"See it there? It pricks the sky." Beyond the hummocks of bronze weeds in wet earth, rose the needle of Calvary's steeple. The idling car pulsed evenly at the curve on Lover's Lane. It was the same spot where they had paused a week earlier.
      "It looks blocky. Too much brick. Like it has no doors," Set said. She liked the short smirky laugh he gave then. "And the architecture--if that's what one could call it--horrible. The whole thing looks like a series of blocks, unrelenting brick with no transition between parts. It's really ugly." Set felt warm with him, in sync, since he called at seven-fifteen this morning. She had been startled by the phone's ring so early on Saturday, and had cringed at the thought of an accident or terror in Ludway, but David's voice was in the receiver, and it drifted around her in bed like sexual pleasure. "From this angle it doesn't even appear to have any entrance," she added.
      "Are you waxing symbolic, September?" His mocking tone suggested he was not fully immersed in her mood. "Temper your remarks with sensitivity. Remember that my dad built it originally. But he certainly didn't create that botched up pile of bricks. They've added on to the first building. That, in fact, was one of the reasons for their dismissal by the Reverend and company."
      "Adding on? I don't understand."
      "I really don't care to rehearse the whole wretched event. I'll just say that Dad questioned the building of additions. He questioned where the money should come from. Sowders had suggested that members should second mortgage their homes to build the addition. Mom questioned other things. In her irascible, blunt way. Theology. Little, stupid points. How utterly little and naive." He was tightening again. "They were part of it. The very kernel of thought that cast them out." As he entered into his black thought, he shook his head back and forth. "That's the tear, the rip, the wound." His mouth screwed up tight. For a second, just a flash, he appeared to Set like a tight fist of head, like a grotesque, abominable force, a gargoyle in tweed and wool. "I soothed them in their great sorrow. Soothe--no, that's not the word. I tried to take the brand of fire away from their minds, even for just the minutes we would talk. They went over and over the subject, trying to make sense of it, trying to survive excommunication--from the church, the town, from life."
      "What a horrible thing. It sounds Medieval. How could you face the town, just walking down the street? Where would you turn?"
      "Wounded, killed. I can still remember Mom's voice on the phone. It was the next morning. After it happened. She called me in Pennsylvania. She sounded like a child. I was scared. 'When I get to heaven I won't be able to say what church I belong to.' She could hardly speak. Sobbing. She was sobbing. I told her that she didn't have to belong to a church. I told her she was good. But that was nothing. What can douse that fire? Being turned out by your friends?"
      He looked past Set, out to the young forest that had shot up volunteer on one side of the road. "I remember trying to just ease the moment. So their minds wouldn't burn. I told them they were good and fair and right. That the others, the others at the Chapel, were Nazis. And that somehow in a twist of nazi demonic group thought, the entire congregation had turned on them. Like a viper. Like a snake they had unwittingly created." He breathed a deep sigh that rumbled on the edge of a cry. "I supported them with my words and with my arms and with my entire soul. My life. I fed them like weak dying souls, from a spoon of love, a pabulum that I ground up--like baby rice. I fed them in order that they could survive. I nourished them out of the essence of my love, their child. I found it where it grew alone in my soul. Alone, without the soil of their damned Christianity, in spite of their damnable doctrine. Alone, because it grew only from love, because they were my parents. I their son." He looked up wide-eyed.
      "Because, you see, I condemned them, too, a long time ago when they took me from the stained glass, from the Amens, and the beauty. I condemned them because they had ruptured my world. They excluded everyone else in the name of their Calvinism. In the name of the Chapel. And they asked me to believe in exclusion. And now, now, they were dying in their sorrow, excluded, cast out, by the very body they had created. And I had to take them and hold them and comfort them." Now he shattered under the weight of his thought. He bowed his head on the wheel and cried, holding his hands out to prop the great sobs. His cries erupted in high animal sounds and were intermittently broken with shuddering drafts of air he drew in.
