House of Prayer No. 2 Read Online Free PDF Page B

crying and carrying the smell of places where people live who tote water in buckets from a well and go to the bathroom in sheds out back. A lot of the people waiting have long greasy hair that needs cutting. You can tell some are missing teeth when they talk and smoke and spit in the metal trash can by the exam room door.
    A woman in a white uniform comes out with a clipboard and hands it to your father. You can read the top of the paper, and you understand why you are special when you read crippled CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL .
    The doctor has seen your X-rays. He twists your legs and makes your hips crack and pop on the white-papered table. The doctor doesn’t answer your father’s questions. The doctor says he will try nails in your hips. Your father wants to know if the doctor will put the nails in your hips himself. The doctor doesn’t answer your father. He says nails are the best remedy. Your father asks if there is any other
remedy
, and he says it in a way that makes him sound like a smart-ass. The doctor stares at your father and says loudly,
With or without the nails, your son will probably be in a wheelchair by the time he’s thirty anyway
.
    To cheer you up, your father takes you to the Hollywood Cemetery, where some of your heroes are buried, President Jefferson Davis, Major Generals J. E. B. Stuart and George Pickett. You and your friends have spent many afternoons playing Pickett’s Charge in the park across from the Episcopal church, running into withering cannon and musket fire, and because of your legs you are always the first casualty as the minié balls rip into your arms and throat, falling dying in the grass, sometimescrawling beneath the azalea bushes where Robert E. Lee sits astride his iron-grey horse Traveller, him saying down to you sadly,
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it was all my fault
.
    After you visit the grave of the doctor who amputated Stonewall Jackson’s arm and tended to Lee’s heart attack on the eve of Gettysburg, you go see the big black iron dog that guards a little girl’s grave. By the time you get to the grave of Jefferson Davis’s five-year-old son, Joe Davis, you are ready to go home.

    AT THE HOSPITAL THEY strip you naked and scrub you with tar-smelling delousing soap in a deep sink in an old tiled room full of drains even though you had a bath that morning before leaving home with your family. A nurse takes the green cardboard suitcase your mother had packed for you that morning and says she’ll deliver it to your father in the reception office. It’s the green cardboard suitcase you used to carry your cat in. Here are your new clothes, nice and clean, with somebody else’s name in the worn waistband of the donated shorts and in the collars of the two old summer camp shirts. One of the shirts is a good one, yellow, red, and white madras, and in the coming months you will trade for it back when it goes through the laundry and is given to someone else.
    Here is the T-shirt to sleep in, here is a fresh sheet for your bed, once a week put the top sheet on the bottom, the fresh sheet on top, and here is your bed on the sunporch. The boys’ ward is crowded in summer. Your bed looks out over the rigging and masts, the bars and chains of the playground swing sets. Thatnight it will all look like shipwrecks in the grey streetlight when you turn away from the crying around you and stare out through the metal safety rails of your bed.
    Your mother sat in your father’s car in the parking lot earlier that afternoon nursing your baby sister because your mother’s luck has changed. She’s had a baby and she’s going to hell. She and another lady went into the little Catholic church to put fresh flowers on the altar one Saturday afternoon, and the priest came out of the sacristy with a rope belt and Scotch on his breath. Women in culottes defiling the altar.
Whores!
The priest swung the rope belt, and in her weekly call to