Rabbit Foot Bill Read online

  “We are doing very important work here, Flint,” says Dr. Christiansen. “Very important work. I need for everything to run smoothly. And so I need Agatha to be happier.”

  I’m not sure what any of this has to do with me.

  “What can I do to help?” I ask.

  “Befriend her. Be a sympathetic ear. Assist her with the preparations for the dance. She’s putting up decorations this moment, I think. In the gymnasium.”

  I recognize an order when I hear one.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good man.” Dr. Christiansen gets up to open the door for me. “And much appreciated.”

  AGATHA CHRISTIANSEN IS standing on a stepladder looping a length of yellow crepe paper streamer along one wall of the gymnasium. Like her husband, she smokes, has a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth. She looks down at the sound of the heavy wooden doors closing behind me.

  “I suppose Luke sent you?”

  I walk across the gym floor towards her. There seems no point in lying.

  “Yes.”

  “That bastard,” she says, turning her attention back to the length of yellow streamer. “But I admit I could do with some assistance. These damn things keep catching on fire.”

  There are ashes on the floor beneath the ladder, a strip of charred streamer hanging limply from one of the rungs.

  “Maybe you should put out your cigarette.”

  “Maybe I should.” Agatha comes down two steps on the ladder, looks hard at me. “How old are you? Twelve?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “Not really old enough for anything,” she says.

  “Old enough to be a doctor here at the Weyburn.”

  She smiles at that, descends the last steps of the ladder so that she is standing in front of me. We are the same height. “You’re a scrappy one,” she says. “Luke usually prefers his followers to be more docile.” She takes the cigarette from her mouth, taps the long ash onto the wooden floor between us. “Handsome too. I bet the girls are crazy for you.”

  This makes me remember Amy, the recent, terrible phone call, and my fruitless attempts to have her listen to reason. (I have tried to call her back several times since she broke up with me, and she has hung up on me each and every time, unwilling to listen to any of my heartfelt pleas for reconsideration and my declarations of love.)

  “Not really,” I say. “I did have a girlfriend, but she lives in Montreal and we couldn’t stay together.” I pause. “On account of the distance.”

  “Really?” Agatha tilts her head at me, the expression on her face one of skepticism. “In my experience, distance is very attractive. Makes the heart grow fonder. Lends enchantment. That sort of thing.”

  “She was tired of my letters,” I admit. “I sent too many and overburdened her. She said I tried too hard.”

  Agatha Christiansen snorts with laughter.

  “Little idiot,” she says.

  At first I think she means me, and I stiffen in indignation. But she leans over and brushes something from my shoulder, the gesture light and tender, and then I know that she is talking about Amy.

  THE DANCES AT the Weyburn are very popular—much more popular than the pottery program would have been, even if people weren’t eating the clay. Physical activity is always more stimulating than something static like arts and crafts. Better to run after a ball or swing a racquet than paint a night sky full of clumsy stars or make skinny animals out of pipe cleaners.

  At dinner before the dance on Friday, the men on my ward are buzzing with excitement.

  “It’s best when there’s a live band,” one of them says. “And worst when the band is made up of people from here, because no one is any good.”

  “A dead band,” offers another man. (I am struggling to learn their names and having no luck, but at least they are beginning to look familiar.)

  “Remember when someone drowned in the well after that dance last year?” a third man says. “It was an awful mess fishing him out.”

  “They didn’t find him until weeks later,” explains someone else.

  I am getting used to these dinner conversations, how topics slide with alarming rapidity from one topic to another and often end with death. It’s a kind of shorthand that families use. No need to explain everything when the participants know one another so well. The men on this ward, on each ward of the hospital, have been together for years and have an intimacy that speaks to that.

  At the dance the music plays through a gramophone, with two of the patients controlling the placement of the records on the turntable—one to snatch the record off and the other to put the new one down.

  “Not a fool-proof method,” says William Scott, who has come to stand beside me against the wall. “I’m told there have been fist fights if one of them does their part too slowly.”

  There are punch bowls and two kinds of cookies, and the streamers hanging from the ceiling are only slightly lopsided.

  I dance with one of the nurses and several of the female patients. No one, including myself, is a very good dancer, but what we all lack in skill, we make up for in exuberance. I find that I am enjoying myself more than I thought I would. It is good to stop worrying about what kind of job I am doing and just move my feet in time with the music.

  When I take a break from dancing to catch my breath, I notice Agatha Christiansen standing near one of the punch stations. We lock eyes and she saunters over to me.

  “Shall we?” She holds out her hand.

  We dance close, her arms wrapped around my neck. Her hair reeks of smoke and hairspray. I can smell alcohol on her breath.

  “You know,” she whispers in my ear, “you can try hard with me any time you want.”

  Her blatant proposition shocks me, and I don’t know what to say in response.

  I can see Dr. Christiansen over her shoulder, dancing with one of the female patients, laughing as he twirls her around and she ducks under his outstretched arm.

  I pull away from Mrs. Christiansen.

  “Sorry,” I say, “but I have to go now.”

  I flee into the hallway and then out of the building into the night. I have forgotten to bring a flashlight with me and the lights around the hospital building wash out after a few hundred feet into darkness. After that there’s only the waning moon to show my way.

