By Sunday night she got dressed and found her car key and went out of the apartment building, boisterous with loud voices. She stopped at the station to get gas and a drink and crackers, and drove out of town.

By the time she had crossed the county line, she was on familiar ground. She passed the railroad track, the Thompson house, and Smiley General Store, and rounded the curve toward Good Hope Baptist. In another mile or so she slowed and began searching the woods on the right, but a tangle of brush and fallen trees revealed little. By the time she reached the crossroads she knew she had gone too far, and she made her way slowly back.

The harvest moon hung over the tin roof, and she pulled off the road and parked the car and got out.

The old house had collapsed in the way an old woman collapses, knowing she is about to die and accepting it. She pushed back the thicket and tried to find the clearing, but there was no one left to sweep the yard. She remembered the first time her mother had let her go alone to pee; as she raced down the path, something had hit her legs, and she screamed, and her mother was suddenly beside her, laughing and crying and carrying her back inside to their bed. It was only the dark, her mother said, only the dark.

As she stepped up on the porch, the boards moved, and she looked deep and saw that the door was busted out. Her anger rose in her throat, and she was hot.

She barged ahead through the opening, and suddenly, she drew back.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, and put her hands up to her face. Something had brushed against her.

The moon had followed her onto the porch, and now it shone upon the door, and she saw what it was: a large orb web, intricate, like a jewel suspended in the doorway, spun out of a mass of gossamer threads. The spider, having finished her work after sundown, rested and waited. The spheres connected, the ductile anchor held.

She stood for a long time, and called her mother's name.

The next week she let the department know that she would meet her class, and as soon as her students had assembled and had sat down, the room was quiet. She looked out of the window and began speaking. She said that she was sorry that she had missed class, she hoped they hadn't minded. There was a little laughter, which brought her back to them. She said that she had given them reason to hate poetry. She hadn't meant to be like that, like a teacher who once had shamed her in school over some silly damn poem. She would try again.

She passed out copies of the day's assignment, a poem by Walt Whitman, an American poet, about a spider.

She began reading

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself

Tears rolled down her flushed cheeks, and she let them go. As she came to the end, she put down the book and moved slowly down the aisle, reciting the rest of the poem from memory, and as she moved, she lightly touched the head of one student, then another. They watched her, absorbed, and did not move away, and as she passed by, they leaned into her touch.

It was a good class, and at the end of term, she gave the highest grades she had ever given. Her colleagues thought she had gone soft, and they taunted her anew. Her students heard about it and one or two came to her defense, which meant she could stay on. One after another, the students, the years amounted to something she came to understand: what she loved.

Her touch became lighter, she laughed more often, but even when life became more difficult, she never faltered from weeding out ignorance. She was still said to be difficult, but at least among those who knew her best, she was greatly loved.

“She had the smile of a shy young girl,” they all agreed.

Long afterward, whenever her students got together, everyone in the class had a different memory of what had happened the night she returned, but they all remembered:

“Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.”