But we did not. A day was all.

Following which, it was the long, wintry drive back to Jackson and to how events went on there—the leaving and the coming, my father’s appearance on the weekends; my mother and me alone in the little brick house with the sycamore in front. If I could’ve asked them, they might’ve said these were also exquisite times. They were in their forties—the clear-horizon years, when if you had a better idea you could give it a try. Have another child. Find a better job. Buy a new car. Buy the duplex on Congress—which they did. Mississippi was alien, costive, but it was just a small, ignorable part of the whole. My mother didn’t have to work. We had a maid to clean and look after me when she went to the library or to a movie or shopping. She bought a piano so I could someday take lessons. When he was home there was time for picnics at Pelahatchie Lake, for day trips to the Confederate bluffs at Vicksburg, to Stafford Springs to swim, to Allison’s Wells, to Jack’s tamale house, to the bootlegger across the river, to the airport to watch planes take off. I don’t know how other people saw them, or if my life—loved, looked after, cloistered by my parents’ circumstances and personalities—was like other boys’ lives. Again, I don’t remember my mother complaining about anything. But for myself, I must’ve been beginning to sense that his being gone was not the exception, but the ordinary, identifying dimension of everything. People go away. Possibly I was becoming more aware of my father as someone not there, and less aware of him in the days and moments he was actually present. Permanence became something you fashioned. This may have been another lesson he imparted to me.

I DON’T REMEMBER THE TIME OF YEAR of his heart attack—the first one. Something makes me think it was in spring, because when the ambulance came to our house in the middle of the night—the men with a stretcher walking right down the hall—they took him out the front door, and I don’t remember it being cold or hot. I remember only being confused and alarmed, since nothing like this had ever happened in the comings and goings that made up our life.

Everything changed on that night, of course. Remembered time can shift and wander. But I was definitely four. I knew something about absence but I knew nothing about change. I knew nothing about my father’s heart, or about what my mother felt: her husband, aged forty-three, in the Baptist Hospital—where I’d been born—laid out under an oxygen tent, not breathing well. Both of them so young.

We went to the hospital, she and I. Possibly it was later that same morning. I saw him under his big, clear tent—as big as a pup tent. We would say today that he was stabilized, but I didn’t know what had happened—what he’d suffered, how it had felt.