Darby turned the painted panes under the gooseneck light. "You see, there it is, the mark. Somewhat related to a girandole. Sat on mantels. There was a fine piece on girandoles in the October issue of Light News." He rotated the dusty fixture again. "The Rush Light Club was going to run a follow-up . . . "
      "Please, Darby. It's cold," Set said.
      "This might have hung just about here," he said, lifting it over his head toward the high dirty ceiling in the office. He seemed oblivious to the others.
      "What about that broken place, Dar? Are you going to hang it that way?" Set asked wrapping herself with her own arms. The office was not heated and all three, Dar, David and Set, were moving briskly and spasmodically to keep warm. "And what do you mean it might have hung here? I thought you said it came over the Appalachians with the first Lindens. They didn't live in this building, did they? I thought this was post-Civil War." Set's body shook convulsively with the damp cold sustained in the stone. "Could we move this antique inspection into some heat? I can't stand this much longer."
      "I should have brought the space heater in from the shed. This room is always like a barn, well into May. In summer, glorious, in November, a veritable icebox. It used to be a small study for Adelaide, the General's first wife, you know." Darby laid the broken fixture in a cardboard box he had pulled from the littered desk. "Well, we could go upstairs or, David, perhaps we could step into your apartment? The kids should be back within ten minutes, if they abide by your limit."
      "Of course," Owen replied, and pushed open the heavy door leading from the make-shift office into his apartment. He twisted the Levelor blind wand, opening up the window to the graveled drive. The conservatory door stood open a crack. Through this sliver of light the several potted plants which Darby kept year-round, poked their green under the gold light. "We can keep an eye out from here." Set thought how quaint David sounded - keep an eye out, an odd phrase.
      "Yes, Set, this building did come after the War, but Darby's little light could have hung in Ivy's house," David added. He pulled off his gloves and blew into his hands.
      "Ivy's? I don't get it." Set perched elegantly on the side of the old sofa and crossed her legs. She knew her argyle socks looked Ralph Lauren and she wondered if David noticed the rich brown tweed in her knickers. But he did not look at her as he spoke. Instead he gazed out onto the ragged frozen weeds lining the lane.
      "Ivy's house is one of the oldest around. It is indeed the original Linden home, a double log cabin, erected by the patriarch when he first came into the valley. I think it actually went up about 1815," Owen said.
      "Correction. 1817. Thomas Linden brought his wife Sarah and six children with him, up from the Ohio River, in June of 1816 and the home was completed by March of the following year," Darby interjected pompously. David turned around and smiled.
      "I yield the floor to you, Mr. Lambert." Leaving the window, he shuffled some papers into his worn attache and picked up a piece of clothing beneath an old card table which acted as a desk. Set noticed then several socks and a shirt strewn about the room and found it surprising that this dapper Oxonian should be so careless with his clothing. "Faith has mislaid some things," he offered casually. Set's heart made a thump in her chest. The green scarf trailed around the leg of one of the cheap end tables.
      "Actually, the Linden family inhabited the cabin only until 1839 when the structure was transformed for a brief period into a coach stop, an inn if you will." Darby had taken on the cadence of the tour, the prepackaged information which was repeated ten times a day to squirming kids who slobbered suckers over their mother's neck, while fathers urged older children to look at the Indian relics in the case. Midway through a tour, one individual--one of three obese young women from Illinois--had asked if they were in Shawnee Caverns, a tourist trade three miles from Shequonur. Darby had winced, then smiled wickedly, and said, "Yes, these are the Shawnee Caverns. Be sure to pick up the brochure as you go out. It will give the full history of these underground formations." The fat women all nodded in knowing appreciation and the seven other people in the group looked confused for a few seconds and followed Darby into the library. No one asked for an explanation. Darby had told Set this story several times, and now as he expounded on the Linden light fixture, she hoped he would not tell it again. He had fallen into the smooth mechanical inflections of the Shequonur tour.
      "Your knowlegde is amazing, Darby. It far outstrips the memories I collected as a boy. I admire what you've done here," David said. Set felt guilty about her own irritation toward Dar when David responded with such warmth, a kindness which could have easily been replaced by sarcasm. Darby could have been a scapegoat for any minor anger in that situation, but just as David had done when he lectured to Set's class, he offered empathy. This empathy understood Darby's need to be in charge, to be master of Shequonur.
      "Tell David about the woman who thought this was the Caverns," Set laughed into the conversation. "One woman actually thought she was in a cave. What possible explanation can there be for such stupidity?" Set said trying to be a part of the other two, not realizing she was repeating Dar's story.
      "Listen, I've practically heard it all when I guided here, so I can believe anything from the touring public," Owen said.
      "I didn't realize you guided here," Darby said breaking his monologue pace. "When was that?"
      "O, just two summers between my Junior and Senior years and college. I used to dread the bell when the cars came over. Old Mrs. Linden would keep a pointed eye on me to be prompt at the door. She would be out in the drive or yard practically waving semi-fore to the wandering groups. They would emerge from their cars and she'd spit under her breath, 'Cattle.' She always referred to them as cattle." David smiled recalling the scene. "Like I said, I dreaded the bell. I was usually in the library pouring over the General's books, when I heard the wretched sound and I was like a Pavlovian dog, reacting to terror."
      "Why were you terrorized?" Set asked.
      "I was shy, I guess. But most of all, I didn't want to repeat the line I was to give, over and over." David realized that he could have offended Dar and added, "Sorry, Darby, I loved the history of the place, but my love could not balance against the repetition of facts I had to spew forth. And I was so young. Just seventeen, eighteen. I didn't have my life under control." Owen winked at Set. "But I did learn much that summer. On most occasions I could wear the mask of presentation sufficiently well to get by."
