"Remember that the significance lies in the mind, in Aaron's mind, because of the night," David Owen began. "I told you about the butterflies and about my anger. I remember only a feeling. Much of the physical detail is supplanted by a memory of feeling, a haze of hot fury that rose in my chest. I remember what happened as slow motion - Aaron pounding on his Chevy hood, Kathy standing silhouetted, still against the church brick wall, the band of laughers writhing and spitting with howls. I turned and walked toward him, Nate. Just walked, but I knew I would do something, something that I hadn't done before. Something that would stop that laughter. He saw me coming, of course, but he didn't turn. Or even look alarmed. He just laughed. I don't think he ever expected what I would do. Because I had always been reasonable. That's probably not the right word. We were kids, and reason seems too formidable and wise for that time of life. I had always let him go. Or let the situation go. I should say situations, plural, where he had taunted, or twisted, whatever he had the ability to do with others. And the really appalling part of that is, I liked him. In fact, I loved him." Owen had been staring through the surrounding band of windows in their silver box, but now he flicked a look at Set. She returned a mild and steady gaze.
      "We all loved him. All of us, all of our class. He was compelling. I've known others since Nate who were compelling personalities, but Nate had been with me through our growing years. And it's as if his person, his life was inoculated into mine. I couldn't remember a time when I hadn't admired him, his stocky athletic build, the way he played football. Even basketball. Though he was shorter than I, he was better. He was smart, in a kind of bold clear way. He knew what he had to do with math formulas and book reports and . . ." Here he paused and smiled a wry sad smile. "And even red rover. Can you believe I can still remember in the second grade when he called me over. Red rover, red rover, we dare David over. And when I ran I didn't break the line and the whole motley snotty-nosed, hand-holding line flung me out and backward on Nate's command. He laughed then, and I lay in the grass with my cheeks hot for a few seconds. But later, even at whatever age a second-grader is, he came to me and said with a warm little magnaminity, 'You went down real hard. Hope you're OK, David.' It's as if he was doing me the favor of forgiving me for falling down, or not breaking through. And somehow it seemed that I should be grateful, because he was bold and aggressive and forgiving of weakness. And the pathetic part is, I loved him for that. And felt guilt for aching."
      "He did things, said things, just this side of cruel, through all our years of growing up and, believe me, we had time, lots of time just to know one another. Intense, rambling, un-inspected time when our parents were about their reorganizing and pot-lucking with the church. That was all in the beginning when the church was formed. So from about sixth grade on Nate and I were more or less thrown together officially because we were the only two boys in our grade with the Calvary group. This gave me time, gave us both time to just be boys together. We weren't exactly ostracized from the rest of our friends, but the move our parents made was big and dramatic and made us separate in a way that we felt. We--the strata of kids--felt it. At the time neither one of us realized how big it must have been for them, for our parents, and . . ."
      "David, I don't quite understand about this move. I heard something at school not long ago, about the formation of Calvary Chapel," she said, remembering Don Morrison's comments on a theological flap, and Agnes Bolton's terse remarks about David's parents. "And you told me the other night about your parents being removed from . . ."
      He cut her off with a swift swathe. "If you know anything at all about the beginning of the church, that it was a break-a-way from the Congregational Christian, then you know enough. The point here is that Mother and Dad and a few other families were the dissenters and Calvary Chapel was born out of their youthful enthusiasm, etcetera, etcetera, and that I grew up in the kernel of that dissension. Or more to what I'm trying to tell you, Nate and I grew up in that kernel. I knew him, I suffered with him. At least I thought he suffered. Rather, I experienced with him, in the trenches of church warfare. Even though we didn't know at the time, since we were way back behind the line, so to speak, we the children didn't know the absolute alteration of life our parents made that Sunday morning when they gathered in the living room sofa chairs at Zed and Jeananne Carter's. Not the old wooden pews at the Christian."
     He had begun with irritation, but now he seemed to dip and glide in liquid variegated emotion. Quick, sardonic, sad, pompous, rigid, hidden, confessional, and agonized. "There, I've said too much on a disagreeable, useless subject. I knew Nate, and that night when he crumpled Aaron Lieb's butterflies I had to stop him. I had to be the one. No one else would do it." David tried suddenly to stand in the cramped cupola, but had to stoop. He stepped down several rungs. "I need a glass of water, Set," he said, climbing on down. "Please just tell me where your glasses are and I'll help myself." Set called after him, indicating the painted cupboard over the sink. She listened to the creaking pump when he turned the faucett, heard the flow of water, and waited for his return. Another minute elapsed before she saw his tousled brown hair emerge into the secret rectangle where she sat. His movements were more purposeful and directed now. His speech punctuated. He wanted to finish.
      "I hit him first across his mouth. I remember that he looked startled but not for long because I had his head against the brick of the church. I wanted to hurt him. He wasn't laughing then, but I wanted to wipe out all the sound I had heard before from him, screaming through the cold November air over the butterflies. I don't remember the details or exactly what I did. I do know that Kathy was crying, the guys were grabbing at me, trying to pull me off, and I kept on knocking his head into the wall of the church. And I did hurt him. I won't go on about that. But I told him that he wasn't going to do that anymore. He wasn't going to hurt Aaron again, and he wasn't going to do that kind of thing in front of me, ever, again. I think I was calm, in my voice. It was bland and monotone. Dead. Anyway, they got me off. Jim Martin was holding me but I tore away. I grabbed Kathy's hand. I called Aaron. We drove away into the night."
      "What happened to Nate then? How badly was he hurt?"
