Five Rabbits Came Home From the Timber

I did not say anything. I was afraid of what would come out.

“I asked him to move them,” she said. “Twice. He kept saying after the fair. My inhaler is empty twice as fast in the summer. I couldn’t breathe in my own garage.”

“So you opened the doors,” I said.

“I thought they’d stay in the yard,” she said. Her voice went up a little. “I thought they’d sit out there in the grass and Della could pick them up after lunch.”

It was the first time I understood that she had not thought it through at all. She had been angry and wheezing and alone with two kids that were not both hers, in a hot July, and she had done the stupidest thing a person can do with a rabbit.

I want to say clearly that it was wrong. It was wrong when she did it, it was wrong that afternoon, and it is wrong now. A grown woman does not turn a child’s animals loose to die because she is mad at the child’s father.

But I also want to say that I understood her a little, standing in that yard. And I think understanding her a little is what kept my mouth shut.

“Which way did they go?” I asked.

Shawna pointed at the timber. “That way. Mostly. A couple went under the shed first.”

I checked under the shed with a flashlight from my glovebox, lying flat on my stomach in the dirt in my work jeans. Nothing. Just a coffee can and an old tire.

Then I stood up and looked at those woods.

It was maybe forty acres of timber, oak and hickory and hedge apple, running down to a creek and up the other side. Thick underbrush. Multiflora rose so bad in places you would bleed walking through it. Poison ivy on every other tree.

Seven rabbits the size of a softball, somewhere in there.

I called Della’s dad from the yard. He answered on the second ring with a lot of noise behind him, a generator and men yelling.

I told him. I kept it short.

He did not say anything for a long moment. Then he said, “Put Shawna on.”

I handed her the phone. She walked off toward the garage with it. I did not listen, but I heard her start crying about a minute in, and I heard her say, “I know. I know. I’m sorry. I know.”

When she gave me back the phone, he said, “Corinne, I can’t get loose till Friday. There’s six thousand people without power down here and I’m one of the guys up the poles. I’ll be home Friday. I’ll walk every foot of it with you.”

“I know you will,” I said. And I meant it. He is a lot of things, but he is not a man who leaves his girl to it.

“Tell Della I’m sorry,” he said. “Tell her it’s my fault. I should have moved them.”

The first thing I did was call Nadine Ebert.