Set breathed deeply. She watched Abe Yoder run a yellowed, crooked fingernail down a column of numbers and words in a three-ringed binder spread over a pocked wood counter. He had pulled it off the shelf when Ora King spoke to him. Bird seed and work shoes, barn boots gleaming in black heavy vinyl and saddle soaps in tins and boxes--every object displayed like items from a century past--crowded the large room. Bags of feed for various animals lay heavily stacked on the cement floor and green hoses draped in garlands high on the walls. A fresh millet smell of grains hung in the air. Set felt fresh and bold, like one, she imagined, who toiled in the earth, who daily came into contact with soil, and well water, and seeds that sprung into green flame out of warm dirt. Her mind ran onto Hardy and she was thinking with the mind of Michael Henchard when Abe's voice scattered her landscape.
      "No, Ora, I don't see it here. Just think you're going to have to let it run its course. But I'd be mighty careful from now on. Never can tell when them cows are going to slip into something a little more powerful and none of us can afford to lose an animal."
      "Thanks for your time, Abe." Ora King stuffed a hand in his gray coverall's pocket. "Now, let's see. Give me three blocks of salt. No, make it four. How's Dorothea?" he asked, limping after the proprietor. Abe Yoder disappeared into another room. Ora waited and did not look at Set.
      "She's doing fine, Ora. Don't know how you . . . ." Abe said, reappearing with two large white cubes. "You doing all right out there? I know it's been real tough without Nancy. How long's it been, Ora? Bout six or seven years?"
      "It's been nine years, Abe, and, yes, I'm alright." This last statement was abrupt. Both men turned toward the door, each carrying two salt blocks. Ora King looked up suddenly with recognition when he saw Set standing back near the bird seed. His weathered face registered surprise but then readjusted itself. "How you doing, young lady? Are you taking up farming and teaching?" he asked, a gruff laugh just below his words.
      "No, Mr. King. I have neither time nor strength to accomplish what you farmers do. I'm here for bird seed. I have two rather exotic birds--cockatoos, who eat like pigs." She was conscious that they had been brought together by an unsavory event. It was like very casual acquaintances meeting in a foreign country, several seconds feigning familiarity. But the farmer did not pursue conversation. Set watched him load the salt into the back of his pick-up truck. Like most of the Mennonite farmers she had met, he was unadorned, straight to the point, but she liked his wrinkled eyes. She felt a strength and kindness in Ora King. She remembered his gentle words to the woman in white at Shequonur.
      When Abe returned, Set questioned him about the winter feed for Will and Chaucer. She accepted his recommendation and he carried a twenty-five pound bag of winter blend to the trunk of the Toyota. When she turned to pay him at the counter, he said, "You know, it's the durndest thing." Set looked up. "Haven't had a case like Ora's for a while. Couple of his herd got into something that durn near finished 'em."
      "You mean they ate something? And just about died?"
      "Yep, that's about it. Some kind of plant probably. It takes a lot to finish off an animal that big, but Ora's got into something."
      "Is that something that happens often in this area, Mr. Yoder?"
      "Aw, I saw it once. About fifteen years ago, out on Melvin Little's place. Both his sheep and cattle got into some foxglove. Killed two of his Hampshires." He slammed the trunk lid and patted it to signal the end of the transaction. "Now you take care of that peculiar fowl you got out there at the caboose. You sure have an interesting kind of place. You find everything you need? I know Margory had some unusual ideas."
      Set noticed that this Mennonite farmer had a greater need to express himself than Ora King. But she was anxious to get home and prepare for what she knew would be another difficult day in the classroom. She gave a non-committal answer, thanked Abe Yoder, and drove away, thinking about Ora King's cows. But her mind was already crowded with ideas she could not sort out, and so the cows became David Owen and then David became Darby.
      Last night Darby had provided no new information for her, but she had shocked him with her retelling of Lori's visit. His reaction at first had been protection of his keep. She was always amused at his breathing life into every stone which made up the main house at Shequonur. Every room was a gorgeous trinket on a beautiful woman, each entry and window resonated with an organic mystery that demanded respect. "I certainly cannot have a felon inhabiting the old girl," he had spoken tartly. "And I will not have the business going to hell in a hand-basket if the stuff the girl said--Lori, wasn't it--actually means that David Owen had something to do with Sowder's death. Which reminds me, Mother said that Doc Ellison's tidbit will be in the papers tomorrow night. But for the details, I don't know. I suppose the preacher could have done himself in."
