Rabbit Foot Bill Read online

  Dedication

  FOR HUGH LAFAVE AND CAROL DRAKE

  BASED ON A TRUE STORY

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Canwood: Saskatchewan 1947

  Weyburn Mental Hospital: Saskatchewan 1959

  Weyburn: Saskatchewan 1960

  Canwood: Saskatchewan 1947

  Canwood: Saskatchewan 1970

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Helen Humphreys

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Canwood

  Saskatchewan

  1947

  BILL NEVER LIKES TO LEAVE TOWN THE same way twice. He strides out with an urgency I find hard to match. He leads me through the tamarack woods. He leads me through the meadow bog. He leads me through the tall prairie grasses. He leads me across the swift, shallow river. I usually have to run to keep him in my sight.

  We have been friends for a year, Bill and I, and although people don’t approve, we are friends anyway. I like that Bill isn’t bothered by what people say. Mostly he is just worried that someone will follow him out of town and see where he lives.

  The reasons why people don’t like my being friends with Bill are these: first, because he is a man and I am a twelve-year-old boy; and second, because he is a man who is not like other men. He doesn’t talk much. He doesn’t live in a house. He doesn’t have a real job. He doesn’t have a family. People say he’s slow, but as I’ve already said, I have to run to keep up with him.

  No one blames me for the friendship. They see it as Bill’s doing. But really, it is me who pushed for it. I followed him around on the days when he sold his rabbit’s feet in town, or did odd jobs for Mrs. Odegard. I hounded him with questions. I fetched him water when he was hot and thirsty. I wore him down with my attentions so that now he’s used to having me around.

  “Why do you want to befriend a tramp?” asks my father, and I can’t tell him why. I can’t explain this feeling of running after Bill under the long, blue prairie sky. It is like he is leading me out of darkness, out of a loneliness I don’t even know I have.

  Bill lives in Sugar Hill. Right inside the hill. It takes ages to get there, so I don’t go very often, as Bill has to walk me in and then walk me back out again before nightfall.

  When we get to Bill’s house, I’m always out of breath from rushing. Near Sugar Hill I can hear his dogs barking, and when we are in sight, they come running up to greet us. There’s a black dog and a grey, shaggy one. Bill doesn’t have names for them. He puts his hand on their heads—first the black dog, then the grey one—and they stop barking and follow us into the house.

  The house is carved into the base of the hill. There’s a small wooden door that Bill can only get through by ducking down, but inside the house he can stand up straight again. The dug-out space is framed up with pieces of wood and there are walls made from the large wooden grain dividers from the rail cars.

  There’s a big main room with two pockets off it. One pocket is the kitchen and the other is the bedroom. The kitchen has pieces of corrugated tin around the walls, and a stove made from a forty-five-gallon oil drum with a fire hole cut out near the bottom and a metal sheet laid on the top so water can be boiled and food can be hotted up. A stovepipe leads from the barrel, through the earth overhead, and pokes up outside, like an animal nosing out of its burrow.

  In the bedroom there is a bed made of hay bales and covered with rabbit skins. The main room has more hay bales for seats, and a bookshelf that covers one wall. Sometimes, if it’s bright outside and Bill’s left the door open for light, I will sprawl on the hay bales and look through his books.

  What is wrong with not working? What is wrong with lying on the hay bales, on the soft rabbit fur, with the dogs curled up beside you, in the house you have made yourself? What is wrong with wanting to keep away from people? There’s not much about people that I like either. I have only been in this town for two years, but that is long enough to have made friends and I haven’t got any.

  This will be the last time I come to Bill’s house with him, but I don’t know that yet. I have skipped school to be here.

  It’s early summer. Bill’s garden at the base of the hill is coming into bloom. We have to walk through it to get to the house, and he shows me things as we follow the path up to the front door.

  “Beets,” he says, pointing to a patch of bare earth. “Rabbits ate the tops.”

