"Say, Bob, hear they shut down over at Dramway. You hear anything?" the man asked. His shirt gapped wide over a paunch, pulling open at the last two buttons. He smiled up at a plump, frizzy-haired waitress. "Hit me again if it fits into your plan, Missy."
      "Oh, you guys just can't get your talkin' done without our special brew, can you?," the waitress said, topping each of the white mugs. "Hal, can I get you anything?" She spoke to a lanky man who eased down into the only empty chair at the back table.
      "One of those honey buns that I had yesterday would hit the spot," he said. He hung his cap on the metal rack that blossomed with other farmer hats and one jaunty tweed cap. The cap issued an eloquent silence against the embroidered emblems of the others. "John Deere," "Almers Challey," "Don't Fix it if it ain't broke," "I'd rather be fishin'"--words and signs spoke a story of close connections with implement and earth. The silent cap belonged to a man in a sport coat and tie, who turned toward the only woman at the table.
      "They say he didn't have an idea before he heard it up there," he said. He shook his head in wise incredulity and sipped at his mug. The woman salted a hamburger paddy and replaced the top half of its bun.
      "That's what Pam said," the woman said. She chomped a hefty bite and talked through her food. "Pam told me herself he became incoherent--yeah, that's the word--and said things about how he was going to find out how she was connected with them. Pam didn't know what in the world he meant. She said, 'Who's them? I don't know what you mean, Reverend Sowders.' He just looked at her, she said, and then something about Satan in the last times. In twenty years at Mary Sutton she had never had anything like that. She couldn't believe he was a preacher." She dumped a thick pool of catsup on her platter next to French fries. "Pam's still shook up over it." Although she bit down again through wide layers and her chewing was excessive and vulgar, her voice had a muffled warmth.
      "But, Sue, didn't you hear the real kicker?" the paunchy man asked, a delighted pinch in his tone. "He found out his roots, so to speak, and, according to Paul Wilhome, he didn't accept them."
      "It's a doggone shame, Bill, to find something out like that. . . I mean, the way he found out," the lanky man said.
      "Well, what about her? You talk about peculiar. Now there's a case for you. All this time, living here, same town," Bill offered. "She never did mix much, but I wouldn't a' thought that she could keep something like that quiet." He obviously enjoyed the sound of his philosophic rhetoric.
      "My sister always said she was weird. Rayanne said she even made her own shoes for a time. And those dresses. I mean she's got a right to wear what she wants. But it's weird."
      "I knew something was out of sorts when Doc McConnel was called in," Bill said.
      "They don't call out the coroner unless there's substantial reason, right, Phil?" the woman said to the man in the sports jacket. His attire and manner seemed to signify a position of authority.
      "County coroner comes in under five conditions," Phil said quietly. Each man and woman assumed a listening face, ready to learn, to take in substantial information. "Homicide." He lowered his voice as if to gently direct his audience. Heads came closer, eyes widened to sensitive preceptors, ears filtered out soft metal and pottery thuds from the kitchen. "Suicide. Accidental death." He paused, and looked up at the blue wallpaper border where a parade of identical geese repeated themselves around the five tables and seven booths of Dalow's Restaurant. Phil's forehead wrinkled. "He's called in if there's an unusual or suspicious means of death. And Doc McConnel told me that he comes in when someone dies within twenty-four hours of being admitted to the hospital."
      "So which was it?" the lanky man asked.
      "Well, at first there was nothing. I mean the squad took him from Shequonur. No one really thought about anything more than heart. His wife told Arlene that he had had a heart murmur--oh, for some time now. But then . . ."
      "Yeah, then the blood." The paunch puffed up and readjusted itself. "I was on that run, you know. And, I gotta tell you, I haven't seen a situation quite like that in the three years I've been on."
      "What do you mean?" the waitress said, shifting her weight from one hip to the other, balancing the orange decaf pot with the black regular.
      "I mean blood--in his mouth, pools of it, and later, on the return, his extremities had taken blood. Purple toes is what one of the doctors said when we got him in the ER."
