After the murder, After the burial —Gwendolyn Brooks

hat evening at dinner the two boys told of how they had seen it step from the shadows of the roadside woods when they rode past on their bicycles with their fishingpoles and their stringers lined with crappie and bluegill and sunfish: a gigantic rabbit, upright though hunched as in shame, tattered, muddy, slightly limping. And yet strangely it had the face of a man, of a quality forlorn and lustreless and somehow colored with grimness too. It was, the boys could have sworn, weeping. Stranger still, the younger boy said they thought it was dragging a shovel behind it. It seemed unaware of its surroundings, the other explained, it hadn't seemed to notice them. It hadn't even looked to know where it was going.

Out beyond the gauntlet of trees, as at the end of a fine telescope, the sun lay across the flickering roadline all huge and molten, collapsing beneath the steady weight of this midsummer eventide. So that when they looked back in disbelief, more to disprove the chimera's existence than to confirm it, the boys saw only the glint of a spade caught on a ray as it slid into the tall growth of chokecherry and wayside bushrue, and two ears rising above it, one long and stiff, the other limp, drooping, like a dog's one lopped ear. They did not stop.

The boys' parents sat quietly as they listened, each tipping over in their inky depths the notions toward which their children's words only hinted. They neither interrupted the children nor so much as gestured. But when the boys finished, their father looked at their mother with slowsearching eyes. She returned his gaze while picking at her nails beneath the tablecloth.

Slowly he chewed his food. He took a long drink of iced tea and he held it in his mouth still longer, swishing it around as though it were wine, although he did not drink wine. Just as slowly, he set down the glass. Then he smiled a faint smile and told the boys in a voice which partook of both the baffled and the calm that the creature they had seen could not have been sad because it was one of the ancient and benevolent spirit guides of the Yokut Indians who once lived in these territories, and that it was a good sign and that therefore they were lucky, since it was well known that he was the guardian of fertility and abundance who rose from the roots of a willow tree once a year to see that all was as it should be: vital and secure.

Later that same evening the father made some phone calls, asking his neighbors whether they had heard or seen anything unusual that day or any. But the neighbors wanted to speak of children with crooked teeth or stuttering vehicles or the old cypress whose weeping sap was forging patches in the frontyard lawn. In the midst of his last call the father saw through the kitchen window a dark shape moving along the walkway. He excused himself. He set the phone in its cradle. Then, quietly, he took his pistol from the topmost shelf of the foyer's hutch, and trembling, the gun like a clumsy hand in the dark before him, he opened the door. His wife stood on the landing, her hair all brushed out and ready for bed. She had come around the back way to straighten a tangled windchime. Now they sat together, there in the dark, listening to the sounds of darkness, staring into the nightscape shadows. And though neither would tell the other, each of them guessed in a number of ways at the things that wandered there.