      "Then you must be very familiar with the original cabin," Dar said, not responding to the idea of facts and masks. "I've wanted to get in there for years, ever since I took up residence at the estate. That's been, yes, it's been six years this coming June. And I've never felt comfortable enough with your friend Ivy Gilchrist to ask."
      "Dar, it's wonderful. It's quaint, stacked with Ivy's collections. In a strange way it reminds me of Aunt Margory's place." Set was rarely able to refer to the caboose as her own place. It was always Aunt Margory's. Now she was repeating information which she had already given to Darby. She knew Dar would act devoid of facts about the cabin, allowing her this opportunity to make chatty conversation about something which might interest David.
      "She's a rather odd old bird, isn't she, David? Those white dresses, and a veritable isolation. I've rarely seen her, maybe," and Dar holding up both hands, "maybe ten times during the past six years. That's incredible. I mean, I keep my privacy, but this woman is positively catacombed."
      David had opened up the door which led into the conservatory; a gold patina, radiating dimly from the glass beyond, etched the apartment floor. "I would appreciate very much if you did not refer to Ivy as an odd old bird. She has been my very dear friend for many years. Your words make wounds in me for her. Yes, she does keep her privacy, but what could be safer or more intelligent in a world which turns your private troubles into grist for conversation mills." Owen was firm, edging on anger. "But why don't we change the subject? With Thanksgiving coming up, I assume you two will be celebrating with some real American turkey and dozens of cousins and aunts?"
      Darby looked stung. "Well, David, I truly am sorry. I was callous. Heaven knows, I believe eccentricity to be an asset. I was simply flinging words about, not realizing how much this woman means to you." Set liked Darby. His arrogance was not greater than his humanity. We all have our quirks, she thought, wondering about the glossy shell which hid the quirkiness of David Owen. "Thanksgiving will be brief and full of turkey. Mother and I will be dining practically alone. My cousin Patty and my aunt and uncle will be with us. But, believe me, mother and I will be alone. The accumulative brain power there with Patty, Uncle Tim and Aunt Judy altogether will be less than an average five-year old's. There are some dim bulbs on that side of the family; good hearts but dim bulbs." Set laughed but was uncomfortable thinking of her own plans which loomed gloomily in the distance of this week.
      "What about you, September? Where did you say you were from? Or did you?" David asked.
      "I probably didn't," Set forced out. "Just a small bedroom factory town up around Toledo. I'll be home with Mom and Dad. Probably my brother's family, and my sister. I haven't heard all of the plans yet. Mom's still firming them up. But we haven't even asked about you," she said directing the conversation to another area. "I mean, you certainly won't be going back to Pennsylvania for the day, will you?" Her face was animated as the spectrum of possibilities for Owen's Thanksgiving washed over her.
      "Not home, certainly. I have some revamping of my conference material. And if that doesn't suffice, I can dip into notes for my new . . ."
      All three looked up startled when the knocking began. Then came the loud crying into the wind. "David, David, are you there?" the voice raged from outside. Faith's car won't start, Set thought, but why would she not just come in.
     By the time David reached the door, Set realized that something was terribly wrong with Faith. But when Owen opened the door Aaron Leib stood with twisted face under a fur cap. It looked ridiculous with its ear tabs and Russian dome.
      "Aaron, what in the world," Owen said, pulling the little man into the room. "What are you doing out here?"
      "I seen them in your car. They had your car and I seen 'em in the drive. They were laughing. I think three of them," and he held up three disjointed fingers. "I was out there cleanin' up, you know, in the little grove, for Ivy and that's when I seen 'em."
      David patted the back of Aaron's big plaid jacket. "It's alright, Fellow, I let them . . ."
      "Boy, oh, boy, oh, boy. Not seen this for one whale of a time. Since you and me and Kath were here. You know, the night we found the letter. Not for one whale of a time." He walked abruptly to Darby and leaned into his face. "You run the place now, don't ya?" Darby drew back covering his nose with his hand. Aaron's breath was sour and filled the apartment space like steam from cooked cabbage. He whirled on Set. "Hi, Teach."
      "Hello, Aaron," Set replied weakly.
      "Now, Aaron, I really appreciate you keeping an eye out for my car, for me." Owen patted Aaron's back again. "But you just go on with your chores for Ivy. Everything's . . ."
      "This place is real purty. But not like it used to be. There used to be a real big table there and me and Kath sat on one side." He dipped down toward where the imagined table might have been. "You talked with Mrs. Linden. Boy, was she ugly." He tittered and his eyebrows twitched. "So if you say so, David, if you say so, it'll be okay about the car. But you keep an eye out, hear. Kids can do a lot of damage." He slapped his hands together, a signal that he had dispensed with this problem. It was touching to see this damaged person feel his own worth. He knew what he had to do; he had perimeters of task. Owen stood beside the door, his hand on the knob. But before Aaron could be dismissed, the gravel rattled underneath the tires of the Porsche. The engine was low and smooth as the car swung around the circle of drive in a final salute to the occasion, and pulled under the trees near the shed.
      "They're back," Darby said. "You can draw an easy breath, David." They all looked through the window, Aaron edging like a stray dog near Owen's side.
      "I didn't have a fear. I was glad the boy could enjoy it," Owen said. He pulled on his gloves. "Set, want to see how they fared on this adventure?" He had opened the door for Aaron. Set, still wearing her brown leather gloves, gave her scarf an extra swag over her jacket and followed. But then she turned around.
      "I'll be back in a few minutes, Darby. I had something to ask you." She didn't invite him on the walk to the shed.

