Five Rabbits Came Home From the Timber

Because the rabbits had to travel with Della every other week, her dad had built a second set of hutches in his garage. It was the only shade on that place, and with the box fan running and frozen jugs of water in each hutch, it stayed cool enough for them through the worst of July.

He built them the spring before. He did not ask Shawna. I found that out later, and I will come back to it.

That week he had been called out on storm duty. A line of storms had gone through southern Missouri on Monday night and knocked down poles across three counties, and the co-ops send crews to help each other. He left Tuesday morning before light. He was three hundred miles away with a bucket truck when all this happened.

So it was Shawna, her boy, and my daughter at that house.

I told my boss I had to go. My boss has run the elevator for thirty years and has four granddaughters, and he did not ask a single question. He just said, “Go on. I’ll run the scale.”

I drove out there with the windows down because the air in my car does not work, and I made myself think instead of feel.

A domestic rabbit loose in the country does not last. They do not know what a hawk is. They do not know what a coyote is. They sit still in the open because nothing has ever hurt them, and that is exactly what gets them killed.

I had grown up on a farm outside Teutopolis. I knew what was in that timber behind the house. I had heard the coyotes from Della’s bedroom window on her weekends there.

I knew every hour counted. That was the whole reason I did not call her daddy first, or call Shawna, or call anybody at all to fight about it. The rabbits were loose, and every hour spent arguing was an hour for the coyotes.

When I pulled into the gravel drive, Della was standing at the edge of the backyard where the mowed grass stops and the timber starts. She had a head of lettuce in one hand. She was just standing there, holding it out toward the trees.

Shawna was on the porch with her arms folded. Her boy was on the steps with a toy dump truck, not playing with it.

I did not go to the porch. I went to my daughter.

Della turned around and her face fell apart. She had held it together the whole time she was alone, and the second she saw me, she let go. I knelt down in the grass and held her, and she cried into my shoulder with the lettuce squashed between us.

“I tried calling them,” she said. “They don’t come when I call. They don’t know their names out here.”

“I know, baby. I know.”

When she could breathe again, I stood up and looked at the porch.

Shawna had come down the steps. She stopped about ten feet away.

“They stank,” she said. “The whole garage stank. I have asthma, Corinne. I have had asthma since I was a little girl. Nobody asked me if they could put seven rabbits in my garage. He just built them. I came home one day and they were there.”