Five hours later, at the bus station, where snow had begun to fall, he handed over his duffel bag and his mammoth suitcase, the lugging of which across campus he’d taken as a foretaste of basic training, and claimed one of the last free seats on the Chicago bus. It was an aisle seat deep in the smoking section, with a baby shrieking in the seat directly behind it. Clem was missing Sharon so much, was aching so steadily at the lost hope of any future meeting, was feeling so persistently close to further tears, that he might as well have been in love with her. Though greater concentrations of smoke than were already in the bus could hardly be achieved, he took a cigarette from his peacoat, flipped up the lid of his seat’s ashtray, and tried to suppress his emotions with nicotine. The monstrous job of breaking Sharon’s heart was behind him, but there was still more work ahead of him today.
Camus was wholly admirable, and his thinking made sense when Clem and Sharon discussed it. When Clem was alone, though, he could see a problem with Camus. Perhaps because he was French, Camus was a closet Cartesian—he assumed the existence of a unitary consciousness that rationally deliberated moral choices, when in fact a person’s real motives were complex and uncontrollable. Clem, borrowing from Sharon, had a good moral argument for giving up his student deferment. But if the moral argument were all he’d had, he might not have written to the draft board. Other strong choices were available. For example, he could have worked to raise public awareness of the immorality of deferments; he could have broken up with Sharon simply because their relationship made it hard for him to study. The particular choice he’d made was aimed squarely at his father.
For the longest time, for more than sixteen years, Clem had admired his father precisely for his strength. In the beginning, in Indiana, where the parish house had been decaying faster than his father could keep up with its maintenance, Clem had been awed, even frightened, by the roping and contraction of his father’s large muscles when he swung a pickax or drove a nail; by the torrents of sweat that ran off him when he scythed weeds on a hot August day. The sweat had a unique, indefinable scent—not stinky, more like the smell of a young toadstool or fresh rain, but still upsetting to Clem in its intensity. （It was a revelation, much later, when he worked for the nursery in New Prospect, to catch the exact same smell from his own soaking Tshirts. As far as he knew, no one in the world except him and his father produced that smell. He wondered, indeed, if anyone else could smell it.） One push from his father at a swing set had sent him so high that he clutched the chains in fear of falling off. One mild flick of his father’s wrist, and a baseball came at Clem so hard it stung his palm through his glove. And the yelling. His father’s voice, raised in anger （always at Clem, never at Becky）， was a sound so blasting that a spanking, which his father did not believe in giving children, might almost have been preferable.
In Chicago, he’d come to appreciate his father’s moral strength as well. When he read To Kill a Mockingbird, in junior high, he recognized Atticus Finch and felt proud. His political views were a perfect replica of his father’s, and they must have been authentic, because they survived his mother’s praise of them. He shared his father’s abhorrence of the Vietnam War and his belief that the struggle for civil rights was the defining issue of the day. During his father’s campaign to desegregate New Prospect’s public swimming pool, he went ringing doorbells by himself, handing out literature and repeating verbatim his father’s words about racial prejudice. Although he didn’t have his father’s scope of action, didn’t have a pulpit to preach from, didn’t ride a bus to Alabama, he followed his example in smaller ways. The jocks at Lifton Central who persecuted the faggots, the wussies, soon learned to keep away from him. When he saw someone weak being picked on, he became so hot with anger and so numbed to pain that he could hold his own in a fight. He mostly wasn’t friends with the kids he defended—they were social pariahs for a reason. He was just doing what his father had taught him was right.
The only sore points between them were religion and Becky. Nothing metaphysical made any sense to Clem, neither God the Father nor, still less, the absurd Holy Spirit, and something had gone wrong from the start regarding Becky, some jealousy or overprotectiveness on his father’s part. Being alone with Becky made Clem aware of a peculiar duality in himself. He would have had a fistfight with anyone who said a word against his father, but he couldn’t stop trying to undermine his sister’s respect for his father’s Christianity. What made this even stranger was that his own ethics were basically Christian. He admired Jesus greatly, as a moral teacher and a champion of the poor and the marginalized. But there was an imp of perversity in him, a sarcastically dissenting alter ego, and being alone with Becky brought it out. He walked her through the absence of evidence for immaterial forces, the lack of hard corroboration for the stories in the Bible, the unprovability of the proposition that God existed, the imperviousness of “miracles” to scientific experiment; and it worked. He made a junior atheist of Becky, and this became another thing that united them, another thing to love about his sister—the way her lip curled whenever God came up at the dinner table.