      "Purple toes. What's that mean?" The woman had finished her hamburger and poked at a paper cup of coleslaw.
      "Blood collects in the furthest parts of the body like the toes. I saw em. Looked bruised. I saw em when we transported him. But he never knew it. He was gone, before we even got him on the stretcher."
      The woman looked uncomfortable and looked around at the booths. "Shhh. You know this isn't really fair to Mrs. Sowders. And their daughter. I think . . . "
      At that point Set could only make out a word here and there. With heads closer and voices subdued she interpreted only one intelligible phrase. She raised her hand to the waitress, who turned away reluctantly from the back table and propelled her wide hips toward the booth. "They said phlebitis, Maggie," Set whispered. "I'm sure they said phlebitis. I can't believe they talk so loud anyone can hear."
      "Ray used to come in for coffee--after planting is over he usually has some extra time in the morning--but he got so disgusted with the rehash and rudeness, he just refused to be part of it. Liar's table, that's what he calls it."
      "Can I get you ladies something else?" The waitress tipped the black-ringed pot over each of their cups.
      "Do you have any of that peanut butter pie left?" Maggie asked. Set liked the way her friend sounded, forthright with humor. Her ethos--that was one of Set's favorite concepts from speech class--announced trustworthy, common, rural, no flattery, wise, craggy.
      "Got two pieces left and one of them has your name on it." The waitress shifted her hips. There was no hint of embarrassment about the way her black stretch pants pulled up in her crotch and wrapped tight over a bulbous backside. "How bout you, Miss Hunt? You want the last piece? When it's gone, it's gone."
      "No thanks, but I'll have refill a little later." Her own voice sounded weak, dishonest. She tried to smile a strong smile, accepting the hips for what they were, but her lips felt propped. Set watched the confident pushy rearend as it stopped at each booth, where the girl brimmed the cups, and exchanged easy repartee with the occupants.
      "Liar's table. That's good. But it's not really a lie, is it. More like a Greek Chorus."
      "That's it, Set. Greek Chorus. You always hit it on the head. In a literary sort of way." Maggie rolled up her blouse sleeves. Her hands looked like a man's. "What exactly is its function? It's been too many years since my lit survey course."
      "O, chanting and confirming, echoing and carrying the plot forward. I don't remember exactly. But that's basically it."
      Maggie smiled her wry smile. "We're in the right place for that--the echoing and carrying the plot forward. You sit in here to see and be seen. To act. On stage in a way. You go to Graystone to really talk. You don't care if you're seen there. In fact, you don't want to be seen. Just talk."
      "Then why'd we come down here?"
      "Because really you can't be anywhere else when the action of the town is going forward. You don't want to be a part of it, but you're just drawn in, you've got to keep your eye on it. The people coming and going, the forum at the back table, the whole eternal human drama."
      "Why, Mrs. McPherson, you wax poetic."
      "Besides, they've got a perkiness down here, now that Gary and Lisa Plank bought it. " She pulled out a white bowl from between the napkin holder and salt and pepper shakers. Their silver tops gleamed. "They've got Half and Half here," she said, ripping the foil covers from three containers. Her coffee whitened. "Down at Graystone they still have those dirty little pitchers with two percent."
      "And those old cups, that old restaurant ware, and their waitresses aren't going places like these little numbers. Like ours in the stretch pants," Set said. She was easing into the wild release of after-school talk. "You're absolutely right. Now that you've pointed it out, I see it exactly. Down at Graystone you have the feeling those poor souls are working their way out of barns and divorces. They still have empathy in their voices. They're proud to have snagged their positions. But these girls are upwardly mobile, going someplace. Maybe even tech school. They don't care if their stretch pants ride up in their crotch." She felt mean and clever.
      "O, Set, Lisa's a good kid. I believe she is going to tech school. But that's OK, that's where she belongs. She's a hard worker. She'll make something of herself." Maggie was pulling back. Leaving Set to sit with her meanness around her. Set was feeling it, feeling the relaxed swing of cruelty, saying it all after school, letting it fly off the top of her pent up teacher persona. Ridding herself of the day. She hated it when Maggie got reasonable and kind after school, while she herself got mean and guilty.
