I think television has had a lot to do with it, said the bison, who did not move very much, only shifting her weight from time to time. She continued: People don’t interact with people the way they used to. My sister Effi says that she knows families who watch the awful thing during supper. Imagine that!

Imagine, Horace said. He wanted to ask the buffalo how it managed to pick up its teacup.

Why, in my day . . .

The entire theater was out of doors, except for the box office and the hidden costume barn. Horace didn’t even try the door this time; he merely limped over to a trash can under the high wooden wall that surrounded the amphitheater, holding onto his gun awkwardly. Rather than jump down and risk landing on his foot, he held onto the top of the fence once he was up and let his feet dangle down, finally releasing his grip and landing on his good foot. That’s when the compulsion began, something calling him, again. Not the demon. Something quieter. Yet larger. Strange.

The Crosstown theater had been built by the town with a grant from the Cross Endowment and with contributions from the Southern American Oil Company and the First American Mercantile National Bank, both family-controlled companies. The last of those Crosses to live in Crosstown was Owen Oliver Cross III, who took his aged mother to Winston–Salem to live back in 1944, where he went to manage a newly acquired bank and the other family investments that had swollen after World War I, and even more after World War II, riding the tide on into the seventies and the independent oil boom. Also there had been three good marriages for his daughters. Philip Cross was the last male of the white Cross line. He had grown up in New York, Martha’s Vineyard, and Winston–Salem, traveling between his divorced Yankee mother and his classically philandering father. And to his grandfather’s dismay, Philip Quincy Cross was not in the least bit interested in corporate commerce or acquisitions or the art of high financing. All through Philips Exeter and Brown he had harbored the ambition of becoming a playwright.

Because of North Carolina’s long tradition of outdoor theaters, he thought it a brilliant idea to found the Owen Oliver Cross Memorial Outdoor Theater and to use as its main fare a play, by him, about his illustrious family’s history, a stage biography with music. The idea had its merits, except for the fact that Philip was a horrid playwright.