Big Easy Bonanza

they tried—
really
tried—to take the children. When summer ended they tried to keep them, tried to talk Chauncey into it. (Only Chauncey wasn’t about to be talked into it—how would it look to Haygood, after all? There would have been a rift and Haygood would have destroyed his whole world was what would have happened.) And so Bitty got to keep her children.
    But they said—Ma-Mère and Pa-Père—the argument they used was that she had harmed Marcelle. Bitty’s chest ached when she remembered, as if Ma-Mère were even now turning the knife in it. She couldn’t even imagine how such a story got started—or more accurately she couldn’t remember. She knew there was something. Something had happened. She knew because she had some vague memories it, and one very sharp one. The sharp one—she couldn’t get it out of her head—was of Marcelle’s terrified eyes.
    Bitty had been drunk and upset about the baby, the little girl whose growing up she would never see. She could remember that, and she could remember Marcelle on the floor, staring up at her with those eyes, and then herself sitting on the floor and Ma-Mère picking up a screaming Marcelle. The memories seemed damning, but the one of the missing the baby made her certain that, whatever had happened, she could not have hurt Marcelle. She of all people would never blame one child for not being another one. Certainly not Bitty, whose father had so much wanted a boy, had tried to make her behave like a boy, had given her boy toys, had made her kill a rabbit.
    She poured scotch and drank quickly. That she could remember. She had not hurt a child, but she had most assuredly killed a rabbit. Her gorge rose. She couldn’t even get down another swallow of scotch. It was the only thing either of them had shot that day, and it had been tiny. Tiny! You couldn’t eat a bony little thing like that, but her father was so proud of her, he made her bring it back to show Merrie Mac. Disgusted, Merrie Mac made them leave it on the back porch.
    Bitty went back that night, to say good-bye to it, and touched its brown body, meaning to stroke it, to console it or perhaps console herself. She’d expected a familiar animal softness, but it was stiff and alien. Not like a puppy or a kitten, not like a rabbit.
Dead.
This was what dead meant. She hadn’t known. When she had first shot it, it was still warm and supple, not like this, with its poor little legs sticking out. In shock she drew her hand away and screamed. Screamed and screamed. Couldn’t stop, even when Merrie Mac came out to find her.
    “Oh, Mother, it’s dead,” she screamed. “It’s so horrible. I killed it. I killed it.” She kept repeating the confession, begging for absolution. She wanted her mother to hold her, but she was afraid to ask her to.
    “Serves you right, Bitty. I told you to leave that revolting thing alone and you disobeyed me again. Serves you right. I hope it haunts you!” She yelled the last part, about the haunting, having to yell to be heard, because Bitty was screaming so loud. As she delivered the curse, the back of her hand connected with Bitty’s cheek. “Shut up and act your age. You’re neatly twelve years old.” She went back into the house, leaving Bitty alone with the rabbit, afraid to follow her. (When Merrie Mac told the story later, she said that poor Bitty had been hysterical, that she had to slap her to stop her screaming.)
    After the rabbit’s death, Bitty had cried for weeks lying under her bed. Even now she could remember the vast, yawning despair of touching the animal, knowing in that moment the difference between life and death, understanding the lonely inevitability of it.
    Her father had bought her stuffed rabbits and books about rabbits. He had made her sit on his lap, breathing fiery fumes at her, caressing her and holding her tight. “Who’s my dollin’ baby girl that’s just too soft-hearted to go huntin’?” And he would give her a big wet kiss on the ear. Jesus! When he wasn’t making her a boy, he was treating her like a girlfriend.
    One day he had come in smelling of booze and looking like the Cheshire cat, so smug and pleased with himself. “Look what I brought for my angel. You’re going to love Daddy for this, baby dollin’.”
    “What, Daddy?”
    “First, give Daddy a big ol’ kiss.”
    She kissed him. And he drew from a cardboard box a shivering baby bunny, a white one that looked like the ghost of the one she had killed. It