ESCAPE

Prelude: A short piece originally preceded by a more substantial work, also an orchestral introduction to opera, however not lengthy enough to be considered an overture.

 “Can’t see a God damned thing,” he mumbled out loud while trying to wipe the condensation from the windshield. “Should have gotten that cataract surgery they nagged me about.”

The windshield wipers squeaked and thumped across the ice mist that was forming in the low spots along the creek. Omar drove with hands tight on the steering wheel, bent forward, eyes squinting, as if getting closer to the windshield could improve his vision. Dusk was closing in fast, a dark-winged angel lifting him from the burden of the monotony to which he had been chained. The nose of his Detroit-made Chrysler was pointed east, but not for long.

Portamento: A mild glissando between two notes for an expressive effect.

            “What do you mean, he’s missing?” Francis snapped back at her sister Lenora on the phone.

            “Just that. He’s missing,” Lenora sniffed.

            This was the last thing she needed, Francis thought. She had a houseful of guests who had just sat down to a very late Thanksgiving dinner with dried-out turkey because her daughter, Faye-Lynn was two hours late. Life was stressful enough, what with kids in college, her untenured professorship, essays to correct and a sulky husband who had recently lost his job. She was not in the mood for Lenora’s sniveling ineptitude.

            “Oh stop being such a drama queen, Lenora. Of course he’s not missing. He probably just went out to the store or something.”

            “No. You don’t understand. We finished up dinner about 3:00 and he didn’t want dessert. He never turns down dessert. You know how he likes his pie. But he insisted that he was too tired and wanted to get home before dark.  We’ve been trying to get him to give up driving, but you know how stubborn he can be. Well, about 5:00, we brought some pumpkin pie out to the farm, and, well, his car wasn’t there. I didn’t think anything of it at first, but the lights hadn’t even been turned on, and I thought, well, if he’d run out to the store, the lights would have been on, and it was the funniest thing. The door was locked.”

            “What?” Francis interrupted, “What do you mean the door was locked? That house hasn’t been locked in years. Not even when we were growing up. Does he even have a key to the door?”

            “Well, that’s just it,” Lenora treaded carefully, “you see, Rusty put in a lock for him just a month ago. There have been some break-ins, especially out Hadley road where the farms are far apart and mostly abandoned. We thought he should start locking up.”

            “Huh,” Francis snorted as she lit up a cigarette, “that must’ve gone over well.”

            “He wasn’t too happy about it, but then we got Harold Krider to talk to him. Harold lost his farm a year ago, after his wife died. A bunch of hoodlum punks walked right into the house while he was out grocery shopping at Mejer’s. They rummaged through all his stuff and when they didn’t get what they wanted, they set fire to the place.  It was a blessing that he wasn’t there. Who knows what they would have done if he’d been home. The house was gone before Harold got back, and he lost everything between the smoke and water damage. He said he didn’t much care about the house, but the worst part was losing Mary’s photographs. He can’t recall his wife’s face anymore. He’s living with his daughter, you remember Kathleen from church. They live down near Flint somewhere. Harold says folks down there wouldn’t think of stepping into the backyard without locking up the house. Dad – he didn’t like the idea, but he said he’d rather get a lock than be forced to move in with us. Or even worse – with you,” Lenora chuckled.

Counterpoint: Two or three melodic lines played at the same time.

With the shroud of darkness came a levity Omar had not felt in years. How long had it been? Esther had been gone so long now, he’d lost count. When was it that he’d lost his freedom – his independence? He knew his daughters meant well, but they saw him as a stubborn old coot. He’d burn the place down himself, God damn it, before he’d leave the farm. They’d have to take him out in a pine box. There was nothing wrong with him at eighty nine. He could still drive and look after himself, and he wasn’t popping pills like most people his age. Didn’t even take blood pressure medicine for Christ sakes. Told the doctor he could go to hell if he thought he was going to help him win a vacation trip from the pharmaceutical company.  

Sometimes he wondered about his daughters. They were like aliens to him – weeds he couldn’t possibly have sown from his loins, like corn that cross pollinated downwind and just showed up one day in the middle of your soybeans. They belonged to Esther. It was her fault. He was too busy on the farm when they were young, then traveling round the country for Monsanto. She kept him away from them, and they from him, as if he would devour them in the way a hog is apt to devour its young if you’re not careful to separate them.

