Rabbit Foot Bill

by Helen Humphreys

  Lucy refills my glass.

  “It’s good to see you looking so well, Leonard,” she says.

  “It’s good to see you too,” I say.

  I have not forgotten her kindness to me, and I want to tell her that, but it seems impossible to do with my mother here. So it is a relief when, after a small plate of food, my mother announces that she is tired and should probably go home to have a rest.

  “Leonard,” says Lucy as my mother stands up, slips her shoes back on, smooths down the front of her one good dress, “why don’t you stay for a bit? We can get caught up. I can drive him back,” she says.

  “All right.” My mother makes no protest, and I realize that it is probably just as much of a strain for her to be with me as it is for me to be with her. Perhaps it is not just me who is making small talk?

  I watch from the window as she walks down the flagstone path, climbs up slowly into the truck, and backs down the driveway.

  Lucy comes and stands beside me at the window.

  “It was good of you to come back for her,” she says.

  “But I didn’t come back for her,” I say. “I came home to make sure that he’s really dead.”

  “Ah.” Lucy is quiet for a moment. “It’s hard on your mother,” she says after a pause, “that you have been so distant.”

  I don’t know if she means the geographical distance or my emotional distance, although they might as well be one and the same at this point. I haven’t been back to see my mother since my daughter was born six years ago.

  “My father was a terrible man,” I say. “A real fucking bastard.”

  “I know.”

  “And she never left him. After everything he did. To her. And to me. She just stayed and stayed.”

  “She tried to leave. Several times.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “She did,” says Lucy Weber. “Trust me. But where was she to go? She had no money of her own. She couldn’t get far. And each time she left, he found her out and forced her back. I hid her here once, and he kicked in my front door.”

  “You should have called the police then.”

  “Leonard,” says Lucy, “you want it to be simple, and it’s not simple.” She leads me back to the couch and we sit down together.

  “But it is simple,” I say. “He was a monster and she let it happen.”

  “Did she?”

  I think of my mother cowering in the corner of the kitchen, her arms over her head in a useless attempt to ward off the blows. I think of her kneeling beside my bed in the mornings after I had been beaten, wiping the dried blood from my face with a washcloth, her tears falling on my swollen eyelids.

  “No,” I say. “I guess not. I guess it happened to both of us.”

  Lucy puts her hand over mine.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I should have done more.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  We’re quiet for a moment.

  “But why did it happen?” I ask.

  Because I don’t understand why my father was so violent to his family, to those he was supposed to love.

  “I remember when the men got off the train,” Lucy says.

  “What men?”

  “Your father. Bill Dunn. How they came home still in their uniforms, carrying their kit bags. How they walked off that train, fresh from the battlefields of Europe, and they were expected to go straight back into their lives after having been gone all that time. After having fought and killed and suffered. They were expected to just pick up where they had left off.”

  I knew that my father had been in the war, but he had never talked about it. He always evaded the subject if I questioned him about those years. But I didn’t know that Bill had also been a soldier.

  “How could they go on as normal?” says Lucy. “After all they had seen and done? I didn’t have this opinion at the time, but I think now that Bill was the smarter man. He knew enough to take himself out of society, to remove himself from his family.”

  “Bill didn’t have a family.”

  “Oh yes he did, Leonard,” says Lucy. “But he didn’t stay with them. He came home and right away he went to live rough. He might have spent a week or two with his wife and children, that’s all. Then he left, and then they left, and I doubt he ever saw them again.”

  “He had children?”

  “Three children. Two bigger girls and a young boy. His wife took them back east, to where her family were living. Trudy, I think that was her name. She had the bluest eyes. Funny what you remember of a person. I don’t recall much else about her, but I remember those piercing blue eyes.”

  It has never occurred to me that Bill had a family, that he had children. He seemed such a singular figure, striding through the prairie landscape of my childhood.

  “But he never told me he had children?”

  “Leonard, why would he have told you anything? You were a child yourself when you knew him.”

  Lucy doesn’t know about my later, fateful encounter with Bill. She doesn’t know that I was fired from my job at the Weyburn, or that Bill was there, or that he killed Henry Tudor. I’m not about to bring it up now. It’s too long and sad a story, how Bill came back into my life and what happened to him because of our association.

  “I do think that Bill got it right,” says Lucy. “Even though, at the time, and along with everyone else in town, I thought he was cruel to abandon his family. But he knew that he was damaged from the war, and he knew enough to keep that damage from his wife and children. Especially his children.” She pauses. “I’m sorry for what happened to you, Leonard, and I do wish I had been able to do more for you and your mother.”

  “You were always nice to me,” I say. “That mattered to me a lot.”

  We’re quiet again for a short while. I’m trying to get my head around Bill having had a family, having had a wife and children. Especially children. What would it have been like for him to make a decision to leave them? Now that I have a daughter, I know how devastating it would feel to never see her again.

  “But when you talk about my father and the damage caused by the war, are you excusing him?” I ask Lucy after a few minutes. “Because I don’t think I can do that, no matter what happened to him in the battlefield, or how hard it was to adjust to family life when he got home.”

