One Easter when I was quite young, my brother and I were surprised with two pet rabbits. They were sisters, and while I cannot recall their true given names I don’t think that Honey and Clover are bad guesses. They were full grown and lively, much different than what I expected from bunnies. Their ears stood tall, erect, unlike the floppy things we had grown to expect from a solid diet of the Saturday Morning Cartoon Express and Cabury commercials. They were lean and brown like dead grass and would use their deceivingly strong hind legs and their little claws to scratch at you furiously of you held them for prolonged periods.

Clover and Honey would live in the chicken coop, along with the hens, all named Martha after our developmentally delayed elementary school custodian. They all seemed to get on fine, as we had expected, the “coop” was actually a hastily renovated back shed area of our single car garage and it provided both insulation against the fickle New England weather as well as plenty of room for all.

My brother and I were responsible for feeding the animals, clumps of alfalfa and bitter pellets for the rabbits, and a coarse cornmeal from a large aluminum trash can for the hens. The animals had free reign of the yard during daylight hours, and while our yard had no fences these deceptively brilliant little beings seemed aware of the boundaries of the yard for the most part, and would come running for the coop at dusk. They were easy pets, all of them, rarely needing much, always giving more than they took.

Turns out one of the rabbits was in fact male. We never identified which one, but I seem to recall my father postulating that the slightly smaller one, Clover, may have been male based solely on that clue. The big gender reveal came in the form of several squirming beings nooked away in a bundle of straw in the corner of the coop.

I don’t recall much of the young bunnies early days, I may have been afraid to look at them. We must have brought them in and put them under a heat lamp, safe from the predation of the Martha’s, or have sequestered an area in the coop where Honey would be able to care for them naturally. The bunnies became rabbits in no time, three of them, again I cannot recall their names because none of them lived long lives and the resulting pain seems to have cast shadows over those memories.

While I’m pretty certain we started with more than three, I don’t remember any loss of life until after the bunnies were large enough to join their parents in the yard. At first they bobbled and struggled to find agency over their limbs, but in short order the little ones were just as fast and wiley and independent as Clover and Honey.

I killed the first one.

It was winter and the rabbits spent most of the time in the coop. The snowfall in New Hampshire was intense that year, and the show in unplowed/untended areas rose several feet. The top of the drifts a brutal crust of ice, the show so cold it wouldn’t even stick to itself, try as I might to construct snowballs and castle walls, the snow would crumble between my clumsy gloved fingers. It was cold, it was real cold on the morning I was tasked to run out to the coop and feed the “ladies” as my mother called them, I would correct her sometimes, reminding her of Clover.

I threw on those ugly tan and brown rubber boots that defined my aesthetic as a young boy and decided to forego the jacket, I would be quick, and get back to more pressing matters like Lego and Atari, and another endless day of indoor activity. In youth the days last forever, a great lamentation of my adulthood is that now the days live in tight margins, over just when I feel like I’m about to get to the good part. 

Rushing, I swung the door open and closed to prevent the escape of any of the ladies, but I should have known better. The Martha’s sat on their perches and in their laying boxes, their mottled feathers puffed out, plumed balls trying to mitigate heat loss, and make the most of the lazy days of winter. The rabbits huddled in the corner on the other side of a partition that marked off their area and the hens seemed to respect that their roommates needed their own area. I didn’t count them off, I simply shovelled the meal into the Marthas trough, and I checked to make sure that their water was full, clean, and free of ice. I had no way of knowing that one of the yearlings was up and exploring the confines of the coop.

As I crossed the cement of the shed toward the hay covered rabbit area with a large scoop full of pellets I felt something irregular under my boot, followed by a sound that haunts me into my 40th year. 

The bunny squirmed and bucked, its head kicked to one side unnaturally, a small siren of agony and shock emitted from it, from it’s once wiggly, sniffy nose, now ran a crimson trickle. I had never heard a rabbit make any noise, much less one so plaintive and pathetic. It was loud, filling the coop with a squeaking swirl of pain. The hens cocked their heads from the trough, the other rabbits, it’s family, ran anxious circles in the straw, they had never heard such a thing either.