Lenora was weak. Too weak to bear her own seed and easily scattered whichever way the wind blew. She didn’t know her own mind. She was easily frazzled and older than her years as if she were a throwback to his own mother’s generation. She wore her hair pulled back in that stringy bun, flat-chested and skinny as a rail beneath those baggy dresses and she was stuck out on that farm, baking pies. Just like Esther, all wrapped up in the church, too pious and a little too quick to judge.

Then there was the other one. He didn’t know what to make of her.  She never took root – always an outsider. Even in the family. Never fit in at the school, or church, though he didn’t care about it as much as Esther had. Had her sights somewhere else her whole life. Flew away like a goddamned milkweed soon as she graduated. She hadn’t stopped moving since, although she’d lived longer in Boston than anywhere else. He was downright surprised when she’d gotten married and produced three children, one after the other. They must be full grown by now. Hadn’t seen them in what – six or seven years? He heard she was a professor in a college. Made the students call her “doctor” for Christ sakes. Well, he guessed she’d earned it alright. She’d put herself through school and never asked for a goddamned dime.

He thought about how Lenora scrutinized everything Francis did. How she’d snicker over the burned casseroles and stringy bread Francis would offer up at Thanksgiving. That was back when Francis made the effort to drive out to Michigan for Thanksgiving and Christmas, before she got bogged down with her own family and teaching. After each visit, Lenora would have enough fodder to keep her going for weeks.  Jokes about Francis’s cooking, how she’d gained a few pounds, and how cluttered her house was that time Lenora and Rusty took the Winnebago to Maine and stopped in Massachusetts to visit.

“They are so different, Francis and Skip, and wasn’t the youngest girl a solemn little thing? She didn’t smile the whole time they were out here. Hard to believe she’s in college already. Been so long since we’ve seen them, hasn’t it, Dad?”

Lenora had rattled on about it just that afternoon while he was trying to watch the football game.

He thought about how Lenora had actually gloated when Skip lost his job a few months back. Like Esther, and even his own mother and his sisters, his youngest daughter was soured by her own limitations and sweetened by the hardships of others.

What was it Francis taught? Was it history? No, that weren’t it. It was some new fangled subject that he’d never heard of and had no use for. Something about women, as if they were a real subject. Hadn’t he made a study of women his whole life? Maybe he deserved a fancy college degree. He couldn’t keep up with everything – all the changes in the family, the world going to hell in a hand basket. How long had Esther been gone?

Motif: Primary theme or subject that is developed.

            Francis was only slightly annoyed by Lenora’s dig. She had learned to block out half of what her sister said years ago, finding the country cadence of her voice and the Midwestern accent a tedious reminder of her own small town roots.

            “Get to the point, will you?” she sighed, “We’re in the middle of dinner, and I have to go.”

            “Dinner this late? My, aren’t we hoity-toity eating dinner at 10:00 at night,” Lenora teased.

She had shifted with ease from sniveling caution over having to inform her sister that their father had gone missing, into a well-practiced condescension cloaked in humor. 

Lenora sounded just like their mother, Francis thought. Mom had been a God-fearing Lutheran, but she could twist the knife of judgment into your gut with a smile as if she were serving up a tray of brownies.  Francis rolled her eyes. She knew Lenora did not appreciate her cosmopolitan lifestyle. She also knew what Lenora was thinking and what the shift in her tone meant. Whoever heard of serving Thanksgiving dinner at 10:00 at night? Mom would be rolling in her grave. The ball was no longer in her court. Francis got defensive.

“I told you, Fay-Lynn was late. We were supposed to eat at eight o-clock. Anyway, how do you know he’s missing? Maybe he just stopped by Floyd’s place for a game of pinochle.  Maybe he lost his key and was headed back to your place. You probably passed each other on the highway, for crying-out-loud.”

“No, that’s not it,” Lenora stalled not wanting to lose the few points she’d gained, “When we got out to the farm there wasn’t any sign that he had been home. It snowed out here today. Just a few inches after dad arrived for dinner. It was done by the time he left. There was no sign that a car had been up the driveway.”

“Well, did you call Floyd, or Harold? Maybe he stopped by for dessert with some of his old friends,” Francis offered.

“Nobody’s seen him. We did call the police, but they won’t activate a missing person’s report for 48 hours. I think you should come out here,” Lenora added.    

There. She’d said it, the dreaded thing. She braced herself for the storm.

