Ahead, the star blinked from the grain elevator. She had not noticed it this year, even though it had been plugged in the day after Thanksgiving. But tonight she saw it clear and white, perched above the magic plain that sprouted the village of East Worthy. The land anointed, baptized in the words of Charles Dickens. Sprinkled or immersed, she wondered, her head lit and spinning with a blur of exquisite half-thoughts. What difference? Baptized in language by one of them, an inhabitant of her other land. Posters. Plays books. All paying homage. And now, her words. She had known the fields, a brambly shawl between Shequonur and the town, were alive with other times, important syllables. She had sensed them, hadn't she? Maybe that's why Aunt Margory was compelled to coat her walls with words; she had heard the rumble of carriage wheels passing this way, bearing the mind and the words of the Inimitable.
      "Listen to this," Dar had said. The Toyota's interior light dimly glazed a page of Kaplan's biography. "He loved an Ellen Ternnan, an actress. Did you know that?"
      "Yes, but it's been some time since I've read an account. What about it?"
      "He calls her 'the Princess whom I adore--you have no idea how intensely I love her! . . . Nothing would suit me half so well . . .as climbing after her sword in hand, and either winning her or being killed.' He left his wife?"
      "Yes, in the end he did. I would call it a midlife crisis, but I despise that term. I think he put Catherine aside. . . think of it, Dar, that's the Kate he's describing in the letter." Every new item about Dickens transformed single words of the letter into tangible pieces of buried time. "I think he lived with, or met with Ellen, for the rest of his life."
      "Yes, it says that his wife he thought 'insensitive, even in public, to his achievements. Just her presence had become an unconscious reminder of irresponsible mothering and obese insensitivity.' Boy, there's a picture for you." Dar flipped off the light. "Mismatched. Seems a perennial theme, doesn't it?"
      All the way home, Dar had painted scenes of Shequonur's opening day for Set and he had colored in a vivid sketch of Ivy Gilchrist and Ora King. They stood close, touching hands, at the piano in the dining room, for at least fifteen minutes. Others, tourists and townspeople, had drifted around them, offering comments about the mantles' collage of weeds and candles. But Ora and Ivy smiled down at the open book of music plunked out by the pianist, a chubby woman who played organ at the Methodist Church. Christmas carols, slow snowing outside the deep windows, Ora and Ivy smiling. Darby had been mesmerized by the diminutive couple. Ora had a voice, Dar said, that made him think of old twig furniture, something to which he was particularly partial. Rustic and brown, graceful and basic, out of the woods, unpretending, but with a twist of ornament. "You know," Darby said, "there's a comfort in that old branch of a man, in his rough sides, a wise knowing in his courage to stand as he is. But now I'm getting downright romantic over the odd pair."
      Both Set and Dar had questioned Ivy's maternal self, her denial of Nate Sowders. Dar could not imagine a mother living with her secret son for years in the same community. It didn't seem natural. But Set was convinced that it could be done with adjustments. It need not eradicate Ivy's sensitivity to life, as David had maintained. Sensitivity toward David. There was the problem. Ivy's relationship with David. A son. Set did have some difficulty with Ivy's replacing Nate with David, for that is what it seemed. David and Ivy. And then there was Aaron Leib.
      "You should have been there for Aaron's arrival," Dar said. "Same bundle of plaids. Breathing like a hound, he pushed several of the tourists away to get to Ivy. And, Set, I thought he'd go over the edge when he saw the mantles. His nose started twitching. It was absolutely Neanderthal. He tried to touch the hedgeapples. What else, right? When Ora pulled his hands away, Aaron actually wiggled out of the old man's grip. And then he picked an apple out of the greens--you know, that gorgeous mantle we assembled in the library? Well, the nose came straight at me, poking the hedgeapple in my face. 'How'd ya get it gold?' he shouted right over Shirley Matthew's "We Three Kings." I thought the cattle in the room would lose their Christmas cheer. In any case, I took the lad aside and told him about spray paint. It seemed a new concept to him. You're a teacher. Would you say Aaron Leib is retarded or emotionally ill? Come on, give me some insight on this one."
      "Probably neither, but how do I know. Maybe emotionally retarded would be a proper diagnosis for poor Aaron. He's not stupid. He knows so much about the land--birds, plants, hedgeapples. He knew the correct name. What was it?"
      "Oh, that's right," Dar said. "I forgot to tell you. While you were checking out I looked it up. "You know how he kept shouting 'bodark' on Kitehi? The plaid man is . . ."
      Set, brimming with enthusiasm for each related tidbit, interjected, "At the lecture last night, I forgot to tell you, he was still bodarking me. Right behind me. By the way, remind me to tell you about David last night."
      "I'm sure I won't have to remind you of the subject, my little twittering lovebird." He raised his eyebrows and Set assumed a disgusted expression although she was fully immersed in her own drama and found the insinuation stimulating. "Bodark is actually from the French 'bois d'arc' and he was right. It means 'bow wood.' The Indians used the wood of hedgeapple trees for archery bows. The little man has some unusual knowledge. But I do love the idea--something so charming about the connection. You know, laying there upon the Colonel's mantel the ancient bow wood of the original woodsmen, silent walkers of leaves." He sighed with the beauty of his words and pulled on his gray mittens. Shequonur lie ahead up the lane.
      "That was lovely, Dar--silent walkers of leaves." She pulled in beside the doghouse, huge and granite, fit for mastiffs and wolfhounds. She let the car run. "He almost said it last night; I think he was going to do it."
