Then Henry forgot about the cemetery for a while. In spite of the noise they’d been making shooting at cans and sticks, earlier, a rabbit walked right out in front of them, and Henry fired at it. The rabbit flipped when the bullet hit and flopped around in a half-circle, dead already, and lay still. They went to pick it up.
2
Any other time he might have picked it up at once, almost without looking at it, and might have stuffed it into his canvas bag and might have forgotten about it. But the boy hadn’t seen a dead rabbit before — hadn’t seen anything dead, in fact, as far as Henry Soames knew, except maybe flies — and so Henry stood with the rifle clamped tightly under his right elbow, barrel out, pointing off to the right, away from the boy, and held the rabbit on his open left hand for the boy to see and touch. He watched the boy’s face and for an instant he felt himself slipping away again into that sense that he stood outside time, involved and yet dispassionate, like a man looking at far-off mountains, or like Henry Soames’ father sitting motionless and huge on a broad stump, watching chipmunks or listening to the brook move down through the glen, rattling away forever, down and down. Or as Henry himself sat nowadays, more and more, thinking thoughts that had never before occurred to him, surprised and bemused at the way things fit together. He saw the boy’s face as though it had nothing to do with himself, a face in an old, old photograph. His hair was the color of clean old straw, white almost, but with yellow glints and dust-gray shadows. It needed cutting; that was the way his mother liked it. His blue eyes had a pink cast, as they always did when the light was strong, and his eyebrows, white against the flush of his face, lifted up and out like wings. He stood bent forward, his trousers halfway down his hips, his hands behind his back in one of those old-man poses he was always getting into, and he looked at the rabbit with curiosity and no distaste. For him, too, the sun had momentarily paused, if it ever noticeably moved in a four-year-old’s world. At last, tentatively, he touched the soft, short fur on the back, gray-brown fur speckled with a pure white (the rabbit was young), and stroked from the tips of the ears to the turned-down tail. The bullet had hit in the neck, snapping it clean, and the head lay now at an angle not natural in life, as though the back of the head rose straight from the shoulders, as if in ecstasy. There was very little blood: a stain around what seemed the insignificant wound on the side of the neck.
“He’s killed, isn’t he?” Jimmy said.
Henry nodded.
“Are you going to shoot him again?” Now a hint of distaste did come, but mainly the boy was curious.
“No point in shooting things after they’re dead,” Henry said.
The boy continued to move his hand very gently on the fur, his question not fully answered, Henry knew, because really it had nothing to do with shooting: a question about what death was, how a thing so unreasonable could be tamed, made to fit in a world of waterbugs, trees, mountains, customers at the restaurant. He said, “Why?”
“A thing can only die once,” Henry said. “Things live and then they die.”
He looked past the boy at the pine woods that began some fifty feet up the slope from where they stood, beyond where the Riddle place used to stand before it burned. It was utterly still in there and dark as a church. Needles on the ground kept out all growth, and wherever one entered, long, gloomy aisles radiated out straight and clean. The CCC boys had planted the trees in 1935 or so. He could remember coming here with his father to watch them work. The Riddles’ place had been gone even then. His father would sit on a rock biting the sweet white tips off timothy shoots and he would chirp at sparrows or meadowlarks as though he were one of them and fond of gossip. Henry had come here two, three times when he’d first found out he was going to die. Self-consciously, sentimentally (as he’d come to see), he would slip into his father’s poses: He would lean his gun against a stump and lower his great, loose body down beside the gun, plant his elbows on his knees, tip his cap back and stare in at the gloomy aisles that led away to the darkness farther in. But he’d gone on living, taking his pills when he needed them, and gradually he’d gotten used to it, and it had come to him that it wasn’t the same. The gloomy aisles weren’t there yet when his father had come, it was spindly new trees he’d looked at, and blowing grasses and birds. If he looked he could see the cemetery, across from here, the narrow gray stones in the shade of the maples and beeches there, but it wasn’t that that had drawn his attention. If he ever looked there, he saw it with the same calm, like a man who’d been married to all that for fifty years. Though Henry couldn’t have predicted it — you had to get to that point yourself to know that somebody else had been there — he saw now that that was inevitable. Everything passes, the carved-out rocks by the brook proved it, and the excitement of fear was no more enduring than anything else. A bad heart was the beginning of wisdom.
“Look at his eyes,” Jimmy said.
He nodded.
“They sort of squint, don’t they? Why do they squint?”
“Because he’s dead,” he said.
(Callie’s mother had said, “What do you get out of it, shooting defenseless rabbits?”
He’d shrugged, and Callie had said, “Now, Mother, don’t you go butting into Henry’s business.”
“It keeps him from shooting Baptists,” Callie’s father had said. “He, he, he!” And Henry had said, a little righteously, as it seemed to him later, “I don’t want to shoot Baptists. It’s not that at all.”
“Well, then you’re a goddamn fool,” Callie’s father had said. He kept beer in the refrigerator, purely as an affront to her, and he could swear like a trooper. He was her cross, she said. But he’d prayed, the time Jimmy had gone into convulsions, and Henry had understood it, whether Callie could or not. There’d been nothing they could do, once they got him to the hospital. Jimmy had been not quite two. At first he’d had a crazy look in his eyes, a clouded look, like the look of an animal dying. Henry had reached into the crib for him, Callie’s father looking over his shoulder (it was up at their place it had happened), and there’d been that look in Jimmy’s eyes, his face white in the dark room, and Jimmy had drawn back in terror, not knowing his own father; and then when Henry had him in his arms, Jimmy’s eyes had rolled up and he’d gone stiff all over, and Callie’s father had said “Holy God!” and on the way to the hospital he’d started to pray, with Callie’s mother sitting stiff as a board beside him, holding the baby, keeping his teeth apart with her bare fingers, and Callie was glaring through the windshield like a madwoman, almost more furious at her father than scared for Jimmy — and that too was natural, it seemed to Henry, even good; yes. He’d driven like hell was after them and it was a wonder they’d any of them made it.)
But now the boy had lost all interest in the rabbit, and Henry thought, Well, all right, then; everything in its time. He dropped the rabbit in the bag.