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veterinarian a half-mile up the street, but returned home less than ten minutes later with the extraordinary news that Binky had died before she could get him in to see the doctor.
    “Not Binky,” Linda wailed, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Not Binky,” she repeated through her tears.
    I put my arms around her. Well, that’s that, I thought. Life will be much simpler now. Then, it was as if a stranger had stepped into my body and taken over. I found myself sobbing like a steam engine. We wrapped him in a blue bath towel and buried him on the edge of our property beyond our backyard fence. We left the house, driving north to Greenville and eating lunch at the local Big Boy—hoping, I suppose, that things would seem better by comparison with our lackluster lunch.
    That night, though, I couldn’t get to sleep. There was a full moon, and it seemed as if all the luminescence were concentrated in a spotlight that shone on Binky’s grave.
    “I can’t stand the thought of him being all alone out there,” I said to Linda. The sense of him buried in the ground was intolerable. I was connected to him by an invisible wire, and I wished he were alive to chew through it.
    I N THE END , I memorialized Binky by building him an elaborate grave complex that would have impressed the pharaohs, crowning his grave with an inordinately large pile of rocks. One damp spring afternoon, after standing at his resting place, I brought the flat central rock into the basement workroom and with the dregs of a can of latex house paint, I inscribed a headstone: BINKY 1990–1992—FAREWELL TO OUR DEAR FRIEND .
    “This I’ve got to see,” my mother muttered when Linda told her about the monument. But I was far from finished. Using a grass whip, I cleared out all the weeds and brush between the boundary fence of our backyard and Binky’s grave beneath a stand of maples. I laid out a straight path to the site, bordering it first with two-by-fours abandoned in our barn by the previous homeowner, then anchoring the boards on both sides with cabbage-size rocks. I filled the mourning path with a three-inch-deep layer of wood chips. Then, I created a second rock-and-board-bounded, woodchip-filled path that meandered from the mourning path down the hill beyond the burn barrel, turned west to wander roughly parallel with the backyard fence, then jogged north and joined the fence, which I lowered at that point to step-over height with a pair of bolt cutters. For a distance of thirty feet or so, I tore out the weeds and brambles, turned over the soil with a hoe, and planted an incompatible mixture of ground-level creeping myrtle and billowing purple vetch. The latter spread that summer like dandelions, burying the myrtle in balls of woody vegetation.
    The next summer, only the barest traces of my paths remained, just rocks and boards to stub the toe of anyone foolish enough to fight their way through the virulent weeds, wild blackberry bushes, stinging nettles, purple thistle, mullein, and out-of-control vetch. The paint had long since flaked off Binky’s marker. I had already touched up the inscription once, but finally let it go. I soon found I had little energy to pine for him. We had unwittingly taken in a new pet who was every ounce as belligerent as Binky.

CHAPTER 2

Ollie Takes Over
    During the first year of our struggles with Binky, Linda bought me a yellow-and-black canary as a Christmas present. The addition of Chester to our household was as effortless as our glum bunny’s was troublesome. He sang merrily at the slightest provocation. The rush of warm air through the kitchen register, the whine of the vacuum cleaner, or the tinny sound from the speaker of our portable TV triggered ecstatic passages of warbles and rolling trills from him. Unlike Binky, Chester had little craving for freedom. Whenever we opened the door to his cage, he would flutter worriedly around our dining room and occasionally settle onto a perch I had hung from the