Five Rabbits Came Home From the Timber

The phone rang at the scale house at ten minutes after eleven on a Wednesday, and I almost let it go, because there was a grain truck on the scale and a line of three more behind it.

It was Della. She never calls me at work. She knows the elevator is loud and I am half deaf by noon from the dryers.

“Mama,” she said, and that was all she could say for a while. I could hear her breathing, the kind of breathing a ten-year-old does when she is trying very hard not to cry in front of someone.

I printed the ticket for the truck on the scale and waved the driver on. Then I turned my back to the window so nobody would see my face.

“Della, honey, are you hurt?”

“No.” A big breath. “The rabbits are gone. All of them. The hutches are open and they’re gone.”

I asked her where she was. She said she was standing in her daddy’s garage, out in the country south of town, and the doors of all seven hutches were hooked open and the water bottles were still full and nobody was in them.

I asked her where Shawna was. Della went quiet. Then she said, very small, “She’s on the porch. She said she let them out.”

I want to be fair to everybody in this, so let me lay it out plain.

My name is Corinne Lasley. I am forty-two years old and I run the scale at the grain elevator on the north side of Effingham, Illinois. I weigh trucks, I write tickets, I check moisture, and I have done it for eleven years.

Della’s dad and I split when she was six. It was not a war. It was two people who married young and grew into different shapes. He is a lineman for the co-op, a good one, and he has never missed a support payment in his life.

Two years ago he married Shawna. She is thirty-seven and she has a boy of her own, eight years old, a quiet little fellow who likes trucks. Shawna and I had always been polite, the way two women are polite when they are both standing at the same ball diamond and do not know what to say.

Della goes to her dad’s every other week. That summer she was ten, and she was raising seven Holland Lops for 4-H. If you have never seen a Holland Lop, they are a small rabbit, under four pounds, with a round head and ears that hang down like a basset hound’s. They look like something a child would draw.

She had saved her own money for the first pair. Forty dollars each from a breeder over by Neoga, paid out of a coffee can she kept under her bed. She bred them herself. She had a notebook with every litter written down in pencil, every weight, every tattoo number.

Seven rabbits. Three does, four bucks. She had been working on them since March, combing them, posing them on a square of carpet on the kitchen table, flipping them over to check their teeth and toenails the way the judges do.

The county fair was nine days off.