Dear Jane,
When you were twelve you had a rabbit named Fitzgerald, you’d seen the name on the shelf at the library at school and liked the word. The rabbit wasn’t as interesting as the circumstances that surrounded it-Daddy had actually broken two of Mama’s ribs and she’d been hospitalized and you got so distracted by it that you refused to eat, sleep, whatever. In the long run Daddy broke the spell by bringing home this rabbit, striped like an Oreo, whose ears couldn’t quite stand up.
Unfortunately this was February and rather than building the rabbit a hutch you insisted we keep it safe and warm indoors. We took a thirty-gallon aquarium tank from the attic and put it on the floor of the living room. We filled it with wood chips that smelled of forests and then we dropped Fitzgerald in. He ran in confined circles and pressed his nose up to the glass. He pawed at the clear corners. All in all, he was a rotten rabbit. He chewed through telephone cords and socks and the edge of the rocking chair. He bit me.
You loved that demonic rabbit. You dressed it in applespotted baby clothes; hid it in your shiny, stooped church purse; you sang it ballads by the Beatles. One morning the rabbit was stretched out on its side-a revelation-we discovered the rabbit was male-but you felt this change of position was a bad omen. You made me stick my hand in Fitzgerald’s cage and when he didn’t nip me you knew he was sick. Mama refused to take him to the vet; she wouldn’t get close enough to the rabbit to drive it anywhere. She told you to be sensible and get ready for school.
You kicked and cried and tore the upholstery on a certain loveseat but in the end went to school. That day, however, as if God was involved, a nor’easter was predicted. When snow came down so heavily we couldn’t see the playground from our classrooms, we were dismissed. By the time we got home, Fitzgerald was dead.
It’s a funny thing, we’d never experienced death before this and yet both of us were pretty much matter-of-fact about it. We knew the rabbit was dead, we knew there was something to be done, and we did our best. I went to get a shoe box from Daddy’s closet (the only one large enough to fit a rabbit corpse in) and you found Mama’s sterling silver serving spoons and stuffed them in your snowsuit. We put on our down bibs and boots and then it came time to put the body in the shoe box. “I can’t,” you told me, and so I wrapped a dishcloth around Fitzgerald’s cold legs and lifted.
There were three inches of snow on the ground by the time we left the house. You led me to the school playground-the spot where the window of your classroom met the outdoors, a place where you could see the grave all day long. Taking a spoon out of your pocket, you began to chip at the frozen earth. You gave me a spoon, too. An hour later, when the brown ground had opened itself like a raw mouth, we set Fitzgerald to rest. We said an “Our Father” because it was the only prayer we both had memorized. You made a cross in the snow out of the stones we’d unearthed and began to cry. It was so cold the drops froze on your cheeks.
Take Route 70 to Route 2, and then to Route 40. Your endpoint is Baltimore. If you get there before five, you’ll be able to tour the medical museum at Johns Hopkins-a favorite of mine.
Afterward, you denied that you ever owned a rabbit. But this is what I remember about the incident: it was the first time I ever held your hand when we were walking, instead of the other way around.
Love,
Joley