Scott was doing reader mail. It was all over the attic, mail arrayed in slanted ranks on the desk and table, on the tops of file cabinets and bookshelves. He was structuring the mail by country. Once that was done he would put each country in chronological order so he might easily locate a letter sent from Belgium, say, in 1972. There was no practical reason why he’d ever want to find such a letter or any other piece of reader mail in particular. The point is that he would have it all in place. The house would make more sense in this alignment. And once he had all the other countries in place, he would do the United States. He would do it state by state, masses of letters through the decades. Most mail made Bill uneasy. It cut into his isolation and made him feel he was responsible for the soul of the sender. Scott laughed at this of course. About the only letters Bill looked at came from jerk-water towns and junctions, wide places in the road. He lingered over postmarks and return addresses. He liked to recite place names that carried the ghost music of remote terrain, hamlets that sat in a summer buzz under the Indian sky. He wanted to believe that only a few shy high-school kids or army recruits or piano teachers in small lost towns might truly see what was important in his work.