House of Prayer No. 2 (27 page)

Like Sam McGee happily sitting in the flames of the wrecked barge
Alice May
, you have considered cremation, as you can never be too hot, though going to hell, as you are learning, is not a compulsory thing to do, and in your mind you really don't want some funeral director handing your sons a box of ash and molars and a shovelful of scorched titanium parts.

Your father hated the beach, had sand issues, couldn't swim, and, like you, was actually terrified of water. At age four, you fell into a chocolate creek in East Texas. Your father stood beside you, fishing, you don't think he pushed you; you were just the type of child who accelerated the odds of inevitable mishap. You stood beside water, therefore you fell in. Your father, unable to swim, saved your life by lying prone on the dock and reaching around frantically in the water until he found your shirttail. You were landed, drowned, and resuscitated by a doctor's wife who later bathed you in a sink and tweaked your erection to staunch your crying.

Freud said storytelling is an unconscious desire to summon fears in order to be able to exorcise them. Your firstborn son with the twist in his spine accelerates the odds of inevitable mishap by sheer proximity to slick floors, wobbly chairs, sharpened pencils,
hot stoves. You imagine him in these Outer Banks being sucked out by the notorious undertow, which has almost drowned all of your friends at some time during the last forty years. Stupidly surfing a big onshore hurricane break years ago, you got tumbled and spiked on your left shoulder, splitting the scapula in two. The doctor said it takes at least seven hundred pounds of pressure to split a scapula. Lucky it wasn't your neck, he said. But what are you going to do? Not go back into the ocean, ever? Freud also said the most important day in a man's life is the day his father dies. For now, you would suggest it's the day your first son is born. You were your father's only son, his firstborn.

On the day of the ashes, you quote Ben, loosely, the favorite collect that he used in services thirty years before—
Come, Holy Spirit, come, come as a wind and cleanse, come as a fire and burn; convict, convert, consecrate our lives for our great good and Thy greater glory
. Ben says he doesn't remember where it comes from.
Have you ever thought of the ministry?
he asks. You tell him about being talked out of it by the visiting Anglican bishop. Ben says the bishop must have thought you were a good writer.
Or else he was Satan
, you say. You ask Ben if he thinks they would have let someone like you into the seminary, and he says when he went through, he girded himself for what he had been told was the toughest interview in the whole process. He says his interviewer mainly wanted to talk about airplanes. When Ben asked him shouldn't they be talking about more serious matters, the interviewer said the main purpose of the interview was to comb for messiahs and homosexuals, and he could tell Ben was neither.

On the way out to where you're going to attend to your father, your sister joins you, and you and Ben spot a white disk, like a Communion wafer, and the disk hovers over the south end of the beach before slipping westward. Maybe it was one of those banners pulled behind an airplane advertising reggae and fish tacos; maybe it was something else. You can't tell, and neither can Ben, even with his Air Force eyes. The captain of the
Captain Duke
asks if you've brought a camera or flowers. You've brought neither. You have a tape with one of your father's favorite songs on it—a song about Lake Charles, the place of both of your births, but the mate says the tape deck hasn't finished chewing up the last tape they put in a while back.

Ben, in full vestment, begins when the charter boat captain, a Wanchese native and part-time preacher himself, cuts the engines after pushing his bow into the wind. The words come hard for Ben at the commending of the ashes; he knew your father as well as anyone could know him. Ben puts his hand on your shoulder to steady himself as the boat drifts a little, side to side, during the gospel. He pets your shoulder twice at the place in the service where you're supposed to lean over the rail and pour out the last mortal remains. You wonder about the particle density of the remains, the way they seem to stream straight to the bottom, only the finer specks leaving a ribbon of beige pollen-like dust on the surface that clings to the boat's waterline.

The rest is the ride in, your quiet sister grieving over the paucity of good memories, you reciting the Rolltop Mantra at the thought of allowing the twenty-year estrangement between you and your father.

YOU AND BEN ORDER FRESH GROUPER SANDWICHES
in the South Nags Head restaurant where once you were Sven and where sometimes over the years your father went looking for news of you.
He's at rest
, Ben says of your father after you are quiet at the table for a long time.

He's where he wanted to be
, he says.