      "Say what?"
      "I don't know, something about his parents, his real self, the fury, the anger. Right in the lecture, making the epiphany part of the corner stone. I don't know, he was right on the edge."
      "He should have let them have it, the righteous pukes. I'd like to see Enid Fout have something shoved at her tight ugly face. Mother always has a pertinent comment about good old Enid. Mother has never liked the Fouts. He has some time left, though. Tomorrow and Friday. Maybe he'll do it and we'll have some extra Christmas magic and excitement this year."
      "With the regular prayer meeting tonight that leaves only Friday. Remember, tomorrow night I have Messiah practice. All the churches are dismissing for rehearsal with the orchestra."
      When Darby opened his door a cloud of flakes whisked over both of them. "Brrr. I'm glad it's cold," Set said. "It's right and proper. Dar?"
      "What?" He leaned his head in her window, rolled down.
      "Do you think Ivy and Ora are intimate?"
      "You mean, do they have sex? Really, my dear, I haven't thought on it. I can hardly take care of my own romances." He snorted his laugh. A crystal flake hung on her eye lash. "Have a rousing rehearsal with the Messiah."
      A tuft of wind scattered crystals under the porch light and Set sat alone for several minutes, wondering about the monstrous canines that must have lumbered before their gray door on the very spot where she sat.

She leaned into the magnifying mirror and examined the skin beneath her eyes. Only at her dressing table, laden with crystal bottles and vintage powder pot, her green alabaster earring box, a tiny basket filled with brushes, her collection of old fabric flowers tethered here and there on the light, itself sculpted like the petal of a flower--only here would she look at her eyes this closely. These things shielded her should she become overwrought with discovery. This afternoon she felt giddy and so she took the chance, cavalier, defiant. Immediately she was sorry.
      The skin looked crepey and when she adjusted herself, drawing back, tilting her head in a different light, it did not lose its delicate crisscrossed tracks, like the infinitesimal trail of a dainty worm she had never caught in the act. What an ugly, ugly metaphor she thought, and smoothed her finger over the skin. But this was worse, for the little mound of crepe remained where she pushed it.
      She walked around, up, around the sleeping room, opening and closing the curtains she had sewn from a scrap of fabric discovered in a damp cardboard box at Connie's. These were her favorite--white herons clinging to a green twig jutting from a swirl of cotton water. Pictorial, odd, forties. When she was ill at ease, she swung these cartoon birds on their green metal rods. She had created them in one sense, lined the curtains, painted the rods, woven them into her world of the caboose. They pleased her.
      Now at the dressing table again, her mind focused, ready to enjoy her preparation. She enjoyed her makeup.
      Already the afternoon drifted, changing, darkening, and she watched with a delicious despair she felt when days turned wild. The weather echoed her own chaos. It made her calm to watch the rolling irregular clouds reflect in the mirror behind her face. A wind rattled the glass behind the herons.
      But a second unfortunate event occurred at the table--just after she had finished with her brown-black, non-smudge mascara. The lapel of her dressing gown fell away from her left breast and there it was--the hair. It must have been the way the sky shifted outside the window that made the peculiar light, an anomaly that pointed out things. Things that weren't really evident to the rest of the world. In a sense, weren't real. But there it was, and all the old dismal littleness swept over her before she had a chance to stop it with the herons or the crystal bottles. It was the Radnor feeling, or the feeling that came when she had been married to Radnor. Even before. Inadequate. Imperfect.
      She endured the feeling of inadequacy more and more. She believed when she was younger that she would mount the platform at each stage--say in her twenties and then her thirties--and, yes, even her forties. At each decade she would somehow have the rules, a script to follow, would learn the lines, perfect the performance and then move on. But now she realized it all went too fast and she never caught up, never had time to learn the lines, let alone perfect them.
      On her left breast, right above the nipple, grew a hair, a single hair which had embarrassed her since she first discovered it at age eighteen. She remembered the day Radnor had seen it down her dress, in a particular light--they had been standing outside the library, college freshmen-- and he had laughed at it. It was a horror then. With his cruel implicating tone, his humor at discovering her imperfection. But the real distress of the single hair was its shadowy indestructibility. Instead of dissolving magically by some method she always thought she would someday discover, it had turned gray. The single hair not only grew back year after year, even when she, with her silver tweezers, had repeatedly plucked it, now it was growing old. The single dark hair had grown pale, brazenly stiff and sickeningly weak and was itself the barometer of time's passage. The past Set never got right was growing old.
      Quickly she gathered up her lapels, lapping them high on her chest, and fingered through her earring box. The little gold knots, that's what she must wear tonight. The ones from her dad. Yesterday she had worn the leaf earrings from her mother. But her dad, his hands, his spotted hands on the remote control, he needed the protection tonight. These were amulets. The one who would need her most that day would be protected by the gift hung at her ears. She had used this formula for several years now and felt compelled to alternate systematically between the two. Tonight, though, with the newfound skin and the breast hair, she felt an icy vulnerability run at her ear as she punctured its lobe with a gold post. Who would wear an amulet for her?
      And then she remembered the letter. Her protection. Her amulet against obscurity. From the velvet-lined bottom drawer of her jewelry box she lifted the words. She carried them forward to the kitchen table, laying them ceremoniously in the center. On one side she placed an unburned candle, on the other a pottery cup of potpourri, needle and cones. She would leave it out. To greet her return from practice.
