In those days, you could believe more readily in a good God. In ’56, as I rode around the state delivering God’s Word with Pop, “fundamental” seemed a beautiful and basic word. Like “barn” or “tree” or “Ike.”

In a voice as red-clay rolling as that landscape, Dad retold me how he had been “saved” by accident. Rendered downward from the overly complex and selfish to pure-as-well-water fundamental:

Drunk, aged thirty-three, jilted by a girl on their first date (she left the dance with somebody better-looking, as everybody present was), Dad’d swerved to avoid a cow but hit a tree instead. Way out along some nighttime country lane, he found his front left tire flattened. No spare. So Dad, staggering, that looped, was soon rolling one bad tire to the nearest station, right hand already filthy rubber-black. He first heard music then chanced upon a lit-up late-night tent revival in progress.

Thinking he might find a ride to the closest garage, my young father hand-rolled his whole tire through the tent’s rear flap. He let his flat rest in sawdust, he noticed the organ and piano plus a general sense of roiling spiritual commotion that at first seemed merely sexual. Clyde saw the pale bare waving arms of girls sixteen. Cries from grown men came up like private zoo noises: “Oh, urh, unh, take me unk, Chrast.”

And—six minutes later—listening, recognizing, reeling from three words—“sin,” “sick,” “soul”—Clyde said he felt change turn in him like some deadbolt lock unlatching. (Sutie’d told him he would know when.) Dad said that—flat on his back in a matter of minutes—he saw all sorts of novelties swim before his eyes during that spell spent in sawdust smelling of black rubber; his entire sin-sogged life pulled-pranced before him. Clyde said he knew now: Sin was not some minor rule you broke. No, Sin was everything that cut you off from other people. Meanwhile, alongside him, real ladies were literally wholly-rolling in the aisles, their summer wash-dresses wet from sudden between-legs feelings and the specific trance of a distant yet close-in God.

The tent’s boy preacher was hollering just how corrupt he himself had recently been being in mo- and ho-tels (especially the ho-ones) all across our newly expensive South.

The dashing young preacher swore he’d sure acted real real bad, via pills, booze, and do-anything B-girls, sometimes four at a time. (Four women, not just four pills.) The more ladies he admitted waking up with (“wives of friends and, Jesus can forgive anything, the wife of my older brother, the war hero, Christ forgive me what I did to her in front of those young girls, what I did to/with/and/on my sister-in-law and what the other teen Jezebels forced her to perform on them during, oh, do pray for me”), the more the kid conceded, the more his congregation loved him for confessing, the more cash spilled his way, and the more his donors agreed—despite all his vices’ excesses—the boy had not lost one inch of his fine looks.