Dad slumped beside his deflated tire at the back of a defrocked former circus tent. Dad stretched out guilty on the ground, dust to dust, flat to flat. He liked to say his life had spun before his eyeballs as he wallowed there in circusy sawdust. He said he saw what they claim a drowner glimpses. “Your life flashes before you—highlights, like. Scenes. Whole perfect Christmas-card-colored pictures. Your Hit Parade of the good times and bad. But spelled in pops, like a set of news-camera lightbulbs going off …”

Clyde swore as how his conversion moment registered like this: till that moment, he’d always breathed through his mouth, and afterward he discovered what the person’s nostrils were drilled there for.

•  •  •

Eight myself, I always pictured a short series of fairly sad events. They’d be lighted like the diorama gallery of some local-history museum—lit too much from directly overhead. I pictured Clyde’s lean parents changing towns real often. I saw the helper, blue-black “Aunt” Sutie, staying put and taking him in. Museums should be phoned. To show successfully his sin-soaked life: Clyde as a train brakeman’s only son, his dropping out of high school to live with Aunt Sutie in her tin can of a hut, the revelation of haberdashery, the pleasure of finding he’d been fated by God for fatherhood.

Listening to his born-again account emerge again, I shoehorned Dad into every picture he described, making each one go more glamorous and movie-ish.

But I sometimes found to my horror, that the man I’d cast in Clyde’s part soon quit looking Clyde-like. Homely Melvin Delman kept swelling into some beefcake film star of the day, a Jeffrey Hunter or Rock Hudson, who, by scene three, somehow turned around and had the head, then hair, then face of Dr. Dick Dix. I canceled that, but Dad’s own cheering grin kept switching back to Dix’s self-satisfied smirk. Even in fantasy, Clyde’s kisser would simply not equate on the silver screen. Not in the pipe-and-jacket role of “Dad.”

Clyde, at the wheel, smiled now and admitted, soon as he had taken Christ aboard as skipper of his Clipper—now that he was married to a woman he adored and had a car this good and a white-headed child as pretty as Clyde himself was not—life felt A-okay. Amen. “Great,” I said. We drove.

I’m pleased he kept his sense of humor, even in his reborn state. That made the saved condition feel a bit more possible to his Bible copilot but secret doubter. It did seem sad—a religion that made things so safe for Mom’s two-timing us once every week. Headed home, I studied Dad’s worried profile.

Taking care never to arrive back early, honking fair warning as we pulled up our own drive, Clyde handed Mom roadside-stand zinnias wound in soggy Virginia newspapers. I presented her with sticks shaped like anything other than a stick. Dad hovered over her bed saying, “Feeling some better, beauty?”