BRYCE SLUNG EDWARD OVER HIS shoulder. He started to walk.

“I come to get you for Sarah Ruth,” Bryce said. “You don’t know Sarah Ruth. She’s my sister. She’s sick. She had her a baby doll made out of china. She loved that baby doll. But he broke it.

“He broke it. He was drunk and stepped on that baby’s head and smashed it into a hundred million pieces. Them pieces was so small, I couldn’t make them go back together. I couldn’t. I tried and tried.”

At this point in his story, Bryce stopped walking and shook his head and wiped at his nose with the back of his hand.

“Sarah Ruth ain’t had nothing to play with since. He won’t buy her nothing. He says she don’t need nothing. He says she don’t need nothing because she ain’t gonna live. But he don’t know.”

Bryce started to walk again. “He don’t know,” he said.

Who “he” was, was not clear to Edward. What was clear was that he was being taken to a child to make up for the loss of a doll. A doll. How Edward loathed dolls. And to be thought of as a likely replacement for a doll offended him. But still, it was, he had to admit, a highly preferable alternative to hanging by his ears from a post.

The house in which Bryce and Sarah Ruth lived was so small and crooked that Edward did not believe, at first, that it was a house. He mistook it, instead, for a chicken coop. Inside, there were two beds and a kerosene lamp and not much else. Bryce laid Edward at the foot of one of the beds and then lit the lamp.

“Sarah,” Bryce whispered, “Sarah Ruth. You got to wake up now, honey. I brung you something.” He took the harmonica out of his pocket and played the beginning of a simple melody.

The little girl sat up in her bed and immediately started to cough. Bryce put his hand on her back. “That’s all right,” he told her. “That’s okay.”

She was young, maybe four years old, and she had white-blond hair, and even in the poor light of the lamp, Edward could see that her eyes were the same gold-flecked brown as Bryce’s.

“That’s right,” said Bryce. “You go on ahead and cough.”

Sarah Ruth obliged him. She coughed and coughed and coughed. On the wall of the cabin, the kerosene light cast her trembling shadow, hunched over and small. The coughing was the saddest sound that Edward had ever heard, sadder even than the mournful call of the whippoorwill. Finally, Sarah Ruth stopped.

Bryce said, “You want to see what I brung you?”

Sarah Ruth nodded.

“You got to close your eyes.”

The girl closed her eyes.

Bryce picked up Edward and held him so that he was standing straight, like a soldier, at the end of the bed. “All right now, you can open them.”

Sarah Ruth opened her eyes, and Bryce moved Edward’s china legs and china arms so it looked as if he were dancing.

Sarah Ruth laughed and clapped her hands. “Rabbit,” she said.

“He’s for you, honey,” said Bryce.

Sarah Ruth looked first at Edward and then at Bryce and then back at Edward again, her eyes wide and disbelieving.

“He’s yours.”

“Mine?”

Sarah Ruth, Edward was soon to discover, rarely said more than one word at a time. Words, at least several of them strung together, made her cough. She limited herself. She said only what needed to be said.

“Yours,” said Bryce. “I got him special for you.”

This knowledge provoked another fit of coughing in Sarah Ruth, and she hunched over again. When the fit was done, she uncurled herself and held out her arms.

“That’s right,” said Bryce. He handed Edward to her.

“Baby,” said Sarah Ruth.

She rocked Edward back and forth and stared down at him and smiled.

Never in his life had Edward been cradled like a baby. Abilene had not done it. Nor had Nellie. And most certainly Bull had not. It was a singular sensation to be held so gently and yet so fiercely, to be stared down at with so much love. Edward felt the whole of his china body flood with warmth.

 

 

“You going to give him a name, honey?” Bryce asked.

“Jangles,” said Sarah Ruth without taking her eyes off Edward.

“Jangles, huh? That’s a good name. I like that name.”

Bryce patted Sarah Ruth on the head. She continued to stare down at Edward.

“Hush,” she said to Edward as she rocked him back and forth.

“From the minute I first seen him,” said Bryce, “I knew he belonged to you. I said to myself, ‘That rabbit is for Sarah Ruth, for sure.’”

“Jangles,” murmured Sarah Ruth.

Outside the cabin, thunder cracked and then came the sound of rain falling on the tin roof. Sarah Ruth rocked Edward back and forth, back and forth, and Bryce took out his harmonica and started to play, making his song keep rhythm with the rain.