"I had the last one,” Sam said. “The last."

"Good.” They looked at one another for a moment in quiet stillness. “It's nice for your mom, getting married,” Roo said.

"I made them a song,” Sam said. “Do you want me to sing it?"

"Yes,” Roo said. “Definitely."

"I made the tune,” Sam said. “But God made the words."

"Okay."

She began to sing, and the tune was long and lilting, without shape or repeat, an endless melody; Roo guessed it was never the same twice. The words God had made up were not for human ears, apparently, or not for other humans, for they were only Sam's voice put forth in a single vowel or call, shaped by the melody and the movement of her mouth and slim throat—Roo could see it move as she sang. Pierce and Val and Rosie and Spofford heard it too, and Rosie took Spofford's hand, laughing, as though she'd had the gift before, maybe in another form though not different.

Sitting beside Sam, on her left hand as Roo was on her right, was the last of the great crowd of small brothers and sisters Sam had once known well, inhabitants of her old house; he was a girl as well as a boy, he was the mean one who laughed and smiled and whispered in her ear to tickle her until she made him stop. Stop! And for the first time, on this afternoon, he did: he stopped, and he began to go away. He wasn't angry and he surely wasn't sorry, he just went away. And since for Sam whatever departed from her into the past seemed (would seem, always, all her life) not to have gone outward or into the distance or even behind, but to have gone in—to have been swallowed by her, or passed away in the direction of her innermost inside (which seemed to her endless or bottomless, containing all of her own self and all of everything that had gone before her as well)—then he remained a part of her, though he was no longer with her, and soon wouldn't be remembered by her at all. The last.

Sam couldn't know all of that; nor could she know that the song without words that she sang was the last breath to be breathed, the last spirit exhalation of the previous age, or the first of the new, same thing. What I tell you three times is true: it was the Hieros gamos achieved in her own small person, and thus achieved for everyone; it was the final reconciliation, too, of Wanting and Having, Having and Giving, kind Wisdom and hard Knowledge, if only for the space of one afternoon in one faraway county. Never mind; in her singing and our listening was completed the renovatio and atonement we all needed, whether or not we knew we had longed for it and sought for it, or would ever recognize we had it. It was the Great Instauration of everything that had all along been the case, the last part of the work set out for all of us to do, never to be finished, as it never has been nor ever will be.

5

After that things would roll forward swiftly and without further contradiction or hesitation, though no one could actually tell the difference. Before long one of Pierce's letters of application got a response; and when a couple of further letters had been exchanged, and a brief visit made, he received an offer of a teaching position at a private school for boys called Downside Academy.

"It would mean leaving,” Pierce said. “Leaving here. The Faraways."

She laughed. “Well, that's possible to do,” she said. “The roads lead out. As well as in. I,” she said, as though imparting a secret, “have been out before."

Here wasn't all he meant, of course, and she knew that too, and he knew she knew. He read the letter again, as though it were hard to understand, needed study; rubbed the paper, felt its watermark.

"How's the pay?"

"It's not good. No. But they give you a little apartment. You have to manage a dorm or something."

"Oh."

"If you're single. If you're married you get a house. Or a House. It's full of kids too."

"You like kids?” she asked.

"Well. I have experience with them."

"You do?"

"Yes. I was one. For some years, actually."

"So go,” she said with sudden force. “Go."

That night she lay still but sleepless in his bed. He had never known, among all the women he had lain beside, one who could lie so still, faceup on her pillow like a funerary sculpture, and yet project such a ferocious wakefulness. He tried to match her stillness, and his thoughts were addling into nonsense when she spoke.

"So do you get health insurance?"

"I don't know."

"You didn't ask?"

"No."

Deeper stillness, baleful.

"Pay scale?” she said into the dark. “Like is there a way of figuring raises?"

"I don't know."

"You didn't ask."

"Um no."

"Don't care?"

"Um well."

"What did you talk about? If it wasn't this stuff."

"Latin. Could I teach Latin."

Her scorn was so deep that at last it lifted him to his elbow to look into the mystery of her face. “Listen,” he said. “If you know so much about this, about about. Life. All the questions to ask. Then why are you, why. You yourself. I mean."

She didn't move or speak for a long time. He had no way to take back what he'd said.

"You mean,” she said, “why should I talk. Because I haven't got shit."

"No. Come on."

But it was so. He could see it even in her still body and the eyes that looked into the dark vacuity of the room; he could almost hear her thinking it. Like him she had somehow come to nothing. She had gone away and not come back, not anyway to the crossroads where she had turned aside; but nothing had become of her out there either, nothing that stuck or stayed. She lived in a room in her father's house, but that didn't mean she'd returned to him, or to it, not really. She had no job but selling cars part-time, which she usually got out of doing, preferring to sweep the floors and file; but she never looked at want ads, not as seriously even as himself.

"Just because,” she said, “you know how to get to the future. Just because you know it's real. Doesn't mean you think it can happen to you."

He had the illusion—maybe the soft passing of great trucks at regular intervals, like falling surf—that his cabin was beside the sea.

"But how can you know that it is, or could be, or anyway,” he started to say, meaning futures, their metaphysical or ontological unreality all he really knew about them; but she too now rose on an elbow and put her face pugnaciously close to his.

"You're a dope,” she said. “What made you such a dope?"

The way she said it made it seem not a mere rhetorical question, insult or upbraiding, and staring at her, searching for a comeback, Pierce for the first time in his life wondered if indeed there were a reason why he was such a dope, one reason, and if it could be known, and if so how, and if known at last, could be wrestled with, dragon or worm or slug at the base of his being, and defeated, or ousted. Would just knowing be enough? Probably not. Necessary, maybe, but not sufficient, and inaccessible to him anyway, right now and always so far, if not forever.

She had watched and waited for his answer for long enough, and turned back to her pillow beside his. She crossed her arms as though she were standing upright and confronting something, him forgotten.

"Any future that gets too close to me better watch out,” she said. “If it knows what's good for it."

He laughed then, at this, and after a moment and a sidelong glance at him, so did she. “Shit you know,” she said. “I have a really bad attitude."