Daddy said nothing for a few moments. “I’m sorry you were there today,” he said. “I’d have wished it otherwise.”

“I know that,” I said, and told him good night.

I slept that night, more than I thought possible. I woke once and the radio clock glowed two-twenty. I wondered if Allen was awake. I thought how nice it would be if I were lying with his chest pressed into my back, his knees tucked behind mine. A breeze ruffled the curtains. Crickets and tree frogs gave voice to the weeds and branches. I’d often had trouble sleeping well in Laurens and Columbia and always assumed the reason was the sound of cars passing, neighbors shutting doors and dragging trash cans to the curb, but now I realized it was also what I didn’t hear—rain on a tin roof, crickets, tree frogs, owls, whippoorwills—sounds so much a part of the night you didn’t even notice them until they were absent.

I thought about the words I’d almost said to Daddy. “What can be spoken is already dead in the heart,” Luke had often said. Nietzsche. I didn’t believe that was always true. But words could be easy, mere movements of the mouth. As I lay there trying to articulate what I felt toward Daddy, toward myself, the words rang hollow—hollow and self-serving.

Eventually I sank back into sleep. I dreamed of a face staring up at me from the bottom of the pool at Wolf Creek Falls. The water was murky but it slowly began to clear, the face becoming more and more familiar.

REVEREND TILSON HAD AGED SINCE I’D SEEN HIM LAST, IN large part because of the heart attack he’d suffered in December. New lines creased his face. The slump in his shoulders was more pronounced. He had been an energetic man who rarely stayed behind the pulpit when he preached. Instead, he’d roamed the aisles, Bible in hand, still only when reading a passage. On summer Sundays he wore no suit or tie but preached in a white short-sleeve dress shirt and his one suit’s black pants. Sweat soaked his shirt, sticking to his skin like gauze to a wound. When I was twelve he carried me in his arms into the Tamassee. I had felt his biceps tense against my back as he’d eased me into the water.

“You’re a child of God now,” he told me, as I’d come sputtering out of the water, “and ever always you will be.”

Now, sixteen years later, he paused between each step as if uncertain the ground would support him. His son helped him down the trail to where the rest of the congregation gathered on the shore below Wolf Cliff Falls, but once on the bank he walked alone to the water’s edge. He turned his back to the falls and faced his congregation.