Rabbit Foot Bill

by Helen Humphreys

  The school is at the edge of town. If I walk through Canwood and out the other side, then along the dusty concession road, I will arrive back home, at the small farmhouse near the rail station, where we live now. If I head out in the opposite direction after leaving the school grounds, I can saunter through the open countryside all the way to Sugar Hill.

  I decide to go home after school, rather than go in search of Bill. I have been lucky today, in not being caught out in my absence from yesterday and in having Mrs. Clark save me from Snake, but I can’t count on that luck continuing. What is true one day often stops being true the next.

  I’m a fast runner, so I can usually outrun any boy who wants to beat on me after school. But today I am safe, because Snake has been both whipped and kept behind in detention, and no one else has the inclination to give chase without his lead. I can saunter through the streets of Canwood, taking my time to get home, bending down to pet a tabby cat, or looking in the windows of the hardware store, or lingering outside the gas station because I like the sound of the bell when cars drive over the rubber hose by the pumps.

  Lucy Weber is out by her roses. When she sees me, she waves me over. She’s a friend of my mother’s, comes to our house sometimes to sit with her on the porch after supper. I run across the road and up her driveway when she signals to me.

  “Leonard,” she says, “I think I’ve made a discovery.”

  She holds out her hand towards me. There’s something small lying in her palm. I come across the lawn to get closer.

  “That’s a rosehip,” I say. It seems odd that Lucy Weber wouldn’t know about rosehips, since she grows roses.

  She laughs. “Yes,” she says. “But look at it closely. What does it resemble?”

  I bend my head over the rosehip.

  “It just looks like a rosehip,” I say. Even if I squint and tilt my head, it doesn’t look any different.

  Lucy Weber sighs. “Where is your imagination, Leonard?” She points to the orange circle of the rosehip. “This looks like a body. And these.” She touches the papery brown tendrils that attach to the orange circle. “These look like legs.”

  “An octopus,” I say, suddenly seeing what she means.

  “Yes. Why do you think that is?”

  “An accident?” I can’t think that a rosehip and an octopus have anything in common.

  “There are no accidents in nature, Leonard,” says Lucy Weber. “Just mysteries we don’t know how to solve yet.” She carefully places the rosehip in my hand. “Here. You can ponder on this mystery for yourself. Later. At your leisure.”

  I still think that it is more an accident than a mystery that the rosehip resembles an octopus, but I drop the rosehip into my pocket anyway. I like Lucy Weber and don’t want to disappoint her by not being curious enough.

  After Lucy Weber’s, there are a few more streets of houses, then three enormous grain elevators, like giants, and then the town just ends. The houses on the last street empty onto the rail tracks, then grassland, and then there is just the scatter of farmhouses and the neat squares of the fields, continuing as far as I can see, out to the next village and beyond that one to the next, and so on, and so on. Forever. Amen.

  The town we lived in before this one was called Shell Lake. It seemed bigger, or maybe that was just because I was smaller then. I remember that the water of the lake was circled by rushes and reeds, and that there was a forest out past the town. I went there once with my parents for an outing. I remember the way the trees talked to one another, all high up and whispery, full of secrets.

  I am thinking this, thinking about the gossiping pine trees outside of Shell Lake, when I see a man crouched over in a cornfield. The ground is still turned from winter, the corn just planted, and so the field is bare and it is easy to spot the bent-over figure of Bill. I can’t believe my luck! My feet fly over the stubble and lumps of earth to get to him.

  “Bill!”

  He looks up at my approach, grins at me. I run right into him and he circles my body with one of his strong arms, to both hug me and stop my forward momentum.

  “What are you doing here?” I say.

  Bill is not often on this side of the town. He usually keeps to the countryside around Sugar Hill. It is more wild and remote over there, fewer farms, less chance of meeting people.

  “The rabbits will be after the corn,” he says, holding up a loop of wire. “And I am after the rabbits.”

  “Can I help you set your snares?”