  “I’m not excusing him,” says Lucy. “There is no excuse for what he did to you and to Janet. I just wanted to explain some of the background of his life to you, give you information that you might not have otherwise known.”

  I was seven when my father went to war. We lived in Prince Albert then, a bigger place than Canwood. I remember clinging to his pant leg at the train station, and how he spun me around before he hugged me goodbye. He held on to my arms and twirled me around and it felt like I was flying.

  I can understand that he was a different man before the war, because I have those memories to hold against the ones when he returned.

  “Did Bill and my father know each other in the war then?” I ask.

  “They were in the same regiment,” Lucy says. “That’s why they were both on the same train coming home. The men from that regiment would have travelled back from Europe together.”

  There would have been weeks of travel. First the troop ship from Southampton to Montreal. Then a train to Toronto. And finally the long train ride from there to Saskatchewan. All that time my father and Bill would have spent talking and being around each other. They might have got drunk together, or played cards, or simply looked out the window and made small talk. One might have fallen asleep with his head on the other one’s shoulder. They were most likely good acquaintances, or even friends. At the very least, having served together and being from the same place, they would have known each other very well.

  I think of how closely my father paid attention to Bill’s trial for the murder of Sam Munroe, how he liked to recount the details from the newspaper to my mother at night, how he liked to quiz me about the murder. He ne
ver let on that he knew Bill or that they had served in the war together. Was he ashamed of their association? Did he think himself the better man for resuming his life, while Bill had abandoned his family and become the local tramp? Did this make my father feel superior? Did he even know what sort of person he really was?

  “I wonder what ever happened to Bill Dunn?” Lucy says. “If he’s still in that prison.”

  “He died.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I kept track of him.”

  Bill died the year after he was taken into custody for the murder of Henry Tudor and returned to the penitentiary. I’m not sure how he died, as no one would give me that information when I inquired after him, but I do know that he did die.

  “That’s a real shame,” says Lucy.

  “Yes,” I say. “It truly is.”

  I stay at Lucy Weber’s for a while longer. She wants to drive me back to my mother’s, but I wave away her offer and say that I could do with the walk. It’s probably five miles, but I am not bothered. When I was a boy I could cover twice that distance in a day. My feet would fly over the earth, barely touching down.

  It’s the end of summer and the light leans on the horizon as though it’s tired. The months of green and heat are shutting down, and I can already see the line that winter will take across the fields.

  I start out on the road back towards my parents’ house and then I change my mind.

  I FIND MY way back to Sugar Hill by instinct. I could probably do it with my eyes shut.

  There’s a road there now. The hill is the one high place in the area and must be popular with walkers and people out for a Sunday picnic. The hill is taller than I remember, and full of small trees and a patchwork of scrub. There’s a path that switchbacks to the top, well worn from boots and bikes. Before I start up the path, I look around the base of the hill for signs of Bill’s old house. Nothing is visible. Whatever used to be there has long since filled in and grown over. There’s no evidence that anyone ever lived inside Sugar Hill.

  I get down on my hands and knees and scrabble around in the grass and dirt. Sometimes it feels like I made up Bill’s life here, that it was all some sort of childhood mirage. But I uncover a small cache of bones in a depression of earth, and they look like rabbit bones to me. And by the beginning of the path to the hilltop is a rose bush, huge and tangled, but still recognizable as a cultivated rose, not a wild one. Along the path there are a few raspberry canes, and the feathery tops of asparagus plants gone to seed.

  The climb is a hard one and I have to keep stopping to catch my breath. I remove my suit jacket, and then my tie, stuff it in my trouser pocket. When I get to the top, I stand on a bare patch of hillside, looking down. There’s a charred piece of earth near my feet, where people have made a fire. There are a few beer bottles and a couple of candy wrappers on the ground. In the distance are the familiar rectangles of the farm fields, the little bit of stitching below them that is the rail line. Strung out in a line along the rail tracks, the grain elevators are solid blocks of red and brown.

  I miss Bill, standing on top of Sugar Hill. I miss him with an ache that whistles through my body. All I have left to remember him by are the three rabbits’ feet lined up on the windowsill of my daughter’s bedroom at home in Toronto. Sarah likes to rub the softness of the fur against her face, or pretend that the feet are real rabbits, that they are her pets. Sometimes I take them down from the windowsill myself and touch the small, sharp toes, the hinge of knucklebone, the soft whisper of rabbit fur.

  I miss Bill, and I miss the scrap of the past where we knew each other and belonged together. And I miss the future we never got to have. I miss the real possibility of a happy ending. I miss the invention of a machine that will turn wrong action back into thought, anger back to love.

  It is fair to say that I never recovered from that summer at the Weyburn Mental Hospital. I am not the self I was before Bill killed Henry Tudor. I am happier now. But the strange thing is that I remember the past as more true, not less, with each passing year. It’s not that events are sharper, but that they’re more full of feeling. It’s as if the events themselves have sloughed off their chronology and exist now only as pure emotion.

