House of Prayer No. 2 (7 page)

There is the lady walking past who works at the phone company, petite, same sweater, even in summer, purse held tightly almost to her throat, her shoulders lift as she walks as if she is always cold and shivering. Every Sunday night your parents call your mother's parents down in Louisiana. To make a long-distance call, you have to dial zero and ask an operator for help. There are only a handful of operators, and you recognize their voices, like this lady in the sweater from down the street who lives in the falling-down house next to the Christian church with her four children, an older daughter who is a high school cheerleader, two twin boys who were sometimes left at their grandparents'
house while the mother worked the switchboard, and a little girl. Last winter when the pond where Mrs. Richardson drowned herself froze over, the two twin boys and a friend of theirs from down on the other end of the street took a kickball out on the ice, and they fell through. One of the twins managed to crawl ashore and get help, but by the time everybody got there, there was only the hole in the ice where the two boys disappeared. Nearby, the kickball sat on the ice in the melting sun. They pulled the bodies out, but nobody wanted to go out any farther on the thinning ice to get the kickball. The next day the grandfather went down there with a shotgun and blew the kickball apart, shooting it again and again until it disappeared. Both families moved away, and the church, which owned the falling-down house, tore it down and made it into the parking lot that it is to this day.

Once, listening in on the extension phone when your parents call Louisiana and the operator is the lady who has lost her child, you can hear the sad story in her voice even when she only says
You are connected
, and then your grandfather answers the phone
Allô?
and your mother says
Comme c'est va, cha?
and your grandfather, who misses your mother, who is his eldest daughter who is so far away and who has lost her faith, you can hear in his low voice that he will not be putting your grandmother on the line as he says
Pas mal, not bad, chérie, not bad. Et tu?
And then you faintly hear someone crying on the line somewhere, and you don't know if it is your mother knowing her mother has not forgiven her or if it is the lady from down the street listening in, her operator's mouthpiece in a tight little first clenched against her sweatered shivering breast.

There's the blind man passing, the man who reupholsters furniture by touch, he comes tapping with his white and red cane, red-lidded, rolled-back eyes, a half smile, and even if you hold your breath, he turns his head and looks into your window, neatly raising his right foot to miss the place where the walnut tree has levered up the sidewalk to trip him in front of your house.

There goes one of the sisters who used to babysit you, the sisters sharing a bedroom in a house in the next block where one night a hand holding a screwdriver floated into their room through the punctured window screen between their beds. When the older sister used to babysit you, she used to draw moody pencil sketches of old rowboats rotting on chains in a cypress swamp.

There's David's father, The Preacher, getting into their ancient blue station wagon, pipe bitten down, himself nearly blind in one eye, a large enough man so you can hear him humming a hymn from two doors down and across the street.
Lord, plant my feet on higher ground
. You miss the parsonage where you spent as much time as you did in your own house before your hips happened, a place that always smelled like bacon and coffee, the old pages and leather of books about God and the Apostles, Virginia history, and places in the world where The Preacher intended to travel. The Preacher and his wife, Janet, are like your other parents, you being the fifth brother to the four sons they already have. The Preacher never holds it against any of you for being boys prone to mischief. Sometimes at The Preacher's church the carillon goes off unexpectedly during the day, sometimes broadcasting “Chopsticks,” “Shave and a Haircut,” or the four-note opening of the
Twilight Zone
theme. Once one of his elder sons
rummaged through his war loot and hung a three-story Nazi banner from the attic window on Flag Day, sending Mrs. Butler, the school music teacher, into a telephone pole when she saw it, you and David goose-stepping on the front sidewalk as an elder son Sieg Heiled from the attic window. And later, when you and David pin some children down in a garage, shooting them in their butts with David's new BB gun, The Preacher comes home to where you and David are sitting on the porch and quietly asks to see the new rifle that he calmly wraps around a tree in the yard before going in to dinner. The Preacher says he did not believe in the concept of Original Sin until he had children.