      But it was too open. Too exposed, too out in the middle, and so she returned from the sleeping room with her script for A Christmas Carol. She covered the fragile page.

All her dark thoughts had been shuffled away by the time she stepped outside the door of the caboose and felt the cold air tighten her face. Her lips were moist within their penciled boundaries of Revlon Red, her skin was cool and damp in its veil of beige foundation. Fresh makeup in the afternoon.
      A picture of her first date flicked across her mind as she settled behind the wheel. She had worn a pink cashmere sweater and pearls that night. Her skin had felt damp and fresh, just as it did now. She could not remember what Alan wore. For years, so many preparations, diurnal and mysterious, because the act of preparing the body was as fragile and dissolving as an eggshell, as a flake. Yet she had pursued it with a passion, with a formula for stockings and dress, for hemlines and belts, for polishes and creams. But now below the surface crawled the delicate worm, creating the crepe. Dark thoughts.
     She looked down at her coat. Its black glass buttons, its jaunty cuffs, its green wool, woven in the early fifties. She felt her challis scarf billowing the right volume at her wide collar. She loved it. She admitted it. It was comforting. Comforting because it was a strike against death. Yes, that's it, she thought. My coat and my scarf all signifying form. A brave audacity. Even the most obscene bag lady with grotesquely painted lips and scarf tied behind a cheap jewel pin signifies a blow against the enemy. See, the clothes say, I glorify and beautify myself, my wrinkled lips and putty skin, until the day you come for me. No mediocre, common dress that mutters weakly, I am little, I am meek, I die willingly in the flesh.
      I do not die willingly and I am not common. I paint my lips and dance. While I breathe I am still the god and executor of the plan. I paint my lips an inch thick because to these ends I will come. Dark thoughts. She had been reading Hamlet too long. Still the revelation of the form comforted her. She smiled in the rearview mirror. Her white teeth formed a line of perfect bone beneath the red curve of her lip. She would look good at the church.
      She had decided to take the long way through the town and then the country in a kind of celebration of the season and preparation for Handel's glorious running phrases. A time to settle luxuriously in the aristocratic secrecy of the letter. Just Dickens and September Hunt riding the town.
      East Worthy lay unsuspecting on this late Thursday afternoon. Several cars rolled out from the IGA. A forgotten item from the grocery list, a loaf of bread or a jug of two percent milk. But the town's real business was going forward high above Main Street where a thick man in coveralls lifted a basket of greens from his swinging box to the light pole. Another man in earmuffs hung out of a truck window and maneuvered the crane arm that supported the man in the box. The truck man played his controls as if they were strings of a Stradivarius.
      Set idled her car at the corner minimart to admire these serious adventures of pine needles and wire baskets. Grown men with brusque voices and harsh work clothes carried on the installation of the baskets with sober commitment. Set grinned. The ethereal man adjusted a dark cone in the green and the basket ignited to stars, a basket of stars. Down at the townhall someone must have flipped the switch. The crane lowered the man in the box to the bed of the truck and the vehicle rolled to the next of four poles that punctuated the town's one block of store fronts.
      A few flakes wetted her windshield and, rather than turn on the wipers, Set watched the town through patterns of white, like the windows in the elementary, cut and pasted, hung with the one-of-a-kind pattern that a child and the wind cuts. A cold gossamer veil trailed across the awning of County Crafts which framed in its window an almost life-size creche. Set wished it would have been fully life-size or much smaller. Almost life-size was somehow disturbing. Above this wooden conglomeration hung silver glass balls as big as hedgeapples. Each was tipped with a pointed spear that appeared potentially lethal for the two shepherds and several wooden sheep below. A few downtown houses sported blinking bushes and the bed and breakfast where Faith was staying had an elaborate display of five wire stars and sparkling shrubbery. All of these garish light systems pulsed silver beats, although it was still afternoon. The days were short.
      Part of the celebratory run took Set over her favorite bridge, an arched cement structure straddling Puck-a-chee. The bridge designated that town had turned to country. Above the fields, beyond the bridge, she watched the sun slipping down the gray dome of the sky. A thin wisp of cloud drifted across the wafer of sun, its light so dim Set could look straight into it. But within a minute, a huge slate cloud, torn in the center, passed over the wafer and it emerged a glittering platinum disc. The winter light was startling and she looked away.
      But out beyond the fields the trees were spun like tapestry, an ancient fabric, holding color inside their tangled trunks. On the near horizon the gold plateau of a shorn cornfield shimmered and waved parchment-colored grasses at its road edge. Mare's tail and burrweed. The sky was worn, rich leather and against its patina stood cows like great black and white jewels, heavy pendants of flesh, stony and still, in the spurting snow. Near them a matching black crow pecked at the frozen ground.
      Like her green coat, these fields had come to form. They formed, they coordinated, they rolled away in beauty with their matching crows and jeweled cows. He had seen it. He had said so. What was the phrase? A tiny paradise, these soft hills. Of course, it had been April then. But still he had felt it, hadn't he, even in the bog of Ohio. Oh, clever Dickens, she thought familiarly. He would not have seen exactly what she saw now through the Toyota's window, but had he seen it, he would have used it well. A corn picker stood at rest in a shorn field, waiting for the harvest of the adjoining field of blonde fluttering leaves, paper thin, waving horizontally in the wind. The big machine stretched out its crooked arm which poised over a metal grain wagon. Beside these, like Tonka toys left by some infant god, waited two more wagons. It all fit so well wherever her eye drifted, the snow creating a nimbus of light for the telephone poles strung with birds, unmoving, their yellow claws tight about the wires.
