The Book of Harold Read online

“So you got kicked out?”

  “Hell no. The next week I stood in front of the church and received my confirmation. So if that ain’t shit, I don’t know what is.”

  Still, Gilbert was upset he’d left the service that morning and missed the action. More than once he asked Harold to repeat the miracle. “Not that I need it,” he said. “I do just fine on my own.”

  Irma was less impressed. She walked out of that church with fists clenched.

  “Harold,” she said. “There’s right miracles and wrong miracles, you understand? You can’t disrespect a house of religion.”

  “It’s not about religion,” Harold said.

  “You’re the one always talking about knowing God. You can’t know God without religion.”

  “And gravity only works for physics majors.”

  “I just don’t see what’s to be gained by getting everyone all excited and then running out of the place like a maniac,” Irma said.

  “They could have followed,” Harold said.

  That night we were huddled around a creek-side campfire miles from Woodville. Beddy heated two cans of beans, and we were passing tortillas when a man stepped into the circle of firelight. He was no longer in his clerical robe, but I recognized him. He asked if he could sit.

  We watched him stiffly lower himself to the dirt as if it had been years since he last sat without the comfort of a chair or couch. His starched shirt was ripped at an elbow, and the knees of his slacks were wet with mud. He wiped the sweat from his face and smiled. It was a weak smile. A distant cousin of the engulfing grin we’d seen during the service.

  “So, quite a morning, wasn’t it?” he said with a light chuckle.

  “I enjoyed your sermon, Reverend,” Irma said.

  He nodded and mumbled a thank you.

  “Would you like some beans, Ben?” Harold asked.

  “You know my name?”

  “It was on the sign.”

  “Oh, yes. Of course.” He coughed into his fist. “No food, thank you. I’d take some water, if you can spare it?” Beddy handed him his water bottle and he guzzled half of it down.

  “My name is Harold. Harold Peeks.”

  “Yes, I know who you are. Or, I had guessed.”

  Gilbert and I exchanged a glance. Harold’s eyes never left the minister.

  “You’re very good walkers,” he said, handing the bottle back. “It wasn’t easy finding you.”

  “Lots of practice,” I told him.

  “Good. That’s what builds muscles. Walking the walk, not just talking the talk. Yes. Of course, my hiker friends tell me walking the wrong way is the best way to get lost.” He coughed again, looked around at us, a bit embarrassed, as if reluctantly fulfilling a duty. “Of course, scripture tells us there is only one true way. One path. And that way is Jesus Christ.”

  He stopped and stared at the ground for several moments.

  “Ben?” Harold said.

  Ben placed his hands in his lap and seemed to be gathering his thoughts. “I want to know how you did what you did.” His voice was quiet, stern. Almost angry.

  “How do you think?” Harold said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t have to know.”

  “Tell me,” he said, the muscles in his jaw tightening.

  “How did Buddha walk on water? How did Muhammad write poetry?”

  “Look, I had an injury,” Ben said. “My body hasn’t done that . . . that thing that happened this morning in two years and . . .”

  “And the doctors don’t know why, and you think your wife is sleeping with the Sunday school teacher, and you squirm every time someone asks you to perform a wedding. And you’re scared to death because you’re unsure about everything you were once sure about.”

  Even in the half-light of the fire, you could see the minister turning pale. But he said nothing.

  “Your sermons have promised a Second Coming. You’ve preached it.” Harold moved closer to the fire and his face glowed. “Did you really think it would look anything like you expected?”

  Ben said nothing.

  “Listen,” Harold said. “Hundreds of years ago a rich man hired an artist to build a huge stone chapel. The artist drew up the design and showed it to the rich man. ‘It’s beautiful,’ the man said. ‘But you need more than two columns. Two will never hold up all the weight.’ The artist promised that two columns were enough, but the man demanded more be added. So the artist built the chapel with twelve columns. It stands to this day. But if you visit the chapel and study the work, you’ll find all but two of the columns are an inch short of the ceiling. Two are needed. The others hold up nothing. There’s your dogma.”