  “Won’t they be waiting for you at home?”

  “Not yet.” I can run all the way back after helping Bill and still make it home in time for supper.

  “All right then.” Bill sits back on his heels. “You ever set a snare before?”

  “No.”

  “Well then, you’ll have to be the rabbit.”

  Bill grabs an old cornstalk from beside him on the ground. He draws some lines in the dirt. They move in a zigzag pattern away from his boots.

  “This is how a rabbit runs,” he says. “So, if I’m about putting a snare here, where should the next one go?”

  I look out over the field.

  “Run it,” says Bill. He gives me a little push. “Be the rabbit.”

  I race in a tight zigzag across the muddy field, over the rotting cornstalks and the nubs of stones, under the blue prairie sky. I run until my heart is banging against my ribs and my breath is tight in my throat, and then, when I run out of field, I race back to Bill.

  He is threading one end of a length of wire through a small loop he has twisted in the other end of the wire, to make a large noose.

  “Well,” he says, not looking up from his task, “what did you learn about being a rabbit?”

  “It’s a bit dizzy-making.”

  “What else?”

  “They can’t see very far ahead because they are always turning instead of going in a straight line.”

  “Good. What does that tell us about a rabbit?”

  Bill takes a thick piece of stick from the front pocket of his overalls and scrapes around in the dirt for a big enough rock to use as a hammer.

  “I don’t know.”

  “It tells us,” says Bill, his hand closing round a fist-sized rock, “that they run to a panic, not a plan. It tells us”—he starts pounding the stick into the earth—“that they are used to being chased, that it is their natural state. Why is that?” He tests the immovability of the stick and then, satisfied that it is firmly embedded in the field, begins to twist one end of the wire noose around it.

  “Because rabbits are prey animals?”

  “Exactly.” Bill balances the other end of the wire on a bit of cornstalk so that the noose is suspended over a furrow. He stands up and ruffles my hair with his hand. He has just been scrabbling around in the earth, so his hand is covered in dirt and bits of straw, but I don’t care. I lean into him and he lets me.

  “Go and be the rabbit again,” Bill says. “Only this time, stop where you think the next snare should go, and I will come and meet you there.”

  I am home in time for supper, having run like a rabbit all the way from the cornfield to the farmhouse. My mother is in the kitchen. My father must still be at the station.

  “Have you been fighting again?” My mother turns from the sink when I come into the room. “You’re covered in dirt.”

  “Not fighting,” I say. “Playing.”

  “Well, whatever you’ve been doing, go and wash up before supper.”

  The little window in the bathroom overlooks the back of the house and the fields beyond it. When I left Bill in the cornfield, he was still setting snares. I climb up on the edge of the bathtub so that I can look out of the window better. He’s probably too far away to spot, but you can see a long way on the prairies, and so I look for any movement in the distant fields. I think I see the flutter of something dark on the horizon line, but it is so far away that it could just as easily be a crow as Bill.

  “Leonard,” calls my mother from the
kitchen, “what are you doing in there? I don’t hear any water.”

  When I come back into the kitchen, supper is on the table. There are only two plates of meatloaf and vegetables.

  “We’re not waiting for Daddy?”

  “He has to work late. There are a lot of freights coming through tonight.”

  I like it when the trains rumble into the town at night. The tracks are close enough to the house that it shakes with the weight of the rail cars, making it feel as though I am on board the train, heading for somewhere exciting, away from the prairies and into a big city like Toronto or Montreal.

  The meatloaf is recognizable as being formed from the leftover bits of cold beef from last night’s supper. I poke at the block of it with my fork, separating out the squares of milky onion that I’m not keen on eating.

  “Sorry,” says my mother, watching my careful dissection of her labours. “I forgot. Would you like me to make you a cheese sandwich instead?”

  Often I am forced to sit at the table until I have finished my meal, whatever it is. It doesn’t matter if I don’t like certain elements of it. But today feels like a magic day, and I am moving through it protected from anything I dislike or that causes me harm. Even my mother has fallen into line with this magic and doesn’t seem bothered that she has to make me a second supper. She is humming by the stove as she grills my cheese sandwich.

