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paper, and you can almost see through it.”
    This Bible felt almost as thin as a New Testament. It was like a little fire truck — not a big clumsy fire truck. It was small and swift and would maybe be easy to understand because it was thin, and it felt good in his hands. “Was he a preacher?” asked Henry.
    “He was a Bible salesman. Spreading the Gospel that way.”
    “Why did you need the scissors?”
    “Oh, I just need to cut something in a minute.”
    Henry walked to the front window, saw the man open his car door and place his valise inside, then look over the top of his car down toward Mrs. Albright’s house, knock a cigarette up out of a pack, pick it out with his lips, put the pack away, and then light the cigarette with a match cupped in his hands. He looked back at Aunt Dorie’s front door before he got in the car. He seemed sad.
    He backed out of the driveway, turned, and headed down the hill. He slowed and turned into Mrs. Albright’s driveway. Henry wondered about Mrs. Albright’s husband. He got killed in a war about the Spanish something. He was a hero and left behind a widow and two children. Uncle Jack said Mrs. Albright’s daughter was unhappy because she didn’t have anything wrong with her, so she left home. Aunt Dorie said you were supposed to take care of orphans and widows. Widows were not the same as black widows. Black widows ate their husbands, Uncle Jack said.
    Dorie walked to the window, stood beside Henry, and looked down toward Mrs. Albright’s. “We don’t want to worry Uncle Jack about buying a new Bible, so don’t say anything to him about it. I’ll tell him.”
    “Since Mrs. Albright had Yancy, does she still have him?” asked Henry.
    “She had Yancy, yes,” said Aunt Dorie. “What do you mean?”
    “Does she have
him
the same way he has that
ball
in his neck?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Like you can’t throw it away.”
    “Well, that’s right. I guess that’s the way it is,” said Aunt Dorie.
    “But some things you have you can throw away.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Why do they both have the same word, ‘have’?”
    “I never thought about it. Come on over here and let’s look at your Bible.”

1939
    T he teacher, Mr. Harris, talked along. New Sunday school year at Antioch Baptist Church. Henry and five other nine-year-old boys sat in wicker-bottom chairs in the church basement classroom, a framed picture of the twelve-year-old Jesus on the wall — the picture that was on their Sunday school quarterly cover and on the walls in several other rooms throughout the children’s classrooms — along with other pictures, including Jesus with little children at his feet, outdoors somewhere.
    “God created the light before he created anything else,” said Mr. Harris, “and then he made the land and the water and he made it separate. And then he made all the plants. Then God made the sun and the moon and then after that the stars.”
    Mr. Harris, a heavyset man wearing a white shirt, one collar point turned upward, and a blue tie with red fishing reels on it that his wife had ordered from a catalog, half sat on and half leaned against a small table in the room. He paused between sentences and looked from one boy to the next. If you kept your eye right on them, one after the other, they were more apt to behave. Teaching these boys was a mission that fed into his view of himself — himself as one of the people that if allowed to run the world could help make it, by golly, a pretty good place. He had a sense of mission. “Then he made the fish and birds,” he said. “And then he made all the other animals. Then God made man and woman to have dominion over all the animals.”
    Mr. Harris owned his own upholstering company now, got all his business learning without any college, and would for sure continue upward in the world when he opened his second store, in Grove Hill. The business world was about fully recovered from the Depression, electricity had