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our world, the next day she saw an eagle eating a gar carcass where John Roman had sat.
    Wootie had been nearly a saint until the last, she thought. Goodness would wear you down too, God knows. You needed to see a bit of hell now and then. That and great joy. Would she ever have them? It seemed goodness was eroding her now, driving her into something flat and simple-headed.
    At the bottom of her lawn was the pier. Old men gathered there, working on a sort of great cruising porch, a pleasure barge, under the supervision of Dr. Harvard. Dr. Harvard loved Melanie with a dreadful love, although she did not know it. His own wife, Nita, had cancer, so this pleasure craft could not be for her. He said it was for them all, for mild adventures up the enormous reservoir and for good philosophy and conversation, but it was really for Melanie. He was white-haired with a face unlined, four years older than Melanie. They were pretty old people and seemed matched and destined for a couple. Although there was the wife, taking her time to pass on, and Harvard, an ex-surgeon heavy with honors and thick with dignity, who could not declare himself. He wore his honors lightly, but the love of Melanie was like a tow chain locked around his neck.
    Among the other old was Sidney Farté, with his shingles and bitterness, in starched shirts so stiff they seemed to make the little man into a kite, whispering with curses, bouncing in agony from one breeze to the next. Ulrich carried on with his new emphysema. He wore floral shirts and had cut down to five enormous Benson & Hedges cigarettes a day. Tall Pete Wren and his dog, Son, remained the only earnest fishermen of the pier crowd. Wren a master bluegill fisherman with fly rod and a Wake Island prevaricator whohad borrowed the biography of his cousin and written a letter from a Private Martin Lewis testifying to his captain’s heroism. The local VFA gave a ceremony in Vicksburg with great belated reverence until the actual hero Wren was rolled in, sad but not angry at the cousin he had not seen in years. Pete Wren was a colonel who had made his rank in the Oregon National Guard.
    Melanie had seen the old man weeping for loneliness in the middle of the pier crowd one afternoon. This emotion did not surprise her, and she drove with Wren to get him a dog from the Vicksburg pound. Now, with Son, a furred brat needing all kinds of attention, Wren seemed better. Though the dog, an Australian cattle dog, was a neurotic bother who would dive underwater to retrieve a fishing lure. Sometimes Lewis and his bride, Moore, only seventy, came to paint or sand. They were both in chemo, but active and inseparable. Moore was always overdressed, like a creature of ancient television housewifery. She wore heels and a pearl necklace when she shopped in Vicksburg. She retained these habiliments when naked and mounted by old Lewis, and this fact somehow got out to the rest, but the couple were unashamed in this scandal. In fact, honored by it.
    When Ulrich was told of the scandal, he blinked and seemed pained, showing teeth in a yanked smile of incomprehension. It was feared he was headed for a breakdown. Ulrich watched the dog Son constantly, always near tearbreak.
    Among these denizens Melanie moved. Lean, clean beige skin, bowed lips. An elegance on loan from the cinema, they thought. She was frank, to the point, with a high brow under pulled-back white hair, a visage of permanent gravity. The men almost quit their lies when she appeared, and this disgusted Sidney Farté, who felt it squeezed him into a church pew. It had been the same with the near-saintWooten, her dead husband, such a clean little statesman who had rebuilt the cove pier and given it handsome rails. Sidney felt censored around him and was overjoyed to hear, after Wooten’s death, that he had begun running queer in his last days at the Methodist college.
    Sidney’s old papa, Pepper, ran the bait store and was even nastier than Sidney, who