Rabbit At Rest

These red-painted bricks, these imitation gray stones, have seen heartbreaking things but don't know it. A block or two toward the mountain from Ruth's old street – Summer Street it was, though they had lived there in spring, summer spelled their end Rabbit is suddenly driving in a white tu

But Janice knows. When he describes this experience to her, she says, "Those are these Bradford pear trees the city is planting everywhere the old elms and buttonwoods are dying off. It blossoms but doesn't bear any fruit, and is very hardy in city conditions. It doesn't mind carbon dioxide or any of that."

"Why have I never seen them before?"

"You have, Harry, I'm sure. They've been putting them in for ten years now at least. There've been articles in the paper. One of the girls over at the club's husband is on the Improvement Commission."

"I never saw anything like it. It broke me all up."

She is busy re-establishing them in the Pe

Since his heart attack, she means. Since nearly dying. He faintly feels with Janice now like one of the dead they used to say came back and watched over the survivors, living with them invisibly like the mice in the walls. She often doesn't seem to hear him, or take him quite seriously. She goes off across Brewer to visit Nelson and Pru and their children in Mt. Judge, or to remake acquaintance with her female buddies over at the Flying Eagle Country Club, where the clay te

Harry asks her, "Why not go over and help Nelson run the lot? Something's going flooey over there."

"That's no fun, hiring myself. And you know how sensitive Nelson is at the idea of us interfering."

"Yeah – why is that?"

Janice has all the answers, now that she is back with her female crowd of know-it-alls over at the Flying Eagle. "Because he's grown up in the shadow of a dominating father."

"I'm not dominating. I'm a pushover, if you ask me."

"You are to him. Psychologically dominating. You're certainly a lot taller. And were a wonderful athlete."

"Were is right. A wonderful athlete whose doctors say he has to ride a golf cart and not do anything more violent than brisk walking."

"And you don't do it, Harry. I haven't seen you walk further than to the car and back."

"I've been doing some gardening."

"If you can call it that."

He likes to get out into their yard toward the end of the day and break off last year's dead flower stalks and bone-white old poke plants and burn them in a fire kindled on the day's newspaper, the Brewer Standard. The lawn needed a mowing badly when they arrived and the bulb beds should have been uncovered in March. The snowdrops and crocuses came and went while they were in Florida; the hyacinths are at their peak and the tulips up but still with pointy green heads. Rabbit feels peace at the moment of the day when the light dims and the weeping cherry glows in the dusk, its florets like small pink bachelor buttons and the whole droop-branched womanly forgiving shape of it gathering to itself a neon pallor as the shadows lengthen and dampen; the earth's revolution advances a bit more and the scraps of sunlight linger longer under the April sky with its jet trails and icy horsetails, just a few golden rags caught in the shaggy forsythia over toward the neighboring mansion built of thin yellow bricks, and the struggling hemlock, and the tallest of the rhododendrons by the palisade fence you see from the kitchen window. Janice put up a bird feeder in the hemlock a few falls ago, even though Doris Kaufma

Before the April evening falls, the birds, big and little, that the feeder attracts flutter and hop to take a drink or splash their feathers in the blue-bottomed cement pond some earlier owner of this little place, this snug limestone cottage tucked in among the bigger Pe