Rabbit At Rest

He turns and walks downhill. On Potter Avenue he continues past Joseph and goes into a Turkey Hill Minit Market and to suppress his melancholy buys a ninety-nine-cent bag of Corn Chips. NET WT. 6%4 oz. 177 grams. Manufactured by Keystone Food Prod., Inc., Easton, Pa. 18042 U.S.A. Ingredients: Corn, vegetable oil (contains one or more of the following oils: peanut, cottonseed, corn, partially hydrogenated soybean), salt. Doesn't sound so bad. KEEP ON KRUNCHIN', the crinkly pumpkin-colored bag advises him. He loves the salty ghost of Indian corn and the way each thick flake, an inch or so square, solider than a potato chip and flatter than a Frito and less burny to the tongue than a triangular red-peppered Dorito, sits edgy in his mouth and then shatters and dissolves between his teeth. There are certain things you love putting into your mouth – Nibs, Good amp; Plentys, dry-roasted peanuts, lima beans cooked not too soft – and the rest is more or less disagreeable mush, or meat that gives the teeth too tough a fight and if you think about it almost makes you gag. Ever since childhood, Rabbit has had mixed feelings about eating, especially the creatures that not too long ago were living just like you. Sometimes he imagines he can taste the terror of the ax in the slice of turkey or chicken and the happy snorting and wallowing in pork and the stupid monotony of a cow's life in beef, and in lamb a hint of urine like that whiff from Thelma's face in the hospital. Her dialysis now and their night in that tropical hut, bodily fluids, but there were limits to what bodies can do, and limits of involvement what with Janice and Ron and the kids and fussy living rooms all over Diamond County, and some limitation within him really, a failure or refusal to love any substance but his own. And she too, she did tend afterwards to be curiously severe with him, as though he had become disgusting now that she had eaten, his sour-milk smell tainting her satisfied mouth. His meat having been eaten by her and now she being eaten by all that microscopic chewing from within. Lupus means wolf, she had told him, one of the autoimmune diseases in which the body attacks itself, antibodies attack your own tissue, self-hatred of a sort. Thinking of Thelma, Harry feels helpless and in his helplessness hard-hearted. The Corn Chips as he walks along the pavement begin to accumulate in his gut into a knotted muchness, a little ball of acid, and yet he ca

Janice is working at the dining-room table, making lists for herself to memorize. When she looks up, her eyes have a rubbed frowning look and her mouth is open a dark slot. He hates to see it, hates to see her struggling so hard not to be dumb. His long walk has left him so tired he goes upstairs and takes off his slacks to keep the crease and lies down on Ma Springer's bed, on top of the covers but under the Amish quilt, a patchwork quilt that releases to his nostrils a memory of how Ma smelled toward the end, with a musty far odor of fleshly corners gone unwashed.

He finds himself suddenly scared to be out of the hospital whiteness, the antisepsis, the halls of softly clattering concern focused upon him… sick him.

He must have fallen asleep, for when he opens his eyes the day has a different tone through the room's single window: a cooler, shadowed menace. The rain coming closer. The clouds and treetops merging. From the sounds downstairs, Pru and both children are home, and footsteps move about in the hall outside much as years ago he would hear Melanie and Nelson sneak back and forth at night. It is not night, it is late afternoon. The children, home from school, have been instructed to be quiet because Grandpa is sleeping; but they are unable to resist the spurts of squalling and of glee that come over them. Life is noise. Rabbit's stomach hurts, he forgets why.

After they hear him make a trip down the hall to the bathroom, they come and visit him, the poor little semi-orphans. Their four eyes, two green, two brown, feast on him from the bed's edge. Judy's face seems longer and graver than it was in Florida. She will have an Angstrom lea

"Not much, Judy. It hurt my feelings, mostly, to be there at all."

"Did they fix that thing inside you?"

"Oh, yes. Don't you worry about that. My doctors says I'm better than ever."

"How come you're in bed, then?"

"Because Grandma was studying for her quiz and I didn't want to bother her."

"She says you're going to sleep over."

"Looks that way, doesn't it? A pajama party. Before you were born, Judy, Grandma and I lived here for years and years, with your great-grandmother Springer. You remember her?"

The child's eyes stare, their green intensified by the maple trees at the window. "A little bit. She had fat legs and wore thick orange stockings."

"That's right." But can Ma be no more than that in this child's memory? Do we dwindle so fast to next to nothing?

"I used to hate her stockings," Judy goes on, as if sensing his need for more and trying to meet it.

"Those were Sup-Hose," Harry explains.

"And she wore fu

Roy, bored to hear all this about a woman he never met, begins to talk. His round face strains upward as if he's trying to swallow something rough, and his arched eyebrows pull his dark shiny eyes painfully open. "Daddy – Daddy won't -" or perhaps he said "went"; he seems unable to wrestle his thoughts into shape and begins again with the strained word "Daddy."

Impatiently Judy gives him a push; he falls against a bedpost, there in the narrow space between the mattress edge and the beaded wainscoting. "Shut up if you can't talk," she tells him. "Daddy's in a rehab place getting better."

The child has hit his head; he stares at his grandfather as if waiting to be told what to do. "Ouch," Harry says for him, and, sitting up against Ma Springer's old brown headboard, opens his arms to the child. Roy dives against his chest and lets himself bawl, about his hurt head. His hair, when Harry rubs it, is stickily fine, like Janice's yesterday, when she cried. Something about being helpless in bed, people hit you up for sympathy. They've got you where they want you.

Judy talks right through Roy's aggrieved noise. "Grandpa, want to watch one of my videos with me? I have Dumbo and The Sound of Music and Dirty Dancing."

"I'd love to see Dirty Dancing sometime, I've seen the other two, but shouldn't you be doing your homework before di

The child smiles. "That's what Daddy always says. He never wants to watch a video with me." She looks at Roy being cradled and pulls at her brother's arm. "Come on, stupid. Don't lean on Grandpa's chest, you'll hurt him."

They go away. A ghostly moment as Judy stood by the bed reminded him of Jill, another of the many dead people he knows. The numbers are growing. Life is like a game they used to play on the elementary-school playground, Fox-in-the-Morning. You all lined up on one side of the asphalt area marked out for games. One person was "it," and that one would call out "Fox in the morning," and you would all run to the other side, and "it" would grab one victim from the ru