      For the rest of the evening Darby and Set discussed various synopses--at first lightheartedly and then dramatically. It was one-thirty before Darby left.
      Now pulled up by the caboose, the garden beyond already dim in early November darkness, Set was tired. She tugged at the bag of seed in the trunk and, when she could not lift it, tore the bag open where it was. She would ask Joe Harmon to help her in the morning. Not a close friend, but a good neighbor. She dipped out a cup of seed, and unlocked her red door with one hand. While the birds fluttered and squawked, she filled the receptacles in their cages. It gave her pleasure to be at this task, far removed from the humdrum of her former life, her beige life teaching in Ludway and Millrun. More than anything she had wanted difference, avoidance of the ordinary, but now the myriad paths of difference had become the ordinary, a kind of upgrade ticky-tacky life. An advanced, fully informed, well-read woman of the eighties was the ordinary. She refused to use the word "Yuppie," for even that term made her more of it. Someone who could fry it up in the pan and discuss presidential policies, and then Keats. A working, confident human who could watch Oprah and then realign fear into fortitude with gleaned information or suggested self-help manuals. So many appliances, VCRs, dishwashers, the complete encyclopedic knowledge of the latest cancer scares, the nightly news with everything in the world piped into her television. And since she lived alone--insisting on her own acceptance of the single life's limitations, the emptiness of certain hours when she wanted to talk to a partner, a companion--she felt even then she was forced to learn the requisite rules of the singles game. There was so much information, too much information. It was all prescribed, nothing was sacred, no thought, no aberrant thinking pattern. Even fear. Strange purveyors of every contemporary deviant behavior appeared and reappeared on her TV. Set felt she could not be different--even by being different. A world of informed, rule-governed, searching, middle-aged women had done it all before her, and better. She had to draw back, and so she did - into her strange painted habitat, her cockatoos, and her friendship with Darby Lambert. With these subtle differences, foiled by an antique landscape--the communal farm-world of the Mennonites, the passion of the Fundamentalists--Set could live. Her mother could never make her beige again.
      Even her recent unsolicited knowledge of David Owen provided her with a difference which she did not consider an ordinary difference. No, she corrected herself, she could not use Lori Sowder's pain as a catapult for her dramatic needs. But if the girl was sincere--and Set was sure she was--didn't the scene indicate something which might be criminal, an event, which, taken with the news of unnatural causes, should be reported to the authorities?
      For God's sake, she thought, I'm turning in someone who is not even suspected for an act whose nature has not even been determined. If David Owen has done something, she paused in her thought, something out of the ordinary, then someone else will have to unveil this revelation. Someone else will have to narc, as the kids would say. Of course, Dar knows now, along with who knows how many students. It would not be her, that's all she knew.
      She considered the moral implications of these last thoughts. She simply had to assume that David Owen is what he seems. A brilliant, Oxford-educated scholar who hails from a small town in the Midwest. He happens to be wildly attractive and well-off, she thought, and a hint of mystery around anything he does only adds to the whole scenario.
      Set's conversation with Agnes Bolton earlier that day had reaffirmed what Don Morrison had told her about Kathy Schmidt and David. The meeting with Agnes, however, had been almost too grim to endure, even for the gleaning of the few pieces which the elderly algebra instructor had provided. Miss Agnes Bolton had taught at East Worthy High since 1949 and had a memory, as Morrison had said, like an elephant, but, as Set had thought at the time, a very hostile and cruel elephant. Tidbits of others' despair and irregular behaviors fell into the cold landscape of Agnes Bolton's mind. Her world was littered with pink detention slips, dates of teenage pregnancies, divorced parents who had let their children run the streets, and steamy love matches which had unraveled before the open doors of metal lockers for forty years. "Times have changed," she had repeated three times after Set found her behind her clean desk top, arranging a set of papers symmetrically in the pages of her grade book.
      "Why, no one years ago, most certainly not the principal, would have allowed that lewd behavior in the halls. Yesterday I saw the Saddler boy actually, actually kissing a young woman in the hall, at her locker. Well, I put a stop to that right there and then, but there's no training, no standards, and I place the blame right back in the home. That Saddler boy's mother I know works at a bar in Greenridge and you know his sister was pregnant six years ago. Abortion, I believe. She didn't do her work, and simply lolled about in class. Why she was channeled into Algebra I, I'll never know. The schedulers," she raised a damning eye over her glasses rim, "have been lax. So much lack of control in the home. Why, I bet not more than half of the students have ever seen the inside of a church."