      "And then, you see," he managed, " I turned round, around, and excluded the rest of them, all of them, the town, East Worthy. I came home from Pennsylvania right away. Three nights after it happened--I remember this, the feeling so well--the scene. I was downtown, I wanted to walk through the town, a festival of some kind, a dance, with the locals hooting and swinging in the town hall. And I sat on a bench in front of the townhall and I cried, right out, like a stupid baby. I was turning, you see, Set. I was turning slowly on the ice like Zhivago--you know that scene in the movie?--and denying them all. The Nazis. All the Chapel. But even the little women who never knew the Chapel. And the farmers who sat at the restaurant. The waitresses Anyone who looked on and did nothing. All those who lived and drew breath in the world of East Worthy. The world I loved. I turned on them all," he snarled. "I had to," he said, suddenly, like an infant. "I had to, you see, because they lived where my lovely parents, my father, my mother, had undergone such cruelty." He sounded instantly fierce. "Where they had created the grounds for cruelty, the instrument itself. The snake that turned and bit them."
      "Let's go, David. Let's drive away from here." Set stroked his hand that lay limp over the steering wheel.
      They drove up the narrow road, Worthy Township 47, out of the young woods and the standing water of dark melted snow. David didn't appear to care where he was, but within several minutes he had brought them around a country block where the road ran out through the fields near Shequonur.
      Set moved next to him, her arm behind his neck. She kissed his face. "I'm so sorry that you've suffered for your parents' mistakes. I know I really resent my parents for . . ." She stopped to find the word, the act that made her stomach roll and her brain ache for identity all the miles to Ludway, but she could not think a complete thought. Instead she saw the word "beige" written on a banner in her mind and then a red blob of Jello wiggling its stain on the standup nap of a carpet. Strange, that both are colors, she thought. I don't have concepts, I have colors. How odd, and then she realized David was talking.
      " . . . so if you think my parents were just ordinary, you are wrong. They were glorious. I had a roaring childhood. They were young. We laughed and explored. I felt open." He saw a cloud of contradiction. "I know, I know. How could my boyhood be so open and yet my parents be part of the whole church fiasco? I don't know how they did it. But in our life at home we were everything. We were adventurers. Somehow they could carry both off. Not only could, but needed to carry both off." He smiled suddenly. "My dad didn't make a good old man. And my mom is still the best dressed, golf-playing fiend in her Florida enclave. I remember once, a couple years ago, not long before Dad . . . before Dad had his heart attack . . . I was in town. I was doing my early drive when I saw a handsome, white-haired man walking out of the post office. Handsome and perfect, refined, and keeping to his way. It was my father. And I was astounded at his good looks and I was afraid to look more because he was so perfect, so beautiful, so right before the fall. And I knew he could not stay that way. That he would dissolve. That all this would dissolve. I was afraid to look at him so perfect walking from the post office."
      "I thought about my parents--their age--over Thanksgiving. I know what you mean about dissolving. You know, David, I was upset by their hands." She didn't want to talk about it, but somehow she had to say about the hands. "Those awful liver spots. I can't stop thinking about them."
      "Oh, the spots make no difference." He was animated now, speaking rapidly, his eyes on the road, determined. "I remember adventure. I was excited just to hear them speak. We always had adventure at supper time because the evening news would come on right after. Big news, not little news--that's what we used to call it. Big news was world news and little news was all the local car wrecks and the Columbus weather man with his map. Big news made us players. My dad would hush us and, then, we'd watch the face talk about Russia or Communism, or floods in India. I don't remember the stories, but I remember my dad and sister and mom talking back to the black and white face on the screen and critiquing--confidently--the whole big picture. I didn't realize then what that did for me. I only had a vague pleasure at the time, and I still do, just thinking of it, because that talking back to the world meant we weren't little. It meant we were on an adventure. Funny, when I think of it. It's as if my dad could at any minute launch a canoe on some ancient, muddy river and paddle through jungles on an important mission that the black and white face had just announced. Even from early on--my dad must have been in his twenties--he discussed Krushev and hurricanes. I always had the feeling that big rusty ships were pulling out of harbors and single-engine planes were lifting out of clearings. We talked to them, you know, and so we were not little." He looked at her and seemed exasperated. "Do you have any idea what I'm talking about, Set?"