      The wind's increasing velocity propelled the snow into a pattern of swirls, a storm beneath her tires. Ahead as far as she could see, even to the stone box of Shequonur, whirled the foot-clouds, as if she had risen, a goddess in a pantheon. Suddenly, beside her rising and falling with the car appeared a lone jogger, suited up in metallic sportswear, goggles, and a skull-capping toboggan. Together for several seconds the Toyota and the jogger seemed to lift and circle over the road. Set could barely touch the wheel, she was so driven by the force of what seemed to be. And then the jogger was gone. Her eyes settled on a small silhouette in the distance; she saw it--the heavy breast of a hawk hunched in the fringe of trees that marked Puck-a-chee's run through the field. Set felt her breath coming and going with the breast of the bird, wondering how it sat so still in the cold. It heaved itself into the brittle air. She watched it circle a field. "I could throw myself into the air with you now, hawk." She heard her voice.

By the time she reached the church, afternoon has darkened into evening. The parking lot pole lights burned blue-green. She gathered score and purse against her breasts, and saw, peripherally, Cynthia and Kenny Hostetler pull in and parallel park--neat with the Toyota.
      "Come on out of there, September." Cynthia’s lips released warm air onto the glass. Her face was huge and white as she pecked at the window. "Say, you're early. I said to Kenny, I want to get over there and maybe get a few sets of papers under my belt before we start." Cynthia's shoulder almost touched Set's as they pushed into the strong wind. Already on the porch, Kenny waited at the wooden doors, his hands in his pockets. "Isn't it shocking about Nate Sowders?"
      Set looked at Cynthia, alarmed. "What about him?" Kenny held the door. Inside they stood removing their gloves at a table piled with pamphlets and flyers. "What about Nate Sowders?" Set drew away several inches from the white face that insisted upon filling too much space.
      "Kenny heard that Nate Sowders--well, you know there's been so much trouble surrounding his death, peculiar--well, Kenny heard that Reverend Sowders found out that his parents weren't his parents. That is, that his mother wasn't his mother. His biological mother. That he just went berserk when he found out. Something about records at the hospital." Her faced paused for a breath. Set focused on the gleaming offering plates at the back of the pamphlet table so that she would not have to look at the unrelenting animation of the face. "Wasn't that it, Kenny? He went down to check about a test for some condition that he had, and some nurse asked about if he knew the location of his biological parents. Well, you can imagine. If you didn't know."
      Cynthia paused a few seconds to evoke a reaction, in order that she need not bear the epithet "gossip-monger," so that the listener would join her like an alcoholic. But Set continued to look away at the plates. "Kenny, didn't you say that he had to be restrained? " she said, calling up the witness of her husband, the more persuasive, objective fact-gatherer, when Set didn't respond.
      "There was some talk about it. I understand that the nurse didn't realize that he didn't know. Some doctors were called in. That's about all I know, except for the identification." Kenny hung Cynthia's jacket at the rack. His wife adjusted the sleeves of her sweatshirt, medallioned with kittens and the slogan, "Hug a teacher." Faux pearl earrings completed her outfit.
      "What identification?"
      "That's the part that will shock you, Set. It's really out all around town so I don't feel like I'm telling tales out of school, so to speak." Set looked fully into the round whiteness of Cynthia's face, not believing that it could be known. "They say Ivy Gilchrist is his mother." And then Ivy was standing there, at the coat rack, small hands folded in front of her blue woven coat, smiling. Ora helped her slender white arms from the heavy blue weave.
      "Good evening, all," Ivy said. Cynthia shuffled about the tote bag at her feet. At first her movements jerked staccato and agitated, but then suddenly she looked up unruffled. The kittens pulled to one side.
      "Well, hello, you two. Still coming down outside?" She didn't wait for an answer. "I imagine this will be an intense practice, don't you?" She directed her rhetoric vaguely in the direction of the couple, while Ivy bent all of her attention on the speaker, kind, taking in each nuance. Her face was un-scheming; her listening a gift to Cynthia.
      "Don't you enjoy these last rehearsals?" Ivy asked. "I do. So filled with all of the composer's creation? What power he must have felt when he heard those last glorious chords in his mind and stroked them onto the page." Ora's eyes crinkled softly in leather skin. He touched Ivy's white sleeve tenderly, his gnarled fingers, padded in calluses, implied the pleasure he felt at such wise statements.
      "I know exactly what you mean, Ivy. I feel the same. I was so anxious for tonight. The snow coming down seems right, don't you think?" Set said.
      With not a single glance back toward the peevish white face and the mild, uncommitted grin of its mate, Set attached herself to Ivy and Ora and they entered the sanctuary. Ivy could not have overheard the remark, not even stoic Ivy, and carried forward as she appeared to be doing. Set must make up, must protect. What if they all knew, carrying their books, walking forward into the front, thinking, carrying, bending their minds on little innocent Ivy. Set scanned the group milling around at the back tables, racing over their features to see if eyes lingered on Ivy. But she couldn't tell. A quiet force hovered over the men and women waiting at the door, a sensation that Set had noticed from the first practice. A Mennonite calm, motions slowed, voices lowered, an inner restraint. Maybe those at the back were thinking of Ivy, but the calm had pulled them in, and--Mennonite and Methodist--all reacted to the serenity that filled the sanctuary.