“Are you crazy?! I can’t just pick up and leave in the middle of Thanksgiving! It’s a 14-hour drive, for Christ sake. I haven’t seen Fay-Lynn since she left for college, and she’s brought this boyfriend with her…oh, for God’s sake. I have fifty-two essays to correct by Monday. I can’t just take time off – I don’t have personal days – I don’t have tenure. You think my life is easy? You think I have money and freedom? I have nothing! I work my ass off just like I have my whole life. I’m still paying my own way. I mean – what have you got on your agenda – an apple pie for the church supper? Jesus, Lenora. Step up for a change. Call me when you know more.”

Francis slammed the receiver on the phone. That was another thing. Why the Christ couldn’t Lenora call her on her cell phone? She’d given her the number a gazillion times. Still, she called the land line every time. She was lucky they still kept it. Anyone in their right mind would get a cell phone, send a text message, or an e-mail if they lived in the right century. Did Lenora even have a computer?

Francis pictured her sister who was two years younger in body and twenty years older in mind. Lenora still wore the same bib aprons their mother had worn when they were children, house dresses, clunky shoes and bobby pins. She lived only a few miles away from their dad. She’d married her high school sweetheart and moved into a small house on his family farm. She had no ambition for bigger things, never worked outside the home a day in her life. She was content to live the same life her mother had lived: church on Sunday, pot lucks, canned peaches and plenty of pies to bake. Just the thought of such a small life turned Francis’s stomach and an unbearable weight pressed down upon her chest. It couldn’t be a heart attack. It was too familiar – a feeling of oppression she had born throughout her life. It was a weight that carried the image of women who were burned as witches or crushed beneath stones for stepping outside their prescripted roles. Her sister would always be the good one. She would always be the witch.

Francis poured a fresh glass of pinot noir and rejoined the family. The turkey slumped in the middle of the clutter and the conversation prattled on without her. Her daughter played footsies with the boyfriend under the table. What was his name? Skip pretended to be interested in his children while he played with his i-phone on the table.

In between tidbits of conversation and half-hearted bites of a meal that had taken her twelve hours to make, including the cleaning and cooking, there were totally irrelevant text messages being bounced around the world. Who the hell was he texting, anyway? Suddenly, Francis felt an unbearable pounding in her right temple. Another migraine coming on, she supposed. And those essays sat in a black leather bag in her study, the ones she had to correct. She excused herself before dessert. She had to escape.  Just like her dad.

The pain in her head was unbearable. It was more than a migraine. Her heart thundered unnaturally in her chest as she reached into the back of her closet and pulled out the old coat. It was her security blanket, the scratchy wool plaid that smelled faintly of wood smoke and bacon from her mother’s kitchen, where it had hung on a peg all those years. The sleeves were threadbare, and the buttons had popped off long ago. It used to be too big for her, but now it barely fit around her ample hips. Bright light seemed to pierce her eyes. She thought she had turned the lights off. She thought about the essays she had to correct and how young people don’t seem to have anything worthwhile to say. And there was all the cleaning up to do. All those dishes and turkey grease. More than once she had wished she had been born a man. Francis curled up on the bed, remembering that time she had run away in that coat her father always wore to cut wood.

Capriccio: A quick, improvisational, spirited piece of music.

There was a sudden thud against the passenger side of the car.

“What the hell was that,” Omar muttered out loud.  

The sound of his own voice startled him and it seemed to rattle around his head like marbles in a jar. Omar’s hands tightened on the wheel.  The Chrysler shimmied as he pulled onto the shoulder. Good thing he was only going thirty.

“Must have been a deer,” he thought.

His heart was pounding. He sat for awhile, trembling until he was able to uncurl his fingers from the steering wheel. It couldn’t have been a very big deer. He wasn’t jolted around from the impact, even though he didn’t wear a seatbelt and never would until his dying day, no matter what the government said.

He remembered the time he’d hit that moose on a trip to the Upper Peninsula. It was the first time he and Esther had gone away without the girls. They’d rented a cabin. Where was that?  Christ, his memory was fading. Things that happened in the past were more like a crazy dream. All mixed up.

 Was the cabin on a lake? Or was it on a river? Where’d he hit that moose, anyway? Good thing they had the truck. It was like driving a tank. That moose barely made a dent in the fender. He’d pulled the fender out with the wench and they went on their merry way. Funny, he couldn’t remember anything else about that weekend with Esther. Just the moose.

Omar was startled out of his reverie by a fierce knocking on the driver side window. It nearly made him jump out of his skin. He’d just gotten his damned heart to stop pounding, and there it went again. He’d been having trouble with that. Once his heart got to pounding he had the dickens of a time trying to calm it down.