      "I think his parents patched him up at home. I only know he didn't tell them what happened. Made up some story, Fox told me later, about how he got in a fight with some kids over at Louistown. He had some bandaids over his eye on Monday. We didn't talk about it ever again."
      But this still is not the letter, Set thought. "Where did you and Kathy go?"
      "We drove around for a while. Kathy and I were both trying to calm Aaron. He couldn't stop crying, moaning actually. He wasn't good and as teenagers we didn't quite know what to do. I felt like an accused felon. That I had shattered my old life after I hit Nate. I had turned a corner. It was the end of one life and the beginning of another, unknown." Aaron's words clicked in Set's mind--"the beginning and the end." The scholar and the grotesque, both ringing with the same words. David's eyes crinkled at the edges, straining to pass the pain, straining to see the distant decision. "I had always been dutiful, sensitive, willing to play by the rules. I took them as my rules. As honor. But now I had broken everything up. I had done real damage to my friend. I had Kathy out, long after her curfew. That was important then. And now I had to protect Aaron, a strange, mentally deficient innocent who was moaning beside me in the car."
      "Well, we ended up on the road out by Shequonur and we parked. Up in the lane to the cabin. It's cleared now, but then it was a cavern of low branches and a barely visible entry. Kathy and I had been there before. We let the car run for a while, with the radio playing, but Aaron was inconsolable. He kept repeating, 'The wings, did you see the wings? My monarchs. The wings." He repeated it over and over. "The wings."
      "I think Kathy first suggested that we explore. Anyway, we got him out of the car. Snow was beginning to fall through the brambles overhead. It fell on Aaron's face and Kathy's hair. It was the first snow of that year. We stood outside watching it for a few minutes, hoping that he would be comforted by the snow, but he wasn't. It was cold and so we got him to walk up the lane. Anything to change the mood, the desperate little drama with so little to work with. Kath and I had been at the cabin, like I said, just walked around it actually the summer before when I was guiding at the estate. We hadn't gone in, Kath and I, before, because the place was overgrown in summer. So much so that the doors and windows were filled up with thorns and roses and poison ivy and neither one of us cared that summer about actually going on in. We were too interested in just being together. We didn't want to take the time it would have consumed to tear at the greenery that was choking the place. Our own faces, and bodies were enough."
      "But that night, the green was gone and we could see through the skeleton of twigs, right into the bare-bone rooms of the place. I had my flashlight from the car and Aaron was actually improving by the time we had walked the path from the road. Kathy and I thought that if we forced him into something different, if we befriended him passionately, even for this night, then somehow things would be better. We were so fiercely moral in those days. Don't you think teenagers are fiercely moral, Miss Hunt?"
      Set was surprised by the question and hurt by the epithet and did not know what mood Owen was projecting with it. She had been in the November snow at the cabin with the three teenagers and now she was teacher again. "Yes, there's a kind of elementary golden-rulishness about most of them. But when there isn't that element, a kid can be perverse. I've seen a lot of perverse, destroy-everything attitudes in the last several years."
      "Well, we were righteous and valiant with a kind of Don Quixote naivete. And sad and unknowing too, although we thought we knew. We thought we could help Aaron. So we went in. It wasn't too difficult. I hacked away at the small trees which had snaked their limbs into the rooms. It was log and you could see the wattling in between the logs. The air was cold and still inside, but I felt hot, mixed with colliding emotion, chastising myself for hitting Nate, wringing with pity for pathetic Aaron, punching up my masculinity for the nearness of Kathy, all of it driving me forward through the frigid damp of those ancient rooms. They seemed ancient, although they weren't in any strict sense of the word. They were ancient and fictional for Ohio, the history is so short. My flashlight would skip up a wall of log, stippled in patches with thin lathe and torn paper hanging in moldy strips. Once when my light passed over the ceiling something scuttled above. We were all scared to death but Kath was the only one who called out.
      "The ceilings were so low in the first room that I had to duck. Hanging things swiped at our faces. Paper, loose board, vine - everything was woven into a brittle, dampened tapestry. And the smell. That odor--it was probably new mould and November vines--but it smelled like the past-- what I imagined the past to be. I imagined that the breath of dead people, the last inhabitants of the cabin, hung stalely in the air and clouded in between the loose lathe. All three of us imagined that we had uncorked a grave--although we weren't the first to explore there. We couldn't have been. But in that moment, on that night, with our untried selves clinging to anything we saw real, we felt we were the first to enter the rooms, in a hundred years. Even though they had probably stood open through pane-less windows to the weather for only thirty winters. In our minds, though, it seemed a hundred winters. We didn't consider those who had lived there within the last fifty years. That's the reason it seemed natural when we found it - the letter."
      Set sighed inside, relieved, when Owen pronounced the word. She had strained, by hint and coercion, to find out about the letter and now the word was out, from him. Yet now it seemed artificial, unreal because she had thought about it so much and because she had pursued him on the subject. She wasn't sure, now that he had spoken the word, why she had pressed him to it, or how he could even allow her to force the information from him, if he had not wished to tell. In that moment she decided that the willful strength of David Owen would never have unveiled any idea that he did not wish to unveil. Thus, he wanted to tell her about a letter--and Kathy--and Aaron--twenty-five years ago. She was sure of it.
