Rabbit Foot Bill

by Helen Humphreys

  “It wasn’t a close relationship,” I say. “He worked long hours. I didn’t see all that much of him. I was closer to my mother.”

  “But you must remember something of the nature of your relationship with him? What sort of things did you do together when you were able to spend time with him?”

  I remember the noises of my father. The slam of the door when he came in for supper. The way his sneeze sounded like the bray of a donkey. The reverberations on the kitchen table from the heft of his fist coming down.

  “He was a hard man,” I say. “He was an angry man. He had to deal with the public in his job and he didn’t really like people, so he was often angry at the end of the day when I would see him. Mostly he ignored me, I think, but I do remember that he would sometimes play catch with me. He did teach me how to whittle. Once, we made a wooden flute together.”

  Later my father snapped the flute in one of his tempers. He snapped the flute and threw it in the fireplace. “Just good for kindling,” he said, and at the time, I thought he meant me.

  “So, Bill became the father you never had.”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “But you chose a man to have a relationship with who didn’t know how to relate to people, who chose to take himself out of human society because he couldn’t deal with emotional relationships.”

  “But I was a boy,” I say. “I couldn’t have known this. To a boy he was a very romantic figure. And he really seemed to care for me.”

  “He killed for you,” says William. “I suppose that’s about as caring as you can get. But the relationship, although possibly good for you, wasn’t good for him, was it?”

  This is what I find so hard to live with, how bad I was for Bill, how good he was to me.

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “So, why didn’t you leave him alone when you knew he was getting dependent on you at the hospital, when he was waiting to eat when you did, when he was becoming rather childishly attached to you?”

  “I wanted him.”

  “And what was this wanting? Was it sexual? Was it paternal? Did you want to take care of him? Did you want him to take care of you?”

  I can still see Bill sitting on the edge of his bed in the stables at the Weyburn. I can see his handsome face and the shock of black hair that he pushed back with the same fierce swipe that he used to brush a horse’s mane.

  “It was everything,” I say. “All at once. He was everything. As a boy and then now, as a man. Loving him made me love everything else that much more—the song of a bird, the cool strength of the river on my skin—all of it. Because of loving Bill I loved the world with an intensity I haven’t felt since.”

  I stop for a moment, remembering how excited I felt all day at the hospital, thinking I would see Bill that evening, how I would rush off to the stables at every opportunity.

  “It wasn’t that I loved the world,” I say. “It was more that loving Bill made me able to bear the world.”

  I WORK THE day shift at the restaurant. The busy hours are breakfast and lunch. There’s not much custom past five o’clock, and so I finish my working day at six. Before I leave I eat my dinner at the counter, tucking into whatever the special is that day—meatloaf and green beans, hot hamburger sandwich, spaghetti and meatballs. Dessert I take with me on a paper plate, covered carefully over with a veil of plastic wrap.

  Scully’s Garage is across the road from the diner. Rusty Kirk’s day also finishes at six, so when I walk over with the piece of pie, I usually find him outside, straightening up the stacks of oil cans, or coiling the air pressure hose into neat loops. Whenever he sees me approaching, even if I am almost upon him, he stops what he is doing and waves.

  “Hey, Doc,” he says.

  “Hi, Rusty.”

  I wait until he has finished his chores. Tonight he is cleaning the service station bathrooms, refilling the paper towel dispensers, mopping the floors. I stand just outside the doorway, so as not to block his way, and watch him. He’s methodical, wiping down the faucet and taps, arranging the bar of soap just so on the edge of the sink.

  “What kind is it, Doc?” he says, his back to me as he swabs the toilet seat with his mop.

  “Coconut cream.”

  “Hot damn!”

  The swearing is a new thing for Rusty, learned no doubt from the mechanics he works with at the garage. I should probably be alarmed at this new habit, but it always makes me smile instead. He curses with such joyful emphasis.

  After he has finished with the bathrooms, we go inside the automotive bays, to the little space at the back near the office, where Rusty has his cot. Everyone else has left for the day, returning to homes and families. It’s like Rusty is the guard dog, I think, as we sit down on his neatly made cot and I hand over the plate of coconut cream pie.

  Early on, I stole a fork from the restaurant, and Rusty keeps it washed and ready to use on the upturned crate beside his bed. Next to a small transistor radio, it is the only item there.

  “Thanks, Doc.” He carefully peels back the plastic wrap and tucks into the slice of pie.

  There’s something of an echo of Bill in this ritual, and I like sitting on the cot with Rusty, watching him eat the dessert, fork it up with great enthusiasm, smack his lips in satisfaction.

  “What do you think?” I ask when he’s finished eating.

  “Eight.” He gives me a thumbs-up and grins.

  We have a ranking system for the pies. So far nine has been the highest, for a piece of superb lemon meringue a few weeks ago. The lowest was a four, assigned to a very tart sour cherry pie with a chewy crust that Rusty spat out and didn’t finish.

