Cotter Pin, Nevada, 175 miles north of Reno, almost in Oregon and almost back in California, is nine hours from San Francisco, as the pickup flies. Ruthie Swenson lived an hour further than that.

The story on the menu at the gas station/bar/casino and pump-out facility has it that one day in 1931 a family almost drove through, headed West with most of their belongings in a flatbed Model A. What worldly goods weren't in their truck followed behind on a two-wheeled oak-board trailer. Its tongue was pinned into a split hitch under the flatbed by a 3/4" hex-head machine bolt. The bolt's threaded end had been bored through, and a big cotter pin inserted there kept the bolt from jumping out of the hitch. Going downhill into the flat place that became the town the truck hit a long run of washboard in the dirt road, the cotter pin sheared, and the bolt jumped out. The trailer skewed and when the driver slammed on the brakes the tongue of the trailer rammed up under the truck bed, snapping one axle at the differential and bringing the whole enterprise to a dusty halt. Thus stranded, the family forsook California and homesteaded northwestern Nevada, and they named the place, in which they prospered, after the innocuous piece of hardware whose failure had serendipitied their success.

The only kind of tea my parents drink is instant tea mix, already sweetened and tinged with artificial lemon. Tonight, for once, I don't mind. It's two a.m. and I'm not making tea for myself. I'm making it for Dad.

He sits on a chair in the middle of the kitchen, flanked by two other chairs to keep him from falling sideways, and the kitchen table dragged up in front of him to keep him from falling forward. His legs stick out from his diaper, which is partly hidden by a thermal undershirt and the robe that Mom hastily threw over his shoulders before I shooed her out of the room.

When Mom's voice, shrill with panic, pulled me out of sleep, I grumbled, "Not again." It was the third time this week that Dad had gotten it into his mind to take a stroll around the block in the middle of the night. He tries to fake Mom out by letting her help him to the bathroom, then reaching for the handle of the back door and trying to get outside. When I found them, she was pleading with him,"it's the middle of the night, it's cold outside, wait until morning." And when he flailed at her with all the strength left in his weakened old body, she wouldn't let go of him, fearing he'd lose his balance and fall. She held on tight, to his wrist, his waist, wherever she could.

I put myself between them, trying to catch Dad's wrists, and Mom cried over my shoulder, "Don't let him fall."

"I don't care if he falls," I bit out. "He shouldn't hit you."

"I'm fine," she said. "It doesn't hurt me! I only worry about him."

We dragged him, still flailing, into the kitchen and Mom pulled a chair up behind him. When we let go of him, his arms lashed out even more furiously. I backed up, but Mom wouldn't leave his side. With one hand clutching the tiny gold cross she wears on a chain around her neck, and the other gripping his shoulder, she withstood his thwacks as if she were made of stone. She stared down at him through the smudged lenses of her glasses, and I reminded myself to take them off her later, and wash them - she wouldn't bother to do it herself.

The original and only key to the ruined house they bought in the Andalusian mountain village weighed a pound and measured four inches. The iron lock on the ancient double door accepted the key up to its neck. It took a while to understand that the door could be double locked (the key turned twice counter-clock wise if you were on the outside), in which case, it needed two turns in the opposite direction to unlock it. Several times Karen locked herself in and then couldn't unlock the door next morning before she understood the double lock mechanism and decided that a single turn was safety enough.

She loved the key, its weight, shape and coolness in her hand. Such a key would be hard to lose. It symbolized to her not only their ownership of and right to enter the 500-year-old house, but the right, somehow, to enter the village. The key was the key to the village she had fallen in love with, and to the house she dreamed of for years when she was away from it, which was most of the time, on the other side of the ocean.

One key was not enough. Since they were only able to come for a month in the summers, Rosario, who looked after the house and cleaned and whitewashed it for them before they came, needed the key. The spring they bought the house, they drove down to a hardware store on the coast to see about getting a copy of the key made, but everyone looked at the key, smiled and said, Yes, this is a real antique and no one makes them anymore, why not get a new, modern lock installed? No, they said, conscious of being those "romantic foreigners." Well, you might try Malaga. So they went to Malaga and eventually found a hardware store of the classic type, that sold all sorts of tools, modern and ancient, and still provided old-fashioned service. There they left the key for a copy to be made. It would take two weeks, they were told, so for two weeks they couldn't lock the house at night or when they went out and simply wedged it with cardboard. But really, what had they worth stealing? Though the villagers were full of stories about dishonest people from the coast who might wander through, or Gypsies, who always stole, or drunken youths who might get it into their heads some night that these foreigners were rich, Karen felt perfectly safe with the door unlocked, and nothing happened.

"Guess what I have, dear," Jane Babbit asked her husband Arthur when he came home that night.

"How ever could I know what you have?" he sighed, hanging up his heavy coat.