      During this monologue Set had been trying to think of her own dinner hour--he had said "supper," hadn't he? That's quaint, colorful, she thought. But she couldn't remember the time before or after dinner--only the meal itself, served from glass casseroles exactly at 5:30. She remembered portions exacting and neat on her plate. Sometimes carrot and raisin salad. For some reason, she had a recurring image of perfect piles of carrot and raisin salad, served once every two weeks. Her mother had shredded the carrots into fringed orange mounds and there was just enough for the five of them. Why was it always just enough? She couldn't remember anything about world news, but the symmetry of the shredded carrots remained fixed in her mind.
      "I . . . well, I know what you're saying. But I don't remember adventure, as you call it, with my parents. They are reserved. You know, careful maybe is the word. Dad and Mother could never, or would never"--she flicked a quick look at the angular face--"would never leave a group, you know, like your parents did. They fit in."
      "Somehow I can believe that of your parents, September. You are careful."
      "How should I take that, David? You make me sound like putty, milktoast. I don't relish the image of blandness." She was trying to be calm, to not register the harsh blow he had just dealt her.
      "Oh, I'm sorry, Set. You see, I told you I could be cruel. And here you are--comforting and loving. And you are so soft and sweet." He leaned and kissed her cheek. "It's OK to be calm, to fit in. God knows we can't take a world of individuals who walk away every time the pieces don't match their mind's apparatus."
      He pointed ahead, out through the glass framing the field where Puck-a-chee ran, the field that was corn stubble and letter. "Look." Out of the sky a fringed dot propelled itself into a winged bird. "A hawk." In a breath it had swooped low, barely touching the dirt, and then lifted over the field, its hooked talons extending into black script. "I've never seen that before."
      "Was it a snake? It looked like a snake," Set said, breathless. They watched it fade into nothingness in the tapestry of trees bordering the creek.
      "Yes, it was a snake. Probably just a corn snake, or a black snake. But what a sight."
      "Talk about brute beauty and force and power."
      "Yes, a Hopkins scene if ever there was one. But in the flesh it's not quite as poetic as 'The Windhover,' is it, September?"
      "David, I threw the letter away." He didn't answer and the framed fields changed more slowly. "Right out there." She pointed her finger. The Porsche scraped against burdock and mare's tail in the ditch.
      "Where?"
      "Out there. That field. I don't know the exact spot. It was night and a cornpicker was going and I just walked out and . . . and I threw the pieces into the air, into the field." She looked at him. "They were just tiny pieces. Just gold tiny pieces. You had left them, in the parking lot. I didn't think it would matter. To you." Her voice sounded low and strong then. "I had to do it." He gazed across the road. He didn't move. "It was real, David." She thought he made a sound then. A laugh, a cry. It was difficult to distinguish.
      "What's real, September? What does real mean? It was real paper and real ink." His head was still.
      "It was a real letter from Dickens. Charles Dickens was here. He was here. On this road, on these fields, at Ivy's."
      "I know." He turned to her. His eyes looked untightened, soft, crinkles about the rims. "I've known since Oxford."
      "I knew you did. At least, I was almost sure. I'm sorry."
      "A man on the bus, going to Little Gidding. A Dickens scholar. We were exchanging backgrounds and when I mentioned that I was from Ohio he launched into an itinerary that had to have been close. I questioned him, the route. And spinning all the time in my head was the date. I always remembered the date. April, 1842. It came together. It all made sense and as the bus rolled on through the Cotswolds, all I could see was Shequonur rising stony in the field and Ivy's cottage. The damp floor and the logs, the pile of spangled dresses that covered the scrapbook. And inside, the page. I made a decision then to come back."
      "You mean, you came back to East Worthy specifically for the letter?" That sounded so much better to Set than the other motives she had rehearsed.
      "You sound so pleased, my little actress." Set felt heat rising in her cheeks. "I came back for Nate. Yes, the letter was compelling. I'm a scholar, right? Its mysterious genesis called me. But, to be absolutely candid, Nate pulled at me more. Nate and other things."
