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The cemetery’s little pickup truck followed ribbons of asphalt through the still, cool, forest of marble, until Annie was lost. The seat of the truck was jammed forward, so that the old man’s short legs could reach the pedals. Annie’s long legs, as a consequence, were painfully cramped by the dashboard. In her lap was a bouquet of crocuses and violets.

Neither spoke. Annie couldn’t bear to look at her companion, and could think of nothing to say to him, and he, in turn, didn’t seem particularly interested in her—was simply performing a routine and tiresome chore.

They came at last to an iron gate that barred the way into mud ruts leading into a wood.

The old man unlocked the gate. He put the truck into low gear, and it pushed into the twilight of the woods, with briars and branches scratching at its sides.

Annie gasped. Ahead was a peaceful, leafy clearing, and there, in a patch of sunlight, was a fresh grave.

“Headstone hasn’t come yet,” said the dwarf.

“Joseph, Joseph,” whispered Annie. “I’m here.”

The dwarf stopped the truck, limped around to Annie’s side, and opened her door with a courtly gesture. He smiled for the first time, baring a ghastly set of dead-white false teeth.

“Could I be alone?” said Annie.

“I’ll wait here.”

Annie laid her flowers on the grave, and sat beside it for an hour, reciting to herself all the wonderful, tender things Joseph had said to her.

The chain of thought might have gone on for hours more, if the little man hadn’t broken it with a polite cough.

“We’d better go,” he said. “The sun will be going down soon.”

“It’s like tearing my heart out, leaving him here alone.”

“You can come back another time.”

“Yes,” said Annie, “I will.”

“What kind of a man was he?”

“What kind?” said Annie, standing reverently. “I never saw him. We just wrote to each other. He was a good, good man.”

“What did he do that was good?”

“He made me feel pretty,” said Annie. “I know what that’s like now.”

“You know what he looked like?”

“No. Not exactly.”

“He was tall and broad shouldered, I hear. He had blue eyes and curly hair. That the way you imagined him?”

“Oh, yes!” said Annie happily. “Exactly. I could tell.”

The sun was setting when the one-eyed gnome drove into the cemetery, after having warned Annie about strangers and put her on the train. Tombstones cast long shadows across his way as he went once more to the lonely poet’s grave in the woods.

He took Annie’s bouquet from the grave with a sigh.

He drove back to his stone house, and put the flowers in water, in a vase on his desk. He touched off the fire laid in the fireplace, to drive out the early spring evening’s dampness, made himself a cup of coffee, and sat down to write, leaning forward to sniff Annie’s flowers as he did so.

“My dear Mrs. Draper:” he wrote. “How strange that you, my pen pal and soul’s dearest friend, should be on a chicken farm in British Columbia, a beautiful land that I shall probably never see. No matter what you say about life in British Columbia, it must be very beautiful, for hasn’t it produced you? Please, please, please,” he wrote, and he grunted emphatically as he underlined the three words, “let us not descend to the vulgarity of, as I believe the phrase goes, ‘exchanging snaps.’ No photographer, save in Heaven, could ever take a picture of the angel that rises from your letters to blind me with adoration.”

(illustration credit 10)

TANGO

Every job application form I fill out asks for a tabulation, with dates, of what I’ve done with my adult life so far, and tells me sternly to leave no periods unaccounted for. I would give a great deal for permission to leave out the last three months, when I served as a tutor in a village called Pisquontuit. Anyone writing my former employer there for an appraisal of my character would get his ears burnt off.

On each application form there is a small blank section entitled remarks, where I might tell my side of the Pisquontuit story. But there seems