Part One: The Rabbit in the Rye
The table was set and all were met with barleywine and beer
There were kin around and smiles abound as Barley Day was here
Glass-blue skies and pumpkin pies and bellies full of bread
Stories of old about glory and gold and the paths the elders tread
The Hollow was never so peaceful amid the Buffalos’ retreat
The Foxes were never so impish, the Owls ne’er sang so sweet
The breeze was never so warm as it was on that September day
Every Frog in his own little bog and not a worry to weigh
Every leaf a perfect breath of orange, green, and brown
And every blade of grass seemed fit for every patch of ground
Every bowl of chowder warmed the whole of every heart
As did the sweet potato pies and leek and onion tarts
But as the sun began to chase the lighthouse and the sea
The party tired of games and song and settled in for tea
And though the light was dwindling, which the children thought unfair
There were still two empty seats, you see, for Runny and the Bear
Still two empty oaken chairs, two pastries left untouched
Two empty steaming cups of brew just waiting for their clutch
Two absences unspoken as they held their children tight
For he to whom their feast was owed was missing in the night
’Twas on the hill the barley mill had stood for all this time
The rabbit found a spot to sit and let his fur unwind
His ears pressed back against his head, no taller than the grass
He waited till the rumble of the Buffalo had passed
He waited till his mouth was just too tired to curl a frown
Till his nervous leg was spent sounding its thump against the ground
Then arose his furry nose, his ears, his eyes to see
His bear friend’s bitter end as he sat slumped against the tree
And even in the dusk he saw the red among the grass
The spot he’d set the dual for which the Buffalo had asked
And there next to his kindred bear, old Runny sat and cried
With no one near to shed a tear for the Rabbit in the rye
John Eamon Buckley didn’t even know his first name until he was already a young man, but such was the timbre of the wake in which he was raised. There were of course countless landmines that had been buried during his upbringing, but as far as he could remember, that was the first one to jump up and take a sizable bite out of his reality. A decade later, he could still recall hearing it for the first time—the strong, singular syllable dripping from the mouth of some social worker who looked as if she’d been unboxed along with her prefab desk, the building around her cold and gray and still teeming with the ghosts of the police station or madhouse or whatever awful thing it used to be. John? Can I get you some water? How are you doing with all of this, John?
Eamon still didn’t know how to answer that question, and over the course of his journey to adulthood he had grown comfortable with the understanding that he would just never be able to put it all into words, and moreover, he wasn’t sure that he even cared to. How do you go about telling somebody a story like that? How would you possibly make them understand? Night in and night out, Eamon still asked those things of himself while wide awake at some obscene hour with his fists clenched around nothing and his eyes glued to his flat’s vanilla stucco ceiling. He wanted to turn back the clock and force himself to tell her everything. He wanted to make himself scream it so loudly that a decade later he could still hear its echo. He wanted to wrap his arms around his younger form and promise that everything would be okay or speak one of a hundred other impossible niceties, but the urge to lie to himself was always too bitter for him to indulge, even in the very moment it began to bubble up his throat. So there was no screaming and there was no answer from the newly minted John and there was no story about where he’d been and how he’d lived. Not for some stranger stuffed behind a desk anyway. Not even after all these years.
Things weren’t necessarily bad in the days before Eamon’s father disappeared, but they were certainly different. Different in a way that only someone raised by a man who was left wholly unchecked to indulge his raging instabilities and violently agoraphobic whims could grasp. Different in a way that only someone who didn’t know truth from tale and had heard nothing but the words of his father until he was forced into the great wide open at the age of fourteen could ever relate to. But there was at least some peace in those days before Eamon knew any better and things were still simple—some ease of mind when there were boundaries and he slept well and soundly under the unfiltered light of the stars and amid the chorus of crickets and night owls. Things were easy and uncomplicated back then, and though there was plenty space to roam and too much time to kill, there were unfortunately no French fries . . . and that was a landmine over which he was always happy to trip.