      "Oh, I was kidding." But she knew that Maggie recognized she was not. And she also knew that Maggie would not count it against her, would continue reason and kindness, would be wise, craggy, and accepting -- of her, of life, just the way it was. She liked Maggie; she was safe with her.
      "I thought I wouldn't make it through lunch with Agnes and Jean going on about Ivy Gilchrist," Maggie said. The waitress placed a plate before her. "Thanks, Lisa. How you doing with your new career. Everything working out alright?"
      "I love it at Klonnerd. I'm really gettin into my classes. I have a prof this term that reminds me of you. You know, in the old days. Remember those chocolate brownies?" Lisa winked her confident smile and tucked her white blouse tail deeper into the stretchy waist of her pants. "Boy, we got some excitement around here with the Sowders thing." She stacked the plates and bowls that had collected around Maggie. "Did you hear it was an overdose of some heart drug and he--oh, I'm sorry, this is gross--"
      "Go on, Lisa," Set said.
      "He bled to death. And even more than that, he was sick with something else. Some mental thing, I guess." She rearranged the Half and Half bowl and shakers. "I guess Lori told someone at school and then--well, the table got hold of it, you know East Worthy--I don't remember what the name was--starts with an "s," I think. Anyway, he was sick. It's a mess, isn't it?"
      "You gonna be jawin' all day up here, or can we have some service?" A man with an impish grin and a quilted coat poked the waitress in the ribs. "The liar's table needs refreshment."
      "You men are just going to have to wait your turn," Lisa said and followed him, her rearend, tight, large and confident.
      "You know what, Maggie? I'm going to go on over to see Theresa Sowders. She needed to talk once. Maybe I can help."
      Maggie poised her fork loaded with peanut butter pie before her face. "Why don't you, Set? She and Lori both are so sad. They seem so out of the right place. They always did. But now, husband, father, heart, mental problems. And the straw that could break the camel--Ivy Gilchrist, his mother."
      Set buttoned her coat with one hand and swigged her coffee with the other. "You'd think they'd be in the bosom of the flock at Calvary."
      "If Iris Bolton is an example of the bosom, there's no wonder they feel out of place. She and Jean didn't mince words in the library at noon. I tried to ignore it but we all heard--Agnes, of course, knew Ivy as a young woman so she had to make her grand pronouncement on her. And Fallowton. That she should actually be given the title of guidance counselor is ludicrous. Any privileged information is fodder for her lunchtime mill." Set felt relieved that her friend spoke with an acid tongue about someone--anyone. But then, Agnes Bolton and Jean Fallowton would have drawn wrath from the angels themselves. Set hated to feel guilty.

"Wafarin. That's what he had been taking for over a year." Theresa blew her nose into a Puffs. Set could not help but notice the difference between Theresa Sowders and her kitchen. Surfaces gleamed, clean and clear of clutter. The congoleum floor reflected a light from a white-curtained window over the sink and the table's enamel top reminded Set of a wide plateau where there was room to ride and play and talk. Through the doorway, a series of other rooms echoed the same spare tidiness. Into the airy space of her kitchen Theresa Sowder's frowsy hair twisted up dryly. Her heavy thighs, pressed tight in jeans, spread out thick on the chair. "I had been picking up his Coumadin for over a year, but I never thought he would take more . . ." and she broke off, whimpering.
      "Coumadin? I don't . . ."
      "Oh, I'm sorry. Sodium wafarin. Coumadin is its counter name."
      "And you say that could cause the bleeding?"
      "Yes, yes, that's it and I should have known. I'm the one who should have monitored it. Good nurse, huh?" Her pear shape rose, padded to the sink, and turned on the faucet for a drink. She kept her back to Set, staring out the window as she drank.
      "And so he took that for a heart murmur?"
      "Congestive heart failure, very mild, though. It's an anticoagulant. The blood becomes very thin. But I didn't know what he would do . . ." Theresa gulped water and set the glass in the sink.