      "There was a decrepit, tiny wooden staircase in the main room. 'Staircase' isn't quite the right word because the steps were thick, hardly-finished slabs of trees, worn with soft concave puddles of prints. More like something from a tree-house, winding up to a second floor which fell away in rotten boards, through the wet paper and a dangling light fixture below. We made Aaron go first. He was gaining some strength and actually showed some enthusiasm for our prowling, so Kathy thought that if he pioneered the second floor he'd be caught up in the moment. The incline was so steep that it was more like ascending a ladder, and Kath and I followed right behind. We were crawling through an upward tunnel. Thumping and rattling and paw noises broke into our short breaths and whispers . I don't know why we were whispering--no one would have been out there on that bitter November night--except we felt criminal and pursued. And then we sensed we were violating the dead. That we were the first to break through. Into the past of that house. We slid our feet carefully over the floor, stepping only where the flashlight touched. It really was treacherous. Kath did step through once--her leg pushed right through a rotten place. She was scraped up and that put a damper on further exploration. We decided to go."
      "By this time Kathy was giggling and Aaron was pointing out odd beetles and other scaled and shelled creatures scattered over the boards. When he picked up a bird's nest, something trailed off the licey weathered grass and thumped softly back into the dark. I shone my light on the thump. It was a bunch of pages stuck together. They were wet, sodden with roof rain, and on top of a bigger lumpy pile. Wet and dark."
      Owen could tell a story. His animation and inflection clicked in the cupola. He was sure of himself, ironic, kind, knowing. Set sat forward, brushing his knees. "Aaron picked up the page thing, with two fingers, and Kathy was yicking and generally being disgusted by the item. Which, when I turned the light right on it, appeared to be a scrapbook, with paper clippings and leaves and other indefinable accoutrements of deserted houses. Well, anyway, the big pile became more enticing to us--if it contained a scrapbook. We decided to carry the whole thing outside, or what we could get of it, although we honestly could not determine what it was. None of us wanted to dip our fingers too far into the wet folds of it. It was like wadded rags."
     He looked directly at Set for a second, and then outside to the dark silhouette of a tapping tree. And then he returned to her. "Please forgive the excess of detail. I guess I just get caught up in . . . I just remember detail. Dramatic detail. It's our provenance as literary types, right, September?"
     She distrusted his motives for drawing her into what he painted as a generic transaction of story-telling. She resented his assumption of her unperception. It's your story, she thought. It's yours and it's important to you, so don't think I'm that stupid, that I can be fooled so easily by your charm.
     "Besides," he went on, "I'm seeing it now through Aaron's eyes. That night has obviously become a totem to him, a turning point, whatever it has meant to me." He tried to see his watch in the dim light.
      "I'll make this quick," he said then. "I've stayed too long. I've an early morning with taking Faith to the airport."
      "She's going?" Set asked, surprised.
      "That call this afternoon was unpleasant news from home. Her father is very ill. Grave. And she has to fly out right away. She's very close to her parents and this is devastating. But Faith is strong. She can internalize sorrow and somehow disseminate it, turn it into good works. I admire her for that. But now it's terrible for her. But let me finish." His pace increased.
      "The pile turned out to be various items left from those who left the cabin last. At least, that's what I imagined. Old dresses, spangled and rich, black, I think, party dresses from--I don't know for sure--but I'd say late Nineteenth-Century. We pulled the stuff apart back in the car. But the letter was most interesting. There was a kind of scrapbook, wet pages tacked with tickets and . . . and I don't remember what all the items were. In fact, I don't think we could actually determine what the various items were at the time. But between two fairly dry pages in the center of the book was a folded paper. Kathy had loosened the wet pages--very carefully--and handed it to me. It was an odd time," he said. "I can still hear the radio playing. 'You've lost that lovin' feeling.' It was our song. The snow was settling on all the branches in that hidden place. I unfolded a single sheet of paper. There was a date in the upper right-hand corner. But that didn't seem real. At first I thought it was a copy of something, or a fake, I didn't know much about letters. But the date I found out later was real."
      "Well, what was it?" Set asked, somewhat irritated at this cat and mouse inquiry.
      "The year was, if I remember, 1840 or 41. No, it was 42. April, I think. The date is all we found out that night, but later we examined it, and made out most of the words. The whole thing seemed so important at the time. So symbolic, so ritualistic, for our dramatic evening. So what I think happened to Aaron's memory is the importance I tried to attach to the night. And I used the letter as the insignia of our pact. Our protection of Aaron, no matter what, our protection of anyone who was unjustly put-upon, and our going forward with no fear against anyone stronger than ourselves. It was all drama and commitment and determination. Kathy and I would stand against Nate, or anyone, we said, anyone who appeared to be in a position of strength, cruel strength. Those weren't our exact words, but that was the idea. And I think we swore on the finding of the old letter that we would protect one another and remember one another for as long as we lived. We each held the letter and said some words. Kathy and I thought we were being good to Aaron, but I know I felt the commitment was important and the pact and the sign and all that went into the evening and that it was for the two of us. The point is, we kept the letter. And Aaron has obviously lived by that letter pact all these years. He's been here in this town, his whole life and I'm sure he's had to deal with harsh realities that life offers and in his own elementary way, on some level, he has adjusted to them. But he has used a teenage commitment as his centering point. His moment to look back on and believe in. Almost religious. But then we all have those structuring times of commitment, don't you think, Set?"
      Set answered blandly for she was disappointed by the blankness of the story's end, if this was the end. "I suppose we do. But was the letter something? I mean, did you find out who wrote it or what it was? What did it say?"
      "Yes, September, it was something," Owen said mockingly. "And it was vaguely interesting. Something about stopping in Ohio. As I recall, it was written by someone disgruntled by the wilderness in Ohio and, let me see, the writer described an inn. That I assume is the reason the letter was in the cabin. You know Darby mentioned Ivy's cabin as in inn. Possibly the letter is connected. But I don't know for sure. It was hard to read. Water damage. Really only partially there. It was totally disintegrated at what was the middle, I think. There was no name, no signature. It was an interesting fragment, though, particularly for dramatic teenagers, and I suppose a find for local historians. But for Aaron Lieb, it meant friendship and probably love. So that's it, Set. Not that exciting, just as I warned you. You were a good listener. Now I do have to run."