      "You mean Kathy, don't you?" No answer came. She looked at him. "You mean you came back because of her, don't you?" she said loudly.
      "Yes." The word could have been a knife. "Kathy and I did some research at the Historical Society in Columbus to confirm the route."
      "Oh, shut up those stupid lies. Research. Research. You did research on her." Set was astounded at the sound of her own voice.
      David's eyes registered another mood. Set looked at him, her eyes wide with fear and anger. "We did research, September, on a Saturday morning. We drove to Columbus."
      "And you picked her up at an auction, didn't you? Out on a farm, right?" Why did she sound accusatory? But she was at a loss on how to regain equilibrium, how to sound uninvolved again. Her voice came unannounced.
      "She told me you were there, you and Darby. And, yes, we met there. We had to step around her husband." He lifted Set's hand. "She's the only one who should have been in on the research, don't you agree? It was our letter, our teenage pact."
      "Oh, please. Don't push that palaver on me again. You and Kathy. You want her or you have her or something. What I can't understand is how she fits this into her . . . her theology, her doctrine. I heard you at Shequonur, in the apartment. It's not my business, of course. But the whole thing is fairly nauseating from this vantage point." Set drifted into acid, into cruelty. "She's such a little small town frump. I really can't see the fascination, David." She was taking another tack--cold analysis. "You said it yourself last night."
      He dropped her hand and leaned his back against the leather door. "I know," he said. "I know what she is. That she's that. But, September, she's," and he paused and he worked his lips to mouth a word he could not find. "She's something more." He handled the words as is they were rare plates, fine china. "Let me tell you how it is. When I'm with her," he started slowly, "I'm walking very close to a cliff."
      "What's that, a cliff of righteousness? You certainly don't feel danger from----"
     
     "Listen," he interrupted. "I'm walking close to the edge of a cliff. Beyond, there's view, the most gorgeous green gold landscape, and I look over it, and I walk. We walk. Clouds above. An autumn day. And then she says things to me--so close they are to the truth, so specific and real and close to my heart, but I only smile, and don't tell her she's close. But somehow she knows, and I don't tell her. 'Why don't you write a poem about this?' she'll say. And I'll have been working on that very poem. But I still don't tell her. And then she'll say she remembers what I said once about a plot, or a little bit of an idea, and that I must do it. Write it. I will have been caught up in that very idea, but so has she. The very same thought. Along with me, although we've been separated. She'll remember a snatch of idea I told her, maybe years before. I, by bits, then, will reveal myself, walk closer to the edge of the cliff. It's a windy day. Monarchs hang in the air." He looked at Set's face, her questioning frown. "I know that's strange. Monarchs, butterflies. I know it's strange, but they're part of the picture. They hang in the air like heavy tissue wads. Small rocking birds. They touch down and sip vertically at ragged clover, its purple heads." He took Set's hand up to his chest.
      "I want to tell her more, but I can't. Then recklessly I take one step closer. 'Someday you will see,' I say. Then I see her white even teeth and that sad smile. 'Tell me now, why can't you tell me now?' That's what she says. I wish she were a simpleton, so that she wouldn't know, so that she'd beg, without that cunning knowledge. I wish she had a candy voice. A sycophant. But she knows, and she laughs, and she admires. She knows what I am and she admires. God, I'm a prince walking near that edge. She says things then, that this is what I am or that is what I am. And she knows better than a thousand psychologists, analysts, my mother, what I am." He paused.
     "Maybe she knows what I think I am." He let go Set's hand and looked at the field. "No," he said, looking back, his eyes round, "what I am. Maker of things, lover of beauty. Still I hide and act strong. But she knows I'm vulnerable. She leads me along that cliff like a child. Inside my head, behind my eyes, gathers the water. And we both know I'm vulnerable. But she saves me. The mystery is, you see," he said simply, "at that moment we both know that she could topple me, but she smiles that smile in the monarchs, and she allows me to live and walk the cliff like a momentary prince. And I go away from her, not thinking, just feeling, like I've swung out of a plane at 6,000 feet, bungi-jumped, tackled a lion--a strange exhilaration in near death. Only with her, only with Kathy. All of the degrees and Oxford towers and lost letters are the dregs of experience, the dregs, do you understand, next to her, in her stupid little dress and her graying hair, her beautiful turning hair."
