An Easter Tale

by

Emery L. Campbell

“When will the Easter bunny come, Mama? Will he come hippity-hop, hoppity-hip? Ain’t he coming tonight, Mama?”
“Don’t say ain’t, Joseph.” She swatted him with a dish towel. “If you don’t talk proper English, the first thing you know you’ll be hanging out with low-lifes and smoking pot and probably end up in reform school. I’ve taught you better than that.”
“What’s pot, Mama?” Joey dawdled over his Crispy Crunchy Sugar Honey Pops.
“Pot’s something real bad that you want to stay away from, teeny Joe-boy,” said his distracted mother. She brushed a strand of hair off her cheek and stuck it behind her right ear. “And don’t play with your food. I should never have let you eat that breakfast cereal at night. Get on with it. It’s almost bedtime.”
Indeed, she had other things on her mind. “I really don’t see how I’m supposed to make plans for Easter dinner when I don’t even know if your father will get home in time,” she added, more to herself than to Joey. Her husband, Walt, got to visit so many exotic places on his business trips; holidays or not, it made no difference. Why, just last week he had spent three whole days in Omaha. It hardly seemed fair, although she knew that Walt worked hard at his job.
She looked at her cookbook collection on the shelf above the little desk in the kitchen. For all Walt knew he just had to sit down at the dining room table, and meals would materialize out of thin air. These things take a lot of thought and preparation. And timing has got to be just right. She couldn’t just whip up something at the last minute and expect it all to come out perfectly without planning.
I have to make a shopping list of the ingredients I need, she reasoned, and then go buy all the stuff. And peel and slice the onions or carrots or whatever. It’s the most creative thing about housekeeping, that’s for sure, but still it’s no joy ride.
“Can I stay up to see the Easter bunny when he comes, Mama?”
“May I stay up, not can I, and no you definitely may not stay up. Have you finished with that at last? You know, you’d grow up a lot faster if you’d get more of your food in your mouth and less on the table. Come on, let’s get your bath out of the way so we can go to bed.”
When Karen had at last tucked Joey in, read him his daily ration of Dr. Seuss, and turned out the light in his bedroom, she returned to the kitchen. She swept the cereal off the table into her cupped hand, wiped up the milk that Joey had spilled, slotted the dinner dishes into the Hotpoint along with a capful of detergent, and turned the machine on.
“I’ll bet I know what they’ll put on my tombstone,” she said aloud. “Karen Brower, dishwasher loader.”
She yawned as she kicked off her shoes and padded barefoot into the den and turned on the TV. Before the words of the hemorrhoid commercial became audible, she pushed the mute button on the remote. She sat there in the recliner staring at the fireplace, hardly aware of the dancing picture on the tube. She picked up the morning newspaper that had lain all day next to the chair and turned to the comics. She struggled to focus on her favorite “One Big Happy,” but before long her eyelids drooped.
It came to her all at once. I know what I’ll do for Easter dinner, Karen thought. She went to the kitchen and took down Mastering the Art of French Cooking from where it lay on the shelf above the desk. She leafed through it until she found what she was looking for on page 106: civet de lièvre à la périgourdine—jugged hare Périgord style.
No baked ham with pineapple slices and candied yams this year. Traditional Easter fare; she mouthed the words with disdain. No, she mused, I have all the ingredients but one for this Easter meal. When bunrab shows up hippity-hopping he’ll get a surprise for sure.
She returned to the recliner in the den. She’d take the chocolate eggs off him first, though. That’s what Easter rabbits always brought, right? Chocolate eggs and painted chicken eggs and jelly beans in little baskets lined with shredded green cellophane? No use not raking in the loot before…she fumbled a bit. Well, she meant that it was only common sense not to, uhmm…you know, interfere with the rabbit that lays the chocolate eggs until you’re certain his pockets are empty.
Karen believed that children needed exposure to the real world while still in their formative years. To her way of thinking one had to mold them, give them experiences that would build character. Life wasn’t just flowers and cream puffs, after all. Oh, what the heck, on second thought Joey didn’t even have to know. He would sleep through all the…dirty work.
She wondered what she ought to do about the still-flickering TV. She supposed it would be best to turn it off, although she hated to miss Saturday Night Live.
To tell the honest to God truth, she didn’t know quite what to expect. Maybe down the chimney around midnight was the most likely scenario. She reasoned that rabbits couldn’t turn door knobs or raise windows, so how else would they get into the house?