After the teenagers had roared over Shequonur's ridge and out of sight, September turned to Owen who was securing the space heater under his arm for Darby. "They loved it. And you made a dent in the psyche of Brian Saddler. Did you see his face when you shook hands? I've never seen him so . . . so relaxed . . . so, I don't know . . . . maybe complete is the word. He's like a lone gray wolf at school, skulking about the halls, leaning belligerent into lockers . . . just angry. Except for Lori. With Lori, he's like a little man."
      "I know what it's like to need something at that age. I wasn't a lone gray wolf, like Brian. Maybe a white wolf, or maybe a domesticated dog, but one that's been kicked. That's not quite right either." David smiled. "Why are we off on these animal metaphors?" He glanced at his watch. "Set, I'm afraid I need to rush. I have the appointment at the restaurant, you know." He didn't use Faith's name. He latched the shed door behind them and both turned their faces into the wind which caught at Set's scarf, whipping it over her mouth. Pulling it away, she spoke into the wild air because she knew she had little time.
      "David, Aaron's mentioned something two times in my presence that I find intriguing." She thought Owen frowned when he turned to her. She tried to laugh but the wind picked at the sound and dispersed it into nothing. "That thing about a letter." Only the clacking branches of a sycamore on the path answered. Set went on. "You know Friday after you lectured to my class?"
      "Yes." They had reached the step to the apartment door.
      "Well, Aaron showed up again after everyone had gone. Really, he's almost frightening at times, the way he just shows up." Owen stood with his hand on the knob of the door, waiting for Set to continue. "He said that Nate, and I assume that's the Reverend Sowders, didn't have, or maybe couldn't have a letter. He said the letter, so I know it's important in his mind." Set waited for David to open the door but when he didn't she continued. "And he said, and I suppose it's ridiculous to assign meanings to all of Aaron's words, that you said not to talk about it. The letter, I guess." She tried to appear whimsically involved with the conversation, but her interlocutor did not respond and so, although she stood with Owen at her side, she felt awkward and alone on the cold stoop. "Can we go in?"
      Owen opened the door. He placed the heater beside an armoire and turned to Set with a knowing laugh. "O, that thing." He laughed again. "Did he mention a letter today? I didn't notice. But I suppose he's talking about something that happened in school. Little events stick out in Aaron's mind and every once in a while he gets stuck on some insignificant detail. Let's see, probably he's talking about one night when we, when I was a senior. Really, it was nothing." He paused. "But for Aaron it was no doubt significant. It started when he was injured, not physically, but psychologically, with words. It was, let's see, probably about this time of year because I think it happened after Messiah practice. That's an institution around here, you know."
      "I know. I'm singing in it this year. But, please, go on." She sat on the edge of the sofa, trying to appear that all was off-hand and that her perch was momentary.
      "I said that he was injured that night, but I should say that he had been injured for years, years of kids brazenly calling him Bug Man. Aaron had a huge butterfly collection, and hundreds, maybe thousands of bugs. I didn't know anything about them then and I really don't know now, but I do know they were fabulous. Spectacular boards spread with huge powdery wings and glossy beetles. He started bringing them in to class when we were, I'd say, in the fifth grade. At first most of the class, the other kids, thought the whole thing was great. Show and tell, elementary courtesy still around in the fifties, and his collections really were detailed and complete even at that age. But by the time we had reached the eighth grade, the cruelty began. At first, they began to poke fun at the collections, but then one day Rita Jones said in a girl group out on the playground, 'Hey, did you see Bug Man's new butterfly? He showed it to the teacher.' Sing-song cruelty." Owen used an echo of mockery for the scene. "That little group laughed for about ten minutes. I can still hear them, because I was standing with Aaron and I knew he heard it. At first, I thought it was nothing. I said something like, 'Stupid girls, don't let them get to you.' But Aaron was trembling, actually shaking all over. I had never really seen anything like that. I don't know what I said, I just remember he cried and I felt so sorry for him. I mean we were eighth grade boys and to cry was death itself. I don't remember all the details; I only know that Rita Jone's epithet clicked that day. Gave her notoriety for a while, popularity within our class for two weeks, and it gave Aaron pain for the rest of our school years. It gives him pain today. Granted, one name, one event shouldn't be able to destroy or maim a healthy person. But who's altogether healthy?"
      Set had settled back in the couch slowly, not wanting him to pause. She had not heard so many words from him since his lecture in her class.
      "He looked odd," Owen continued. "I'm sure you've noticed his eyebrows which look like paste-ons. Well, his appearance only heightened the attacks. It's as if the class needed a scapegoat and they got a willing one in Aaron Lieb." His voice was dark now.
      "What do you mean, willing?" she asked.
      "I mean he tried to laugh with them, to not be hurt, to allow them the freedom to hurt him, to be a part of, and the pattern became acceptable. At our early parties, say, ninth and tenth grades, the boys could really impress the girls with a few Bug Man remarks and Aaron kept laughing. They said it all in front of him. Nothing seemed to matter except the downy hair and the silver giggles of the soft girls. And the girls, most of them, were the pied pipers who led the pack hypnotized. Their legs were flutes and their incipient laughter led the pack out of town. The Bug Man, poor Aaron, was left behind." He had been standing looking out into the reflective glass of the conservatory, but now he turned to Set. His face was lined with passion, his voice ranging through emotions of sorrow and acidity. Set saw the smolder of emotion, but could not identify with clarity how one unusual classmate - didn't every class, every group who ever existed on the earth have these caricatures - could evoke such rare empathy.
      "David, you mean you were part of the pack. And you feel guilty?"
