Read Online House of Prayer No. 2 by Mark Richard - Free Book Online Page B

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 lastlifeline 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.
    To the east, the coast is so close seagulls wheel over freshly picked peanut fields, and softball themselves there in flocks to weather Atlantic storms. To the immediate south is the Carolina border, and the accents in your town are more Carolinian than Virginian, the open
o
vowel and the soft lift and glide of end-of-sentence cadence. To the southeast your river delivers its black swampy water to one and then another fresher, larger river that nourishes the tidal brackish Albemarle Sound and then is drawn by the tides through the Outer Banks beyond where the Elizabethans had set foot and then disappeared.
    Since your grandmother has told your mother that she is going to hell, you will not be driving thirteen hundred miles that summer to Louisiana over unfinished interstate in the back of an un-air-conditioned car. You are twelve years old. Your dentist and his family invite your family down to their cottage on the Outer Banks for a week instead. The dentist lets air out of everyone’s tires to drive up the sandy streets. You kids climb Jockey’s Ridge, over one hundred feet tall, the tallest sand dune on the East Coast. Folklore says Satan is buried beneath it. You and the dentist’s children take pieces of cardboard and sled down the gentle oceanside slopes, and you climb forever back up and stand on the dune’s crest. Looking down on its sheer soundside back, you see the sand flooding through the windows of the abandoned houses as Jockey’s Ridge migrates westward by the wind into Albemarle Sound. You are certain Satan is buried somewhere beneath your feet. The ominous white wind that lifts the pretty kites around you is also whisking away the mountain of sand that covers him. It feels as if Satan is buried here and he is not dead, merely sleeping.
    In a shell and saltwater taffy gift shop, your father hands you a box. It is a ship-in-a-bottle kit. You look at it and you immediately know what it means, that when you get home from this vacation, you are headed back to Crippled Children’s Hospital.
    You know the routine; you wait to surrender yourself to the bed with the No Breakfast signs. You follow Nurse Wilfong on her rounds, help her as she tends to some of the younger boys. One day she asks you if you want a job, and you say sure, and she says go up to the office and raise the flag. She says she’s noticed the flag hasn’t been raised in a long time. There used to be anold scoutmaster who came by to make sure the flag was up every morning, but he doesn’t come around anymore.
    You go to the office and they give you the flag, and you go outside and raise it, and