“What do you mean, by 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 got stuck in traffic from the airport. 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 ineptness.
“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 is, 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 door hasn’t been locked in years. Not even when we were growing up as kids. Does he even have a key to the door?”
“Well, that’s just it,” Lenora treaded careful here, “you see, Rusty put in a lock for him just a month ago. There have been some break-ins, you know, especially out Hadley way 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 some sense into him. Harold lost his farm a year ago, after his wife died. A bunch of hoodlum punks broke in while he was at the IGA and set fire to the place. The house was gone before Harold got home, and he lost everything. He said he didn’t much care about the house, but the hardest part was losing Mary’s photographs. He says he can’t recall his wife’s face anymore. He’s living with his daughter, now, down near Flint somewhere. 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 lock up the house than be forced to move in with us. Or even worse – with you,” Lenora chuckled.
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? 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,” Lenora teased.
She had shifted with ease from the sniveling trepidation of having to inform her sister that their father had gone missing, into a subtle kind of condescension cloaked in good humor. Lenora sounded just like their mother, a God-fearing conservative Baptist who could twist the knife of judgment into your gut with a smile, as if she were serving up a tray of brownies. Lenora did not appreciate or understand her sister’s cosmopolitan lifestyle. Whoever heard of serving Thanksgiving dinner at 10:00 at night? Their mother would be rolling in her grave.
Francis heard the shift in Lenora’s tone. She knew what it meant. It was the same driveshaft that turned the loud clucking of women’s tongues which had reverberated throughout her childhood. Girl posses, arms folded over slightly budding breasts excluding her because she made honors or didn’t wear the right shoes; the clucking of her mother, finger wagging in her face with admonitions that she was too smart for her own good, and how she’d never get a husband; Clusters of farm wives at church who clucked and shook their heads because she didn’t stick around to help when her mother took ill. All that internalized women’s oppression resting on her shoulders. No wonder she ended up teaching women’s studies.
“I told you, Fay-Lynn was late,” Francis rolled her eyes at the receiver of the phone. “We were supposed to eat at 8:00. 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 get back to match point in the sister game; “When we got out to the farm there wasn’t any sign that he had been home. It snowed out here this morning. 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 52 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, but I have nothing. 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. She was lucky they still kept a land line at all. 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, but not Lenora. A cellphone was too complicated for her, a modern contraption that stole your money. Lenora called regularly with updates and anecdotes about dad, but she waited until the rates went down on weekends, or called after 10:00 P.M. when Francis was more than likely not home or in bed.
Francis pictured her sister who was two years younger and twenty years older. In her mind, Lenora wore the same bib aprons their mother had worn when they were children. House dresses, clunky shoes and bobby pins. Lenora lived several 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. She was content to live the same life her mother had lived: church on Sunday, harvest parties, peaches to can 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. She knew it wasn’t a heart attack. It was a familiar 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 prescript roles. Her sister would always be the good one. She would always be a witch.
Francis poured herself a fresh glass of pino noir and joined the family at the table. The turkey slumped in the middle of the table 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 and everyone – damn it – everyone had an i-phone next to their plates.
In between bites of a meal that had taken her twelve hours to make, including the cleaning and cooking, totally irrelevant text messages bounced around the world. No need for adolescent body language anymore, eye-rolling, sighs of exasperation. Francis imagined some of their texts like they were tiny spears being driven into her heart. OMG this is boring, or can’t wait to get out of here. And she didn’t even want to imagine what Skip was doing. Was he having an affair? 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 would never correct. She excused herself before dessert. Just like her dad.
“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.”
The windshield wipers squeaked and thumped across the ice mist that was forming in the lowlands. 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 ordinary to which he had been chained. The nose of his Detroit-made Chrysler was pointed east. But not for long.
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 autonomy – his independence? He knew his daughters saw him as a stubborn old coot because he refused to give up the farm and at eighty-nine he still drove his own car.
