Chapter 3: Miss Tabitha
The timing of the break up couldn’t have been better really, not that it helped at all. The timing of bad news is only better in retrospect, and it was too soon for that comfort. I was waist-deep in self-loathing and loneliness. Funny, really, I had gotten used to having only a few friends and being alone for such a long time, I was surprised at how much I balked at the return to my old habits of reading and sketching. I had to work that weekend and had the next week off to visit my aunt in Potomac. Grover and I had plans to meet in D.C. A debauched evening was maybe just what I needed.
When I got to the station, Grover was getting ready for Colors detail. He was gathering the flags and the National Ensign out of the case in the watch room. I offered to help him and we got, Pierce, the kid from Tacoma, Washington to finish the trio. Grover was going on and on about something Petty Officer Hurdle had told him over the weekend, some psychic who lived in town and was supposedly eerily accurate. She lived in the section 8 housing just outside the base in Crisfield and did the readings for five dollars. Grover was psyched to go first thing Monday morning, he had even secured permission from Hurdle to go right after quarters on Monday. He stopped mid-rant, as we were filing out to the flagpole.
“Jesus, you look like shit.”
“Yeah, I think Susan and I are Kaput.”
“Man, I don’t know how you stayed that long with a girl that wouldn’t give you any pussy.”
He could see that he hurt my feelings. He cast his gaze down as if to apologize.
“Don’t worry about it, Wednesday night: Georgetown!”
We raised the flags and finalized plans to see the psychic. Hurdle explained to me how Miss Tabitha was the real deal. She predicted an accident that would kill his sister almost year before it happened. She also predicted the cancer that would afflict his father, going so far as to say he would have lung cancer. I thought about it and was not quite taken with Miss Tabitha’s predictions.
Hurdle described his sister as a party-girl who would often drive over for an underage pub crawl in Myrtle Beach, so her death by car accident is really no real surprise. Who knows how much information Hurdle gave to this woman during the process, or just how vague her responses were. His father, like most men in the Carolinas smoked cigarettes like they were the last things he was ever going to get. So lung cancer in a male from the South is not rare enough to warrant an immediate suspension of disbelief either.
I spent the weekend in a monochromatic fog, punctuated by brief yet frequent visits to the phone to check my voicemail. The only call was from my aunt, confirming where the key was to her place, and that she would see me Monday night. I counted down the time till I would be on the road. From 0800 to 1200 I had the radio watch. At 1100, I ate lunch with the rest of the crew watching Bob Barker on the Price is Right. From 1230 to 1530, we got underway and I showed one of the new guys, a dumb kid from Virginia Beach how to take a vessel in tow. I even watched wrestling that evening rather than read, because it was easier to count off the hours with television’s half-hour division.
Monday came, with no message from Susan and as promised, after quarters, we all piled into Grover’s car and drove the ½ mile to Miss Tabitha’s.
The house was a duplex, fashioned to look like the more beautiful Victorian-style wood homes in the area. When I pulled up in front of her lawn, with its brown grass yard and plastic flowers in the window, I could feel how drafty the places were without having to go inside. I was ashamed at having to work for a government that would provide such shitty housing to its less affluent citizens. The sentiment was ham-handedly concurred with when Pierce said: “God DAMN! This place is a shithole.” Of course, he felt that the poverty of the inhabitants was wholly due to their own stupidity and laziness. While I held the moral high ground of understanding that these folks were a product of systematic racism and lack of economic opportunity. The truth is, these people were poor. Beyond that, neither of us could truly say why or how.
We knocked and were greeted at the door by a youngish black boy wearing a sweatshirt bearing the name of the local high school. He stared at us all vacuously while we explained we were looking for Miss Tabitha. I should rephrase what I just stated. I explained, while Pierce and Grover looked at the floor and shuffled their feet. The boy yelled toward the back for his grandmother, and I caught a whiff of the inside of the house. A strange mix of moth balls and home cooking mingled in my sinuses, shocking me a bit until everything balanced out. It was the olfactory version of leaving a matinee theater showing and having to squint for a few minutes until your eyes adjusted.
We took our boots off in the front entrance and placed them next to the boys hi-tops and a pair of broken black pumps, the heels looked like they had been chopped with an axe. We all sat on a soft couch in the middle of an immaculate living room. The young boy sat in front of the television playing a video game. A well thumbed bible with the name Miss Tabitha Hawkins inscribed in gold letters was carefully placed on the coffee table in front of us. A voice shot out from the rear of the house,
“I’ll be with you boys in just a minute, I need to get this rice done or it’ll burn itself.”
I casually perused the living room while my shipmates were transfixed on the video game. It reminded me of many older people’s homes I had been in as a child. There was a painting of Jesus on the wall next to the dark brown reclining chair that faced the enormous television. After a few minutes of checking everything out, from the family photos to the candy collecting dust in a small dish on an end-table, Miss Tabitha entered the room.