THE BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN
is dark and cold and roamed by Pleistocene fish that science has forgotten. One night you and Steve were culling through what had emptied from the tail bag—scallops, fish, ballast stones, sand—and something jumped up and ran to the rail, and you're glad someone else saw it. It looked like a hairless monkey with webbing between its arms and body. It hopped up on the rail and turned its head and hissed like a cat through cartilage-looking teeth. It had been a strange trip already. A submarine, spooked by the fathoms of cable strung behind your trawler dragging its dredges, had surfaced in an eruption of ocean the previous night off the starboard rail. Its brightening, pulsing amber light lit the water from below the area of a football field, signaling Everything Must Yield moments before the submarine leapt like a giant fish, roaring and snorting ballast blasts of foam, its bow wave nearly sweeping everyone off the deck. The crew had been taking little white pills that flapped shrouds in the edges of the deck lights already. The boiled-looking furless monkey hissed at everyone on the rail again before diving overboard. No one would have believed you if you had told about the monkey
thing, but there was a guy on board who said he had seen worse. He couldn't talk about it without tears welling up in his eyes. That's the kind of thing you find at the bottom of the ocean, where your father wanted to be.

The day after your father's ashes you take your elder son down to Wanchese. Wanchese was the bad Indian, your fifth-grade history teacher used to say, the one who turned against the colonists after they kidnapped him and the good Indian Manteo and took them to London. Returning to the New World, Sir Walter Raleigh's men repaid Chief Wingina's kindness of feeding the starving colonists by shooting him in the buttocks and then severing his head. Wanchese defected back to his own people. Manteo was named Lord of Roanoke. Not much has changed in Wanchese: the derelict cars, broken marine gear, old culling boxes rotting in the marsh; the fish houses, the old trailer on the canal where you and Steve lived. Your son notices how many stop signs have been knocked off their corners. Grocery store accounts are still kept in spiral-bound notebooks. You ask about the notorious captain who first hired you twenty-five years before. Someone says he doesn't know, maybe Alaska, maybe South America,
maybe sumwarz up norf
.

You take your son to the South Nags Head restaurant. It's been flooded a couple of times by hurricanes, an old picture of you and Steve long gone from the wall. You still know some of the women you knew back then who are still there now. They've married commercial fishermen once or twice, raising teenagers now; they say that your son looks so much like you that you must have spit him out of your mouth.

What is an apostrophe?
your son asks on the way home. He's
five years old, and he further resembles you by walking with his back bent a little forward, with the view of his feet that affords. At the beach that week, he will find a watch, a piece of rare coral, a Smith & Wesson tactical knife, and, in the ruined inner court of a washed-over sand castle, a shark-tooth fossil.

You're often flummoxed by his simple questions. You work through an unsatisfactory explanation of possessive mechanics and contractions. Finally you tell him it's usually a little speck that means something's missing.

The evening veil is on the Atlantic to the east even as Pamlico Sound to the west is still lit like a lake of fire. As you drive north to supper, you point out the cottage where his mother and you stayed six years earlier, the kind of old shuttered place they're now tearing down to build the eight-bedroom models. There's a tiny bedroom in the back with a broken-shouldered double bed in which he was conceived, beneath an old reproduction of Winslow Homer's
Hurricane
.

You pass an old outdoor pay phone where you spent many a midnight leaning into trying to make something right with someone miles away on the mainland. This is the place where your father is cast and your son was conceived but it is not home. It's a beautiful place but you tell your wife you don't think you need to come back here ever again. This is a place where only God knows how close you came to what
could have been
, and only His grace saved you from it. It's the lesson of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the oven of the insane king Nebuchadnezzar: sometimes God saves us through the fire, sometimes He saves us from the fire, and sometimes He saves us not at all. If He doesn't save all the special children, who does He save?

AND SO IT COMES TO PASS
that seven years later you find yourself sitting in a hard wooden pew in a tiny whitewashed cinder-block church in winter with little heat, the one toilet is clogged, there's an outhouse out back if you're really in need, and the bass player is missing a string on his bass guitar. You and your mother are, as usual, the only white congregants in House of Prayer No. 2 on Pocahontas Street in Camptown. There is much praise and music and glad uplifted faces around you, but this day you remain seated, unmoved. You have been coming to this church for the last fifteen years when you are home. You know the regular saints, and the regular saints know you. This is not the kind of black church where, when white tourists show up slumming to listen to the music and to be entertained, they are seated in the hot seat of the front pew.

You doubt any white tourists have ever attended House of Prayer No. 2, at least not since you have been coming. There will be a couple dozen spontaneous hymns, a lot of personal testimonies, at least two collections, a sermon, and an altar call where many will be slain in the Spirit. Deacons of the church will stand ready to catch the slain and to cover them with blankets if they need to be covered. If you ask Pastor Ricks what happens when he lays hands on someone and he or she is slain in the Spirit, he says it's when the natural is
overshattered
by the supernatural, the person's overpowered by something greater than him- or herself and enters a sleep like Adam slept when God removed his rib. In that state there is a spiritual impartation, something changes in the person, letting him or her know the reality of God.