      He stood partially to avoid hitting his head, leaning toward her, his hands resting against the back of the plastic couch. He kissed her forehead. "Thank you for listening to an old memory," he said, stepping now on the first rung.
      "Do you have the letter now?" Set asked. It was the logical progression of thought which he had avoided.
      Owen had stepped down three rungs. He did not answer. Finally, when he reached the floor, he looked up into the cupboard peak where the story had unwound. "I don't know. I don't know where it is now, or if it is. I think Aaron took it that night. After that Kathy took it. I was to have it next, but we all lost enthusiasm for the object itself and I went away to college. So I didn't actually ever possess the letter. I suppose it's been mislaid."
      Set climbed down after him and they stood looking at one another at the bottom of the ladder. "It's one of those things, like an old ring, exchanged with your going-steady boyfriend. I'll bet you have a few of those tucked away somewhere," he said smiling broadly, ingratiating himself to her with determination. "In any case, my listener friend, don't be too alarmed by Aaron's cryptic statements, and don't give too much credence to the literal in his comments. Try to understand him through empathy, through the sympathy for one who still abides by the simplicity of teenage morality. Those first gleamings, for the primal sympathy which having been must ever be. Do you teach the Intimations Ode?" he asked.
      After that remark Set had made some inane comments about her past seniors' reactions to Wordsworth. But she felt herself foolish, trying to explain how she approached the Romantics, as David edged, smiling, to the door. Then at the door he had offered her the perusal of his Oxford Journal, just that. She had thought it odd but accepted immediately. He would bring it by on Monday. But Owen's journal was too easily acquired, too available-not to be compared to the ephemeral sketch she held now of three teenagers standing in a woods, swearing eternal friendship on an old letter.
      At her sink, delineating, analyzing every detail of his visit, Set took up England in Literature, felt its textbook weight and realized that she had been standing for a long time in one position, leaning her hip into the porcelain's curve. She had to quit thinking, thinking so much that it choked her. She had to make the most of her own time. She had to quit this rehashing of someone else's life. What about her own?
      Turning out the light in the Keats room, she made purposeful steps toward her bedroom. She was determined to enhance her career, to know more, lecture better, in general, be exciting. She would give some enticing detail on the Victorians tomorrow, that's what she would do.
      Under the cupola Set stopped to hear the clacking branch. Then she went to bed with a thin hope. In the white sheets she opened to the Victorians, 1830 to 1900. She flipped through the chapter. The line drawings of Tennyson, Browning, Bronte, Hopkins, Dickens--yes, she'd find some titilating details that even Brian Saddler couldn't resist.

At 1:20 in the morning Set awoke with a start, the right side of her face indented from where she had lain asleep on her book. For several minutes she teetered between waking and sleeping, listening for the clacking bough. Nothing. Will and Chaucer released muffled burrs in their covered cages, and then Set fell away into unconsciousness.

Set bent down to pick up the envelopes and papers that lay splayed across the linoleum. She had not seen the box of books beside the counter and had nearly pitched headlong into the partition that marked off Marigold's desk. Ed Kiser stood back to catch the whole view.
     "Lookin' good this morning, Miss Hunt. Whatdaya call that gitup ya got on?" he chortled at her rear end. As he emitted brief grunts--somewhere between lechery and amusement--Set scraped together her mail. She was not in the mood to assume her carefully acquired and usually pleasant ethos as the faculty eccentric.
      "Well, Ed, I would think that an astute historian such as yourself would recognize this 'gitup' as knickers. Use your imagination. What do you teach those kids anyway?" The history department, Room 13, was adjacent to Set's. Ed Kiser laughed good-naturedly and remarked to a blocky muscled man, who stood writing at a clipboard on the counter, that the English Department was in a tissy. Set, not interested this morning in heightening the sexual palaver of these beefy coaches, shuffled, dispassionately, through the morning's junk mail. She turned her shoulder against them, but made sure she wasn't too rude. Some mornings she needed their leering and grunting. Just not now.
      Two envelopes from film companies displaying their wares, a note from Maggie announcing a baby shower for Shelly Godwin in the business department, and a new absence list with a threatening penciled message: "Please try to hold on to these slips. Each new slip will cost 25 cents." The assistant study hall proctor had such full-blown nerve; to write a note like that. Set jammed the pile together and into her briefcase, and, then with both hands full, signed her name on the line beside the printed "S. Hunt."
     She hated this factory approach Louden had instituted, and so she usually took one of two perverse measures: she scribbled indecipherable marks with the attached stringed yellow pencil or made elegant, black flourishes in Chancery Italic with her calligraphy pen. In this second approach she engaged the blocks below and above her own blank, swirling ink-long into the precise print of Agnes Bolton and the backward-tilted sticks of Don Morrison. Either way, her name--since she was forced to a diurnal signing on this demeaning list--her name would not be like the others--they who signified their insignificant existences in this building with consistent, unremarkable, and legible script.
      "Good morning, John." A potbellied, smiling man had entered the office carrying a canvas bag over his shoulder. He flapped his wine-colored suspenders over his round front and turned with obvious pleasure to Set.
      "Well, howdy-do. How's Miss Hunt today?" He was familiar, warm, a domestic thread running through the hardened processes of education.