I ran from the coop to the house with tears streaming from my face, blubbering I could barely explain what had happened, but “something’s wrong with the bunny!” Both parents sprung into action, so automatic they failed to notice that I was following. My father peeked into the coop then dashed over to the garage returning with a pillowcase. Returning to the garage from the coop with the pillowcase bundled close to his chest. What followed were two sharp strikes, hammer against the cement floor of the garage. The siren stopped wailing. 

Father returned from the garage, visibly shaken, I don’t think he cried, but he pushed up his glasses and pinched his brow at one point while my mother held me and told me it wasn’t my fault. The standing rule of thumb to follow was that when you were in the coop to make sure to shuffle your feet. Years later after all the animals were long dead I found myself in the “coop” now a storage area for our bicycles and I realized I was still shuffling.

I didn’t kill the second one.

One sunny spring day my brother and I returned from a bike ride, I don’t know where we kept them in those days. We lived in a conveniently shaped neighborhood that allowed us to loop endlessly passing the house as we did skids in the sand left from the salting of our roads in the winter. My mother would have been tending the yard, getting her bulbs in and removing dead matter from the flowerbeds that lined the house. We would have been waving to her every time we passed, each time she would smile and wave back. I don’t remember these moments well, but this is what would have been happening.

When we passed and saw she was no longer in tending the soil, I do clearly remember her buckled over in agony with a shoebox in her hands. She was in the grass now, wearing all white, pristine, the box in her hands, weeping. My brother and I made it up the driveway before dumping our bikes in a violent pair of crashes and we ran to her side.

“The fucking cat! He killed my baby!” She wept, in the box one of the yearlings, on its side on a bed of tissue paper. Still breathing with great labor, puff-puff-puff. The other animals unaware this time, it was dying without sound, just my mother softly weeping. I was in such shock I just stared at the pathetic last moments of the bunny for what seemed like an eternity. I was in a tunnel, I remember touching my mother between her shoulder blades, feeling her heart through her back. A broken heart is easy to feel, it shakes the whole body, a priest beating the pulpit in a vain attempt to get the attention of an absentee savior. I thought it would never stop. It’s not going to stop. It wouldn’t stop, the death would just last and last.

My brother took the box away, he wasn’t much older than, my senior by only 3 years, I guess this would make him 9 or 10, doing the work my father struggled to do as a grown man. Remember how my father may have cried? Remember how even in generational stoicism he had shown the pain? Dad had finished off the rabbit in the garage, a man who had killed deer as a lifelong hunter. In that same garage I would see him lay our broken boxes and string deer up from the rafters, split from their loins to their throat, their swollen tongues pushed out between their teeth, eyes wide still from the shock of the slugs impact. They would drip onto the boxes. They would hang above the boxes and no one wept.

From that garage I heard a clumsy wack. Several others to follow. My brother weeping. Later he would come out, my mother would hold him, then he would go inside, into the bathroom and emerge with a new expression, one that he shows at times today. This look was one of knowledge of the world. It’s the expression of Adam exiting the garden, it’s the look of a man, not a boy, his mind alit by Apollo, a fire that I would see again when my brother returned from the room occupied by mother’s body after her passing. I didn’t look upon my mother’s body. I just wept then as I did when we lost the second rabbit.

I only wept later when the third rabbit died.

I never saw the body of the third rabbit. He had a problem and we couldn’t help it. A couple months dissolved into summer and toward the end of the spring we knew something wasn’t right. It’s face was swollen and hot to the touch. 

Maybe a year before my toe had been jammed and became painfully infected. It was nearly twice it’s size, the skin drawn thin and if prodded it would split oozing out an ochre fluid, rank smelling stuff of infection. My parents had been really concerned and helped me clean it twice daily, speaking maybe a bit too freely among themselves about the dire nature of the infection and their fears of gangrene, amputation, and a variety of other horrors that would feed fuel to my budding sleep issues. The infection persisted until we made it to the ocean, I shit you not when I say the sea water did what all the medication and antibiotics had failed to accomplish.

