House of Prayer No. 2 (8 page)

You stab at the frozen ground beneath the snow and swing your legs across the ice and make it to the magnolia tree just in time to sing the last verse of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”

Glory to the newborn Creep.

SAY A MAN'S RELATIONSHIP
to his God is determined by his relationship to his father. Your father memorizes Justin Wilson Cajun
comedy records. He writes the jokes down and retells them to himself out loud when he thinks no one can hear him. He works on perfecting Justin Wilson's bayou accent. Your father is often paralyzed by his perfectionism. You read this in an evaluation you find going through his desk at home. Your father manages large forests and tracts of timber for a papermaking company. In his evaluation, your father's supervisor says he does an outstanding job but doesn't get as much accomplished because of his perfectionism. Also, the supervisor reports, your father's perfectionism creates problems with the men who work for him in the field. On your father's desk is a copy of
They All Discovered America
. Your father has a theory about what happened to the Lost Colony over on Roanoke Island, something to do with the grey-eyed Lumbee Indians down in Robeson County, North Carolina, where he has spent months cruising old-growth timber for the paper company. He's found an obscure account of a sighting of a white man, a white boy, and a mule down your town's own river in the sixteen hundreds. Your father has some questions for a professor at Duke and a librarian at East Carolina University, there are their telephone numbers and addresses on a notepad. In the bottom right-hand drawer of his desk are two coffee cans of arrowheads and spear tips he has found during hours of walking fields after fresh rains. He's thinking of buying some golf clubs, though he has never played golf. He has filled out an order form from a sporting goods company, and there is your mother's missing sewing tape that he's using to measure the length of his arms. In another desk drawer there are some dim grey photocopies of some ancestor's release from a Union prison near Vicksburg. He says two of your ancestors kicked a man to death in Sumrall, Mississippi,
and fled to the relative safety of the Alamo; their names are on the wall with those of the other patriots. Two of your other relatives were caught in Pennsylvania stealing a locomotive for the Confederacy and were hanged from a telegraph pole. Here is an old photograph of five men hanging from a telegraph pole. Here is a photo of a derailed steam engine alongside some broken train tracks; someone has written in white marker with an arrow pointing to spilled firewood nearby:
The bodies were found here
. Here's an envelope with two mint-perfect Confederate currency notes, a five and a ten, and two five-cent stamps with Jefferson Davis's portrait. In the bottom left drawer of the rolltop desk are the
Playboys
, and on the top shelf of his closet, by where he keeps the snake pistol, is the book you only flipped through once, having been stopped by the words urging the reader to remember to pluck the woman's clitoris like a banjo string.

In a banker's cardboard box are maps and plats of the lake property. Your father is going to subdivide the whole thing himself on weekends with a surveyor friend of his. You are no longer on crutches, you can now walk with a cane, and your father says you and an unemployed sharecropper he has found are going to pull rod and chain for him down on the flooded Roanoke River basin on Saturdays; the weather is still cold and there shouldn't be too many snakes.

There are old wagon rut paths and ancient corn rows from a hundred years ago grown over by pine and brush where the valley falls off, and the footing is sharp, and you are no good at pulling chain. You keep falling down and Mason, the sharecropper, keeps helping you back up. He doesn't understand how he's
supposed to balance the rod. Your father keeps stalking back and forth from point to point hacking at things with his machete. Mason lives in a large one-room house set on a clay mound. He's always ready when your father pulls up in front of the place, he meets you coming out the door, closes it quickly behind him in a way that even as a kid you understand that he's ashamed to let you see inside. He slaps on handfuls of English Leather that only partially cloak the smell of the house he shares with his wife and children.

When it's time to stop for lunch, your father has made a couple of peaunt-butter-and-fig sandwiches for you, but Mason doesn't eat lunch, says he isn't hungry, and you realize he didn't bring a lunch, so the next time your father doesn't bring a lunch either. You all drive to a colored country store, and your father buys lunch for everyone—little tins of Vienna sausages, cellophane cubes of saltines, slices of hard rat cheese the black man cuts off a block with a large knife, and RC Colas to drink. What you notice is how your father knows the owner of the little colored store and some of the black men who sit on the soft-drink cooler. Outside the store your father introduces you to a hundred-year-old black man sharpening a piece of metal on an old grinding stone. When your father's surveyor friend asks your father later how he knows the hundred-year-old man, your father says he gave him a ride home once.
He's a very interesting fellow
, your father says.

