At the same time I was growing up in the suburbs, a boy about my age was being raised in Brooklyn. One day, he, too, would grapple with his faith. But his path was different.

As a child, he slept with rats.

Henry Covington was the second-youngest of seven kids born to his parents, Willie and Wilma Covington. They had a tiny, cramped apartment on Warren Street. Four brothers slept in one room; three sisters slept in another.

The rats occupied the kitchen.

At night, the family left a pot of rice on the counter, so the rats would jump in and stay out of the bedrooms. During the day, Henry’s oldest brother kept the rodents at bay with a BB gun. Henry grew up terrified of the creatures, his sleep uneasy, fearful of bites.

Henry’s mother was a maid-she mostly worked for Jewish families-and his father was a hustler, a tall, powerful man who liked to sing around the house. He had a sweet voice, like Otis Redding, but on Friday nights he would shave in the mirror and croon “Big Legged Woman,” and his wife would steam because she knew where he was going. Fights would break out. Loud and violent.

When Henry was five years old, one such drunken scuffle drew his parents outside, screaming and cursing. Wilma pulled a.22-caliber rifle and threatened to shoot her husband. Another man jumped in just as she pulled the trigger, yelling, “No, Missus, don’t do that!”

The bullet got him in the arm.

Wilma Covington was sent away to Bedford Hills, a maximum security prison for women. Two years. On weekends, Henry would go with his father to visit her. They would talk through glass.

“Do you miss me?” she would ask.

“Yes, Mama,” Henry would answer.

During those years, he was so skinny they fed him a butterscotch weight gain formula to put meat on his bones. On Sundays he would go to a neighborhood Baptist church where the reverend took the kids home afterward for ice cream. Henry liked that. It was his introduction to Christianity. The reverend spoke of Jesus and the Father, and while Henry saw pictures of what Jesus looked like, he had to form his own vision of God. He pictured a giant, dark cloud with eyes that weren’t human. And a crown on its head.

At night, Henry begged the cloud to keep the rats away.

As the Reb led me into his small home office, the subject of a eulogy seemed too serious, too awkward a pivot, as if a doctor and patient had just met, and now the patient had to remove all his clothes. You don’t begin a conversation with “So, what should I say about you when you die?”

I tried small talk. The weather. The old neighborhood. We moved around the room, taking a tour. The shelves were crammed with books and files. The desk was covered in letters and notes. There were open boxes everywhere, things he was reviewing or reorganizing or something.

“It feels like I’ve forgotten much of my life,” he said.

It could take another life to go through all this.

“Ah,” he laughed. “Clever, clever!”

It felt strange, making the Reb laugh, sort of special and disrespectful at the same time. He was not, up close, the strapping man of my youth, the man who always looked so large from my seat in the crowd.

Here, on level ground, he seemed much smaller. More frail. He had lost a few inches to old age. His broad cheeks sagged now, and while his smile was still confident, and his eyes still narrowed into a wise, thoughtful gaze, he moved with the practiced steps of a person who worried about falling down, mortality now arm in arm with him. I wanted to ask two words: how long?

Instead, I asked about his files.

“Oh, they’re full of stories, ideas for sermons,” he said. “I clip newspapers. I clip magazines.” He grinned. “I’m a Yankee clipper.”

I spotted a file marked “Old Age.” Another huge one was marked “God.”

You have a file on God? I asked.

“Yes. Move that one down closer, if you don’t mind.”

I stood on my toes and reached for it, careful not to jostle the others. I placed it on a lower shelf.

“Nearer, my God, to thee,” he sang.

Finally, we sat down. I flipped open a pad. Years in journalism had ingrained the semaphore of interviewing, and he nodded and blinked, as if understanding that something more formal had begun. His chair was a low-backed model with casters that allowed him to roll to his desk or a cabinet. Mine was a thick green leather armchair. Too cushy. I kept sinking into it like a child.

“Are you comfortable?” he asked.

Yes, I lied.

“Want to eat something?”

No, thanks.

“Drink?”

I’m good.

“Good.”

Okay.

I hadn’t written down a first question. What would be the right first question? How do you begin to sum up a life? I glanced again at the file marked “God,” which, for some reason, intrigued me (what would be in that file?), then I blurted out the most obvious thing you could ask a man of the cloth.

Do you believe in God?

“Yes, I do.”

I scribbled that on my pad.

Do you ever speak to God?

“On a regular basis.”

What do you say?

“These days?” He sighed, then half-sang his answer. “These days I say, ‘God, I know I’m going to see you soon. And we’ll have some nice conversations. But meanwhile, God, if you’re gonna taaake me, take me already. And if you’re gonna leee-ave me here’”-he opened his hands and looked to the ceiling-“‘maybe give me the strength to do what should be done.’”

He dropped his hands. He shrugged. It was the first time I heard him speak of his mortality. And it suddenly hit me that this wasn’t just some speaking request I had agreed to; that every question I would ask this old man would add up to the one I didn’t have the courage to ask.

What should I say about you when you die?

“Ahh,” he sighed, glancing up again.

What? Did God answer you?

He smiled.

“Still waiting,” he said.

IT IS 1966…

…and my grandmother is visiting. We have finished dinner. Plates are being put away.

“It’s yahrzeit,” she tells my mother.

“In the cabinet,” my mother answers.

My grandmother is a short, stout woman. She goes to the cabinet, but at her height, the upper shelf is out of reach.

“Jump up there,” she tells me.

I jump.

“See that candle?”

On the top shelf is a little glass, filled with wax. A wick sticks up from the middle.

“This?”

“Careful.”

What’s it for?

“Your grandfather.”

I jump down. I never met my grandfather. He died of a heart attack, after fixing a sink at a summer cottage. He was forty-two.

Was that his? I ask.

My mother puts a hand on my shoulder.

“We light it to remember him. Go play.”

I leave the room, but I sneak a look back, and I see my mother and grandmother standing by the candle, mumbling a prayer.

Later-after they have gone upstairs-I return. All the lights are out, but the flame illuminates the countertop, the sink, the side of the refrigerator. I do not yet know that this is religious ritual. I think of it as magic. I wonder if my grandfather is in there, a tiny fire, alone in the kitchen, stuck in a glass.

I never want to die.

Life of Henry

The first time Henry Covington accepted Jesus as his personal savior, he was only ten, at a small Bible camp in Beaverkill, New York. For Henry, camp meant two weeks away from the traffic and chaos of Brooklyn. Here kids played outside, chased frogs, and collected peppermint leaves in jars of water and left them in the sun. At night the counselors added sugar and made tea.

One evening, a pretty, light-skinned counselor asked Henry if he’d like to pray with her. She was seventeen, slim and gentle-mannered; she wore a brown skirt, a white frilly blouse, her hair was in a ponytail, and to Henry she was so beautiful he lost his breath.