“Oh, much … Day and night, you have no idea…. World of difference. And how, pray, were our looney-toon motel-owners making their Ferris wheels out of pea pods and Popsicle sticks, hmm?”

At school, a bully hinted how his own dad said I was not my dad’s, my own dad’s, but I’d been brought by a stork, brought in a horse doctor’s bag, and how “stork” was one word for what’d poked me into life. I clobbered this kid—my blow inexpert but effective thanks only to surprise. When he rose up and came at me, I asked him (with a simplicity that seems to prove, even from here, I was Clyde’s genetic heir), “How could YOU stand to hear that your own daddy was a fake one and had lied to you and that the only really bad man in town was your real dad, hunh?” He’d already blacked my right eye. But my question had the power to stop a bully whose knee I had just skinned if by pure accident.

The question had been fundamental, so it worked.

V: Deuteronomy

“Saddest of Possible Sundays”

If there arise a matter too hard for thee in judgment, between blood and blood, between plea and plea, and between stroke and stroke, being matters of controversy within thy gates: then shalt thou arise, and get thee up into the place which the LORD thy God shall choose.

Deuteronomy 17:8

The Worst of Any Sabbath hid beneath routine: I woke to my usual stubborn if negligible morning erection, to our innocent April sun, to her usual headache.

We had so many Good Books to scatter, Dad let me skip both church and Sunday school. Hooray! We ate our standard lunch but early—baked chicken or corned-beef-and-cabbage. Mom always served Ocean Spray cranberry sauce to simulate its being an occasion.

Clyde and I purged his Packard of that season’s pink-and-gray masculine finery, the martini-glass and dice-motif accessories. We counted our Bible-list inventory into cardboard boxes. These had been created to hold canned pineapple and Tide detergent and still smelled sweet or eye-burningly clean. Then off we set. We left her before noon that Sunday I would understand then lose him.

I was freshly eight, quite proud of that, still squinting through the purpled eye. I “rode shotgun.” Bearing down upon our Clipper’s blue leatherette Owner’s Manual, I tried writing a story for third-grade English, the accelerated reading circle.

“Is it going to be a funny story, son?” “Probably bout as funny as I can make it.” “That’s a good thing to be. Funny keeps them glad to see you coming back,” and Clyde added with a moment’s strange bitterness, “Some of them.”

But quickly recovered: “Your mother is a wonderful woman. Grace remembers everything she reads.” Even she admitted this was just not true; she said so often. I looked over at Dad.