Five Rabbits Came Home From the Timber

One was a doe called Hazel, brown as a deer, and one was a little black buck called Licorice, the smallest of all of them. We walked the timber every morning and every evening for the rest of the summer. Ivo’s traps stayed set behind the garage until the end of August. We found tracks in the creek mud once, small ones, and Della sat by them for an hour.

But they never came.

Ivo told her, as gently as I have heard a man say anything, that sometimes a rabbit just goes somewhere you cannot follow. He said it was not her fault and it was not anything she did. He said she had done everything right, and five out of seven was more than most grown men would have gotten back.

Della nodded. She did not cry in front of him. She cried in the car on the way home, and then she was quiet for a long time.

What she did after that, I have never told anybody until now.

Every evening that summer, after supper, she asked me to drive her out to the edge of that timber. Her dad said it was fine. She would get out of the car with a leaf of lettuce and a slice of carrot, walk to the place where the mowed grass met the trees, and lay them down on a flat rock she had found.

Then she would stand there for a minute with her hands folded. I never asked her what she said. I did not need to.

She did it every evening until school started. She did it in the rain. She did it on the day it hit a hundred and two. The lettuce was always gone by morning, and I never told her it was probably deer.

The Effingham County Fair is held in Altamont, a few miles west of town, at the end of July. It is a small fair. There is a grandstand, a tractor pull, a demolition derby on Saturday night, a Ferris wheel, and the barns.

The rabbit barn is an open-sided pole building with a tin roof and rows of wire cages on wooden stands. In the morning, before it gets hot, it smells like straw and cedar shavings. By noon it smells like everything else.

Della had five cages in a row on the end of the third aisle. Each one had a white card zip-tied to the front with her name, her club, the breed, the rabbit’s tattoo number and the class.

Della Lasley. Holland Lop. Five times in a row.

She had been up since four o’clock that morning, grooming. She had gone over every one of them with a damp washcloth and a soft brush. She had trimmed their toenails the night before. She had given each one a slice of apple for luck.

She wore her white 4-H shirt with the green clover on the front, tucked into jeans. I had put her curls in a clip, and by nine o’clock it had already given up and they were loose all over her shoulders.

I wore a black T-shirt and jeans and my hair in a clip too. I stood next to her and held her water bottle and tried to look like I had no feelings about any of it.

The judging started at nine.