God, Fate, Chaos Intervene via a Star

FROM THE NORFOLK LEDGER-STAR

October 1971

OUTER BANKS REEL FROM SECOND STORM IN LITTLE MORE THAN A MONTH

HATTERAS, N.C. — Residents of the Outer Banks began the familiar work of clearing roads, pumping water and accounting for neighbors this week after a second major storm struck the coast in little more than a month.

For families on Hatteras Island, the latest flooding came before repairs from the previous storm had been completed.

Telephone service was interrupted in several communities, roads disappeared beneath water, and reports of missing and displaced residents traveled slowly between villages. Boats were used where automobiles could no longer pass. In some areas, authorities acknowledged that complete information concerning evacuations and rescues might not be available for several days.

Coast Guard crews worked throughout the emergency, joined by fishermen, local residents and private volunteers arriving from communities along the Carolina and Virginia coasts.

Some came carrying food and blankets.

Others brought boats.

Church groups organized collections and temporary shelter, while volunteers traveled into flooded areas looking for residents who had been unable or unwilling to leave before the storm.

One Hatteras resident described the response simply.

"Everybody was looking for somebody."

The full accounting of property lost may take weeks.

The accounting of people, officials hope, will come sooner.

——————————————

The South Carolina fishmonger handed the mullet across the counter wrapped in yesterday's newspaper.

"Fine one," he told the minister's wife.

She smiled stiffly and wrinkled her nose.

Indeed.

She missed catfish.

She thanked him and carried the purchase back through the heat.

Her husband was seeing to the taking down of the revival tent. There were chairs to fold, ropes to pull, canvas to dry before it was rolled, and a dozen other things that apparently required one man's supervision and several other men's labor.

They had been given the use of a little house while they were there.

House was generous.

It had two rooms, a porch that leaned toward the road, and an outhouse that seemed much farther away at night than it did during the day.

But it was clean enough, and people had been kind.

People were usually kind to Reverend Elijah and his wife.

They traveled up and down the coast spreading the Word to anyone willing to hear it.

Sometimes to people who weren't particularly willing.

They had preached beneath canvas, in churchyards, on beaches, from the backs of trucks, and once from the deck of a borrowed boat in a harbor where the congregation remained in their own boats, tied together and drifting gently while Reverend Elijah preached salvation across the water.

That had been something.

What they did not have was children.

Perhaps the Lord had intended them to give themselves more completely to His work.

Miriam believed that.

Most days.

Today Miriam was tired.

Very tired.

Tired of fish.

Or at least this kind of fish.

She quietly and selfishly missed seafood étouffée and the blackened, spicy dishes of Louisiana. She missed the little cakes and pastries.

She missed pretty dresses.

But she had sinned so much to have those things.

What had once seemed almost an adventure—a rescue, even—had grown tiresome.

She was tired of seaside towns.

Tired of the heat and humidity.

Tired of the packing and unpacking and putting up and taking down.

And this wasn't even their revival.

The Reverend had asked to be part of it and then enthusiastically helped himself.

She was tired of sleeping in beds belonging to strangers.

Sometimes on cornhusk mattresses.

Tired of women asking whether she had been blessed with children and then making the little sympathetic face when she said she had not.

What a question!

To ask a woman.

What if she had miscarried?

Didn't they understand what it was like to be a woman in the world of men made by God?

Sometimes she imagined resting her head in the lap of Jesus.

Sometimes His mother, Mary.

She was even tired of her husband's Hellfire voice when he got onto one of his tangents and began speaking as though the Almighty Himself had temporarily loaned Elijah His lungs.

She carried the mullet into the little kitchen and laid it on the table.

Its eye looked at her.

Miriam looked back.

The eye was much too alive.

The mouth turned downward at the corners, and for one foolish moment she imagined the fish was sad about what had happened to it.

That was a sin.

