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

The New York Times asks you to go down to Atlanta to profile Jimmy Carter. One thing they don’t tell you that you probably should have known is Jimmy Carter has a contentious relationship with the New York Times; and that’s probably one reason you were offered the job.

Mr. Carter is cool to you at first, then loosens up as you meet his wife, and you spend a couple of weeks with them coming and going to the Democratic National Convention, which is in Atlanta that year. At the end of the two weeks, you have an idea of how to put the story together, and Mr. Carter invites you to go to Africa with him, where he’s leading a campaign to eradicate river blindness. You call the editor at the New York Times and tell her you’re going to Africa, and after she hears your pitch that maybe Mr. Carter needed to be president to become the statesman that he is evolving into, she tells you to come back to New York, you’re not going to Africa, you’re too sympathetic to Mr. Carter. The paper pays you a kill fee, and you’re back on the streets again.

It’s the first year of the time when the doctors said you would be in a wheelchair, and maybe because you’re aware of this, the pain in your hips is getting to you, maybe it’s just walking the hard concrete of New York looking for work, often not having subway fare, maybe it’s the bitter cold.

You help a guy who has fallen out of his wheelchair on East Seventy-ninth where people keep walking past, and the guy is angry with you for helping as he accepts your help, and all you can say is I know, I know .

YOU MAKE YOUR WAY TO VIRGINIA BEACH and don’t tell anyone at first that you’ve failed at becoming a writer. You have a canvas cot you found in some trash on a side street in New York, a two-volume edition of The Oxford English Dictionary , a suitcase, and your typewriter and box of papers. You hide in a house on the North End of the beach that your old friend Kenny the drummer said was empty, but you are discovered in two days. You see a man on the beach who tells you his daughter has just bought a house a few blocks away.

The daughter lets you stay in the attic apartment of the house she has just bought. Her family is the family that built your hometown. She’s beautiful and between her third and fourth husbands and a little lost at sea herself. You insist on paying rent, and she says, Fine, a hundred dollars, and you don’t even have a hundred dollars, and she doesn’t care.

You’ve only been gone two years, but there’s nobody from the old guard anymore at the T-bird when you wheel a bicycle up there one night and look through the plate glass. You’re about to wheel away when you see Melvin. Melvin was with Witcher the day Witcher played chicken on the single-lane bridge, driving his tractor-trailer at the oncoming log truck. When you first moved to New York and were eating beans for the fifth day in a row from a Crock-Pot in Queens, and homesick, you’d called the T-bird one night to tell them that you were coming home. They were having the annual Tacky Tourist party. Melvin had answered and said how proud everyone was of you for going to New York to be a writer, even though New York’s a sewer and no place anybody else would want to live, and you’d hung up, realizing you could not go back to Virginia Beach. And yet here you are, and Melvin is surprised to see you. He buys you a drink, and you sit at a table in the corner, and Melvin hears your confession—you don’t think you have what it takes to become a writer.

THE NEXT DAY MELVIN TAKES you out in the country in his Jeep and you drive down to North Carolina, where his father was the superintendent of schools, and his mother says it’s okay for you to take one of the old mattresses out of the barn for your attic apartment. On the way back to the beach, Melvin stops in a place where he has to collect some rent from some people. You pull in to the yard of an old house up on concrete and brick pillars; there are some dirty children playing in the yard who look up when Melvin drives in as if they’ve never seen a Jeep with a mattress on the roof before and it frightens them. Melvin says there’s a pistol in the glove box, if he’s not out in fifteen minutes, to get the pistol out of the glove box and come in the house looking for him.

Melvin goes to the door, and a white woman who’s not happy to see him makes a smile on her old face and lets him in.

You watch the children for a while. There are some dogs in the yard, stray-looking mostly. They keep going around to one side of the house and keep sticking their heads up under the foundation, and their throats move as if they are drinking, and you figure there must be a leaking pipe to a tap there, though there is a working well in the yard. You sit and watch for a while, flip down the glove box door, and see the .38 pistol you know there is no way you’re going to touch, and you flip the glove box door closed and wait some more.

The door to the house finally opens, and a rough-looking guy lets Melvin out, and Melvin shakes his hand and comes out to the Jeep. You’ve got one of your little notepads on your lap and you need to borrow a pen, and as you drive off he asks you what you are writing, and you don’t answer but what you are writing is: At night, stray dogs come up underneath our house and lick our leaking pipes .

A friend calls you and says he is one of the judges of a short story contest, and if you send him one, he’ll put the fix in for you, it’s a thousand-dollar prize. So far you’ve been eating when the girl in whose house you are staying takes you out to dinner at nice restaurants. Sometimes Melvin comes around and throws pine bark through your open attic window to come out and play, but you are on your mattress in the hot attic going over At night … because you’ve learned from Gordon that everything you need is in that first line, all you have to do is unpack the story, its metronome is already ticking back and forth.

You finish the story about the stray dogs and send it to Esquire , and that’s when a new editor calls you up. He’s found the story in the slush pile, and they’re going to take it and run it, and you hug Melvin and his wife and kiss your landlord friend goodbye and get on a train back to New York.

NEW YORK IS BETTER NOW that you will have a story published in a national magazine. You live in a haunted house on East Twenty-second Street that belongs to the girlfriend of a Coast Guard pilot you met at the T-bird one night. Her name is Anstice. Anstice is a caterer, and you eat when you work for her and help her clean out the four-story brownstone, which is pretty much as her parents left it thirty years before. A woman from Barbados who was her mother’s nurse still lives there, and the woman from Barbados still talks to the mother, who has been dead for a long time. The woman from Barbados doesn’t like the ghost of the man who walks the top floor and terrifies the bejesus out of you when you hear him up there.

One night someone leans over you and blows cold breath on you, and when you tell Anstice, she asks you which bed on which floor you are sleeping in, and when you tell her, she says, Oh, that’s just my father coming to see who’s sleeping in his old bed .

When it’s time to sell all the old furniture in the place, the piano movers come to move the piano, and it’s the piano Anstice’s parents used to play when they came home late in the evenings with friends after finishing the shows they’d been performing in on Broadway. The dead mother doesn’t want the piano moved. At first, the movers can’t get in the house; the double front doors are jammed, even with you inside pulling and the movers outside pushing. You have to call a locksmith and he can’t get the doors to open; he’s taken the locks out and handles off and removed all the hardware. Then, while you’re standing there with the locksmith and the movers outside, the doors swing open as if they’d been pushed by a gentle breeze. The movers are spooked, especially by the running commentary of the woman from Barbados. Then, when the piano movers are starting to move the piano, the plaster in the ceiling starts cracking and falling in big pieces, and the movers run outside. Just then Anstice comes out of the hospital across the street, where she’s been visiting a dying friend, and you call out to her from the window of the room where the plaster is falling, and Anstice comes in and stands in the center of the room. She has been crying across the street. Her hands are balled into fists, her eyes are closed, and she yells, Mother, stop it! And it stops.