A feeling had been overcoming me lately, one I'd entirely forgotten about with the hopes of better pay and and the approaching game, but seeing Amos there in his overalls, grinning not unkindly, it swept through me again -a shadow, like something that passes over your eyes when they're closed and you're out in the fields lying on your back, the kind of shadow that makes you sit up and gasp because you can't figure out if that shadow is outside you or within you, and then you come to find, with all those dead cornstalks stuck to the palms of your hands, that it was a murder of crows, and you don't feel any better about your situation. 

     This shadow passed through me.  Amos seemed to be controlling it, I thought.  Somehow, I got out of the doorway and shallowly asked him to come in.  He did.  Before I closed the door, I checked out at the horses and the carriage.  Amos had come alone. 

    "I have a basketball game," I said lamely.  He stepped into the living room, pausing in front of the TV. 

    "How do you turn this thing on?" he said.

    "There's a button."

      It occurred to me that all that time on the phone I'd been sitting in the dark.  When I put on the light, I also realized our house hadn't been cleaned for weeks.  Or, maybe longer. 

     "Let me get this stuff out of the way," I said, and hurried around the couch kicking plastic toys and Mary's clothes, my shoes, near the wall.  The room filled with sound.  The man had turned on the television.  Then, apparently having enough of it, he turned it off with the remote. 

     "I told you, Peter, that I've come for you."

     "Okay," I said. 

     "One of your preachers-"

      "My preachers?"

      "He came to my house and said the same thing I'm going to say to you."

       "What is it then?"

       "Death doesn't stop at the door.  That's what he said." 

       Suddenly I was thinking about the basketball game, how I was going to be late, how if I didn't make it to the game then Mary would think I had no reason not to switch cars with her. 

       "I'm not afraid of death," I told him.  I got up and checked the clock.  Then, I checked out the window like I expected death to be standing out there.  And what I thought I saw was something in his carriage.  "Who's out there?"

    In a flash, Amos was behind me.  He held me by the wrist. 

    "We've all been talking," he said. "There is something moving in the fields.  I followed it here." 

    "What's wrong with you, man?"

      A striking pain shot up from my heels to the crown of my head.  I broke away from him and pushed into his chest but Amos was so big he didn't even move.  Suddenly, I felt that I had to get to Mary.  I probably said as much to him.  I don't know what I said.  I just had to leave.  I grabbed the keys. He stood like a tree in my living room.  I didn't want to leave him alone with our things.  He said my name softly and I heard him.  When I got out, I jumped in the car and, reversing, I saw it again, a shadow -definitely outside me- in the carriage.  And the shadow, I realized, was Mary's.