     John Fraser had been janitor at East Worthy High School for twenty-seven years and Set liked him. In these excruciating Monday morning minutes of realignment with institution, she clung desperately to his work-a-day world insights, his trite proverbs, his messages from the furnace room, where he kept a welcoming inner hearth in the bowels of the building. She often glanced longingly in the direction of his tiny block room. Always, when she used the girl's restroom in the basement, she would spy, just for a moment, inside the open door where John tacked his cutouts--magazine articles and jokes--on to a neat bulletin board beside the pumping, coal-blackened tank of heat.
     On winter days this tank clanked ferociously its first belches of warmth into every register on the first and second floors. No one said much about these unannounced mechanical barrages, although each teacher found it necessary to shout over the clattering of what sounded like giants screws winding up somewhere below.
     The students barely ruffled a muscle at these morning outbreaks. On cold mornings the racket often proceeded undaunted for two hours. Mostly, the noise reminded Set that John Fraser, daily man, a link with the outside world, was, perhaps, leaning back on his wooden stool, or pinning up clean, little reminders about broken glass in the locker room or loosened doorknobs in the library, or sweeping the pitted cement floor of his happy domain with his stubby, straw broom. With these thoughts she would smile and raise the volume of her voice. Her class never missed a beat through the warm noises from John's great black keep.
      "Well, what da ya think, gonna get down to what they said it would?" John asked, launching into a comfortable weather exchange. "Better git them boots ready, and chains on your tires. I think we're in for a big one this year."
      "Really, John? I hope so. I'd love to have a Dickens Christmas. Little shop windows edged in frost, noses pressed against them, sleighs bumping over white fields, just like in that beer commercial, and fireplaces crackling with pine logs." She sighed as she smashed her coat between the others in the inadequate office closet. "What makes you think it's going to be big, John?" He was sorting envelopes and plastic-wrapped bundles of school teen magazines that he had drawn from the green canvas bag.
      "Corn's tight. It was tighter'n blazes in the husk. Like a fist. Tall, too. Shot right up this year. Yup, protects itself from the weather and grows tall to git up above the snow." He gave her a familiar wink. "But you city folk probably aren't familiar with our ways here, in the country. Right, Miss Hunt?" He had initiated their favorite topic for repartee.
      "Now, John, I'm getting better. I'll be out slopping hogs soon. Why, I was even in Yoder's Feed Store exchanging information on cows last week. And I learned that some cows were almost poisoned, somewhere. . ."
      "Ya know, I heard about that and--"
      "Oh, Miss Hunt, I almost forgot. A package came for you from the county office," a woman interrupted. She sat behind the partitioned desk. "I tucked it in my desk Friday after you had gone. I think it's a video tape." Marigold Lessing's plain and efficient manner did not offend Set. Louden's secretary maintained her dignity with a controlled intelligence that amazed Set. A sleepy, dragging, low cacophony reigned in the small office on Monday morning and rose to a feverish dance, reminiscent of whirling dervishes, by 2:25, but it didn't phase Marigold.
     "What interesting pants. You look very nice." Everything was measured and orderly. Even her compliments.
      "Thanks, Marigold," Set said, grabbing the brown package and ripping its paper. "I don't believe it. The Hamlet film. Finally. But I needed it in September."
     No one was listening. Marigold and John were discussing a plugged toilet in the boys' restroom and Ed Louden was exchanging education jargon with Cynthia Hostetler, the other half of the English department. The topic was a writing conference in February. Could the Board find a way to allow her attendance at this hands-on seminar? The county writing objectives needed to be addressed. Set snatched up her briefcase, tape, and books, determined to avoid the noxious vocabulary, and rushed from the room.
     At the bottom of the steps, she almost collided with Maggie whose appendages, swathed in green polyester pants and jacket, swung to a halt. She held Tupperware bowls in her right hand and a beige tote bag in her left.
      "You planning a Monday morning party? There are about eight or nine kids standing down by your door. You eating in the room today or do you have lunch duty this week?" Both continued walking in opposite directions, still speaking.
      "O, good night. I forgot. Yes, I'll be swilling it in the cafeteria," she called after Maggie who disappeared at the corner steps. Set saw the group at her door. Maggie, reappearing at the corner, called again after Set and moved heavily back toward Set's room. The home-ec and English teachers stood unperturbed in the middle of the hall, now filling with students who wore morning looks. Disgruntled, quiet, the teenagers muttered brief conversations at lockers.
      "I had something to tell you, Set. I'll just meet you over there around 12:10." Maggie turned and plodded back towards her own province. Set could hear two girls accost Maggie and then the teacher's composed, masculine, response. No student ever ruffled the feathers of this woman mountain. She was a citadel of confidence and humor, obviously not realizing, or at least not admitting, the paradox between her own appearance and the paragon of housewifery which she promoted. Because she didn't recognize anything askance, none of her students appeared to have the slightest question about her capabilities in home-economics and all that that study entails--pleasing food presentations, color-coding for highlighting the skin, interior design. Confidence, aggressiveness can work miracles, Set had thought many times. She thinks she's good, therefore, she is. It was a mystery to Set who had defined her own exacting perimeters of taste.
      At the door, Lori Sowders stood flanked by four girls. One was Kirsten Schmidt. Joannie Madden, Susie Baxter, and Rachel Kauffman were talking softly until Susie exploded with laughter. Joannie hit her friend's arm with a knowing tap of pseudo-disapproval. "You're gross," Joannie moaned. "He couldn't have." Kirsten looked embarrassed as Set approached.
      "Well, girls, you're bright and bushy-tailed for Monday morning," Set said and then immediately regretted it. What a trite phrase, she thought. She avoided unimaginative language when possible. What could she expect from her students if she repeated the village jargon. "Let me put this down before it falls," she said flopping her paraphernalia onto the desk. Kirsten reached to help her.