      "Probably so, Miss Bolton, but that is the way the world is today. I would think, however, that in East Worthy, with all of its churches and traditions, that a greater percentage of students attend church." Set was aware that she had chosen the appropriate jargon for the woman before her.
      "Miss Hunt, you have said it right when you said 'the way of the world,' for it is the way of the world that is leading these youth. You know, of course, that we are living in the latter days? And as far as the number of churches, that is of no consequence." Her small gray eyes did not blink as she articulated these last words. "Do you attend church, Miss Hunt?" she asked tersely.
      "I haven't attended regularly, but I have been at the Owen lectures. I wondered, in fact, if . . ."
      "Yes, I have seen you there, Miss Hunt, but I am asking if you have a personal relationship with Christ? Have you been born again?" The words were pointed and rigid. They carried neither passion nor sympathy. Set was alarmed that this brief encounter had turned, without signal, into an exchange concerning eternity. But she accepted Agnes Bolton's boldness as commitment and caricature.
      "Miss Bolton, I sincerely thank you for your concern, but I usually don't discuss my spiritual life. I've listened to Reverend Miller several times on Sunday morning. He's at the Presbyterian, you know," Set added, attempting to redirect the conversation.
      "I know full well where Aaron Miller speaks, and I am also fully aware of his lack of knowledge. We can't water down the word of God, Miss Hunt. In the end, each of us will stand alone before the throne of God. Each must admit then if he has a personal relationship with the Lord, and that pap Aaron Miller spreads will leave you standing with the mark of the beast on your forehead. The earth on fire. Alone, after the Rapture." Her voice, growing louder, splattered against the math posters with their laminated X's and Y's.
      "Thank you for your concern.," Set offered blankly, watching Agnes's blotched and pudgy hand tremble on her grade book. "I was wondering, speaking of church matters, if you had had David Owen in class?" Set attempted to make this question sound congruent with the conversation.
      "Humph," she responded, pushing her wrinkled arms against the desk to support her weight. She rose to her full height of five feet and one inch, a block of orange flesh. "Yes, he was in Algebra I and Latin with me. We had Latin in those days, you know. But it was all that I could do to keep his attention away from silliness, love interests. He never had a mind for hard work. Not if it interfered with pilfering away his time with other matters." Her voice punched staccato on "other matters." "But, then, what could you expect with the contention and spiritual life in that family setting?"
      "I don't understand what you mean. Certainly David Owen is a brilliant speaker, and in the setting of the church, a brilliant Christian speaker. What about his family?"
      "Trouble-makers, from the beginning. Perhaps at the beginning, at the beginning of Calvary Chapel, they were there. But they got too big for their britches. And the Lord won't endure pride."
      " Tell me what you mean, Miss Bolton, Agnes. I've been impressed by the conference so far. I've attended every night. I'm shocked to learn that Dr. Owen came from a dysfunctional background."
      Agnes Bolton pursed her lips and lifted her papers against her blocky bosom. "The Owens--particularly Lydia Owen--created upheaval. In the church, in the Lord's work. They questioned the Scriptures. They turned a cold heart to the spiritual life of our congregation. They were told by the deacons. They were admonished to soften their hearts. But they wouldn't allow the spirit in." She paused and assumed a placid fold in her upper lip. "It was necessary to remove them from our midst before it infected the work of the Lord." The lip spread out again, almost into a smile, but Set wasn't sure. "I remember Pastor Sowders did it by the book. It was biblical. He told them--and all the deacons signed it-- that it was done because of their unwillingness to obey God's Word by making reconciliation with the brethren. They needed to soften their hearts. Sin. Matthew 5: 22 through 26." She wiped a bead of sweat from the lip. Set could hear the furnace clanking below and up through the radiator at the back. "'Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer. . . ' It cut off the problem at the root. The officers knew that the Lord was in their act."
      "Do you mean they were . . ." she hesitated in using the word, "excommunicated? In this small town?" Set was aghast at the significance of the act, how large in the world of the village.
      "They were told by letter that it was the chiefest desire for them to confess and correct their sin and come back into proper fellowship with God and with us. Their action and attitudes did not comply with God's word or the covenant of Calvary Chapel. And, by the way. the chapel is Calvanistic in its doctrine, Miss Hunt, and, as such, does not subscribe to papist dogma. No man is God and particularly not the man who sits in Rome. We do not excommunicate." Agnes Bolton lumbered up and then to the back of the room. There she opened a cupboard and clutched at a large, simulated leather handbag from the third shelf. When she turned, she kept her eyes on Set, and then swung forward, shoving her loose flesh firmly toward the younger teacher. "Here is some literature you should read. What occurred with the Owens was an opportunity for them to change, to come back to the fold, to soften hardened hearts," she said, clacking the purse open. She pulled up two pamphlets. These she handed to Set. "But as Enid Fout said at the time, we were better just to cut it off, to discourage the kind of dissension in the church that Lydia Owen promoted. And so the deacons acted properly. Bob Fout was on the board then and there's not a finer Christian than Bob Fout. They did it all right. It was proper."