  “Here you go, Doc.” He solemnly hands the paper plate and piece of plastic wrap back to me. Maybe he thinks that because he receives his piece of pie every evening on an identical paper plate, they can be reused. I don’t have the heart to tell him that I just throw the plate and plastic wrap in the trash can outside the garage. He takes such pride in handing this equipment back to me. I want him to have his pride where he can, as I imagine that working at the garage does more to erode his confidence than boost it. I also don’t have the heart to tell him that I am no longer his doctor.

  “Thanks,” I say, putting the plate down beside me. “How did it go today?”

  “Oh, pretty good.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Same as usual.”

  “Nothing different?”

  Rusty creases his forehead, thinking.

  “Oh yes,” he says. “There was something different.”

  “What was it?”

  “A horse. Out by the pumps. A man rode up to the pumps on a white horse and said, ‘Fill her up.’” Rusty smiles, remembering. “It was a joke.”

  “Pretty funny joke,” I say.

  “The man gave me an apple to feed the horse,” says Rusty. “You have to give it this way.” He holds out his flat palm towards me. “So the horse doesn’t bite your fingers.”

  “What was the horse’s name?”

  “Spirit.”

  “Because it was white.”

  “I suppose.”

  I remember the horses in the stable with Bill at the Weyburn, how easily he moved around them and how they were calm with him. I remember the noises of their feet thumping on the ground, how they would shake their heads and snort sometimes. The shudder of the animals was reminiscent of a heart beating—of a heart beating outside the body.

  “Tell me about the horse,” I say to Rusty. “Everything you can remember.”

  ON FRIDAY NIGHT William has come to my apartment with a different agenda than usual. He wants to talk about Agatha Christiansen. I had told him about the affair when we first started our sessions. There seemed no reason to keep any secrets from him, if I genuinely wanted him to help me. But we haven’t talked about it since, and I am surprised when he wants to switch from talking about Bill to talking about Agatha.

  “Why did you do it,” he asks, “if you knew it was wrong?�
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  “Sleep with her?”

  “Yes.”

  “She approached me.”

  “But you could have refused?”

  “I did refuse at first.”

  I think of my first sight of Agatha Christiansen, when she was smoking and hanging streamers in the gymnasium. I had thought she was a little crazy, especially when the streamers were catching fire and she couldn’t see a correlation between her cigarette and that fact. But then she had shown me sympathy when I was still smarting over the loss of Amy, and she didn’t seem crazy after that.

  “She was bold,” I say, “and that frightened me off at first.”

  “But you persisted?”

  “Well, she persisted, and I just agreed at some point.”

  William sits back in his chair. He taps his pen against the tabletop.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “I’m thinking.”

  “Can I ask you something? Off the record?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you think that Luke Christiansen ever found out that I was the doctor who was sleeping with his wife?”

  “I think that he suspected it was you.” William puts his pen down. “When he found out how you had lied about other things. That evidence would have established a pattern in his mind. I don’t think it would have been hard to make the leap from one thing to another.”

  I have thought as much myself.

  “Do you ever hear from her?” asks William.

  “No.”

  Agatha wouldn’t know where to find me even if she did want to get in touch. I hope that she didn’t hear about my disastrous run at the hospital, about Henry Tudor’s murder and the neglect of my patients. I don’t want her to think badly of me. But it’s probably much too late for that. She has undoubtedly heard the full account from her husband. They may be geographically and even emotionally distant, but he is sure to have let her know about all of my misdeeds.

  “It wasn’t ideal,” I say. “The fact that she was married. And married to my boss. And maybe it happened because I was so upset about the breakup with Amy.”

  “But you let it happen when you knew that it wasn’t a good idea?”

  “Yes. It all happened so quickly, though.”

  “But you could have slowed it down, Leonard.”

  “Could I?”

  It has never occurred to me that I can slow anything down. I am always going at full tilt, my feet barely touching the ground. I am always racing to catch up to my life, in pursuit of it, running in a zigzag across the field.

  William gets up and pours himself a glass of water, comes back to the table and sits down.

  “Tell me again how it started,” he says.

  “She came on to me at the dance, but I saw Dr. Christiansen dancing just behind us and that made me stop. I knew it was wrong. I fled from her advances.”

  “And then?”

  Then there was the darkness rushing up to meet me as I raced across the hospital grounds. There was the moon above the fields, and the shadowy figure of a man out by the stables.

  “Then I saw Bill as I was going back to my cottage.”

  “And pretty soon after that you decided to begin an affair with Agatha Christiansen?”

  “Yes.”

  I can suddenly see where he’s going with this.

  “Bill again,” I say.

  “He’s like a drug,” says William. “All sound judgment is suspended when you are under his influence.”

  AFTER WILLIAM SCOTT has left, I can’t settle. It’s too late to pay a visit to Rusty to distract me, and there’s no one else I can turn my attention to, so I go for a late-night walk.

  The streets of the little town are deserted. All the lights are off in the buildings. I walk to the end of town, out past the last house to where the river cuts through the landscape. The river here is upstream from the Weyburn. If I were to jump in, I could float right past my old cottage, right up to William Scott’s door. It’s a tempting thought, but I don’t jump in. Instead, I walk along the bank, looking at the dark water. In daytime there is a heron that sometimes lifts and lands on this little bit of river, hunting for minnows in the shallows.