  The main hospital path leaves the front entrance, passes by some of the farm buildings, and then winds along the river to the cottages. The cottages are probably a mile distant from the hospital, the farthest buildings from the main compound. I suppose this is meant to ensure we have some measure of privacy, but now the distance feels excessive.

  I’m passing the stables, where the working team of horses, the Percherons, are housed, when I see the man. He’s moving along the outside of the building. He’s far enough away to be in the shadows and he has his back to me, but I recognize the way he moves as though it was myself moving in my own skin. I rush from the path towards the barn, but by the time I get there, the man who I swear is Rabbit Foot Bill, has disappeared.

  When I get back to the cottage, I can’t quiet myself. I lie in bed. I get up and pace around the room. I make some tea. I walk outside and stand by the river. I go back indoors. I sit in a chair. I lie down in the bed again.

  When I was twelve they took Bill away to the Prince Albert Penitentiary because there was not a hospital for the criminally insane. I have never been to the prison, but I know that it is a hard place, a severe place. This mental hospital is a resort in comparison. The inmates there would not have the freedoms of this institution. The prison is not a place for rehabilitation. It is penitential, with cells and punishments. But if one was a good prisoner there, followed the rules and didn’t cause any trouble, then perhaps they might be transferred to a place such as this? Is that how Bill got here?

  It is half my life ago, but I can remember Bill and my time with him as though no years have passed at all. I can feel it in my body, the pull of wanting to be near him, and I r
ealize, with a shock, that nothing has altered with my becoming an adult, that I still love him as much as I ever did.

  IN THE MORNING I search out Dr. Christiansen in his office.

  “I was wondering,” I say, “if there’s a patient at this hospital by the name of William Dunn?”

  “Dunn?” Dr. Christiansen gets up and goes over to the filing cabinet near the window. He opens the top drawer and rifles through the folders. “One of your patients?” he asks.

  “No, not a patient of mine. But he’s from the same small town as I am. I used to know him there and I thought I saw him yesterday here, out near the barn.”

  “Dunn. William. Yes, here it is.” Dr. Christiansen extracts a file from the cabinet and brings it over to his desk. He opens it.

  “He was transferred here from the Prince Albert Penitentiary two years ago. We have him working with the horses. He’s good with animals, seems to have a knack. That’s strange.” Dr. Christiansen looks up at me. “It seems we allow him to sleep in the stables instead of on the ward.”

  “He always preferred animals to people,” I say. “And he had trouble being indoors.”

  “He may sleep in the stables,” says Dr. Christiansen, “but technically he is on a ward and has a doctor in charge of him. I’m afraid it’s not your ward, Flint,” he says, shutting the file. “And you’re not his doctor. It might upset him to see someone from his past. He’s not schizophrenic, but he displays periodic bouts of psychotic behaviour. It’s probably best if you don’t renew your acquaintance with this William Dunn.”

  I RUN OUT to the stables as hard and fast as I can, my white doctor’s coat flapping behind me like a sail.

  It’s dark inside the building and it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the change in light. I stand just beyond the doors, panting. I can hear the whicker of a horse and the rasp of my own breathing, and then I can see him, can see Bill. He’s standing outside the row of stalls, a bucket in one hand, a length of rope in the other. He looks taller and leaner, but otherwise recognizably the same. The same thick black hair. The same long limbs.

  “Bill,” I shout across the warm darkness of the barn. “Bill, it’s me. It’s Lenny.”

  He comes towards me then, bucket and rope still in hand, until he’s standing right in front of me. His face is more deeply lined and his eyes have a flicker of fear or nervousness in them that they didn’t possess before, but he’s still the same man I remember from when I was a boy. I feel flooded with happiness.

  “Doctor,” he says, “what did I do?”

  “No, Bill, it’s me. It’s Lenny. From Canwood. From when you lived in Sugar Hill. Remember?”

  He peers at me, even though we’re standing inches away from each other. He looks deep into my face, his forehead tightened into a frown.

  “I don’t know you, doctor.”

  “Because I wasn’t a doctor then. I was a boy. I was a twelve-year-old boy when you last saw me. I don’t look exactly the same.”

  I want to say, When you last saw me was when you killed Sam Munroe, when they took you away, when you were called Rabbit Foot Bill, but I don’t want to upset him with unpleasant associations of the past.

  “I used to come and see you in your house in Sugar Hill.”

  “How did you know I lived in Sugar Hill?”

  “Because I would visit you there.”

  “You would?”

  “You often did work for Mrs. Odegard and I would visit you there too. Remember, you used to cut her hedge.”

  Bill considers for a moment. “Yes,” he says after a while. “I recollect I did cut a hedge.”

  “Don’t you remember me, Bill?”

  I know he probably underwent all sorts of punishments when he was in prison. He might have been tortured by guards or by the other prisoners. Or sent to rot in solitary confinement. He’s sure to have suffered from various deprivations, and maybe this is why he can’t seem to make the leap from the image of the boy I was to the image of the man I have become. I have changed but surely not completely? It breaks my heart that he doesn’t recognize me.