The VCR blinked 11:30 p.m. All at once there was a scratching noise. Soot began to cascade onto the floor of the fireplace, followed by muffled, angry words in a high-pitched voice. A paw appeared, then another, then the whole body of a hefty, tall, soot-covered, once-white rabbit with pink eyes tumbled onto the hearth. Karen shrank deeper into a corner of the recliner.
“You there, in the chair,” the rabbit commanded. “come ‘ere and gimme a paw with my load; it’s stuck in there somewhere.” He stooped and peered up the chimney. “Even had me caught next to it for a few seconds. God, how I hate these narrow chimneys!”
“Watch it, bunny boy! Don’t drag all that dirt on my rug!”
“Look lady, your rug is the least of my worries. I gotta get my bag of goodies unstuck. I hope you don’t think this is the only stop I’ve gotta make tonight. And don’t call me bunny boy. My name is Vince.”
He looked down at himself and groaned, making a half-hearted attempt to brush the soot and ashes off his fur. “Jeez, what a mess. Dry cleaning is the only way I’m gonna get this stuff off. But the tumbling always gives me a headache, and I just can’t stand the smell of that cleaning fluid. If I didn’t have a wife and thirty-nine kids to support, you wouldn’t see me doin’ this.”
Karen’s eyes narrowed. This wasn’t quite what she had counted on. First of all, she knew perfectly well that rabbits, even Easter bunnies, couldn’t talk. Oh sure, Aunt Willie always used to insist that the angora she kept for several years in that cage out by the barn would say, “Bunny wants a carrot, bunny wants a carrot.” But, you know, Aunt Willie…why, she even claimed to have long conversations with the chickens. Not only that, her attic was full of bats.
She decided to humor the visitor until she saw an opportunity to make her move.
The rabbit scowled. “Don’t just sit there and stare! Get your butt out of that chair and gimme a paw.” He had pulled himself up to his full height.
She stood and surveyed the scene. “One foot on my carpet and you’ve had it! Just stay right where you are.”
She kept her eyes fixed on the rabbit while she edged toward the door from the kitchen to the garage and opened it. With a parting glare she stepped over the sill. From a collection of garden tools standing in the corner next to the Ford she picked up a long-handled, three-pronged tilling rake. She hurried back into the den, thrusting the rake at the impatient Vince.
“Here, you can use this to free your bag, but don’t expect me to go poking around in there.”
Because of the rake’s length it took a lot of jockeying to get it up the chimney, and every time the rabbit looked up there to see what he was doing he got more dirt on his arms and face. After a considerable struggle and a stream of colorful language Vince succeeded in dislodging the pack; it thumped onto the hearth amid a cloud of soot.
“Don’t you people ever get your chimney swept? Santa Claus ain’t gonna be one bit more anxious than me to navigate through all that garbage.”
Karen winced at the “ain’t” but bit her lip.
“Oh damn! My wife has tied the top of the bag shut with a knot again. I dunno how many times I’ve told that doe not to do that. I always break my nails tryin’ to untie it. Here, see if you can open it. After all, the stuff is for your kid. Come on, I told you I ain’t got all night.”
“Look, Vince, or whatever your name is, if you think I’m going to mess with that filthy bag, you’re crazy. Why don’t you get one with a zipper like everybody else? Furthermore, you may be the big boss in your place, but this is my house, and I won’t be ordered around, least of all by the likes of you.”
Vince heaved a deep sigh and his shoulders slumped. “Why did I ever get mixed up in this line of work? Uncle Malcolm would’a given me the franchise for one of his Li’l Hopper day care nurseries. The pay was pretty good, and I could’a been home for meals every day. Instead I had this romantic idea about travel; see faraway places, I thought, get all those frequent flyer miles. And believe it or not, I really wanted to make kids happy. So I jumped into this job with all four feet. The weeks went by, and the family grew by leaps and bounds. I signed contracts for the eggs and chocolate chicks and jelly beans, and it’s just too complicated to get out of it now.” A tear rolled down his chubby cheek, making a streak through the soot.
“Aw, Vince, it’s all right,” said a chastened Karen. “Don’t go all whiny on me. I get more than enough of that from Joey, God knows. I’ll tell you what; let’s brush you off a little. Wipe your feet on these newspapers. Then we’ll go in the kitchen and talk.” She got the whisk broom and gave him a good going over.
“Hey, watch it! Not so rough. I bruise easy. How’d you like it if somebody manhandled you like that?” He kept on with a flow of bad-humored although muted complaints. Karen inferred that Vince probably had to deal with a lot of pressure in his work and that he was at least trying to be civil. He wouldn’t hold still, so she gave it up.
“There, I think we got most of the loose dirt off. Now give those feet another good wipe, and then come over this way to the kitchen. But keep on the wood flooring around the edge of the carpet. Watch out! Don’t trip over that lamp cord.”
