Rabbits

1.

            You can usually find Sadie sitting cross-legged on the floor of her broken down rabbit shed with the soft curve of rabbit cradled against her belly. She holds the rabbit’s shit-covered paws, its eyes wide with nothing, while she dreams about her mother. But that’s like the sand dunes near the lake shifting and running like rivers and lava, filling up around her ankles. She’s already afraid there is nothing, absolutely nothing, on the other side of that kind of wanting. Dead trees, some older than three hundred years, emerge from the sliding dunes like grey words coming free from muffled sentences. On her way to the beach, Sadie looks up and down the sudden trunks, back and forth between their stiff, surfacing branches. She thinks if she looks hard enough she’ll remember.

            Mostly there’s her remembering her mother coming on her bicycle every day at three o’clock to pick her up from school, the rhythm of her bent back tire rubbing against the fender: So who is she is she am I am I, Sadie likes to sing to herself while shifting the pads of the rabbit feet between her fingers.

            Of this she is sure: Her breasts are hers, and when Hugh put his hands beneath them they had weight, and when he set her on the hood of his truck she had hips, and when he held her up from behind and said, “You have a fine ass,” she had a butt and wished she could follow herself around just so she could see. Before that she was all sand and eyes as big as her body.

            Hugh doesn’t know if he’ll marry Sadie or Patty Armstrong. He has thirty cows, seven pigs, and a warm house. Patty has four horses, an old Chevy, and ten acres her father gave her. Hugh likes to imagine riding on the back forty of his property, racing Patty on the dark quarter horse. He likes to think of hearing the creek from high up on a horse, of feeling wind. Sadie has tight breasts, a laughter as cool as bed sheets after dark, her own tractor, and a hutch of rabbits. And Sadie lets him tickle her until she screams. Patty tells him she isn’t ticklish, go ahead and try.

            In her art class at school Sadie paints falling leaves and models the bodies of women in clay. They all have Barbie-doll breasts and hips like hers. She makes them over and over again until one of the boys whispers, “Dyke,” and then she pulls her hands away.

            The art teacher fires the figures in the kiln. Only three don’t explode from the heat. The broken ones come out dark surprises, parts of their faces and hands blown away because of the fine cracks in the wet clay she did not see. Moisture was trapped inside the others. Once heated, it opened wide their thighs and heads. “That much clay together doesn’t work well,” the teacher tells her. “You have to hollow it out.” The women who have not exploded Sadie paints with brown and white glaze. They come out of the kiln glistening like rocks that never dry.

            She thinks to give them away to Patty or her maybe her best friend Ellen, but not to Hugh. The cross-legged one the art teacher likes so well he mounts to a board for her. He is more excited about it than she is, so she gives it to him. For days after she’s so sorry she aches at night before she goes to sleep.

2.

            I am Sadie’s older sister, and I don’t want to be the one telling you her story. You want me to tell you I am jealous of her, that she was my daddy’s favorite and sat on his lap until she was fourteen, and I wanted that. You want me to tell you I saw her when she didn’t see herself, and it hurt me because she was beautiful. I won’t do that for you. Because Sadie is Sadie, and I am me. I’m telling you her story because she’s dead now.

            Grandma Jenny makes everybody the keeper of everybody else’s story in this something-other-than-a-family we call a family. I got Sadie’s because Grandma Jenny says nobody else can tell it close enough. She’s too tired to take care of it, what with her cataracts filming her eyes over into sleep all the time and those neighbor kids running at the doorbell all day trying to sell her candy bars and frozen pizzas.

            After the funeral Grandma Jenny waves me over. I’m still crying over Sadie. I want to be hurting and remembering on my own, but Grandma Jenny sees everything her way. “I got Stevie to take over her rabbits. Sarah gets her clothes, even if they are too big yet. I’ll keep her paintings from school. You get her story,” she says. She pats my hand for maybe the fifth time in as many years.

            “Why me?” I ask. So far I’ve gotten out of taking on anything too big. Daddy’s story went to my cousin Bob. The two of them went hunting together every fall. He’d seen Daddy climb a tree in a windstorm and another time reach into a cow, pull out a half dead calf, and blow life into it. Grandma decided that was more than the rest of us knew, so Bob should be the one. Stevie got Grandpa Ed’s story, which was weird because Stevie was only seven when Grandpa went, but Grandma said Stevie looked too much like the old man for anybody else to get it. Sadie had Mama’s story. Grandma had not been too sure about giving it to her, but Sadie pleaded. She promised to keep as close to the truth as she could, although I heard her slip plenty of times. Once she told Ellen Haveto that Mama had flown a fighter plane in World War II, which I almost gagged over. I mean, Mama did fly a plane, but it was only an old crop duster.

            I don’t want Sadie’s story. Seventeen isn’t a good age to die. Before that and there’s only a few things to remember. That the kid collected yellow butterflies. That her eyes were the color of mossy pebbles at the bottom of a creek. That she looked too much like somebody else to be all her own yet. Seventeen is the place in between, and it hurts too much to sort out. The old lady knows it. After seventeen there starts to be so much living in a person’s life you can choose any which direction: The parts all fill in with the way she fired a gun at a noise in the dark, or took a sheet of cookies out of the oven because your hands were full with her baby, or how she told you she wasn’t out drinking with somebody else’s husband when she was. That woman fell like too much food from your mouth, especially if you loved her.

            But seventeen, and Sadie. These words rest half-formed on the roof of my mouth. They hurt like hard candy that scratches. Too much of me will come out with the telling, and I’m not sure which is what, who is who.

