Clyde, at the wheel, smiled now and admitted, soon as he had taken Christ aboard as skipper of his Clipper—now that he was married to a woman he adored and had a car this good and a white-headed child as pretty as Clyde himself was not—life felt A-okay. Amen. “Great,” I said. We drove.

I’m pleased he kept his sense of humor, even in his reborn state. That made the saved condition feel a bit more possible to his Bible copilot but secret doubter. It did seem sad—a religion that made things so safe for Mom’s two-timing us once every week. Headed home, I studied Dad’s worried profile.

Taking care never to arrive back early, honking fair warning as we pulled up our own drive, Clyde handed Mom roadside-stand zinnias wound in soggy Virginia newspapers. I presented her with sticks shaped like anything other than a stick. Dad hovered over her bed saying, “Feeling some better, beauty?”

“Oh, much … Day and night, you have no idea…. World of difference. And how, pray, were our looney-toon motel-owners making their Ferris wheels out of pea pods and Popsicle sticks, hmm?”

At school, a bully hinted how his own dad said I was not my dad’s, my own dad’s, but I’d been brought by a stork, brought in a horse doctor’s bag, and how “stork” was one word for what’d poked me into life. I clobbered this kid—my blow inexpert but effective thanks only to surprise. When he rose up and came at me, I asked him (with a simplicity that seems to prove, even from here, I was Clyde’s genetic heir), “How could YOU stand to hear that your own daddy was a fake one and had lied to you and that the only really bad man in town was your real dad, hunh?” He’d already blacked my right eye. But my question had the power to stop a bully whose knee I had just skinned if by pure accident.

The question had been fundamental, so it worked.

V: Deuteronomy

“Saddest of Possible Sundays”

If there arise a matter too hard for thee in judgment, between blood and blood, between plea and plea, and between stroke and stroke, being matters of controversy within thy gates: then shalt thou arise, and get thee up into the place which the LORD thy God shall choose.

Deuteronomy 17:8

The Worst of Any Sabbath hid beneath routine: I woke to my usual stubborn if negligible morning erection, to our innocent April sun, to her usual headache.

We had so many Good Books to scatter, Dad let me skip both church and Sunday school. Hooray! We ate our standard lunch but early—baked chicken or corned-beef-and-cabbage. Mom always served Ocean Spray cranberry sauce to simulate its being an occasion.