A Rabbit for Vally
by
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Just past the off ramp for Gagetown I saw a pair standing on the shoulder of the road - an adult and child. It had started to drizzle and I noticed as I came closer that neither wore any rain gear. As I passed them I saw that they were both female, the little one probably less than ten years old.
After having read that 83% of hitchhikers picked up in a Texas survey had criminal records, I had promised myself I would never pick up another hitchhiker. But I couldn’t leave a small child out in the rain without cover. I found my foot coming off the accelerator and onto the brake. As I rolled to a stop some hundred and fifty yards past the couple, I watched them in the mirror as they picked up their bags and started to run toward me. I put the truck in reverse and backed toward them, shortening the distance they had to cover. The little one ran awkwardly, her body stiff and one little fist pumping air while the other clutched a very small suitcase.
I leaned over and opened the door on the passenger side of the truck. The woman looked up at me but did not immediately start to climb in.
“Are you going far?” she asked.
“I’m going to Hamilton Falls. It’s not on the Trans Canada – I turn off at Tewkesbury,” I explained, since a lot of people do not know where Hamilton Falls is.
“Is that a big town?” she asked.
“About nine thousand people,” I answered, rounding upward by close to a thousand. The Chamber of Commerce would be proud of me.
“Would it have a youth hostel or YWCA?” she asked.
“We’re not quite big enough for that,” I said. “But there’s a rooming house run by Mrs. Garret that they say is clean and not expensive.”
She turned and put her hands around the little one’s waist and with surprising strength swung her up onto the seat. Then she climbed in beside her, the child now wedged firmly between us.
“You got lotsa lotsa hair on your face!” the child said, looking up at me with slanty eyes.
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About the Book
When Harry Kenner stopped for the two hitchhikers, he could not guess that they would change his life. Not only would he fall in love with one of them, he would fall hard for both of them.
One of the hitchhikers, Vally, is seven years old and, as a Down Syndrome child, possesses an extra chromosome in her genetic make-up. Her mother calls it “a happiness gene” – an “extra” given her by a kindly Creator. It is her sweetness and vitality, as well as her vulnerability that first captures Kenner’s heart. Not long after, Vally’s unwed mother, Katherine, finds her way into the same heart. Her reckless courage both frightens and attracts Kenner who feels compelled to help in her fight to keep her child.
This is the story of a dying man who suddenly discovers something worth living for. He finds himself pushed to the limit to succeed in a field in which he had heretofore failed. When failure seems about ready to overcome him, the needs of his charges push him past exhaustion and despair to achievements he could not have imagined a few months earlier.
About the Author
Kenneth Langdon is a Canadian author, all of whose novels are set in the little Province of New Brunswick alongside Maine.
His novels include A Spy in my House, Jackals of the Night, Dirty Politics and A Rabbit for Vally. Non-fiction works include An Island of our Own and a memoir, I Wasn’t Always Old.
Under the name Ken Langdon, he writes the syndicated weekly newspaper column Before the Courts, currently carried by fifteen newspapers, mainly in Atlantic Canada.
Kenneth Langdon lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick.