My coach inhaled another unfiltered Camel. He kept his car window open, a huge hand fanning. Dad admitted knowing: every costly “weed” took an entire bowl of rice out of the mouth of some little Korean girl orphan.

  “Name one,” I said. “—Besides, which orphan would WANT a whole bowl of rice shoved in her li’l mouth!”

  Well, this cracked Clyde up so he had to pull over. He chuckled unto coughing then, pointing at his chest, snaffled even at that. Dad retold my quip at each of that day’s far-flung motels. I was forced to rattle through the Bible books ever faster as uninterested eye-rolling adults scanned their lobby’s sunburst clocks.

  3.

  Desk clerks at Pecan Grove and Satellite Sputnik Lodge Acres became our all-time favorites.

  Our pet client was the plump aforementioned seed-art woman (Pecan Grove Sleepytime Auto Cabins, “Serving the Weary Traveler and the Weekly Boarder with Unequal Courtesy Since 1939, New Canaan, N.C.”).

  She made amazing Biblical-topic mosaics from pet-shop and seed-store grains. Verna lovingly called them her “scenes.” Exploiting the job’s abundant free time, she’d already served up twelve door-sized Last Suppers, formed of mostly oats and millet. (Trillions of innocent seeds had been introduced to Elmer’s Glue then crucified onto Verna’s pine planks.)

  Pecan Grove’s cement-block lobby looked positively bumpy with earlier seedy references to Christ’s Passion. John the Beloved’s hair shone, so much glinty barley. Ours was the Golden Age of Hobbies and Shellac. This deep-voiced lady manager, wearing smocks stitched from the giant floral prints of couches, battled a drinking problem that pounced her between projects. “It helps, do I stay busy,” she spoke the homemade way many country people did then.

  Verna sometimes phoned our house midweek. She complained, even to Mother, about the record number of Bibles being swiped from good ole Pecan Grove Sleepytime. “My type clients I’m gettin me here lately, they are true lowlifes, lower. If this place’s sheets could talk prior to Oxydol, they usually do! The Godless is winnin, honey. Tell your men to bring Bible replacements P.D.Q.”

  But even I, at six, guessed: Verna hid the Testaments herself. She was that needy. And her new canary-seed Resurrection had to be seen to be believed.

  Even after the two-hour drive, Dad did not disappoint: “Museums. I swear, Verna, museums’d fight to get their mitts on these o’ yers.” Between visits, the tibbling lady forgot she’d shown me her lifetime’s art. Though I felt put-upon, one glance from my Christian father showed me where true duty was. I again followed a heavy artist, fumey with gin. I exclaimed from scene to gritty scene, I asked which grains formed apostle halos (morning glory). I asked, wasn’t that Last Supper’s broken bread maybe … ? “Wheat,” she winked, nodding at her leisure-time pun. “Smart cub you got you here, Clyde.”

  “We think so. Takes after his mother’s side in that,” he touched my silvery-blond bangs. I let him. My mom, Dad’s wife, was back home, maybe busy being unfaithful to Dad. His marital “we” always galled—since it left out me.

  Clyde marveled at the skill of “Miss Last Supper,” shook his head with genuine wonder. I forever wished I had been born more like him.—I’ve since tried daily faking it. For my students. For my own kids now. But from Clyde, it flowed, most natural. Perhaps because of what I’d had to see at eight, I myself am not so kind.

  Before distant service stations, with our family on holiday, Dad would chat up the gas-pumpers. He learned all sort of things. Mother sat examining her nails. Head tilting back, she let her eyes go in and out of focus to make red polish look less chipped. “What does our poor Clyde hope to gain from those colored boys?” she asked her hand. “Look at him, Meadows, forever backslapping. He’ll never even see them again. Your daddy running for mayor, is he?”

  Till he spoke, you could miss his character’s many beauties. Dad’s baritone ran ripe as black olives, it soon spread river-delta-wide. Clyde owned a hymn, no, a hymnal of a speaking voice. He hadn’t been a Christian many years. He often mentioned how recently the bright light of conversion had sun-cured Evil’s syrup-dark recesses.

  Back home, first grade was new to me and just okay. Mother, alone on her good days, could be lazy-acting but all right. My three friends were pretty much fun, especially when we played down by the ditch. But nothing matched those Packard Bible Sundays with my dad so briefly home.

  Our assigned motels bore such longing names: The Whispering Pines Deep Sleep Cabins, Perfect Starlite Lodge, Moonstone Lake Court Retreat ’n’ Cocktails.

  They had about them some of the yearning exuded by my father, the half-worldly Christian business gent. They were based in fact but soaked in longing. Motel names combined a New World love of scenery with some mortal nostalgia for the silence we all hail from, the peace we hope to find in nightly, then final rest—

  Whispering

  Deep

  Sleep

  Perfect

  Starlite

  Retreat

  —all blinking in the period’s hissing neon tubes—blue or pink—set high above a black silhouetted cornfield’s orange sunset.

  • • •

  I am now forty-nine years old. (I don’t know how or why but am.) I also find myself a linguist, a college dean, and the father of two teenaged girls. It’s mostly for them—I’ve decided, on the windy cliff called Fifty—to set all this down.

  Till lately, I’ve never really thought my life particularly notable. Maybe curious. Funky? Certifiably! But now I see: Modesty itself might be an act of lingering suppression. From Dad, I overlearned the will to disappear. That deathblow—finding Mother pinned under a massive fellow not my Clyde—convinced me: All my boyhood up till then had been quite bland and regular. It wasn’t, though. Because Clyde wasn’t.

  Clyde Melvin Delman, Sr., had a way of giving others almost too much credit. But, afraid you’d prove him wrong, a person grew toward such kindness. You unwittingly became Clyde’s own best dying hope for you. I’d been named Clyde junior but Mom—when asked to sign the birth certificate—just couldn’t abide having “Melvin” attached to a child of her own; so she scratched it out, substituting her maiden name, a prettier M-word: “Meadows.”

  Now recalling our Bible-delivery Sundays, I can say that, apart from lovemaking and research, at no task have I ever been happier. You felt you were doing good. You were getting to have fun on purpose. You left her behind and didn’t need to know what went on. Seeing that could wait. Could wait till two years later and what I call The Worst of All Possible Sundays. That day evicted us from our simple lives and routes. It became our family’s nonrefundable one-way Exodus from Genesis.

  By forcing Clyde to see what he knew too well but forever allowed himself to doubt, I would doom my mother to the public role of Whore; I would fox my father out of his own life. I would lose my place in mine.

  Except, of course, in this. I mean: in holy memory.

  I sit here on a Saturday in my college office stacked with almost-brilliant freshmen applications. Vines have overcome my single leaded window. The electric wall-clock above the door seems to lurch every two minutes with a little snap like baby teeth breaking.

  Given this building’s stillness, I feel sealed voluntarily into some cave of choice. No one knows I’m here. Recalling 1954, I forget the concept of tenure, of divorce. I feel far too young to have a kid myself. Much less adolescent ones with figures, interracial boyfriends, politics already. I picture Clyde’s ungainly features, grinning, unaware of anything but his son. I become eight, then six, and soon transparent. His.

  III. Leviticus

  “Seen Pictured Here in Happier Times …”

  Thou shalt not wholly reap the corners of thy field…. Neither shalt thou gather every grape of thy vineyard; thou shalt leave them for the poor and stranger: I am the LORD your God.

  Leviticus 19:9–10

  And now, before the sight of those two naked grown-ups doing that and little me hopping on board and the lethal harm it worked in all of us, we get to talk 1954–1960. Good deal!

  We’re back before motel chains took over. Chains, indeed. Bible delivery to “automotive camps” (as some of our older clients still called themselves) now seems the ideal chore for recalling that honey of an American moment.

  It was a time of plain good luck, possessed of a simplicity only half dumb. With the world war so freshly won, most everybody made money. That marked it as a great decade to be their child. Treats abounded. Yards were big. The beagles were named Snoops, and our block’s many yellow cockers, Blondie. Our clubhouses, the large crates white appliances had come in.

  Kids love tasks like delivering newspapers. Kids enjoy repetitive jobs and the voltage of giving adults something that they truly need. Add the quantum power of Bibles and you quadruple that pleasure. Our Sunday mission seemed a mixture of a-tisket-a-tasket, hide-and-seek, getting gold stars on your best school assignment. Plus feeding the multitudes from one ambitious Packard trunk, enough sardines and Wonder Bread for all.

  But I was still my mother’s son, and those early motels exercised on me the profoundest erotic pull. Puritanism wants us to believe: a male’s sex desire begins the day he shaves and gets his driver’s license. Ha. Being Grace Delman’s boy, I was born erect. And now that I’m more than middle-aged, only scholarship and romantic love have provided blunting detours around that doggedly upstanding feature! During board meetings, awards ceremonies, even funerals, my thoughts still tend to take a filthy turn. And not toward the healthy sort of married lovemaking promoted by manuals that advertise at the rear of liberal journals. No. Smut. The sexual comics that boys then showed other boys. Popeye and Olive Oyl and Bluto locked in nasty three-ways.

  Trying for self-improvement, I carried more than two thousand Bibles into love nests. Each tourist cabin held itself off separate from others. Every detail of a real home—gutters, chimney, shutters, siding, shingled pie-crust roof—had been lavished on such clubhouses for adults. Cottage windowboxes spilled white petunias epileptically elaborate. Flanking each door, two metal yard-chairs, backs tulip-shaded and painted either red or green. Inside, those portions of the room not varnished or linoleumed stayed mainly Bed. Boat-sized mattresses dented with the signatures of industrial-strength double occupancy. Two all-work adults drove out this way. They rented a hidden bed to serve as—what?—some silly form of trampoline? To help them in their playing … with each other?

  I would find out. Bible-toting, I tracked such knowledge with a glum detectiveness. Boy, would I ever find out!

  Jaw set with my holy mission, arms flapjacked with God’s grim threats and uncollectible promises, I got issued the passkey. One size fit the slit of every single cabin. Like X-ray vision or God Himself, I imagined barging into rooms I had been warned contained “honey-mooners, late checkouts, kiddo.” (Wink.) As I scattered those ineffective poultices and wet blankets, God’s Laws, I sniffed scents my dirty innocent little mind then simply titled “Clues.”

  Of course, I had to earn my passkey. Dad and I were forced to stand at more front desks, inspecting further clerkly handicrafts. Along with cheerful “Miss Last Supper,” our second-best blue-ribbon obsessive was a retired Marine colonel. He grew begonias.

  His plants were huge overtended things that seemed—in being this adored—by now conscious as cats and as smug. Set on the steps of a ladder painted white so as to perfectly display them, these specimens invited light to swarm among their leaves’ embedded red and purple flecks. They looked like chunky angels considering going off some high-dive. That was their coach’s plan; we now faced Parris Island for begonias.

  Colonel was proprietor of Satellite Sputnik Lodge Acres. Colonel spoke of his plants with the stern pride peculiar to drill instructors. The Colonel resembled a leader whose men have just won the battalion colors, some proud guy being interviewed by Stars and Stripes.

  “Now, he”—the crew-cut old salt pointed to one plant especially translucent, serrated, chevroned. “He kept trying to be a slow bloomer. But we got him with the program. Rationed him one pinch of fertilizer per month. And just being so near the other fellows seemed to give him first the idea then the needed get-go, and, well, you can see. With him this healthy, there’s been pretty much no retreating….”

  Our host now studied his spit-shined shoes—knowing some compliment was due him. And Clyde Melvin Delman, Sr., was a compliment in a handpainted hula-girl tie. My dad, as optimistic as funny-looking, shook his head. “Museums. I tell you, Colonel, whole greenhouse-type museums should be phoned about what you’ve got going here…. It’s too much to believe, even for in Nature….”

  The owner did glance up, a longing shyness. To see just how handsome his boys looked in stair-step formation. “Well … with the recent humidity, their stem tone HAS firmed to advantage….”

  My father encouraged everybody: hobbyists, Bible-readers, counterfeit Ollie Hardys, kids, adulterers.

  2.

  It being 1954—our being working-class North Carolina Baptists—school days, ball games, bachelor parties, annual physicals, all commenced with prayer.

  This embarrassed me, a secret pagan, a college-professor agnostic (if still in bud formation). Other restaurant patrons saw fit to praise Jesus via short silent pre-salad nods; I considered this tony, stylish, “European.” Dad proved noisier.

  Clyde felt so glad for even half a grilled-cheese sandwich, he shuddered, closed his eyes, took both my hands in his (salt and pepper shepherded within our grasp). As his molten orange cheese cooled white, Clyde spoke a most unquiet sermonette. “Dedicate the goodness of this food into a strength sufficient, Oh Lord, to bring, Lord, others to Thee. And make of us, Your wicked servants, a worthy …”

  Starving, I sensed others wishing he’d just shut up and eat. Glad only for the fiction of shutting my eyes, I vowed I’d never—once free of Falls and Clyde—ever pray aloud. Certainly not during daylight. And never within earshot of your classier people sampling T-bones. Amen.

  I didn’t much mind Clyde’s benedictions while we traveled. But once we were home in Falls, my little friends from school might see. I peeked around as Clyde’s voice shamed ten tables into whispering, as my nice hot mushroom soup most prayerfully congealed.

  During long rides, Dad never spoke of being a boy. True, he recalled the intricate ankle-level lore of marble-shooting. He still knew how to find my next slingshot’s perfect green forked hickory. But Clyde had no childhood keepsakes; he owned not one photo of his family.

  Mom’s vanity table stood clogged with half-used pots of cold cream amid ancestors in browning silver frames. Good-looking men sniffed past the shop signs of their huge mustaches. The women appeared embarrassed to be so chesty with the buttoned-up predictions of my mom’s own dreamy strong points. But about Dad’s folks, I could fit all known facts into a single folded hankie: his only sister never visited us, sent no Christmas cards, but worked high up in Washington, D.C.’s city government. Their late father, a brakeman on the Atlantic Coastline Railroad, had moved about as often as his trains did. The mom died young of drinking tainted pond water, diphtheria. When Clyde was a kid of twelve or so, his dad transferred north; the boy chose to stay forever with an unofficial stepmom, “Aunt Sutie,” someone he still considered his truest family.

  Though she lived just across the Virginia line, Sutie had never once come calling. I always pictured her as that virtuous side-facing lady carved (oval) into every cameo. She must look like the aunt of Oz’s Dorothy, some stern yet decent stay-at-home. A loving, pasty, aproned lady, this Sutie would know her Bible and make exceptional biscuits. She’d tried to prevent Clyde from becoming a wanderer like his dad. But Sutie never quite saved her skinny boy from a drummer’s route, the cyclone’s upward suction.

  Though I pleaded for news of Dad when he’d been my size, most of his stories began with “my coming to Christ at thirty-three, same age as Jesus when He died. Got in just under the wire.”

  No man more childlike ever kept quieter about his youth.

  3.

  Pop being on the road during the week, I begged Mom to take me to our county fair. “It’ll cheer you up, the rides and all. Plus, they have every kind of chicken possible. They show them in one room. When the man ones crow, it echoes great. You’ll see.” Mom surprised me; she sulked off, brought back her cardigan and purse. “Will this be warm enough, you think?” Grace Delman asked her son, Meadows, age six and a half.

  At the Twin-County Agricultural “Expo,” Mom ate hot dogs before she rode even one thrill-ride. She wouldn’t let me do that. And, boy, it sure did make her sick. She had to be helped off the Ferris wheel. Wedged in beside me, after warning me against even thinking of trying their cotton candy, she got so terribly ill, and in more directions—onto more screaming lower local people—than she could ever quite “live down.” The gallant man who helped her from our “gondola” carried a doctor’s bag. He was blond and tall and hospital-looking, metallic as some big new galvanized country mailbox.

  At first it seemed they had just met. Later, I guessed otherwise. Even I, staring up at how he stared down on her, even with Mom shivery and gone matte-gray as shrimp not boiled yet, even I understood that he had scented her. From the ground, looking up toward this rare smell’s source, he’d sniffed my mom on high.

  The odor of some half-hurt fully horny animal, hers had registered from two hundred yards: the scent was her great backlog of soured intelligence; too many retail novels consumed too fast (all scenery skipped), then never reconsidered.