  “Roses, carrots, onions.” He stops in front of another square of empty dirt. “This is where the lettuce used to be,” he says. “I blew it up trying to shoot the rabbits.”

  I circle Bill, like a fly on a horse. I want to be all around him, all at once.

  “Bill,” I say, “will you show me how to grow things? Will you take me hunting? Can I shoot a rabbit?”

  Bill opens the door of the house, slouches down to fit inside the frame.

  “Nope,” he says, and steps inside.

  He turns as I’m coming through the doorway and picks me up, his huge hands grabbing me around the ribs and hoisting me up into the air.

  “Quieten down,” he says, as though he’s talking to the barking dogs.

  The pressure of his hands around my ribs makes me squirm and kick out like a beetle. I can smell his sweat and the stale tang of his breath. He carries me over to the hay bales by the bookshelf and drops me.

  We eat great slabs of bread with jam made from the Saskatoon berries that grow in the gullies between the hills. Bill brews tea in a saucepan and we drink it out of two battered tin mugs. After he’s finished drinking his tea, Bill puts some freshly severed rabbits’ feet to boil in the tea water. Boiling them gets rid of the stray bits of flesh and blood and the dirt from their nails from when they were alive. People only want to buy a clean rabbit’s foot. It’s not lucky if it’s not clean.

  “Can I have another one, Bill?” I ask. “I lost the one you gave me.”

  This isn’t true. I have carefully kept all the rabbits’ feet I’ve managed to make Bill give me. I have them lined up by size on the small table beside my bed. Sometimes, when I hold one in my hands, I push back the hair and feel each tiny toenail. It is the feel of the toenails that makes me remember that the foot was once alive.

  “Last one,” says Bill, and he walks over and drops a rabbit’s foot into my cupped hands. “Next time I’ll have to be charging you.”

  I know this isn’t true either, but I pretend to take the warning.

  “I can see that, Bill,” I say, and I tuck the rabbit’s foot into the pocket of my overalls.

  After the murder I don’t know what to do with the rabbits’ feet. There are six of them altogether, enough for three full rabbits, since the only feet Bill uses for the charms are the hind ones.

  What I wish, after the murder, when I’m lying alone at night in my room, is not that the boy was alive again, but that the rabbits were. I lay the rabbits’ feet out on my stomach. I can feel the cold, thin bones and the ticky-tack of their nails against my skin. I want them to be conjured back into three living rabbits, each one warm and trembling, resting quietly, safely, on my body.

  Rabbits sleep in a great rabbit heap in their burrows. When Bill cuts the feet off his rabbits, he throws their bodies into a pile, ready for skinning. They seem asleep, furry body nestled into furry body, slung over one another in easeful abandon. They seem asleep until I look at their back legs and see the bloodied stick ends where their feet used to be attached.

  “Why are rabbits’ feet lucky?” I ask.

  “Dunno.” Bill has his back to me, trying to scoop the feet out of the boiling water before they disintegrate into soup.


  “Is it because they’re fast? Because they can outrun everything?” I’m thinking that a rabbit runs so swiftly that it could even outrun trouble. Perhaps that is why it’s lucky to carry their dried-up, shrivelled feet in your pocket.

  “They run fast, but they run to a pattern,” says Bill. “And once you’ve sussed out the pattern, they’re easy to catch.” He turns around from the stove and holds out a small, sodden rabbit’s foot towards me and smiles. “See.”

  Before it’s time for me to return home, Bill walks me up to the top of Sugar Hill. It is the highest point of land around, and looking down at the flat rectangles of fields and the squares of the grain bins makes me feel more bird than boy, like I could fly right off the top of Sugar Hill, soar lazily above the prairie dusk.

  The dogs have come with us to the crest of the hill and they wrestle with each other in the vetch. I like watching them fight, because they mean it and don’t mean it at the same time. They can stop right away if they decide to. When I am fighting it’s not that simple.