      Out of the door group emerged the small, intense figure of Layton Kaufman. He strode to a metal music stand at the front, followed by a heavy woman in a white jacket. Her hair appeared dyed blonde, heavily sprayed into a bouffant. She carried her large body compactly, placidly behind the director. Behind her strode a no-nonsense plain woman, hair parted in the middle, swept into waves, rolled tight in back. Brown turtleneck, beige A-line skirt, walking Oxfords, and a strong back. Part of the old order Mennonite. These two were soloists, alto and soprano.
      "I'd like to begin with the recitative 'Behold a virgin,' Jean, and let you go on into the chorus with Clara trying the new instrumentation." At the front stood a piano-like keyboard. A harpsichord had been engaged for this performance and Set anticipated the clattering antique sound. She purposely slid next to Ivy in the last pew, waiting with her, wrapping her up in acceptance. She would, if need be, become an arrogant shield against the slightest hint, the subtle innuendo.
      When Clara Yoder lowered her shoulders into the first chords, bending her body down into the keyboard of the harpsichord, Set closed her eyes in the wash of raw sound, the reassuring tinny clutter of the strings. Handel's mind sang in the high white arch, filtered between the wreath's branches and red bow, and hung in the arched indentation at the front. The sound slid down the five white candles propped around the potted white poinsettia in the window; it rose up and through the two tapestries that flanked the arch.
      Set studied the abstract patterns on the tapestries. Before tonight she hadn't thought much about the huge cloth rectangles swung high up at the front of the room, but tonight, while Clara Yoder fondled Handel's mind over new keys, and Ivy sat like a white carving beside her, and the evening dimmed over the red carpet at her feet and the purple glass in the windows, she wanted to define the applique. Very much not a part of the old order, she thought. Too contemporary. But then she thought of quilts. The women who had sewn these patches of color onto the hangings were quilting. Very large Mennonite quilts, stretched with--what were they? Birds. Yes, sateen birds flying upward on the left side. On the other, a figure of a woman, kneeling, perhaps. One tapestry had been fringed with copper cloth, the other with heavy gold tassels.
      "O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion," rolled out of the heavy woman in cheap white, who now transformed the black notes into a husky pixied delicacy.
      "Yes, yes, Jean, the balance is nice," Layton said, striding long steps to the back. "Blending is good. Ina, come in now at letter A and we'll see if the piano needs to be forte." So it was to be harpsichord and piano. "Now, Julia, at letter B." And with the darting of his white wand an organ joined and the three keyboards danced off an elfin accuracy. The hefty woman sang with a rural audacity. She reminded Set of a determined snail in a rich garden. Toward the garden snail, the chorus, still at the back, lifted their heads. Where they stood in quiet groups or sat in back pews against the red tufted pillows, or entered late from the wind-opening door, they, too, opened their lips, silently, as these first combined sounds, great gentle globs of peace, mounted up, rose vibrating, and circled about the white arch. For this they had practiced on long winter evenings. And to this rich nuclei of sound, the chorus would add layers of bass and soprano, alto and tenor.
      Layton Kauffman focused. Even his navy v-neck seemed controlled, the brown tweed in his trousers, calm. He strode faster to his stand, calling out for the chorus to assemble. The motion of the people, round women in house dresses with severe hair, young girls with long permed curls, several men in clean plaid shirts, one man with a dark suit, tie, and long hair--all seemed swept along in the swelling calm, a loud peace. Quiet talk on the red carpet. Even Enid and Bob Fout appeared transformed by the peace, and Lori and Theresa Sowders somehow seemed tidier and sophisticated as they moved forward. The Hostetlers, too, looked noble, absolved of their gossiping, as they took their places on the risers below the sateen birds. Kathy and Reuben Schmidt appeared from the furthest group at the offering plate table; they separated at the risers, Kathy to the altos and Reuben to the basses. Set waited with Ivy and Ora, watching the chorus assemble and finally she moved forward with them into the warm closeness of bodies.
      "Let's begin with the chorus entry on "O though that tellest good tidings." I'd like you, Jean, to take the last eight measures and the rest pick up at H." A shadow emerged from the back. David Owen walked toward Layton.
      "I hope you’ll permit a voice from the past, Layton, to join you tonight." Layton, with both of his hands, took David's outstretched hand and shook it. Then, directed toward the basses on the last riser, Owen managed a tight ascension through the altos where he brushed past Set's arm, finally arriving on the highest plank, directly under the kneeling woman. Beside him, standing straight and still, was Reuben Schmidt
      The white wand lifted. "At E, instruments." The dancing joy of those leaps, eighth and sixteenth notes, running and pounding against strings in the boxes of piano, organ, and harpsichord subsumed them all. Sopranos twisted first their single line "O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion." Tenors echoed, then basses, then altos, one upon another. Repeating, repeating like a child's round, like a curse, like a magic spell. Over and over. O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion. Arise. Arise. Layton swept low into curved sounds like a soaring hawk, dipping into a phrase from which the body of voices moved, a buoying wind on which the bird hung. The book scores, opened at exactly the same page, made four black borders before their singing heads, their round mouths spilling a liquid sound.
      Set dissolved into a world of sound and light--the exit signs at the back flashed green jewels, the carpet oozed dark red, the tapers and poinsettias poised themselves in waxy translucence, and the metallic runs of Handel's mind gathered up the colors, forms, and voices into a sensual collage. Each candle and chord, each black book and plaid shirt, each round mouth and rural rendering of Handel, melted and transfigured into an abstraction as still and permanent as the sateen birds. Layton Kauffman whipped up the great collage with sweeping arcs, his wand pointing, defining. His wand insisted upon the moment, urged them toward the form that was only the moment.