      "Miss Hunt, we've got a proposition for you," Lori said, sounding important and in-charge. There was no trace in her voice of the last week and a half. "You know that winter youth group we have at the church?" She fell over her words, rushing to the question. "Well, we were talking and would you be a chaperone for it? I mean, I don't know if you have to be at the other, the regular one, but couldn't you make some kind of arrangement with Louden? I mean, Mr. Louden"
      Kirsten leaned forward, her raven hair sweeping over her porcelain face. "Don't forget Lori, the deacons," Kirsten said quietly.
      "O, yeah, we have to ask the deacons, but I'm sure they'll say it's fine. But we wanted to know from you first."
      Set arranged her books, trying to think of an appropriate response, not sure of involving herself in this other ecclesiastical world. In that world she could make darting feints, but she could not see herself actually functioning as a creditable player. "Thank you so much for the offer. I feel privileged that you want me. I'll have . . .
      "We want you the most, Miss Hunt. You're cool," Rachel said. 'The morning bell rattled through the hall.
      "I'll see what the schedule holds, Lori. Give me a little time. When is it again?"
      "This is the embarrassing part. That we're asking so late. It's in two weeks. On Friday night. December first, I think."
     The pack of girls converged with the river of students in the hall, and then Lori turned back. "Oh, another thing." She dropped her voice. "Mom wanted me to ask if you'd have time to talk to her." Set looked up from her papers.
      "Certainly, Lori. Is anything wrong?" She scanned Lori's face.
      "Well, sorta. She wondered, maybe after school tonight? She doesn't want to inconvenience you. But it's been pretty bad and so . . ."
      "You tell her that's fine. Tonight after school."
      "Thanks, Miss Hunt. I'll give her a call. And I sure hope you can chaperone," Lori called back as she exited the room, her easy manner returning.
      Only when Set looked up and into the twenty-eight staring faces did she remember with alarm that David was coming by after school with his Oxford journal. And now for the first three periods she would not be able to breathe, let alone find Lori or reach David. Besides, she did not want to reach David. She did not want to cancel. On the other hand, Theresa Sowders must be desperate to want to talk, coming to a virtual stranger. But even these nagging thoughts were buried under the flurry of events in the first three periods.
      Her dispersal of and introduction to Behold the Land for the10Rs seemed plastic, and she felt that most of the students sensed her lack of genuine enthusiasm. The "reader"--Ron Sidders--announced that he had already read it and designated it "boring." Set tried to steer him away when she saw what was coming. After his grinning critique of the book, Set launched into a torture scene, dramatizing the stakes and coals and the hapless, scalp-less pioneers with fire in her eyes, but less than half of the kids rallied to the mood. And during her reading, the steel gray skies beyond the torn blinds at the window seemed to repeat the somber world within. The 10Rs were putting in another week.
      In communications class, Mona Clayton upset a glass of water she had placed on the table for her demonstration speech: "How to Create an Elegant Table." Marty Conner and his assistant, Bud Miller, had sent the class into uncontrolled laughter when they demonstrated--with a rubber glove filled with water--the correct milking of a cow.
      By third period Set had negotiated a deal with Ed Kiser and Madeline Swartz, the librarian, to use the VCR for her advanced seniors. She had to promise Ed a perk, suggesting that she would take his noon duty for a week after vacation. Finally he had relinquishd the rolling entertainment center--he hadn't finished his unit on the Civil War anyway. She had three days to complete the Hamlet tape--she was at the mercy of the consumate bores at the county office who had attached a note requesting the tape's return by Wednesday at 3:30. That's when she thought of it. She would make these three days before Thanksgiving break into a Hamlet film-fest. It would be a good break--darkness and Shakespeare's words washing over her. This world, this golden parapet. Yes, it would be a welcome release for 42 minutes each day.
      When Set appeared at the door with the cart, Brian Saddler sauntered to the front of the room. "Ya need some help there, Teach?" His tone bore the hint of a smirk, but his general attitude had changed. He rolled the metal platform into the room with its blank rectangle face perched above, and then he efficiently disentangled the cords that were a cryptic annoyance to Set. Grateful for his manly help, given with small gestures that signified his acceptance of the teacher, Set became too demonstrative. She cooed thank-yous and praise for his skill with the cart, but this affection simply put him off, sent him stony, and Set was mystified again when he strolled arrogantly to his desk.
      The class had changed direction. An easiness, which appeared on video days, took over. Pencils and pens were tucked in notebooks and purses, and the interchanges between students were spirited, anticipating, uplifted. They could be passive now, not active; it was this generation's natural bent. Jill Eikenberry always forward thinking, began to tug at the ragged blinds, but Kirt Smith stopped her. "Aw, come on Eikenberry, give it up on those things the Board calls blinds." Jill yanked several times on the blind but its slat bottom had been pulled out by a 10R and Jill was unable to budge the rolling bar above. "Besides, we don't need 'em down. It's practically night out there," he said. Set looked out to the mouse-gray clouds gathering over the stone wall of the elementary building. Even the gigantic red and orange construction paper leaves in the first-grade's window appeared ashen in the dimming light.
      "That's alright, Jill. Kirt's right. We can leave them up." Kirt smiled. "As you can see, we've had a change in plans. The Hamlet tape came in, and so it's now or never."
      The faces registered pleasure, approval. It could have been a tape on cranberry farming. They wanted to sit, take in, receive. "Let's go for it, Miss Hunt," Susie Baxter said.
