Ghost Boy

by Iain Lawrence

  “Take this,” said Samuel. His hand was suddenly holding money, the roll of dollar bills that had come from selling postcards.

  “I can get home,” said Harold.

  “You can get home a lot faster with money.” He pressed the roll into Harold’s palm. “That’s what Tina would want.”

  The circus broke camp soon after that. The trucks pulled out in a convoy, climbing back toward the mountains. They left behind them a big square of turned-over ground and, beside it, a smaller one—a tiny one—marked by a plain white cross. They left behind them the old Indian. And Harold the Ghost.

  The boy and the Indian sat by the stream, under a willow. The old Indian had his feet on his medicine bundle.

  “Are you going to Salem?” asked Harold.

  “No,” said Thunder Wakes Him. “I would have liked to, though. I have never been west of the Cascades.”

  “Then what will you do?”

  “Oh, I might ride south. Camp by the Humboldt for a week or two, if I can find a place by myself.” Thunder Wakes Him plucked a stem of grass. He split it into four and let the pieces fall from his fingers. “I’ll catch the circus coming back.”

  Harold nodded.

  “Can I give you a ride?”

  “No, thanks. I want to walk awhile, and then catch a train, I think.”

  The old Indian whistled for his chestnut horse. He took his feet from the medicine bundle. But when he stood he grunted, and a little look of pain flashed across his face. “It is hard to get old,” he said. “No longer can I do the things I did when I was only eighty.”

  The horse had crossed the river. It came down to the opposite bank and waited there for its rider.

  “Well, I’ll see you, Harold,” said Thunder Wakes Him.

  “Yeah. See you,” Harold said.

  The old Indian stooped to pick up his bundle. Again he winced, and the roll of hide and leather dropped from his hand, unrolling on the slope. Little pots and jars scattered across the grass.

  “My medicine!” cried Thunder Wakes Him.

  Harold scrambled after them, and the touch of the cold glass jars made him suddenly homesick. His mother kept a row of them in the little cabinet in the bathroom. As a boy, he had built castles of the ones she had emptied. He liked the feel of them again, and only slowly packed them back. But the old Indian threw them on the leather and rolled the bundle around them.

  “Now you know,” said the old Indian.

  “Know what?” asked Harold, though he did.

  The old Indian smiled. “You are a good person, my little white friend.” He took his bundle and walked down to the river, into the water that rose to his knees. He waded toward the chestnut horse, stepping awkwardly over the stones, and in the middle he slipped. For an instant, he was flat above the surface, for another instant underneath it. And then he stood again, dripping wet, his buckskins blackened by the stream.

  The water, where it flowed around him, carried on. It eddied down along the banks, down toward the ocean. It carried a stain of red that dripped from the old Indian’s face, from his hands, leaving him white underneath.

  The old Indian looked at the back of his hands. His long gray braids hung across his face. “It’s a miracle,” he said, and laughed. “When you get stuck being something else, it is hard to get unstuck.”

  Harold nodded. Then he turned his back on old Bob and started his journey home.

  Chapter

  52

  Harold the Ghost came home to Liberty on a steam train. It stopped at the old, dust-covered station, and he walked up through the town to his home.

  He carried his bundle on his shoulder, the bat for a handle. He looked like the same boy who had left Liberty weeks before, but he wasn’t the same at all. He walked steadily, quickly, his head held high. And when he met the children running down to see why the train had stopped, he neither slowed nor lowered his head. He just kept walking.

  “Hey, it’s the Ghost!” shouted Dusty Kearns. “It’s Harold the Ghost!” The children swept down in a line and swarmed around him. A girl said, “We thought you were dead.” And Dusty cried, “He looks like he is!”

  They tugged at his clothes and snatched at his bundle. But Harold felt bigger and stronger than he ever had, and he walked along in silence as the children circled him.

  “Where have you been?” they asked. “What were you doing?”

  Harold kept walking. The bundle hung heavily over his shoulder.

