House of Prayer No. 2 (26 page)

Who is that grey-haired man standing in the corner of the room?
he asks you, and you don't turn to look, because you know there's no one there.
There's a cat in the room
, says your father,
I can hear it
.

YOU TAKE A ROOM
at a motel across the street from the hospital. Often when you go over, your father is sleeping. When he's awake, you're careful to let him spend time alone with his wife
and stepdaughter. A black nurse finds you leaning against a wall in a hallway staring at your shoes. She tells you to be sincere in your forgiveness and walks on. When you see your father again, he says he's down to the bottom of the deck.

When your father is lucid, you ask him about all the work he did on the lake property. He says the black man who sold him the lake property feared retribution if he allowed your father to build an access road through his property. That's why your father hired so many local black workers to help him, the black stonemason who built the beautiful wall that was the only landmark on the lake for years. When the black road contractor lost the bid to pave the road, he wanted to see the numbers of the winning bid. As your father tells you this story, he begins to search through the top sheet on his bed looking for the paperwork from forty years before.
Save all these bits of paper
, he tells you; he says he wants to read the history later. When you try to ease out the door, he says,
Nobody likes to be left out, is what I'm trying to say, please?

YOUR FATHER IS DYING
, and he is angry with his own father. He tells you a trip to his father's grave affirmed all the hunches he's always had, but he won't say about what. He says he had a little room off the garage to build his radios and his father took it over to work on his clocks. Your father is getting himself agitated. His wife says for him to think of a quiet safe place, and he settles down. You ask him what place he's thinking of, and he says it's a stand of bamboo in the back corner of his house where he used to hide when he was ten years old.

One morning you go to the hospital, and there's a rush of people in and out of his room. Your father says he's going, right now, call a priest. You ask a nurse to call the local Episcopal priest as you and your stepmother try to comfort your father. A little while later a large black man in vestments comes in, and your father rallies to ask,
Who the hell are you?
There's been a mix-up; the nurse called the African Methodist Episcopal church by mistake. The pastor says he can still pray for your father, and your father tells him to get out. Your father's anger rejuvenates him, and it's good to see. Now the pastor is angry, saying that maybe your father could at least pray for all of us, since people close to death are closer to God, and your father refuses to pray for anyone, and you can tell that if he had the strength to get out of bed and bum-rush the pastor out the door, he would.

You get ahold of Ben, and Ben comes as quickly as he can. Your father is glad to see him. With you standing there, he tells Ben that it's going to be hard to say goodbye to you this time. He says you're a lot like him and that's what scares him. Your father apologizes for not dying. He says he got his times mixed up.

Your father slips deeper and deeper into the morphine. The last night you remember having a conversation with him, the movie
Carousel
was playing on the overhead TV with the sound off, and your father was watching it intently. He motions for you to come over, and when you do, he whispers,
Who are those two men folding that shroud in the corner?

After that your father sleeps and sleeps. You go across the street to a funeral home and make arrangements with the undertaker. Your father has said he wants his ashes to be scattered
offshore of the Outer Banks. The undertaker has just installed a new crematorium; your father will be the first to go through it unless someone else dies in the next day or so. The undertaker tells you about a sixteen-year-old boy who was just visiting two weeks before on a school trip, the teacher wanted to show the students what life on the streets could lead to, and at that time the sixteen-year-old boy had laughed the loudest when they toured the embalming room, and now the sixteen-year-old boy is in the back on the table himself, draining.

YOUR FATHER HAS BEEN ASLEEP
for two days and two nights; you don't know what to do. You have a feeling that they will keep upping the morphine drip until it's over. You've been there two weeks. He may never wake up.

And then you get a call from Melvin. You haven't spoken with him in months; he says he has just had you on his mind, how are things in California? You tell him you are actually in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where your father is dying. He says he's on the interstate driving home from Greensboro and he's coming up on the Rocky Mount exit with the blue hospital sign, and in about ten minutes he meets you in the hospital lobby. Long ago you have stopped believing in coincidences.

Melvin takes a room in your motel, and he has a quarter of a plastic bottle of bourbon, and you and he finish it and go out to dinner at a chain steak house, and you tell him all about what's been going on and what's been said these last two weeks. At the end of dinner Melvin says he thinks it's time that you went home
to your family, and you both later realize that that is the supernatural permission he had come to give you, though neither of you know it at the time.

