"Not the axe--ummm, the insturment itself. Jist the amplifier."

She did not ask about the amplifier and he appreciated that. She knew when to skip ahead. Lovell ducked his lashes, testing her open admiration.

"Why the quiz show?" he probed.

"Oh. elan. elan is the staff of my existence. I am seldom able to leave my home, so my elan is ofttimes confined to shifts of moonlight and season, ladybugs on my African violets, that sort of thing." The ten-gallon sunhat c.o.c.ked up at him--dark, blank gla.s.ses unmoving on her sallow face. Tiny wrinkles were just sprouting along her lips' ridge. Perhaps she was older than he first thought.

"Why you cover yerself so?" Lovell did not stutter.

She sighed, eagerly.

"Isn't it wickedly absurd? An affront to one's natural eye?" she demanded with husky fervor, showing small, even teeth that radiated something a tad--well, electric. "I cannot suffer any harsh sun due to my condition. I am afraid mine is an extremely rare, systemic condition that leaves me debilitated and homebound much of the time. Too much direct sunlight can aggravate, even activate the worst symptoms, causing a flare-up which might leave me bedridden for days, even weeks. I'm resoundingly incurable. I have borne it for years and keep chugging along, so no pity for Fionuala Dar'bannon, thank you. My eyes are particularly sensitive."

"That was a snootful." Lovell leaned against her Royale Victoria, strangely comforted by this bird and her plight. Her condition, whatever it was, did not resemble the pestilent skin eruptions or blood disturbance that was worming its way through the backwoods of late. She looked certifiable, yes. But she hardly looked contagious.

"Speaking of electricalities..."

Were they, he wondered? Were they speaking of electricalities?

"...perhaps you are aware of some handy fellow or tradesman fluent with the alternating current," she continued. "Not the directing current, I was told, the alternating one. My lights went out during our blow last night. I lit the hurricane lamps. I've a fully oil-stoked furnace, but otherwise I am in a pickle."

Lovell scratched his beard, grinning with her. She set a gloved hand on the fender alongside his.

"Why, the whole morning has been a pickle. My housekeeper, Ess, she sent her little colored boy over first thing before breakfast to tell me she was tending a horrid toothache and could not shop groceries or clean. I rely upon Ess for most of my outside errands, you see. At present, I am feeling my way toward Cayuga Ridge. Is the road pa.s.sable?"

"Prob'ly not."

"I thought the Cayuga school janitor might be acquainted with super power surges and other electricalities. Do you know him?"

"No, ma'am, I do not. Prob'ly a fuse would fix you."

"Yes, a fuse," she enthused, perfectly ungrasping.

He asked and she told him there were no downed lines in her yard. Since power was still live back at the lounge he suspected her fuse box. And not surprisingly, Lovell's boots wanted in from the cold and damp. The prospect of Floy's hard homecoming had blown off into Arctic oblivion.

Behind her blind shades, this odd Royale Victorian woman got fiercely ecstatic when Lovell said, "I kin do a fuse. Any ole beau kin do a d.a.m.n fuse."

So, she took him home.

He spent the trip making peace with her eight-piston coc.o.o.n. It was calming. The Reo's tinted windows cut the sun's glare by half, creating a greenish cell. Lovell had never felt the like. His a.s.s unpuckered. She was a cautious driver. Soon he forgot about deadly roadslides or patches of black ice. He was ready to go. Along the way, she told him to call her Fina. Just call her Fina, she mewed. Her friends did.

Home was some-kind-of-sw.a.n.k alright. Jumbo-sized and special as finding Notre Dame Cathedral shut off, towering up a run amidst snowpeaked regency. Lovell had seen this one before. In the National Geographic. "Home again, home again, jiggityjig," she added. When she finally idled down that long, brown-vined arbor into the receiving end of a swell carriage house, Lovell got tongue-sprung. Icicle nests circled in formation around the arbor; a crystalline garden sprouting behind low stone walls and latticework, mired in windswept drifts, neglected and complete with its own frozen puddleduck pond.

A shade turned the duckless ice purple, the three-story, pavilion-peaked shade of that splendor she called home again, home again. Freshly salted tiles led their way, climbing inevitably toward the manor house's broad, riverstone foundation. Before they made the porch, Lovell tried but failed to count each of those steep-gabled dormers above, totaling up the silent windows that watched him come. Cradling his raunchy guitar, he was given, strangely given, to counting her steeples.