Once they were in the kitchen she relaxed a bit. The vinyl floor covering was a lot easier to clean than the carpet.
“Here, pull up a chair,” she said. Then she almost jumped out of her skin, for there on the table lay the cookbook still open to page 106! She snatched it away as fast as she could and put it on top of the fridge with a guilty glance in Vince’s direction. Thank goodness, he hadn’t noticed it. He was drying his eyes with a Kleenex to which he had helped himself from the box sitting on the table. She sighed with relief.
Taking the juicer out of the cupboard, she threw in a handful of carrots and filled two glasses with their juice, placing one in front of Vince.
“Hey, I’m beginning to feel better,” he said with a dab at his eye. “I’ve seen them gadgets before, but there’s no use gettin’ one ‘cause I ain’t got around to having our place wired up yet. There’s always so much to do. Lately I been trying to get the storeroom in shape. The shipments of Easter stuff keep coming in by the truckload, and you gotta have some place to put it all.”
Karen didn’t know what to say. She tried to visualize shelves laden with cases, the floor strewn with opened boxes, wrapping paper, and those little plastic curly-cues.
“Do you do all the work yourself?”
“Heavens, no!” said Vince. “That’s one advantage of having a big family. Fifteen of my eldest offspring are on the payroll. Rodney and Sid operate the forklifts. A crew keeps track of all the goods coming in and going out, unpacking, filling delivery bags, and doing the paperwork. Russ, my oldest, is in charge. My wife, Livia, prepares meals for the whole bunch. It’s a family deal. But the home deliveries are my job ‘cause I’m the only one in the family who can read a map. I majored in geography at Lapin College. Oh, I’m more than just a pretty face.” He gave her a sidelong smirk.
It was a constant struggle for Karen to get her own household organized, and she envied Vince’s apparent ability to marshal all his familial forces to such good effect. She tried to imagine her husband helping to keep the house in order. And, of course, Joey was hopeless; anything he dropped lay right where it fell until Karen picked up after him.
The more she thought about it the more morose she became.
“I need a stronger drink,” she said.
The refrigerator overflowed with leftovers, but in the back stood a bottle half full of Kroger’s cranberry-apple fruit drink. She poured herself a stiff slug in a water tumbler and downed it in one swallow. She saw Vince observing her over the rim of his glass of carrot juice.
“You got troubles, lady? You wanna tell me about it?” He glanced at his Bugs Bunny watch. “You gotta understand, though; I’m getting jumpy. All this chit-chat has made me late, and I’ve still got a lot of miles to cover.”
“Don’t get me started, pal.” But then she realized with a start how ridiculous this was and came to her senses just in time. Had she really been on the verge of unloading her woes on this…this…bedraggled, furry stranger? Talk about bad hare days!
Faced with her indecision, Vince drained his drink and rose from the table. “You’re gonna have to excuse me, but I got work to do.”
Then he remembered the big knot in his bag still sitting in front of the fireplace. “You got a knife or a scissors I can use to get into that bag?”
She opened a drawer and handed him a paring knife, admonishing him again not to lay a paw on her carpet. He edged along the wall back to the den and attacked the knot. Predictably, when he had slashed through it the bag fell open, and most of its contents spilled onto the floor.
“This is all I needed!” Karen could see that Vince was hopping mad. He tried stuffing the gifts back into the bag, but it was hopeless. With the top torn there was no way to hold it shut. He turned and glowered at Karen who was watching from the kitchen doorway.
“I suppose you ain’t got a bag I can borrow,” he said in a surly voice. The veneer of civility he had assumed was wearing thin.
“Nothing that big,” she said. “I can give you one of my plastic garbage can liners, but it won’t hold half of all that stuff.”
He snatched the proffered item and started to sort what to leave and what to repack. Karen had been right; the garbage bag was nowhere near big enough.
“I really gotta get out of here,” said Vince through gritted teeth. “I’m just gonna have to drop off a lot more here than I should. I don’t see any way around it. I’ll have to go back home for another load before the night is over. What a disaster!”
He crammed as much as he could into the bag, taking whatever was nearest to hand.
“For God’s sake, don’t let the kid eat too much of this candy all at once, or he’s gonna be sick.”
He hoisted the bulging bag onto his shoulder with a grunt. “I hope to God this doesn’t bust on me. I don’t believe in working with flimsy material. Just have to make the best of a bad job.”
Muttering to himself, he lurched through the kitchen door that Karen held open. She raised the garage door. “Thanks for the juice, missus,” he said with a grudging wave, then staggered out into the night and disappeared.


