I have lied. To myself. When Anne died, things were not “idyllic” and pastoral and perfect. Memories have a way of censoring themselves, calling up only the sweet, the pleasant, the joyful . . . rarely the pain or the hurt or the uncertainty. “Things” had never really been so smooth or so dear. Perhaps for Anne. But the truth is I’ll never know. And therein lies the problem. I believe she was completely unknowable. That lack of knowledge hurts. Even now. I would talk to her, intimately, revealing, confessing, explaining as though she were the perfect Mother of Jesus, and she would hold and coddle and comfort. But she never confessed or revealed to me. She would talk—oh, she was a master of small talk, of conversation, of changing the subject, of evasion. I knew I didn’t know her. I would think: But how much does any man know his woman, or a woman her man? And I would convince myself that it is normal to have that distance, for one-sided relationships to exist. But she could also be cruel.

It took a long time for me to actually “come to God.” I had accepted that I had the Call from my teenaged years, sitting on a mourners’ bench during a revival meeting, weeping real tears of fear—for I had a fear of God then, not a love, just that Old Testament awe of the Most High, and I believed in him as firmly as I believed in spring and autumn, as firmly as I believed in the power of fire and the cold death that awaits beneath the ocean. “He’s real,” goes the song, and I sang it with true conviction.

I was baptized at thirteen, given the right hand of fellowship, joined the usher board, worked on this committee and that, studied the Bible with a true verve, reading it over and over, much to my grandmother’s pleasure. I became the model Christian in the eyes of the congregation of First Baptist. Visiting the sick, teaching Sunday school, all with nods of approval from the deacon board and the mothers of the church, all with a stern look of approval from my grandmother.

By the time I was fourteen, Isador had gone off to school. Franklin had proven to be a serious student, a hard worker in the fields, and an excellent athlete, respectful and dutiful. But in the end, just like his uncles, he loved women more than he loved the Lord. So I became the pious one, the holy one. This drove a wedge between us as he started high school and started going out on dates, while I, the Bible-studying, humble little brother, remained behind. He couldn’t tell me the dirty jokes he and his friends chuckled over, or the nasty pranks they had pulled, or exactly what he did to those girls he took out in Malachai’s old blue Ford. He never tried.