And the indoors was everything he should have expected at this point. Cornices and high ceilings, room after epic room, landscapes under gla.s.s, formal portraits in rich oils, murky hallways, depthless corners, velveteen loveseats and scrolled woodgrains that whispered money, money, money. She gushed appreciation, for Lovell, for the stringed instrument, the kazoo, The Holy Encyclopedia Brittanica, crickets, and other pa.s.sing interests which he lost track of as they zig-zagged through labyrinthine chambers. He noticed an overabundance of snapshots. Every doily and lampstand held a postcard or three, or four, a stereoscopic slide, a foreign postage stamp, a ripple-edge photo. No matter where his eye fell, he saw Carlesbad Caverns or the Colossus Of Rhodes. Stereo-visions of The Great San Francisco Earthquake scattered across a footstool.

Eventually, Lovell found the laundry porch where he found the problem in her circuit box. He proved true. Lovell fixed her blown fuse, gave her the juice and when he returned to her parlor with the nine-bulb chandelier all aglow, her veils had lifted.

She ran, clasped his coattail and gushed, "Transcendent is the light!"

She spun, hands high. He gave chuckle.

"Light, oh light, espathen teke jind uava de tosh!

"Espa--?"

"The Gaelic means: of dying embers the spirit shines. A friend taught me as a child."

Yes, Miss Fionuala had shed her wraps, and was soon explaining volumes about her very weak eyes. He saw she was willowy and fragile indeed, a network of freckles upon lucid skin. No more dark gla.s.ses. Her swollen brown eyes were revealed, her crop of ash-auburn curls. Fionuala Dar'bannon thanked him mercilessly. She reminded Lovell of a s.p.a.ce alien he had seen one Sat.u.r.day matinee. No, this one was hardly the looker from where he stood. And here, under the unvarnished glare of her chandelier, Lovell figured Miss Dar'bannon had waved bye-bye to thirty-five, maybe even forty, though she could fake ten years up or down. Her eyes were dimming, she said, weak and dimming with each day.

There was no coffee, so she served him warm cocoa in a sun-drenched gla.s.s nook she called the Florida room. They sat at a round teakwood table and drank from gilt-edged teacups.

"You'll need a proper fuse from the hardware. Made do with a copper penny in the meantime," Lovell admitted, stroking his devilish spade beard.

"How clever. A copper penny. You can do such a thing?"

"Legions have. But swap it back or you might burn this palace down." He took pause, meeting her liquid brown gaze. She was beaming back at him from the shade of a rubber tree plant. His eardrum hit a rimshot. "Anyway, shut the gate, the meter's runnin. Miss Fina's back on rural electric. Is she happy then?"

"Wickedly warm and wickedly happy," her airy, fluted tongue told him, more cocoa pouring forth, "are you happy Mr. Starling?"

"Happier than a sissy in a C.C. Camp."

Fionuala giggled, though she had no notion of what he meant and he knew it and she knew he knew. Somehow, nothing in the words really mattered. She asked if he had a home and he said not really. She asked if he was married. Lovell answered the same. He described the roadhouse, the music he made there, the drunken ovations he had provoked in so many joints for so many years. They all seemed phony in the telling. But she listened with swollen-eyed rapture.

He slept the night in a spare bedroom. She insisted. He insisted. It would just be for a few days. Before he moved in, though, Lovell borrowed her Royale Vic to fetch his guitar amp and motorcycle from Bull's Gladiola Lounge. The car got through, but not without adventure. Lovell left Bull a note saying he figured Sat.u.r.day night was no-go what with these slick roads so the axeman was heading south to flamingo heaven so Bull would need a new headliner. Lovell didn't jot a dot about Floy. The weather thickened into stiff snow flurries during his dusky return. Arriving with a b.u.mperload of Triumph, Lovell fought the carriage house doors closed. Winter's dark sank fast. Fionuala's white castle accepted him once more.

Blissful, he snoozed like a mole in his splendid guest room, snow deepening throughout the night. Down the second-floor hallway, Fionuala slept in her own little room with the nursery carol wallpaper.

Next morning, Lovell sipped cocoa, told some warstories from the road, then tuned an E-string up to D so he could pick and sing a couple of jump tunes for Miss Dar'bannon. This seemed to excite her. Taking his hand, she led him on a tour through her vast manor. He quickly learned the lay of the house, including which toilet pipes complained, access to the rooftop cupola, the total number of gables: twelve. There was even a secret staircase behind a panel in the second-floor linen closet. Pure Abbott and Costello stuff. The cramped, hidden steps descended to the furnace cellar where you could exit the house from flat double storm doors--if you could lift a yard of snow. The third floor was currently unfurnished, given over long since to dust and storage. Fionuala grew faint, so she napped several hours of the afternoon while Lovell repaired a library shelf, then leaned out a third-story alcove and lag-bolted the shaky lightning rod to the house's crown. For supper he made his Mad Rabbit Stew, going easy on the red pepper for the sake of his host's delicate stomach. He whipped up a bowl of snow ice cream as an antidote, drizzling caramel over it before delivery. Licking spoons, they shared slides and postcards she solicited faithfully from around the world. Her swollen eyes ached to see all wondrous sights and vistas, she said, before her eyes were gone. "How long?" he asked. Months, maybe years, she could not say. The snow held for most of the coming week. The housekeeper never appeared.

