Burning Tulips

Chapter Twelve: Dogs and Rabbits

35 Chapter Twelve Dogs and Rabbits Early one morning before the sun has risen, I stand by the stained glass window in the hallway and can tell something is going on in the garage. Mom is standing in the yard grabbing her stomach. Then she sees me and screams, “Don’t come out here! Get away from the window!” I know what is happening without going outside. We raise rabbits, call them our pets, have photos of us petting them in our Sunday clothes. The day before Dad had won a freezer playing poker. Today he’s killing the rabbits. If he knew I saw him, he’d say he had to do it, say the old ones get too mean to keep as pets, say they make good eating. But he doesn’t know, so he’ll pretend the rabbits we ate were rabbits he got hunting, not our pets with the silly names. He’ll say the health department made him sell our rabbits. We haven’t always had rabbits, but we’ve always had dogs. I thought the rabbits were to be pets, but I can see they are another investment, like the used, junky cars that pile up in the backyard waiting for Dad to fix and sell for a profit. If the dogs prove to be good hunters, they get to stick around as our pets. Bo and Pat are our bird dogs who live in the tiny pen behind our garage, a pen that is too small for one dog. I read the dogs books, and if the neighbor kids see me, they laugh. The old woman with long, gray hair and a large garden who lives directly behind us tells me she likes the stories, thinks it’s beautiful watching me read the dogs book. Beautiful sounds like a foreign word, yet I tell her I think it is beautiful watching her brush the long hair which hangs to her knees. I don’t even know her name. I didn’t even know she heard me reading until she spoke one day. She seemed just as surprised to find out I watched her brush her hair. When we watch each other, we don’t feel so alone. She lives with nobody in her house. I live, crowded, in a house full of people. And the dogs, they have no space to run. Yet, somehow, all of us know the same aloneness. One day I’m going to own a large country house 36 Burning Tulips and invite her to live with me. I’ll take all the stray dogs, old people, and orphans. Then there will be no more of this aloneness. The old lady notices Bo isn’t around and asks me where he is. I tell her Dad decided Bo wasn’t a good hunting dog and we sold him. I didn’t tell her that he said it doesn’t matter how many times he beat him—the dog won’t learn. Dad sold Bo to someone at the factory thirty miles away from here and thinks he got a good deal. “Sold him as a goddamn hunting dog,” he laughed, knowing Bo was gun shy. In front of Dad, I made the mistake of crying and he yelled, “Quit crying! It was just a dog! You got one more out there!”The old lady doesn’t need to hear all this. Bo won’t hunt and was sold. She understands the rest. But Bo isn’t just a dog. One morning about five weeks after Dad sold him, I’m eating breakfast and see Bo outside the window. Bo, the dog who lived in a tiny pen, figured out how to travel across the highways and return home. For awhile longer, Bo is able to live in the garage where the rabbits used to live. Dad will get into another one of his moods later, but for the time being, Bo is back. And the old lady stands by the fence, not saying a word, but smiling with the same kind of happy eyes the dogs have, and we read our books, ignoring the neighbor kids, happy to be back together. I sit on a lawn chair next to the pen, the old lady stands by her chicken wire fence, and I read stories until my throat crackles. ...