“You must know, son, I’d give my life for you. And it’s not just something I say to be saying a thing. You should understand how … much I’ve … already … who all I had to …” And here his head bobbed more my way. He made his mouth open wide like some bird dog yawning. Dad resisted showing how bad I’d made him feel. Even so, he let me guess how much I had already taken from him.

—Maybe the belief in something is the thing? The main part of it.

Dad now rested one bone-thin arm along the top of our seat. He had turned almost totally toward me.

“Son, come sit in your real poppa’s lap. We got us some time to burn here. Even with the Colonel being so far off, we’re still running mighty early, us Birdmen in the air upside down. Really upside down today, huh, champ?” So fast then, I climbed over and he took me up onto his legs, he closed his stringy arms around me. And pressed me hard, almost too hard, against him, as if, now he knew what I’d guessed, I must soon be taken from him. He acted like our touch must be forever after rationed.

It had been bad enough when we were only looking at each other, but soon as I curled up and became a full weight wedged between his painted Hawaiian tie and our steering wheel, my father said, “Uh-oh. Fine mess we’ve gotten us into this …” And in a low snort, like making fun of himself, “ ’Fraid this un’s been a long time comin, boy,” and cried. He cried over me. Literally.

My bare arms soon shone wet. Clyde bent his chest, shoulders, forehead over and across me. For a roof. He made a roof that rained. This was a rehearsal for his later howling so our town came running to its windows, but out here in the country, arriving as this sound did from anywhere I’d known, it surprised me even more.

He rocked with it till our Packard’s springs responded. And during, Dad held on to me as if crowds were gathering outside our car to drag him to some tree and hang him while I screamed to get him back.

During, he tried to comfort me. The noises I heard should have told me who he was, all he’d hid from me and others, and what that daily cost him. But I just clung to his bone shoulders, and we both cried so; it was almost calming how full-out we cried. Not like God-fearing men, brave and tromping around in the male countryside. No, we almost sang. Young girls enduring their first cramping pain. Simple together, pressed low beneath it, we nearly yodeled with the hurt’s first smart knifing.