Even after the two-hour drive, Dad did not disappoint: “Museums. I swear, Verna, museums’d fight to get their mitts on these o’ yers.” Between visits, the tibbling lady forgot she’d shown me her lifetime’s art. Though I felt put-upon, one glance from my Christian father showed me where true duty was. I again followed a heavy artist, fumey with gin. I exclaimed from scene to gritty scene, I asked which grains formed apostle halos (morning glory). I asked, wasn’t that Last Supper’s broken bread maybe … ? “Wheat,” she winked, nodding at her leisure-time pun. “Smart cub you got you here, Clyde.”

“We think so. Takes after his mother’s side in that,” he touched my silvery-blond bangs. I let him. My mom, Dad’s wife, was back home, maybe busy being unfaithful to Dad. His marital “we” always galled—since it left out me.

Clyde marveled at the skill of “Miss Last Supper,” shook his head with genuine wonder. I forever wished I had been born more like him.—I’ve since tried daily faking it. For my students. For my own kids now. But from Clyde, it flowed, most natural. Perhaps because of what I’d had to see at eight, I myself am not so kind.

Before distant service stations, with our family on holiday, Dad would chat up the gas-pumpers. He learned all sort of things. Mother sat examining her nails. Head tilting back, she let her eyes go in and out of focus to make red polish look less chipped. “What does our poor Clyde hope to gain from those colored boys?” she asked her hand. “Look at him, Meadows, forever backslapping. He’ll never even see them again. Your daddy running for mayor, is he?”

Till he spoke, you could miss his character’s many beauties. Dad’s baritone ran ripe as black olives, it soon spread river-delta-wide. Clyde owned a hymn, no, a hymnal of a speaking voice. He hadn’t been a Christian many years. He often mentioned how recently the bright light of conversion had sun-cured Evil’s syrup-dark recesses.

Back home, first grade was new to me and just okay. Mother, alone on her good days, could be lazy-acting but all right. My three friends were pretty much fun, especially when we played down by the ditch. But nothing matched those Packard Bible Sundays with my dad so briefly home.

Our assigned motels bore such longing names: The Whispering Pines Deep Sleep Cabins, Perfect Starlite Lodge, Moonstone Lake Court Retreat ’n’ Cocktails.

They had about them some of the yearning exuded by my father, the half-worldly Christian business gent. They were based in fact but soaked in longing. Motel names combined a New World love of scenery with some mortal nostalgia for the silence we all hail from, the peace we hope to find in nightly, then final rest—

Whispering
   Deep
   Sleep
   Perfect
   Starlite
   Retreat