“Oh my god, these are amazing,” said Caroline, her diction muddled by a mouthful of perfectly fried, golden-brown potato wedges. She was shoehorned into the window side of a red vinyl booth next to her boyfriend, Mark, the pair of them seated across the table from Eamon, who as usual had nobody on his shoulder to play his better half. He was something of a loner by circumstance of comfort rather than anything more pointed, but the three of them had become a familiar clique over the past few years and so Eamon, despite his solitary nature, never really made the jump to unambiguous hermit . . . and he was patently aware that he had the two of them alone to thank for that.
Eamon chose his next victim from the heaping pile of starch in the middle of the table, swiped it through the thick puddle of ketchup on the side of the plate and popped it into his mouth only to surmise that something was missing and immediately reach for the saltshaker.
“I already salted those,” objected Mark. “You watched me do it. I watched you watch me do it.”
“I watched you salt the top layer, but we’ve just eaten the top layer, so now somebody needs to salt the fries that are on the lower layer. It’s really not that complicated,” Eamon said with a well-intentioned smirk as he gave the newly unearthed goodness a dusting of God’s chosen crystal.
“See, he gets it,” jabbed Caroline, taking a freshly seasoned bite and miming her unbridled pleasure for Mark to see. “Perfect.”
“You’ve really put a lot of thought into this, huh?” said Mark.
“The mechanics of salt as it relates to fries are uncomplicated, but that doesn’t mean they don’t require some reflection. I think the question you should be asking is . . . why haven’t you given them that same consideration?” returned Eamon before blessing the pool of ketchup with a few shakes of his wrist. “Tomatoes need love too, you know . . . not to get too technical or anything.”
Caroline shoved another fry between her typically demure lips, put a hand on her chest and collapsed against the window, overcome by the sheer deliciousness of it all. “God, he gets me in a way you never could,” she razzed, never missing an opportunity to throw a barb the way of her beau. “Tomatoes need love too. So much love.”
Mark gave her a half-hearted frown and barked, “Yeah, well, if you think there are any actual tomatoes in that bottle . . . I’ve got news for you.”
“I love news!” replied Eamon. “What is it? Something exciting?”
“You know what I mean. Don’t make me come over there.”
Eamon, of course, knew exactly what Mark meant, but he always relished the opportunity to play obtuse any time his friend gave him an opening, and he was never above partnering with Caroline to snipe at Mark’s simpler nature. Mark may have been uncomplicated, but that was more a virtue and less a shortcoming in the eyes of his companions as he was never too wrapped up in himself to share a moment with them. Even if it was nothing more than a shallow back and forth, it was typically wholly welcome, and truthfully, Eamon usually preferred that to anything that might require any unwanted introspection. Mark was far from an artist in any facet of his life, but no matter the painting at his fingertips, its promise was always sweeter than a mirror.
Caroline, too, was a source of support for Eamon in his constant struggle to adjust to the world beyond his upbringing, albeit for entirely different reasons, and though her outlook wasn’t nearly as plain and positive as Mark’s was, she understood Eamon in a way he didn’t. She knew what it was to feel like an outsider, even in familiar situations. She knew what it was to look at the table and not see a seat, even when the table was her own, and most of the time, all it took was a gentle glance in Eamon’s direction or a friendly hand on his shoulder to remind him that he wasn’t the only one who felt lost and encumbered by his circumstance of birth. To remind him that she also had a history laced with mirrors.
The milkshakes arrived to silent, smile-laden approvals from Mark and Eamon and actual applause from Caroline who clapped her hands together like a schoolgirl as a tall glass of strawberry slurry was set in front of her. As for Mark, he could never say no to chocolate in any situation where it was an option, and Eamon, it seemed, still hadn’t evolved beyond the delicious predictability of vanilla.
“Can I get you anything else?” the waitress added, already halfway through her turn back toward the kitchen when Eamon stopped her with a question of his own.
“Actually, I was, uh . . . I was just wondering . . . is this Runny?” he squeaked while pointing to a line sketch of a rather fancy-looking rabbit on the front of the laminated menu just under the diner’s name, Millie’s Place.
