“What would you name one? The first name that would come into your head?”
“Fisher,” said Rabbit.
“That’s a good name.”
“What would you name one?” he asked, tossing down half of the second glass.
“Oh,” she said, pulling with both hands at the buttons on her blouse, finally popping one off and holding it as if it had fallen from the ceiling, “I wouldn’t care.”
“That’s what gets you in trouble, not caring. That’s why C’s son is named . . .”
“I mean I wouldn’t mind—anything you would like would be fine with me.”
“Fisher would be a good name.”
“I wouldn’t mind,” said Ester.
Rabbit looked into the refrigerator, finding nothing he wanted.
“She must have stopped using that thing,” he said, half out loud.
“Who?”
“Cell.”
“What thing?” she asked, thinking from his voice that the thing might be worse than the using of it.
“C said that they had something they used to keep from getting pregnant.”
“What?” she asked, thinking, in horror, He must think that I use one. He is blaming me for using something, some piece of rubber or something.
“I don’t know,” said Rabbit.
“Didn’t he tell you?”
“Something with water that . . .” and the sentence was drowned with the last water in his glass, as though trying to rinse the liquid through his mouth and into his face, quenching his blushed expression. But, unlike some, Rabbit’s embarrassment did not hamper his ability to communicate, and Ester understood immediately both why he couldn’t continue and what he was talking about.
“Oh!” she said. “One of those things.” Solidly, like talking about an ax handle. “Someone should have told her that they don’t work, that she could be pregnant before she even went into the bathroom and—”
“Well, whatever . . . they shouldn’t have named him Glove,” he said, looking down into the empty glass.
“Maybe not. That wasn’t his father’s name, was it? A lot of times people will name their sons after their fathers.”
“No. The burden of C’s father’s name, Ansel, on a child, would crush it. Nothing small could survive with that name, not around here where people still remember, or would remember if they were reminded by the name.”
“I never heard anyone talk about him.”
“No one talks about him, that’s why; for fear maybe he’ll rise up out of his grave or something.”
“No.”
“Yes. Edlebrook’s father broke up the cement foundation of his barn, loaded it in his pickup, drove down to the grave, and piled the pieces on top and around his flat marker, just so if he did rise out of the ground it would take longer. . . .” Then he added, “Of course he did have to bust up the foundation, but he didn’t have to dump it there, all of it, all fifteen loads.”
“Stop teasing, Rabbit.”
“It’s true, go out to the place and look, at the bottom of Millet’s pasture and look.”
“Come on.”
“Go look.”
“Maybe there’s some cement there, but it’s not for that reason.”
“Honest to God.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I spent time studying him.”
“Ron Edlebrook’s father?”
“No. Ansel Easter. I used to lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, studying him . . . figuring out how it had to be. Then after he was dead I still lay awake, thinking, and when I heard from someone that there was a person in Wisconsin who knew him before he came here, I borrowed a car and drove up to see and talk to him, or rather her, as it turned out to be; the name hadn’t given it away.”
“What did she say?”
“Only that he was a coal miner, and I’d already guessed that, from the way he talked, and the dust-gray hair on top of his head, and a way of walking that seemed close to the ground and like he would walk through a door or a wall if he happened to turn his head to watch something else and wasn’t aware that it was coming. And of course his voice and forearms.”
“Do you think I don’t want a baby, Rabbit? Is that why you’re talking this way—because you don’t want to say it or talk about it?”
Rabbit leaned forward onto the table. “If I thought that, I’d’ve never been able to keep quiet. Besides, I don’t imagine that it makes too much difference what attitude you have. It either happens or it doesn’t.”
“I just thought that on top of us not having any that you thought I didn’t want one.”
“No, it’s just that you never knew C’s father. If you had, you’d be interested in those things that with everyone else are common-place—like having been a coal miner and a boiler man—anything to help fill in the gaps and explain to yourself how someone could begin living in one way, change to another, and then before your eyes shut himself off from the world altogether . . . making his sons go out for groceries, shut up in that huge house with only his boys and the ragged mute that he had taken out of a circus sideshow and kept with him from then after. Except in church, where from behind the pulpit he would throw back his head and sing as though possessed; but he quit that too.”
“I’ll talk to Cell about him someday,” she said. “She’d know about him, from C.”
Although this implied of course that Rabbit did not know and had no business talking about Ansel Easter, it came to nothing. He was only listening to her with his face. He was studying C now, and wondering how it had happened that he had named his boy Glove, especially when he had to be so careful, so very careful with everything he did, even covering his mouth when he yawned, in order not to let his soul escape, in order not to find himself being what his father became, like stone. Then his thinking went into another time-out and he could see his yard, where the deerflies, fishbugs, and gnats went in and out of place after place that would have and then would not have bits and pieces of the retreating sunlight.
“It’s like someone pulled a plug in the sky and all the colors drained down into it,” said Ester, watching too.
“Yes,” answered Rabbit, “very much like that. Very much like that.”
IN THE WINTER, WHILE TRUNDLING THROUGH THE SNOW, AN IDEA CAME to him that had nothing to do with C Easter, and nothing to do with the bank. It came in that time it took to walk across the last stretch of partially shoveled sidewalk before stepping into his own deeply drifted yard—in anticipation of the satisfaction he knew would then come. His desire (and he could be said to have very few desires, given that his father, Merle Wood, had desperately wanted him to be more than himself and he, Rabbit, wanted only to be as much) could not be traced back to its source, and he could neither negate it nor deny it. He was inescapably trapped, because desires become ambitions become needs, and how could he explain to Ester that he wanted, yes, needed, a new house, a larger house sitting in the exact spot where their perfectly adequate, perfectly congenial one sat now?