     Through phrase upon phrase--and his name shall be called wonderful, counselor, good will, good will toward men, behold the lamb of god that taketh away the sins, the sins of the world, all we like sheep, all we like sheep, all we like sheep, he trusted in god that he would deliver him, let him deliver him, his yoke is easy, his burthen is light, his burthen, his burthen is light, let him deliver him--the black books swayed with the great hawk. His arms spread their full length to extend and stop the last sound . . . If he delight in him.
      Then silence. The chorus rested. There they stood, in the sanctuary of South Hill Mennonite Church. An hour and fifteen minutes had spun away with the Messiah.
      "I'm pleased," Layton said, and laid his baton on the music stand. Set, shocked that the break had come so soon, broke from the collage and tried to find his face. But already David was walking away, toward the back. Set pushed gently against Mary King, excusing herself. She needed to see him, to talk to him. She had decided that it would be tonight. What right did she have to keep the secret away from him. She felt guilty and ill at ease now that the music no longer masked her other senses. Now that the town knew about Ivy and Nate; at least someone knew, someone who might ruin her own first telling. She must hurry to make her part of it right and be rid of what she did not own
     But when she reached the entry, David was gone. Perhaps he was downstairs. She would find him and thrill him with the news--not only that she had the letter safe in her possession, but that she had documented its source.
      She peeked into the Sunday school rooms, pretending casual interest in the elementary mission programs, sheets of colored construction paper with outlines of chickens--"Chickens for Children"--a project for Haiti. At least these people, these Mennonites, acted upon their Christianity, built houses, and comforted after tornadoes, and gave chickens and soap to ravaged islands. Rather than contemplating their spiritual navels, they acted. It pleased her moral sense.
      But this didn't hold her long. There was no shadow at the far end of the hall and she felt a tightening in her throat. The chorus would be wandering back to the risers within ten minutes; Layton would allow no more time than that tonight. But he was not in any of the rooms, and Set felt conspicuous making another circuit of the basement. She would check her lips and give her hair a fluffing. He had to be here, somewhere.
      Standing before the restroom mirror, Set wondered about Ivy-- what she felt. She wondered about David and his agony. Then she smiled openly to see how he would see her smile. A scuffle in the first stall jolted Set's smile. Embarrassed, she pretended to check her teeth. The dark green wooden door swung out and Lori Sowders appeared, snapping the top of her jeans. "Hello, Miss Hunt."
      "Lori. Hi. How are you doing? Don't you love the harpsichord?"
      "Yeah." She pumped pink liquid soap onto her hands. Set fumbled aimlessly with her belt. After Lori had pulled the brown paper from its dispenser and wiped her hands, she looked up at Set. "Some stuff is bein' talked about. You know, about Dad."
      "I know, Lori. I heard a little, just a while ago."
      "He found out--he found out . . . and this makes sense, the way he was before. I mean, it would be real upsetting to find out, well, that you aren't who you think. You know about that Grandma Sowders wasn't his real . . .
      "I know. That's what I heard."
      "It doesn't make any difference to me. I mean your grandma is your grandma no matter what, or your mom is your mom even if--well, you know. Mom told me that that must have been what did it to him. Made him act that way before."
      "When did your mother learn about it?"
      "Mom just told me last night. But she knew after someone from the hospital came down and talked to her a couple days ago. About how Dad was down there when he found out. I guess they didn't know." Lori's dark penciled eyes squinted against tears. "How could no one know? Not even Dad?"
      "I don't know, Lori. Things and events get lost in records. It can happen. How is you mother now?"
      "She's pretty good. At least she knows why Dad was that way." She pulled a pick from her tight back pocket and jabbed it into the dark roots of her hair, pulling the sides out at least an inch. "But she's got something else she's got to find out." She turned her left hand over adjusting the wad of yarn wrapped around the back of a large blue-stoned ring.
      "What's that?"
      "She won't tell me that, or not now, anyway. I think it's about the box, you know, that Dad had. And maybe who his real . . . Oh, I don't want to say. So I don't bug her. She's got . . ." The restroom door opened and a round-cheeked mother guided a girl toddler forward.
      "Now do you have to use pottie, Sarah?" The mother brimmed with Mennonite calm, even in this act. "You stay right there and Mommy will be right out."
      Set and Lori smiled the prescriptive smiles of restroom interchange to mother and child. After the mother entered the stall, the child pulled out the sides of her red felt skirt and skipped the length of the five wooden stalls. Then Set saw them. What she had not seen before. The toes of two black leather oxfords extended beneath the door of the last stall. Set hadn't heard a sound. She had spoken freely with Lori. Lori had talked freely with her.
      When Set looked again she noticed that the oxfords rested on sturdy crepe soles and these shoes rested in absolute stillness. An older woman filled with Mennonite serenity and acceptance wore those shoes, Set thought, relieved. Besides, nothing monumental had been exchanged in the conversation.
      Still the shoes and their stillness froze an image in her mind, even after she left the restroom. She feigned interest in a paper wreathe on the bulletin board, suggesting that Lori go on up. Waiting for the crepe shoes and for David Owen, she pretended to scan the poster that announced a caroling party for the Mennonite youth on December sixteenth.
