Dirty Nose

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The rabbit had a black spot on the end of her nose, as though she had pushed her face into a little pile of soot. That was why the girl called her Dirty Nose. There had been other names considered, proper rabbit names mostly, but none of them stayed. Dirty Nose did. She lived in a wooden pen behind the house beneath the pecan trees, where the little girl brought her clover and carrot tops and sometimes sat cross-legged in the grass telling her things that rabbits were particularly good at keeping secret. Dirty Nose would twitch her nose and listen, which was enough.

The storm came one afternoon while the girl was inside. It arrived hard and sudden, bending the trees and turning the yard silver with rain. Thunder rolled over the house, and the wind pushed against everything that could be pushed. When the worst had passed, the girl ran outside in her bare feet and found the door of the rabbit pen hanging open. Dirty Nose was gone. She called beneath the porch and behind the shed. She looked under bushes and along the fence. Her mother helped, but the yard seemed enormous now, stretching into blackberry thickets and wet underbrush where a small gray rabbit could disappear forever. By the time her father came home from work, the girl was sitting on the back steps with rainwater still dripping from the trees and tears making clean little paths down her cheeks.

Her father did not tell her everything would be all right. Fathers learn, after a while, that some promises are too large to make. He changed from his work shoes into an old pair of boots and went looking. He crawled beneath the hedge and pushed through blackberry vines that caught his shirt and scratched his arms. He searched beneath fallen limbs and inside tangles of honeysuckle. The evening grew darker. Mosquitoes found him. Mud covered his knees. Still he looked. Then, deep beneath a blackberry thicket near the edge of the woods, he saw two frightened eyes and a nose with one small black spot upon it.

He reached carefully through the thorns and lifted Dirty Nose against his chest. The rabbit trembled there, wet and muddy and very much alive. When he came out of the woods, the little girl saw him crossing the yard and ran before she could be told not to. Her father knelt and placed the rabbit in her arms. She held Dirty Nose against her cheek and whispered something only the rabbit heard. Her father stood nearby, scratched and muddy, pretending the blackberry thorns had not hurt very much.

Years later, the girl would forget many things about that house. She would forget the color of the kitchen curtains and exactly where the pecan trees stood. She might even forget the sound the old rabbit pen made when its little wooden door opened. But she would remember a stormy afternoon when the whole world seemed to have swallowed something she loved, and a man coming home tired from work who went into the wet woods and would not stop looking until he brought it back.

Sometimes that is how a child first learns what love looks like. It comes home from work, changes its shoes, and walks into the thorns.

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