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

One girl keeps calling and says, Play “Misty” for me , then hangs up. Play Misty for Me is the title of an erotic thriller playing at the movie house. You listen harder to girls talking around their lockers at school, trying to figure out which of the two wallflower girls it is. It’s either the first-chair flute in the school band or the girl who works at a pharmacy after school. A boy down the street confides to you that his older sister thinks your cane is sexy. You both stand there and look at each other confounded by this.

There are some older girls who, when they see you walking somewhere with your cane, stop their parents’ car alongside the curb and say, Get in . Some of the girls have just gotten their driver’s licenses. You think at first they feel sorry for you and are being nice, until the girls tell you they’re going to pick you up that night and you will all go to a movie and then to the Dairy Queen and you say, Okay.

Sometimes the older girls take you to an R-rated movie, and then they ride around out in the county smoking cigarettes in their parents’ big Buicks. It’s three of them in the front seat and just you in the back with your cane and they seem to forget you’re back there as they talk about who’s horny and who’s having their periods. It’s nighttime, so they can pick up a radio station in Chicago as you drive around and smell the dark county in bloom with the windows down if the bugs aren’t bad, the honeysuckle and the bubbling swamp gas smell of rotting vegetation.

There’s an older girl who goes to your new church, red hair that burns crimson in the stained-glass light; even your mother has commented on the girl’s hair, long, gold, highlit with garnet when you sit in the pew behind her and her family in your father’s church. After the incident with the drunken, rope-wielding priest, God for your mother had been a Ouija board, then astrology, then a book of physical fitness published by the Royal Canadian Air Force. You are relieved to be no longer Catholic, even though you are probably going to hell with your mother. When your father called Catholic Communion “The Magic Show,” you laughed out loud.

You like your new church, your father’s Episcopal church, and you like the new priest, Ben. The church smells good, old wood, fresh starch, and the cologne and expensive perfume of the Whiskeypalians, as some of the Baptists call them. The old church organ was brought over from England in the hold of a sailing ship. You like to sit near the man in the sharp suit who defended the spy pilot Gary Powers when he was shot down over Russia in his U-2. His wife is the sister of the poet laureate of the state. There’s the new paper mill manager and his pretty wife, both from Richmond society. Elizabeth Taylor stays at their house when she’s in town with her husband, who is campaigning for the Senate. After service, many will congregate and smoke outside the vestibule steps. Some will go directly to the country club for lunch and discuss Ben, the new priest. Some parishioners find him a little liberal for their tastes. Ben retired as a decorated Air Force fighter pilot before entering seminary to become a priest. When he hears that “somebody” said that he might be a bit liberal, Ben says to tell that “somebody,” Yes, I am a liberal and I am combat ready .

The church has a coffeehouse in the parish hall on weekend nights for kids to gather for fellowship. Black-light posters and a pool table, parent chaperones in the back. It’s a place kids meet and get in cars and go out into the nearby woods to smoke pot and drink beer and do the things teenagers do.

The older girl with the brilliant hair has been meeting you at the coffeehouse and letting you take her into a nearby alley because you don’t have your license, and the older girl lets you do pretty much whatever you want as long as you are standing, or she only has to kneel to do it. In church you realize that the perfume you come home with on your clothes must be her mother’s, because once at the Communion rail you knelt beside her mother and smelled it and your heart beat faster. When you glanced sideways at the mother as she opened her mouth and slightly extended her tongue to accept the little white sliver of host, there was a knot of confusion in your pants.

A MAN AT THE POST OFFICE tells you your father is a real crack-up. You’re finding out your father is doing stand-up comedy in hunt clubs out in the county and down in North Carolina. He’s been doing the Justin Wilson records there and people ask him back. Then you hear your father is in a play somewhere, he has the lead.

Your father has a lot of things going on. Your mother is worried that he has bought new underwear. He says he is going to work at the lake property and forgets his tools. His car is hit by a watermelon truck going the wrong way on a one-way street, your father says he didn’t see it coming. He doesn’t realize school is out, that you’re just spending your days in the backyard hammock reading Ambrose Bierce short stories and histories of the navies of the world.

But your mother notices and signs you up for advanced-placement math class out at the high school. You’re always late, stopping on your bike to listen to the cornstalks grow and pop in a cornfield. It’s so hot the pavement is splitting open and you have a spectacular bike wreck, going over the handlebars and sprawling on the sticky tarmac. One of your legs won’t stop quivering, like the time you fell at Crippled Children’s and they called the doctor’s stat and Charles knelt beside you, your spasming leg bouncing off the floor until you yelled Hit it with a rolled-up newspaper! and Charles started laughing and the spasming stopped, and your leg rolled over exhausted and went to sleep.

The advanced-placement class bumps you that fall into an algebra class taught by a teacher who polices with a meter stick she once broke over a slow country boy’s back. She looks at you, the youngest in the class, a cripple too, and she smells a cheat.

In defining finite and infinite numbers, she says, by definition, finite terms are numbers assigned to things that can be counted. For instance, is the number of grains of sand in Jockey’s Ridge finite or infinite? You’re the kid holding his hand highest to be called upon, eager. You say the number of grains of sand in Jockey’s Ridge is infinite. Miss Meter Stick smiles and says, No, if you could count them, you would find that there is a finite number of grains of sand in Jockey’s Ridge. No, you say, that’s incorrect. First of all, you patiently explain, the ocean is constantly throwing up fresh sand that dries and is blown onto the dune by the wind at the same time the same wind is carrying sand off the dune into Albemarle Sound. Second, you say, even as you notice Miss Meter Stick tapping the meter stick against the side of one of her shoes, her smiling face beginning to purple, second, the number of grains of sand in Jockey’s Ridge would have to be considered infinite by her very own definition of being able to count them; if the grains cannot be counted, there is no finite answer, hence no finite number. But if you could count them, she says, as she moves down the aisle of seats to where you are seated, you would eventually reach a number, a finite number, so you’re wrong, she says, poking the corner of your desk with her finger. Then you go fucking count them, you unwisely counter, and you are sent home from school for two days at a time when your father is toward the end of his first affair and is looking for someone upon whom to vent his guilt. You had long before nicknamed his backhands “flying tigers” after his college mascot, Mike the Tiger, whose tiny head ornamented the LSU class ring worn on the hand delivering the often unexpected blow.