Mr. Bridge_ A Novel - Evan S. Connell [12]
“I haven’t touched them,” she said. “Do they need to be cleaned?”
“No,” he said. “I was just wondering.”
“Is a button missing?”
“No. Nothing’s wrong,” he said.
Then he put on his trousers for a third time and decided he could get through the evening, which he did; but as soon as he got home he took them off and handed them to her, saying they ought to be let out a little.
14 Thumper
The children wanted a pet rabbit. Carolyn in particular was pleading for a rabbit. Now Douglas and to some extent Ruth had joined the familiar chorus. A rabbit would not be any trouble, they would take good care of it, feed it, clean the pen every day, and so on and so forth. For a while Mr. Bridge avoided saying yes or no and hoped that the clamor would diminish. He was not anxious to have a rabbit around the house. It would get sick and die. Or the children would tire of it, and then what? But Easter was approaching, and he sensed that his wife was on their side, so at last he conceded: he handed her a five-dollar bill and said all right, since a rabbit was what they wanted, get them a rabbit.
Easter morning the children wandered around the house and the yard with little wicker baskets looking for the chocolate eggs Mrs. Bridge had bought and for the hard-boiled eggs which they themselves had decorated and which she had hidden. In the garage Carolyn found the rabbit. His pen was an orange crate with a piece of chicken wire across the top and he was nibbling a shred of lettuce when she saw him and let out a screech of pure joy.
They named the rabbit Thumper. He was a healthy, mildly inquisitive, normal rabbit, utterly useless, and they spent the rest of the morning pushing lettuce and carrots at him. Mrs. Bridge went around collecting the undiscovered hard-boiled eggs, somewhat puzzled that they had managed to find all of the chocolate eggs. Mr. Bridge, after contemplating the children and their rabbit for a few minutes, went back to the house to read the Sunday paper.
But while he was reading the paper he wondered again what would happen. He suspected that the rabbit would catch distemper or pneumonia. The previous Easter the children had begged for some baby chicks, so Mrs. Bridge had bought a dozen at the grocery store, but they had not lived long. They were dyed as bright as Japanese lanterns and probably the dye had penetrated the skin. At any rate, they began falling over. All twelve were dead within a week, and he had a persistent feeling that the rabbit was not going to have much better luck.
Thumper expired sooner than he expected. Before noon. Jock, the Sealyham from the next block, came trotting into the garage and was driven mad by the sight and odor of the rabbit. Douglas kicked at the Sealyham and grabbed it by the collar, Ruth swatted it with a broom, Carolyn screamed and ran into the house for help; but by the time Jock was dragged out of the garage the rabbit was almost dead. It lay on the stained and pellet-spotted newspaper and its ribs went up and down like bellows. The water cup had been turned over, the lettuce was scattered. The Sealyham had lunged against the crate so hard that several of the slats were splintered.
The dog had not gotten its teeth into the rabbit, but Mr. Bridge, bending down and looking closely at the rabbit’s eye, guessed that death was on the road. Carolyn, weeping, pleaded with him to get a bottle of limewater, for she had heard somewhere that limewater was a sovereign cure for ailing rabbits. But neither limewater, nor any other remedy, would save this Easter bunny.
About thirty minutes later Thumper was dead. Mrs. Bridge took the children into the house.
That a creature could die of terror, and nothing except terror, was something Mr. Bridge found difficult to believe. Yet this was precisely what had happened. It disgusted him a little. He disliked weakness. He wrapped the carcass in a page