“You have to burn it,” mumbled her grandson. He slid down a little further in her chair. “You’re supposed to burn it. Everybody knows. To keep them changing.”
“Yes,” said Grandma Harken, curling her lip. “Yes, that’s the way of it, right enough.” She took the jackalope wife’s shoulders and turned her toward the lamp light.
She was a horror. Her hands were human enough, but she had a jackrabbit’s feet and a jackrabbit’s eyes. They were set too wide apart in a human face, with a cleft lip and long rabbit ears. Her horns were short, sharp spikes on her brow.
The jackalope wife let out another sob and tried to curl back into a ball. There were burnt patches on her arms and legs, a long red weal down her face. The fur across her breasts and belly was singed. She stank of urine and burning hair.
“What did you do?”
“I threw it in the fire,” he said. “You’re supposed to. But she screamed — she wasn’t supposed to scream — nobody said they screamed — and I thought she was dying, and I didn’t want to hurt her — I pulled it back out —”
He looked up at her with his feverish eyes, that useless, beautiful boy, and said “I didn’t want to hurt her. I thought I was supposed to — I gave her the skin back, she put it on, but then she fell down — it wasn’t supposed to work like that!”
Grandma Harken sat back. She exhaled very slowly. She was calm. She was going to be calm, because otherwise she was going to pick up the fire poker and club her own flesh and blood over the head with it.
And even that might not knock some sense into him. Oh, Eva, Eva, my dear, what a useless son you’ve raised. Who would have thought he had so much ambition in him, to catch a jackalope wife?
“You goddamn stupid fool,” she said. Every word slammed like a shutter in the wind. “Oh, you goddamn stupid fool. If you’re going to catch a jackalope wife, you burn the hide down to ashes and never mind how she screams.”
“But it sounded like it was hurting her!” he shot back. “You weren’t there! She screamed like a dying rabbit!”
“Of course it hurts her!” yelled Grandma. “You think you can have your skin and your freedom burned away in front of you and not scream? Sweet mother Mary, boy, think about what you’re doing! Be cruel or be kind, but don’t be both, because now you’ve made a mess you can’t clean up in a hurry.”
She stood up, breathing hard, and looked down at the wreck on her hearth. She could see it now, as clear as if she’d been standing there. The fool boy had been so shocked he’d yanked the burning skin back out. And the jackalope wife had one thought only and pulled on the burning hide —
Oh yes, she could see it clear.
Half gone, at least, if she was any judge. There couldn’t have been more than few scraps of fur left unburnt. He’d waited through at least one scream — or no, that was unkind.
More likely he’d dithered and looked for a stick and didn’t want to grab for it with his bare hands. Though by the look of his hands, he’d done just that in the end.
And the others were long gone by then and couldn’t stop her. There ought to have been one, at least, smart enough to know that you didn’t put on a half–burnt rabbit skin.
“Why does she look like that?” whispered her grandson, huddled into his chair.
“Because she’s trapped betwixt and between. You did that, with your goddamn pity. You should have let it burn. Or better yet, left her alone and never gone out in the desert at all.”
“She was beautiful,” he said. As if it were a reason.
As if it mattered.
As if it had ever mattered.
“Get out,” said Grandma wearily. “Tell your mother to make up a poultice for your hands. You did right at the end, bringing her here, even if you made a mess of the rest, from first to last.”
He scrambled to his feet and ran for the door.
On the threshold, he paused, and looked back. “You — you can fix her, right?”
Grandma let out a high bark, like a bitch–fox, barely a laugh at all. “No. No one can fix this, you stupid boy. This is broken past mending. All I can do is pick up the pieces.”
He ran. The door slammed shut, and left her alone with the wreckage of the jackalope wife.
She treated the burns and they healed. But there was nothing to be done for the shape of the jackalope’s face, or the too–wide eyes, or the horns shaped like a sickle moon.
At first, Grandma worried that the townspeople would see her, and lord knew what would happen then. But the jackalope wife was the color of dust and she still had a wild animal’s stillness. When somebody called, she lay flat in the garden, down among the beans, and nobody saw her at all.
The only person she didn’t hide from was Eva, Grandma’s daughter. There was no chance that she mistook them for each other — Eva was round and plump and comfortable, the way Grandma’s second husband, Eva’s father, had been round and plump and comfortable.
Maybe we smell alike, thought Grandma. It would make sense, I suppose.
Eva’s son didn’t come around at all.
“He thinks you’re mad at him,” said Eva mildly.
“He thinks correctly,” said Grandma.
She and Eva sat on the porch together, shelling beans, while the jackalope wife limped around the garden. The hairless places weren’t so obvious now, and the faint stripes across her legs might have been dust. If you didn’t look directly at her, she might almost have been human.
“She’s gotten good with the crutch,” said Eva. “I suppose she can’t walk?”
“Not well,” said Grandma. “Her feet weren’t made to stand up like that. She can do it, but it’s a terrible strain.”
“And talk?”
“No,” said Grandma shortly. The jackalope wife had tried, once, and the noises she’d made were so terrible that it had reduced them both to weeping. She hadn’t tried again. “She understands well enough, I suppose.”
The jackalope wife sat down, slowly, in the shadow of the scarlet runner beans. A hummingbird zipped inches from her head, dabbing its bill into the flowers, and the jackalope’s face turned, unsmiling, to follow it.
“He’s not a bad boy, you know,” said Eva, not looking at her mother. “He didn’t mean to do her harm.”
Grandma let out an explosive snort. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph! It doesn’t matter what he meant to do. He should have left well enough alone, and if he couldn’t do that, he should have finished what he started.” She scowled down at the beans. They were striped red and white and the pods came apart easily in her gnarled hands. “Better all the way human than this. Better he’d bashed her head in with a rock than this.”
“Better for her, or better for you?” asked Eva, who was only a fool about her son and knew her mother well.
Grandma snorted again. The hummingbird buzzed away. The jackalope wife lay still in the shadows, with only her thin ribs going up and down.
“You could have finished it, too,” said Eva softly. “I’ve seen you kill chickens. She’d probably lay her head on the chopping block if you asked.”
“She probably would,” said Grandma. She looked away from Eva’s weak, wise eyes. “But I’m a damn fool as well.”
Her daughter smiled. “Maybe it runs in families.”
Grandma Harken got up before dawn the next morning and went rummaging around the house.
“Well,” she said. She pulled a dead mouse out of a mousetrap and took a half–dozen cigarettes down from behind the clock. She filled three water bottles and strapped them around her waist. “Well. I suppose we’ve done as much as humans can do, and now it’s up to somebody else.”