      Above, she could hear Layton Kauffman directing chorus members about, and then Ora passed her coming from the men's restroom. She watched him pull his strong, wiry frame up the steps. A plump woman, with white finger waves parted in the middle, chugged past her. Set thought, they all seem sufficient to themselves. Strong. "I think Layton's beginning to adjust our heights, September," the round woman said.
      "I'll be right there, Bertha." But Set stared absently at the bulletin board, allowing everyone to pass her so that she could be the last. She wanted to see the chorus from the back of the sanctuary; she wanted to see David standing in place with the basses. She would pass him and whisper cryptically that they needed to talk.
      But he was not there, there in the jostling borders of black books. He was not there in the pews. Marianne, Theresa, Lori, Ora, Ivy--the chorus was all there, all but David Owen. Layton stepped up and down from his box, aligning the rows.
      "You two basses down here, please. Lowell Yoder and John down to the next row. Are there two empty chairs?" Two gray-haired men shifted places. They were quiet, a family. This camaraderie of faces had sung together for years, blended, drifted in vibrations over the red-cushioned pews. "Bertha, you're going to have to come down front." Bertha's full face peeked from behind Cynthia Hostetler. The group exploded in soft laughter. Even being short was a delight. Phil King blew his nose and that too was melodious, cushioned and part of the collage.
      As Set turned away, she heard Layton's directives for clothing. "Long skirts and dresses and white shirts or blouses, please. I don't want anyone in the congregation to pick you out for what you wear. No large earrings," she heard him say as she pushed the heavy wooden door into the wind. David must have gone early. She would see if his car was in the lot.
      Her skin felt hot and red, not the cool veil of afternoon, even as the ice pelted her cheek. His Porshe sat illumined under the blue-green pole lights. Its eyes were lit and in two shafts of crystal mist moved a silhouette. Only when she brushed out the snow caught in her lashes did Set see that the shadow was two shadows--wrapped together, leaning together, stepping into the gravel as if the lot was paved with wooden boards. The shadows danced to heavy thuds that pounded from the car's windows.
      "We had a love, a love you don't find every day, so don't, don't. . . " The Righteous Brothers growled intermittently with the wind's rush. But Set could not feel the wind that wrapped her hair over her face, or the pellets of sleet that punctured her lips and ear lobes. Her toes felt the way down the steps toward the shadow. And as she scrapped close to the ground, another shadow entered the beam. Slender and fluid, it extended an arm, like a figurine.
      "I didn't even know you could dance, Mom," the figurine spoke into the growl.
      Now, as if a great orchestra was gaining momentum, other leitmotif joined the wind and the Righteous Brothers. "Since . . . by . . . man . . . came . . . death" rose in a low rumble from the purple and gold glass where someone cranked open a window. The melancholy words eased out from inside the church while Layton Kauffman dove and swung in wide arcs to urge his members forward; and into this mournful phrase struck words that assembled themselves into a surrealist performance.
      "Bring back, bring back, that lovin' feeling" collided with the powerful surge of sound from the purple window: "By man came also the resurrection of the dead, by man came also" . . . Set watched. The figurine watched. The shadow danced. All held in time until a third sound clattered into the night. The rusty exhaust of a battered truck. Aaron Leib scattered gravel as he slid to a stop. He dropped his padded weight and skittered into the eyebeams where he held something up to the shadows. His thick hand clutched a gossamer rectangle.
      "See, David, I have it. Right here. I have it. You shouldn't of, Kathy. No, no, you shouldn't have given it away to Nate. That wasn't right. It wasn't right, was it, David, that she would give it away? After what he did with the butterflies." He fumbled in his coat with his other hand and drew out an object. Set didn't recognize it at first. And, then, as a rush of realization swallowed her, she heard a familiar voice plead with wolfish ferocity.
      "No, Aaron, please. Just hand it here. She didn't mean anything wrong." David stepped closer to the bulky man. "Here," and he opened his palm to Aaron. But in a metallic mist he drew it back. A fine gold haze drifted under the light. And again and again golden clouds radiated from Aaron's hand. The gossamer rectangle changed to heaviness, to bulk, to substantial mass and Set understood instantly, with horror on her breath, that her kitchen table was disheveled, raped, robbed, shorn of its shrine. The words gone, the page turned golden, like hedgeapples, like apples of the sun.
      "The letter, the letter. No. Please." Her voice was barely audible. The music blossomed grotesque tassels while Aaron folded the letter to a golden square.
      "Aaron, don't . . ." But David's voice was inconsequential to the act. The letter, first a sheathe of gold, shattered into flakes in Aaron's hand. These metal flakes drifted benignly with the silver flakes of the air and Aaron went down on his knees to find them in the gravel.
      "It just fell down here, David. See, I'll fix it." He grabbed indiscriminately into the gravel, bringing up stones and slivers of gold. He shook the gravel loose that clung burr-like to his gloves and poked at the flakes for several seconds. His mouth drooped when he looked up, his nose pulsating. Set thought at that minute she had never seen a mouth shaped like that, like a clown's makeup. The corners turned down and the lips trembled. It was like a climactic scene in a melodrama overacted. But Aaron was not overacting, or acting in any fiction, or responding to anything other than an interior drive, an instinct for love.
      "Here, Aaron, it's alright. We'll fix it." Kathy touched his coat. "No, I shouldn't have given it away. I'm sorry." She lifted under his arm and, where he stood, wrapped her arms around him. David knelt down for a moment in the stones and examined the residue, but then stood. He took Aaron's other arm. David helped Aaron slide across the leather seats of his car and reached to lower the pulse of the Righteous Brothers. A plaid arm tugged at David's coat.