  Ben looked up, “So what do you propose? Knock down the columns?”

  “Give them a push. See if they wobble.”

  “And if you push down one of the two that are needed,” Ben said, “the whole roof will fall in.”

  “Good,” Harold said. “You’d finally see the sky.” Harold laughed. So did Gilbert.

  The minister breathed a long quiet sigh and then spoke into the fire. “I fear for your souls.”

  “Don’t,” Harold said. “Ben, I am something new and something old.”

  “I want you to tell me you’re lying,” Ben said, nearly whispering.

  “We’ll be leaving at dawn if you want to join us,” Harold said.

  “Tell me you’re lying, and I’ll leave you alone.”

  “Maps and muscles, muscles and maps. You think you have one. I’m offering the other.”

  The minister stood up, gazed around at us all. “You people think hell is a joke? It is very real,” he said. “And you are all in real danger.”

  “Cool down, limp dick,” Gilbert said. Harold put a hand on Gilbert to quiet him but kept his eyes on Ben.

  “I’ll be praying for you. I really will be,” Ben said. His voice was stronger now, more sure, more angry. “I don’t judge you. I don’t judge you at all. But God will judge you.” He nodded as if agreeing with what he had said. Then he walked from the fire.

  We sat watching in the weird kind of silence that only a threat of eternal damnation can bring. Gilbert tried to laugh but it didn’t travel too far. Reverend Ben Patterson had left some of his anxiety behind, and it hung in the air like the smell of burnt hair.

  “Are there any more beans, Beddy?” Harold asked.

  “Harold, I don’t get what you’re doing,” Irma said. The anger from earlier was no longer there.

  “Irma,” he said, smiling and pulling up a spoonful of beans. “You don’t get what I’m doing but you follow. That’s magic.”

  Borders on the Boundless

  Late that same night, after everyone else was asleep, I woke to see Harold standing with his neck bent and his face towards the stars. He was motionless against a backdrop of swaying trees that moved like waves in the night wind. I went and stood by him.

  “Blake,” he said, keeping his eyes on the sky. “More stars tonight than last night.”

  I looked up. The Milky Way looked like a smear of light.

  “All things are one,” he said. “I mean physically. All goes back to one boom. All to one point. A singularity. Everything that exists was in that one point. Isn’t that strange?”

  A satellite floated by, like a star on a journey. Harold used his thumbs and forefingers and made a frame against the sky. He laughed a little.

  “To make borders for the infinite, that’s the temptation, that’s the mistake,” he said. “People are more awestruck by the height of a cathedral’s ceiling than they are by the height of the sky. It’s why we name God. Why we try to explain things. Borders on the boundless.”

  The irony of Harold’s life is that he became those borders. It is the desire to frame the sky that has drawn people to Harold. The same desire that drew people to Jerusalem’s Temple, to Buddha, to Jesus. Show us the spot, the body in which God resides. The infinite framed by the finite.

  Harold referred to himself as the S
on of God, he called himself Christ, but he never claimed to be God. Never said he was a unique divine incarnation. It wasn’t like that walking with Harold. It wasn’t God possessing Harold like some ghost. Harold was more like a pop fly on a sunny day. He was lost in the sun. You looked for him, searched for him, but all you saw was sun.

  “You know, Blake, the Big Bang didn’t really change things that much,” he laughed, his eyes still on the sky. “Geez, I’m drunk on God tonight. I know I sound crazy, I know that. But I tell you, God was crazy first.” He looked at me with his eyebrows raised. “God’s insane. And in love with us.” He turned his face back to the stars. “It can be very dangerous to have a crazy person in love with you.”

  For a while neither of us spoke. Then he looked directly at me.

  “Who am I, Blake?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Tell me who I am. I’ll believe you.”

  I was suddenly afraid. Like the drop in your gut when you’re standing on the edge of a canyon, knowing how easy it would be to fall or jump.

  “You’re Harold. You’re Harold Peeks.”