      He dropped to the couch beside her and leaned into her, his elbows propped on his knees and his hands twisting together. The sound of his voice came deep from inside. "I think twice I used the words Bug Man, with the guys. Once I even said it in front of him, but when I saw him shiver I swore that I'd never use those words again. I'm not a missionary, I never was, but to burn the soul of a person, to take innocence or the unassuming, unsophisticated open soul of a person and use it for your own pleasure, to impress when you're fourteen, to look good in front of the boss when you're thirty, or the teacher or the girl, by scalding the guileless love or trust of a human being, is intolerable. I don't often use the word sin because it reeks of fundamentalism. It's a stone-dead word because the flocks assign their own chiseled meanings. But I use it now in its purest form. Sin. Evil. And Aaron was visited early by this force. It's always around, but concentrated and aimed correctly, it will maim. Or kill." He was still leaning toward Set, but suddenly sat back. "So that's what happened to Aaron. And that's the reason one night stands out in his mind." He cleared his throat. "Probably any of several nights stand out in his mind," he said tossing that night once again into the blankness of twenty years ago.
      "But, I don't quite understand about a letter. Something happened on that particular night? Somebody hurt Aaron?" Set would not hold her curiosity now.
      "I guess I did go off on a tangent," he said easily, a charm reentering his mood. But Set had the feeling that this charm was tacked on. "Some of us were standing outside right after practice. I said we were singing in The Messiah, didn't I?" Set nodded. "There were about seven of us. Aaron was there. And Kathy. Schmidt, but Rogers then. And Nate Sowders. Just the usual teenage banter. Nate was talking about college, I think, but he seemed unusually ebullient. He was always up. Always the rah-rah cheerleader type. But he was particularly blissful that night. I remember that because I was thinking about my date. Kathy and I were going steady then." He looked straight at Set. She smiled. "I wanted to leave immediately because Kath had to be in by ten-thirty." His expression changed suddenly to a bland stare. He was giving too many details and Set knew this registered in his mind at that moment. But he seemed to reevaluate and continued. "I suggested we take off but Kathy was laughing at Nate's high wit so I stood there on the walk in front of the church brooding over the night. With wild poetry in my brain. Aaron left first. I remember Nate poking the Fox. That was Jim Martin. The guys all twisted their heads toward Aaron's little beat up Ford and continued making their inane remarks for Kathy's sake. Then Aaron screamed. I had never heard him scream before. Or any male. We were seniors. One did not scream. But he kept on screaming. By now Nate and the guys were suppressing great bursts of laughter, spitting through their arms which they held to their mouths, thus, identifying themselves as the grand purveyors of Aaron's agony, for Kathy's sake, and at the same time, pretending to mask their guilt, so that they could enact the final glory moment. Nate controlled himself enough to call toward Aaron, 'Got a problem, Aaron? Any way we can help, Bug Man?' When I got to the car Aaron was throwing up on his hood."
      "The poor thing. What was it? What was wrong?"
      "I couldn't see at first in the dark. Only some shadowy lumps in the back and front seat. I leaned in. There were three dead cats, stiff and long, propped up in cardboard boxes. Some might call this a ghoulish boyish prank. But they had taken two of Aaron's mounting boards - he had had them in school that day to show the elementary - and the boards were in the car. All of the butterflies had been crumpled. You couldn't even determine that the little piles of tissuey powder were butterflies or any thing that had ever lived, except for one wing. The filament was strewn over the matted stinking hair of the cats and I can still see a pathetic green wing caught over the open eye of a dirty yellow cat."
      Set thought then that the story of Aaron Lieb was grotesque but not much different from the breed of event she saw periodically at school. It was David Owen's reaction to the event that was different. It was in fact mesmerizing. The pulsating, enticing humanity which erupted from his central self drew her to him like a moth to a lamped window in summer. Or maybe like a flame. A hint of this passionate care threaded through David's reaction to Mildred Troyer at the epiphany lecture and it was this empathy which Set could not resist. Did she not have the same involvement with mankind, like Donne suggested? If she did, then why was she so drawn by and shocked by Owen's character? He was up pacing before a late afternoon grayness muting the window glass.
      "I wanted to kill him. Why, how? There was no sense in it, no reason other than to look good - in front of the others. But how in the name of God can anyone, even an eighteen-year old boy, do that?"
      "I don't know. I don't know, David, but I see similar acts daily, or at least weekly at school. Not always so horrible, so Gothic as this dead cat thing, but still wretched in their intent. And I don't think that all have as devastating an effect as the one you describe." He wheeled on her.
      "But why, why should there be any events like this?" he nearly shouted. "Cruelty for pure pleasure." This seemed naive rhetoric from a sophisticated man. Set had dismissed the question of evil long ago, dismissed it because she did not dwell on it, or need to find its source. The question was too philosophical and large. Unmanageable and therefore discarded.
      "But what about the letter?" Set asked again after what she deemed a thoughtful pause.
      "You are one for details, aren't you, September?" Owen returned sarcastically. Set knew she had pushed too hard. "I've just told you about Aaron's agony and you're harping about letters." He stood with his back toward her looking out the window, but then he turned. "I'm sorry, Set. I don't mean to be caustic. You see, I do the thing I scorn. Perhaps this is the plight of man," he said with Biblical histrionics. He glanced at his watch. "I'm so sorry and I'm not trying to put you off. But I must run. I don't want to leave Faith to the prying eyes of the Greek chorus at Duwans's. But I will finish the story, although it really isn't that interesting. I promise. In fact, let's set a time now."
      "I'd like that. What would be good for you?" she asked politely.
      "You asked me over before. Does the offer still go? I could come by tonight after dinner."

