“I think he was just doing his best, getting along by going along with my mother, whose piety and evangelical fever had preoccupied her family since the last century. She knew no other world – God the Tyrant and supplicant humanity crawling on its belly to be forgiven for sins they never knew they’d committed. ‘It’s no sense defying the LORD,’ she told me. ‘He’s got all the coons up one tree.”