  The sun is lower than the hill, although it takes forever to sink beneath the flat pan of prairie in the long lean of light that takes afternoon to evening. At this moment we’re the highest point in the landscape and I want to remark on this to Bill, but I can tell he’s tired of my jabbering. He stands a little apart from me, arms at his sides.

  It’s June. The light is long, but the air shifts cool in the evenings. I can still taste the winter in it.

  This was one of the last real times I spent with Bill, and I wish we had spoken or that he had laid his hand on my head as he sometimes did; but this didn’t happen. I watched the dogs and he watched the sky, and then he turned and I followed him back down the hill.

  He takes me to the edge of town and I walk along the rail lines until I’m home. We live at the station and this station looks the same as all the other stations we’ve lived in. One small prairie town is the same as the next to me, and I don’t know why my father thinks they are different. He’s restless, my mother said once. He has a restless soul. But how is moving twenty miles down a rail line a cure for this restlessness? The only thing that makes this place better than the last one is Bill. Sometimes, coming home at night to the station, I actually, seriously, forget which town I’m in.

  Supper is cold beef and potato salad. Father doesn’t like talk at meals, so we sit there in the cool of the kitchen with the night noise of the prairie outside and the rattle of knives and forks against our plates. My parents won’t be finding out about my missing school until tomorrow, so tonight I am safe and I sink into the calm waters of this, into our quiet supper in the kitchen, followed by mother and I listening to the radio in the parlour and father sitting on the porch, smoking. I don’t call it happiness, but looking back now I think it was a sort of happiness; that shelter is a kind of happiness.

  At night there’s the low loop of the train whistle and the scratch of bat wings in the air outside my bedroom window. I lie in the dark and listen to the sounds of this June night, and I wonder if Bill can hear these same things from deep inside Sugar Hill, or if he only hears the noises of the burrowing creatures that share the dug-out with him. I wonder if the rabbits’ souls are restless souls and if they try to claw their way out of the hole or race around at top speed inside, looking for their living bodies. Thinking of the rabbits makes me remember the rabbit’s foot that Bill gave me this afternoon, and I get out of bed to fetch it from the pocket of my overalls. The floor is smooth and cold under my bare feet, and when I cross the room to the chair where my clothes are folded, I can see the moon, huge and heavy, weighing down the corner of my bedroom window. It keeps me there, hand curled around the bony rabbit’s foot, my skin growing chill. It is not that I think the moon is beautiful—although I do like the milky sway of it—but more that I can feel the heaviness of it as though it is a sorrow suddenly caught in the snare of my own blood.

  The next day at school I try to keep well away from the group of boys who are always beating on me for reasons I never understand. It’s raining, so I must be hit. We’re doing sums in arithmetic, so I must be hit. The sky is a certain shade of blue, so I must be hit.

  I slink into the schoolyard just before the bell, keeping to the wall and lingering near a knot of girls playing hopscotch. When it’s time to go into class, girls and boys are meant to line up separately before entering the building. I stay pressed to the brick wall until the last possible minute and then scuttle in at the end of the girls’ line. Once inside the classroom it’s safer because the teacher is there. Mrs. Clark likes order and carries a long wooden pointer, smacking it down on the edge of a student’s desk if they start whispering or horsing around. She is not above using the pointer to hit a student’s outstretched palms when they have been “disruptive.” Mrs. Clark’s words are connected very closely to certain punishments, and we have all quickly learned this vocabulary. Being “inconsiderate” means a half hour of standing quietly in the corner of the classroom, face to the wall. If a student is “unruly,” they are sent to stand out in the hallway for an hour. But being “disruptive” means that the student is hauled up to the front of the class, told to put out their hands, and then whacked across the palms with the wooden pointer. Sometimes one hit is judged to be enough, but if Mrs. Clark has been particularly annoyed by the manner of the disruption, she will strike a student’s hands until they are red and swollen.