Set did not often think of Darby as gay. She did not think much about his sexuality or his desires or his encounters with other men. She thought of him as a mind in which she sunk herself and her daily turmoil, emotional agonies, and clever language. He was excellent at the quick uptake, the easy abstract glide from subject to subject, the pure pleasure of leaving things out and yet understanding what connections were there and omitted from speech. It was action for the mind and it soothed the interior of her brain. That's how she pictured it. Rumpled gray matter, a raging session with Darby, and then smoothed brain cells lying back in place within her cranium. At first it was a gift he gave to her. Now it was a necessity. It made her function.
      When she first arrived in East Worthy, after she had engaged Darby to paint the garden room, she had thought on his sexual preferences, but even then only minimally. He had arrived at the caboose that first day with a tin can of paint brushes and a box of paints and she had thought briefly, "Gay." His crisp, knowing articulation, his rapturous response to the illuminated walls, his comment on her Majolica plates and pitchers, his rush of precise information on the various mismatched furniture scattered in the diminutive nooks and corners, and his tart remarks delivered rapidly on the people, places, and things of East Worthy--these observations were delivered to Set as if the two of them had been friends for years. The conversation assumed she was now part of the community, part of a varied group, a textured existence. Darby Lambert had been chatty but not unkind in his summation of village mannerisms. His perspective was one of amusement, only mildly scornful of local tradition; his was intelligent perusal of ordinary functions, tinged with historic overlays, appreciation of folkways, East Worthy notables in frontier arts and war, and adherence to maintaining the least spectacular of the town's short history in reverent holdings. Laid deep in several chests at Shequonur were fragments of outbuildings he believed to have figured into the General's stables or vegetable huts or privies. Dar had kept a fragile molding from a log building which had fallen just before he took over at the estate. Fishing through a pile of rubble, he had rescued the delicate crumbling one-foot piece from extinction and believed he had a treasure. He had painted a local scene on a piece of the altar which had been crudely erected in the family's chapel, now bulldozed. He caressed and coddled these pieces of Ohio frontier as if they were Monets.
      Set admired him for his record keeping, this precious behavior toward slivers of life gone before. His record assumed a worth to human survival; it gave form and drama to sodden scenes which probably passed in misery or, at the least, unnoticed by its participants. Darby noticed and gave meaning to what had gone before and gave humor and additional importance to those events which passed daily in East Worthy and at Shequonur by observing and creating ceremony. This was all-to-gether to be admired. It was drama.
      Not only Dar's attention to records, but his perspective, his angle on the world, soothed Set. With so much meaningless pap and maintenance of dull routine, ceremony was essential for sanity. So when he offered her his frame, his style, his fragrant chipped china and crisp articulation on village matters, his homosexuality carried no meaning. Except to add more pleasure.
      Set found satisfaction in the forbidden element of Darby Lambert, in that which could not be acted out in East Worthy. One did not come out of the closet in Midwestern villages, even in 1989, not unless one could pay the price. Of course, the community talked behind closed doors, recognizing that Darby was wiry and effeminate and then they certainly speculated on the rest. But when Dar did not act out the role by holding hands with young men or wearing earrings or other objectionable paraphernalia, his peculiar delicate stance and pompous pronouncements about the history of a Duncan Fife sofa or the use of a certain table at the signing of the Greenville Treaty--these otherwise unacceptable asexual gestures became acceptable to the village worthies. In fact, Darby was desirable for his firm commitment to preserving the history of this vague piece of land and surrounds. Further, he painted the town. Although many of the local women were snowballing now in their need to stencil elementary geese and leaf borders on ceilings, doors, and loose articles of every ilk--a pseudo-countrified tripe that nauseated the exquisite esthetic artist in Darby, he painted when hired and, in this way, became part of the fabric of history. The town felt a part of him and he of it.
      But beneath Dar's front of tradition lay the shadow of another world exotic to East Worthy. Set could not remember if Darby had ever proclaimed to her that he was gay. At least she could not recall a specific time when he admitted the fact and she recognized the words. Perhaps he never had. Within a month after he came to the caboose, they had simply understood together that this was who Dar was. Set thought she had made some comment about the privacy of sexual persuasions, finally concluding with the proclamation that she didn't care if one had sex with chickens. "They wouldn't dare ask brazenly if one had sex two or three time a week. Or year. Can you imagine one of the little old ladies approaching you with such a question?" she said after they had alluded to contemporary ideas. "To someone who's straight," she added, feeling the power of her tentative feminist jargon. "But of the homosexual they would believe it their right to ask anything. Suddenly the sex life of one who deviates is their domain. Their righteous prerogative." Dar had added, "Their duty, their calling," with relaxed laughter, assuming the stance of a geriatric maiden aunt, hoisting a cane in the air, punctuating with a dry old woman cackle.
      It was after that conversation that Darby had dropped scattered references about night excursions to the closest gay bar in Lighton and had used apologetic inflections about such tawdry pilgrimages. His sense of taste made these outings repellant. His sense of a Midwest farm heritage, his love of tradition, made the events surreal. How does a local boy, one who loves the trappings of frontier history and swaths of elegance, make peace with low-life line-workers who drink beer and laugh with drag-queens in pink pumps? Their commonality lay in sexual preference, in the need to unmask for brief periods of time, in the need to not pretend in this fundamental way. Darby did not ask for this common ground often and, when he did, he sought any crystallized fragment of learning he could find at the bar. Set understood that he had acquaintances who had slivers of cultivation to which he clung at those midnight hours . But he made it clear to Set that these were leavings, unacceptable and tiring encounters which did not heal. Set also understood that the Lighton runs had little to do with an actual sexual interchange and much to do with a way of looking at the world.