During his third night, Fionuala came to the guest room and woke Lovell. He returned with her to the little rhyme-papered room where he took her virginity. After that, they made love every night and every morning before cocoa. There was nothing said about it. Fionuala accepted him and his presence within her as though Lovell had simply reappeared from some mislaid remembrance when their hearts and bodies had once entwined. With each kiss, her true loveliness surfaced and he saw. How could he have overlooked such fair beauty? So what if, from time to time, he overheard her speaking something she called Gaelic to the mirrors and clocks. She was used to living alone, where her natural charms had suffered from lack of appreciation. His beard left a mild rash on her cheeks, her belly, her legs. She did not mind, but he shaved the beard anyway. In lush tones, she declared him the handsome rake, with or without the shrubbery.

For a week he strummed her and his guitar while Fionuala's naps grew shorter. After dark, they built fires in the library's hearth where she lay before him, growing warm, pink, strong. He held each darling foot in hand. Her naked arch seduced his everloving soul. Outside, the snow began to thaw.

When Ess the housekeeper brought groceries that following Sat.u.r.day, Fionuala cut the lady's workload by half, getting her out of the place in under two hours while Lovell hid behind the secret panel upstairs. He sat inside the wall on the tight, candle-lit stair, made erotic drawings in a Big Chief notebook until he heard Fionuala's gentle tap from the linen closet, her airy flute trilling, "aelspin frey ma tein, woen ma...come out, come out, my love. Wherever you are, you are for meee-heeee."

Winter surrendered to mayapples, wysteria and Queen Anne's lace. Lovell kept a low profile, working the garden when n.o.body was around--which was almost always. Who were these friends who called her Fina? Rarely, it crossed his mind. There was the housekeeper twice a week. An old family lawyer visited monthly, bringing stipends from the Roanoke bank, discussing vague executory matters in her parlor while Lovell stayed upstairs. This gave him time to plan his attack on the horticultural front. He began to draft a free standing belfry on lined tablet paper. One had to wonder, but rarely.

Lovell dredged the duck pond with twin pitchforks strapped together, wading knee-deep, clearing out weeds while Fina sat on the porch viewing three-dimensionals through her stereoscope. Given time, some duck might even call Lovell's handiwork a home. He tilled fresh rows at the back of the garden, invisible behind evergreen spires. These rows he planted with laughing tobacco and crowder peas. Lovell had always been partial to crowder peas. Meat was plentiful. The neighboring forest was so untapped, he could hunt fowl or rabbit from the porch. Fina's daddy, Asta, provided a fine Marlin Rimfire rifle from his collection.

One Tuesday in late August, the narrow staircase had gotten altogether too d.a.m.n hot and stifling when restless Lovell thought he heard housekeeper Ess crank up her old Dodge to leave. He was just reaching for the secret panel's handle--when Ess began mumbling a few inches from his face, on the other side.

"So how much was it, mister?" he heard her ask softly, in a voice deep as any bullfrog's. "Let's see. It'uz sixteen and four bits--and two penny. Sixteen from twenty, that's, uh--"

Lovell went rigid. Ess was a breath away from him, inside the linen closet.

"--that's four dollar. Four bits from a dollar, that's four bits more--"

She was talking to herself. He heard the housekeeper pull clean sheets from the shelves. Lovell got stranger than wise, afraid to move off down the stair, afraid Ess might hear the creak of steps inside the wall.

"--then there's the two penny. That leaves forty, forty, forty-sebb.u.m. Yes, ma'am. She owe me three dollar and forty-sebb.u.m cent."

He didn't even know what Miss Ess looked like. He had never seen her clearly. He wished she would go away. Ess slid a blanket from its berth, somewhere near Lovell's ankles. The floor flexed as she left the closet. Pressing his mended ear to the wall, her one-woman debate continued down the hall toward Fionuala's bedroom. Lovell realized it was only grocery change Ess was ciphering. Only change due her for the tally. Faintly now, the trickle of Fina's laughter came up through the boards, joined by gleeful chimes from Ess's youngest boy, Melrose--who came with the housekeeper when school was out.