  “You been hiding?” asked Dusty. “Looks like you’ve been hiding under a rock.”

  Harold smiled. He took off his little round glasses and touched his eyes with the back of his hand, then put them on again. His hair stood up in white tufts.

  The circle grew wider around him. It grew wider and silent. A girl fell into step beside him. “Did you go off with the circus, Harold?” she asked. “Is that where you’ve been?”

  Harold shrugged up his bundle and kept on walking. He thought of Princess Minikin, always happy, laughing her way through crowds; of poor Samuel, who hated being thought a freak; of the Cannibal King as a fat little boy crying because he’d been called a snowman. He thought of the old Indian pretending to be something else, and then of Tina again—the best of them all—telling him it was hard to be different.

  He stopped in the street, in the circle of children. He looked around the blurs of faces and saw them looking back, wondering where he had been, seeing that somehow he had changed. You’re no better or worse than anyone else, the Gypsy Magda had told him. But he was better now; he was better than he used to be.

  Harold the Ghost shifted his bundle to his other shoulder and set off again along the street. The children stood away before him, all but Dusty Kearns. In overalls streaked with grass stains, his scruffy boots laid open down the tongues, Dusty stood and stared. His freckled face was set in a hard, mean look. His hair was like coppery wool.

  “Where have you been, Maggot?” he asked.

  Harold stopped. He was surprised to see that he was a little bit taller than the rancher’s boy, who stood like Roman Pinski, legs apart and shoulders back, puffed like a pigeon to make himself seem bigger than he really was. He had so many freckles that his face looked smeared with brown and pink, and his hair was nearly as red as the juggling clown’s.

  It seemed to Harold that years had passed since he’d lain on the prairie and wished he looked like that. He’d thought no one would tease him if he looked like Dusty Kearns. Now he imagined that they would, but only in different ways. It was the inside of him they were teasing, not the part they saw.

  “Huh?” said Dusty. “Where did you go?”

  He had gone to Oregon to meet the Cannibal King. He had gone all the way to the mountains and back. But all he said was, “A long way.” He said, “I’ve gone a long way, and I’m tired now, and I just want to go home.”

  Dusty Kearns rolled his hands into fists. For a moment it was hard to tell what he meant to do. Then he tucked his thumbs into the straps of his overalls and kicked at the dirt with his boot. He reminded Harold of a barking dog that had been told suddenly to shut up. Through his freckles he blushed a strange red. “Aw, let the baby go home,” he mumbled. Then he stood away, and Harold walked past him.

  The buildings of Liberty grew large in the Ghost’s round glasses. His bundle thumping at his back, he passed the empty door of Kline and Sons and turned toward his house. He walked up the same streets he had gone down in the darkness on the night that the old Indian had taken him off across the prairie. He passed through the gate and started up the path. But the closer he came to the house, the more slowly he walked, until he reached the foot of the steps and stopped altogether.

  Staring up at the house, the Ghost felt the same blur of emotions he’d felt on the circus lot when he’d come across the trailer of the Cannibal King for the very first time. He wanted to go in, and he wanted to run away. He wished he could know what waited inside.

  Harold stood there for a minute or more. Then h
e trudged up the steps and across the porch. Sunlight gleamed on the doorknob, but in places the brass was worn to brown where hands had grasped it. The Ghost felt sad to think that it remembered, more strongly than he did, the touch of his father and his brother. Then he put his hand where theirs had been, turned the knob and pushed open the door.

  “Ma?” he shouted. The house seemed to swallow his voice. “Ma? I’m home.”

  He let his bundle swing down to the floor. He walked through the hall, staring through doorways, looking for changes, as though he’d been gone for years. He came to the kitchen, calling for Honey, but there was no dog there to greet him. There was only a bare, clean patch of floor beside the stove, where Honey’s blanket had always been stretched carefully square. The food dish was gone. The water bowl was empty.