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. Easily frazzled. Older than her years as if she were a throwback to his own mother’s generation, hair pulled back in that stringy bun, flat chested and skinny as a rail beneath those baggy dresses. 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 Just like her mother.
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. Hasn’t stopped moving since, though Boston had been the longest she’d lived anywhere. He was downright surprised that she’d settled down and married, started producing children. They must be full grown by now. Hadn’t seen them in what – six or seven years? He heard she was a professor up there. Lenora gloated when Skip lost his job, soured by her own limitations, sweetened by the hardships of others. What was it Francis taught? Was it history? No, that wasn’t it. It was some new fangled subject that he’d never heard of and had no use for. 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?
BAM!
What the hell was that! 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. 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 getting weak. Was it on a lake? Where’d he hit that moose? 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 again.
Jesus Christ, it was a kid! There was a kid banging on his window. A kid with a bloody gash in his – no, maybe her 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? Ahhh! It hurts! I – I think I’m going to faint,” and she did.
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.
“Ow! 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 from the dead, stumbling forward. He put his arm around the waif-like shoulders and brought her/him 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 and belonged to some old geezer relative.
“You alright? Can I give you a ride somewheres? You want to go to the hospital or something?” Omar 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. The kid didn’t reply.
There was something about the way the kid sulked. 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 a handful when she hit her teenage years. It was the late sixties, maybe early seventies. He seemed to remember something about her running away around Thanksgiving. She’d gotten pissed at her mother about something or other, probably had enough of baking pies. It was cold out. They were expecting Esther’s parents, her brother and his wife to come out from Minnesota. They were due to arrive any minute. 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 two 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 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. 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. He didn’t know if he had enough patience left in him to put up with a sulking 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?
“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 of women his whole life. It seemed to him, just now as he thought back on it, that he had been living in a petticoat prison. First tied up in his mother’s apron strings, his sisters tying the knot even tighter with their clutching ways, always coddling him, 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 trade driving a tank through France and being shot at by Germans any day for the quiet desperation of a so-called life 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 monotone 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, 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.
“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.
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 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. That old man in the model-T had turned 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 his old farmhouse with its brown and gray wallpaper and mixed up patterns in the curtains. It was a crazy quilt, that house. One without color. The air was always too close, thick and heavy with a curtain of smoke from his father’s pipe. 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. When he was too young to be pushed outside to play in the yard, Omar would sit on the hooked rug on the floor playing with blocks of wood. Eventually, he’d sit in his mother’s lap and finger the keys until he was three years old and 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. 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. Run 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 grabbed his father’s wool coat and left the house. He could still hear the storm door slam behind him, and feel the scratchiness of the wool in that coat that was two sizes too big for him. The red and black plaid coat his father wore for cutting wood…
“I don’t feel so good,” the kid was stirring in the passenger seat.
Omar had forgotten about his passenger as he tried to wend his way between the past and the present.
“Stop the car! I’ve got to throw up!” The kid seemed to be in a panic.
Omar put on his blinker and poked his way over to the right shoulder and stopped just in the nick of time before the kid bolted from the car and began puking on the side of the road. Hands shaking, Omar managed to put the car in park and waited patiently for the kid to finish up and crawl back into the passenger seat.
“My head really hurts,” the kid whined as he fastened his seatbelt and covered himself with that old red plaid hunting jacket.
Francis made her way up to the bedroom. It was cool in the back of the house, away from the heat of the kitchen and the gas fireplace. She suddenly felt a chill of body and soul, thinking about her dad and wondering where he might be this late at night in the middle of God knows where snowy Michigan. Why hadn’t he taken her up on the offer to move in with them? Surely, she was more capable than Lenora in looking after him. He had no business living by himself out on that old run down farm. If he’d moved out east before Skip lost his job, she could have set him up in assisted living, gotten his veteran benefits in order. She could have given him the life he deserved in his dotage years. She reached into the back of her closet and pulled out the old plaid hunting jacket her dad used to wear, and curled up on the bed. Her head was pounding.
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 brittle yellow 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.
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.
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.