      Set went to Theresa and placed a hand on her shoulder. "Do you think then, Theresa, that he tried to? That he meant . . .," and she paused. "That he . . ."
      "Suicide? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe. He was so restless, so agitated, so upset during those last weeks." She turned to Set. "You understand that there was something else, don't you?"
      "Well, you said he was not himself, the box, the fear of people watching him. And I did hear just mention today that perhaps mentally something was . . ."
      "I think, Miss Hunt . . . September, that he had been suffering from manic depression." She did not whimper now. "I've talked to several doctors about it. It fits. Mood swings. And I've read a lot of literature on the subject since I first suspected." They sat at the table and Theresa gained composure; she took on an occupational dignity as she spoke. "It can effect the mind exactly as Nate seemed to be effected. Intelligent, confident, yes, but then the paranoia. It got worse and worse. Suspecting. Believing that someone was watching, that someone wanted . . ." She stopped. Set wanted to know.
      "The box?"
      "Yes, and I realize that there was a letter in the box. And, you see, I realize that the letter was old, maybe valuable. But Nate was all mixed up in his mind about its connection with . . ." Her eyes squinted and then appeared liquid. "With Kathy Schmidt." Set turned toward the window, embarrassed for this woman who was uncovering layers of accumulated pain. "Several years ago, Nate and Kathy became involved. Please believe that he is . . . that he was a good man. We had talked it out, worked it out." She cleared her throat that was swelling. "But it was never quite the same. I don't blame Kathy. Absolutely not. She has come to me and asked my forgiveness. But life has its up and downs, doesn't it? The Lord never promised that things would be easy." Her habitual church smile turned up to Set and her face glowed open and fresh for just a split second, just for a moment that flashed the tapestry at South Hill before Set's inward eye. The kneeling woman with the doves.
      "That's very difficult, Theresa. You have been very brave. It can't have been easy."
      "My father was an alcoholic. You learn to be strong." Parents, and days past. The remote control, the spots. "But with David. I knew there were feelings. Things that had never been ironed out. I knew when Nate asked David Owen to speak at the conference it could not be right. I asked him not to do it, but he said it would be a healing for both of them. You know about David's parents?"
      "Yes, he has told me about it. But I'm sure I can't fully understand all . . ."
      "No, it was a very difficult decision for Nate. But he wanted to make a gesture toward David. He believed the Lord wanted it. He prayed about it for months."
      "For both of them it would have been difficult."
      "I've wondered since David arrived in East Worthy if this was the right thing, if he could really be a part of us again. I was afraid of what it might do to both of them. I was afraid for Nate."
      "That . . .that David would harm him?"
      "No, that Nate--so close to the edge, to what was happening to his mind--would not withstand. And David? How could he? How could he really come back to where his parents were so . . . so hurt?"
      "You had good reason to be concerned," Set said. Her voice sounded bland against what she knew of David--the real backdrop of his hatred, the David of the Oxford journal, the David who ranged between violence and tenderness.
      "But I think the reason he didn't think about how much he was taking-- the Coumadin, I mean--was because of his mother." A door scraped across cement at the back entrance. "It's Lori," Theresa said softly, "and Brian will probably be with her. I don't want her to hear me going on about this."
      Lori slung a bookbag from her shoulder to the kitchen floor. "Well, hi, Miss Hunt." She appeared younger today, fresh and untainted. "Hi, Mom. Got anything to eat? Do you care if we work on book reports in my room?" Brian smiled sheepishly, his hands in his jeans pocket. And even though the temperature mandated heavy clothing, he, like most of the male high school students Set saw, insisted upon only an unsnapped jeans jacket over a shirt. He wore nothing on his wolfish hair, and his hands were red with the cold.
      "Chocolate chips cookies on the cupboard from Enid. And macaroni salad from Jon's mom -----. Brian, did you get your car fixed?"