  After supper, I tell my mother I have homework so I can go and lie on my bed and think about setting snares with Bill in the cornfield, and wait for the trains to blow past the house, rattle the metal legs of my bed against the floor.

  The next morning I run like a rabbit along the concession road, deke around the grain elevators by the rail tracks, then walk slowly through town towards school, whistling the song my mother was humming the night before.

  When I turn the corner of Mrs. Odegard’s street, I see Bill out front, clipping her caragana hedge. He sometimes does gardening work and odd jobs for the old people in town. The old people seem much more forgiving of his ways than the people his own age or the boys my age.

  “Bill!”

  I run the last few hundred feet to get to him as fast as I can. He doesn’t stop his clipping, but looks over his shoulder at me and smiles. It’s a hot morning already and it’s not even nine o’clock yet. I can see the sweat slick on Bill’s face and arms from the effort of working on the hedge. He is bare-chested under his overalls.

  “I’ll bring you some water,” I say.

  “Don’t make yourself late for school,” he says.

  “I’ve got loads of time. I ran like a rabbit to get here.”

  Bill smiles at that. “All right then,” he says. “A glass of water would be welcome.”

  Bill is nervous of the indoors. He doesn’t like to be too long inside houses. It makes him feel trapped. He goes back to his clipping, and I walk up the path and into Mrs. Odegard’s house. She always leaves the kitchen door unlocked. She must be resting upstairs, because she’s not in the kitchen or the parlour. The pitcher of water is frosty from its spell in the icebox. I pour some into the largest glass I can find and take it outside to Bill. He downs the water in one swallow, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and passes the empty glass over to me. He’s almost finished one side of the long hedge that grows between Mrs. Odegard’s house and the street.

  “I’ll go and fetch you some more, Bill,” I say, and just as I’m turning to head back towards the house, I hear a whistle and my body stiffens into place. I know that whistle, and it makes me afraid.

  “Well, well,” says a voice. “If it isn’t crazy Bill and little Lenny.”

  It’s Sam Munroe. He’s walking along, smoking a cigarette, then crossing the street and coming towards us.

  “Rabbit Foot Bill from Sugar Hill. He never worked, and he never will.”

  “But he is working,” I say, because it seems such a lie that Sam can chant that rhyme while Bill is so obviously cutting Mrs. Odegard’s hedge.

  “Shut up,” says Sam. “I didn’t say you could speak.” He takes a pull on his cigarette and blows the smoke right into Bill’s face.

  Bill doesn’t say anything, just looks square at Sam, and then plunges the shears hard into the boy’s chest.

  I hear the thud of metal hitting bone, and I see the shocked expression on Sam’s face as he crumples to the ground. There’s no blood until Bill reaches down and yanks the clippers out of the body, putting one foot on the boy’s shoulder for leverage as he does this. Then the blood rivers out of Sam Munroe as fast as springtime.

  Bill wipes the shears, slowly and deliberately, on the leg of his overalls and then, without saying a word, goes back to work clipping the hedge. The snick snick of the clippers is the only sound around me.

  “Bill,” I say. “Bill, I think he’s dead. I think you’ve killed him.”

  Bill turns from his work, looks at me, and says, quite clearly, “He had it coming to him.”

  The trial is swift. The verdict certain. Bill makes no effort to defend himself. I wait outside the courtroom on the day he is sentenced, and I watch him being led out of the building and into the police van. He is wearing leg irons—two cuffs of steel around his ankles and a short length of chain running between them. The irons look like the collar on the leghold trap I saw Bill set once for beaver.

  I yell to him, but he’s too far away to hear me.

  What I never say to anyone is this: I didn’t go for help. I stood there beside the hedge, a slow worm of satisfaction crawling through my blood, watching Snake die. I was glad Bill had stabbed him. It was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me.