In the morning Melvin goes up to the hospital room where your father sleeps and helps you rouse him. You introduce Melvin to your father, and Melvin leaves to let you say your goodbyes, and Melvin says later that your goodbye was awfully fast, that it was almost as though you were following him out the door into the hall.

You follow Melvin to his home in Virginia Beach, and you cook a big pot of gumbo for his family and leave it to simmer, and then you go down to Sandbridge Beach, way past the cottage Melvin saved you from before, you go down to the preserve where you had taken the girl from California on a break from handing out campaign literature and you had seen a red fox with a bushy red tail and had taken it as a sign that you would marry her, and you go out on the empty beach, and a couple of miles down you find the keel spine and wooden ribbing of an old shipwreck that a nor'easter has thrown up on the beach. From where you are to Hatteras south they call it the Graveyard of the Atlantic; there are over six hundred shipwrecks out there, and this is not unusual. The next storm will take the wreck back out again.

You sit, and you are very tired, and you try not to repeat the Rolltop Mantra of being disappointed in yourself. You worry a hand-hewn wooden peg from a joist on the keel of the wreck and put it in your pocket and start to walk away, then feel superstitious about taking it, so you walk back and kick the peg back into place, and the next night you are sleeping soundly at home in your bed
with your wife and sons in California. You had said goodbye, and when he had asked,
So, this is it?
you had said,
This is it
, and when he had offered up his hand, you had taken it and shaken it and put it back in the folds of his sheet.

BEN'S GENERAL PHILOSOPHY IS
people are generally doing the best they can. He tells you this as you wait for a Wanchese charter boat to take you through Oregon Inlet to the ocean buoy beyond, where you will scatter your father's ashes off the Outer Banks per his request. You talk about your father and his famous anger. Ben says he may have inadvertently angered your father when your father appeared one afternoon at one of Ben's little parishes with his next wife-to-be and insisted Ben marry them on the spot. Unprepared but willing, Ben cast around for a witness and was only able to enlist a handy black janitor. Ben says your father fumed and didn't call him for years.

You tell Ben how you had adopted the Rolltop Mantra to defuse your father's anger after the aquarium incident. The thermostat on your father's beloved aquarium went on the fritz, and your father kept turning the heater up and up until the neon tetras and black mollies and guppies leaped out of the hot tank, landing in little gummy blobs on the dining room floor. While cleaning out the aquarium in the kitchen sink, your father saw a much smaller boy give you a thorough whupping in the backyard. Tapping on the window with his class ring, he summoned you inside. Your father shook some water off his fingers, landed a flying tiger across your face, then went back to rinsing the
aquarium. You learned that whenever your father summoned you, especially to stand next to his rolltop desk, where a hundred cigarette butts smoldered in a large glass ashtray, you could re-cage the tiger simply by reciting,
I am very disappointed in myself
.

You rent a beach house for yourself and your wife and your two young sons, none of whom will be going on the charter boat. The morning of tending to your father, you go into the ocean alone at dawn, just when the convenience-store posters say not to, reminding people about the two fatal shark attacks that have recently happened just north and south of where you enter the water.
AVOID SWIMMING ALONE AT DUSK OR DAWN IN A RISING TIDE
. You make it out past the double sandbar, feeling the edge of a rip current so strong at one spot that it's as if your legs are tangled in sheets. The waves are confused but insistent. They keep coming—their nature, their job. You swim and then try to make it in without dislocating either of your two new hips.

Your surgeon would not approve of this. Even with the two new hips you are still in the habit of looking down so as not to trip. You have always hated the way you walk. Once, walking with your wife, holding hands on a boardwalk, she said to look down and see your shadows together, and you refused. You won't watch the reflection of yourself approaching storefront windows. A friend, possibly the boy from college with the melted face, said it wouldn't be you without the way you walked. He said it's as if you're wading through something no one else can see. You stagger up onto the beach, find your towel, and wonder if that noise you heard was a sonic boom from Oceana Naval Air Station to
the north or something else. With several pounds of titanium hip and femur in your body, you're cognizant of lightning. You're the first off the beach when thunder rumbles. When you lived in Virginia Beach that summer in the rich girl's attic, a beautiful black-haired girl who rented boardwalk bikes and always wore a long one-piece bathing suit was split open down her chest when lightning found the zipper there.