Animals did not possess human thoughts. The Lord had given man dominion over the creatures of the earth. Feeling sorry for one's supper was foolishness at best and perhaps something worse.

She chopped off its head.

The head went into the bin.

She opened the belly, pulled out the guts, and prepared the fish for supper.

There was nothing animal in what she did.

There was no connection between her and the thing she was going to consume.

It was a gift from God, that was all.

Smelly gift.

Bony gift.

Mullet.

There would be plantains and turnip greens with it. Someone had given her a lemon, which was a luxury, and Miriam sliced it thinly. She put two slices into their drinking water and arranged the others over the fish.

She stood back and admired it.

For just a moment she felt like a lady in a fine house.

Even if the fine house had two rooms and an outhouse.

Pride.

Another sin.

Oh, how she could count them up.

Sometimes she thought perhaps that was why God had given her no children.

She struck the thought immediately from her mind.

Another sin.

A woman presuming to understand the will and mind of God.

Sometimes she wished she couldn't think at all.

Having a brain didn't serve her.

Forgive me.

She closed her eyes.

Forgive me, Lord. You know my heart.

Then she finished setting the table.

The fish was ready.

The greens were ready.

The plantains were ready.

Elijah was not.

Miriam sat.

She waited.

The food cooled.

She waited longer.

Finally she rose and began cleaning the kitchen because waiting became less irritating if one's hands were occupied.

She gathered the mullet head and entrails and folded the newspaper around them. There was a burning pile behind the house where their hosts disposed of what couldn't be used.

She was nearly out the door when a word caught her eye.

HATTERAS.

Miriam stopped.

She unfolded the paper.

There was blood on one corner and something slick from the fish along the fold. She wiped her fingers on her apron and read.

For families on Hatteras Island, the latest flooding came before repairs from the previous storm had been completed.

She read on.

Telephone service was interrupted in several communities, roads disappeared beneath water, and reports ofmissing and displaced residentstraveled slowly between villages.

Miriam's eyes stopped there.

Missing.

Displaced.

She continued.

Boats were used where automobiles could no longer pass.

Boats.

She read the word again.

Boats.

They had a boat.

Not a grand one, but a good one.

Elijah had insisted upon it after the harbor revival. There were souls inaccessible from land, he had said.

Miriam kept reading.

Coast Guard crews worked throughout the emergency, joined by fishermen, local residents andprivate volunteersarriving from communities along the Carolina and Virginia coasts.

Private volunteers.

Boats.

Missing and displaced residents.

Families on Hatteras Island.

Miriam slowly lowered herself into the chair.

The fish guts remained bundled beside her.

She had gone to buy their supper.

The fishmonger had chosen the fish.

He had chosen the newspaper.

He had folded it.

He had placed it into her hands.

Miriam had not asked for this newspaper.

She had not been looking for Hatteras.

Yet here it was.

She carefully tore away the soiled portion and folded the article along its crease.

She would save it for Elijah.

For Reverend Elijah.

She still did that sometimes.

Jasper.

His name had been Jasper when she met him.

Jasper had been a grifter and a petty thief and a womanizer with beautiful hands and a talent for discovering what people wanted to hear.

But Jasper was dead.

Now he was the born-again Reverend Elijah.

Elijah had explained that he had not chosen the name himself.

The Lord had placed it upon his heart.

Miriam had never asked why the Lord had chosen the name of one of His greatest prophets for a man who spoke so frequently of his own humility.

She had thought it once.

Only once.

Then repented.

Just as Lucy was dead.

Lucy had done things Miriam no longer permitted herself to remember in detail.

Lucy had survived however she could until Jasper found her.

Then Jasper found the Lord.

Reverend Elijah had baptized Lucy beneath the water and raised Miriam in her place.

He had saved her.

She cleaned his house.

Made his bed.

Lay with him frequently to purge his carnal urges.

She was saving him just as he had saved her.

He told her this, and she believed him, no matter what he asked her to do or perform.

