The Rabbit Back Literature Society Read Online Free PDF

accept that you would never know for sure—it could be one thing, could be another. But the sedative they’d given him ought to let him sleep through his injuries for a few hours.
    The doctor said he didn’t want to speculate about the nature of his injuries, but he speculated anyway.
    His wounds seemed to be partly gashes and partly animal bites. They could very well be self-inflicted. He could have hurt himself with sticks or stones. Maybe he had stumbled in the garden and panicked and hurt himself on the sticks and thorns. Did he, by chance, have any suicidal tendencies? A garden is a lovely thing, but it’s also full of sharp sticks. It was possible,too, that some small animal, a rat perhaps, had attacked him. In any case, he’d been given a tetanus shot.
    “I don’t know what happened,” Marjatta Milana told her daughter. “I was washing the dishes. I had just been cutting out
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car sweepstakes coupons and your father had been sitting in the garden all morning. Then I had the idea to go out and cut his hair at last, make him look a little more human. I fetched the scissors and went outside, but he wasn’t in his chair.
    “I was afraid that he might have got lost in the woods, although he’s always stayed in the garden before. I had sometimes wondered if he might take it into his head to go into the park and through there into the big woods, which go on for who knows how far. I was about to call the emergency number, and then I heard a voice from the raspberry patch. And there he was, covered in blood. Oh my Lord, my heart just leaped from my chest. I was afraid I’d have some kind of attack and both of us would be left lying there in the garden to rot.
    “But he was still alive. He was lying in the bushes on his back and making this weak sound. I said, ‘Don’t worry, Paavo, help is coming,’ and then I ran inside and called the emergency number and then I guess I called you… I don’t remember what I did… and your sister, too—I’m embarrassed to say it, but I think I did call her, sputtered something…”
    Ella thought her mother was going to start sniffling, but she just cast a weary glance at her husband.
    “This is all just too much somehow. And the kitchen’s such a mess. The dishes just left to lie there… oh blast, I think I must have ruined my new porridge pan. I left it on the stove. If you could manage it at all, could you go to the house and clean upa little? There’s no reason we both have to stay here, and I’m sure you have your work to do.”

    Ella had been scrubbing the pan for an hour and a half when her mother called. Ella’s father had woken up and recognized her, but he wasn’t saying anything sensible. “What am I going to do with him?” her mother sighed.
    Ella wondered whether her mother wanted some kind of blessing from her to send him to a nursing home.
    “Keep trying,” she said.
    After several nights spent thinking about her father’s case, she had developed a theory that the problem was a mathematical rather than a moral one. It wasn’t right to drive your own husband or father from his home and put him in an institution unless it happened to be unavoidable. As time went on, however, the individual by the name of Paavo Emil Milana was less and less the Paavo Emil Milana that she and her mother knew, and more and more some other person that Ella wasn’t particularly eager to get to know. Once her father’s share dropped below a certain percentage, it would, according to Ella’s theory, be time for him to part with the rest of the family and move away.
    It was already late in the evening. Light poured in through the west window and filled the room with the reddish brown colour of the curtains. Ella left the pan to soak and spread the local newspaper on the kitchen table.
    Next to the paper sat a clay gnome that Ella glanced at now and then. Her mother had made it in the art club a couple of years earlier.
    The sculpture wasn’t bad, but