Receiving God’s Word, the farmers grew stern-faced but pleased, very ceremonial, the way country people are, especially in town. They said their “Thank ye kindly”s as much to me as Clyde.

Then Dad and I walked right into Emergency. He was known on sight from where he distributed the Nurses’ Whites at their little graduations and visited the sick so regular.

A blue-black man in a starch-white uniform introduced himself to me and laughed to see Dad. “Well will you look what the cat drug in, what bit you, Clyd-i-o?” My father told, but the short way. How his arm got broke. How we’d got to hurrying. How this here’s what usually comes of that.

Rory said, “Knowing you, you probably already heard the one about the Nun, the Sheep Dog, and the Preacher’s Wife—or did you tell me it, knowing you?” But when he touched Dad’s arm, Rory stopped joking. Dad said would I consider waiting out in the lobby, please. Rory turned my way and was very nice: “We got us many a funnybook out there under the fish tank. You like funnybooks, Green Lantern? Cause my kids do.—But wait one, you’re right banged up too, look at this eye. And little cuts all over him. But this shiner’s half ripe, older then the others.”

5.

It was after they set his arm and did paperwork and swabbed me off and got most of the big glass out of his hand and released him. They said they would drive him home. No problem, not in an ambulance with red lights going, maybe just in Rory’s car, though home was only seven blocks off. But Clyde said no, he was in no hurry, beautiful day like this—are you kidding?—we would hike it easy. Air’d be good for us. We had never made it to our last Bible stop at Colonel Begonia’s out past Edenton. I knew Clyde didn’t want to get us home one minute early.

So, with my small pliant hand holding Dad’s one good sinewy one, with him protecting the bad arm, we set out. He moved old. I squinted up at him, thinking I had never seen anybody age so quick. I blamed the wreck, and not his guessing all that I knew now.

I wish I could quote directly what we said, hiking toward whatever seemed necessary next, one fate awaiting us all. Something had changed in Dad’s spry step and sassier ways. Suddenly his jewelry hung on him like so many separate responsibilities. I told Clyde I would look out for him now, from here on in, now that he had a broken bone and all. He must have heard some new pity in my voice. He must have felt I had ideas about him, ideas even past the father question.

We’d always understood each other. We just guessed certain things. But I didn’t know, at that age, what was appropriate, what not. If I felt a thing, I showed it. (Except about me, Aunt Sutie and him all being possibly partially mainly colored. That, I saved to work on later.)