      "We will, Susie, but I have to say a few words about the Victorians before we go on." A low moan issued forth from the back. "Not a full-blown lecture, just an introduction. We're already out of sequence because of my idea about Christmas, so I'm going to have to cut this short." Set had rearranged her syllabus to accommodate an idea she had had for several years: a production of A Christmas Carol, allowing her seniors to act, dress and think like Victorians and at the same time ingest a little more literature. Set had a hundred of these live-literature ideas. She was determined to go through with one this year. Thus, the Victorians had to precede the Eighteenth Century and the Romantics. She might dispense with Pope completely.
      "Take out your books and turn to page 411 and scan through the introduction with me. Well, first there's Victoria and her beloved Prince Albert. It's her name that marks the period and her life-style that sets the tone. It was a Sunday School mentality," Set continued before she realized the possible offense. But when she glanced over the group, she saw no disgruntled faces. She continued on through Tennyson, Arnold, the Brownings, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
      "The later Victorians began to turn away from the prudish, formulaic, and rigid rules of their predecessors." Now Set began to roll. "Thomas Hardy and Gerard Manley Hopkins, Houseman, and even Dickens. And that brings us to our little production for Christmas. We've got to start next week. I've ordered the books for you and we'll have to have tryouts, at least, by . . . Yes, Seth?"
      "How many parts are there? Is everybody gonna' get a part?" Set had to manage this aspect of the drama gingerly. Their disappointments hurt her. She wanted them to belong to the Nineteenth-Century world she would create.
      "There'll be tons of work for everyone, and, yes, we can have crowd scenes. Carolers, shoppers, odd characters along London streets. A cast of thousands, if necessary. But I'm going to need the strong help of a student director and costume and prop chairpersons. I absolutely cannot do this without your strength and assistance."
     Lori and Brian spoke quietly but with increased animation, while Jill and Susie flickered with smiles and whispers. It was building, the mood was burgeoning into the winter flurry that was pre-Christmas fire. "But look at the time. On to Hamlet." Set felt satisfied that the tone was in place as she switched the tv knob and the first generic rattle of educational credits marched across the screen. Nothing could ruin Hamlet, she assured herself.
      All of them eased down into their minds, each variously selecting, as his intellect allowed, the walking ghost, the Medieval costume, the familiar words-"'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good Mother"--the simple release from having to engage in thought, even the gentle taunting at the actors' tights. Kirt's head lay embraced by his arm on the desk. His quiet breathing suggested sleep. The room, dark and warm, filled with poetry and calm. Even the furnace seemed subdued and satisfied, only errupting three times in tolerable rattles.
      "Look, look out." Jill was on her feet, her arm extended toward the window. "O, look," she repeated. Kirt lifted weighted eyes in the dark.
      Every head turned now toward the rectangles of smudged glass where the blinds made a jagged silhouette against the gray light.
     "It's snowing." Some stood, a few walked to the windows, several sat on the ledges, and no one spoke.
     At first, separate, identifiable crystals lit on the near pine bough and the cement below and disappeared, but as the class lingered at the windows, the air filled with a twisting curtain of white. "Words, words, words," Hamlet said to Polonius as the diaphanous curtain became opaque and the paper leaves in the elementary faded. "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams," Hamlet said to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as the roofs of cars, parked along the street, turned white.
      Set understood clearly at that moment, watching her students, that the snow must stay, even if Shakespeare, the Prince of Denmark, and the rolling cart appeared crucial to the day's objectives. The entire county office could storm the room, click Hamlet from his metal box, and tap their watches with disapproval. The snow must stay, the event marked. She did not consider gathering these young men and women to their former seats. "Why don't we change the video around, in front of the window?" she asked. Brian came forward. No one spoke. Each student turned his desk to the back of the room where the rectangles of snow played, animation.
      Later, when Set recalled the moment, she thought it was the most strangely beautiful scene she had ever witnessed. Before them were cubes of light and language, portraits of snow edged in words. The tv's block of light danced with actors, declaiming passionately, while the skies emptied cold crystals into the day, into the real world beyond the rectangles of glass. She imagined that the first grade was watching from behind their leaves, and she understood also that her seventeen-year-old students must watch. In East Worthy the snow was an event, and she recalled David's account of the night he had tried to help Aaron. She turned to watch Lori's and Brian's heads. Their skulls were as delicate as eggshells, their brains encased within, experiencing, registering, the spectacle of weather. It seemed as old as Stonehenge, Set thought at first, but then rearranged her thoughts with Indians. The moment was primal like the sound of leather-bound feet in tall, uncut forests. The marking of mosses on trees, the determining of star positions, the tapping of gourds on vines.
      Set's mind exploded in images and wandered, out beyond the rectangle of television light, into the hills around Shequanor, where the corn stubble was being erased with white, and then back again. When a celluloid Hamlet strode across the monitor, raging about "this goodly frame, the earth," she could not tell where her students were focusing their attention She hoped they heard the miniature Hamlet when he talked about the "brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire," but she sensed they watched the other blocks of snowy light and heard nothing but their own interior plans. In the end, she didn't care what they heard. It was the first snow.
      When the bell rang, most of the class left, winking and squinting in the light, gathering their books and increasing their volume in the hall. Only Brian remained as Set attempted to roll the cart out of the desks. He helped, saying nothing, but then stood at her desk for an extended moment. "Thank you," he said, his eyes clear and unblinking. Set wasn't exactly sure why he thanked her, as he walked away, but she thought it was for the snow scene. Her mind felt warmed.
     And then she remembered David and Theresa.

