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

Author:Mark Richard
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, Biography, Religion
ISBN: 9780385534062
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2011-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

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

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