  He smiled. “God has given you that answer.”

  Hush

  Some days I walked without saying a word. Some days the quiet was so rich, so deep down, it felt like floating. The silence I kept during that time stuck. After Harold’s death, it guided me. For years, silence was often my sole companion. I walked and hid. On the run, hiding. The last years before I was brought to this basement, I lived in Mexico. I crossed the border in Brownsville, walking with the tourists. I wanted a place where I couldn’t read the paper, couldn’t understand the billboards. Lonely. Very lonely. No common language, no words between us. A place where I could speak and not be heard. I could listen and not understand.

  I traveled past the busy border towns, through the flat northern deserts, to a small village in the mountains. I lived for a year in a cinderblock hut with a dirt floor. I’d buy food from the locals, but I was alone. Learning as little of the language as I possibly could.

  After a while, the locals believed me to be holy. A hermit saint. Why else would I be alone, be silent, unless I was spending all my time speaking with God? They painted prayers on pieces of wood and metal and left them outside my door with offerings of food or a few coins. Pictures telling me what their words could not. Asking me to pray for sick parents, risky business ventures, an infertile cow. I became an expert on the lives in the village. But I imagined them all as crudely drawn cartoons, like the prayer pictures they’d left for me. I placed the drawings around the inside of my hut, leaning them against the cinderblock walls. The pictures were more real to me than the actual people living minutes away.

  I did pray for them. I began to believe maybe my prayers did have a power. Maybe God did listen. Maybe God only speaks English and I had to act as an interpreter. One day, returning from the village with plastic jugs of water, I found a new painting asking me to pray for a little boy in a yellow shirt. The picture showed the boy with dark eyes and in bed, a woman crying large, blue teardrops beside him. It was hard to look at.

  I prayed. On my knees. Prayers to God, to Harold, to me. The child died. I received another drawing of the same woman with the same oversized tears beside a small grave. Below her, red flames were painted. At the top of the drawing were clouds and angels and the Virgin. The boy in the yellow shirt floated between.

  They were asking me a question. Where is he now? How would I know? I could say he was happy and in peace, but maybe God was burning him for the sin of life. Maybe he simply didn’t exist anymore. I couldn’t say. I couldn’t help. I was just another false prophet.

  I painted a simple portrait of the boy smiling in the arms of Jesus. I placed it outside my door and left the town.

  Driftwood

  Tonight I can hardly write. Each time I try, I fall asleep.

  Shael visits the Mole Hole. Heavy smoke spilling into the room from the vent. Then, like light in smoke, she’s there. I paint her. Her still, with her Sabbath candles and cigarette.

  I try to paint the flames as moving. Her as still. Her still.

  I remember waking one cool morning in a dew-coated field. Harold and Shael’s sleeping bags were empty. I crawled from my bag and walked through a wood, scratching my legs on the brush. I found them by a small lake. Shael sat on the dock while Harold swam, sending ripples over the surface. Shael didn’t move. She was still. Nearly perfect. I wanted to walk from the woods and sit in the grass or on the dock or maybe even swim. But I stayed hidden in the trees.

  The picture was peace, and if I placed myself in it, then the peace would be ruined. So I watched and tried to imagine being there. Could I be that still? Can I be that still? I see that lake so often, but I’m never in the picture. I’m hiding in the trees.

  “My hands are not still enough to paint you,” I tell her.

  Driftwood, she says.

  “Why do I hurt so much?”

  Driftwood, she says.

  “I am sorry,” I say.

  She smiles and floats away.

  My Warmth

  By the middle of December, I didn’t have many clothes left. Each day I wore the same sweater, the same shirt and jeans, and my blue and yellow jacket. Eventually the jacket went as well. We were walking in a midsized town about sixty miles east of Austin. It was foggy and the air was chilled. I was all snuggled and dry in my Teflon. We passed an old man sitting on a bench. He looked cold.