     The startling finally-recognized phenomenon for both of them was that September could heal, was the salve which medicated a great wound, could supply moments, many moments which cleared his mind. She could release the swelling multiple-layered response to life - to jeweled beauty and exquisite pain, to the paradox of pleasure and pain, the strata of daily astonishment supporting Keats's Melancholy lurking in the Temple of Delight. But the most shocking element was reciprocation. This delicate and fragile balance held because Darby returned the comfort for Set. And so they went on together not questioning.
      Consequently, as she watched Darby Lambert assemble his paints and brushes on the table, Set was not thinking about him as a man, but as a mind to which she brought the mismatched pieces of her emotions. She needed to talk. She knew he had been speaking for some time about the ruby-paned light he was about to rejuvenate for the Holiday Open House, but she had drifted in and out of his monologue, her mind turning on David Owen. "Just think, Dear, what a marvelous trinket this must have been when it warmed the front hallway of the gabled cabin in the wild. I imagine it hung in a central place, perhaps a front hallway. That's how I see it, a tiny front hallway. Did you see any thing like that when you were there? I really must get in there, September. Now that I've gone off and besmirched the fellow's dear friend, it will no doubt be years before I can infiltrate. Set, do you think . . .?"
      "Darby, what do you think it could be?" she interrupted distractedly, not excusing her interjection.
      "Well, I think this was probably a Cincinnati-made L. L. Smith, probably--"
      "No, no, not the light. The letter. Why would that weird little man be fixated on a letter? And David finally admitted that there was one. At first he acted as if he didn't even remember it, but then he said something about . . . . No, no, that's not true. No, he didn't, not actually about a letter. Just the night with Aaron and Kathy and Sowders."
      "And the cats. Those horrible dead cats. Didn't you say three?" Dar writhed in his thin flesh, imagining the stiff-haired cadavers.
      "And then, what about Aaron recognizing the room when he was here this afternoon? He said that the three of them were here and what's that got to do with a letter?"
      "Well, who knows what went on here twenty, actually over twenty years ago. The place was a hodge-podge of mismanagement. And the elder Lindens were positively reeking with lies about the history of the estate. Anyone could have been here. I imagine all kinds of people - teenagers and all - were running in and out of the old girl." He dipped a fine black bristled brush into yellow ochre.
      "But what's a letter got to do with being here? If they found a letter, why were they here? Aaron said they were in the room, the office room. And think of it, it was November he said, after a practice at the church. So it was dark out." She paused to watch Darby stroke a graceful yellow stripe across one of the red panes. "Maybe it was a love letter," she added. A protective edge entered her speech. "Maybe something between David and Kathy."
      "Aha," Dar said, tipping his brush into the air, "that's good. You might have it there. You know how putridly emotional teenagers are. You said they were seniors, didn't you? Some tripe between David and Kathy, maybe from Kathy to David. Who knows?"
      "But, then, why would a letter between those two be so monumental to Aaron?"
      "No, my dear, the real question is, why would a comment about a letter from a bizarre little mentally deficient man be so monumental to you?" Dar returned slyly.
      "Come on, Dar. You know I can't help it. The man intrigues me. He's brilliant and passionate." Darby looked up from the lamp. "Passionate about life. Passionately good. Perhaps not exactly good in the Sunday school sense but intense, intensely human. That's why I can't understand why he shows this interest in Kathy Schmidt. If he does."
      "Who says he has any real relationship with her now? There was their high school romance, according to Don Morrison, right?"
      "Yes, but what about the auction? They were both there. And then at school, at the lecture, he was cruel to her. He wouldn't have been cruel if there wasn't something." The pitch of her voice had risen. "I don't know. I just have a sense of it," she finished softly.
      "Well, if there are any lingering fantasies from high school days, Reuben Schmidt will keep a firm hand on his little household. Really, Set, with her church affiliation you need have no fear from this married woman." He picked up two octagonal slices of wine-tinted glass and carried them to his kitchen sink. Set watched the glass turn the water red as it flushed the dusty surface in the worn afternoon light. "But back to the letter," he said. "What about this? What if its older than that?"
      "Older than what?"
      "Older than twenty years ago? An old letter, something, something historic? A kind of document or something?" he said toweling off the panes.
      "I thought about that at first. But I don't really think so. A November night, dark, teenagers. Where would they find a letter, if they did? And why would that matter to Aaron now? It has to matter to a mind stuck in the sixties, Aaron's twisted adolescence. An old letter sounds romantic, but I don't think plausible. Now let's think about it. How can a letter have force? Or power, so to speak?"
      "Well, if a letter really exists that has power, it must have fear, or revelation behind it. Maybe something glorious revealed in . . ."
      Set sat up straight. "That's it. You were right the first time. Something fearful. If it is powerful enough to make him--Aaron--remember all these years, then it contains fear, fear for someone, somewhere. Nate Sowders. Maybe something to do with him."
      Darby coughed and said acidly, "Yes, certainly, Sowders and fear. How about blackmail? Oh, I like it. This is practically soap opera now." Dar had completed the minature scene of pagodas and dragons on one pane and was propping it against the blurred glass in the window. On the table before Set, three miniature pots of paint gleamed in three solid color pools, releasing their fresh scent into the dusty antique aroma of Dar's silver brides baskets and porcelain ear vases. Unexplicably, in the way one sense can erupt into a flurry of other senses--an amalgamation of memory not quite seen, but felt, way back in the brain--with this whiff of oiled color, Set felt the art room at John Proctor High and saw Whatley Taylor moving about his space of blue and green and yellow, a world of primary color, in his loose Hawaian shirt and his blonde beefy arms swinging cardboard boxes of old canvases into new corners. Wet paint always made her feel something was about to happen. Change, color, new form. Dar's delicate paint pots were certainly not the stacked cans of latex in Whatley's space. They were not the throbbing color and rythmn of red rectangles and blue dots covering Whatley's room, a room that pointed forward, somewhere into a future to be experienced. Instead, these small jars at her elbow pointed into the past, backward into the cobwebs of Shequonur, into lives already lived, into time spent and irretrievable. Set was struck with the thought that neither paint, not man - Whatley nor Darby - dealt with the present moment, this passing, skidding molecule of rushing change, here in the room with heat and light. She pushed away the disagreeable image of Whatley Taylor, understanding that she preferred in this moment that it be the distant past regained. Not her own past, but another's. She took a deep breath of the little paint pots and tried to disguise to herself that she still could not throw away the pile of letters she kept in a shoebox from this art teacher and their short-lived, unimportant romance.