  It was thought that Henry Tudor had run off and was hiding in the hospital stables because he’d seen me come into the mattress factory to take Rusty Kirk away, and perhaps he assumed that all of the men would be taken away, one by one, that his turn would come and he didn’t want to disappear from the only place where he felt safe. He was probably hiding from me because he feared me, and when he saw me in the stables, he might have thought that I had found him, that I was coming to capture him and to take him away from the Weyburn. When he was advancing towards me over the stable floor, he was most likely surrendering. He certainly wasn’t attacking me. Henry Tudor was disturbed, but he wasn’t a violent man.

  Bill, on the other hand, was a violent man. I knew this myself, and it was in his file, the one that Luke Christiansen had read out to me. Bill had mostly kept his violent urges under control at the Weyburn, but his attachment to me had tipped the balance.

  I can’t forgive myself for what happened to Bill. It was my doing entirely. I can see now that I hung on to him too tightly, that I forced a relationship on him that he perhaps didn’t want or couldn’t handle. Henry Tudor’s death, and Bill’s too, can only be my fault.

  But I had wanted to help Bill, to genuinely help him. He had given me hope and love when I had none, and I wanted to return that kindness. I wanted that very badly.

  What do you owe the person who has saved you?

  You owe them everything.

  These are the last green fields of August. From the top of Sugar Hill they shine like emeralds in the sun, unnaturally brilliant in the way things are the moment before they start to fade.

  WHEN I GET back to the house, it’s coming on suppertime. My mother doesn’t remark on how long I’ve been gone. We sit down at the kitchen table, eat cold meat pie and boiled potatoes, listening to the deep notes of the male news announcer as he talks calmly about the day’s events and recounts the weather forecast.

  I’m restless from the funeral and the talk with Lucy Weber, from the walk up to the top of Sugar Hill, and all the thoughts in my head, the feelings in my body. After supper, I leave my mother on the porch and go for a walk down the dusty driveway. I walk out to the crossroads and back again, the fields growing golden with the setting sun, the neighbouring farms set back from the road, exactly where I remember them. Here in the prairies, it is the sky that changes. What’s on the ground tends to stay put.

  There’s the click of insects in the grasses at the edge of the road, and every so often a truck will clatter past, leaving a tumbleweed of dust boiling in the air behind it.

  When I get back to the house, my mother is still sitting on the porch, and so I go to sit down beside her.

  “The evenings are going to get cooler soon,” she says.

  “Yes, I’ve been thinking that too.”

  “It’s funny how the change happens, how it just comes on all of a sudden, even though you expect it to be gradual. But it never is. One day you just wake up and it’s coming on winter.”

  “Yes. It always surprises me too.”

  We’re quiet for a while.

  “It’s been a long, troubling day, hasn’t it?” my mother says.

  “It has.”

  “But it’s a peaceful evening.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you see that spot?” My mother points to the ground just in front of the truck. “That’s where he fell. Just tipped off the porch and staggered for a bit, then dropped right there. He was on his way into town, to the hardware for some roofing shingles.” She pauses. “He was face down in the dirt. I let him lie there for a good long time before I called the ambulance. Just to make sure. I watched from behind the curtains at the living room window. When the birds started landing on him, I knew for certain he was dead.”

  �
�Mom.”

  “I thought it would have happened sooner, with all the drink.” She looks at me and her eyes are bright. “I should have done more, tried harder to get you free of him.”

  “Mom, it’s okay.” I reach over and take her hand. “Honestly it is.” Her hand is as small as a child’s in mine. “I don’t blame you. Because, in a strange way, I was free of him.”

  We sit for a long time like that, holding hands on the porch, while the daylight thins and the night begins to come on and the moon drags her light across the fields.

  I TAKE A taxi home from the airport. It’s been raining, and the streets shine and hiss as we drive over them. All the brightness of the city seems alarming after the emptiness of the prairie.

  Maggie opens the door for me. She must have been watching for my taxi through the front window.

  “How was it?” she asks, leaning up to kiss me.

  “Brutal. For the most part.”

  I put my suitcase down in the hall.

  “But then better.”

  “How was your mother?”

  “She was okay. It was good to see her.”

  “I’m glad.” Maggie puts her arms around me. “I know you weren’t looking forward to it.”

  “Well, it had to be done, and seeing her was nicer than I’d expected. Maybe we’ll take Sarah out there for a visit at the holidays? After my mother has moved into town.”

  “I think that’s a great idea.”

  I’m hungry and start down the hallway to the kitchen, but Maggie holds on to my arm.

  “Before you do anything else, you should go and say good night to Sarah. She’s been waiting up for you.”

  I take the stairs two at a time. Past the landing window, where the tops of the maples rise above the neighbour’s roofline. Past the bathroom door with its stained-glass transom of a tiny bird perched delicately on a branch.

  Sarah is awake.

  “You’re back, Daddy.”

  “I am.”

  “It felt long.”

  “Yes. For me too.”

  I cross the room and sit down on the edge of her bed.

  “Shall we have a story now you’re home?” she says in such a grown-up way that it makes me smile.