My father had made a decision, the last baby rabbit had to go, and so, we all got in his truck and drove to the river for which my town was named. Deep in the surrounding woods we set the last one free, I remember father telling me that it would live in the woods and the woods would make it better. “This is where he wants to be. They all want to be free, but they let us live with them.” Those are his words, I remember that bit like it was yesterday. “They let us live with them.” I wonder if he did that on purpose or what? I would ask him what it meant but I’m sure that the memory has faded.

Even with this idea in my head I did get the feeling that the rabbit was out of sorts when placed on the forest floor. Blinking at us over his abscess he just sat there in frightened stillness. He didn’t bolt to freedom. I think I even said something about it not wanting to go and my brother clapped me on the shoulder and said something about it saying goodbye. My brother was crying.

I don’t recall what happened to the older rabbits, we didn’t have them much longer and the Martha’s met their own fate at the hands of a skunk while we were camping (a story I still question at times) but I think we brought the other rabbits to a farm. To a farm? As I type that it feels unlikely, but that’s all I have to offer. I was young. I knew better than to ask a lot of questions.

We never had rabbits again, but on a walk through the woods with my father we found a tiny black bunny, just out there in the open. My father was concerned for it, a lot of people have these ideas of hunters being callous alcoholic killers, but I have never met a man who was such compassion for animals. His relationship with other species is one of a bygone era, as I am vegan it’s complicated but I feel in many ways his engagement with the animals we share the world with has a level of purity lost on me. I once watched my father swim half a mile into the violent Atlantic Ocean to save a dying bird, but this is a story about rabbits, I’ll tell you about the birds another time. 

My father said it was a domestic bunny and would die in the wild (the ugly truth about the fate of rabbit three now apparently no longer taboo) and we would bring it home. Unlike the other rabbits who had a more feral quality this rabbit was indeed, clearly domestic. Its “fur” something unreal like a synthetic Claire’s Boutique fur boa, almost otherworldly in it’s whisper softness. This was not a wild thing. This was an animal specially bred by man to be cute, to meet some imagined standard of petness, impossibly alive and yet- there it was.

We only had it for a few hours and it was gone. It slipped from the enclosure we had made for it in the living room and wasn’t seen again for nearly a decade. We looked all over for it, but it had completely disappeared without a trace. We left out food and water hoping it would eventually emerge from whatever nook it may have escaped to and become part of the family again, but it never did. My mother, who had never seen the bunny laughed it off and said that it must have slipped out the door when we had left the house for supplies, but I knew it must be around somewhere.

My father has a handy quality I have long admired and been envious of. I have seen the man swap gas tanks on his truck, put a new roof on our house, knock down walls and rework the wiring, the man has a depth of understanding of such things that continues to impress me. A big one was when fate dealt us a poor hand and our furnace shit the bed in the depths of yet another cold winter. It took days to replace the thing, I helped as much as I could, I was much older now, but a bit too young to help haul the corpse of the dead furnace from the basement. Dad must have bribed an uncle into helping with the backbreaking task, I was on hand to “move shit out of the way” and to collect some pieces he would hand out from the secret places behind the beast as he disconnected it from the rest of the home’s central nervous system. One by one nuts and bolt and obtuse elements and connective tissue were handed out to me, I carefully collected them, a surgical assistant to the task. When my father emerged laughing, covered in dust and grit from the spot behind the furnace he met with my uncle who laughed as well. My father held the petrified remains of a small bunny, it must have slipped into the ventilation (under the sink… the spot missing its grate) all those years ago mistaking it for it’s genetic memory of a warren it had never inhabited. It died in quiet solitude. I didn’t understand the laughter, gallows humor being a foreign concept at the time. I collected the remains and buried them under the pines in the backyard while they hauled the furnace through the bulkhead. Neither asked me to return to help with the task, I don’t know if it was out of sensitivity or of simply being able to do the task easier without some broken kid around to get underfoot.

The furnace kept us warm until we left the house one by one, first my older brother, then me, then my mother, my little brother, and finally my father. When I visit I drive by to see what became of the house and see the yard has been fenced in, they have chickens. The garage has been remodeled, I wonder if the coop area still smells like alfalfa. I wonder about what else has gone on in the car port of the garage. I wonder about a lot of things these days.