House of Prayer No. 2 (12 page)

But your mother notices and signs you up for advanced-placement math class out at the high school. You're always late, stopping on your bike to listen to the cornstalks grow and pop in a cornfield. It's so hot the pavement is splitting open and you have a spectacular bike wreck, going over the handlebars and sprawling
on the sticky tarmac. One of your legs won't stop quivering, like the time you fell at Crippled Children's and they called the doctor's stat and Charles knelt beside you, your spasming leg bouncing off the floor until you yelled
Hit it with a rolled-up newspaper!
and Charles started laughing and the spasming stopped, and your leg rolled over exhausted and went to sleep.

The advanced-placement class bumps you that fall into an algebra class taught by a teacher who polices with a meter stick she once broke over a slow country boy's back. She looks at you, the youngest in the class, a cripple too, and she smells a cheat.

In defining finite and infinite numbers, she says, by definition, finite terms are numbers assigned to things that can be counted. For instance, is the number of grains of sand in Jockey's Ridge finite or infinite? You're the kid holding his hand highest to be called upon, eager. You say the number of grains of sand in Jockey's Ridge is infinite. Miss Meter Stick smiles and says, No, if you could count them, you would find that there is a finite number of grains of sand in Jockey's Ridge. No, you say, that's incorrect. First of all, you patiently explain, the ocean is constantly throwing up fresh sand that dries and is blown onto the dune by the wind at the same time the same wind is carrying sand off the dune into Albemarle Sound. Second, you say, even as you notice Miss Meter Stick tapping the meter stick against the side of one of her shoes, her smiling face beginning to purple, second, the number of grains of sand in Jockey's Ridge would have to be considered infinite by her very own definition of being able to count them; if the grains cannot be counted, there is no finite answer, hence
no finite number. But if you
could
count them, she says, as she moves down the aisle of seats to where you are seated, you would eventually reach a number, a
finite
number, so you're wrong, she says, poking the corner of your desk with her finger. Then
you
go fucking count them, you unwisely counter, and you are sent home from school for two days at a time when your father is toward the end of his first affair and is looking for someone upon whom to vent his guilt. You had long before nicknamed his backhands “flying tigers” after his college mascot, Mike the Tiger, whose tiny head ornamented the LSU class ring worn on the hand delivering the often unexpected blow.

You avoid your father and in the Indian summer evenings read William Faulkner's
Light in August
in your stuffy second-story bedroom. The pages soak with your dripping sweat. You don't understand a lot of the book and it doesn't matter, you concentrate on the pages anytime your father passes your door. As in the book, your town has a mysterious black man living in an old unheated house without plumbing in the woods on the edge of town. People call him Hogbear, and he roams your town in the day foraging for food from the rancid trash behind supermarkets. His bicycle is adorned with streamers and bits of colored cloth, the seat levered up to its highest position, the handlebars extended with sawed-off broomsticks. He wears a military jacket with sergeant stripes on the sleeves and a military cap. He says he won World War II by hitting a bull's-eye on a rifle range in Illinois. He rides his bike back and forth to Norfolk, and he'll come down off the bike when children throw rocks at him and call him Hogbear. His real name is Robert, Robert DeLoatch, and your
father tells you when you see him behind the radio station going through the trash to be polite and call him Mr. DeLoatch, and this is what you do.

As in the book, your town has many spinsters living in old houses, like the old sisters who live two blocks over on High Street, where you go to sell lightbulbs and cleaning brushes to earn money for Boy Scout camp. They were up on the third floor of their house when you knocked, and there was that strange small ball of light circling the ceiling. One sister sat in a corner, and the other, the one who had urged you up the two creaking flights of dark steps up through the unlocked front door when you knocked, the low-simmer smell of something old stewing somewhere, the one who had urged you up made a gesture with her wrist and finger following the small ball of light circling the ceiling. The look on her face was that it would all be explained later, and you realized, as you fled fearfully down the stairs, your cardboard sample suitcase of lightbulbs and cleaning brushes dumbling down beside you, that she meant that it was all explained in the past, as in the book you are reading. As in the book, people learn, as you are learning, that some things can never be explained, like that strange light circling the ceiling, even when you run to The Preacher's house and tell Janet and she says that everyone
knows
that house is haunted.

As in the book, people in your town want to make examples out of others, you even see it in yourself, the teachers who want to make an example out of you, because maybe that is the flip side of mercy toward the crippled. There's another teacher at your school who keeps you off the honor roll by giving you a C in
handwriting, for which a flying tiger will spring from the ceiling. When it is time to separate the college-bound from the vocational-skills students in your class, the teacher takes you all on field trips to show you the importance of an education. She takes you to a windowless, airless basement of a peanut warehouse with unbreathable peanut-dust air lit by a dim red lightbulb to witness the example of an old black man with a hoe guiding an endless stream of peanuts onto an endless conveyor belt that disappears into a black hole in a wall. She shows the example of the old man at the sewage plant sweeping spent condoms and rock-hard turds off the top of the bubbling brown settling pool of sludge with a long-handled swimming pool scoop and dumping them in a bucket.
See?
she will hiss.

Your father finally comes into your room one night as you read your book. He has something to tell you. He says the paper mill is digging four new wells on the river, they need more water for the papermaking process. People's wells have been going dry, the water table has dropped for ninety miles around. Your father says where they're digging the wells is the site of an old Indian camp. He says he bets you could probably find a lot of arrowheads if you look.