      "But they never came back, I mean, did the Owens not come back to Calvary Chapel. I thought Don Morrison said they started, or were one of the families who formed, Calvary Chapel, that David was just a boy when he was pulled out of some other church. I would think that the effect of such an event would be catastrophic and I . . ."
      "What has the beginning of the Chapel to do with the continuing work of Jesus Christ?" she asked imperiously. "It is the witness and the evangelical work of the chapel which overrides any individual, particularly when that individual has set himself against the Spirit."
      Set believed the interview was nearing its close with this last statement. Agnes Bolton took her large plaid coat from a wire hanger inside a small closet and pushed her round, brown-speckled hands into the sleeves. "The Owens did not return. Now the boy, David Owen, has returned in the proper spirit. I'm glad to see that he did not adopt the ways of his parents. Although he did have a manner as a student here which I could have sworn could have led him into some spiritual difficulties. Why, he spent most of his time lollygagging around the Rogers girl." She slid the top button through the plaid. "Now there's a fine family, or at least she married into a fine family. She married Reuben Schmidt, you know, and that was her salvation, so to speak. Anyway, David Owen has returned and the congregation has welcomed him with open arms. The Lord saw fit to use him for the gospel. He's tempered his life with the love of the Word, and he found out that even those big degrees of his can't change the Word of God. Now you read those pamphlets. They'll explain what I can't in a few minutes."
      Set watched Agnes Bolton's formidable form move squarely around the corner at the end of the hall and then looked down at the paper in her hand. Black capital letters enclosed a cartooned red flame: "WHERE WILL YOU BE WHEN THE RAPTURE COMES???" Set smiled. Below in smaller type, but still roped by the fire, paraded "The Latter Days Are Here. Will You Wear The Mark Of The Beast?" She opened the folded paper. But she did not smile when she read its text: "Gorbachov's forehead could be evidence of that mark. Do not be taken in by world peace. There is no worldly hope for the SAVED, those in the Lord." A cartoon gray mushroom mark extended from a wily enlarged cartoon Gorbachov. She felt a nervous nausea. She stuffed the pamphlet into her grade book. When she finally made her way down the hall, she paused a few seconds under the Class of Sixty-five. Her eyes were drawn up by the unyielding smile of Nathan Sowders, shining, under the glass.

Now, standing in her entry, Set realized that she had forgotten to look in the newspaper. While Will and Chaucer pecked staccato at their filled cups, she opened The East Worthy Citizen to scan the front page, but there was nothing about Sowders there. On page eight she found a small article entitled "Local Minister Dies at Shequonur Estate." She was surprised, though, to find nothing about the "unnatural causes" which Darby had indicated would appear. Visiting hours at the funeral home and the time of the funeral were given. Only one sentence indicated something out of the ordinary had occurred: "The Reverend Nathan Sowders, pastor of Calvary Chapel in East Worthy, passed away suddenly on the Linden family estate, Shequonur, Friday evening. Friends may call at the Sidinger Funeral Home between 7 and 9 to pay respects to the family."
     The cars are pulling up now, she thought, into the parking lot of the IGA and close to the curb at Sidinger's. Lori and Agnes Bolton and Theresa, his wife - they would all be there, and then would come the wrenching scene at the first sight of death, plastered and stiff, mechanical and hard.
      The question came back again to David Owen. Will he be there and Kathy or the Schmidts? But he had said he hated Sowders.
      She knew then she had an excuse to call. She would ask about their arrangement for Friday's senior class. As an act against the finality of death, an act of the living in the face of sorrow or terror, she picked up the phone and rang the apartment at Shequonur.
      “Hello.” His voice was cool. Set felt a surge of shame and impropriety as she listened to her own voice manipulate thoughts over her inner desires. "Dr. Owen, this is September Hunt. I was with Darby Lambert at your apartment." She paused. "On Friday night." She paused again but there was no sound. "What I'm calling about is the arrangement we had made--at the beginning of last week--about my class and . . . oh, perhaps this is entirely the wrong time to call. We can talk . . ."
