They spent their wedding night in a grove of aspens a quarter mile from Henry’s fire lookout cabin. He had left his truck parked at the door. They made love immediately and then lay awake for a time, still connected, still one flesh, smiling up at the stars and listening to the uproar of gunfire, bongo drums, bugles, coyote howls and drunken song from the clearing around the cabin. Still in situ he felt himself swelling within her. She felt it too.

Henry—what’re you doing? Who, me? No, him. That hain’t me, Honeydew, that’s Gawd Hisself entering into you: all ten inches of sacred cock. Ten inches my foot, you blasphemer. It’s all I got, but there’s more to come; it’s the thought that counts. It’s the diameter that fulfills. You mean the circumference. Don’t be a pedant; if you’re the Holy Ghost I’m the Virgin Mary. Not now you’re not. Oh Henry, Henry, oh my God Henry I love you….

The leaves of the quaking aspens twinkled above them. A golden meteor soared eastward across the Pleiades. The new moon went down in the western sky and the sounds of the shivaree began to fade.

Nine thousand five hundred feet and ten inches above sea level.

THEY SPENT the remainder of that summer at the fire lookout on North Rim. The regulation ninety days of passion came and passed and even so he continued to marvel in her, to dote upon her, to adore each detail of her flesh and hair and mind and character. They quarreled about nothing, now and then, when the isolation of the place cast a pall of melancholy over her spirit but resolved each quarrel in a warm solution of sexual salts, weeping, laughter, plenty of wine and long walks through the woods.

Mornings she worked on her Mozart sonatas and Bach partitas, sawing away on her fiddle inside the board-and-batten shack, sitting on a rickety chair before her music stand, turning pages. While Henry in his open-aired lookout ninety feet above closed his book or put down his binoculars and listened, found himself leaking tears over the perfection of Mozart and struck into awe by the vast echoing unanswerable vision of the grand Bach chaconne.