Lovell slumped back down on his step, damp in the head.

When Fionuala heard about this close call she declared it Pickwickian, that's right, poppyc.o.c.k incarnate and she leapt into his arms. The following Sat.u.r.day she paid Ess a fifty-dollar bonus, then sent her home for the last time. The housekeeper's long, steadfast service was no longer required. Fina said Ess was perplexed but took it in her usual stride.

It was the right way to go. They were independent minded people. Their house took care of itself. She seldom took her naps anymore, though she was still sun-sensitive and always would be. Lovell cooked, making the occasional sugar and supply run into Ewe Springs where he was less known. He would park her clashingly-tinted Royale Victoria somewhere out of the way, usually down a blind alley, then walk up the lane to shop. Once he ran into a hillbilly jump fan who knew him from the club, a boy named Percy; but Lovell was more easy talking by then and did not really mind the encounter. Another time, in the blind alley, he crossed paths with a long, old, preacher-looking thing who asked him how went a tizzypoke. That's what the long thing said. How went a tizzypoke. This encounter wasn't to Lovell's liking. But he let it go.

Later that day, he bought himself a new D-string before heading home to his Fina. With his amp barely humming, he played her every scarlet torch song, every sweetheart's lament he knew, and later, they made love in her parent's great canopied bed for the first time. With all the windows open, with crickets and scent of hydrangea tickling over fleshly pleasures. From that evening forward the great vaulted bedroom was theirs.

At Fionuala's urging, they began to make day-long excursions in the Royale Victoria Reo. She would don her layers and dark gla.s.ses then Lovell locomoted slowly out of the hills, sometimes to Roanoke, sometimes as far as Shanville for a Sat.u.r.day picture show. She liked Mr. Montgomery Clift. He liked Miss Barbara Stanwyck. They both loved King Solomon's Mines. They spent hours turning Rexall's postcard rack, haunting museums and record shops. They even rode a Ferris wheel under cloudy skies. It was even easier to stock their groceries downland then carry the booty home. There was much to choose from in the city. Yet, it always felt great to escape at day's end.

Only once did Fionuala seem vexed. That particular sunset, one autumn eve they left Roanoke for the hills. Bridge repairs forced Lovell to detour the Royale Victoria, cruising past the silver gate and silvery lawns of St.Dympna's Healing Home. Fina averted her gaze, turned in, and played possum during the return trip. Usually she chattered non-stop. But that day, with the sun ebbing through swamp-green gla.s.s, Lovell left her to her secrets. He was much the same as she. So be it.

He wouldn't know real Gaelic if the words were etched in stone. So who the h.e.l.l cared if her Gaelic was blarney? There had been no skin rashes nor irritable reactions to sunlight--not in months. If her swollen eyes had weakened, Lovell was unaware. Apparently, so far, Fina saw as sharply as ever. Perhaps too sharply. She still doted on her stereoscope and exotic photos. And Lovell, he had his own fetish for Taj Mahals. He was just learning how to look, to look out, not in; for his own mysteries shone brightest in Fina's celestial eyes. She made him tougher every day. Tougher than wise.

A year went dawdling by. They grew pokier together, weathered more snow storms and now it was red-hot August again, waiting for the flames to break. Waiting for cool relief.

Lovell savored her naked arch for that extra moment, licked Fionuala's tasty nape before leaving bed. He took the translation of Gabriele D'Annunzio's The Flame Of Life from his bedstand, retiring to the porcelain throne for further study. Afterward, he made for the kitchen. Lovell held cocoa in high favor, especially Fina's cocoa; but two of the loveliest arrivals in their home, dearest to Lovell's heart, were chicory and roasted beans in the cupboard.

What to conjure for breakfast, what would delight her, he wondered? Wearing canary silk bottoms and only canary silk bottoms, he padded through the marbled foyer, smelling phantasmic pecan m.u.f.fins from the near future just before he chanced a glance out the front door's prismed gla.s.s.

Bent in the prism, a big, big man was coming up the gloamy path. Moving from inside the arbor where Lovell's Triumph lay stashed, the man was grimy, barefoot in a lean blue nightie.

That man was Floy.

Quietly, Lovell slipped out, latching the door closed. Son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h-born-Satan if it wasn't Floy. She was big, but he had seen her bigger. Every big inch of her, he'd felt that inch, he'd smelt that inch, he'd been pinned by that inch, he'd left his climaxes in their bargain. And they had all been bigger. This morning, loose skinflaps draped off Lady 's bulk. Something was awry with her hairdo. Floy spotted him but gave nothing away. She looked unhealthy in her torn, shapeless nightie; why, she couldn't weigh more than two hundred and a quarter.