      "This is exactly the right time to call, Miss Hunt." Owen's voice was warm and inviting now, insinuating that he was pleased with her voice and the moment. "If you are wondering about Friday's engagement with your seniors, please know that I have every intention of speaking to them. Of course, if this is still in your plan."
      "I didn't want to presume too much, that you would be there after . . ."
      "After Nathan Sowder's death?" he filled in abruptly. "I would be delighted to speak to your class, just as we planned. The Reverend Sowders won’t be harmed by our carrying on, will he, Miss Hunt?" Set could not distinguish whether his tone was complacent or relieved, belligerent or contrived. She only knew that it was not connected to tones of death-loss, that it did not derive from sorrow. She could not place his voice, connect it with any event, and so she also carried on mechanically.
      "Thank you, Dr. Owen, for your time. My seniors meet third period. If you could be there, that is, outside my door, room three, about ten o'clock, there will be a few minutes for you to acclimate yourself to our facility, as Mr. Louden refers to our dingy accommodations. I'm sorry we can't offer you a glorious lectern and microphones, all the accoutrements you deserve."
      "I’m quite comfortable in the facility, as Ed Louden calls it. Room three, if I recall correctly, is where I first read Wordsworth under the guidance of Miss Kellogg, uninspired as she was. You needn't apologize." Set had forgotten. David Owen was more familiar with the oiled wood floors and the tiled halls than she was.
      "Of course. I forgot you graduated here. I only this week found your picture in the hall. Before I forget, is there any way I can prepare my class for what you will present?"
      "So you found that wide-eyed boy in the picture? Were you shocked at my age or appearance? Now that I'm a man of the world I more often than not hide those tender beginnings. Particularly from young attractive women like you." His voice was ingratiating, charming. Set's face was warm in the room where she stood alone. How could he even remember her when the moments of their meeting were figured by other people who wheeled in light and death. "Perhaps I should lay out a plan of attack on the subject of epiphany with you in person. Is there some time before Friday when we could meet and plan for your class?" Owen's unsolicited aggression was shocking, out of touch with the moment, incongruous with the day and the events which had gone before. Set was visualizing the figure with the Oxford shirt standing in the dim topaz glow of a conservatory, listening to his inexplicable words which did not connect with form or compassion, and she was utterly persuaded by his marbled and mysterious surface charm. He did not even attempt to hide it.
      "Well, maybe tomorrow night right after school we could . . ."
      "Wait, I have it. It's perfect." His words spun out of boyish energy. "Ivy. Ivy Gilchrist, do you know her, Miss Hunt? Please may I call you September? Your name is so lovely." But he did not wait for Set's answer. "I'm to meet with my old friend tomorrow some time and I think that the two of you should meet. Ivy spends too much time alone and the two of you might have much in common."
      "Darby has spoken briefly of her. I'd enjoy that." Now she hesitated. "Should I pick you up at . . ."
      "I shall call at your home at precisely the hour you choose. What would be good?"
      Set, flustered at this instant plan, a plan that would involve intense physical and mental preparation on her part, offered it quickly: "I can be home about 3:45. I live at the caboose down on Liberty Street. Maybe you know the Margory Dunlap place?"
      "My God, yes. That wonderful configuration of gardens and rambling structures is yours? I used to fantasize about its interiors. I will arrive precisely at 3:45 to sweep you away, epiphanically, perhaps, to another spot which you might appreciate as much as your own home."
      "Do you mean Ivy's place?"
      "Ivy and Ivy's place will make you appreciate," he paused, but then continued, dropping his volume. "Ivy will make you appreciate life."
      "Thank you, Dr. Owen. Thank you, David," she spoke plainly into the mouthpiece. "See you after school." Owen did not reply and Set hung the receiver gently on the wall.
      Disturbed and elated she found herself wandering for an unaccountable period of time about the Keats room and then into the garden room; she could not perceive if minutes or hours had passed when she drew the book from the shelf. Turning the pages so hurriedly that she made a small tear in page 136 of Holman's Handbook, she found the entry on page 180. When she read, she read aloud, into the silence of the walls, "An event in which the essential nature of something--a person, a situation, an object--is suddenly perceived." She looked up and the trees in the garden parted slowly in the soft night wind. "An intuitive grasp of reality achieved in a quick flash of recognition." When she looked up again the lights beyond the trees flickered from Sidingers and three pairs of headlights pulled away into the blank darkness. Maybe from the IGA and maybe from the funeral home. Set kept her finger propped in the pages and whispered into the room, "Epiphany."