The Saturday afternoon your father covers your window with thick grey plastic Mr. Panton two doors down is cutting his grass with the town's only electric lawn mower. It is late fall and the rye-grass is lush and the sun is leaving early. Your house is cold and drafty, and your father is stapling plastic on the window frames. He is a black shadow on the plastic outside your window and you're glad you're not having to hold the ladder so he can climb to the second-story windows because you never hold the ladder just right. Once, when he almost fell, you'd let go so he wouldn't land on top of you. Mr. Panton's eyesight is poor and he has run over the cord to his electric lawn mower so many times that the cord is forever shortened in electrical tape splicings. He can't reach the far corners of his yard anymore. You hear Mr. Panton run over his cord again in the dusk. Your father's shadow moves off and your grey window to the world fades to black.

The next morning will be Sunday, and your father will load you into the back of the station wagon and take you back to Richmond.

WHEN THEY CUT YOU OUT
of your cast, you are surprised there are no bugs inside, but your legs have atrophied into two long hairy sticks of rotting flesh. You can scrape hair and dead skin off the bone with your fingernail. Later you hear that doctors think leaving children in body casts for a long time is not a good idea.

They wheel you down to the ward, and it's been cleft palate season. There are a lot of children running around with complicated black stitchery on their upper lips. Some look like little Hitlers, others look like black-whiskered cats. They put you on the big sunporch with some older black boys, and you're glad to find Michael Christian. Nurse Wilfong comes to see you and says how you've grown, must have been your mama's cooking, and you look toward the little sunporch and ask where Jerry is, and she holds your face in her hands and bends over and says,
Jerry died
.

Out on the big sunporch it's cold at night. The older black boys are all from Richmond. There's Dennis in the corner bed. He keeps saying,
I used to be smart but then I got a brain tumor and now I'm stupid
. The little boys tease him and if they get too close he'll strike at them with palsied arms and try to strangle them. Michael Christian inherited your old transistor radio from Big Mike when Big Mike left but the nurses have taken it away from him. There's a black boy named Columbus Floyd who looks like an old man already bent over a cane waiting to be taken upstairs. You nickname him Chris and he likes it. He doesn't want to learn how to play chess, but he'll play checkers with you for
hours and you never win a single game. He keeps the little boys away from Dennis's bed, they're afraid of his cane.

They take you to physical therapy to teach you to walk again. There are no muscles left in your legs, and if it weren't for Charles, the black PT assistant, holding you up with a belt looped under your arms, you would fall more than you do. There's a new physical therapist who takes your extended atrophied leg over the edge of a padded table and then pushes it down so hard he tears something in your leg and you scream and pound on his back with your fists until Charles comes over and says,
What the hell you doing, man?
The new guy doesn't work there much longer.

The woman who replaces him performs a miracle on a boy from Appalachia. The boy has never walked a step in his life. He lives in his wheelchair and is old enough to masturbate furiously all the time under a blanket, then he asks a nurse to clean him up. He only sleeps in his wheelchair; when they put him in bed, he's frozen in the wheelchair position and says all night out loud, keeping everyone awake,
My legs are tighter than a cork in a bottle, my legs are tighter than a cork in a bottle
. So the night nurse and Ben have to lift him down into his wheelchair, where he masturbates himself to sleep.

The new physical therapist and Charles soak the boy in a stainless steel vat of hot water and massage his legs and back for hours. Charles gets the boy up on crutches and he is surprisingly tall. He has a way of talking that sounds like a female cat yowling when she is mounted by a tom and the tom has his teeth in her neck. Everyone is a little frightened of the boy now that he is on
crutches. He follows people a little too closely like he would like to kick their crutches out from under them. When he can finally walk just using a cane, a woman and two men from Appalachia come to get him. If they are related to him or to each other, it is hard to see. They feel like the people who once tried to get David into a car with North Carolina license plates the Saturday afternoon you were in a part of town you were not supposed to be in, which is why you never told your parents. These people from Appalachia come to fetch the tall boy with an old beat-up wheelchair that he happily sits in when he sees it. When the nurses say he can walk now, he doesn't need the wheelchair, it's a miracle, the people mock the nurses and run out of the place pushing the boy laughing ahead of them. One of the men looks back, and his look dares anyone to follow.

By Christmastime, all the black boys on the big sunporch have been cut up and nailed back together. When their families come to visit, it is like a party. Often they come from church in their church clothes, and they have real fried chicken and they always make you a plate. Sometimes their preachers come with them, and their preachers pray over the boys and they'll pray over you if they catch you looking and you're always looking, so they pray over you, too.

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.