I leapt the five feet down from Clyde’s window. Then I ran back toward them jostling my way, me screaming, “Howdy. Please, quick, my dad’s hurt. Howdy, hurt in there …” I was pointing as they swerved around me, their shoes hard on pavement, a beautiful manly motion directing all of them.

I saw one slither through our car’s open window and soon start trying lifting my dad out. Clyde looked dead. Even at his liveliest, with the big knobby hands and large head, he could act slack, some demonstrator puppet man. He now appeared looser still. Like he had given up on everything, or been abandoned by it. Hard to explain how changed he seemed from earlier, and not just from being knocked clean out. Maybe it was my guessing aloud I was another man’s. Maybe it was Dad’s even suspecting that I knew his race and history.

They slapped him, one fellow cupped a handful of water from a ditch and threw it at Clyde’s face, and they were working his head from side to side. I waited behind them, winded, as he finally opened one eye.

“He drunk, son?” the oldest farmer asked, no judgment. “No, sir. He is born-again,” and then it seemed to me Clyde really had been. After seeing him pulled out of the driver’s window like from the wrong side of something black’s body. The oldest farmer pointed: “For a man, sure is wearing a lot of jewry.”

“Sells it for a living, sir,” I said.

“Well … that’s all right, then….”

Clyde stared at me as at some short adult stranger.

“Stand out where he can see somebody he knows,” the farmer said, then shifted Clyde’s shoulders forward just a bit too rough. “Know this youngun? Recognize this here boy? You got him some kind of upset, but you’re all right. Know your own boy here?”

Then, hurt at being called “upset” by people unknown to us, I understood I had been crying without noticing—like it was just a more serious way of breathing. I drew close to Dad, I did my Ollie, puffing my pink cheeks, fooling with the phantom tie, aiming a slow-burn eye-roll: I offered him my all-time funniest expression. And I saw Clyde start to smile his best crazed hopeful grin. It always made a kind of pocket dawn—the way it opened, breaking horizon-to-horizon across the most unlikely pleasing face. But, soon as he smiled, I saw him remember. I saw him know I knew I might not be his.

Then he fell back into the big hands of the men propping him forward, he let out one pinched cry straight up. It knocked me aside with shame for what I’d done—asking, insisting. Clyde’s groan scared the fellows holding him.

“Could be it’s his neck,” one said, professional. “Don’t nobody shout out like that unless he’s got something’s bad broke.” Come to find out, it was his arm. “He’s favoring the right one,” the farmer spoke of Clyde as of livestock. “Look at him guard it, like. ’At one’s busted, sure.”