Jesus Christ, it was a kid! There was a kid banging on his window. A boy or maybe it was a girl with a bloody gash on the head.  He rolled the window down.

“What the heck! You just hit me with your car! I wasn’t even walking in the road – I was way over on the side! What – are you blind, old man? Ughh!  It hurts!” The kid suddenly crumpled to the ground.

Omar was shaking like a leaf. He managed to open the door, but the kid was blocking the door.  He leaned out the window.

“You alright?  Hey!  You!  You alright?”

He pushed the door and the body rolled over flat on the ground so he was able to open the door and step out over it. Gingerly, he kicked the kid who was barely visible, wrapped up in an oversized red plaid hunting jacket that looked like something he would have worn back in the thirties.

“Ouch! Don’t touch me!” the kid sat up on elbows and squinted up at Omar.

Omar still couldn’t figure out if it was a girl or a boy. The child couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen. Hard to tell at that age. These days, anyway. They all dressed alike, girls and boys. He held out his hand, thick and calloused from years of farming. He was shocked by the slender bone-like fingers, cold as ice that clawed at his own gnarled and arthritic talon. He pulled upwards and the child rose up seemingly from the dead, and stumbled forward. He put his arm around the waif-like shoulders and brought her/him limping around to the passenger door.

They sat for awhile, two trembling birds in the dark of night. He kept the engine running and turned the heat up. The kid slumped down into the wool coat that must have been five sizes too big.

Omar cleared his throat, “You alright? Can I give you a ride somewhere? You want to go to the hospital or something?”

He wished he had packed some water or food in the trunk. He was so careful to pack his bags before he left for Lenora’s, knowing that it would buy him some time for the get-away if he didn’t have to go back to the house after dinner. But he hadn’t thought of packing anything to eat. The kid didn’t reply.

There was something about the way the kid moped. The high forehead plastered with curly black bangs. “You know, you kind of remind me of my older daughter when she was about your age. What are you, thirteen? Fourteen? She had hair like that. No matter how short she cut it, she still had those wild black curls that stuck to her forehead,” Omar paused, waiting for a response.

He remembered something strange just then. Francis was such a handful when she hit her teenage years. It was the late sixties and she was rebellious. He seemed to remember something about her running away around Thanksgiving. She’d gotten ticked at her mother about something or other. It was cold out. They were expecting Esther’s parents, from Minnesota. They were due to arrive any minute. It must’ve been the night before – that would’ve been Wednesday. Anyway, Francis took off on her bicycle about dusk, and after a couple of hours, Esther began to fret. He wasn’t too worried about it, himself, knowing that she’d get hungry and come home, but he had to keep the peace, so he hopped in the truck and drove up and down those long, lonely roads looking for her. He had the deer-jacking lights on top of the cab. It was like driving under a flood light. Then, about four miles away from the farm, he saw her walking her bike along the side of the road. There she was head hunkered down inside that big old wool jacket that had belonged to his father…

Omar looked over at the kid, “Huh,” he grunted. “Isn’t that something?”

“What?” the kid snapped.

“Well, that coat you’re wearing, it looks almost identical to one that belonged to my dad, way back when. I was just remembering my daughter running away in that coat. Same old red and black plaid like we used to wear for woodcutting and hunting before the government stepped in and made us wear orange. Had a hat that matched. Might even have had mittens and britches at one point.”

“I’m not a girl,” the kid sulked.

“Well, don’t worry about it. I can’t tell anymore. You young folk all look alike after awhile,”

Omar put his left blinker on and pulled off the gravel shoulder and onto the road, contemplating turning around back toward Hadley.

“Where to then? You want a lift home?”

“No!” the kid snarled, “Home’s the last place I want to go. Just drop me off in Flint, if you’re going that far.”

Omar sighed, his heart still pounding away in his chest. He didn’t know if he had enough patience left in him to put up with a sullen, spoiled brat of a kid, and he had no intention of driving down to Flint. His intent was to drive up north and find that cabin he and Esther had rented that time he hit the moose. Was that where he was going? What road was this, anyway? Had he missed the turn-off?

“So, where’re you coming from, son?”

