Mark Richard - House of Prayer No. 2 - A Writer's Journey Home

Your parents haven’t been coming, because you are supposed to go home soon. The wards are emptying out for the holidays, and there are just a few of you left. The doctors fix Big Mike’s face and Big Mike runs away. The police come and walk with Ben around the playground in the dark shining their flashlights. The night nurse tells you Big Mike didn’t run away home, she called, they don’t expect him to show up there. Big Mike has a brother in the Navy, so maybe he’ll turn up in Norfolk.

The society people and the charity people and the practice preachers come and go with their old donated toys and oranges and little broken candy canes, and you’re happy not to be bothered anymore. You worry about Michael Christian. You realize no one has ever come to see him on Sundays, and when the other black families come, he is always on the edge of his bed leaning in to them, the first to laugh too loud at their jokes, trying to butt into their conversations. He wears shorts even in winter because he never goes outside, there is always some sort of metal brace on his legs. You watch him over there in his bed, in his shorts, taking the batteries out of his precious transistor radio and putting them back in. You see all the years of scars up and down his legs and you begin to realize that Michael Christian will never go home, that this is his home, he lives at Crippled Children’s Hospital.

The day your father is supposed to come get you he doesn’t show up. Two days go by. When he does show up, you are angry. He wants to know if you would like a pastrami sandwich. Okay , you say.

There is traffic getting out of the car. You are almost hit by a truck crossing the street to catch up with your father. The sidewalk in front of the delicatessen is broken. Your father is not like Charles. Your father drinks beer and talks to the waitress. You say nothing. On the way out he buys some pickled herring for your mother and a halvah bar for you.

At home the Christmas tree is up, your mother cooks shrimp Creole for you. She comes into the bathroom one night because you have been sitting in the bathtub so long staring down at your hairy skeletal legs in the cold water. She wants to know what you want for Christmas. You tell her you’d like a saw to cut off your goddamned legs.

There’s a Christmas sing one night around the old magnolia tree in the park and your father wants you all to go. It has been snowing, and there is ice everywhere. You really don’t want to go out on the ice on crutches. Your father has been drinking bourbon and says it will be good for you to get out and get some air and see some people. You really don’t want to go. You’re going, goddamn it , your father says. You make it out to the car without falling on the ice on your crutches but you slip a couple of times, it’s dark. You’re cold, maybe because while you’ve been away you’ve grown out of your old winter coat, the sleeves are almost at your elbow. Your mother is scared, but she has your baby sister to attend to. You’ve taken so long to get to the car there’s hardly any parking at the holiday sing. Your father has to park pretty far up a dark lane. I’m not getting out of the car , you say. Your father gets out, comes around, and pulls you out of the car by your collar. As he holds you up by the scruff of your neck, he props your crutches under your arms. Now walk , he says.

You stab at the frozen ground beneath the snow and swing your legs across the ice and make it to the magnolia tree just in time to sing the last verse of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”

Glory to the newborn Creep.

SAY A MAN’S RELATIONSHIP to his God is determined by his relationship to his father. Your father memorizes Justin Wilson Cajun comedy records. He writes the jokes down and retells them to himself out loud when he thinks no one can hear him. He works on perfecting Justin Wilson’s bayou accent. Your father is often paralyzed by his perfectionism. You read this in an evaluation you find going through his desk at home. Your father manages large forests and tracts of timber for a papermaking company. In his evaluation, your father’s supervisor says he does an outstanding job but doesn’t get as much accomplished because of his perfectionism. Also, the supervisor reports, your father’s perfectionism creates problems with the men who work for him in the field. On your father’s desk is a copy of They All Discovered America . Your father has a theory about what happened to the Lost Colony over on Roanoke Island, something to do with the grey-eyed Lumbee Indians down in Robeson County, North Carolina, where he has spent months cruising old-growth timber for the paper company. He’s found an obscure account of a sighting of a white man, a white boy, and a mule down your town’s own river in the sixteen hundreds. Your father has some questions for a professor at Duke and a librarian at East Carolina University, there are their telephone numbers and addresses on a notepad. In the bottom right-hand drawer of his desk are two coffee cans of arrowheads and spear tips he has found during hours of walking fields after fresh rains. He’s thinking of buying some golf clubs, though he has never played golf. He has filled out an order form from a sporting goods company, and there is your mother’s missing sewing tape that he’s using to measure the length of his arms. In another desk drawer there are some dim grey photocopies of some ancestor’s release from a Union prison near Vicksburg. He says two of your ancestors kicked a man to death in Sumrall, Mississippi, and fled to the relative safety of the Alamo; their names are on the wall with those of the other patriots. Two of your other relatives were caught in Pennsylvania stealing a locomotive for the Confederacy and were hanged from a telegraph pole. Here is an old photograph of five men hanging from a telegraph pole. Here is a photo of a derailed steam engine alongside some broken train tracks; someone has written in white marker with an arrow pointing to spilled firewood nearby: The bodies were found here . Here’s an envelope with two mint-perfect Confederate currency notes, a five and a ten, and two five-cent stamps with Jefferson Davis’s portrait. In the bottom left drawer of the rolltop desk are the Playboys , and on the top shelf of his closet, by where he keeps the snake pistol, is the book you only flipped through once, having been stopped by the words urging the reader to remember to pluck the woman’s clitoris like a banjo string.

In a banker’s cardboard box are maps and plats of the lake property. Your father is going to subdivide the whole thing himself on weekends with a surveyor friend of his. You are no longer on crutches, you can now walk with a cane, and your father says you and an unemployed sharecropper he has found are going to pull rod and chain for him down on the flooded Roanoke River basin on Saturdays; the weather is still cold and there shouldn’t be too many snakes.

There are old wagon rut paths and ancient corn rows from a hundred years ago grown over by pine and brush where the valley falls off, and the footing is sharp, and you are no good at pulling chain. You keep falling down and Mason, the sharecropper, keeps helping you back up. He doesn’t understand how he’s supposed to balance the rod. Your father keeps stalking back and forth from point to point hacking at things with his machete. Mason lives in a large one-room house set on a clay mound. He’s always ready when your father pulls up in front of the place, he meets you coming out the door, closes it quickly behind him in a way that even as a kid you understand that he’s ashamed to let you see inside. He slaps on handfuls of English Leather that only partially cloak the smell of the house he shares with his wife and children.