House of Prayer No. 2 (25 page)

You go to Louisiana for Uncle James's funeral, and while you're there, you see five shirtless crew-cut boys who look a lot like you did when you were their age, you watch them climb up on a picnic table and jump off over and over and over and over
again and you think,
We should have children
, and when you get home, you find Jennifer skinny-dipping in her mother's pool, and she gets out and stretches on a towel in the sun and tells you she's pregnant.

So your wife is pregnant and you're broke and your novel is a disaster. You take your first edition of Mark Twain's
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
and a rare print of Stonewall Jackson's last meeting with Robert E. Lee into Santa Monica to sell, and you run into one of the students who had been studying with Barry at Ole Miss. She's Robert Altman's script supervisor and Altman has told her to write a script for him and she's stuck. So you help her break a movie she calls
Cookie's Fortune
, and she says she can't pay you or give you credit, but she can introduce you to Altman, and that's good enough for you, and you meet Altman, and one of his readers has put one of your short stories in his hands to read, and he thinks it would make a good movie—ensemble cast, strong female leads—would you be interested in adapting it for him? So you adapt your story in about two weeks, and he reads it and says it's good, it'll be his next movie, and you think, That wasn't so hard.

Except Altman always has several next movies, and through the grace of Ron Carlson you are offered a teaching job at Arizona State. It's a big campus and hot, and one day as you are walking across, you realize you can't walk. You have to sit down and it's 113 degrees and you can't move. Despite the white Arizona sun, all you can see is the color of your pain, and the color of your pain is black.

The time has come to amputate the femoral head of your left
hip, hammer in a titanium spike with a Teflon ball, rebuild the pelvic cup, sew you up, send you home. You interview several orthopedic surgeons and you learn that surgeons do not like to be interviewed. The best people who can tell you about a surgeon's handiwork are anesthesiologists and surgical nurses, but they are reluctant to talk, though one anesthesiologist you happen to run into in a bar waves you off a highly recommended orthopod, saying he had just seen the doctor butcher some kid's knee. The next best people are the physical therapists, and several you interview give you a name—Ted Firestone. Firestone is young, strong, and aggressive, your wife says he has the bearing of a quarterback. He guesses your surgery will take a couple of hours, but when it lasts for six, your wife gets worried. In addition to the replacement, he has to chisel out the old hardware, drill out the old screws, chip away the old growth, and repair your femur where it has cracked. He had warned you that something like this might happen. When he first looked at your X-rays, he said two things: your situation is beyond the abilities of most surgeons, and that surgeons in your past did you no favors.

You have recently seen one of your old surgeons, the doctor who hammered in your first nail, the doctor who told your father that with or without surgery, you would probably end up in a wheelchair by the time you are thirty anyway. It is the seventy-fifth anniversary of Crippled Children's Hospital, and they ask you to come speak. The doctor is old, old, old. In your speech you talk about the first time you came to the hospital, and then you single out the doctor, and give a list of things his nail survived; the car accidents, the years at sea, a body-slamming dance craze, a spectacular
fall down a marble staircase, a crash landing in a realtor's plane, and in the end, you never mention those terrible words he said to you and your father that day, instead you thank him that soon you will be able to walk your sister down the aisle on her wedding day, the same little baby your mother sat in the car nursing the day you arrived for admittance to Crippled Children's.

While you are recovering, your hospital phone rings and it's some Hollywood producers. Apparently, the script you wrote for Altman has been circulating, and they want to know if you want to write for their TV show. You have to tell them that you don't watch TV and are unfamiliar with their show, and they say,
Perfect
. Come to Beverly Hills tomorrow for the interview if you want the job. You call an agent, and she says you should take the meeting, she tells you how much a job like that pays, and you misunderstand, you think the pay is what you make in a month, when in fact it's what you would make every week. You tell the agent there's no way you can get from the hospital bed in Scottsdale, Arizona, to Beverly Hills, you'd have to go into the meeting pushing a walker, and the agent screams,
For God's sake, don't go into the meeting pushing a walker!

Your surgical nurse hears all this, and she is a big fan of the show, so she brings in some crutches, and your wife brings you a khaki suit, and they dope you up and get you on a plane. You are met by a special medical station wagon that takes you to the Beverly Hills address. Unfortunately, you have to climb about a hundred steps of exquisite, hand-cut, mossy California quarry stone from the curb so that by the time you get to the door, you have sweated completely through your khaki suit, and you have
popped so many pills you don't remember the interview, but the producers hire you anyway, and that is your first job in Hollywood.