      She glanced at the wafer disc of watch on her wrist. "I guess I can ask tonight. Everything. He said he'd finish the story. They can't be that long at Duwan's, so I need to be off. Unless, of course, the phone call from . . . from . . . St. Louis, wasn't it?--unless that means something major. Now there's another turn. Don't you find Faith McDowell a little odd?"
      "And yet another woman muddies the water for you. Set, look, the man is a virtual stranger to you and you persist. I do know how it is to fixate on things. On a person," he added. "So I sympathize. But this will pass. The man won't be here much longer than another week. He's different, he's strong, he's delightfully educated, always a magnet." He propped two additional panes in the window and turned to her. "But there's an odd air about him. You think Aaron is strange. Well, I think Dr. David Owen is strange. And trust me, Missy, I have seen some strange creatures in my life. Seriously, Set, I sense something else, not quite sinister, but pumping, releasing some liquid emotion deep in him."
      "That's what I mean, the intense . . . "
      "No, not the intense human thing you said. But a pain, maybe agony would be the word, that he covers up. And I sense that the agony shifts in him, bubbling deep, and that he is a master of vigilance, constantly watching to stifle the eruption when it gurgles to the various surfaces of his . . . I guess I would say his life." He screwed a black lid on the yellow pot. "There. I said it, and quite poetically, don't you think, my dear?"
      "But, Dar, everyone has agony, some shifting personal madness which must be kept hidden. That's the condition of the Homo sapiens. David has so many folds and layers of idea that certainly secret sorrows lurk about. But what you see is intelligence capable of dissecting the minutest sorrow, the thinnest sliver of joy. He just feels it more. That's what it means to major in English. Go ahead, guffaw, but the entire field is littered with these feeling ones. At times it's nauseating, but in David Owen, it is rich and human. He's real. And I've got to go." She picked up her jacket and scarf. "Are you spending all day Thanksgiving with your mother?
      "I'll endure as long as possible. But when cousin Patty starts on her upcoming bridal shower, I will make a quick retreat." He arranged his pots under a table which he swathed in a paisley cloth, masking these contemporary tools with symmetrical green folds. "I assumed you'd be gone until Sunday. I have five mantels to complete before Friday morning, nine o'clock. I thought about spraying hedge apples this year. Golden hedge apples and silver weeds. Economy, you know. What do you think, Set?"
      She draped her scarf about her head and assumed a nineteenth-century oratorical stance. "I went out to the hazelwood because a fire was in my head," she said majestically.
      "What?"
      "Just a line from Yeats. You remember, it's on my wall. 'The Song of Wandering Aengus'. The last lines are haunting, beautiful. Your silver weeds and golden hedge apples are like the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun." To repeat the words gave her pleasure and she suddenly felt ready to entertain the great David Owen. "I'll see you tomorrow, Dar."
      She heard him call after her into November's supper-time darkness. "I know. From one of the feeling ones to one of the doormats of life. I'll try to be more sensitive," he quipped. "Good luck tonight, Dear, with your letter mystery. But don't be too intense. I worry about you."
      As she pulled down the lane, she could see in the rear-view mirror his slender silhouette standing in the doorway, still waving a bony hand into the night.

As she waved her hand, standing at her red door, to the tall man walking away, she asked herself again, "Can that be the whole story? Why is it not enough?"
      She cleared away the cups, punishing herself with guilt, pummeling her mind with reproofs about caring--for the letter, for tonight's impression of David Owen, for his past, for his intensity, and for the fire of life she believed she lacked. She clung desperately to the drama she did have--the caboose itself. And although it had been Aunt Margory's, she decided after tonight it would be her own. Entirely hers, its golden walls, its unexpected nooks, its cupola, and its vining words. David Owen had taken passionately to it and so now it would be an item, an aspect of enticing interest for his person and then he would return.
      But still his letter story was not enough. Owen had in fact heightened the mystery of the letter by suggesting that it was subsidiary and incidental to his distant teenage evening. But he had given her two substantial pieces of information which involved her coincidently but, also, officially, in his life. First, Aunt Margory and Ivy Gilchrist had been friends, he said. Second, he had offered to her a perusal of his personal journal. Set was still wondering why he would allow her full rein of a truly personal piece of writing. But she accepted--with her heart beating hard--the care of what he called his Oxford Journal for the remainder of the pre-Thanksgiving week. He would bring it by school tomorrow for her and she could return it before she left for Ludway.
      The first few minutes of Owen's time with Set had been spent in admiration of the caboose and its complex of eccentric outgrowths. As Set guided him from the entry, where Will and Geoffry scolded and cracked their hard beaks against plastic trays, to the back sleeping room, where she had punched up her white embroidered pillows and poured three tears of pine oil into a bowl of green potpourri, David stood rapt by the spectacle of language and walls mingling with such ease. In each room, he paused to read the words out loud. He caressed the language with his voice, silently staring at the wall after he had read the lines which emblazoned the space. After he had read the garden room wall, he touched one green leaf of parsley in Set's tiny white window and then he read the lines again. "O let them be left, wildness and wet--Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet."