  “No.” Bill shakes his head slowly. “I don’t believe I do know you.”

  “Well, I’ll try to help you remember.”

  “All right, Dr. Lenny,” says Bill agreeably. “If that’s what you want to do.”

  That’s what’s different about him, a passivity that wasn’t there when he was a free man. Most likely this is the result of years of institutional living. I hate to think that he’s been broken, that his spirit is damaged, but I also have to accept that twelve years of captivity will change any man.

  “You live here now?” I ask. “In the stable?”

  Bill nods.

  I notice that the bucket he’s carrying is full of water. “That bucket must be heavy,” I say. “Put it down for a moment and show me where you live.”

  Bill obediently places the bucket on the floor of the stable and leads me back past the row of stalls to the last enclosure on the left-hand side. He pushes open the swinging half door and I see the cot, bedding neatly made, and the small table beside it with a flashlight and a cup on it. The rest of the stall is empty—empty and very clean.

  “There’s more room here than on the ward,” I say, and Bill nods again.

  “I couldn’t abide it there,” he says. “There were too many people. They made too many noises.”

  “Don’t the horses make noise?” I look down the row of stalls, at the heads of the horses all turned towards us, watching curiously.

  “I know what the horse noises mean,” says Bill. “People sometimes make noises that have no sense to them.”

  I have an overwhelming desire to throw myself down on Bill’s bed, the way I would throw myself onto the fur-covered hay bales in his house on Sugar Hill.

  “Do you miss Canwood?” I ask. “Do you miss Sugar Hill?”

  Bill shifts from side to side, as though it makes him uncomfortable to think back to the town and his home. Perhaps it upsets him too much to remember anything around the murder and that is why he has blocked out the memory of me also.

  “I like it here,” he says.

  “What do you like?”

  “The horses.”

  “What about the hospital?”

  “I don’t go into the hospital, unless a doctor comes out here and tells me to.” Bill reaches out and touches my shoulder. “That’s what I thought you were here to do, Dr. Lenny—make me come back with you to the hospital. You have the look of a doctor.”

  “I am a doctor,” I say, “but I haven’t come to make you do anything. I just wanted to see you, Bill.”

  “Because you know me?”

  “Yes.” I like the heaviness of Bill’s hand on my shoulder. It feels exactly like I remember. “And because you know me.”

  I DO WORRY about going so directly against Dr. Christiansen’s orders, but when I walk away from my visit with Bill in the stables, I feel almost giddy with happiness, and that feeling overrides any trace of guilt. It is all right that Bill does not remember me. I will get to know him all over again and then, when he feels comfortable with me, he’ll be able to recall my younger self. There are so many questions I want to ask him, but first I have to make him trust me again, trust me as he did when I was a boy.

  Back at the cottage I rummage around in the bureau until I find what I’m looking for—the six rabbits’ feet I collected from Bill when I was twelve. I lay them out on the top of the bureau, in order of size, just as I used to. If I push down hard on the top of the feet, their toes will make little holes in the wooden surface of the dresser.

  I have learned some things about rabbits’ feet in the years before meeting up with Bill again. I made it my business to learn. I know that to be truly lucky, a rabbit’s foot should be cut from a living rabbit at the time of a new moon. The rabbit should be caught in a cemetery. This is because some folklorists believe that the rabbit is actually a shape-shifted witch and to cut the feet off the rabbit is to disable t
he powers of the witch.

  The foot is thought to be able to ward off evil because a rabbit’s powerful hind legs touch down on the earth before their front legs do, and the strength of this action can ward off spirits from the underworld.

  More benign associations have the rabbit’s foot as lucky because rabbits are connected with spring and the return of flowers, the return of life. To see a rabbit running across your land meant that you would enjoy a fertile garden that year, or that it would be a good time to set about having children.

  I especially like the superstition that states that it is only good luck to carry a rabbit’s foot if that foot has been given to you as a gift. If the killer of the rabbit keeps the foot for himself, it will only bring misfortune.

  There’s a sudden, sharp knocking at the front door. I walk across the room to answer it. Agatha Christiansen stands on the porch.

  “I’ve come to apologize,” she says through the screen. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

  “You didn’t frighten me.”

  “Didn’t I?”

  “Not at all.”

  She tilts her head to one side, a gesture I now recognize as belonging to her. “Then why haven’t you invited me in?”

  I open the screen door, wordlessly, and she steps into the cottage.

  “I like what you’ve done with the place,” she says, and that makes me smile.

  “Thank you.”

  We stand opposite each other. She smiles at me and I see how beautiful she is. Her eyes are the colour of sunlit wheat.

  I feel emboldened from having seen Bill, and full of happiness, and maybe this is why it is the simplest thing in the world to lean in and kiss Agatha Christiansen as she stands in the little galley kitchen.

  “Well, well,” she says after we break apart. “You are full of surprises.” She takes my hand and leads me into the bedroom.

  Sex with Agatha is nothing like sex with Amy, who gave out her passion in small, measured increments and then seemed to immediately resent it. Agatha laughs inappropriately, bites my shoulder so hard that she draws blood, cries when she comes, her tears hot stars blooming on my skin.