  It was wrong to have been with Agatha, I can see it now. Not just morally wrong, but also because it was a form of self-sabotage. How would I have been able to prosper at the hospital and be a successful doctor when I was engaged in such a secret and treacherous act? I was hurting myself, and yet I count the times with Agatha Christiansen as happy times. I remember her laughter and the taste of her skin and the look in her eyes that surely was a kind of love—a kind of love for me?

  William is right, though, when he equates Agatha with Bill, how one was possible because of my attachment to the other. How one was a result of the other.

  I walk along the riverbank and I think of how to unlock the past, of how to figure out the mystery of Rabbit Foot Bill once and for all. For all William Scott’s insistent tapping, I have to be the one to actually open the door. I am the one with the answers, even if they seem unavailable right now. But where do I start? What is the best jumping-off point?

  I have reached the little stone bridge that signals the end of town. From here the river cuts through farmland and I don’t want to follow it out into the stubble of the dark fields. I turn around.

  To get to the bottom of my obsession with Rabbit Foot Bill, I think I need to go right back to the first murder.

  Canwood

  Saskatchewan

  1947

  THE TRIAL IS THE BIGGEST THING THAT’S EVER happened in this town. It’s all anyone talks about, how Bill killed that poor boy and then went back to cutting the hedge, as though it was nothing.

  I am too young to be a trial witness, but the police take a long statement from me, sometimes asking the same questions over and over again.

  “What exactly was said between the victim and the accused?”

  “Did you see William Dunn push the garden shears into the chest of Sam Munroe?”

  It turns out there was another witness to the murder, an adult, so there was less emphasis placed on my account. The other witness was a man living across the street from Mrs. Odegard, who was on his way to the pharmacy and had just stepped out his front door when Sam confronted Bill. He couldn’t hear the taunts from Sam, but he did see Bill plunge the clippers into Sam’s chest and then pull them out again and continue with his work.

  It is this detail, the calm extraction of the shears from Sam Munroe’s chest that has set everyone firmly against Bill.

  “Why didn’t you go for help right away?”

  Why didn’t I go for help right away? I stood there, watching the blood crawl across the dirt. At some point I must have dropped the water glass, because there were shards of it around my shoes, like pieces of ice from a frozen pond, and I remember thinking of that, of walking out over the ice in winter, of a landscape and a season far removed from this one.

  When I finally could speak, after what seemed like ages, with just the snick snick of the clippers as the only sound around me, I said, “Bill, I think he’s dead. I think you’ve killed him.”

  I know I should have run right away for the police or the doctor. I know I should have acted quicker. I don’t think I could have stopped Bill from killing Sam. He moved too fast and it happened so swiftly, but I could have acted quicker afterwards.

  But when Bill said those words, “He had it coming to him,” all I could think was how right he was. Sam Munroe was a bully and he deserved to be treated as badly as he’d treated me. Now he couldn’t hurt me anymore. I was glad he was dead.

  So, I didn’t run for help when it first happened. I only went for the police after the man across the street yelled at me to do so.

  But I couldn’t explain this when they questioned me. I just said I was too frightened to move, and they believed this. They must have known that I was in shock, and perhaps, too, they thought that I was frightened of being killed by Bill, that if he had murdered one boy
, he might be about murdering a second. That would be what they wanted to believe. I couldn’t tell them that Bill had done it for me.

  When the police questioned me, I wanted to leave out the part where Bill pulled the clippers from the chest of Sam Munroe and set to using them again. Although it made a certain sense to me, knowing Bill as I did, I knew that it would go against him. The police couldn’t understand that Bill had to finish a job. He was a hard worker and he liked to work straight through, start at the beginning and end at the end, with no breaks in between. This is partly why I took the water out to him, because he couldn’t stop what he was doing long enough to fetch it himself, even if he was thirsty.

  I couldn’t leave out the part about the shears being removed from the body because the man on his way to the pharmacy had seen it and the police used him as the main witness in the trial. My statement was just meant to support his testimony.

  Callous, is what the papers said about that action. He showed a callous disregard for human life. My father read this out at the dinner table. He liked to read out the details of the trial, not aware that I knew them all already, that I was there in the courtroom every day. He knew that I had witnessed the murder, and he was there when I gave my statement to the police, but he didn’t know about my long association with Bill and thought that I hadn’t really been affected by the murder. He always ascribed to me a toughness that I never really possessed.

  My father had forbidden me from going to the actual trial, but he couldn’t really keep me away. The courthouse was packed, everyone in town was there, and even though children weren’t allowed in, my mother’s friend Lucy Weber took pity on me and snuck me in with her. I think she thought that I’d been so upset at my young friend’s death that it would be good for me to see the murderer brought to justice.

  The trial took three days. On the first day they called the lead witness, the man across the street from Mrs. Odegard, who had been on his way to the pharmacy.

  “Did you see the accused strike the victim?”

  “I did.”

  “Where did he strike him?”

  “In the chest.”

  “Show the court, if you will, Mr. Melville, where the accused struck the victim, exactly.”