      "That's the song, you know, Lovin' Feelin. Leave it be, David. Leave it be while we ride."
      "Kath, come on. Let's go, if only for a few minutes," David said. He had not even looked at Set who was picking at the gravel with bare fingers. Kathy's eyes appeared crinkled at the edges with a distant strain, but then her face smoothed and she appeared the undisturbed force of goodness that Set had envied before. Calm, soft, committed gently to small choices. No one could fault that smooth face.
      But before David had opened her door, his hand about her waist, two figures appeared at the side door of the church. Set saw them coming, man and woman, their height huge, stretched out of proportion, from Set's perspective where she crouched in the gravel.
      "Kathleen, I believe we've seen enough tonight. The practice is not over. Please come with me," Reuben Schmidt said restraining the door with his arm. Kathy's wrinkled eyes returned, but then smoothed.
      "I'm sorry, David. And Aaron. Perhaps we can talk later," she said. "Reuben is right." She smiled at Aaron and touched a soft hand to his face. She looked at David with a smile, just edging on sadness, Set thought, but not quite. It acquiesced. It turned. It resigned itself into smoothness.
      "You bastard," David spit toward Reuben.
      "And you, David Owen, are the child of your parents," the woman said. "The others said, yes, your return was a sign that you had given yourself to the Lord. But you have a great blackness in your heart. Only the Lord Jesus Christ can take away the weight of your resentment and bitterness. Only the Lord Jesus Christ can cleanse the sin you hold. Since you were a child . . ."
      "Since I was a child, yes, since I was a child. You have hit upon it exactly. I have had the full progression, the inside story of your godly life. I know exactly what you are. And I cannot be injured by your insipid rhetoric. Yes, I am the child of my parents. You see, I take them now, I own them, I love them even in their naiveté. In their need to cling to the likes of you." He smiled with even teeth now, relaxed, his words falling from him easily, words that had been brimming at his lips for days, for years. "I want to see you again, Enid. Just one more time."
      "And I . . ."
      "Shut up, you evil bitch. I want to see you one more time and then in a box. And the only reason I will look at your damnable face then will be to make sure you're not breathing."
     Even Set was amazed by his poisoned words. She watched Enid's face, but nothing passed over her features except what might have been a glimmer of a smile. Not quite, almost. But what Set did see for sure were the black crepe-soled oxfords that paced away toward the side door of the church.

She would glance every few seconds down at the seat where the pieces lifted slightly with sharp turns of her wheel . Only when the moon drifted from behind a cloud or a car's oncoming lights hit the seat just right would the pile ignite into gleaming scales of gold.
      She had lingered in the lot, picking the paper fragments from dirt and stone, but the more she pinched them carefully between her fingers, the more they dissolved into smaller pieces. By the time she had gathered what she could see, Kathy and Reuben, Kirsten, Enid, David and Aaron had disappeared and she had shivered, coatless, alone in the parking lot of South Hill Mennonite Church. Gathering her coat at the vestibule rack, Set had repeated nonsensically with the voices "By man came also the resurrection of the dead." Then she crept out of the church holding her shattered secret in a bare hand. While she drove, she would glance down to the golden pile on the front seat and then she would look up to the fields, alternating her thoughts with the view.
      It didn't seem real, that it ever could have been, the letter. She must remember this time, look back, and know that she held it in her hands, the words, the words of Charles Dickens. It was real. And then she would remember the spray can in the air, misting paint, covering words that had survived rain and rot for over a century, hidden, in a few seconds for all time in just a few seconds.
      It was her fault. She had had to make a romance, hadn't she, a childish shrine, to feed her fantasy. Instead of protecting and hiding the letter, she had let it go, playing her own game with this importance, this paper that could have changed the world, added to the world's knowledge.
      Ahead in the field the Tonka toy wagons had come to life and a cornpicker rattled into the dry corn, streaming its diagonal lights through opaque stalks. Shequonur's square tower lay beyond, blinking Dar's plastic candles at four windows and to the south, through the woods, Ivy's cottage sprouted between gray trees. Where he had been. He had come this way. Set squinted eyes at the stalks and the lights, trying to see it. No, he had not seen the great steel cornpicker, but if he had, he would have made something grand and memorable from words that would now rest regally between leatherbound covers in some city museum. She eased her foot off the accelerator, thinking hard, noting details. Finally, she eased to a crawl and pulled off beside a snow-filled gully. She squinted up her eyes, again, in concentration, watching the steady forward motion of the machinery. Light, corn, field, words.
      "The great beast roamed restlessly through the fields, casting its unblinking eyes over the parchment stalks, and at the tip of its snout rose a potpourri of delicate dusty flakes, the smoky residue of the harvested corn," she said outloud. "Yes, that's good. A potpourri of dusty flakes."
      And then she gathered the little pile of paper on the seat and opened her car door. She drug her coat into the weeds, down through the gully, and up into the field's stubble, where she stumbled. She stopped only once when the snow covered her shoes and the stalks cut into her ankles. And then in one easy, graceful motion, she cast the fragments into the air. They drifted casually for several seconds. The cornpicker's eyebeams made a right turn toward the road.
     Set smiled. In a secret moment a cloud of corn and words had become indistinguishable, compound, for all time. Only for her. It was the most dramatic thing she had ever done.