There is this village that is nearly impossible to track on the maps.
The strangers really had a hard time finding it. They would look through the routes in the Arizona highways - route 89, route 90, there is a narrow path which connected two desert like towns and nothing else. There is no name, no sign, just a big space between Tucson and the Sonoran desert, as if the cartographers had looked at that particular stretch of land and decided, collectively, that nothing worth marking existed there.
Obviously they were wrong. Maybe they sensed something the residents never could - that Hawthorn Creek was a place that existed on a realm of its own. A place where the air tasted different after rain. Where the light at dusk turned the earth into crimson red, alluring and unsettling in equal measure. Here silence existed but it was incomplete. If you go outside and close your eyes at the right hour, you could feel the air, you could hear a faint sound of the desert breathing.
Around three hundred people called it home. Many of them were born there. People there grew up watching the same mountain and the rivers. They could read the nature like a book - which rivers will flow in the summer, which flowers will bloom first in spring, where the coyotes will gather when the new moon is on the rise. They laughed together, grieved together, celebrated together, they knew each other's history, not just the surface facts but the deeper truths - who drank too much, who loved whom in secret, whose children did what, whose grief had never healed.
Among them, Miles J. Morgan was known for one thing above all others.
His music.
—----
He had been playing since before he could read.
His mother often mentioned this story about him which eventually became a village legend - how once four-year-old Miles had climbed onto the piano bench when no one was watching, he stretched his little fingers across the piano, and played - first he was just banging it, but a little by little the banging stopped, the piano started to sing, it's like his hands gave a soul to the piano, his notes had a harmony that sounded like the sunshine on a winter morning, it was soothing, a perfect symphony.
By the time he was seven he learned everything that his school teacher Mr. Albert had to offer. He started to compose music when he was twelve. When he was sixteen he got an offer from a prestigious music school in Phoenix but he turned it down Cause leaving the Hawthorn Creek is near impossible to him, for him it is like taking a tree and dragging out from the soil.
He never chased wealth or fame, instead they somehow found him. People from the neighboring town and even from different states used to come to Hawthorn Creek just to listen his music . The church hired him as their regular pianist, they didn't requested any hymn they just sat there and listen to him quietly. They believed that his music would lead them closer to god.
Miles never thought high of himself. For him he is just an ordinary man that expresses himself through music.
He was twenty seven years old in the autumn of 1942. He had a loving wife named Margaret, she was both gentle and sharp and who loved him with every possible way a mortal being ever could. He had a daughter named Melissa, who was five years old and who had inherited her father's talents, and she would fall asleep every night to whatever Miles played softly in the next room.
He had a best friend, Shawn Scott, despite being in his early 20's he became the village sheriff and the only man Miles had ever met who could argue with him about music for three hours and then buy him a drink and mean it.
In short he had everything.
He was standing tall and high.
But we should also remember that the depth of a fall is determined by the height of the place you started.
And Miles Morgan was standing very high.
—------
The morning of October 14th, 1942, it was starting to get cold in Hawthorn.
Melissa's birthday.
She had asked for two things, a doll with yellow hair and a song. A song that no one ever heard before, a song that will exist only to express her. Miles had promised both, so he spent his three weeks working on it. In the evening Melissa goes to play with her friends outside, so he played the fragments in the evening when Melissa was outside and Margaret sat in the kitchen pretending not to listen.
"It's beautiful," Margaret had told him one night, appearing in the doorway in her nightgown, her dark hair loose around her shoulders.
"It's not done yet."
"It doesn't need to be done in order to be beautiful honey."
He looked at her with an expression that only Margaret knows. The calm composed genius musician has a childish, non composed, shy face around his wife which is hidden from the outside world.
"It has to be perfect," he said. "She deserves perfect."
Margaret had crossed the room and kissed the top of his head. "She deserves her papa," she said. "Which she already has. The rest is just decoration."
He had finished the song two days before Melissa's birthday. Played it through once for himself in the empty house, then sat at the piano for a long time afterward analyzing every note wondering is it perfect?, and he listened to the last note before it faded into the desert air.