      "Yeah, Dr. Owen gave me an idea about the carburetor." His words slurred through a chocolate chip cookie. "That dude knows cars." Lori pulled at Brian's jacket, balancing a plate of cookies with the other. They disappeared into the rooms beyond and then Lori peeked her head back around the corner.
      "Mom, Brian's got the scripture for youth group Sunday. Can we use your concordance?" Lori suddenly jerked backward and giggled. Brian was tugging at her hand. "Quit it."
      "On the table in the dining room." Giggles and flimsy reprimands followed the two through the rooms and up the stairs.
      "Lori seems really good, Theresa."
      "She has been. That's why I don't want her to see me like this, going over and over what she can't help. She's got to go on with her life as normally as possible. So to learn about her grandma . . . and then to understand about Ivy Gilchrist . . ."
      "What have you learned, Theresa?"
      "Only what Nate said to me before he . . . before he died." Set felt that this was the first time Theresa had used the word. "He came home one night--I told you how he was, so wild, I couldn't help him--he had been to Ivy Gilchrist's house. He said it had to do with the letter, what people were trying to do to him. But, anyway, he said--and he yelled, she was evil, possessed, all sorts of things, I can't remember, only that he was worse than he had been before. 'She said she was my mother,' he said. And he went to the box, the seed box, and picked it up. He laughed. He cried some. But mostly laughed and kept repeating the thing about Ivy. I thought it was part of his sickness, of what was happening to him. And after that, it all happened so fast." Theresa was bright-eyed and spinning in memory. "I haven't had time. I haven't had time." Her eyes fixed on Set who laid her hand over Theresa's.
      "I know about it, Theresa. Let me help you. For Lori's sake. She needs to know. Later, sometime. My Aunt Margory was a friend of Ivy's. . ."
      And Set told her the story as she had heard it from Doris Meeter. But she did not yet tell the tale of the letter. It was hers. She didn't know if she would ever tell.

Set had not really expected that David Owen would be standing at the front, but she had to be sure. She could not take the chance that he might perform his last lecture on epiphany. But with a stab of disappointment, she saw the square powerful body of Doctor John Elwood smiling from the lectern, creating an apex to the triangle of congregation and clear windows. He looked like an aged Nate Sowders and he was playing to a packed house.
      Set looked around. Almost all the players were there--Enid and Bob, Kathy and Reuben, Faith McDonald, Jon Phillips. No, Set thought, some are not here and she imagined Lori and Theresa scurrying around to dress properly for their appearance.
      Set and Theresa had talked longer than either had thought possible. They had ranged freely across the wide plain of the kitchen table and both had experienced the human event, the natural bonding, the empathy that grew up between the facts of Ivy and Eli. Set believed that Theresa even defied--for those few hours--the doctrine that all good things emanate from the Lord. I was there, Set thought, not the Lord, she spit from her mind. I was there.
      Then Set saw them, Lori and Theresa, smiling meekly as they scooted into the last pew. "I was there, Theresa," Set shot toward them with an anxious look. But Theresa waved an uncommitted wave, a gesture that could have easily gone to Enid, and then turned a mild gaze to the lectern.
      "So, you see, my brothers and sisters in Christ, how the devil works his way through the most insidious and subtle of sources, how desperate he has become in these last days. From Calvinism to Armenianism, from Armenianism to Pelagianism, from Pelagianism to deism, from deism to agnoticism, and, dear friends, to that last hopeless and most pathetic of human conditions-from agnosticism to atheism." Elwood's muscular frame expanded with his powerful articulation. And even as he said the words, he smiled. The smile did not leave his face.
      Set didn't see him walk in, but there he was--in the aisle. She watched openly as he slid into the blonde pew next to Kathy. Kathy did not look up at first, but then her head jerked, a short, violent twist toward him. David turned neither right nor left, his face an angular blank, his eyes lifted over the permed head of Enid Fout, beyond to the communion table and the heavy brown curtain of the baptismal pool. Elwood, who had begun the evening scripture with extraordinary grace, paused. With an almost imperceptible twitch of his head, he squinted his eyes. But his voice didn't miss a beat.
