I wanted to consider him beautiful in some of the ways a lady might be. Kneeling beside him, inches from his face, I could hear cigarette paper crackle with flame as he inhaled. Toward him I felt a sad, almost hypnotized gentleness. I kissed, one last time, my father’s cheek.

“Dad is a Dad is Dad is,” I said, simple as some three-year-old and not my usual grave first-reading-circle self. “And I is me am I. My dad here is the man Clyde Senior and I am really mostly his junior Clyde, and right straight through me, too, sir.”

“Dern tootin.” But his voice came thin. “That’s the spirit. More like it,” but his voice came thin.

Then Dad turned the ignition and we started fast toward our last “drop” today. Smoking hard as if for the very first time, he drove quick, using just one hand. I sensed now that, when by himself, when not poking along with me and singing about God, Clyde usually traveled far faster.

He’d got many speeding tickets in several states and had to hire good local lawyers to help keep his license and our livelihood. Dad maneuvered now with just one floppy wrist. Fingers of his right hand dangled far beyond the wheel. The cigarette was palmed within his left. He kept squinting through blue smoke, kept looking overly concerned or, no, concentratedly aimless. Clyde’s face was set at seeming neutral but its color had failed, grayer, even ashy. I could not yet know what all my question had released in him, the fishhook wickedness of a kid’s innocent asking.

“Sometimes, son,” he said a few miles in, “you wonder if the thing you love most is half enough to somewhat make things up to you.” He smoked and drove. “You want something to come along and punch you in the shoulder and say, This makes stuff worthwhile.” He picked a piece of tobacco off his tongue. “But until that happens, you pretty much have to just bump along, just try and figure out what matters, if anything.—I do try. That I know. I do get tired, like everybody. And I’d be a liar if I didn’t tell you straight, pardner—there’s a lot of humiliation connected with it.”

We whizzed so quick past white farmhouses, checkered laundry draped sodden on the lines, denim and weekday colors absorbing this bright Sunday. (I knew that truly righteous households did not leave clothes out drying on the Sabbath. Christian kids could not play rummy, could not attend moving-picture shows. Mainly you just sat there with your Bible in your lap and thought your private sexual thoughts and waited for God’s day to end.)

At this speed, our Packard, motorcycle-black and snaggled all across with chrome, seemed a different car. Not the stodgy high-mid-price family sedan, not our usual pilgrim Kleenex box. It suddenly felt like something dangerously smooth, and not unwild. I noticed how some people, clumped on a porch, stared after us. One shirtless young man in the front yard stood waxing a new red wrecker-truck as pretty as some toy. I felt proud of the farmers’ attention till I understood we earned it by racing so.