Table of Content
So you break your self-imposed no-buying-new-books rule and you get House of Prayer No 2 as soon as it comes out. You recognize the seeds of the novella Fishboy in his experiences at sea. And the seeds of the short story The Birds for Christmas, in which a group of broken boys stuck away and forgotten in a children’s hospital watch Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds on Christmas Eve.
The special child and Debbie play under the big pecan tree where the corn crowds the yard. One day the special child makes nooses and hangs all of Debbie's dolls from the lower limbs of the tree. Estelle, the big black maid, shouts from the back door at the special child to cut the baby dolls down, but she doesn't come out in the yard to make him do this and he does not. She is frightened of the special child, and he knows this. If he concentrates hard enough, he can make it rain knives on people's heads. Usually an audiobook read by the author adds extra authenticity and intensity to the audio experience.
Gebetshaus Nr. 2: Eine Reise nach Hause von Mark Richard: gebraucht
This story is about such a man's openness to a force beyond himself, his gradual yielding to a power that leads him first to love and hence to light. Here’s some pieces that have come off the ship over the years, the oil dealer says. There are a couple of Ulysses’ men in his shirt pocket. The child spends the weekend at the oil dealer’s house with his wife and children waiting for his mother and father to come home from the hospital empty-handed again. The mother starts crying watching the Kennedy funeral on the big TV the father bought to lift her spirits.
A remarkable memoir that is at once a history of a family, a history of mid and late 20th Cent rural Southside Virginia, and a spiritual memoir. It ranges over literature, film, and spirituality, across geographies, and in and out of a man's search for closure, God, and home. Its in many ways the beau ideal of a memoir. Atmospheric and evocative, Richard elicits the sympathy of the reader while maintaining the emotional space that creates the mysterious emotional bond that binds the reader to the author's own search for the known and unknown.
House of Prayer No. 2
It’s a new-aged concept housed in a 14th century building. Starting from the train station on the eastern side of the Old Town, follow the path left outside the city walls. Just around the corner is the Nabburger Tor , the grandest of Amberg’s four city gates. A drawbridge was lowered to allow access across the moat and the gate’s towers were used as medieval dungeons. The USA kept an army barracks in Amberg until the 1990s. The city will celebrate its 1000th birthday in 2034.
The father and the German have become good friends. Sometimes they do their work way back in the deep country away from company supervisors, and sometimes they walk through empty old houses on land their company has bought for timber rights. In the attics they fi nd rare books, old stamps, Confederate money. One day eating lunch in the bottom of the lake, the father and the German fi gure how much more timber has to be cut before the water will reach the shore.
The house of love
Those of us who love Mark Richard's writing often complain that he doesn't do more of it. Yet I'm grateful he chose not to take up residence in some comfy English Department, where he might so easily have missed the variety of experience that has enriched and shaped his understanding of the world and man. The only part of the story the child does not quite believe is that somehow Ulysses was older than Jesus. He doesn’t say anything to the oil dealer, because the oil dealer was being nice, but he will have to ask Miss Perk about that later. On the weekends, they break their promises to picnic with their families at Indian caves they have found and ride everybody around on the bush motorcycles they use to put out forest fires. Instead, the father and the German spend every extra hour of daylight cutting sight lines with machetes, dragging “borrowed” surveying equipment, and measuring chains around the edge of the empty lake.
School did not appeal to him (many of his teachers believed him "special"—and not in a positive way), but he staggered through high school and beyond, worked a motley assortment of summer jobs and drifted into substance abuse, crime and disarray. (At times, Richard sounds like a Southern version of Frederick Exley.) A voracious reader and a wannabe writer, he possessed talent and enjoyed the good fortune of meeting writers like Walker Percy, Reynolds Price and Truman Capote. Esquireeditor Rust Hills helped him, and, slowly, his career emerged. He eventually married, had children, earned success, some fame and many sojourns in Hollywood. God appears in the story early and increasingly often.
The mother won't get out of bed except to cry while she makes little clothes on her sewing machine. She keeps losing babies, and her mother still won't let her come home. The father sends for the mother's sister. They pack a Thanksgiving lunch and drive to Appomattox to look at the battlefields. It rains and then snows, and they eat turkey and drink wine in the battlefield parking lot.
The father and the mother meet some new people. The new barber plays the guitar in the kitchen and sings Smoke! He is handsome and wears so much oil in his hair that it stains the sofa when he throws back his head to laugh. His wife teaches the mother how to dance, how to do the Twist.
Richards was a very brave man, and he didn’t let his situation of crippled hips destroy his love for adventure and learning. Richards eventually became a very successful writer and against the odds proved doctors wrong as he passed the age of thirty and was still walking. For a while I think some memoirists have all the luck in the characters they have been dealt, but then I think that it takes more than a camera obscura to be Vermeer. In this case it's not even only the additional gift of felicitous writing--there's also the spirit of someone whose physical debilities cause him to categorize pain in colors but who refuses to be slowed by the fact that he is a wreck.
The German and his wife have two children the special child is supposed to play with. Once, when the special child was spending the night, a hurricane came, and Freddie wet the bed and blamed it on the special child. After that, the special child broke a lot of expensive windup cars and trains from the Old Country. There's the big German, Gunther, with the thick accent and his wife who manage the dairy on the edge of town. They have a German shepherd named Blitz who does whatever Gunther tells it to do. The special child is frightened of the vats of molasses Gunther uses to feed the cows.
Crippled by deformed hips as a child, Mark Richard was told he would spend his adult life in a wheelchair. The son of an unpredictable, violent father and a mother who sought inner peace through scripture, Richard spent his bedridden childhood in the company of books. As a young man, he set out to experience as much of the world as possible before his hips failed him.
One whole Sunday the father and the mother spend the day digging and digging, finally unearthing a cannon-sized piece of iron agate. On Sunday nights she calls her mother in Louisiana and begs to come home. Say you have a "special child," which in the South means one between Down's and dyslexic. Birth him with his father away on Army maneuvers along East Texas bayous.
From the helicopter the father uses to reseed the forests farther south, you can still see Sherman’s March to the Sea, the old burnage in new-growth trees, the bright cities that have sprung from the towns the drunken Federal troops torched. Yah, yah, zat iss in der past, says the German, you must let it go. The little girl downstairs is named Debbie.
The author nearly lost me as I listened to his story. He doesn't sugar coat the life he lived during his late childhood and early adult years, a life that drove his mother to her knees in prayer. However, I had to discover what "House of Prayer No. 2" had to do with a young man living so recklessly. For what I learned about writing, what I learned about life outside my protected conservative Christian bubble, and what I learned about God's redemptive love.
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