Garnet's ideal applicant, Daventry, appears suddenly -- "I thought he was a will-o'-the-wisp" -- and has a warm, soft hand "like that of a goat." Indeed, he'd grown up in Utah as a shepard. Garnet has taken to dismantling clocks for a hobby, and notes that Daventry "shakes his head like the old half-broken pendulum of the clock when I am dickering with it."
Up until now, Purdy has successfully evaded any indication of the time frame of "In a Shallow Grave" -- including what war Garnet was injured in -- but now divulges as Vietnam with one word at the end of a long paragraph in which the veteran defends his flowery way of speaking: "I don't take any pleasure anymore in reading the newspapers, and anyhow they are about the living, Daventry, and writ in living language, no, I have got firmly habituated to these old books . . . and so gradually you are these old books have seeped or trickled into my speech and have took over from the way people talk today. But until you spoke just now I didn't know I had this peculiarity even. So that explains how I call you a courtly young man, dig?"
He dispatches Daventry with a letter to the Widow Rance. Predictably, she finds the youthful applicant, Garnet's physcal surrogate, to be sexually irresistible -- making him strip off his clothes so she can see every inch of his flesh. Garnet is horribly jealous, but it also brings the two of them closer together.
In the meantime, Quintus continues his reading of the old books -- "which I don't think either of us enjoyed" -- snatches of which stick in Garnet's memory. "It is a remarkable fact," Quintus reads, seemingly at random, "that the three chief natural elements, water, air, and fire, have neither taste, smell, nor any flavor whatsoever."
Later, browsing through a "Guide to Phrenology," Garnet reads the following under a heading "MAN IS A GLYPH": "Man is little more than a glyph which punctuates space, but once gone is as unrecollectable as smoke or clouds."
Daventry begs not to be sent any further to the Widow Rance, but Garnet is insistent, even as he knows what the result will be.
The widow becomes sexually obsessed with Daventry -- he is tortured with her voraciousness -- and he spends less and less time with Garnet and Quintus in the old house.
While Daventry is away, Garnet is served with eviction papers for non-payment of back taxes. In a pseudo-Christian ceremony -- fueled, perhaps, by the powerful pills and dope they have been ingesting -- Daventry makes a communion from his own fresh-spilled blood. A hurricane arises and prevents the eviction and, as part of his further sacrifice, Daventry agrees to wed the Widow Rance. With this, Garnet's physical self begins to regenerate.
Garnet, fearful he will lose Daventry forever is told by the former teen runaway, now-Christlike savior: "'Hear me Garnet,' he was going on, looking at me like he was in search of my soul, 'I will never leave you even though the firmament part, because we are one, one soul in two tormented halves.'"
Daventry is killed, crucified on a tree in a freak wind storm -- "his arms stretched out as if he would enfold me" -- with his scalp circled by a ring of blood. Sacrifice complete, Garnet is united for a brief moment with the Widow Rance. But he walks away; "the droll thing about getting what you long for is the longing was better, longing pains more, but it's more what you want."
The Widow Rance, her new love for Garnet now unrequited, begins recruiting her own applicants -- sending handsome young men to Garnet with love letters based on those Daventry brought to her.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
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