  “Ma!” he shouted. “Ma?”

  Heavy steps came down the stairs. They came faster and faster, and the door thudded open, and his mother stood there in its frame. She was pasty, and she seemed older, but she didn’t come any closer.

  “Where have you been?” she said. “Where on earth have you been?”

  “Don’t be angry,” he said. “Please don’t be angry, Ma.”

  “Angry?” she said. “I should whip the tar from you.”

  Then her mouth started shaking; her eyes blinked open and shut. And Harold saw, for a moment, the younger, prettier mother he had known years ago, before the war killed his father and took his brother away. He saw her as clearly as he’d seen the sad little man trapped inside Samuel’s body.

  She was the same person he had always known. And he remembered how she had kissed his father goodbye at the start of the war, how she had wept on the platform as the train started east down the tracks. He remembered the way she had thrashed on the floor with a little piece of blue paper balled in her fist, shrieking like a madwoman at the telegram that said his father had died. Memories poured through his mind in an instant: how she had cried every morning and every night for more than a year, then finally smiled when Walter Beesley came to the door with a huge bunch of bright yellow daisies; how she had danced at her wedding; how she had begged him to be nicer to Walter. He remembered the day she took his father’s picture from the mantel, the day he said, “I hate you.” He saw her down on her knees, tugging at David’s uniform, shouting at him not to go. And he saw her crumple in a faint when the second telegram came; he remembered so much in that instant.

  “I’m sorry, Ma,” he said. “I’m sorry for everything.”

  She came across the room, her arms reaching out. She crossed it faster than Harold did, and they met in a hot, sweaty hug. She cried as she rubbed her hands across his back.

  “Where were you?” she asked.

  “I was playing baseball, Ma,” he said. “I was playing baseball with elephants, Ma, with a princess and a man like a fossil. But I’m back now, Ma. I’m home again.”

  Harold felt a pressure on his legs. He looked down and Honey was there, leaning against him, her head turned up and her tongue hanging out.

  “That poor dog,” said Mrs. Beesley. She sniffed and laughed. “That poor old flea-bitten dog. She’s hardly come out of your room since the day you left. Won’t sleep or eat anywhere else but up in your room.”

  Harold reached down to pet her, but his mother tightened him in another crushing hug. She squeezed him even harder than Samuel had. She pushed him away to see him, then squeezed him again. “We were frightened,” she said. “God, we were frightened, your father and me.”

  “I want to see him,” said Harold. “I’ve got an idea about Kline and Sons. I want to open it again. I want—”

  “Tell me later,” she said. “Oh, I just want to hold you.”

  Acknowledgments

  Like most stories, Ghost Boy doesn’t really begin with the first sentence on the first page. It starts instead in another book, with a title I’ve forgotten, in a paragraph or two about an English circus in which the elephants played cricket. In that very real circus, the elephants enjoyed their little game immensely but pouted when they lost.

  I liked that image and mentioned it one day to my father. He surprised me by telling me what the elephants wore, and how they held the cricket bat, and how they lumbered up and down the pitch. He talked very fondly about it, because he remembered seeing it as a boy. The baseball game in this story is based on what he told me, and the story grew from there, through the help of many others.

  Details of the circus come from two British-born friends, Barry White and John the Hermit. Barry had captured elephants in Kenya and knew firsthand their favorite ways of trampling people. The Hermit remembered the mud and smells of a circus lot and the mysteries of Gypsies.

  The story was transposed to postwar America through the help of librarian Kathleen Larkin of Prince Rupert, British Columbia. She found answers to countless questions, down to such details as whether army trucks had glove boxes. Her husband, J. Kevin Ash, brought my elephants to life when he introduced me to three of them as they passed through Prince Rupert in a Shriners’ circus sponsored by his club.

  The writing was helped along by my wife, Kristin Miller, and my very good friend Bruce Wishart. My agent, Jane Jordan Browne, suggested several changes and then found an excellent place for the story with Delacorte Press. There I was lucky to work with two wonderful editors: Lauri Hornik, who guided Ghost Boy into a major revision, and Françoise Bui, who saw it through its final changes.

