When the blue that lined the muscles in Dad’s arms and neck receded into his skin, like a magic trick – when he broke the kitchen table, the clock radio, and the glass bowl that his mother gave him for a wedding gift, the last remnant – when he threatened to break Jared’s neck and mine – I ran out the back door and into the woods. I broke through the bramble, the branches and thorns raking my arms and face. My feet sank into the cushioning soil. The roots tangled like broken spider legs, like a web that a scared boy would break through as he ran from a father who loved but might kill him. I skipped over those roots, as if I was flying. Fear moved me – and one should never underestimate what fear can make a boy do. Fly even. Skip across a tangled earth where gravity is the least of our problems.
I disappeared into the woods. Disappeared. Like a magic trick. I ran fast and faster. At a certain speed, a body becomes invisible even to itself. At that speed, fear dissipates, and all that remains – aside from the dry film that scums the dish – is joy. A boy needs to run far into the woods to get to it. A boy needs to run fast. But when he tumbles and lies on the forest floor, legs throbbing, chest billowing, eyes almost blinded by tears and sweat, he sees joy in a sky that burns through the spaces between the tree branches. He sees it in the bark of trees that sway in the breeze. If he’s lying by a swamp, he sees it in the algae and the cypress trees that rise from the water like probings of life. If he digs into the soil with his fingers, he finds it in the worm. If night has fallen and he lies on the ground long enough, he sees it in the eyes of a long-toothed possum wandering toward the garbage that neighbors have put at the roadside for pickup.
‘We’re a family of extremes,’ Dad said.
‘What’s that mean?’ Jared asked. I couldn’t have been older than twelve.
‘I’ve told you how my father died?’ Dad said.
He had – often. Along with working as a salesman at a used boat dealer, Dad’s father played the French horn in a wedding band. One night, when Dad was sixteen years old, the van carrying the band from a Valentine’s Day party in southern Georgia skidded on an icy bridge.
‘The van burned,’ Dad said. ‘Everyone and everything inside it turned to ash – everyone but the girl who sang and everything but my father’s horn. The girl went through the windshield, and except for some cracked ribs and cuts on her face, she was fine. My father’s horn went through the windshield with her and landed on the roadside gravel. Everything else was twisted metal and cinders. The fire was so hot, they couldn’t identify the teeth.’ He looked at Jared and me to see if we understood the point. I didn’t. ‘Extremes,’ he said. ‘The police gave that horn to my mother, as if it would help us grieve. I always hated that horn.’
‘Do you think it’s strange that Mom also died in a car wreck?’ Jared asked.
‘It’s to be expected,’ Dad said. ‘In a family like ours.’
Jared told me later that night something I’d never heard before – that Mom had been with another man when she died. They were driving in his car. He said, ‘Who knows what they were doing when he veered into the truck.’
‘Liar,’ I said.
‘Ask Dad,’ he said.
‘Never.’
Months later, I found the French horn in the attic. When I dusted it off, the tuning slides, the valve levers, and the leadpipe looked like parts of a marvelous machine. I put my lips to the mouthpiece and blew. My breath made no sound – at least nothing like music. I brought the horn down to my bedroom anyway and hid it in my closet. When Dad went out or was working, I tried to make the horn sing. Then the music teacher at school announced she was starting a concert band. I snuck the horn to her classroom where she taught me enough notes to play the Star Wars theme song, ‘Across the Stars.’ Twice a week in after-school practices, I rehearsed the song, and at night, when Dad was sleeping, I whistled it.
On the evening of the spring concert, I slipped out of the house.
Sitting in the dark auditorium before the lights came up, next to other kids with their flutes and trombones, I felt the same joy I felt while running through the woods or lying on the ground staring up through the tree branches.
Then it was my turn. When I blew into the French horn, I felt the music light up inside me.
I completed only four measures before I heard rumblings from the audience. But I focused on the mouthpiece and the valves and the brightness inside me. I played four more measures and then heard laughter – polite, uneasy, then unrestrained. I stopped playing, looked into the dark that hung over the audience, then played again. The laughter came harder. I stopped and started again. As I lurched through the notes, I strained to see beyond the lights that flooded the stage.
I saw him. Dad was dancing in the space between the stage and the front-row seats. I never learned how he found out about the concert. The audience thought he was hysterical. Their laughter seemed to energize him, and his dance became outlandish. Maybe the dancing and laughter would have broken another boy’s focus, but my lips found the mouthpiece again and I finished the song, missing no more notes than I did in the best of my practice sessions. When the song ended, the audience clapped, and Dad bowed twice before going back to his seat.
He’d come to hear me play an instrument that hurt him.
And he’d humiliated me.
I never hated him more than I hated him that night.
I never loved him more.
I looked for him at the end of the concert, but he’d already gone. So I walked home alone, and when I got there, I looked into his bedroom. He was lying face down on his bed. The next morning, he was still sleeping when I left for school. In the days that followed, neither of us mentioned the concert.
Then, during the summer, the French horn disappeared from my closet, and when I checked the attic, it wasn’t there either. Maybe Dad pawned it for drinking money. Maybe he dropped it in a dumpster. Maybe he disassembled the marvelous machine and buried the parts in the backyard. I never saw it again.
But during my three years on death row, I sometimes heard that French horn playing – more softly and truly than I ever learned to play it, as if Dad’s father was serenading me. The music might have come from my dissociative disorder, another version of the impulse that made me want to crawl out of my skin. But it gave me peace. Locked up between concrete walls for twenty-three hours a day, the other death row inmates and I existed apart from day and night and from time itself, except that every passing second rang like a bell reminding us that we’d moved a second closer to the needle that would kill us. Some of the men found religion, seeming to believe God cared more for sinners than saints, even sinners who’d raped and killed and would rape and kill again if they got the chance. Other men descended deep into the insanity that had put them on death row to begin with.
I clung to the edge. The weight of insanity tugged at me, and clouds of faith teased me. I was grateful when I heard the French horn soundtrack from Star Wars.