      September almost smiled inside because all dyes were cast, all choices irradiated, all maneuvers rendered useless. She had no power against loss of reason. She looked down at the crisp crease in her brown slacks, just from the cleaner, and she fingered the row of horn buttons on her trim, velvet-collared jacket, and smiled a benign and hopeless smile.
     "You see, I don't know what lies behind her simplicity, behind her common, little dress and her knowing eyes." Would he never end, Set questioned in a stupor. "Her simplicity is a mask. But I do know what lies behind your couture and your earnestness. Your sophisticated cover." He looked at her with pitying eyes, sorrow at the pain he was creating in the white face before him. "I'm sorry, Set. I cannot not choose her. I have no choice. I cannot resist her, her acceptance of whatever is. That's the mystery. She accepts whatever is at hand," he said, surprised, "and yet she knows. I think she knows.”
     "Knows what?" Set asked blankly, too stunned to rage.
      "I don't know what she knows. Yes," he paused, "she knows me. I think. But that's part of it, too. I don't know what it is that she knows, and maybe in the end she knows nothing. But that lures me too. It's no use, Set. I only feel it. I've tried reason before and my reason is tired. I choose her masked face and her knowing eyes. And her stupid little dress."
     He touched her velvet collar and the top horn button. He didn't even wince when September punctured his skin with her bright red nails, as she slapped and dragged his hand away from her neck.

Later, when she had time to think it out, when, in any case, she could not stop the flood of emptying despair that left her catatonic in bed, she propped up the new pieces of the scene and stared at them. Tried to look at them squarely, recognize their reality as they stood blockily about the stage, full of volume and color, as full of mass and form as the bed in which she twisted, or the green words that marched around her room: I went out into the hazel wood because a fire was in my head.
      Even the words accused her of playing a role he said she should give up. They were Yeats, Irish. But they were human words, she had said, words that painted personal agony, that speak for any sorrow. She argued wildly against his parochial stance. But he always countered with a viable reason and she couldn't understand how she got backed into a position, defending the very subject this doctor of letters had taken his degree in. It was all ridiculous and she had wanted to be home, in the caboose. Why were they still talking when he had bathed her in irrefutable reality. There was no mystery now, no game, no trying for the prize, no romance. Just this handsome man driving his leather-bound car, exposing candy love for a small-town frump. That was reality. But reality based upon abstraction, upon a quality he can't, even as a wordsmith, define. For David Owen could not name what drew him. Just her knowing, knowing, knowing.
      When he touched Set's collar, she had screamed. She blubbered uncontrollably while they repeated country blocks. After he said he wouldn't take her back to the caboose until she was better, Set resigned herself. What's the difference anyway? She had endured an adventure of spirit, hadn't she? And, in truth, they'd never been connected romantically by a shred of involvement from him. He had kissed her, perhaps he had even desired to have something with her. Perhaps he had had sexual desire and passion and . . . But that was even more sickening, as the mirror was held up to her own soul, like Gertrude's, even more binding and insoluble. There could be no plan, no device, if passion did not follow reason. If sexual desire could exist without that other mysterious power that he ascribed to her, to Kathy. But he'd gone beyond that, beyond the Kathy thing, and included other particulars, holding the mirror closer and she had taken it, too tired of her own planning to react. Besides, it was almost refreshing--not to react as the blows fell hard. To sit and smile in a stupor. To not put on. Just take it. Not that David knew he hammered at her mind, at the elaborate devices built into her behaviors. He obviously didn't realize the descending power of each word. He was kind, as he had been to Mildred Troyer at the senior lecture, explaining and encouraging. He solicited the needs and spirit of his auditor. He was kind. Kindness was the hardest hit of all.
