He was given no pills to take. There would be convalescence—some taking it easy. But from my standpoint, he was in the hospital, and then he just resumed life.

He did set aside cigarettes, though he did not take any exercise. Driving his territory was deemed stressful, and since I was not in school yet, my mother and I rode with him once again, with her now driving. When having me along—age four—became impractical, I was sent to Little Rock to live with the grandparents in the Marion. How long this went on, I don’t know. A year, possibly, with me back and forth to Arkansas; while the two of them did what they’d done before I was born. Lived on the road while he recovered and got stronger. They might’ve loved it.

My age, of course, soon changed that arrangement. Kindergarten and then school. Her helping with the driving was now confined to summer. To stay off cigarettes, he opportunistically affected a pipe, which was thought to be better. He gained weight. He developed hemorrhoids and big corns on both his feet (which he carved away at with a safety razor blade, while seated on the bedside when he was home, and as I watched). He now limped—possibly from the corns. His affect became burdened. His breath was shorter and he wheezed. He lost hair. Something inimical and sinister in the way the company Fords were made—a flaw in the design of the door-front moldings—caused him more than once to close the car door on his hand, wounding him but not breaking a bone. It was before the days of lawsuits for such things. He tried to be more careful. But overall he was weakened.

In Kansas City his bosses contemplated his situation and relaxed his duties, divided his territory into two parts and gave one to Dee Walker. My mother attended him as lavishly as possible. And yet, he very well might’ve felt trapped—trapped inside his defective body, trapped in a now-stressful job he’d always loved, trapped in his car and in all those tiny hotel rooms and coffee shops, trapped as the father of a son he saw only on weekends—when he came home exhausted, needing calm and sympathy and sleep. He might also have felt remote from his only love, whose affections and time she was now required to share with me. He also might simply have hurt and been scared.

I do not know about my father’s faith—if he had any. He might’ve said he did—after his heart attack. But he did not practice one, not as long as I knew him. I know he didn’t take pleasure in books—where he could’ve found what we all find if we don’t have faith: testimony that there is an alternate way to think about life, different from the ways we’re naturally equipped. Seeking imaginative alternatives would not have been his habit.

Like any of us he certainly possessed an ongoing, interior narrative, yet he was not notably inward.