 Omar liked the way the word son had pried itself loose from his lips. That was something he’d always wanted to be able to say, the word “son” in that grandfatherly way – the way his own father would have used it when they sat down to have a heart-to-heart talk. But he hadn’t been dealt such a hand. He had been saddled with daughters and trapped in a house full of women his whole life. It seemed to him, that he had always lived in a petticoat prison. First tied up in his mother’s apron strings, his sisters tying the knot even tighter with their clutching ways, forcing him to stay on the farm, which, when you come right down to it, was just another woman tying you down. Then the wife and his own daughters who were nothing more than jail keepers shackling him in their good intentions. His only escape from the harshness of that soft and feminine world had been the war. He’d have traded driving a tank through France and being shot at by Germans any day for the quiet desperation of his so-called life which had been metered out in years by a woman’s hand. The shrapnel in his left knee was the only reminder that he had once tasted freedom. For six months on the front line he had felt alive.

“I’m not your son. And it’s none of your business,” 

The clenched-teeth reply was so well practiced, Omar knew that the kid must have said it a thousand times to someone else in his life, practiced it in the mirror, grunted it into his pillow at night and sneered the words as he slammed the door to do his chores in the morning.

Who did the kid remind him of? He wondered. It wasn’t really Francis, but someone close. The way he held his jaw, jutting forward so that his lower lip protruded into an Indian pout; eyes narrowed like little slits cut out in a freckled mask. All full of piss and vinegar bottled up inside.

“You know, I’m not going anywhere’s near Flint. I was headed up north, to tell the truth,” Omar tried to explain.

“I don’t care,” the kid mumbled, “I’ll go wherever. Just away.”

Omar wondered what could have happened to set the kid off that way. What terrible thing had riled him up enough to leave his home? Did he have a mother? A deer-jacking father who was patrolling back roads at this very moment? He didn’t want to pry, but he did know from experience that a kid doesn’t just up and leave home for no reason. Hadn’t he run away once? When was that? What reason would he have had to leave…?

“You can drop me off wherever you want,” the kid yawned and tucked his head further down into the jacket, using it as a pillow to lean against the window.

Sonatina: A short or brief sonata.

Lenora shivered as she stood in the middle of the kitchen. She reached for dad’s old hunting jacket, but it was missing from the peg where it had hung ever since she could remember. Funny, she hadn’t thought of it in years. Dad must have put it away somewhere.

“I don’t know why he keeps the house so cold. He’s got a full tank of oil, and the woodstove in the kitchen. You’d think he’d want some heat at his age,” she shook her head and went into the parlor to turn up the thermostat.

“Huh. That’s odd,” she called out to Rusty who was still in the kitchen.

“What?” he asked.

“There’s music on the piano,” she whispered as she turned on the lamp.

There hadn’t been music on that piano for almost her whole life. No one played the piano. It had belonged to her grandmother and hadn’t been touched since gram had passed away. The piano had sat like a dry heap of bones in the corner ever since she could remember. Her father wouldn’t let anyone open it up and play it. More than once he’d threatened to chop it up for firewood.

Lenora fingered the yellow brittle pages with their thick notes dancing across taped edges. She couldn’t imagine who would have been playing the piano. Surely it was out of tune. She gently pressed down on one of the black keys and it twanged like an old saloon gal. She remembered her grandmother, bent with age and barely able to reach the pedals and how she would play those funny old songs and everyone except Dad would gather round and sing.

Canon: A musical form where the melody or tune is imitated by individual parts at regular intervals. The individual parts may enter at different measures and pitches. The tune may also be played at different speeds, backwards, or inverted.

Omar settled into the road, the pitch black night broken up by a thin white line, an occasional flurry of snow, the windshield wiper – squeak, thump – squeak, thump. It was hypnotic, that dry heat of the car and the purr of the engine. He remembered a similar drive. Only the car was an old model-T and the heat – well there was none. The transmission whined like an old mare, and the road was rough, still unpaved. He had sat in the passenger seat. An old man had picked him up hitchhiking. It was colder than hell – must’ve been the same time of year. He was about fourteen years old, and – yes – he’d run away. He’d had a fight with his father over some damned thing, and his father’d lit into him. Knocked out his front tooth. What were they fighting about? What could have been so important?

He thought of his daughter Francis, the one that got away. The one who escaped as he had tried to do so long ago and his eyes began to tear up, making it even harder to drive. That old man in the model-T had turned right around and brought Omar home. He guessed it turned out alright. He got his tooth fixed, anyway. Never had harsh words with his father again.