            “Give it to Ellen,” I say, knowing there’s no way the old lady will go for that. Ellen’s over by the casket tracing the lace on Sadie’s sleeve. I love Sadie, but I wouldn’t touch her body now it’s dead. Because she’s Sadie’s best friend, Ellen gets to do that, along with hiccupping loud during the service and resting her head on Stevie’s shoulder. Ellen would tell Sadie’s story the way Sadie’d like it told, with thick sighs and Sadie the smell of crocuses and silky white and clean like rabbit fur after it’s just been washed.

            “Until Ellen marries Stevie she’s not family,” Grandma Jenny says. Her voice is somewhere else because she knows I’m only stalling.

            “It’s too much for me,” I say. I’m crying more over Sadie being gone than I am over the story. “Let me think about it.”

            Grandma Jenny inches her bent self to the edge of her chair. She positions her cane under her right fist and tilts herself forward and up. “I’m too old for all this hoopla,” she says, using my shoulders as a railing as she goes by. “Just do what I tell you.” Her eyes are wet and mean as a stormy day. “Do what I tell you,” she says again and pinches me on the neck.

3.

            Sadie died when she fell out of the barn window. That simple and that quick. She was leaning naked out over the yard at dusk watching the Kuipers across the field bringing in their hay. The air was fat with crickets and the coming night. Back in the barn Hugh Suthers was pulling on his pants and studying the dark of her back and thighs against the flushed sky. In the distance the Kuipers’ red barn was turning brown like old blood in the fading light.

            Hugh said, “I’ve got to get home to the cows, and you’ve got chores.”

            When Sadie turned away from Hugh to look out the tall, open window, she felt this fear rubbing, roughing deeper and deeper in her. It pushed her to take off like a crow and sweep herself high over the Kuipers’ brick house, then circle further over the skinny, shiny Methodist church steeple that runs straight through the heart of Porterville like a giant needle.

            Hugh blamed himself for bringing up the chores so soon after making love. Standing there shirtless and pulling on his boots, he was sure he saw her jump and that it was his fault.  Later he blamed her for smashing herself down into the muddy yard. She ruined farming for him, the breaking of her body cracking his own dream. He married Patty, but he longed for the side by side hutches of Sadie’s rabbits, the jab and cough of her John Deere’s engine in the morning, his hands closing on the memory of her waist, safe under him, just moments before she chose to do it. He hated Sadie when he tried to get out of farming and all he could talk about was selling the cows and getting free.

            But Sadie didn’t jump. When the sun dropped to a fingernail’s edge over the earth, the last bright lines hit her body dead on. It lit her up for the three Kuiper boys a field away to see. Stunned by her spread-armed and -legged there, full naked and slick as a tree after a rainstorm, they stalled out their tractor and hung together, awkward and wide-eyed as cattle. Squinting her eyes against the glare, Sadie saw them seeing her. Reaching to pull herself in quickly, she slipped on the worn boards. Her hands clasped her naked breasts as she went down head first.

4.

            Stevie and I butcher Sadie’s rabbits off three a night. He wants to get rid of them before they have new litters. I hold each one down by its ears and smack it with a hammer. I can’t look away so I try not to listen instead. Sometimes I sing the national anthem so I won’t hear the whacking even though I can’t help but feel it. While Stevie skins them, I wash my hands in the hose. Their white and brown hairs cling to me like fine cuts and etches. It seems as if takes an hour for the hairs to completely wash free. Some still turn up on my wrists or between my fingers before I go to bed.

            When Grandma Jenny pushes open the screen door, her nose sniffing fresh meat and blood, we tell her we’re rebuilding and cleaning the hutches. Stevie yells that she’s crazy, that there’s nothing dead out here. Go back into the house or she’ll get sick. He’s the only one who gets to talk to her that way because of his looking like Grandpa Ed.

            Each morning now I find a folded ten-dollar bill in the pocket of my jeans or under my pillow. That’s half the money Stevie gets from the Porter Inn for the baby smooth carcasses he drops off at their kitchen. I fondle the money, hold it against the window pane, and try to see through to tomorrow, and the next day, and finally the day when I have enough money to buy that one-way ticket.

            At night Grandma Jenny gets us around the dinner table to drink coffee and talk about Sadie.

            “The leaves will be falling soon,” she says. “Sadie’s favorite time of year.”

            Stevie and Sarah look at me. They wait for me to tell them about Sadie, a memory neither of them have the right to tell since Sadie isn’t all of ours anymore. She’s mine now. They wait for her to wave, for the sound of her yelling hello, for something in my voice to come in and sit like a warm shadow in the chair where Sadie used to be. All of us who are left behind just sitting there, holding on, going nowhere.

            “Didn’t Mama fly that crop duster all the way across the state line one October?” I ask, cutting a slice off one of the apple pies from the funeral and popping it in my mouth.

            Grandma Jenny stops me right there. She waves her fork at me. “You know that’s not your story.”

            The taste of flight burns my tongue. “I can smell the diesel fuel, feel the plane drop and tip, then Mama right it. We are eating wind. Going miles on that tank of gas.”

            Grandma Jenny raises her hand to me, even though it’s too late. I’m already tucked in the seat right behind Mama. Sadie’s squeezed in with me. Our hair whips in our faces. We’re screaming over the engine so we can hear each other tell what’s happening next. “We’re headed all the way to the sea,” Sadie yells. “Further than that,” I say, and we are up and away into a sky neither one of us knows yet. We’ll be making it up as we go.

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