You and a friend go over where the drillers are unearthing thousands of years of human habitation and dumping it in piles the size of your house. You find some nice arrowheads and relics, including a ceremonial bowl shaped from a mollusk fossil. The fossil is four or five million years old, from a time when all of this land was underwater in a shallow ocean. You know this is true because you have gone out in the country and stood on the special
little bridge a man built over his creek, and you have looked down over the rail and seen that the creek runs through the fossilized spine and splayed rib bones of a whale trapped in rock that must be as old as God.

You finish reading
Light in August
and you don't understand a lot of it and it doesn't matter. You are learning that time doesn't always move forward, sometimes it moves backward, and that is a great comfort when you know exactly how many months and years it will be before you are committed to a wheelchair forever.

YOU'VE HEARD PEOPLE SAY
God gave us the moon and the Devil gives us its moods. You've taken to roaming the countryside on moonlit nights with a boy of whom your mother is especially suspicious. His family lives near you, his little brother and sister, twins, come around asking for work, and your mother gives them jobs you no longer do around the house. She hires them to rake the leaves from the large oak tree in your backyard, then she overpays them and gives them more lunch than they can eat later. Their father has an old van that he has cut down to move lumber. He has taken out all the seats, there is no glass in the windows, there are no headlights, no license plates, the van is not supposed to leave the premises. It's a banged-up vehicle that expels thick grey smoke when you finally get it started, so your friends call it the Smokebus, at least that's the first reason they call it the Smokebus. On moonlit nights, because there are no headlights by which to see the roads, you and your friends throw some lawn furniture in the bus, and whoever is driving straps on some safety
goggles to drive because there is no windshield and the bugs are fierce when you drive through the swamps, and you set out toward the pig farms in the northwest part of the county to steal a baby pig. There is a black shot house in the opposite corner of the county called Miss Pearl's and if you bring Miss Pearl a baby pig in a burlap sack and put it in her pigpen out back, Miss Pearl will give you underage drinkers either a case of beer or a pint of whiskey.

Full-grown sows can weigh a quarter of a ton and more, and if they knock you down, they can kill you and eat you. They are protective of their young except when they accidentally step on them; that is why they have so many in a litter. The mud and pig slop is slippery in their pens, and you can't run fast, you can't run at all. Somebody brings a softball bat and you think that is a good idea. Occasionally, a light will come on and a shotgun will be fired in your direction, over your heads, but that is rare.

Your friend whose father owns the Smokebus has long blond hair parted in the middle, broken teeth, and a laugh that sounds like he is choking. He wears an old long raincoat and a dirty driving cap. One night he says there's not enough gas to take the long way around town. He says the Smokebus is invisible because it has no lights, so he's going to drive straight through town as fast as he can. There are two stoplights in town and you are stopped behind a log truck. Everyone is muddy and it is your turn to hold down the burlap sack with the screaming pig fighting to escape. The Smokebus is coughing and rocking as the pig gets halfway out of the burlap sack. It is not a baby pig, more like a juvenile. You are all trying to stuff the pig back into the burlap sack, the
van is rocking as you and the others chase it around, banging and falling over the upended aluminum lawn furniture. In the middle of it all you look out the paneless window, and you see your father has pulled up alongside you in his car and he's looking over at what in the hell is going on over there in that van. Your and your father's eyes meet for several long moments, and the way he turns and looks straight ahead you understand that he does not see you where you aren't supposed to be doing what you're doing, because he is on his way to where he is not supposed to be going to do something he is not supposed to do.

Something dark settles over these ventures and you don't ride with them for a while. People out in the county are talking about the pig rustling, more shots are fired. The next time you ride along, somebody brings a rifle, and you decide this is the last time you are doing this. There's not much of a moon, there's barely enough light to see, and when you pass through the swamp bottoms, whoever is driving has to look up and follow the grey swath of sky through the tops of the trees to stay on the road.

You are the one who shoots the church. There had been random shooting out the Smokebus window and careless gun handling by others. The rifle had gone off and put a hole in the floor by one of your feet. Clouds are confounding the moon, it's past time to go home. You grab the rifle away and decide to empty the clip at the next lights you see and it's the marquee and steeple lights of an old church, and you unload the rifle in the church's direction and you're done.

Years later you'll stop and walk around the church like a tourist because in local history the church is famous as a hot pulpit
of abolition before the Civil War. You walk around the church pretending to admire it all the while looking for bullet holes. You don't see anything except some holes up in an eave that could just be carpenter wasps.

For your sins you get hard knots, two nodules pressing up under your skin chafing red beneath your belt with the CSA buckle. It's the heads of two nails in a mending plate in your right hip that are working themselves out of your bones. The doctor decides he can take the nails out of your hip without putting you to sleep. Your father drives you to Richmond and they put you on a table. Two orderlies hold you down. The surgeon gives you a shot of local anesthesia in your hip. A nurse holds your head so you won't look. The surgeon cuts into your skin and has a hard time getting the nails out. He has to get some pliers to pull the nails out, and he almost pulls you off the table. It's not so much the pain, it's the squeaking of the nails in your bones as he has to twist them back and forth like he's pulling them out of wet lumber. It's also the way the nurse winces and the way the doctor grunts with the effort. It looks like you'll be going back into the hospital the next summer. When it's over and you're sitting in your father's car in the parking lot, he asks you if you want a pastrami sandwich. You wish you could ask him for a cigarette and a beer. When he asks if you're okay, you say,
Let's just go home
.