  Most of my fellow pupils are afraid of Mrs. Clark, but I am only grateful for her. While she is striding around the classroom or stiffly writing equations on the chalkboard, I am safe from harm. No one will pick on me while we are in class for fear of being seen to be “disruptive.”

  Today I am the last to file into the classroom, and as I come through the doorway, Mrs. Clark moves behind me to close the door.

  “Where were you yesterday, Leonard?” she asks.

  I have already rehearsed my lie on the walk to school and it slides easily out of my mouth.

  “Helping my father at the station, ma’am,” I say.

  This is a farming community. Teachers are used to their pupils missing school for chores.

  “Very well then,” Mrs. Clark says. “But I will be needing a note from him next time.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The door clicks shut behind me and I take my seat at my desk near the window.

  I don’t mind school. It doesn’t take much effort to be good at it, and I can spend some of the day paying attention and some of it staring out the window at the fields. I like to think of Bill, imagine what he is doing while I am learning geometry or the provincial capitals. I like to picture him doing the most ordinary of things—walking with his dogs or eating breakfast. He does a handful of things over and over again, and I know what most of these things are. It makes me feel good to be able to recreate the activities of his daily life while I am sitting at my school desk.

  Recess brings danger in the form of the older boys in class, who come sniffing for me like dogs after a rat. The pack of boys are led in their chase by a tall boy with the nickname of Snake, but whose real name is Sam Munroe.

  I was last into the school and I am first out at recess, hurtling through the door and out into the yard, flattening myself against the brick wall by the hopscotch grids.

  Sometimes the girls take pity on me and let me call out the numbers for them, but today I am outside before they have had a chance to assemble, and the group of bully boys is right behind me. I can hear their feet slapping against the ground as they race after me. It sounds just like wings on a flock of ducks beating up from a pond.

  Snake grabs me around the neck, his hand sweaty and his breath oddly sweet. His angry face is just inches from mine as he pushes me up hard against the wall.

  “Did you think you could escape your punishment?” he says.

  It’s not really a question, and I’ve learned, from past mistakes, not to answer him, even if he insists on it. Whatever I say will be wrong and will bring more trouble down on
me. Instead, I pretend that I can’t breathe, that he’s cutting off my air supply. I gasp and splutter, hope that my face is turning suitably red. I flail my arms and legs.

  And then, like a huge bird descending from the sky, like an angel from heaven, Mrs. Clark plucks Snake off me, and the other boys scatter like chicken feed. I rub my neck. It feels like a miracle, watching Snake be hauled along by Mrs. Clark, back through the door of the school for what is sure to be an energetic caning. But I also know that this moment of victory will be a short one, and that Snake will be after me twice as fiercely when he gets free from the teacher.

  The hopscotch girls are out in the yard now. They circle me like crows. One of them, Sally, who has a desk near mine, puts her hand on my arm.

  “Are you hurt?”

  I shake my head. My neck feels a bit sore, but it’s nothing compared to what I usually suffer under the hands of Snake and his friends. I feel lucky, not hurt.

  Sally has kind brown eyes, and her frown is one of concern, not displeasure. I like the feeling of her hand on my arm.

  “Why does he hate me?” I ask. “I haven’t done anything to him.”

  “You’re new,” says Sally.

  “Not that new,” I say.

  I have been in Canwood for two years. That seems like a suitably long time to me.

  “You’re new,” she says again.

  “And small,” says one of the other girls.

  And then I do understand. It’s not about me at all. It’s because I’ve recently arrived at the school, where probably there have never been any new students, any people outside of this small community, any strangers. And I am small for my age, making it easy to pick on me. Somehow, this makes me feel disappointed. I wish Snake’s persecution was actually about me somehow, not just about aspects of my life I have no control over.

  “It won’t stop then, will it?” I say.

  “Maybe you’ll grow bigger,” says Sally helpfully. She takes her hand off my arm. “Would you like to count for us until recess is over?”