"What do you have in mind?" Jones said. "I guess we could manage a fire dance. Maybe a blood sacrifice, if you volunteered." She laughed and shook her head at the dirt. "--Why not just look around?"

The flats were light but they were long and awkward, and carrying them out was a job for two people. We made quite a parade, two by two, lifting the scenes up to Lon in the back of the truck, then doubling back to take another from the top of the pile. "Around at what?" I said.

"This. What we're doing now. packing it all away."

We stood aside for Mary and Sylvie coming through. "But this -- we do this all the time."

"You asked me about a ritual to end the season. What more do you need?"

By that time I had loaded the trucks often enough so that it should have been obvious to me. The business was one big ritual; it was ritual after ritual, raising and striking; dressing, recital, abandonment; all the tricks and methods of mummery. "I don't know," I said. "But I can't believe you don't have something up your sleeve."

Jones bent to the stack and slipped her fingers under a corner of Athens. "Not a thing. Anyway, it would be too late. The new season started an hour ago. If I were you I'd be sure that my head was well-stocked"

There was still some light in the sky when we drove up the tarred ramp from behind that last, grey-fronted hall. Lon stuck his nose out into the main road, looked right and left; then the rear axle lurched over a hump and we were on our way. Behind us, Moscow pulled out and paused as if he was having second thoughts. A cloud of grey smoke burped out of his tailpipe. He came along after us, picking up speed. It was barely half a mile before the town fell away, leaving us in open countryside dotted with a few cattle farms set well back from the road. Lon said we had a long drive ahead of us, eight hours or more to Philadelphia, to the Valenciennes, our winter home.

In the front seat Jones and Lon ignored the map resting half-crumpled, half-folded on the seat between them. They talked and gestured at the road ahead; then Jones reached her briefcase from its storage place under her feet, took out a legal folder thick as a dictionary and spread the topmost pages across her lap. She never smoked in the truck, but now as she read and made notes the pen sometimes found its way to her mouth. Mary and I talked about books; she admired the woodcuts of Lynd Ward, and the children's stories of Carl Sandburg. She said that it would be a good thing to get home, to see her books, air out her apartment, and learn if a cat she knew called Max still lived in the neighborhood. He would be sure to come by, she said, as soon as he knew she had come back. He would stay for the winter. He always did.

Ten minutes later Jones looked back over her shoulder. "Hope you haven't gotten used to writing everything out longhand," she said.

I said, Oh believe me I haven't. Nope. No, ma'am.

She handed me back a smaller brown folder with the manuscript pages of All Hallows Eve piled ragged and dogeared inside. "Then you'll be glad to know you'll be typing again soon. Somewhere in a cubby hole at Valenciennes there's an Underwood. Been a long time since it's seen any use, but I think it still works --?" She looked at Lon, who nodded as if he knew it for a fact, which he probably did. "O.K. Start with a clean copy of this. I've made some notes, but you're free to ignore them."

"Since we take the same liberty with you," Mary said, and gave my left arm a squeeze.

"Don't spend too much time on it," Jones said. "If you get stuck just push on. We'll all iron it out together. You're a professional now; you've got a deadline."

She had announced our winter schedule more than a week before, but I still hadn't had enough time to get over the shock. Mondays and Tuesdays (and every day until All Hallows was ready) would be given over to the repertory productions they knew best: Shakespeare, Ibsen, some Moliere, and a bit of Sophocles for spice. Wednesdays the Valenciennes would be dark. Thursday through Sunday, and twice on Saturday, the Jones company would offer all new plays, my plays, though I knew full well that by the time any curtain raised on them they would carry many more fingerprints than just my own. I was to come up with a full script every thirty days: Jones allowed one week for me to work out a general outline, one week each to rough out the two acts, and a fourth to redraft the entire project. It would go into rehearsal on the sixteenth of each month, one day after the premiere of its predecessor. That gave me four more weeks of changes and polishing with the company while I worked on the bones of the next play. There would be no room for false starts: I must get it under way, and I must get it right.

It helped to know that I had a definite responsibility after that long, indefinite summer, but the promise of the Underwood helped more. Mr. DeLodges had used an Underwood; my fingers knew it by heart. With the machine, I thought, I could be a human dynamo.

"I'll manage it," I said in my best ex-office boy voice. "So long as I don't run out of ideas."

"Never fear," Jones said. "Ideas are cheap. Even the good ones."

"We could make you ride in the other truck," Mary said. "They say great plays come out of anguish and misery."

"And sometimes out of juicy gossip. Lon can help you with that."

"Ouw," Lon said.

