Cave mountain, p.23
Cave Mountain, page 23
But unlike the prodigal son in the parable, Rembrandt knows the story, and he knows how the story ends. The prodigal son, irreverent, flush with the money his father gave him, living high on the hog (later, he will be reduced to feeding the hogs, and later still, he will be hungry enough to eat the hogs’ feed), is not looking toward the future. But Rembrandt is. Or rather, in the painting, his wife, Saskia, is. On second look, Rembrandt/the prodigal son is not looking at the viewer after all—he bellows a boisterous greeting at someone who has just entered the room somewhere to the left of the viewer. It’s Saskia/the harlot who looks directly at the viewer; her expression isn’t unhappy, but it certainly isn’t thrilled. She, unlike her customer, is sober. She’s smirking slightly. I read a little exasperation in her expression. It is the look of a prostitute growing annoyed with the rich, drunk idiot whose lap she’s sitting on, still tolerating him, but only until she can take his money, and then she’ll be done with him. She is looking forward to parting this fool from his money—soon.
It is worth noting that this is only the right-hand third of the original painting: The rest of it probably depicted an indoor panorama of carousing and debauchery. But for whatever reason Rembrandt felt unsatisfied with that part of the painting, and he cropped it to just this image. This image is literally not the whole picture.
Of course, it is true that Rembrandt was young, rich, successful, and in love when he painted this picture. But giving it the title he did seems to indicate that even when he was at the blind height of his lavish, shallow young man’s life, he had a feeling that it would not last.
Rembrandt knew he was a sinner—he knew even when he was in the middle of sinning that he was a sinner—and he knew even then that one day the prodigal son would come crawling home on his knees to beg the Father for a forgiveness he does not deserve.
He had to paint that early painting, so that, many years later, he would paint this one:
It is among the last works—possibly the very last work—Rembrandt painted, and it is titled The Return of the Prodigal Son. It is the work of a man getting ready to knock on Heaven’s door. Father, I’m coming home.
Some stories require one to have lived some life to understand them, and I must confess that the parable of the Prodigal Son—and the parable of Rembrandt growing from an almost to an altogether understanding of the parable of the Prodigal Son—resonates with me so personally that it disturbs me and makes me uncomfortable.
During my trip to Louisiana and Arkansas in the summer of 2023, I listened to an audiobook of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity as I drove south, because I had heard that it is one of the calmest and friendliest books by a Christian addressed to a secular reader. This passage in particular struck me and stayed on my mind for some time:
According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. . . . Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind. . . .
In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that—and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison—you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.
The next day, in Grosse Tête, Louisiana, Paul Kleinpeter asked me if I have sinned.
Paul Kleinpeter: What’s your vice? What’s your sin? You got sin in a life. Have you ever told a lie?
Benjamin Hale: Everyone has.
[laughter]
PK: Have you ever stole anything?
BH: Not lately.
[laughter]
PK: Have you ever—I can take you down through the whole Ten Commandments, and I bet you’ve broken them all. I broke them all multiple times. Liars won’t go. Thieves. Killers. Did you ever kill anybody?
BH: Nope. I know I can say no to that one.
PK: In your heart?
[laughter]
BH: In my heart I’ve done a lot of things.
PK: No, but in your heart. You know? “I hate that person. I wish they was dead.” Did you shoot him? Just in your heart. Or did you look at your neighbor’s wife? Did you covet your neighbor’s goods? Do you want to write a book as good as the next fellow did, or the other book you read?
BH: Well, the other day I was listening to C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity on the way over here. I mean, when I drove down here from New York. Somebody told me it was one of their favorite books about Christianity. I was listening to it in the car, and there’s a part of the book where he says that pride is actually the worst sin, that all the other sins come from pride in some way. And I thought: That’s really interesting, because it made me think I’m definitely . . . I know I’m guilty of pride.
PK: You know, I don’t see that, though. That’s a good confession, but I don’t see it in you. I see a very humble man. I see a man that’s hungry, and I see a man that’s looking, and I see a man that’s seeking. Seek and you will find, knock at the door. . . . Listen, I’m telling you, if we knock long enough God’s gonna start speaking to you.
I was thinking about C. S. Lewis. I was thinking about John Berger. I was thinking about Rembrandt. I was thinking about myself. I was thinking about pride.
Pride is the utmost evil. Pride leads to every other vice. “Do you want to write a book as good as the next fellow did?” Paul asked me. Yes! Of course I do! I want to write one better than the next fellow did. Pride is the wellspring of art. Pride is the reason we create. Yes, the point of creating art is to create beauty. But the artist is motivated by two things: to create beauty and to be the one to have created it. I had a character in an (unpublished) novel reflect on this: “Is it a coincidence that Hitler was a failed painter, and Franco was a failed poet? So was Mao, wasn’t he? And didn’t Saddam Hussein fancy himself a novelist? And Kim Jong Il a filmmaker? The desire to make art is right next to the desire to subjugate, to rule—to watch crowds of people salute the image of your face, to live forever. The heart of an artist beats wild and childish and prideful in the chest of every dictator.”