  From the first word I wrote, I saw Harold Kline as an albino. But I threw away almost a hundred pages when I realized that there was more to albinism than just a whiteness of skin. For teaching me the realities of the condition—which changed the story completely—I owe many thanks to NOAH, the National Organization of Albinism and Hypopigmentation, and especially to one of its members, an inspiring young man named Eric Downes. Eric told me some very personal things in a very patient way and suggested new directions in which my story could grow. He very kindly read the final manuscript and provided this clarification:

  “Although Harold Kline has albinism, he must always be considered an individual. There are over a hundred different DNA mutations which can cause albinism. No two albinos are alike, just as no two people with regular vision and skin pigmentation are alike. Some albinos have a small amount of pigment in their skin, some have none. Some albinos see 20/40 (very close to the ‘perfect’ 20/20), some see 20/400. Harold is intended to be only a person with albinism, not a representation of every albino.”

  For more information on albinism, NOAH can be found at www. albinism.org.

  READING GROUP

  Questions for Discussion

  1. From the very beginning of the novel, Harold is on a journey. What is he looking for? Does he find it?

  2. At no time during this journey does Harold stop and wonder about the consequences of running away. Why not?

  3. Describe Harold’s personality. Which of his characteristics do you find admirable?

  4. “And across the wide front window of May’s Cafe was a poem in slanting lines:

  He’s ugly and stupid

  He’s dumb as a post

  He’s a freak and a geek

  He’s Harold the Ghost.”

  Harold has seen this cruel rhyme and heard the people of Liberty call him names such as Whitey, Maggot, and Harold the Ghost so often that he has accepted it all as true. How do other people’s perceptions of Harold affect his perception of himself? How do others’ perceptions of you affect the way you look upon yourself?

  5. The Gypsy Magda asks Harold, “If you think that you are less than them, can you blame them for thinking they are better?” Discuss the meaning of her question. When does Harold begin to see himself clearly? How has society tried to justify its treatment of minorities, foreigners, and others who don’t fit into the conventional models of the community?

  6. Harold struggles to exist between two competing worlds: the world of the sideshow performers and the world of the “normal” people. Teens are
often faced with a similar dilemma: family versus friends or one group of friends versus another. How would you manage these choices without alienating one group or the other?

  7. “The morning clouds were thick toward the west. Blue and black, smeared with yellow, they made the sky look bruised and battered.”

  There are beautiful descriptive passages throughout the novel. Read aloud your favorite of these lyrical passages and talk about why you find them so pleasing.

  8. Throughout the novel, there are characters, events, and places that are symbols for ideas: the circus, the Cannibal King, the Oregon Trail, and the storm, to name a few. What does each of these metaphors represent?

  9. Whenever Harold feels threatened, he closes his eyes tightly and chants silently to himself, “No one can see me, no one can hurt me. The words that they say cannot harm me.” Harold’s belief in his own invisibility defines his sense of being an alien. Many teens share these feelings of being an outsider. How have you experienced these feelings? How do you deal with them?

  10. At first Harold thinks Samuel is the ugliest thing he has ever seen. Yet when Harold stares into Samuel’s eyes he sees something other than ugliness. Samuel and Tina carry the message that a person’s self-worth is determined by what is inside, not by physical appearance. But every message from the media today seems to be that your physical appearance is the only important thing. Where do you stand on this issue? Talk about the instances in the novel where the sideshow performers show their goodness. In which instances in the novel do the “normal” people show their lack of humanity?

  11. “Beware the ones with unnatural charm. And the beast that feeds with its tail… . A wild man’s meek and a dark one’s pale. And there comes a monstrous harm.”

  This is one of Gypsy Magda’s prophecies in the novel. What are some of the others? What do her prophecies mean? Do they come true?