It was the best thing that Mile had ever written. He knew it in the same you know true things - not with the mind but with the body, a settling, a rightness. He felt simultaneously proud and daunted by it, as if he had reached somewhere deeper than he intended and pulled something up that had no name.
He convinced himself that it was just emotion. The weight of love for his daughter, translated into sound.
But was he the only one that listened to it?
—------
He went out in the early afternoon to buy the doll.
It took about twenty minutes to walk to the General store from his house, past the church he took a right turn after that he was going straight on his right there was the land where the Harmon family had grown cotton until the Depression broke them. The day was bright and cold, the sky has a deep blue color that only appears in the October, Miles was walking with his hands in his pocket and his mind was busy thinking about the notes the beats analyzing if there should be some improvements needed, would melissa like it or not.
And he arrived at the general store.
He bought the doll- yellow haired with a princess dress, exactly as she requested after that he spent a few minutes talking with Frank Delaney at the counter about the world war, which is the hot topic now, in the newspapers, radio broadcast it was in everything. Two boys from Hawthorn Creek had gone. One had written back. The other didn't.
"Strange times," Frank said.
"Yeah, strange times," Miles agreed.
He started to walk towards his home.
He was about five minutes from the house when he saw the smoke.
—-----
It was the color of it that stopped him first.<
Not the gray-white of a fireplace or the pale drift of burning leaves. This was black, dense and churning, the kind of smoke that meant something was being consumed entirely. It rose above the rooflines in a column, and even as he stood there trying to understand what he was seeing, his mind arranging and rearranging the information, he knew.
He knew the direction.
He ran.
The distance was nothing. He had walked it a thousand times. But in those few minutes, the world rearranged itself around him. He could hear the fire before he rounded the last corner — a sound like something eating, patient and enormous. He could feel the heat. He could see the neighbors already gathered at the edge of the property, a loose, horrified cluster, and Shawn among them with his jacket off, directing two men with buckets toward the side of the house where the flames had not yet reached.
"Miles!" Shawn's voice. A sound Miles had never heard from him before — controlled, but just barely. "Miles, stay back—"
He did not stay back.
The front door was open. He went through it.
The interior was a roaring orange world. The heat was a physical thing, a wall. The smoke was immediate and total, filling his lungs, his eyes, turning everything to blurred shapes and shadow. He called Melissa's name. He called it again. He moved toward the hallway, toward her room, one arm up against the heat—
Shawn caught him from behind. Two arms locked around his chest, pulling him back. Miles fought. He fought with everything.
"She's not in there," Shawn was saying against his ear, his voice breaking on the words. "Miles. She's not — we looked — Miles, listen to me—"
He did not listen. He could not listen. He pulled and struggled and screamed his daughter's name until his throat tore and the smoke took his legs and Shawn dragged him out onto the ground and the cold air hit him like water and he lay on the earth looking up at the sky while the house burned and burned and burned.
✦ ✦ ✦
They found Melissa near the back of the house.
The fire had been kinder to her than it had been to most things inside. She looked, someone said later, almost peaceful. As if she had simply gone to sleep in an unusual place.
Miles did not hear this at the time. He did not hear much of anything for several days.
Margaret was alive. She had been found near the back door, unconscious, smoke-filled, her hands burned where she had apparently tried to open something — a window, they thought, or perhaps the door itself. She was carried to the doctor's house and did not wake for two days, and when she did wake, she could not speak. The doctor said it was shock. He said time would help.
Time, Miles thought, sitting by her bedside in the chair that Shawn had brought from the Scotts' house because it was more comfortable than the doctor's chairs and Shawn was the kind of man who thought of those things. Time.
He had composed a song for his daughter and she would never hear it.
He had two weeks of fatherhood left, though he did not know this yet.
What he did know, sitting in that chair while his wife breathed slowly and the Arizona desert pressed its cold face against the window, was that the music had gone.
Not metaphorically. Not the motivation or the desire. The actual music — the internal sound that had been with him since before memory, the continuous low melody of his own perception, the thing that made him Miles — had simply stopped.
The silence where it had been was not peace.
It was a hole.