But we’d lived in the new suburban places, too: Alcoa, where my father did something involving, of course, aluminum; Oak Ridge, where he was a night watchman at the nuclear plant; and Nashville, and towns that are nameless to me now. Towns where we could walk to shops, like the after-Christmas day my mother and I walked to Woolworth’s, after Aunt Marguerite had sent me a card containing a dollar, and I discovered just how far a dollar might go: a wooden paddle with a pink rubber ball attached by stretchy elastic, a jigsaw puzzle of a windmill or waterfall (individual pieces cut to resemble Florida and the Liberty Bell), liquid stuff for bubble blowing, and this delightful object: a sheet of cardboard picturing a bald man under a plastic bubble, iron filings inside like so many shaved black hairs. When you moved a magnet attached by a piece of string, voilà!—spiky hair, beards, goatees. We walk home down Ramses Street, me carrying my big paper bag of things, the volume of them somehow more important than the particulars, past the stop signs and the parking lots, the lonely bench where black women waited for the bus.

Your mother was raised a Catholic, my father says, by her grandmother, who was from Ireland, but there wasn’t any Catholic church; everybody was Presbyterian, and her brothers used to go to a little place called Fortner’s Chapel. They kept snakes there, rattlesnakes to handle when they got to praying. Some of them got bit, but nobody died, not that I ever heard about. They didn’t take to Catholics in Sweetwater, but the old lady took her off by herself and taught her the rosary and that kind of thing anyway. They’d pray to Mary, and everybody was hopping mad when they found out, but you don’t tell an old Irish lady what to do. They must have been the only Catholics in East Tennessee. Your mother wanted to be Catholic later, but I wouldn’t let her.

The world of the stories my parents told—the country world—was just imaginable to me, though already remote. Eating a squirrel, frying up a possum in a lean winter? It was a life they wanted to move away from, even as it comprised the chief substance of their language, their figures of speech, their songs.