“Is it what?” the waitress fired back as if Eamon was speaking some long dead language.
“Is it Runny? The rabbit in the rye? I just figured that what with—”
“You want runny what on rye?” she asked through a pair of baggy eyes.
“No, no . . . I was asking if the drawing on the menu was—”
“Turkey,” Caroline interjected. “Tomato, lettuce, no onion, and mayo on the side. And can we get that to go if it’s not too much trouble?” Their server shrugged and scribbled something on her pad before turning on her tattered flats and plodding back to the kitchen. “Guess she’s not much of a reader,” added Caroline before playfully kicking Eamon’s shin under the table.
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean she’s dumb,” barked Mark, pointing his finger at both of his comrades as if to ward off an attack he knew to be coming. “Some of us non-readers are totally smart and stuff. And like . . . super handsome.”
“Uh huh. It also doesn’t necessarily mean she’s not dumb,” Eamon retorted, raising his eyebrows and slurping his shake as Caroline stroked her boyfriend’s chubby cheek with her perfect, graceful fingers. “Although, for a woman, I must admit she’s quite handsome.”
“Right, but like . . . not as handsome as me, right?” offered Mark as he craned his neck and smoothed his imaginary lapel, tacitly aware of forgettable looks but happy to be in on a joke, even at his own expense.
Caroline grabbed one of the menus and took a moment to look at the drawing on the cover—a perfectly fine charcoal sketch of a hare hiding among some tall grass, his fur covered by a plaid overcoat and his head topped with a gray flat-cap. “I mean, it does look like him,” she said. “With no one near to shed a tear for the rabbit in the rye.”
Books were omnipresent during Eamon’s youth as there wasn’t really any manner of entertainment apart from stories, games, and the endless paradise of the outdoors in the Idaho desert of trees where he was brought up. But despite the seemingly endless collection of volumes from Verne, Defoe, London, Dumas, and Twain on the ramshackle shelves that lined his cabin, Eamon had never even heard of Winterset Hollow until his brief and bitter stint with his first foster family. It was a remarkable story and an inter-generational marvel, and even after the very first time Eamon sunk his teeth into the charming tale of a clan of animals scrambling to prepare for their yearly Barley Day feast, he immediately understood why the acclaim for E. B. Addington’s masterpiece had only grown throughout the decades since it was first published.
Winterset Hollow was one of those timeless, inimitable books that was simple and pure and patently entertaining on the surface, but so much more underneath. It spoke about life and loss and struggle, fear and bravery and sacrifice in a way that was so approachable it was almost easy to miss, and it immediately wormed its way under Eamon’s skin and stayed there like good, strong ink from the day he first opened the cover. Its pages were filled with simple poetry and complicated lessons, and even at the age of twenty-six, he still cherished every word of it as if they were his alone. He loved every turn and every character, and though there were lovely, lively pieces to them all, Runny the rabbit always held a special place in his being as Eamon understood all too well the desire to escape to the tall grass and be still until nothing and nobody knew him to be there. With no one near to shed a tear. No one at all.
Sixty-some years after its publication, Winterset Hollow remained many things to many people, but it was also the reason that Eamon, Caroline, and Mark found themselves in the sleepy little hamlet of West Rock, Washington—a small town nestled along the coast of the Pacific Ocean that was wholly unremarkable save for its most famous resident, E. B. Addington himself. They were on a pilgrimage of sorts . . . there to pay homage to the man who had given them so much even though he never knew their names. There to pay respects and gaze upon the grounds of the estate that famously inspired his book, if only from afar. They were there to say thank you and to let him know how much it all meant to them . . . and they were close now. So close.
