The Best of Intentions

When the legless man’s mother came down with red boils and sores the doctor sent her to bed for a month. She slept in the potato-shed out back of the house next to the dog’s house and the failed juniper hedge. No matter how hard his da tried he couldn’t keep the hedge from bending and wilting and falling in on itself. The legless man figured it had something to do with the baby rabbits his da etherized and buried beneath the hedge. Maybe the rot and fester had worked its way into the roots and sullied the junipers with death and rabies. Maybe his da had planted the juniper hedge wrong or forgot to feed it. These things did happen, after all, even when the person who did it had the best of intentions.

His mother lay astride the bed, her legs slung through a block-and-tackle that kept her feet a smidgen above her head. The doctor said it would help redirect the flow of blood and humors, starving the red boils and sores until they left the body like a ghostly vapor. His mother believed she was being visited by evil spirits, a pox and scourge for being unkindly to the washerwoman who lived two houses down and had horrible eczema. The legless man believed his mother was a receiver, a radio transistor with a burnt-out tube. His da simply ignored the whole ordeal seeing no purpose or reason for it at all, and even if there was, he hardly believed it mattered in a world where God made so many baby rabbits he had to kill a shoebox-full and then bury them under the juniper hedge.