Sweet land stories - E. L. Doctorow [44]
At a steering committee meeting, the Elders Imperatived that the monthly Embraces should thenceforth be limited to families with children. I thought, given the needful of this world, that such a restriction was unfortunate, but the fact was that we were beginning to feel embattled. Allegations that we were all familiar with, having heard them many times over, were regularly communicated to us—by relatives, friends, or professional contacts on the outside—as if we had to be enlightened: Your prophet is an alcoholic. He abandoned a wife and child. He has grown rich at your expense. How could any of this have been news to us inasmuch as our prophet was what, in our entirety, we had been? As Walter John Harmon took our evil unto himself, we had emerged newborn, with our addictions, our concupiscence, and our depthless greed lifted from us.
His life was no secret. Every moment of it was a confession. But as the outer world was as darkly inverted as the negative of a photograph, so was its logic.
Each instance of negative publicity seemed to encourage another suit or investigation of one kind or another. Elder Rafael Altman, our CPA, informed us one morning that the IRS had applied for a court order to subpoena the Community books. One of our lawyers was dispatched to apply for an injunction. Those others of us with skills still practiced on the outside met in extraordinary session with the Elders to come up with some overall strategy for dealing with an increasingly impinging world. As to bad publicity, up to this point we had met all of it with a pious silence. Now we decided for the prophet’s sake that we must speak out on his behalf, we must give witness. We would not proselytize, but we would respond. Judson Berglund, a high Attainist who before coming to us had run his own public-relations firm in California, had the Imperative to organize this effort. He quickly brought order. When a national newsweekly questioned the miracle of the Fremont, Kansas, tornado, Berglund saw to it that they printed Elders’ testimony in their letters to the editor. An attack by a well-known anticultist we boldly duplicated on our Web site, along with the countervailing responses of dozens of our members. And so on.
It only became us, though, to respond to everything patiently, resolutely, and in the spirit of forgiveness.
Walter John Harmon was typically stoic about all the problems mounting up, but as the summer drew to an end and the leaves of the oak trees began to turn, he seemed more and more withdrawn, as on that day of the Embrace. He seemed irritated that nothing he did went unnoticed, as if our devotedness was pressing on him. Yet he was called by God to have no private life, no private feelings, and so we worried about him. Our joyful life of peace and reconciliation, the exultant knowledge infused in all our beings of an exquisite righteousness in the sight of God, and the prayerful anticipation of the coming to our green earth of God’s Holy City, was shadowed now by our concern for the spirit of His prophet. When the children sang, he was inattentive. He took long walks alone in the holy site. I wondered if it were possible that the weight of our sins had already become too burdensome for his mortal soul.
WHAT I REMEMBER now is Walter John Harmon standing with my wife, Betty, in the orchard above the Tabernacle on a chilly gray afternoon in October. Clouds dark with rain sailed through