  “Give him your coat,” Shael said to me. Another time I might have argued. But I was so hopped up on brotherly love that I took off the jacket, placed it over the old man’s shoulders, and walked on with a warmer feeling of goodwill welling in my chest.

  That warm feeling lasted all of seven minutes. Then I was cold and bitter. Up until then I had left things that made my pack lighter—extra socks or the shoes I never wore. But the jacket I wanted. I even considered going back to the old man and explaining it had only been a loan. But as I was working out just how to do this, a car rolled by and the little old man, wearing my blue jacket with the yellow stripes, waved from the passenger side window. The interior of the car looked warm.

  That was December 16, annually celebrated as The Day of Warmth. Of course in every version of the story told, it’s Harold giving his coat. In the movie Harold Be Thy Name, I’m not even in the scene.

  Feet

  The day after I gave my coat away was colder, the rain spiked with ice sharp as glass. We found an abandoned house surrounded by untended fields. Rotten wood and walls thinner than my skin, but it kept out the wind and rain, so we hunkered down.

  Three rooms. A kitchen with a stained, dry sink and a gutted oven, a bedroom with nothing but springs and an old Sears, Roebuck catalog, and a bare living room. It was a wreck, smelling of wet plaster and rot, but after weeks of having nothing, very little was something to sing about.

  After an early dinner, we sat around the living room, the westward windows catching the last of the day’s light. We talked softly, laughing every so often. We kept our voices low. Even Gilbert was quieter. Not subdued, just quieter. We looked at each other, in each other’s eyes. And that was okay. It was all right to look into each other’s eyes, to hold that gaze.

  Harold said the least of all of us. He just sat on the floor smiling. We stayed like that for nearly an hour. Quieter by the minute. When we finally fell silent, Harold stood and stepped outside. He came back in with a bucket.

  “Rainwater,” he said. He walked back to Shael and unlaced her shoes. Then he rolled away her socks and, using a cloth, he wiped her feet clean. Gilbert was sitting to Shael’s left and Harold moved to him next.

  I did not like this. I had no desire to expose my feet, my uncut nails and gathered funk, the smell, the calluses.

  “There’s nothing worth fearing. Not a thing,” he said.

  Shael and Irma were crying. I watched the weeping but I didn’t join in. I was too distracted. Harold never changed the water. I was the last person he
would come to. My feet were going to be washed with the same gray, grimy rainwater that had washed Gilbert’s corns, Beddy’s hangnails, and all the other feet that had come before me.

  He was now washing Irma’s feet. She was sitting on a crate and humming through her tears. She leaned down and touched Harold’s face.

  “Harold, I know this.” She whispered so quietly only Shael on her left and I on her right could hear. “Is this our Last Supper? Is this goodbye?”

  Shael’s tears stopped.

  Harold smiled at Irma. “No,” he said. “We still have some walking to do.”

  Then came my turn and Harold kneeled by my feet. I found myself shaking my head. It was the grime, the humiliation, the disturbing image of him below me.

  “Remember this, Blake. You’ll need this.”

  I let him take hold of my feet. I let him place them in the bucket. The water was warmer than I had expected, and my feet, barely hidden by the cloudy water, wriggled. ‘We’re back in the womb,’ my feet thought. ‘It’s okay,’ they mewed to themselves. ‘Back in the womb and ready to be born-again.’

  I looked from my feet to Harold. He looked at me. There was something mournful in his face. Something he knew about me. I saw what Irma already had. Someone was going to die. The water was lying. Death was on the way, not life. If my feet had not been held down by my legs, they might have jumped from the water and run out of the room.

  “I do not fear death,” Irma announced. “Not mine, nor yours, Harold. My God is the resurrection. My God is the life.”

  Harold shook his head, his eyes on my feet. “Irma, an empty tomb is a Hollywood ending.”

  “What the hell are you all talking about?” Gilbert said.

  “When I’m dead, burn my body or they’ll waste lifetimes waiting for my corpse to twitch. That’s what I ask. Burn it up.”

  “But Harold,” Irma said, “death is swallowed up in victory. Death is defeated.”