Sentimentality

For eight years, the garden was never harvested. A pair of cottontails made their home there every summer, folding grass over the old rows to form a burrow I wanted, as a child, to investigate. Heavy rains one month drowned three of the garden bunnies. My father found them before the fire ants, and he told us that they were nestled together, asleep.

We raised cows out in the country. My sister and I woke up early and carried milk bottles to the barn where the calves slept. Even so young, they were animals that could lift you off the ground to work the rubber nipple. My father let us name them. Moe had the face of a shy bachelor: white except his red ears and cloud that stretched across his quarters. He bucked my sister, feeding, one morning, and she bit a bloody line in her tongue. We both ran screaming to the house. My father was drinking coffee by the rose bushes. He said the wound would heal quickly.

Maybe out of disbelief, my sister didn’t return to the calves, not then or ever. She spent mornings awake with her door closed, and I filled the bottles with my father. I never questioned him. In August, when school began, my father had his mother stay with us while he taught, and she didn’t talk about things like the garden either. She showed my sister how to wear makeup and read books to me about a family of Chinese dogs.

Once my sister found boys, I’d already learned to live alone. On cold mornings, I searched the pasture for hibernating snakes. It was eight years past, and our tractor cut the garden weeds the same length as the field. Walking through, I tripped on a row, cut my knee open on a hand spade. It had rusted, so old, and I knew the wound could disease.