She moved slowly, with the conscious effort of age, but she appeared younger than the Eighty or so years attributed to her by Hurdle. She looked at each one of us and I made a conscious effort to look her in the eye while she explained what the process was. She said that we would meet with her individually in her dining room where she would hold our hands and get a feel for us. She told us not to discuss what she said until we left her house. She then asked if we had any questions. I felt like being a smart ass and saying something like: “Shouldn’t you know?” but refrained. I couldn’t completely restrain myself however.
“Miss Tabitha, are you Pentecostal?”
“Yes young man, I am.”
I could tell this threw her off a bit so I decided to pad the next question. I could also feel my shipmates glowering at me already.
“I don’t mean any disrespect ma’am, but how do you reconcile your use of magic with your beliefs?”
She answered me matter of factly.
“My gift is a gift of the spirit, like speaking in tongues or healing. My pastor don’t see it like that, but my pastor ain’t Jesus, and he didn’t give me my gift for seeing either. The Lord did.”
I was relieved that she didn’t appear offended by my question. She even asked one of her own.
“How did you know I was Pentecostal?’
“I saw your Sunday shoes by the door when we all took our shoes off to come in, and they looked pretty new, except both heels were broken.”
She smiled while she answered: “Boy, they ain't made a heel yet that can stand up to the Holy Ghost.”
My shipmates looked at me oddly while Miss Tabitha and I shared a laugh. She then called them in before me. I became transfixed by the video game, glancing occasionally at my watch, as time ticked slowly by.
After about an hour passed it was my turn. I sat at the dining room table and placed my five dollars into an old cigar box on my right. She took my hands in her bony, dark fingers and I felt a sudden surge of energy, not sharp, but like a dull glow had entered my body. I could not describe it as cold or hot, more like bright wave of light, blunted around the edges as it coursed with my blood. The sensation was so quick; it was like describing a vaccination. The sensation is shorter than the description and the acuity of it fades as quickly.
She looked directly at me, took a deep breath and removed her hands from mine. I saw a tear drop from her left eye, and she deliberately handed me back my five dollars. I was too confused and ignorant to know what was going on at first. I placed the five dollars back on the tablecloth. I started to open my mouth and she spoke.
“I can’t read you.”
“Why not, was it the question I asked?”
“No boy, I’m too old to be worried about any questions from anyone now. I just can’t read you.”
“Do you know why?”
“Yes.”
I waited for a response.
“Do you read the Bible young man?” She asked, looking me in the eyes.
I answered her honestly.
“I have read it ma’am, I only skipped a few parts of Numbers. Why?
“You re-read the gospels son, you re-read them and you come back and tell me about it. I can’t say any more than that.”
I couldn’t resist the smart ass inside any longer.
“I’m not Jesus or the Anti-Christ am I?”
I think she sensed my concern underneath the smart-assed exterior.
She laughed and assured me that it was not a bad thing, but that she couldn’t say any more than what she had already. I stood up as she did and she hugged me quite tightly pushing my five dollars back into my hand.
“I can’t take this Miss Tabitha.”
“You can and you will. I ain’t about to take no charity. Now you go on.”
I took the money, as she was pretty emphatic about the charity thing. Although I felt that she did technically read me. I wasn’t going to argue with her though.
“You come back when you read those gospels, you hear?”
“Yes Ma’am.”
My shipmates were curious as to what happened between Miss Tabitha and I. They said we had been in the dining room for over an hour. I told them and they were both pretty spooked by the whole thing. They revealed that she told them both that would live for a long time. She Grover that he would go back home very soon to live, and Pierce was told that he would get ill but not to worry, this would not debilitate him in any way.
Turned out, she was correct: two months later, Grover was transferred to Coast Guard Headquarters in D.C. Pierce would get the clap from a local girl; something that would get him a standing ovation and the nickname “Seaman Clap” for the rest of his stay in Crisfield. I started to re-read the gospels, but became distracted by self-indulgent grief. The day of the reading sat uncomfortably in the back of my mind though, as it reminded me of an earlier incident from when I was in high school.
I was friends with this girl from a family of semi-sold out hippies that I met at an animal hospital I worked at one summer. Her family clung to many of the stereotypical hippie lifestyle choices: listening to the Grateful Dead, heavy political involvement, but they were Republicans- super conservative gun –toting, vegan, pot smoking Republicans. The girl’s mom made her living doing astrological charts for people. She had quite a thriving business from her South Florida home. I was invited over for dinner by the mom once when she came to pick up her daughter from work one afternoon Over dinner, I was asked a lot of pointed questions about my birth. I volunteered the answers while joking with the girl and her sister at the table, which was super low to the ground and surrounded by Moroccan style pillows. The mother asked what time of day I was born and I told her that I was born in the morning. She became noticeably silent. I pried, but she would reveal nothing to me.
Back at work the next day, the girl began to avoid me. I wondered what I had done wrong, and replayed the evening in my head for any indications that I did something stupid. Finally, after three days of nothing more than common courtesy from my friend, I asked what was wrong. She told me it was something her mother found in my star chart. She refused to give me any details, and when I tried to buy the chart from her mom, I was denied. I remembered thinking that something was wrong with me, but tempering that in my assurance that all of this was simply New-Age bullshit.