***
West Rock was pointedly charming only in the way that it wasn’t pretending to be anything other than what it truly was. Surprisingly enough, there were no bookstores stocked with copies of Addington’s work, no gift shops selling keychains adorned with tin cutouts of his characters, and no guided tours tracing the streets he once walked. In fact, there was no mention of him at all among the storefronts and street signs that dotted the heart of town as it snaked along the rocky coast for no more than half a mile. To Eamon’s eye, it was really no different than Boise except that it was a bit smaller and seemingly less concerned with being a crossroads of nearly identical subcultures and regional freight lines. And as they walked along the shore toward the only pier in town, he couldn’t help but feel like West Rock didn’t care a whit that they were even there to begin with, and a new and unfamiliar comfort bloomed through his being. Three rabbits in the rye and nothing else at all.
Mark and Caroline found themselves bouncing along Main Street, playfully bumping shoulders and ribbing one another about their respective literate interests, she munching on her turkey sandwich and he with his hands in his pockets as Eamon lagged several steps shy of their pace. A moment or two behind their heels was the position Eamon usually preferred when in their company, and though he was well aware that pacing typically painted him as some charity case of a third wheel, those were colors he was happy to wear if it meant being able to see the two of them together. It made him happy to see them happy, and it made him feel a little less existentially tortured to see such incongruity in this world seem so natural and so inarguably correct. Mark and Caroline were like proof to him. They were proof that it could all work out even if it shouldn’t. Proof that different didn’t necessarily equal broken, even when the math seemed so sure.
Mark was a small mountain of a man, a former high school lineman who stood a head taller than most and carried his weight with a surprisingly effortless comfort. His strides were long and confident as he navigated the coast, and even though his pale cheeks were turning red form the salt-stained sea breeze, his jaunty disposition never skipped a beat. Caroline, on the other hand, was strikingly fit, the habits she’d learned from a lifetime of track and field at the same school where the three of them had met having served her well through college and into adulthood. She was as graceful in motion as she was in empathy—her olive-brown skin holding its own against the early September sun and her jet-black curls swinging with every turn of her legs. As a couple, they seemed antithetical at a glance, but to anyone who knew them even in passing, they were simply incomplete without each other. Two halves of the same lump of clay. Two breaths of the same kick of wind.
Eamon himself was physically reflective of nothing but the patchwork fabric of the country in which he was born. He was shy of six feet tall and cursed with thick locks of red hair that he was careful to keep short enough not to be a bother, and though he was scrawny and sinewy and unassuming, that by no means meant he wasn’t capable. A lifetime of hunting, tracking, and foraging had grown his senses to be sharper than most, but whereas such things were once paramount to the survival of him and his father, now they were just fossils he was keen to ignore lest he dwell too sharply on the baggage that made him feel so out of place so often. There were times when he wanted nothing more than to be chubby and uncoordinated and unaware of everyone and everything around him . . . times when he wanted so badly to be something other than what he was. Anything really. Even a pair of blue eyes would do.
As they made their way closer to the pier, which looked more like just a big dock than anything official or city-sanctioned, Eamon fiddled with the free ferry passes to Addington Isle that he had stowed away in his hip pocket. He knew they were there, but that didn’t stop him from running his fingers over their surfaces and feeling the creases along their midlines to be sure he hadn’t made some horrid oversight that would derail their little pilgrimage. They had come to him through a subscription to a Winterset Hollow fan magazine called The Frog’s Feast that had found its way into his hands through a strange bit of coincidence that he was happy to have fallen into.
He and Mark had shared an apartment since the year they graduated high school, but even from the day they christened their new pad with a six pack of something cheap and awful, Eamon knew it was only a matter of time before his best friend would want to share his home with Caroline. There was no jealousy or hard feelings on Eamon’s part the day that Mark approached him about moving out, and truthfully, their relationship never even skipped a beat. He was happy for them and knew their future together would be stronger for it, but that didn’t make the prospect of being a bit more isolated any less daunting. There was always something about having a roommate that forced Eamon to be more sociable than he otherwise would be. Something about sharing his life that behooved him to sharpen his social graces and be more open to the idea of compromise, even on a superficial level, but there was also a part of him that was terrified that he would slip back into the darkness he had fought so hard to escape the moment he set foot in a space where he needn’t answer to anybody.
