Considering it was Sunday, everybody seemed napping or indoors, and so we simply walked undistracted, walked a little closer. Red tulips bloomed in tight rings around trees in certain yards. One sparrow and one jay were splashing at a lady’s salt-white birdbath. The sun was moving to its setting slot.

The more tired he sounded, the more whipped Clyde looked, the more he blotted his forehead with the good arm’s sleeve, the slower he dragged. The longer he lingered, sitting on someone’s curb, the angrier and surer did his junior grow.

“Why don’t you just bust in and stop her, Dad?”

I’d moved around before him. I hardly knew what all I wanted ended. But my directness, coming on again, seemed to hurt him even more. He held the one free hand over his face but still peeked out through fingers’ openings.

Terrible to hear his child confide all this, as some grown man might—to a buddy after many drinks in a dark bar—something the town had urged him to say out plain, something he’d long meant to blurt and damn the consequence.

I pressed ahead, a bossy, confused little boy: “Dad? We’ve just got to run in there right now and make her show she loves you! Is all.”

It was a logical plan. So logical, only a kid would conceive or trust it. I now stood waiting in the Sunday street for my father to join me in acknowledging this sudden good idea. A Bible mission right into our own house!

“Son, son. It’s not like that,” he slowed then stopped. “People do what they do. You decide if you can live with it. But to want to undo everything that’s ever happened to you, it’s like wishing you were dead. One thing leads to another and before long, to send away any of it means you expect nothing else…. After all, she gave me you. You should have seen you at the hospital—all six pounds four ounces. Pink as anything and bawling loud enough to wake the dead.—Haven’t we had ourselves one fine time, though?”

And I realized that he was talking of the past. Already it had become Over, and I was barely eight. It was this, I think, this split in time, that really made me act.

There is the mystery of being male. There is the need to get the seed out of your body to the exact deep spot, and to do that well. Or at least to think you did. You are always being judged by Physics. The long male adventure stories tell how certain men can hunt and plan exactly, can trap any game. The invigoration of How To Aim and Accomplish. All that hit me with such a bath of adrenaline, I became, right there, almost pubescent. In the next few months, my body subtly changed—an unexpected scent like some brass doorknob’s, a sudden gloomy stringiness, my new front beaverish teeth growing positively ridged.