"Mornin, doll...how ya been...?" Her mouth sounded boggy, aimless.

"Mornin to you, Floy."

She had found him. Him, or some fool who could pa.s.s for the late Lovell Starling. A stranger who only looked the part. What could she expect? Floy climbed the porch, sat on the swing. Their faces never quite met. Soon, she began to bay, horribly. Lovell fretted as her tears rolled on. Mainly, he fretted about waking Fionuala.

"You never did come home, doll," she snuffled finally.

He sat on the porch rail and faced up to her. "This, mmm...this here's my home now."

"But you dint come back to yer Lady Floy."

"No. I didn't."

Her wet chin quaked, dropping open. More teeth had been lost. Suddenly her eyes pled up at him.

"I'm yer wife. Best come home with yer wife now."

"We was never married proper," he shook his head. "You know that."

"But, all our years of struggle..."

"Married er not, them years is over. Thank G.o.d and Billy Sunday."

"Wooo-w-was-was-was ever bit so b-b-bad?"

"No. Not ever bit."

Floy's cheeks pooched out, about to bust as her mind drifted off, across the mist-couched lawn where sunrise was overdue. Lovell's heart sank. She had never left her boudoir without three coats of semi-gloss, not in all their years together. He could clearly see the ragged complexion, the ill-plucked eyebrows. Her hair hung limp and spongy, matted with hairspray, clinging with lint, sticker burrs and c.r.a.p. Shoeless, her chipped gold toenails begged for soap and a trim. But her wasting corpse could not figure in this conversation. Lovell had little choice. He had nothing left to give her.

"Lady's been workin..."

"That's fine. That's good."

"Been pickin fruit fer Uncle Dodge n'friends o'his. Moppin n'sweepin up fer Bull sometimes, Bull, he said you left him a bye-bye note. I said, Axeman dint leave me no bye-bye note..."

Lovell shut his eyes, aching to blot out her woes. For Mister Pity's sake, he wanted to ask Floy, do we have to do this? Can't you just fix yourself s.e.xy again? Can't you snare another thumb picker? Why not settle for a burlycue piano man, or an elderly pedal-steel man ripe for his Navy pension? Christ, wasn't there some fool barkeep, somewhere, with a grubstake and a footlong, rock-hard death wish? But Lovell did not ask. His eyes opened and looked, out. Sizing her up, he saw enough.

"...run into dumb ole kid pitchin pennies front of Ewe Spring merchant establishment. Done sold my rooty-toot shoes n'jewelry, ain't I? So that dumb ole kid says he sees ya drivin this Reo and kid tells me who that Reo belongs to. Folks say she's daft from a early age, yes they do."

"She's not daft," Lovell shot back, arms crossing his bare chest.

"She perty? Pertier than me?"

"Leave her go, Floy. She's a good woman."

"You love her, don't ya, doll?"

He nodded.

"I git scary up at the place. Alone..."

"I'm sorry."

"Last week," she reached out, touched his knee, then withdrew the hand, "last week I believe it was, after midnight. I woke up, sweaty and hot, hearing voices out back around the clothesline. Lych voices. I heard that mush right off. Ain't I heard Lych voices before?"

Her words got low. In the dank light, Lovell could see the huge medallions of Floy's nipples through her thin, blue batista gown. An old b.l.o.o.d.y crust stained the collar's hem, a stray spit of red beside her left nipple.

"Got out the bucklight, shined it out the back window and I saw em. Two Lych's alright. Long man and a long woman. I could see them messy faces o'theirs, even from the house, and she was round-bellied, ready to drop as you will soon see. I hollered scat and they both run off into the wood, uphill o'the privy. Couldn't sleep after that of course. An hour or two, and she commences to wail. Up there in the trees. Serious wailing, terrible wailing and screeches through the night. Every so often I caught wind of him too, that Lych feller coaxin her through it, kind of soft and steady in words n.o.body fit could understand.

"They was gone the next afternoon when I finally felt st.u.r.dy enough to search the wood. Didn't take long to find it. That dead suckling they had left behind, unburied. Right betwixt two sa.s.safras roots it lay, still half-stuck in its afterbirth. Couldn't tell if it was a he or a she Lych." Floy threw Lovell a wild, unfixed stare. "Lovell, that Lych suckling, it had that b.l.o.o.d.y pox they been warnin about. Even dead, there's no tellin what kind of contagion that wee thing might reek. It was covered with pustholes, flies, the whole mess. Just rotting and dead when it was born. What else could I possibly do? I doused it with kerosene. Burnt it up. What else could I do?"