It was a challenge that Eamon was loathe to face at twenty-three, but he knew it to be a necessary one, and so he found himself a flat in a forgettable corner of Boise that he could afford on his meager retail assistant manager’s salary, packed his paltry belongings into his hatchback, and marched once again into the great unknown. The Frog’s Feast, oddly enough, was waiting for him in his mailbox as if it was part of some strange and serendipitous welcome package. It was addressed to the previous tenant, but it felt like it was meant for him as if somebody, somewhere, was trying to tell him that maybe he wasn’t so different. As if maybe the rye was searching for him too.
That night, Eamon sat on the bare floor of his apartment and read his new rag cover to cover under the watch of four stark white and empty walls. It was filled with fan fiction of the worst kind, reviews of the various Winterset Hollow cartoons that had been produced over the years, and page after page of user-submitted artwork, but it was hardly the content that mattered to him in that moment . . . it was the connection. A connection that he still felt every time a new quarterly issue showed up buried among the bills and credit card offers. A connection that made his decision to take a weekend trip to Addington Isle somehow free of the bulk of his normal anxieties when, tucked into the pages of praise and homage, he found a handful of coupons for a free ferry ride that were good for only one day of the year—September 7. Barley Day.
There were seven other people waiting for them at the pier, most of them looking no older than thirty-five and no younger than twenty, but all of them seeming more than a little bookish even at a distance. Eamon couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in the presence of this many young strangers without seeing any plaid, but there were myriad corduroys and fashionably questionable sweaters and almost all of them were sporting glasses of one thickness or another.
“Well, these certainly look like your people,” said Mark, nodding at Eamon who was now walking abreast of him and Caroline.
“My people!? Did you hear that?” Eamon replied with a snoot. “My people have been through a lot and frankly, we don’t need your insensitive stereotyping right now, okay?”
He waited for Caroline to support him with some amount of feigned disdain, which as requested, she expressed with a perfectly judgmental “Mmhmm.”
Eamon continued, “And look, just because they’re all staring at their shoes and clearly horribly uncomfortable in their own skin doesn’t mean they’re my people.”
“What about the one with red hair?” challenged Mark.
“Actually, he does kinda look like you,” Caroline added, looking the young man closest to the water up and down. “Maybe if you lost three inches and gained thirty pounds?” Eamon couldn’t disagree, but before he could conjure something witty to say, the most boisterous and rotund among the strangers took it upon himself to welcome them in shamelessly theatrical fashion.
“Good morrow, fellow Hollowheads!” he barked, stepping away from the rail with a leather-bound copy of Addington’s opus under his arm. “Hast thou come to share the feast of Barley with this party of wayward souls?”
Mark stopped dead in his tracks and rolled his eyes so hard that both Caroline and Eamon could hear his corneas etching new wrinkles into his gray matter. “Okay, I’m going home,” he said, turning on his heels as Caroline stepped in front of him to lend some perspective.
“You be nice! It’s only a ferry ride. It’s not like you’re spending the weekend with any of them,” she said.
Mark took a resigned breath and forced a pitiful smile, returning the gentleman’s greeting in the words of his people, the largely unaffected. “Sup.”
“Ah, a man of letters,” said the group’s self-appointed spokesperson.
“He’s making fun of me, isn’t he?”
“Nooo, no, no. He’s just—”
“No, he’s definitely making fun of you,” Eamon interjected, turning his attention back to the others. “Are you guys all waiting for the ferry?” he asked, brandishing his free passes from The Frog’s Feast.
“Indeed!” crowed the town crier. “We are but weary travelers in search of passage to—”
Mark held his finger aloft in such a singular manner that it stopped him mid-sentence, and he wasted no time in turning his attention to the one who resembled Eamon as if to say, you . . . you may speak. “Yeah, man, we’re just waiting to get over to the isle,” said the redhead as the rest of the motley gathering confirmed as much by nodding and waving their own free passes in the salty September air. “It’s been almost an hour now.”
Mark spun back around as if his word was final and said, “Well, there you have it, no ferry.”
“Actually, now that you mention it, I don’t even see any signs or anything,” pondered Eamon, looking around for any indication that they were even in the right place to begin with.
