The rabbit’s nest was made from a ring of dried grass and puffs of cottony fur. In the middle were the babies, tiny and almost hairless, eyes still closed, noses and ears the color of flesh. One was caught in the snake’s unhinged mouth, only its back legs left to be consumed. I backed silently out and rose to my feet without taking my eyes off the snake. I reached for the shovel and chopped at the long rope of its body the best I could, until it lay in raw, pink pieces around the nest. I stood back panting and leaned the shovel against the house. Then I got down on my belly and went as far under the house as I was willing to venture. Looking closer, I saw punctures in one of the tiny bodies. I reached over the snake and prodded with my finger at the baby rabbit, dead but still warm. Then the third one began to squeal, a high, piercing alarm that made me scramble out backward again, bumping my head on the pipes. After a while I crawled back under and took the baby rabbit still screaming into my palm, unable to believe something so small could have such a voice. I held it in the sun begging it to stop, whispering into my cupped palms until the cries died away. I took the baby rabbit inside, the burning bush leaning forgotten against the house, one secret traded for another.
I had to hurry so I wouldn’t be late making supper. I put the sightless creature in a shoebox stuffed with strips torn from one of John’s flannel shirts. I searched the kitchen drawers until I found an old medicine dropper and climbed on my bed to feed it drips of warm milk. At first it stiffened like it would choke but after a while it was content. When it was close to time for John to come home I took the shoebox and hid the rabbit in the hall closet, behind the water heater with the box Granddaddy carved for me. I had realized long ago the box was something John would despise and might destroy. Now I knew the rabbit was something he wouldn’t stand for either, because it comforted me.
All that night during supper I worried the rabbit would cry in its shattering way, but the house was still as we sat at the table over our plates. When John was finished he went to drink in front of the television set he’d bought one week with our grocery money. He didn’t question why I was warming milk or why I went to the bathroom so many times. If he noticed me leaving our bed all through the night, he didn’t seem to care. As long as I kept the baby rabbit full, maybe I could have something of my own for a while.
For almost a month, I took the shoebox with me to the Odom house hidden in a bag of cleaning supplies. Once or twice I thought Hollis would find me out, the way he always hovered close. But, as if by instinct, the baby rabbit kept quiet when he was around. It was fattening up, its fur thickening, its eyes opening, thriving despite the cow’s milk and the dark closet where it lived. It liked to nestle under my chin, still and warm and breathing fast. Granny always said I had a touch with animals. Holding the rabbit close to my heart, I promised when it was strong enough I’d find a way to turn it loose on the mountain. I felt more like myself in those few weeks, having something alive that depended on me, something that knew in its blood and bones what it meant to be wild.
Then Hollis showed up on my doorstep one day near the end of September, while I was feeding the baby rabbit from its dropper. When the knock came, I hurried to settle the rabbit in its bed of rags and hide it behind the water heater. I thought it might cry out because its feeding had been interrupted, but it only rooted at the stuffing of its bed. I looked down at myself on the way to answer the door. It was noon but I was still in my nightgown. I wanted to throw on some clothes or at least a housecoat, but the knocking came again, louder and more persistent. When I opened the door and saw Hollis, my shoulders slumped. He took off his cap and scratched at his flattened hair. “I was about to think you was gone somewheres,” he said. When I didn’t respond, he replaced his cap and sighed. “Well. I was on my dinner break and thought I’d look in on you.”
“I’m all right,” I said.
He looked past me into the front room. “Shoo, it’s kindly hot out here. Looks like we’re having Indian summer. Can I trouble you for a drink of water?”
He followed me to the kitchen and sat at the table as I filled a glass from the tap. I remembered my naked breasts under the thin nightgown fabric and stood at the sink with my arms crossed while he drank the water in long gulps, Adam’s apple bobbing. Then he put down his glass hard and I jumped. He laughed at me. “What’s got you so wound up?”
I glanced toward the kitchen doorway, willing the baby rabbit to stay asleep.
“I bet you thought I was John, coming in for dinner,” he said.
“No,” I said. “Sometimes he eats in town.”
Hollis grinned. “If I had you waiting on me, I’d come home to eat.”
I dropped my eyes, face burning.
Then he said in his awkward way, “Most people thinks me and John favors.”
I decided to ignore him, hoping the less attention I gave him the sooner he would go away. I went to the table and took his glass, not touching where his mouth had been.
“Do you think me and John looks alike?” he asked.
I turned my back to him and rinsed the glass in the sink. “No.”
He fell silent, seeming to think it over. “All right,” he said after a long pause, “I didn’t mean to bother you. I just thought I’d see if you needed anything.”
I turned around and looked at him, waiting for him to leave.
“Hope I didn’t bother you,” he said.
“No,” I said. “It was nice of you to stop.”
I thought he would go but he only sat there staring at me, smiling in a way that made my guts draw into a knot, eyes moving over my face, my hair, my breasts, so intent that I almost felt his touch. After a moment he said, “You don’t like me much, do you?”
I froze, caught off guard. Before I could think, I blurted out, “No.”
His smile died. My hand rose to my throat. For a second I wasn’t sure if I had spoken out loud. “You got a smart mouth, girl,” he murmured, the shock plain on his face. I thought to apologize, but nothing came out. Hollis’s neck and ears turned red. “My brother’s run through a lot of women in his day,” he said. “Don’t think you’re any different than the rest of them.” Then he got up from his chair and stalked to the front door, slamming it behind him. I went to the window to make sure he got into his truck and left. I stood for a long time gnawing my fingernails, knowing I had made a mistake.
I would like to pretend that year never happened and enjoy the life I have now with my twins. Sometimes when I sit on the back steps the girl climbs onto my knees, long legs hanging down and bare toes poking at my calves. I bounce her as we watch the boy playing in the yard, peeling bark from a stick in ash-colored strips. He doesn’t come to me the way she does. I can’t remember the last time I held him. In cold months he follows me to the woodpile and takes the heaviest log he can carry, brings it behind me into the kitchen to put in the wood box beside the back door. He lights a fire and stands back as he tosses in kindling, embers shooting out and disappearing like the ghosts of fireflies. Summer nights I put the oil lamp on the table and we eat as moths bat at the blackened glass chimney. In the mornings they come to the kitchen and stand at the stove waiting for a biscuit. I blow on them before setting them down on their small palms.