Set hated lunch duty-- not because of the scrapping of brown, hard plastic plates into open garbage cans, or the pompous and frigid attitude of the frowsy teacher's aid, who collected lunch money righteously in front of the plate and napkins piles, or even the painful spectacle of student helpers, each noon chastened into middle-aged frumpery, subdued, clad in white aprons, spooning up vegetable soup with weak smiles, directed by what seemed an inordinate number of ill-willed cooks. Set cringed instead when a mood was broken, when, after releasing herself to short, intimate exchanges with students about tangential subjects like the flag corp's problems with hemlines and routines, the coupling of a good-looking sophomore with a senior stud, the paper lunch bags with cut carrots and peanut butter sandwiches, she had to see these people again, lined up, corralled, in her room, behind desks.
     The gap was emphasized by the location of the cafeteria in a separate building--the gray stone elementary. A definable boundary. It was as if they had all been released for a few minutes into real life, and then chained again into rigid conformity. It was unnatural. She felt the pumping, the anticipation, the rush in her sixth period class, after lunch, and she felt guilty when she herself wanted to escape, running from the building with her class behind her. A pied piper. It was the same feeling she had when she glanced into the furnace room. She usually said something wild and tired in her sixth period to which her sixteen juniors groaned in grateful agreement.
      Today's table banter centered on snow--sledding on Buroker's Hill, wearing long underwear under band uniforms for the Thanksgiving parade, and first wallowings in the old sentimental, Christmas card tripe about good will during the holidays. The snow had set it off, and it all sounded better than the reality that would follow. Set was relieved when Maggie squeezed in beside her at the table. "I bet Mrs. McPherson would," a girl teased when the home-ec teacher lowered her trunk onto the bench that rocked tellingly under her weight. The student held her hands in a masculine manner on the table, and spoke with a deep voice.
      "Would what, Melissa?" Maggie asked. The rest of the bench-sitters turned their smiles toward the teachers.
      "We bet you'd take a tour with us on the machine, if we asked. Right, Jackie?"
      "If the machine is a snowmobile, my fifth period already asked, and, guess what, Ray and I have one at home. Maybe we'll have to have a group tour sometime this winter." Melissa and her friends took up this idea and continued to talk. Maggie turned to Set. "I was going to call you this weekend, but Ray wanted my help in the fields. Anyway, I was so doggone tired when we got in, I just put it off."
      "About what?" Set asked surprised, since she and Maggie rarely communicated on weekends.
      "You know, Set, that I don't meddle in your--in what you do. But the kids have been talking in class, well, really in several classes, about you seeing David Owen. Now that's--"
      "I don't believe this. I hardly know--"
      "I knew that would get you, but just listen a minute. The whole thing with Owen is your business, but its his connection with the thing that happened to Lori Sowder's dad that makes me concerned. Lori's in my Life Styles Class eighth period. Last week the kids were subdued, you know the whole thing with Sowders, and generally I just left them alone. But Friday, they started talking, they wanted me to hear." Maggie leaned closer and dropped her voice. "The girls kept insinuating that Nate Sowders--now this sounds fantastic, but this is the word they used--that he was murdered. Of course, I stopped them right away. I told them that to say such things was totally damaging and irresponsible on their part. At first I thought it was the usual high school hoopla, but, even then, this kind of comment went beyond the fringe."
      "Was Lori saying that? Set asked.
      "Lori was absent Friday afternoon. But they insinuated that Lori had told them."
      Set was afraid to ask the next question, but she did it anyway with a tightening in her throat. "So what's that got to do with David Owen?" she whispered.
      "Set, they actually came right out and said that he might have done it. For these students to be insinuating something like this is really dangerous, Set." Maggie's voice was dead-pan, frighteningly calm. Set had never heard her speak in this manner. "You asked me about Owen last week. And you were there at Shequonur when it happened. And the kids now are talking about you and Owen. Set, you know I wouldn't have broached the subject except that this kind of stuff can do really serious damage in a small town. The kids know it's serious, but they don't know in what ways. Your career, your reputation. You're a newcomer, and these towns can change on a dime. I've seen it happen. And I haven't even mentioned that--"
      "That you wonder if he did it?"
      Maggie pulled up straight and looked directly into Set's eyes.
     "Yes."
     Melissa gave the home-ec teacher a friendly tap on the shoulder as the students moved to empty their plates at the barrel, but Maggie didn't respond. "Yes. I wouldn't have. Not from that gossip from the kids. But over the weekend I heard something that . . . well, anyone, any responsible person would have to consider what the kids said with what I heard."
      "In the name of God, Maggie, what? Say it." Set was trembling inside, both from fear and pleasure. It was a drama beyond any she had ever known. But before Maggie could respond the lunch buzzer flared and both suddenly realized that all the teenagers, except for two dull-faced cafeteria helpers stacking clean plates, had returned to class. "What? What?" Set asked furiously.
      "There was an autopsy and Sowders died from some kind of overdose. Ray's sister's daughter works at the hospital and so I know that for a fact."
     Set got up, feeling fire in her face, trying to think what to say to her friend. Both collected their purses and lunch paraphernalia and made a habitual hurried walk to the high school building. Set stopped on the walk between the two buildings and confronted Maggie. A thin film of snow crept over the soles of Set's Oxfords and Maggie's Walmart tie-ups; the morning's wind had disappeared.
      "I know, Maggie. Lori talked to me. I mean, I don't really know about what you call an overdose, but the thing about Lori suspecting. Can I call you tonight? We really have to, I really have to talk to you. And another favor, could you take my sixth period for just a few minutes, maybe five while I make an important phone call? I hate to ask but. . ."
      "Of course. But let's not stand here dawdling in the wind. Your sixth period's probably hanging from the ceiling now and I'm not in the mood to pry them down."
     They scuffed on through the white film and Set slipped once at the steps, falling against her friend's arm. "It was a hemorrhage, Set. Internal. Nate Sowders bled to death."