Authors: Richard W. Jennings
There were faint tracks in the shallow snow, mostly dog footprints, including one set from the fat family dog who followed me out the door, but also some that could have been squirrels and one set that I was pretty sure had been put there by a rabbit.
In the distance, I heard the slowly rising rumble of commuters launching themselves onto the expressway. From across the street came a sudden burst of shouts, followed by the drumlike banging of pots and pans.
I felt disoriented without my horoscope. I didn't know what to do with my time. Orwell was at the new veterinarian's office. And it would be an hour before any other member of my family got out of bed.
I went inside and sat down at the kitchen counter without turning on the light. The weak aroma of last night's dinner hovered around the stove. Hamburgers slightly overcooked in the cast iron skillet. Frozen French fries baked and salted on a cookie sheet. A pot of peas with butter. Lettuce and tomatoes in a blue ceramic bowl. Scents, dreams, thoughtsâeven wordsâthey all try to stick around, but we ignore them, so they leave.
This gave me an idea. I retrieved my backpack from where I'd left it by the kitchen door and wrestled my green three-ring binder from the jumbled mess inside. I would write down everything the rabbit had ever told me, like a real detective, or a proper historian, would have done all along.
It took every bit of the time that fortune had allotted me that morning, but I completed my self-imposed assignment and produced a list that looked like this:
I left out the secret knock, since it was more of a signal than a complete message. I couldn't decide what to do about the dream advice, though, since I couldn't be sure that the words I had dreamed actually came from Orwell. Finally, I did add the phrase, but I put an asterisk at the end of it.
22.
NOT SO FAST. SEE IT ANOTHER WAY.
*
Looking it over, I couldn't help but notice that there wasn't really that much to go on. There were messages that suggested that I pay attention to other messages. There were messages obviously about specific events on certain days and intended just for me. And there were messages that I supposed might be useful to any person, anytime.
As I struggled to figure out the words on this short list, I was reminded of the book we use in church, where the actual words the main person spoke are few and far between, and the majority of the book is filled up with other people trying to explain what he meant by them. Complete understanding of the Book of Orwell could be a long time coming.
Of course, that's just one way of looking at it.
While Orwell was in the hospital recovering from surgery, I called to check on him every day, once before I left for school, and again when I got home.
Every time I called, he was sleeping. But on Friday, the veterinarian said, "This rabbit is ready to be transferred to a nursing home. Does yours have room for him?"
"You bet!" I replied.
My father took me to the pet store to buy a proper rabbit cage and other supplies so that Orwell could stay in my room. Then we hurried to pick up the patient.
Orwell was waiting for us at the front desk in a white cardboard box with round holes in the sides. I wanted to give him a hug, but because of his recent surgery, I scratched his bumpy head instead.
"Am I ever glad to see you alive!" I told him.
He laid back his ears and nuzzled my hand with his weakly vibrating nose.
Safely home, I set up his cage on a LEGO table I'd placed by the windows. I lifted Orwell out of the box with both hands as the veterinarian had instructed, and set the rabbit carefully into the center of the cage on a carpet of fresh, aromatic pine shavings.
Orwell sprawled on his stomach with his tiny legs trailing behind him like the tail of a kite. He made no impression in the pine litter. The poor little guy weighed next to nothing.
Orwell was in as bad a shape as I've ever seen him, worse than the day I found him in the front yard, worse than the time he got carried off by the Irish setter. He was a limp and nearly lifeless rabbit now, a rabbit skin filled with loose and leftover parts, a beanbag toy and little more.
How much luck did he have left? I wondered.
"Can he walk yet?" My sister and her wily cat had followed me into my room.
"I don't think so," I answered. "It's not supposed to happen that fast." Then, so I didn't attract bad luck by expressing too much wishful thinking, I added, "If it ever does."
"Then why is he in a cage?" she inquired.
"I'm not sure," I replied. "Maybe it's to protect him from your cat."
"He won't hurt Orwell. He's just curious about anything new."
It was true that the cat was always the first to inspect any box or shopping bag brought into the house. No sooner would you set it on the floor than he'd sniff it, walk around it, climb into it, sit on it, and generally claim it for his own until he eventually got bored and moved on.
Now the inquisitive feline had his face up to Orwell's wire mesh door. He stared blankly at the quiet rabbit and swished his tail.
"I don't know," I said. "It looks to me like he wants to eat him."
"I don't think he could," my sister said. "They're almost the same size."
Suddenly, in a single, skillful bound, my sister's cat leapt onto the top of Orwell's cage. He stretched out his full furry length, placed his head down on the wire, and studied the little rabbit from above.
Orwell seemed unperturbed.
As my sister and I continued to observe, the acrobatic cat rolled over on his side, rested his head against his forelegs and, as cats around the world are so adept at doing, promptly fell asleep.
"He doesn't look very dangerous to me," my sister said.
Soon the old dog came padding in, his belly barely clearing the carpet. Seeing the cat and the rabbit apparently enjoying an afternoon snooze, he decided to join them, collapsing like a deflated beach ball at the foot of the platform supporting Orwell's cage.
"That's strange," I said. "I thought they were natural enemies."
"People can change, you know," my sister said, an accidental insight that burst from her mouth like the burp that follows swallows of fizzy soda.
"Well, Orwell," I said, "you sure have a knack for making friends. I guess we're going to have to extend the visiting hours a little tonight."