You have your other hip replaced right before you begin work on a medical drama. The showrunner is making a movie about F. Scott Fitzgerald, and your offices on the Fox lot are in the same building where Fitzgerald had his office long ago. The showrunner brings Fitzgerald's aged secretary in one afternoon, and she walks around telling you and the showrunner the history of the place. Toward the end, she passes your office and says,
And that was Billy Faulkner's office
.

BY THIS TIME YOU HAVE TWO SONS
, the older of whom has a glitch in his spine. You are now the parent your father was, driving him to special clinics, watching as the doctors make him run, walk, stand on one foot. No one seems to know what the condition is. They think it's developmental and not degenerative, but they're not sure.

You tell your mother that you need some prayers sent your way. Your mother has been employed at the same hospital these last thirty years. She has worked her way up from switchboard operator to one of the managers in a terminal care ward of the hospital. People bring her their loved ones who are dying, and she sees that they are comfortable to the end, sees that they have what they need. Your mother has developed a network of prayer warriors at the hospital, mostly black women and a few black men who meet informally in side hallways and unused rooms to hold
hands in a circle and offer up prayers. Your mother attends Bible study classes in the black part of town. On Sunday mornings, she attends her small white Episcopal church, and in the afternoons she attends her black friends' church, House of Prayer No. 2.

The situation with your son is a test of your faith. The platitudes you hear don't help. You do not offer platitudes to people in their times of need. You have learned that the only platitude you can offer others in a time of need is to tell them that you love them. You also do not offer prayers in the hopes of changing things. You have come to believe that those types of prayers are dangerous, especially when the word “if” is used. Those types of prayers are a type of negotiation, and you are beginning to believe that negotiation with God is sinful.

Your mother does not offer a platitude about your son. She recounts all the years of trials and suffering she says she watched you endure, and she says maybe all of that was necessary for you to be the parent of this boy who has his own difficulties. If that is true, then it is a kind of God's redemptive grace that you can finally accept.

ABOUT THIS TIME YOU GET A CALL FROM BEN
, the priest at your church when you were a boy. Ben is retired and is a circuit rider to small country parishes that don't have their own priests.

Ben tells you that your father is dying in a small hospital down in North Carolina and he wants to see you. It's been about twenty years since your last communication with him, a single-spaced fifteen-page hand-printed letter dated
New Year's Eve
, in
reply to a letter you had written months earlier. His letter is in the form of a multiple-choice questionnaire. Sample questions include “At what point in time did God die and you took his place?” and “Where in the Bible is it written that there is no place in Heaven for non-writers?” It is an angry questionnaire and your father closes it with a quote from
A Covenant with Death
, an out-of-print novel about a man accused of murdering his wife—
If you cannot love, pity. If you cannot pity, have mercy. That man is not your brother, he is you
. Your wife says you must go see your dying father, and she is right.

It's a small hospital in a small mill town like the one in which you grew up, and when you see the house where your father and his second wife live, it's the same three-bedroom brick rancher that is in your hometown where your mother still lives, the same bushes and trees and flowers planted in the same configurations. When you walk into your father's hospital room, he shoos everyone out and tells you to pull up a chair, he's ready to make his confession.

NO ONE IN THE HOSPITAL
who knows you are your father's son seems to like you. Not at all. When you meet your father's doctor, the first white person you have met in the place, you ask him about your father's condition, what his chances are, and the doctor says,
Why don't you just make your peace and hit the dusty trail?

Your father's wife is there and his stepdaughter, and they are perfectly nice. Your stepmother says she had thrown your father
out of the house just before all this happened. He had wrecked his truck, drunk, and split open his head. He had spent a night in jail, making friends there telling jokes in his orange jumpsuit.

At his bedside your father says he wants to talk himself to death. He says he's ready to die, what do you think about that? Before you can answer, he says,
Everything is could have, could have, could have
.

They start giving him morphine. You ask him if his pain is specific or general, and he says,
It's endless
.

He asks you if you remember taking the St. Francisville ferry across the Mississippi with your grandfather, and you have a vague recollection of bright light on shallow water and watching your father and his father eat shrimp and drink beer in a place on pilings where you could see the river between the floorboards, and then your father starts talking about you as if you were someone else. He says you turned out all right in spite of it all. He says he can't figure out what made him trip off the end of the dock. He looks at you and asks,
Are you me?

You tell him your name. You say you are his son.