I’d hoped, by now, to have become the kind of guy that some dishwasher repairman might naturally confess to: his single hidden misdeed, say, as a newly divorced and suddenly lovesick Boy Scout leader. My late father was just such a self-employed confessor-priest. To perfect strangers, Clyde conceded details of his own pre-Christian career at sinning. And that put people at their ease; that lubricated their own worse crimes, then here came amazing sins flying at him, us.

People could see how gentle Clyde was now he’d been saved. He seemed to live daily relieved of some ordeal survived; there’s the champagnelike buzz a person feels on walking unscratched from an otherwise shredding car wreck. Folks believed Clyde’s tales of early bourbon binges (since bourbon bottles are notoriously “easy,” going to the highest bidder).

But when Dad mentioned sins involving “certain ladies of loose virtue,” people grew more still. You sensed they figured, where love was concerned, major money must’ve changed hands. They’d start to doubt his prodigal boasts, my father’s face was that much a novelty item. I felt lucky not to take after him, except—I hoped—in spirit. Like lots of persons born-again, Dad’s best fun involved admitting to the starter decadence. Maybe he forgave my mom her public infidelity because he himself had erred (he claimed) so often in his first, more restless life? Being newly eight and having sinned far less myself, I felt less willing to ignore Mom’s misdeeds.

Dad would gladly drive 190 miles one way on his sole day off to replace a Bible that some clown had packed by accident.

Unlike me, Clyde M. Delman, Sr., never held such Bible-robbers’ crimes against them. I—homework done, arms crossed, tipped back against our Packard’s broadcloth seat, marveling how bad most motel patrons must be. Imagine carrying off God’s Word, and both darn Testaments!

“No,” Dad would tell me. “Pal-o-mine, live and let…. See, to do its wonder-working best, the Good Book’s gotta be in the sinner’s hands. Has to be out circulatin, agitatin. So—fergive a little. ‘It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves.’—Remember, son: A stolen Bible is a noticed Bible.”

I’d spy Doc Dick Dix speeding around town in his glinting white Pontiac; it was a cabin cruiser of a car, back seat piled with the hideously large hypodermics of a doctor to livestock. Dix’s back seat featured black rubber plungers used in the insemination of prize heifers; there were half-gallon cans of things called Bag Balm and Dr. Beemers’ E-Z-On Castration Salve. His vehicle was rigged for powerful shortwave and had two fishing-pole-sized antennas whipping silver angles off its back.

Doc Dix’s old nurse (the young ones, manhandled, quit) radio-dispatched him all over Person County. She voiced him toward troubled cows or barren horses in a territory roughly the size of my dad’s Scripture one.