There is nothing unusual about the sight of
FOR SALE
signs in my neighborhood. People come and go for many reasons. So when the school bus dropped me off one chilly afternoon and a freshly planted
FOR SALE
sign beckoned from the house across the street, I barely even noticed, dismissing the commonplace placard with, "
Cela m'est egal
" ("It's all the same to me").
But once I got inside, it was a different story.
"Did you hear?" my father asked. "The what's-their-names, you know, the people who live across the street? They won the lottery yesterday! Can you believe it?"
"I was always meaning to speak to her," my mother said. "But I never had the time."
"Wait a minute!" I interrupted. "You mean the people who live directly across the street? They won the lottery?"
"That's right," my mother said. "Isn't it amazing? I've never known anyone who won the lottery before."
"You still don't," my father said. "You've never actually met them."
"I've waved," my mother corrected him, "as I was backing out of the driveway. That counts."
"Not for much," my father said.
"You mean," I continued in my astonishment, "the house across the street, the one with the
FOR SALE
sign?"
"That's the one," my mother said. "You can hardly blame them for wanting to move, now that they're rich and all."
"Why should he turn out to be the one who gets rich?" my father lamented. "Of all the dumb luck! So close and yet so far!"
I couldn't stop asking the same question over and over. "Those people? That house? That driveway? The one you would come to next if you were driving down the street to our house in a car, or a school bus, or on a bicycle, or in A NEWSPAPER TRUCK?!!"
"What are you talking about?" my father said. "The house right over there. The one with the rusted tricycle in the bushes."
"Maybe I should bake them something," my mother said.
"I doubt they're hungry," my father responded. "Besides, they're leaving."
"Yeah," I said, "with my money."
"I'm sure everyone feels they should have won," comforted my mother.
I went to my room to complain to Orwell about being skunked again by fate. Obviously, the people across the street had wound up with a newspaper intended for me. Orwell must have put the winning numbers in my horoscope before he went in for his operation, not knowing that my father had just canceled our subscription.
Rats, rats, and double rats! What good was luck if it kept missing you all the time?
Sitting in my room with Orwell, agitated about the loot landing at the wrong house, I eventually recalled the rabbit's recent dream suggestion to try to see things in a different light. And so, with reluctant effort, I forced a revised theory to percolate in my brain.
What if what was happening wasn't events going haywire? What if what was happening was happening according to plan? What if I was never supposed to get the money? What if Orwell never walked again?
Nature thrives on change. But is all change merely random? Just because something is unpredictable doesn't mean it's an accident. Just because we can't figure out a pattern doesn't mean it happened by chance.
Everything keeps changing all the timeâdreams, weather, neighbors. And I had heard, possibly in church, that nothing changes everything like money does. I had even heard it said that sudden money can make you worse off than you were before you had it, but how this could be true, I couldn't see.
I thought about a conversation I'd had with my father, not so very long before, when together we'd dragged our after-Christmas trash bags to the curb.
"Look at that!" my father said.
"Look at what?" I replied.
"Look how many trash bags we've put out on the curb."
"There's a lot," I observed.
"Look up and down the street," he continued. "Did you happen to notice that we have more trash bags out here than anybody else in the neighborhood?"
I hadn't noticed, but it was true. We had a handsome little mountain of them.
"Do you know what this means?" my father asked, but I didn't, so he told me, as I knew he would. "It means that you and your sister got more things for Christmas than anyone else in the neighborhood, that's what it means."
"Oh," I said.
"It means," he concluded, "that you and your sister should be very grateful."
But to tell the truth, I wasn't. I was glad when I got the presents, of course. Who wouldn't be? But by the time my father and I'd tossed those trash bags on the curb, the happy holiday feeling the presents brought was long gone.
I'd much rather have Orwell hopping and healthy and hanging around than a whole roomful of store-bought presents. I looked at him. He nibbled politely on a carrot. Orwell was starting to get a real bedridden look. His hair was a mess. I rummaged around in a desk drawer and found an old doll hairbrush that I never use anymore, part of a set I'd gotten for Christmas when I was my sister's age.
I lifted Orwell out of the cage ever so carefully and set him in my lap.
I have no idea what happened to the doll, but I can still remember begging my mother to get it. All those times I was sure I had to have something, only to discover after I'd gotten it, I didn't really want it after all!
Over the years, I've accumulated so much stuff this way, stuff that now jams the drawers of my desk, clutters up my bookshelves, spills from the top of my closet, and lies forgotten in the shadows underneath my bed. Useless junk. Stupid toys. Disappointing gadgets that don't work. So many different kinds of things that someone made and someone sold and someone, namely me, just had to have.
You know what I think? I think that if something is for sale, then the person who is selling it has figured out that it isn't that important after all. So maybe I shouldn't buy it either.
The stuff that really matters is never for sale. It just shows up, sometimes in your front yard.
I brushed that sad sack of faint life lying so limply in my lap. Soon, his fur began to take on a sheen, becoming a rich and earthy brown, like the hair of bears lolling in the shade in summertime, or countless armored acorns scattered among autumn leaves. It was a bold brown, like the hard bark of winter trees defiant in the snow. A shimmering, glistening brown, like the tight, wet fur of water mammals working tirelessly on the riverbanks in the spring, nature's brown, a manly brown, a brown that quietly warns of hidden strength.