The physical difference between us was so obvious, people on our Bible route never mentioned it. But I could see them, scouting back and forth, amazed at how little the barley-sugar Ollie looked like his tall dark frizzled Stan.

Once the Colonel said, “Our young recruit must have a very very bea-uuu-tiful blond young mother, is all.” Someone else, studying the fineness of my features, asked Dad if he’d been plain as a child. “Dern straight! Takes years. You can’t get this ugly all at once!”

I still longed to meet his sister. Had he been the family runt? Even as a kid was he the butt of jokes around his house? Had Nursemaid Sutie been his only friend?

I looked fairer if more frail than Clyde. True, our minds worked in different ways, but that’s what made Dad’s trusting presence such a sunny pleasure to my cooler and more watchful nature. (Only later would I see my childhood fascination with sex as latent proof of who my driven, shameless parents truly were.) But then the idea of being genetically beholden to the rooster man I’d first met at the fair, it felt beyond me. It saddened me till my whole white-boy weight felt like one blacked eye throbbing all over. What pained me most: how such rumors cut me off from Clyde.

Still unaware of them, he drove slowly toward Edenton, toward begonias and the far-flung favorite of our territory’s unburned motor courts. It seemed that silence was our only enemy today.

“Dad?” “Yes, son.” “I was wondering.” “What about? Shoot. Is it something about out of the Bible? Because if you want me to go over that part again—background of ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son …’—I will. I’ll tell you the little I do know on that score, a not-educated man like me:

“Seems like God made this earth all up, then He got just one thing really perfect, His Only Boy. And then God hauled off, let Him be killed by worthless fellows like me. And just so’s God could save the killers … Well, that kind of sacrifice, it’s way past anything we’re ever gonna understand. Still, it’s important to try. But the exchange of good for bad and back again is mighty doggone complicated I can tell you.”

“Not that. It’s something I don’t know how to ask about yet, but need to.”

“Welp, we got nothing but time, pal.” And Dad hummed a few bars of something part hymn, half Tin Pan Alley.