a bank account. I was experimenting with a lifestyle that others have forced upon them. And it occurred to me that the dollar some passerby gave me would not be given to someone else, someone with real need.

  Often a church gave us sandwiches or a restaurant left us scraps. On New Year’s Day, near Manor, Beddy noticed a sealed trash bag in a dumpster behind a Dunkin’ Donuts. The bag was stuffed with muffins, bagels, and every color doughnut you could imagine: sprinkles, raspberry, chocolate-chunk, Bavarian cream. Beddy carried the bag over his shoulder, handing out pastries to anyone who’d accept them like some fantastical pastry saint.