      "He was at Oxford, you know," David said.
      Set looked confused and tried to mentally shuffle through her Hopkins notes from school. "I guess I do remember something about Oxford. Isn't Hopkins wonderful?" she added enthusiastically.
      "When he was at Oxford he was troubled, tormented by his growing sense of form in the church. His family, particularly his father, was aghast when he-Gerard--switched his allegiance to Catholicism. They were High Anglican, of course. but it wasn't enough for Hopkins. Eventually it all ended in his Jesuit commitment. But I'm sorry to go on. I'm sure this is a part of your senior lecture."
      These details were not a part of Set's senior lecture and she could not remember specific detail about Hopkins's conversion, nor his stay at Oxford. Only that he was a priest. But she had sparkled with his words when she taught "The Windhover" and "God's Grandeur. " Her class, with few exceptions, could not grasp this Nineteenth-Century man who played with words, invented rhythms in a kind of paradoxical backward revolution. In his revolt Hopkins had joined a stony bulk of traditional theology with a mutant sprite of language, a spirit so original that the great doctrinal sarcophagus was carried into the language skies of poetry, carried as if it was no weight at all. "Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume here buckle! And the fire that breaks from thee then . . ."
      Set broke in before Owen could finish the line. "A billion times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!" Her face was flushed and she saw in his eyes a pinpoint of dark light deep in the blue pupils. They had both known the words and the words hung triumphantly in the air of the garden room. Margory's vision of walled words, language which spoke in architecture and physicality, had done its work, had made a spell over a moment. Both of them--in that second--understood its fragile nature. They did not speak as they trailed back into the main structure. Under the cupola, where David looked up into the night sky, they paused.
      "Ivy said that Margory Dunlap had a wonderful inventive mind, but I had no idea that her vision was so complete," he said. "This, September, is marvelous. And to think she did this here under the watchful eyes of East Worthy. She must have had such a splendid, singular spirit to carry on, splashing words onto her walls in golds and greens. They grow--the words grow and become part of your insides, your domestic landscape. I have great admiration for your Aunt Margory." He smiled with appreciation for the woman who had carried out her fantasy single-handedly. Set responded like a sixth-grade girl.
      "I know. I know; I felt exactly like that when I first saw it, when I was, I think, in the second grade. But is it true? Ivy knew my Aunt Margory?" She was thrilled at the connection. And the connection had been strong, long-held, and treasured by Ivy who had informed David just that afternoon of Margory Dunlap's illuminated temple. Yes, Ivy had called the caboose a "temple of beauty and idea," according to Owen. Set had loved these same ideas for these many years, but she had known so little of her own aunt. Her mother would not speak long on the subject of the black sheep, Margory Dunlap, and Set, not wanting to disturb the expectations of familial placidity in her growing-up, did not ruffle the waters.
      Set had a great fear of ruffling the waters, creating scenes, as her mother called them. Since Set was eleven, her mother had warned her about her father's heart condition, and the great weight of plunging her father into angina kept Set mute. A smoldering anger had resulted and increased under the surface of her beige world, her muted emotion, her smiling Sunday school acceptance of life. Mediocrity of emotion was expected in the Hunt household and Margory Dunlap's difference must have created a firey stir for Alice Hunt, who remained reticent and righteous on the subject.
      "According to Ivy," David said, "Margory was a beacon of hope for her when she, Ivy, was younger. Your aunt must have been here a long time before Ivy knew her. How long did your aunt live here in East Worthy?"
      Set was clutched with shame that she could not reel off family history and had no definitive answer on Margory's residence in the town. Somehow, not to know made Set less, a polyester person with no tradition and no history. "Well, I'm not exactly sure about when she came to East Worthy but I do know that she taught sixth grade for over thirty years." Her voice was emphatic, selecting phrases with increased volume to highlight. "Mother has all that history in family trees at home." She added quickly, "She was my mother's aunt, you know. My great aunt."
      "Ivy says that Margory Dunlap was her salvation on many occasions, some difficult times. But most of all, Margory wasn't afraid to go exactly her own way. She had this caboose brought in from a field outside town. I remember walking past it when I went to the river to wade, even when I was very young. I called it the 'Mystery Train,' he laughed. "But Ivy told me that Margory had first loved it--the caboose - because it was a small and private world and because she had taught, or I guess had read a book to her class about kids living in an old train car. But then you probably know about it--The Boxcar Children."
      "No, I don't know that one. A children's book?" Shame, again. She didn't know even this children's book. "Isn't it amazing that this woman, this elementary teacher, could be so absolutely original in her approach to her environment," Set added astutely.
      "I haven't read it, but it sounds charming. You might be interested in this, Set. Your aunt Margory gave Ivy her copy of the book. According to Ivy, that gift of The Boxcar Children was significant, right next to the caboose itself in importance. Ivy suggested that you might like to look at the book." He stood in green and crystal tines of light under the cupola. The ladder to the crow's nest was inviting.
      "Would you like to go up to the perch. I haven't really bothered with illuminating it yet. I've left it to the end. But it is wonderful, even without renovation," Set said. She climbed first, looking back at him, smiling, her feet curving around the heavy rods of metal. Owen followed, emerging into the November night. The fittings were loose in the cupola and the compartment was a rectangle of cold stars and metallic wind which rhythmically tapped one pine bough into the glass. They faced one another, their knees almost touching in the black-green perch. There was silent approbation that this was the moment he would speak of the letter.
      "O yes, I said I would finish about the letter, didn't I?" he said as if he had just left off the story minutes before. In a sense, he had, for Set had thought of little else and she sensed that he had done the same.