      "And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; That ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them and the flesh of all men, both free and bond." He paused again, but then finished with a smile that simultaneously jarred and compelled Set to watch. "Both great and small. And I saw, and behold a white horse. And I beheld, and lo a black horse."
      She thought the white and black horses sounded candied with some terrible mesmerizing syrup, a sweet potato bake. When the Reverend Doctor Elwood asked for Hymn 392, "Just as I Am," only a few heads in the eastern pews remained in awkward positions toward the spot where Owen sat. Not until Jean Zinwell nudged Zed and then whispered to Marlette Bratley on her other side, did a ripple of vague congregational consciousness expand to waves of comprehension. David's hand lifted to the back of the pew behind Kathy's head. His fingers entered the soft hair that fell away in strands at her neck . Her heavy dark ropes, twisted into a thick knot, had loosened in the wild gusts that swept about the brick feet of the chapel. Now a few gray hairs, laced with crow color, coiled on Owen's finger. And behind this drama of neck, hair, and hand, the pew literally vibrated with tension. Reuben Schmidt first turned his head, and then--slowly--his shoulders, knees, the trunk of his body, to his wife. He said nothing. Someone was speaking, though, but it was not Reverend Elwood. Hymn 392 dwindled to a few voices near the front, a last note drifting to silence on the belch of Elwood's "Without one plea."
      "I despise you. That you could do this to yourself. I loathe your mind, its silly, vacuous and righteous blindness." David wrapped her hair as he spoke. Consonants and vowels, rage and violence, poked up in his quiet words. All of them were cleanly delivered to the two-hundred and fifty-six members of Calvary Chapel. They did not miss a syllable. "I cannot comprehend how you could do it, how you could acquire this layer of yellow decay, this 'yes, sir, no, sir, tell me the way, sir, tell me where to go what to think, tell me how a god should be formed and seen and worshipped and obeyed. Tell me, sir, how to line the walk to my house with flowers, no, nothing too bright, nothing risque, no leaf that doesn't bend to John 3:16.' I hate the years that show you are nothing more than this, this smiling housewife, living and dying--yes, you'll die," He laughed shortly. "Die with the unmitigated ignorance of never thinking of anything but bending to form." His hand trembled in her hair. "I hate the littleness of you, the layers of nothing but smalltown weakness and form. I hate you. I hate you. I love you, damn you." He stopped. His hand stopped. The heads of people stopped. And no sound was anywhere.
      No sound until Owen stood and walked up the middle aisle toward Elwood. At the front he turned and lifted a black book above his head. "Do you see this?" he shouted. "Do you know what this is?" He waved the book from side to side and jostled it close to the faces of a man and two women sitting at the end of a pew.
      Then he found Enid two rows back. He leaned over Bob Fout awkwardly and jammed the book close to her face. She didn't flinch. "Here, Enid, it's my Scofield. Let me read the scripture for my last lecture." He opened it. Between clinched teeth he said, "Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers, for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness?" He didn't watch the book, but Enid.
      "And what communion hath light with darkness? That's it, isn't it? I've figured it out. Tied together unequally. I was tied to you by the longing of my soul to love you, to understand you, to be part of the thing you felt. Of the instant, of the split second when I would know. But instead I learned in that crucial moment what you are. It spoke so much louder than your words."
      "Dr. Owen, this is not the . . ."
      "And you be still, you piece of pompous pap, you bloated Bible verse, with your eternal splitting of syllables, translations of Greek and Hebrew, to define your wretched doctrine. All to exclude, exclude, demean, leave out. Study your spiritual navel, little nazi. That, of course, is more important than inclusion. Or maybe even doing the dirty work of love and acceptance. So much more satisfying to the likes of you, Elwood."
      David turned on the congregation. He pointed his finger that the first row could see trembling. "But the real puzzle for me is not a man like Elwood or Nate Sowders. The real dilemma for me is you. It's you who were friends. With my parents. With me. A kid. There'll always be demagogues, but I've wanted to believe there'd be revulsion, natural revulsion. Outrage against insanity. Instead, there are sheep." His face looked old. Or older suddenly. He looked tired; even grayer than when he first spoke on the first night. "You, sheep."