"What might you have?"

"You're not even going to try to guess?" she asked, arching her famous eyebrow. "Now, what would Professor Babbit's students think of that?"

Professor Babbit let his breath out slowly, careful not to sigh again. "Well then," he said, narrowing his eyes at the back of his own coat. "In the interest of scholarship, I would say that you have a grant to study the erotic poetry of the Lower Babylonians in the time of Nebuchadnezzar."

"Close!" she chirped, clapping her hands.

"For Heaven's sake, Janie," he snapped. "Here I've barely taken off my coat and you're tossing out riddles like a school girl! You know I've got midterms up to here, and now that Wilson's sick. . ."

A sudden chorus of cornets freshened down the polished hardwood halls, piped from speakers artfully concealed in the darkened rooms of their spacious home. Professor Babbit sighed then, and hung his head, allowing his wife and the soothing tones of National Public Radio to lead him into the steamy yellow kitchen. A volley of raw April wind rattled the darkening windows. "The soul's sap quivers," Arthur Babbit shivered, quoting Eliot as he accepted his glass of merlot: . . .

There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the springtime
But not in time's covenant . . .

If I can now no longer recall my first meeting with Gladwyn Halder, I do remember our first long talk. It was in Glad's room in the "old" dorm. I was a sophomore at the time. Glad, a graduate student, was writing his Ph.D. dissertation on the fin de siècle American writer, Terence Clay Philbert, a novelist of the "Jamesian school." Glad took an interest in younger "Lit" students and had invited me over. Though my period was the Romantic and Keats in particular, I was more than eager to hear his views on the turn of the century period. Wasn't that why I had come to the university anyway - to have "literary chats" in venerable surroundings? Glad's "digs," to use his word, housed a profusion of paperweights, letter-openers, inkwells, and fountain pens. On the walls hung his collection of mirrors. There must have been about twenty ornately framed examples, each casting the odd reflection, from different periods and countries. And there were books everywhere, many of them first editions with inscriptions from their authors. Located in the midst of this profusion was the most interesting object of all: Glad himself. He was plump, had whitish skin, and wore blue-tinted spectacles. His teeth were demarcated darkly by smoking stains, skeins of saliva occasionally suspended between the upper and lower rows. He was attired in what I was to learn was his 'outfit': white shirt with sleeve-garters, necktie with a gold clip, and pleated trousers. He was a consummate talker.

Our "chat" that night lasted well past midnight. Glad was eloquent on Henry James. I remember in particular his introducing me to the famous Guedalla quip about the Master's three stylistic periods: "James the First, James the Second, and the Old Pretender." Whenever Glad saw that I was flagging under the weight of his erudition, he would simply change the topic and start a new story. Superfluous to say (a 'Glad' locution - his style was infectious), I missed many of his allusions but the tenor of his talk intrigued me. Glad appeared to be on intimate terms with all the major writers of past and present: he gave the impression that the history of literature was one long grapevine.

Each snow fall brought a silent argument. Should he shovel the snow while it fell, or wait until it had fallen. His mom was no help. Since his dad had walked out, she'd left things like that to Davy who might have let spring handle the snow if it hadn't been for the neighbors.

Davy dragged himself out of bed as soon as he heard his mom leave for her Saturday job. He dressed, cleaned his room some, then went down to the kitchen where he ate a breakfast of toast and milk and tried not to think about the snow.

He was sure they looked out their windows and wondered why he wasn't taking care of the sidewalks. He was sure if he picked up the phone at just the right moment, he'd hear them talking about him on the party line. He was so sure of these things, that once he cleaned the kitchen and got the mail, he wrapped himself tightly in his shame, bundled up and went to the garage. With shovel in hand, he followed his tracks back to the porch.

Colin and Rose had never had a baby, but that was all right, it was for the best, because it must have been obvious to Mother Nature, as it was to anyone else with eyes in his head, that Colin was already Rose's baby and Rose was already Colin's baby. Another baby would have been one baby too much in their lovely home, two babies would have been two babies too much, and so on. Besides, there are always other people's babies around to play with. Things were better as they were, as things generally are.

Francis, on the other hand, did have a baby, now 14, but it, a she as it happened, lived with its mother, Francis's former wife, and this was also for the best, at least it was on this evening, because if the child had been home when Colin telephoned she would have been doing her homework and Francis as the conscientious father he supposed himself to be, would have been helping her, and though he would have been annoyed by the ring he would have left his daughter's side to answer it, because when a phone rang you answered it, it was impolite and some would vehemently call it downright unsocial not to. From this, however, the child would have drawn an understandable if dubious conclusion, as adolescents so often do, viz., that her father was always being called away when she needed him - a stinging lesson whose reverberations twanging shrilly for the remainder of the child's, the adult's, even the granny's life could have had who can truly say what, or which, deleterious effects?