He tried to imagine Francis living in Boston and what her life was like. He’d never been out to visit her. He couldn’t remember what she looked like now. All he could remember was Francis hunkered down in that old coat next to him, lower lip puckered out, black curls plastered to her forehead…just like the kid sitting there now.  Why had he fought with his dad?

Omar thought back on the dull walls of that old farmhouse with its brown and gray wallpaper and mixed up patterns in the curtains. It was a black and white crazy quilt, that house. The print on the walls never matched the drapes. It was dizzifying, and the air was always too close. Thick and heavy from his father’s pipe, it sat on your chest. He could feel that nebulous weight now, like a curtain of smoke you couldn’t grab and push away.

The piano. That was it. He could see the old upright in the corner of the parlor where his mother gave piano lessons to countless children from town. They paraded out to the farm for half-hour lessons once a week, their thick-calved mothers clutching purses and sitting on the bench in the hall. Omar would sit on the hooked rug on the floor, playing with blocks of wood while his mother taught. Eventually, he’d sit in his mother’s lap and finger the keys until she taught him the scales and then how to read the little notes that danced across the page so hopefully.

 He remembered that tiny glimmer of hope, how the strings of notes beckoned him away as if they were little pixie girls come to save him from the awful silence of the house and the farm being so far out, and away from town. Sometimes he imagined the black and white keys were a railroad track, his fingers the train. Someday that train would come and he would head east and never look back.

Was that what they’d fought about – that Thanksgiving he ran away? It must have been after that music teacher from the school came out to visit. What was her name – Miss Herbert? She’d stopped by to inform his parents there was a scholarship available to a music school back East. She hoped that in a few years, they would consider the application process. She said he was very talented and that his mother had taught him well, and that he could go places.

“Huh,” Omar mumbled, “go places, my foot.”

He remembered kneeling on the floor in his room upstairs, ear to the heat grate so he could hear the conversation in the kitchen.

And then his father’s words, “He don’t need to be running off to music school. That’s no life for a boy. We need him on the farm. He’s the only one. The rest are daughters. Who’ll run the place?”

And his mother’s apologetic concession, “I’m sure he can continue his music from home, play for the choir, and give lessons like I do.”

That was the day the music stopped. It no longer danced across the page with its fragile little banner of hope. The train that ran through his fingers on the keys just up and froze. Ran out of steam. No sense in following a track to nowhere.

He remembered now, how he came down the back stairs, heavy footed as if gravity would pull him through the cracked linoleum in the kitchen and down into the cellar. How he glared at his father and pointed his finger at him and screamed.

“You have no right! You have no right to choose my destiny! What makes you think I want to be a stupid farmer, like you!”

That’s when his father up and hit him with a left hook. Spitting his front tooth onto the floor, he’d grabbed his father’s wool coat and left the house. He could still hear the screen door slam behind him, and feel the scratchiness of the wool in that coat which was two sizes too big for him. The red and black plaid coat his father wore for cutting wood.

Finale: Movement or passage that concludes the musical composition.

It was Faye-Lynn who found her. She and Skip had just cleared the table for dessert when they noticed that Francis wasn’t in the kitchen. She went to her mom’s room, and there she was – all curled up in an old red and black plaid coat.

“Where’d she find that old thing?” she laughed to herself.

She went over to the bed and bent over her mother, giving her a little nudge to wake her up. But something was wrong. She seemed odd, her body limp and her doughy skin cold to the touch.

“Mom?” another little shake, “Mom?” a little louder.

It was too late for resuscitation. She’d gone quickly. They said it was an aneurism. Time of death 12:02 A.M.

Coda: Closing section of a movement.

Omar heard piano music rattling around in his head. It was some concerto, Chopin? Tchaikovsky?  Funny, he hadn’t put the radio on, and he never listened to classical music anymore. The car radio was permanently fixed to the country station. In the distance, above the notes of the piano that now sounded like shattering glass, he heard the kid’s voice call out in alarm.

“Hey Mister! Hey! You alright? Watch where you’re going! Hey!”

And then blackness and silence except for his daughter’s voice. Was it Francis?

“Dad?  Dad?”

They found the car out on 390, headed north. There’d been a deer, an icy patch, a crash, but the cause of death was the heart. He was wearing his old hunting britches and cap – the ones that were red and black plaid which hadn’t been worn in years. They smelled of moth balls. Oddly, there was a matching jacket on the passenger seat; identical to the one Francis was wrapped up in, only with a blood stain from an unknown source. Time of death: 12:02 A.M.