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the flower-banked float holding Miss Junior and Mr. Gay Pennsylvania, both gorgeous in chiffon, and another marching band. Our open limo, a ’68 Caddy with corrosion-speckled chrome, came toward the end.
    The streets were lined with faces, unfamiliar most of them, hatched since “my time,” yet all of them in another sense profoundly familiar, with that Hayesville look, a doughy solidity, a way of sitting, “just so,” on the curbs and porches and aluminum folding chairs brought out to the sidewalk, and with that Hayesville accent in their singsong voices, those voices with always something sardonic and something kindly about them, that small-town mix of street slyness and barnyard slyness, with love in the slyness, and menace in the love. Block after block was lined with these faces; they called my name, they pointed and laughed at my banner. I was trapped and had no idea how to act. My fellow limousine passenger, the Congressman, kept gladly waving, gathering votes; he called out people’s names; he bounced back to these sidewalk crowds their own belief that by being born in a place and staying there year after year they had performed a great and cherishable feat.
    When I tried to imitate the Congressman’s waving, my hands felt like lead. My face seemed imposed from afar, a mask stiff with fear. I had traversed every inch of these streets, as a child, in all weathers, dragging a sled in winter, bouncing a basketball in summer, sashaying in a noisy group of semi-delinquent, cigarette-puffing buddies, or clinging awkwardly to the fragrant body of a solid local girl; but never had I moved as slowly as in this infernal siren-plagued inane caravan. I would have screamed, as one screams in a stalled elevator, but for the illusion that I was in a narrow glass display box and a scream would use up all my air.
    An old classmate, now a beefy master plumber in a denim leisure suit, capered to the side of the limousine and offered me a beer. A middle-aged woman in purple slacks held aloft a sign upon which my face, torn from the cover of a sensational magazine, had been pasted and captionedin Magic Marker with the words NOT THIS BUT JESUS . The parade was heading down Filbert Street now; at its corner with Elm lived a woman who had been kind to me, who had let me sit in her kitchen while her daughter entertained more amusing boys in the parlor—a disconsolate paranoid widow who had always been fighting with her neighbors but who had served me Ovaltine on her porcelain kitchen table and let me shell peanuts into her wastebasket while she told me the plots of the cellophane-wrapped novels she read all day in her dark and manless house. (She rented those novels from the Hayesville Drugstore’s lending library; how gaudy and dynamic and precious books seemed then, well worth a nickel a day!) At her corner the crowd was thick but she, who had seemed old then and would be ancient now, was not present among her neighbors—still fighting with them, I supposed. I looked toward her big front window and, indeed, a watching shadow lurked within, not close to the glass, where she might have attracted hostility, but deep in the aquarium gloom of that living room in whose brown, nappy, welcoming furniture I had once sunk so gratefully, as respite from the exhausting furniture of my own home. I waved, and the shadow in that dim parlor waved back. “Now you’re cooking,” the Congressman told me. “Give ’em the high five.”
    Hayesville tots in strollers clutched balloons and flags. Some tots looked like candy apples, big heads on sticks, their faces smeared with sugar. Older boys raced in and out of the crawling parade, taunting it as they would tease a half-crushed snake. I saw a young father lift an infant to his shoulders, and I remembered my own father’s shoulders under me, and my panicked grip on his high unsteady head, on that brown straight hair of his, hair so fine that in the coffin, while the minister was doing the eulogy,