Daylight had just begun to slant through the windows when Joey’s footsteps awoke his mother. A light was still on in the kitchen, and a table lamp burned in the den. Karen had been fast asleep in the recliner by the fireplace. Good Morning America flickered on a soundless TV.
Joey’s eyes grew wide with wonder, for there on the floor was a small mountain of baskets out of which spilled chocolate bunnies and chicks, jelly beans, and every imaginable kind of Easter goodies. He squealed with delight.
“Mama! Mama! Look! Look what the Easter bunny brought!”
Karen sat up, rubbed her eyes, and surveyed the room. Sure enough, a great pile of Easter gifts lay on the hearth, but she looked in vain for the dirty newspapers that she knew she had spread on the floor the night before. She checked the tools in the garage; the tilling rake was right there in the corner where her husband always left it after working in the garden on weekends. She took another long look at the heap of candies on the floor in the den.
“I don’t get this at all,” she said under her breath. She shook her head and pinched herself on the arm to make sure she was fully awake. “Come on, Joey, let’s get some breakfast. Don’t stuff yourself with chocolate.”
Joey followed his mother into the kitchen with great reluctance, his fingers and lips already stained brown. He smeared fingerprints on the door frame.
“Did you see him, Mama? Did you? What did he look like, Mama?”
Then she heard heavier steps on the stairs, and her husband, Walt, appeared in the doorway.
“Hi hon. I finished up in Cincinnati last evening earlier than I thought and was able to catch the last flight to Atlanta. I got home just after midnight. I saw you asleep on the chair and didn’t have the heart to wake you. I sure missed you, sweetie.”
Grabbing Joey under the arms, he hoisted the smiling boy high in the air and hugged him. “I missed you, too, little Joe.”
“Daddy, did you see what’s on the floor in the den?”
His father winked at Karen and chuckled. “It must have been the Easter rabbit, son.”
Karen joined in the hugging. “I’m so glad you’re home, Walt. You have no idea what a night I had.” He gave her a quick, puzzled glance, but she looked down. “I’ll tell you about it later. First I’ve got to get washed up, and then I have some shopping to do for Easter dinner.”
She had made up her mind: she would never again even think of eating rabbit. Instead she would roast a leg of lamb with all the trimmings. She could live with that. After all, it wasn’t as if she knew any lambs personally…

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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 17.03.2010

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