Paul hands each of us a shovel to work on the piles of rabbit droppings under the empty cages in the barn. “Rabbit shit is the cleanest of all shits,” he says. “It makes for great fertilizer. You could practically eat it.” The small, round black pellets of manure have an earthy smell. We shovel it into a wheelbarrow then carry the bucket to a pile next to the shed where Paul keeps his tools. “We’re going to start composting. From now on anything plant or animal doesn’t go in the trash. It goes here.”
The compost heap grows in the weeks afterward as we add eggshells and rabbit bones, apple cores and lemon peels. Paul rents a tiller and tears up the ground next to the house so that the grass and weeds turn to mulch. He boxes in four large gardens with wooden boards and Mom plants tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, carrots, cabbage, lettuce and even strawberries. Saturdays are for pulling weeds and once the vegetables begin to grow, she avoids store-bought produce if she can.
After the first slaughter, we eat rabbit most nights. Tony considers this a kind of torture and is in constant protest just like Mom was in Berkeley under Reagan. He squirms in his chair. He crosses his arms. He stares at his plate. He says, “This piece looks bad. What if I just eat the potatoes?” Or he says, “I think rabbit can make you sick. We studied it in school today.”
Mom makes baked rabbit and lemon rabbit. She makes stir-fry rabbit with peppers and onions and “rabbit surprise,” which is leftover baked rabbit that has been cut up and put into a casserole dish. Sometimes Mom fries up a rabbit kidney in a pan or a veiny rabbit heart the size of a plum. The organs struggle and spit, dancing around the hot frying pan like they’re still alive, filling the house with the gamy smell of hot blood. Mom will lift the kidney whole with a fork and plop it in her mouth without even salting it. It’s amazing to watch her eat something so disgusting. It seems to us like a kind of sorcery.
When Mom dares to serve rabbit liver as an entrée, Tony refuses to eat at all. He just stares at his plate and shakes his head.
Mom says, “There’s good nutrition in that liver.”
“I’m not eating this. It’s disgusting.”
Mom crosses her arms and says, “You can’t get up until you eat your liver.” There’s a silence in the kitchen as the words ring out. I look down at the slab of tough, unseasoned meat on my plate and poke it with a fork. Eventually I take a bite. It tastes exactly the way rabbit manure smells.
Tony doesn’t budge. He sits all through dinner, then after dinner when I take a bath, all through The Greatest American Hero and teeth brushing. I walk into the kitchen to check on him, “Maybe just eat a little.” But he shakes his head and lays it into the crook of his elbow at the table.
Just before bedtime, when the lights are off and I am in bed wondering who is going to win the standoff, whether Tony is simply going to start a new life there in the kitchen next to his uneaten plate of liver, maybe pitch a tent beneath the table or set up his sleeping bag next to his chair, I hear Mom walk in and say, “Okay, you can get up. I don’t know what to do with you. But you’re going to bed without supper.” Tony runs downstairs and jumps into the bed next to me, pulling the covers over his head.
“Why didn’t you just eat some of it? Just to make her happy?”
“That’s not my job.”
On a Saturday morning Mom announces that she is going to make a pot of rabbit stew using only vegetables from our garden. She has a kind of hypnotized look in her eyes, a dreaminess as she slices the zucchini and tomatoes and tosses them into the big metal pot that we see on Christmas when she makes warm apple cider with cinnamon sticks. She adds onions and celery and potatoes and bits of rabbit. The pot boils all afternoon, filling the house with an earthy aroma that gets in our clothes and hair. When dinner comes, she stands at the pot proudly and says, “See, we can be self-sufficient if we want to. No money from the government or a corporation, just people living off their own labor.”
I offer her my bowl because I’m certain we’re about to hear a lecture about Nixon. He was impeached just after I was born. The events are always connected in my head since they’ve been described to me that way so many times. “Well, you were born right when they got Thatbastard Nixon so I knew we were on to something.” It’s not clear exactly where the stew fits into the story but I know “living off our own labor” is a way to “stick it to the man” who is always “stepping on the little guy” and that eating rabbit stew is my patriotic duty.
After dinner, the big pot goes into the fridge where it sits overnight and, as Mom puts it, “steeps.” Like the special cheese in the drawer that we’re not allowed to eat, the philosophy is that rabbit stew gets better “as it ages.” So, on night two of rabbit stew, we sit down to eat a thicker version of the soup we ate the night before. The carrots have begun to lose their shape and bits of rabbit meat have separated into long strings. The celery is still mostly intact and there is still the occasional potato.
By night three, there is a palpable resentment in the air. Mom spoons the thick stew into our bowls. Paul wants to support Mom’s project to “live off the grid” and as a rule does not complain when she cooks. But after two reheatings and three days in the fridge, the stew has become something more like a slop. It is still possible to distinguish solids from liquids but it is no longer possible to distinguish solids from each other. Potatoes and carrots and celery and rabbit clump together in a mushy gel the consistency of thickened snot. We lift the stew into the air with spoons and let it drip slowly back into our bowls.
By day four of rabbit stew, it is not entirely clear if what is left in the big pot is technically food. A grayish brown mass sits in the center. Chewy bits of caked stew, blackened from four nights of reheating on the stove, have fallen off the sides and are only distinguishable from the clumps of vegetable by their shape, which is flat, like little squares of tomatoey skin. Mom serves the stew in silence. Tony and I stare at our bowls, trying to remember brighter days. Even Paul taps the goop with his spoon, testing it cautiously, like it might jump. He looks up at Mom, who says, “What? It’s better now. It’s absorbed the spices.”
Tony takes a bite, twisting his mouth in disgust as his face loses color. “I don’t feel good. Can I have something else?”
“No you cannot. Eat your dinner. This is good nourishment.”
I watch him lift his spoon slowly to his mouth with an unsteady hand. He sniffs at it, throws his head back like he’s been punched, and throws up right into his stew bowl.
We freeze. I think maybe he’s faking it and I’m mad that I didn’t think of it first. But as he pulls his mouth away, covered in red and orange spit, chunks of vegetable on his chin, it’s clear he waged the most effective nonviolent protest yet. If this isn’t passive resistance, I don’t know what is.
I expect Mom to scoop the puke out of his mouth and put it back into the pot because at this point what would be the difference?
Paul says, “Jesus, Tony,” as he wipes his face with a hand towel. They go into the bathroom to clean up. Mom stands silently next to her pot of homegrown rabbit stew, defeated and alone with her thoughts.
I wonder if this is how Nixon felt.
When they walk back in, Paul says, “Maybe we should go out to eat tonight.”