Sometimes she woke in the night and he was already praying for forgiveness.

She kept hoping for a child.

God had saved them both with this arrangement.

God was decidedly strange in His arrangements.

Sometimes she didn't feel loved.

She felt used.

But that was her own selfish pride.

Her imagination.

Her troublesome female brain.

Her uterus had infected her thinking.

That was why she needed Jasper.

He could think for her.

She meant the Reverend.

Miriam lowered her eyes.

Reverend.

Reverend.

Reverend.

She repeated it twelve times under her breath.

Jasper was dead.

Jasper was also wanted in a few localities.

And now God had placed this into her hands.

Miriam looked again at the words.

Families on Hatteras Island.

Missing.

Displaced.

Boats.

Private volunteers.

A cry for help.

Their next mission awaited.

She folded the newspaper carefully and started to place it beside Elijah's plate.

Then stopped.

No.

That was too obvious.

He had to find it.

Miriam carried the newspaper to the counter and left it there.

Carelessly.

Like the messy housewife she was.

She missed it.

She left it.

He would see it.

He would read it.

And God would speak to him.

Miriam sat in the little two-room house with the leaning porch and the distant outhouse and waited expectantly for her husband to come home.

Between them sat the message God had sent.

Beside it, the fish grew cold.

____________

Jasper came into the kitchen the next morning with his first black coffee in his hand.

The newspaper was in the bin by then.

Miriam had given up.

He looked down.

Stopped.

Reached into the bin and pulled it out.

His eyes widened.

"This is a message from God!"

Oh, Lord, Miriam thought.

Lucy was not all dead.

She knew the look in his eyes. She knew the tone in his voice.

They were going to Hatteras.

Of course they were.

They would depart on a high note, Reverend Elijah at the helm, bound for Hatteras Island to save the lost souls.

What no one knew then, and what perhaps no one would ever know—especially Jasper and Lucy—was that Jasper was still a grifter.

He was an alcoholic. He could be grandiose and wildly certain of things that existed nowhere except inside his own mind. He talked endlessly of God, quoted the Bible, and repeated sermons with astonishing skill. He was an excellent and intelligent mimic. He could hear another preacher deliver a sermon and later reproduce not only the words but the pauses, the rising voice, the sudden whisper, the hand placed solemnly over the heart.

Sometimes he improved upon it.

Jasper could deceive people.

The more dangerous thing was that Jasper could deceive Jasper.

By the time he became Reverend Elijah, the grifter and the believer had become so thoroughly entangled that even he could no longer have said where one ended and the other began.

And Lucy, despite all his efforts, had been born with a brain.

She had even learned to read and do arithmetic while living in the house of ill intentions.

She was quiet.

Sensitive.

Nice.

She had provided services to men who told themselves they could no longer enjoy their wives and required certain bodily comforts elsewhere.

Lucy didn't know this was wrong.

How would she?

It was simply what happened in the house.

Men arrived.

Money changed hands.

Women provided what the men had purchased.

By the time Jasper appeared, Lucy had begun growing bored.

Bored with the house.

Bored with the other girls.

Bored with the customers.

She did not understand that some part of her mind was starving.

She thought she was full of sin.

Then Jasper came along and explained everything.

Jasper was very good at explaining everything.

Especially after a few sips from whatever he kept tucked inside his coat.

He envisioned a life without sin.

A life governed by God's will.

A life in which the past could be washed away and a person could be born again.

Most enticing of all, he described the grand adventure of it.

Lucy was fourteen.

Jasper was twenty-two.

Tall.

Handsome.

Certain.

A knight in shining armor who had appeared at the door of the house of ill repute and offered to rescue her.

So Lucy went with him.

Years later, she would call that salvation.

Years later still, sitting beside a cold fish and a newspaper from Hatteras Island, Miriam had almost forgotten there had ever been another way to tell the story.

………………….

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