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

GOD TURNS US OVER to what we worship. In the fall, on the Outer Banks, the early afternoon gathering gloom over the ocean in the east is a peculiar darkness, a kind of darkness that can cast your mind into a wonderful place to express all sorts of things like ingratitude to God, the failing light perfect for people prone to such things to commit their sins. Some bad things happen between you and Steve that fall, mainly having to do with a seventeen-year-old girl. After Labor Day, the people who can leave the Outer Banks do. The wrecks remain. There are a lot of burglaries in the cottages around you, and people should suspect you but don’t. A girl punches out all the windows in the nearby realty office one night after she drinks a quart of vodka alone. The glass opens her arms from her wrists to her elbows, and the doctors said the only thing holding the flesh together was all the bracelets she liked to wear. She is almost bled out, sitting in the dark in her rocking chair, when you find her. She has called out weakly to you in greeting as you just happen to walk by from a depressing evening at the nearly empty dance pavilion. You could smell all the blood. She had been a popular girl all summer, and her parents come and get her and take her away to a mental hospital.

Steve goes out on steel hulls, and you take a couple of trips on the wooden shrimp boats down in Core Sound. You raft alongside a local boat one night, a real horn-callused barefoot fisherman from Wanchese. He’s from the old school of Wanchese fishermen; if you work on their boats, you’ll be singing hymns and slinging fish . His wife is with him, two children, a boy and a girl, all barefoot and sunbaked, all old with a kind of knowledge you do not possess. They invite you for supper to their galley table overflowing with cucumbers, fish, fresh biscuits, tomatoes, okra, corn, and the fisherman thanks God for the plentiful harvest, the abundance of the water, the blessings of his wife and children, for the fellowship with you. There’s a Bible in the wheelhouse for the time between hauling in the nets.

Later that night you have the wheel of the little shrimper, an old one, wheelhouse on the stern. The night is moonless and cloudless under a canopy of stars so dense it makes you claustrophobic, and it’s hard to breathe. You’re homesick and unwilling to go home; undone by a young girl and beyond broke, you feel bankrupt. The last time you were in the hospital a candy striper kept coming by, a girl probably your age, and you kept wondering why she kept coming around, you weren’t encouraging her, and she didn’t seem to know why she kept coming around either, but after a while you looked forward to her visits, and on the last day before you went home, she brought you a little blue palm-sized New Testament and you didn’t think she was that kind of girl, and maybe she didn’t either, because she says, handing it to you, that she felt led to give this to you, and she had written some words in the front cover that you have to this day, and some of the words say, A friend of mine once said that there were two things in life that last and that is man’s soul and God’s word. So I thought I’d give you God’s word so that you may grow in Him and be whole . The night at the wheel of the shrimper you know you are steering into a dark that will stay dark for a long time.

ON YOUR LAST TRIP NORTH the captain and the mate shoot up vodka once they finish off the heroin they’ve brought. A guy tries to knock you overboard one night after arguing about a rain hat. Your trawler is boarded by the Coast Guard at gunpoint and forced into Cape May, where everyone decides to go out on the town, everyone putting on his best wear: black pants, black T-shirts with motorcycle logos and skulls, wallets chained to belts, hobnailed boots. The crew popping pills and snapping open dangerous-looking knives—bucks, martial arts, and the first stiletto you have ever seen and which you subsequently steal. About ten of you walk the bad streets adjacent to the docks at Cape May, a scythe up the street of black and trouble, except for the one element that is you: slicked-back long greasy hair, scraggly beard, sure, but wearing the only clean clothes you could find in the bottom of your duffel, the irrelevant college clothes—the pristine white corduroy slacks, baggy with the weight you’ve shed on deck, and the baby blue Izod alligator shirt, tight with new muscle, purple variety-store flip-flops clopping around your feet. And still you swagger with the rest of them, looking exactly like what you are, some assholish seafaring preppy impostor.

The swagger also helps hide the pain, your pelvis is cracking and your femurs are flattening from lifting dredge gear, lifting eighty-pound wire baskets of scallops and carrying them across a rolling wet deck, standing for hours as you shuck in the constant movement of heavy weather. The pain is so perfect that it has a color, its color is silver. You can only sleep because of total exhaustion, or a draw from a pipe, or a pill from a mayonnaise jar someone is passing around. Even then, the bone-on-bone silver perfect pain sends you out-of-body while you are below deck in your bunk next to the engine room. Sometimes you hover over the trawler looking down on the other watch working, and one night, shipping out of Key West, you out-of-bodied back to the island from your at-sea anchorage, and you saw a girl you’d been interested in with another guy wearing a white fedora with a black band around it, and when you got in later and asked her about it, she said it was true.

You are thinking about the girl down on the Outer Banks, the seventeen-year-old, and you slip away from your crewmates to call her from a pay phone, charging the call to your parents’ number. It must be two or even four in the morning. You don’t realize the operator will call your parents’ house to get authorization to bill the call to their number. The operator wakes your parents up, and your father answers the phone and gives his permission, thinking you are calling collect, and then waits for you to come on the line, and you never do. Your mother later says that your father sat at his rolltop desk in the dark for a long time holding the old black receiver to his ear, waiting to hear your voice before finally hanging up and getting back into bed, where she says she could hear him not sleeping until it was time for him to get up and go to work at the paper mill.

ONE DAY A STORM BRINGS YOU HOME to find that they have bulldozed all the shacks around where you and Steve live; the power and water to yours have been cut, but you continue to sleep there. You hot-wire the current and find the water main. The same storm brings Steve home early, and you try some false hilarity for a while: the storm has washed thousands of pounds of green bananas and broken crates up onto the beach. With the salvaged lumber you two build a new front porch and steps to your place, placating for a while the guy who owns it when he finds you squatting. But by Thanksgiving you and Steve go your separate ways, and by Christmas you are on Marathon Key, Florida, watching smugglers unload bales of pot one night at a public dock under the direction of a deputy sheriff. Art and his best friend, caught up in a disagreement concerning Art sleeping with the best friend’s wife, had let their subchaser sink at a dock far short of the Caribbean. In your and Art’s southernmost misadventures you spend a night in Cuban custody along with other fishing-boat crews trying to ransom refugees out of Mariel when Castro temporarily opens the port. Art had refused to take the convicts the authorities loaded onto your boat; they weren’t on the list of relatives the Miami nationals had given you when you’d left Marathon Key. It was either relent or remain in jail, and so you and Art relent, locking yourselves in the wheelhouse on your return with a .22 rifle and a revolver, keeping a wary eye on the dozens of prison-pale men who lounged on your decks. In the jail, you pledge to God that if ever given the chance, you’ll go home, embrace your folks, go back to school. But given the chance, you’ll head for the Outer Banks instead.