One morning your father pulls in to Mason's yard and a hound you've never seen before comes scramble-barking out from under the house. When Mason doesn't come out, you open
your car door to knock. Dogs never bite you. You and your father are let inside the house by a woman who says she is Mason's wife. The single room is bright, lit by bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling. The windows are plastered over with newspaper. It's stifling hot from a woodstove, and smoky. Single beds are braced together, clothes are hung on long ropes. Things look like they've been blown against the walls by a tornado. When you look closely, there are faces in the piles of rags on the beds. Mason's wife is very sorry, but Mason is in the county hospital. Mason has gone insane. At the hospital they found that a roach had crawled into one of his ears and become stuck and died. The fluid built up behind the blockage and affected his brain. Mason went insane in the one room with his family for a few days before the eldest daughter could escape and fetch help.

You look at the eldest daughter. She looks older than her mother, but Mason told you once as you waited deep in the lake woods for your father to make his computations in his little surveyor's notebook that his eldest daughter is about your age. You look at her, and she stares straight back at you. Years later, when you hear she has become a witness for Christ in the Holy Land, you are not surprised.

FORTUNATELY, THERE IS AN OUT-OF-CONTROL FIRE
in the Great Dismal Swamp that your father must see about and he decides to take you with him. Your father shows you the ditch George Washington surveyed to drain the swamp and the little railroad the loggers built to haul out the juniper logs. He shows you where
he once saw a bear swimming the ditch with a cub on its back. He starts to tell you something about the tannic acid in the water of Lake Drummond when you come around a corner of the dirt road and see pumper trucks and firehoses abandoned and farther on, in thickening smoke, a lost school bus of frightened sailors from Norfolk who have been impressed into firefighting service. The wind has shifted, and they have panicked, the smoke pouring across the ground at them. Your father tries to explain to them that it is a peat fire mainly burning centuries of decay in the soil and that it probably won't hurt them, and right at that moment you hear some men shouting and you look over just in time to see a bulldozer being swallowed up in a deep smoky hole. See, your father says, the fire is burning
underneath
us.

Driving deeper into the smoke, you and your father pass more panicky people fleeing in the opposite direction. You arrive at Lake Drummond. Your father tells you the lake is a poquoson, the round water is actually higher than anything around it, like a coffee cup saucer turned upside down.
A meteor strike, probably
, says your father. It's a ghosty place and you like it, moss from the cypress trees, a black mood in the water, peat smoke blowing across it until you can't see very far and your eyes begin to burn and your father says,
We better get out of here
, and you do.

As you flee the fire, your father stops just ahead of the rolling smoke and crackling flames that are scalping the crowns of the trees, and you get out and take pictures of each other with a plastic camera you have brought. In one photo you stand on a little rusty railway handcar, the kind with the levers you pump to propel yourself along the tracks. You are pretending you are
working the frozen levers trying to outrun the flames that are right behind you. Your father smiles as he takes your picture.

It is the best afternoon you will ever have in your life with your father.

THERE IS A SAWMILL
and a paper mill in your town on the banks of a black-water river. You can hear the debarking drums turn all night stripping logs. There is sulfur in your air, and ash. Sometimes in the morning the ash lies thinly over everything, the mill has a free carwash to flush it off. The chugging smokestacks of the paper mill billow heavy white, day and night, mostly steam, they say. Some people think there's also something in the air that is an irritant to the central nervous system. From New York to Florida, people say,
I knew somebody from your town, and they was WILD
. From outer space, a new thermal heat picture shows a teardrop of warmth pluming up eastward from the smokestacks of your town, over Camptown, the colored shacks of the men whose forearms are blistered by stoking the boilers with coal and wood chips, whose lungs are ruined from unloading lime by the wheelbarrow from the bleach train, the janitors of the paper salesmen's offices. People say the warmth is the reason it doesn't snow so much anymore. Some people say your town stinks. Smells like money, is what your town says.

Jamestown is barely to the north, the town is full of its English ancestors, some Irish, some Huguenots. Richmond is to the northwest, close enough that on still days people could hear the cannons from its siege. The river through your town was Lee's last
lifeline of food coming up in coasters from the Albemarle Sound. There is ancestor worship in your town. Quakers had spread abolition among the upper Baptists and lower Methodists and most had opposed secession, yet many rode off to join the fight for their own reasons, living in the saddles of horses for twelve days at the Battle of Brandy Station, three horses shot out from one of the citizens in one fight, one citizen shot dead the day before Appomattox. One officer for whom your street is named, finally finding his way home, to this county, this landscape and its women not as gang-raped by Union soldiers as others to the south, not having had as many typhus children's graves dug up by Union soldiers looking for buried silverware as others to the south, this one man coming home from seeing what he had seen and deciding to start the church where The Preacher preaches, this old Confederate officer finally just this emaciated thing in grey rags with a black gun-blasted face—his wife, an aged old lady now, turning and seeing, one day, a specter in her meager garden, and it is him, home again to a house that still stands on your street to this day.