The sound of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata wafted up the back stairs to the bedrooms occupied by my three brothers and me on the second floor of the 1870 house we lived in across from a dairy farm, surrounded by cornfields, creeks, and not much else.

The sound of our father playing the baby grand piano he bought as a floor model bargain was a nightly lullaby for the four of us kids. If not Beethoven, Chopin, or Debussy, we might hear tunes by Dave Brubeck, George Gershwin, or the Modern Jazz Quartet.

As we grew, two kids each paired up and switched between two bedrooms in rotation. On this Moonlight Sonata night, I was seven, and paired with my oldest brother who was nine. My eight-year-old and four-year-old brothers were asleep in the other bedroom.

As Beethoven had me on the crest of sleep, a flutter entered our room from the hall. fwit fwit fwit thud! fwit fwit fwit thud!

“What’s that?” I asked my big brother, eyes wide open in the dark. fwit fwit fwit thud! fwit fwit fwit thud!

“A bird must have gotten in somehow,” he said with an oldest sibling’s self-assurance. I ducked my head under my blanket. fwit fwit fwit thud!

“What should we do?” I asked, my voice tightening.

“We have to tell dad,” my brother said. We jumped out from under our covers, dodging the poor flying creature who was in as much of a panic as we were.

We ran through the long hall to the back stairs that led to the living room where dad was mid sonata. We were halfway down the stairs when dad spotted our pajamaed figures and stopped playing.

“There’s a bird in our room!” we yelled excitedly.

“A bird?” dad asked.

“Yes, it’s in our room flying around and banging into the walls!” we stammered. There was a brief silence.

“Go back to bed and get under the covers and stay there,” he ordered. We ran back to our room, dove into our adjacent beds and covered ourselves, heads and all, leaving barely enough space open to breathe.

We heard dad’s heavy footsteps proceed through the house to the kitchen, countered by the clink and clatter of mom putting dishes away. The old door to the cellar opened, and dad stomped down the worn stairs to the dark cellar where an army of fat, fuzzy spiders guarded tools, winter equipment, and guns.

The steady clomping of each step our father took back up the wooden cellar stairs was followed by the sound of his steps up the front stairs from the kitchen to our bedroom. I peeked out from under the covers.

The dark silhouette of my father hovered with the glow of the hall light behind him as he stood in the doorway looking into our room.

“Stay under the covers!” he quietly commanded.

fwit fwit fwit thud! fwit fwit fwit thud!

I heard a gun being cocked. I could tell by the sound that it was the BB gun and not the .22 rifle.

“Stay down,” our dad said again.

fwit fwit fwit bang! fwit fwit fwit bang! fwit bang! Bang!

I heard a soft thump as something hit the floor. Dad bent down in the dark to pick it up and walked across the hallway to an open window.

He slammed the window shut and walked back to our doorway.

“Go back to sleep” he said, turning off the hall light.

We heard his footsteps back down the stairs to the kitchen, then the heavier sound of his feet on the old cellar steps where the guns were kept. He slammed the cellar door shut and walked back to the living room.

My brother and I lay quietly, the Moonlight Sonata floating back up to our room. Our father resumed playing at the point he’d left off when we’d first told him about the bird, calming us back to sleep after the excitement of the winged intruder.

The next morning, we excitedly told our two brothers about our nighttime adventure and how dad had shot the bird in the dark while we were in our beds. Our second-oldest brother looked around the room and bent down to pick up a small object.

“That wasn’t a bird,” he said, holding up a BB covered with bloody fur. “It was a bat.”

We all raced down the back porch stairs to search the grass under the window where dad had thrown the dead creature. There was nothing there.

“Where’s the bat?” we asked our dad.

“Threw it over the fence this morning.” Our father was an expert at catapulting dead snakes and other creatures over the fence with the old shovel kept behind the cellar door. “Bats can have rabies. Gotta be careful.”

It was three years later when I was ten that I decided to read the copy of Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird that sat on one of the many bookshelves in our house. I was struck by the moment when the Finch children realize that their father Atticus Finch is a rifle sharpshooter when he has to kill a rabid dog making its way up their neighborhood street.

My dad was an electronics engineer rather than a lawyer like Atticus, but they were both men who wore glasses and were better known for their intellect than their physicality. I felt a special pride when I pictured my dad killing the bat in our room years ago, aware that, like Atticus Finch, he didn’t like to use guns, but he could when he had to.

Though my dad is no longer with us, I think of him every time I hear one of the myriad piano pieces he used to play at night as we kids fell asleep… his unintended lullabies…

You can read about another of my To Kill a Mockingbird associations in my earlier RGG piece, “My Own Boo Radley”. Do readers have a family member or friend who they associate with a character in a favorite book or movie? I’d love to hear about it!

Publisher’s note: Featured image courtesy of the author. The shovel in the photo belonged to her father and was the very one used to dispatch the remains of the story’s antagonist.