      No one tried to stop him when he scrambled along the front pew gathering piles of hymnals. She saw that whatever he would do would be tolerated by the crowd. How the thing would play out, she could not guess.
      But she didn't expect his voice trembling into the white space. David was singing. At first, she thought, a chant, a spell, maybe a drone of pain. But then the sound became distinguishable.
      ". . . How sweet the sound. That saved a wretch like me," he sang. He carted the hymnals to the front. On the communion table, right above the heavy carving "In Remembrance of Me" he placed his Bible. Then he lifted up a hymnal and held it above his head. He smiled at the faces pew-lined. Like a magician, he swirled the book over his head, and, with exaggerated Ed Carney hand preparations, laid it on the Bible. With a ferocious alacrity he grabbed the other books and piled them on the first mound.
      "Through many dangers toils and snares I have already come." He took up the other books, along with a random pile of bulletins, pamphlets, and ringed songsters that lay in the front pew. Holding these above the black tower of books, he let them drop insultingly onto the table. The tower leaned and toppled, plopping some of its cardboard onto the carpet.
      "Remember how you all said it to us kids? Remember how you taught me? Never, never place anything on the Bible." He gathered the books from the floor and dropped them again onto the table. All the time he hummed and mouthed words. "Tis grace hath led me safe thus far." He built the tower again above the Bible, jamming the papers, wadding the bulletins, dropping the hymnals so that their pages eventually crumpled, folded back, and fanned open on table and floor.
      Then he turned directly on the congregation. He twisted his mouth in outlandish articulation.
      When we've been there ten thousand years
      Bright shining as the sun
      We've no less days to sing God's praise
      Than when we first begun.
      Amen.
      Amen.
      Amen.

He repeated "amen," singing it up and down the scale. It sounded like an ancient plains song, with odd and foreign phrases, minor keys, and distant modes. Suddenly his chant broke to speech.
      "You took it off, do you remember, Hubert?" A balding round man shifted in the second pew on the west side of the church. "It was quite an important issue, wasn't it, the amen? Too formal. And, of course, more important than including the world, making peace, assisting poor humanity. Studying your spiritual navels and excluding the amen from songs. That's your work, isn't it. That's your legacy." He leaned against the communion table.
      "And I'm your legacy too." He swiped his arm across the table sending the Bible, papers, hymn books to the floor. Up the steps to the curtained wall he ran, where he ripped back the fabric and spit into the pool.
      He walked to the edge of the raised place and held both arms out, like an ascending prophet. "Let's bow our heads in prayer," he said Elwood style. "To what ever spirit that directs good, damn these vicious sheep, and raise up a fearless mind. Someone, anyone, who will defy evil, self-righteousness that stinks with the smell of fear, fear that excludes because it's too weak to look at truth. Even at a simple human act like kindness. Like not turning out your friends for a lifetime. Like . . ." He smiled. " Not in Jesus's name. Not in Jesus's name." His accent fell on Jesus. "Do you hear me, Enid, not in Jesus's name, I pray. But to the fields and air, to the trees that grow outside this town, to the dirt, to that one person who might show up someday in this clear-paned arena of death. Not in Jesus name."
      He stumbled down the steps and paused several times in slow strides to the back. Owen leaned against the glass dividers between the sanctuary and the entrance hall. He appeared to be saying goodby casually at a family dinner. "What pleases me most at this moment is the knowledge that you feel hatred and loathing for me. Very unchristian sentiments, wouldn't you say? You feel it and I created it and I enjoy it. Right here, right now. In this moment."
      He dropped his weight against the curled back of the last pew, fingers prodding Theresa Sowder's jacket. "Kathy, how could you?"
      And then he was gone.
      A crescendo of conversation pushed up into the white dome.
      The last thing Set heard as she pushed back the door's metal bar was Reverend John Elwood thundering his magnificent voice into the crowd. "And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him."