In hilly farm country, I meet an odd religious eccentric in ill-fitting clothes and a broad hat. He says "I was fated to die today." He says it with delight--for the sun is setting and he's survived! "It was a curse, and such curses die at sunset." The sun hits the horizon. He's safe.

He runs for sheer joy through the tall grass and brush along the tractor roads toward his friend's cabin by the highway. He wants to cross the road to it, but waits a minute, till the sun's fully under. A big truck comes over the hill, and I yell a warning--the curse could still be hanging on by a thread. He runs out in front of the truck and then stumbles, goes down, and as the truck passes I hear a strange clattering.

When the truck passes, I run over. There he lies, dead. Only the truck never touched him; he'd run out of its way. Nor did he stumble; he fell from a dozen gory bullet wounds. That clatter was from the assault weapon on the porch of the farmhouse across the road.

He beat the curse, so they shot him.

He wasn't reckless. He wasn't foolish. He was just murdered.

And I'm a witness.

So now they open fire on me, too. Bullets bounce around me, kick up tufts from the hillside and I drop and crawl up slope in the feeble shelter of the grass, seeking a hollow to drop into...

NEXT DAY

Off to the movies. See the film Witness, because it won an Oscar for the screenplay:

On a trip to the city, a young Amish boy witnesses a killing. The detective who must protect him ends up on an Amish farm, in borrowed ill-fitting clothes and a broad hat. The middle's a cross-cultural romance between him & an Amish woman. But then the tone changes. The witness flees through fields... as the Amish farm is attacked by killers with assault weapons--two centuries, clashing. The future, invading the past.

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