A deer lay in the road, kicking its legs wildly.

His headlights, sweeping around a sharp turn, didn't illuminate the creature in time. A deer lay in the road, kicking its legs wildly.

His headlights, sweeping around a sharp turn, didn't illuminate the creature in time. The right side of his car (a graduation present) lifted up, and a burst of hollow cracking noises ushered from beneath, as if he'd run over a pile of dry sticks. His head hit the car's roof. Slamming on the brakes, he cupped his hand over his forehead and peered at the creature in the rearview mirror. The deer was cast in the red glow of his brake lights. He could hear its hooves scrape against the pavement as it flailed its legs with increasing urgency. He switched on his emergency lights, which began to tick off the seconds like a metronome.

Todd Selman had two hundred dollars in the rucksack on his back, and clothes enough for leaving home. The motion of the train assured him that he was leaving home and he moved slowly toward an empty seat in the middle of the car. He tried to look tough as he came abreast of the kerosene lamp flaring in a bracket above the aisle. He had dogged fifteen miles across Texas prairie. Just after sundown, he'd flagged the westbound train where it panted up the grade out of Four-Mile Draw. A woman looked up at him with disgust and his face reddened as he followed her gaze to the dust and grass clinging to his clothes. He reached up and felt matted hair poking from under his straw hat.

A big-shouldered man in a brass-button coat was measuring him with a searching glance. "I'll be along directly to write out a ticket for you. How far you goin'

"I'm goin' to California, if you're goin' out there."

"We're goin'." The conductor let the panel slam over the steps. "But I can't sell you a ticket for that far. You'll have to get off in Wrangler, and the agent'll write you one, sure enough." Todd shrank back at this piece of bad luck. Everyone in town knew his family. Granger Selman had fought the Comanches and whittled out a homestead by the sweat of his brow. He was a pedigree. Everyone knew that. And now they'd know his son was running off without so much as a fare-thee-well. What got into kids nowadays, they'd say.

Lucy Blair turned over a philodendron leaf to examine it. It was streaked with yellow. Now what did that mean? Too much light not enough, too much water or not enough? The radiant floor heat was upsetting it? Or was it too close to the window and chilled? Every once in a while, she went through this. A plant that had been perfectly healthy for years would suddenly sicken and she'd wrack her brain trying to figure out why.

"That's just the way it is," her sister Monroe would say. "Just like people, plants get sick. And just like them, sometimes they get well and sometimes they die." All well and good for Monroe, who was not a plant person. A semiretired bookkeeper, Monroe tended to be matter of fact; she did not truck with the unseen side of life. What was on the surface, unless it involved numbers, was good enough and she didn't see why it shouldn't be for everyone, there being no proof that anything else in fact existed. Although she was tolerant of her sister's "tendencies."

The Reverend Samuel Yow beamed at his wife as she spooned another helping of cherry cobbler onto his plate. As he devoured it, she read him an article from the evening's Orange Springs Clarion.

In the course of his wife's reading, a frown had gradually taken charge of the Reverend Yow's face. "Myrtle, somethin' about that makes me uneasy."

"Why, Sam? They say some real nice things about Mr. Crawford."

"Maybe too nice."

"Honey, I'm not followin' you. You¹re usually the first to say we shouldn't talk about other folks at all if we can't say somethin' good."

The preacher sighed. "Myrtle, have you ever read a poem by Laughlin Crawford?"

"Well, no, not personally. But ever'body knows he was a great poet."

"How do they know it?"

"From the critics, I reckon. And you know those ladies in the UDC must've studied his books."

"To my knowledge, nobody ever published any o' his books for the ladies to study."

"Land o' livin'!" Myrtle exclaimed. "Who does know about 'em, then?"

"Miss Ottoline."

"You mean . . . that¹s all?"

"Far as I know. On Friday night, she¹s gon' let a lot of other folks in on the secret, too. And she just might be askin¹ for trouble . . ."

He didn't know them right away; it was a year before he began to even sense they were there - a cold draught, a murmur, a sharp change in the air like nuggets being dropped on metal scales.

And after two years on the southern Montana prairie, along the snaking Southern River with banks overwhelmed with discarded rocks, signs of earlier plunder, a river that still yielded gold dust, Brandy knew for sure he wasn't alone. The draughts became visions, the murmurs became voices, and the changes in the air now carried sound.

You could say the sole caretaker of the restored mining town along this river was now haunted. But during the hours of 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., Monday to Saturday, June to September, he was surrounded by the living - like Prissy, who ran the front desk, selling tickets to tourists passing by on Highway 1. Ageless, with a gray-white bristly mustache, a biker boyfriend, and a sweet chirping voice, she reminded him of the frontiers women who had settled Montana she'd look just right in a bonnet and long dress, swinging an ax to cut wood for the cook stove."