“Guess that’s that,” Mark said, spinning on his heels again only to be forcibly turned around by Caroline.
“Give it a couple minutes, Babe. We’re already here. Come on, we drove like seven hours.”
“Fine. But if I have to hear any more from Captain Renaissance Fair over there, I’m gonna shove that book so far down his throat he won’t be able to joust right for a month.” Eamon bobbed his head from side to side as if he was evaluating the merit of Mark’s threat. “What?”
“I don’t know,” he protested. “I mean, that was okay, but I would’ve gone with like . . . ‘so far down his throat that he’ll be shitting whist cards for a fortnight,’ or something like that.”
“Ooo, that’s way better!” chimed Caroline.
“I hate you both so much. And for the record, whist cards are just regular playing cards, so who’s the smart guy now, smart guy?”
“Certainly not me,” Eamon squeaked, but as he looked down at the suddenly useless freebies in his hand, his silent reverie for their weekend trip was interrupted by the sturdy chug of a big diesel engine and they all turned to see an old fishing troller limping in from the sea. The haggard boat swung a wide turn across the shoreline and idled to a stop before reversing until its stern was close enough for Eamon to see that “The Standard” was painted on the hull in faded lettering. The boat was in rough shape and its captain didn’t appear to be faring any better as he stepped out of the wheelhouse sporting canvas pants, a hefty fleece, and a beard befitting a very particular image that he clearly had no intention of avoiding.
“All aboard!” he said as he grabbed a thick rope and tied his craft to the nearest cleat. The entire party gave him a skeptical eye, but it was Mark, having never met a stranger he was too shy to engage, who elected himself consigliere.
“All aboard for what?” he barked.
“You guys wanna go to the isle or not?”
“Wait, this is the ferry?” Eamon asked as the rest of the congregation slowly crowded around them, prompting the captain to point to a large people-carrying craft that was docked a hundred or so yards away and looked as if it had been left there to die.
“Nope. That is the ferry. This is The Standard,” the captain said, gesturing broadly with his hands out to his side.
“Well, when does the ferry come?” asked Eamon.
“It doesn’t. Been out of commission for five, six years, something like that.”
Caroline took the coupons from Eamon’s grasp and flipped them up for the captain to see. “But why are they still sending out coupons?” she asked to a chorus of supportive mumbles.
“I look like the goddamn mayor to you?” snapped the captain.
“Watch it,” Mark warned.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean nothin’ by it, Captain Gene,” he said, stepping up to the dock and offering Mark his hand as he clocked the empty to-go container Caroline was still clutching. “I imagine Millie didn’t wanna lose her tourism bump,” he offered with a chuckle and a nod toward the diner. “Pretty sure she’s been sendin’ those out for a decade or two at this point. Anyway, I’ve been pickin’ up the slack here for a while. Takin’ people to the isle in between fishing charters and runnin’ hunters out to some of the other islands. Guess everybody likes a little extra jingle in their pocket. So, you guys havin’ a good buckwheat day or what?”
“Barley Day!” shouted the big mouth from the back of the pack.
“Whatever. Look, twenty bucks a ride, round trip. Now, I may not be much for books and fake holidays,” Gene said as he climbed back aboard his craft and opened up a cooler stocked with cold beer and a few bottles of Jack Daniels. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t know how to celebrate.”
Suddenly, Mark felt much better about the whole excursion. “I like this guy,” he said as Gene grinned and kicked open the little half-door that was cut into the stern. “I mean, we did drive like seven hours.”
“That all it takes?” asked Eamon of his friend. “A cooler full of beer?”
Mark turned to him with the blankest of expressions hanging from his face and said only, “Have we met?” He stepped onto the boat and immediately everyone felt a bit more comfortable with the situation at hand, and one by one, they all followed suit. And as Mark cracked a beer and downed a good portion of it with his first grateful gulp, he raised a silent toast to a book he had never read and gave himself over to a man he barely knew as they set a course for Addington Isle.