      When he crossed the stone bridge into East Worthy he flipped on the CD player. Verdi, Gregorian Chant, Vaughan Williams and then the Righteous Brothers. That's what made him launch into the other particulars. It had to do with Set's reliance and fascination with other forms, with her British parroting, with her playing a foreign role. It lies in rhythm, he said kindly, the rhythm of the American walking wide, free, not looking at his space, because his space is everything ahead of him, and he doesn't have to curb his step. He's not pinched and careful, he is looking far ahead over the horizon to the next day or the next hill or the next field. The rhythm beats in the music, probably something African, thumping, accompanying the wide walk. I didn't grow up around Blacks, he said. I never knew a single Black family to ever live in East Worthy, but still the blues or rock or even black gospel pounds at the base of my mind and soothes me when it meets the rhythm of my mind that's pounding and thumping. He switched the radio to a Dayton station and black beat rose up out of the car and caught the rhythm of Set's colliding thoughts. She knew exactly what he was saying. David's exposition made her glowing hours with Aretha--Aretha, the Faberge egg--explicable. Set would have preferred mystery.
      For a few moments the two rhythms met and merged, pounding hard together, releasing Set, for the duration of the song, from the act of realignment, adjusting her own natural beat, checking the thump of her heart to match the dull, mechanical flop of known and expected sound, of circumspection, of plans tediously worked out, deliberate, with no subtleties, no organic change, no scream in the night, or whisper. She knew exactly what he was talking about. The British were careful on the surface. Set was careful, too.
      He explained the mystery away. Subtleties, he said, for an American lay on top.
      "On top of what?" Set asked, losing track in his disjointed logic.
      "Just on top, on the outside of the mind, in the boldness of choice or no choice, of endless choices, of many paths, and schools, and vocations, behaviors. Not that that really exists for the American, but he believes it does, it's woven into his culture, his mind. The American in general doesn't develop the sophistication of inner slivers of thought because he can play it anyway he wants it, on top. He can run and range, he can shout obscenity. The British work inwardly, refining and ranging wide, inside, with ironies, and interesting situations, delicate and paradoxical, winding down paths to uncover little weeds and gullies. Because that is where the British are forced, into the mind."
      "David, really, what has this . . ."
      "Please, just go with me a few more minutes. The American is still laughing and shouting out on the real path, still trying to find the physical hill, and the real mountain, still calling hard and loud to his friend. He still hasn't bothered to go inside. His discoveries are on top, still to be discovered. That's what he thinks. It's not an inner journey and it pounds in American rhythms. In the Righteous Brothers. Even now. Still pounding right here, 1989. "
      "David, wait a minute. You tell me to listen, but what good does that do if I have lost your thought completely?"
      "I'm sorry, Set, but I just want you to be able to be yourself. Your persona. Don't be afraid."
      "What, like you are yourself? Like during the past weeks with your lectures at Calvary? Spare me the lecture on being who you truly are." Her words clicked spitefully. "You weren't yourself all during those talks at the pulpit. And, more than that, your motives are not as pure as mine. You were plotting some kind of weird revenge. On Nate. I don't know, maybe on Kathy. On the whole town."
      He suddenly looked heavy in his eyes, the light snuffed that had ignited the last few minutes. "Maybe that was myself." Set looked at him, East Worthy's houses passing outside his window. "How do you know that wasn't me in front?"
      "Because. Your journal. Your words. Your thing with Kathy last night. The whole thing with the Bible and the pool. Your anger."
      "How do you know that's not me?" he said again simply.
      "What do you mean? Which one?"
      She waited. But he didn't speak.
      "You are the most exasperating man I have ever met. So smug. Now we have riddles for the little teacher, right?"
      "Good, Set, good. Yourself. Say it. Don't be careful. Careful. The irony is that we have both--I include myself--we have both tried to find the meticulous beauty of the old world, the knowing of the old. The patina. The tradition. But here I am." He snorted a big laugh. "Wandering the same fields, in the same town, thinking about the crow color in her hair, and the lines around her eyes, and her dress. I've been to Oxford and the cathedrals and the Bodlien and the illuminated manuscripts. But here I am. Here I am." He stopped.
      He drove her to the caboose. They said goodnight and they didn't speak again.