  I don’t know how I manage to find my way back to Sugar Hill, but I have remembered the way without even trying.

  The door to Bill’s house never closed properly. It doesn’t have a latch, just notches into the dirt on either side of it, and when I walk up the path through the garden, I see that it’s wide open.

  The dogs have been at the rabbits. There are bones and bits of skin scattered across the earthen floor. There’s a rabbit skull by the stove in the kitchen, one eye still socketed into the hollow of bone.

  I stand in the middle of Bill’s house and it suddenly seems small and squalid, like a pit dug into the earth, like a grave full of animal bones. When Bill was here it was huge. It was warm and cozy. Now I can feel the chill in the earth, and that cold also shrinks the place, makes it appear smaller.

  Outside, the garden has been trampled by the dogs, or by the rabbits who must have grown suddenly bold with no one to shoot at them when they came to help themselves to the vegetables.

  The dogs are long gone. They must have been more wild than Bill supposed and, after the rabbit carcasses were devoured, left in search of other food. They aren’t waiting to be taken care of by me. They’ve gone off to look after themselves. Maybe they know that Bill isn’t coming back. Maybe they knew before I did. Bill always said that dogs are smarter than people.

  I climb up to the top of Sugar Hill and lie down in the vetch, as the dogs used to do. The clouds are low, flock across the sky above the hill. There’s a fall of starlings, and a rise of heat crawling through the grass towards me. This is the last warm light of afternoon.

  I am a boy. I am a dog. I am the rabbits with their hind feet gone. I am the climb and the drop, the flat land below the hill, the flat sky above. I am this place and the long walk towards it. I am everything he ever saw, everything he ever touched. I am all—I am only—him.

  Weyburn Mental Hospital

  Saskatchewan

  1959

  I HEAR THE SOUND OF CLASSICAL MUSIC BEFORE I open the door. Strings and the soft surge of orchestra—a soothing melody that stops me with a hand on the doorknob of the meeting room. I cock my head to one side and then to the other, like a bird, listening. I can hear no voices, just the strains of this gentle music.

  When I open the door and enter the room, Dr. Christiansen and four of the other doctors are gathered in a circle of chairs at
one end of the space. A small gramophone plays the music I heard from the hallway, and on a low table in the centre of the circle is a reel-to-reel tape recorder and six glasses of water.

  The curtains are drawn tight against the windows of the meeting room, and it takes me a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dimness, after the brightness of the outdoors. I stumble as I walk across the carpet.

  “Ah, Leonard,” says Dr. Christiansen. “There you are, finally. Let me introduce you.”

  He waves his hand towards the circle of white-coated men.

  “Carl Hepner. Daniel Mortimer. Ben Carter. William Scott.”

  “Dr. Leonard Flint,” announces Dr. Christiansen, waving at me in turn.

  None of the doctors say anything to me, but they all look hard in my direction. One of them nods at me. I have forgotten who he is already.

  I take a seat in the empty chair beside William Scott, a diminutive black man with glasses, older than me, but not by much, and the only man whose name I have remembered because he was the last introduced.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” I say. “It took me a while to find the room.”

  It had taken me a while to even find the building. Though I have been here for several days now, I hadn’t fully realized how massive the hospital is. Mostly I’ve been in one small section of the compound. I hadn’t known it would take me half an hour to even locate the right wing, let alone the meeting room itself. The scale of the complex is hard to adjust to—how the wings extend out from the central building like spokes in a wheel—and I am off in my perceptions, the way a drunk misjudges the distance between the car and the curb when exiting a taxi.

  “I’ll recap for you,” says Dr. Christiansen helpfully. He raises an arm as though he’s conducting the music that is slipping so gently through the gramophone speakers.

  “Here at the Weyburn we believe that no one is sane and no one is mad. In order to help the people in our care, we need to understand what they’re experiencing, understand their reality. We are undergoing a series of experiments here concerning a drug known as lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD for short.”