Pride, C. S. Lewis asserts, is the complete anti-God state of mind, and it is also what drives us to create. Pride drives Lucifer to rise up against God: Paradise Lost is one of the greatest works of art about doubt and struggle with faith. As Satan—whose voice, generations have noticed with perplexity, delivers the story’s most beautiful poetry—wages his war against Heaven, John Milton the rebel and artist wages war against Milton the Christian. Stanley Fish thinks that this was deliberate on Milton’s part; of course Satan speaks beautifully, for evil seduces with beauty; the Holy Grail is not the cup of the king, but the cup of the carpenter. But I much prefer the fulminous romance of William Blake’s interpretation in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Note.—The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” To make art at all is to commit the sin of pride. A work of art is a volley in the artist’s war against death, and any attempt to vanquish death other than through the way into Heaven offered by faith is war against God.
Forgive me, for I have sinned. This book you hold in your hands, like any work worth doing, is a work of pride. I have taken other people’s lives—other people’s tragedies—and turned them into a story: for glory, for money, and most of all out of the desire to create beauty. There are some people in this story, those who did nothing wrong, who don’t mind being written about, but there are others who do. I couldn’t help feeling shameful and treacherous while meeting the Kleinpeters; they helped me, and they spoke with me candidly and generously, without knowing how badly their sister comes across in this story. Lucy spoke with me only with great hesitance and trepidation, and I have throughout this effort struggled with the feeling that I’ve betrayed her, too, although I honestly hope that this story exonerates her in the reader’s mind. And I hope to redeem the sin with the sin itself in another way, at least in the eyes of Heaven, because there is someone else in this story who also spent most of his life suffering from this tragedy, someone who may or may not deserve redemption, but upon whom I have come to wish forgiveness and grace: Mark Harris.
13
Trust and Obey
THE SAME SUMMER IN ARKANSAS THAT I MET SUZETTE’S BROTHERS Jerry and Paul Kleinpeter, I learned that Winston Van Harris, after serving fifteen years in prison, had been paroled out of state in 1993 (the Arkansas Department of Corrections wouldn’t tell me to which state) and had been out on parole for the next ten years, until he was discharged from the system in 2003. I also learned that he had died of cancer in 2022 at the age of seventy-five. Pursuant to Arkansas Act 539 (Bill 294), passed in 2017 in response to the 2012 US Supreme Court decision Miller v. Alabama, which ruled that juveniles convicted of murder cannot be held subject to a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, Mark Harris, after serving forty years of a life sentence, had been released to supervision out of state on July 23, 2018, and the ADC was not authorized to give me any more information than that. That sent me looking for a sixty-two-year-old man with the hopelessly ubiquitous name of Mark Harris (though I was not sure he still went by that name), and all I knew about him was that he did not live in Arkansas.
Toward the end of the summer, through a lot of internet sleuthing, I discovered that Winston Van Harris had changed his name back to something closer to the one he had been born with—Daniel Gobe Smith—that he had moved to Alpharetta, Georgia, and married a woman named Robin Lynn Holt, who had died in 2020. Since Mark Harris had no other living relatives I knew of and would have had nowhere else to go after his release on parole, I figured it was a good bet that he also lived in or near that town in Georgia. And sure enough, on Whitepages I found a Mark Harris of the right age who had no public records before 2018: a mailing address, an email address, and a phone number. I called the phone number and left a voicemail, and sent him an email, asking if I had the right person, explaining what I was doing, and ended with a request to interview him, if he was indeed the Mark Harris I was looking for. A few days later, he responded with a long email. He had read the article I had written in Harper’s about both Haley’s disappearance and what I had known then about the murder of Bethany Alana Clark, which had recently been published, and he was wounded and extremely angry about it. He ended his email with this:
For my part, I hope you decide to abandon your fictional novel project intended to be marketed as non-fiction.
And it makes no sense whatsoever for me to participate in a project that will further demonize me and perhaps subject me to further slander and misrepresentation to the public.
I have no interest in resuming PTSD-related nightmares, or resuming thoughts of suicide and wishing I had the courage to do that to put an end to experiencing more hatred from people I don’t know and don’t know me, who will only and ever view me as a heinous murderer.
It was clear that he had no interest in speaking with me. But I wrote him back to say that I had no interest in demonizing him or painting him as the villain of the story, which is true. I ended my email with this: “I promise that I am coming to you with my hands open and in good faith. I want to get at the truth of the matter, and I would very, very much appreciate your help.” Mark wrote back:
Thank you for kind response, which I just saw now.
I am giving your proposal a great deal of thought.
After that, in late August, we had several long phone conversations over WhatsApp, and four months later, during my winter holiday break from teaching, I had a few days free right after New Year’s, and I drove from my home in New York’s Hudson Valley down to Alpharetta, Georgia,* where I spent an afternoon talking with Mark Harris and his wife, Barbara, in person. Since then, Mark and I have been emailing and texting each other fairly regularly. Back before I started writing this, when I would verbally tell the story that begins with Haley’s disappearance on Cave Mountain in April 2001, I would usually end on the unlikely friendship that has developed between Lucy Clark and my aunt Joyce. Now, as a consequence of writing it, I think I can say that Mark Harris has become my friend.