Jones hooked one arm over the seat back. "Your Mr. DeLodges kept a good library. Don't tell me you never took the chance to look at it." I said of course, all the time, and Jones looked at the road ahead. "Well, there you are. If all else fails, just dredge something up from the library. Steal from the best. Steal with feeling."

"Winston Howe, the soulful plagiarist."

"Not plagiarism," Jones said. "Grave robbing. You're taking the bones and packing on your own flesh, so they can walk around again. You're lending them a voice. Shakespeare was a grave robber. The most soulful grave robber of all."

Jones sat back with the landscape passing by across the windowglass, across her eyes. "Keep looking around," she said. I thought she meant for ideas; I thought she was telling me that there were plays inside every house that we passed. It made sense, but after a few minutes the houses all looked the same to me, and soon I turned down to the folder in my lap, only to find that it was too dark to read. "I want Mary to look that over," Jones said without turning back. "Then tomorrow we can -- wait, this is it. Pull over."

Lon eased onto the shoulder. He shut off the engine, and in the growing dark Jones rolled down her window. Cool air came into the cab. "Some night," she said. "Everyone out under the stars."

Mary slid across the seat and came down beside me, and a moment later Lon came around the front, carrying a battered tacklebox that I had never seen before. We stood out there with the night sky looking just like a black cloak that had not yet reached the western horizon, and I thought of the myth of Morpheus that they dramatized so often in The Twilight of The Gods. I thought of Lon unfolding the Night Scrim, running from one end of the stage to the other with a frayed old rope in his hand, only to hurry back to the lightboard so that he could turn on the stars, one by one. "There," Jones said, pointing down across a shadowy field that slanted away from the road. Water glimmered down there beyond a row of trees: it might have been a pond or it might have been a river. I couldn't be sure.

Moscow pulled up behind us and sat there at the wheel, unmoving with his bumper almost touching ours, his headlights on and the engine still running, until the rear door opened up and Sylvie stepped onto the running board. She came scuffling through the dust, into the lights, wearing a black skirt and her black band jacket with gold epaulets at the shoulders and braid around the wrists. She shielded her eyes. "Moscow says he wants to go on," she said.

"Now there's a surprise," Jones said. She set off towards the water, calling back over her shoulder. "Tell him we'll make it quick. A race, then. To the river and back. Fastest one loses."

Sylvie gave me a shove and ran laughing after her down the slope. By then the Templetons had joined us along the roadside; faced with that, Moscow at last cut the motor, but we never heard him get out.

"--You did have something planned after all," I said to Jones when we caught her up. "A ritual to end the season."

She only walked on ahead with her face turned down, cutting at the grass with a switch she'd picked up along the way. "You can call it anything you want. Just get down there and get soaked."

At the bottom of the field Sylvie disappeared into a black cluster of leaves. There was a lot of rustling and kicking about, then a white shape slanted downward from the bank. Water splashed; between the trees her head broke the surface and she shrieked at the cold. Above us the trucks waited dark and silent. Still no sign of Moscow. We fanned out along the riverside, the Templetons standing back against the slope, Lon off downstream cutting himself a pole. Jones and Mary and I went on until water squished in our shoes. We entered the brush at about the same time; I stripped off my shirt, shoes, trousers, socks, and went in like that. It was cold all right, and perfectly clear: reaching down to touch the bottom, I could open my eyes and see their distant bodies white as paper against a spillage of ink.

At the top of the hill Moscow was waiting with a wicker trunk full of linen. He threw me a towel that I caught with my face, then leaned back again and set his shoulders against the truck. He crossed his arms and kept his eyes turned down towards the water. I didn't speak to him. Still dripping, I reached All Hallows Eve from the back seat, and by flashlight looked at the notes she had written on the first page:

Artaud: we are athletes of the heart -- we make use of our emotions the way a wrestler makes use of his muscles -- DON'T SHY AWAY from the darker implications of these stories. I trust your choice of subject and your feeling for the characters -- Try to play with the form a bit: multiple endings, audience involvement, music, etc & don't be so straiqhtfaced and serious!!

I sat on the running board reading this, my trousers soaking wet, the towel draped over my head. I knew what most of it meant, but the way she had used it confused me. What parts of it, I wondered, should I feel free to ignore? Was it only the play that was too straightfaced and serious, or did she mean me? Could the two be separated?

"Use our emotions," I said aloud, forgetting (or perhaps not?) that I wasn't alone. "She's sure giving mine a workout."

Moscow looked at me and said nothing. Below the rim of the hill, their voices started to grow. They were coming back.