Of all the people who were involved with what happened in 1978, even very peripherally, who are still alive, Mark is the one most on my philosophical wavelength, the one whose worldview and ways of thinking harmonize most closely with my own. Conversations with Suzette’s siblings, no matter how they begin, inevitably swing like compass needles toward the magnetic north of God, Christ, the Holy Ghost, and the urgent business of the salvation of my own lost soul from eternal damnation. I found Jerry Patterson to be an incredibly warm, smart, and funny conversationalist, and I like him a lot on a personal level, but the political signs in his front yard made me suspect we would find a lot of uncommon ground should the conversation turn in that direction. Ray Watkins, the octogenarian former deputy sheriff and sheriff of Newton County, who will probably be the guy who rings you up if you buy something at Bob’s Do It Best Hardware and Lumber in Jasper, was also generous with his time and kinder and more helpful to me than he had to be when I bothered him at work with questions about things that happened nearly half a century ago, but Ray has the heart of a Boy Scout and a lawman. “I’ve never smoked a cigarette,” was almost the last thing he said to me, explaining his remarkably excellent health at his very advanced age, “and I’ve never been drunk in my life.” My soul is jaggedly mismatched with that man’s, as I had apparently already smoked more cigarettes and been drunk more times during that particular trip to Arkansas than Ray had in his lifetime. Lucy would get away from me, too, sometimes, especially when talk moved in the direction of religion or politics.
About politics, I should say that coming out of the culture war meltdown of the 2010s, which whipsawed with a grand flourish into the total bouleversement of the covid pandemic, I have been dragged by conflicting currents this way and that and now I don’t know where I am. Up until a few years ago, I was a good soldier for blue America—a well-educated middle-class New York Times–subscribing Democrat who faithfully recycles and votes in every election, even the little ones—but now I am adrift, still hating what I used to hate, but having lost faith in the magi I used to trust. I once furiously threw an ex-boyfriend of my about-to-be wife out of our house on the night before our wedding—on October 1, 2016—after he casually dropped that he planned to vote for Donald Trump. I was bloated with righteous indignation at the time; Caitlin made me apologize to him at the reception the next day, and I did so to make her happy, but I didn’t mean it. If I ever see that guy again, I will apologize again for real, and I will mean it the next time. This book made me spend a lot of time in the reddest parts of red America from 2022 to 2024, a time when blue America had possession of the ball and was fumbling it with long and pitiful maladroitness. I am not a liberal hothouse flower; I have traveled to every state in the country, and I hear America singing, blithe and strong. But in 2022 when I set out, I hadn’t left the blue bubble for some time. I remember a fiction workshop I taught at Bard in the spring of that year: The college had decreed masking optional in the middle of that semester, but none dared go barefaced, as a mask had become a loudly visible badge of leftist political allegiance; it happened often that a student emailed me stating her or their refusal to read another student’s piece for the workshop because someone else in the class had read it first and warned her or them that it contained triggering material; knitting had oddly become a fad among Bard undergraduates, and there were usually three or four people around the room clicking needles at scarves or shawls as we discussed a work of student fiction; one of the students had an emotional support poodle who usually spent the class napping at their feet next to a portable rubber water dish; the social atmosphere was one of extremely delicate constant censorious moral paranoia, and the triggers were hair. After that suffocating environment, my God was it a relief sometimes to be among the roughs, sounding their barbaric yawp. Around that time cracks were already appearing in the mental dam in my bone-vault that holds up the reservoir of what blue America deems the “correct” views, and its destruction was hastened along by friendly conversations with many relatively sane and reasonable people who are MAGA Republicans and/or evangelical Christians, and even some people who don’t necessarily want to piously and obediently inject something into their bodies just because the sage wisdom of the widespread establishment consensus that overwhelmingly predicted Trump’s defeat in 2016 told them to. (Don’t worry: I’m not an anti-vaxxer, but I have sympathy for them. I can also find sympathy for murderers.) As Haley’s father, Steve, said, “Something that keeps me in a ruby-red state when I’m a sapphire-blue dude is, man, the people here are pretty damn awesome. Even though they vote for Donald Trump and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, you know what, the people here are amazing—it was just thousands and thousands of people who gave up what they were doing to look for this kid. Most of them we never met.” And as I’ve spent time with Trumpers and Bible thumpers and anti-vaxxers and mostly found them to be perfectly ordinary and fundamentally decent people who furthermore know how to change a tire without having to look it up on YouTube, I have become increasingly convinced that red America and blue America each indulges in its own set of self-serving delusional mythologies in roughly equal measure. I finished writing this book in June 2024 and sent it to the publisher from my laptop while waiting to board a plane that would take me back to Arkansas to attend my uncle Jay’s memorial; the disastrous presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was televised one week later, and now, in May 2025, I am making my last tweaks before it goes to galley. What’s happened between then and now is a sickening travesty, and the red and the blue are both responsible for it. I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.
