by Jack Ketchum
My father Bradford Collier was a squirrel hunter and a good one. I remember him sitting rocking in the shade of our porch his Sunday afternoons off with his old .22 cradled in his lap and watching the stand of four grouped tall black oak trees far across the field which the squirrels would naturally favor for their rich crop of acorns and we inside would hear the short flat bark of the rifle maybe half a dozen times over an hour and then his boots moving slowly down the wooden steps. There’d be silence and then we’d hear the boots again and Anne and Mary Jo and I would rush out from the kitchen to find him working on the five or six he’d shot, pinching the loose skin of the back to slit with his knife and inserting his fingers to tear and peel it away like a too-tight glove, cutting off head and tail and feet and slicing the belly open to flip out the tiny entrails.
Should he decide a hike was the order of the day there was another stand of six hundred-year-old oaks down by the brook about half a mile away. He’d disappear down there for a while.
They were clean kills nearly every time though like any other hunter he’d had to slit a throat or two. But what my father shot normally didn’t suffer much. And my mother’s stews were fine.
My father considered squirrels vermin, though. Pests. Even if they did make for good eating. So that it was a surprise to all of us when in the summer of 1957 when I was just turned eleven and my sisters Anne and Mary Jo were twelve and ten my father returned from the stand of oaks with five dead eastern greys in one hand and in the other, one that was very much alive, held by the scruff of the neck and trying hard against all hope to bite him.
“Must’ve fallen out of a tree,” he said. “And fallen long and hard. See? Front paw’s broken. Danny, you get on into the kitchen and ask your mother for some string and good thick twine. Girls, get a couple of those popsicles you been suckin’ on all summer long out of the freezer. Eat ’em fast or run ’em under the water, I don’t care which.”
He lay the five dead greys out on the porch and we did as we were told. My mother came out to join us and take hold of the squirrel by the scruff of the neck and the base of the tail while we watched my father cut and loop the twine around his jaws and snout in an expert bowline knot so he could bite no longer and once that was done had her turn him over on his side. He used his hunting knife on the popsicle sticks stained pink and orange and cut a length of string. The squirrel chattered and scrabbled at the wood but could gain no purchase.
“Hold him tight now, Marge. This will hurt.”
But seeing those two big gloved hands coming toward him much have frightened the squirrel to such degree that he stopped resisting entirely and simply rolled his eyes. Even when my father took his delicate paw and forearm and gave them a sharp jerk apart he just jumped once and then lay still and panting. My father splinted the leg with the popsicle sticks and wrapped it tight with string.
“Take that twine and make me another bowline, Danny. We’ll collar him and tie him off to this post here and see what happens. If he doesn’t go into shock on us he might be fine in a week or so.”
“Shock?”
“From pain. Or what we just did to him. Either one could kill him.”
And once we had him sitting up dazed and baffled and leashed to the support stud with his makeshift muzzle removed my father did an astonishing thing. He took a glove off and ran his hand across the squirrel’s back. Just once. Bradford Collier did that. A man who never had use for animals in his life unless they were working animals, a cat who was a good mouser or a guard-dog maybe, and who considered the greys nothing more than fat rats with furry tails. Who happened to taste good and were cheap at twice the price.
“Husk some walnuts, kids. Put ’em nearby and then leave him alone awhile. That’s one scared animal.”
In time my father actually allowed us to name him. It took some spirited wrangling between the three of us but we did. We named him Charlie after Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie. My older sister Anne’s idea. I thought it was dumb to name a squirrel after a dog but Mary Jo sided with her and that was that.
Charlie took to the easy life right away. A bowl of water on the porch in front of him and all the acorns and walnuts he could eat. He never again tried to bite. In a couple of weeks my father determined he’d healed and removed the splint and though he ever after favored the leg he got around well enough and was quick enough so that once we let him off his leash you had to be careful opening the screen door or the next thing you knew he’d be inside, barking and chattering at the furniture and climbing it too.
There was nothing he couldn’t get into. No cabinet or drawer was safe. But he never made much mess except somehow to displace things. A fork in my father’s socks-drawer, my old cat’s-eye marbles mixed in with the spoons. So after awhile we tolerated him inside and got used to his invasions. My mother bought mason jars to protect the beans, rice and macaroni. My father, who was as good with woodworking as he was with the wrench down at his garage, even went so far as to cut him a small hinged trap at the base of the door to the porch so Charlie could come and go as he pleased.
He never once went back to the stand of oaks across the field. Not that we knew of. In fact we observed that he wasn’t much for trees in general anymore. He seemed to prefer to stay in or around the house, under the porch or in the tall fieldgrass and the low scrub beyond. Maybe it was remembering that fall, that height, that sudden break. He’d climb the bookshelves or the bedposts or the banister up to our rooms handily enough—my mother was forever polishing the tiny scratch-marks he left behind with wood-stain. She didn’t seem to mind. She said Charlie was just antiquing her furniture. But the trees he mostly left alone.
He climbed us too.
He seemed to know not to go for a bare leg or arm but if you were wearing pants or jeans or especially a jacket—he liked to rummage through deep open pockets—he’d be up and over you and riding your shoulder in a matter of seconds. You could walk around with him that way and he’d just hold on perfectly balanced like some strange furry added appendage.
Only my father wouldn’t tolerate it. Like the rest of us he’d feed Charlie a walnut now and then but that far he refused to go. He was almost as fast with his hands as Charlie was on his feet and would pluck him off like an annoying bug and drop him soundly to the floor. Charlie was persistant, though. It was almost as though my father were the one he really wanted to climb and the rest of us were just amusement. Walking monkey-bars. Finally it got through to him that he just wasn’t wanted but I’d still catch him watching my father sometimes, that nervous sidelong glance, chittering, nose twitching, and was never quite sure that someday, sometime, damned if he wasn’t going to try again.
My father still continued to hunt. Twice a month, maybe. Across the field or down by the shady brook.
And I sometimes wondered what Charlie thought if he thought anything at all of the scent of squirrel-meat steaming in our stewpot. I look back on it now and how we could actually eat the stuff with him running around underfoot is something I’ll never understand. But we did.
As I say, we’re not one thing, we’re many. We’re capable of all kinds of balancing acts in our heads. Until something or someone tips the balance.
The way my wife beside me’s tipping it now.
That winter was a cold one in northern Jersey and the snow fell thick into five-and-six-foot drifts against the house and mostly Charlie stayed indoors. He liked the mantle over the fireplace which I always thought unnatural since wild animals are supposed to be afraid of fire or even the scent of fire but for Charlie the hotter the fire in the grate the better. He’d fall asleep up there basking in the updrafts.
Come spring and he was using the trapdoor again and using it a lot, his comings and goings according to some design unknowable to us but clearly urgent to him. He’d either be flying through the trap constantly back and forth or else he’d disappear for hours at a time. We suspected sex of course, though only Anne and Mary Jo and I would talk about it and only in private.
Parents weren’t comfortable talking with kids about sex back then.
“I wonder how squirrels do it,” said Mary Jo.
“With their penises, silly,” said Anne. “Just like everybody else.”
“Charlie’s gettin’ some!” I laughed. They ignored me.
“Anybody ever see Charlie’s penis?” asked Mary Jo.
“Not me.”
“Ugh,” said Anne. “Spare me!”
I rarely went along with my father on his Sunday excursions down to the brook and never once in memory shot from the porch at all. At an age when most boys would shoot at most anything that moved with rifle, bow or slingshot I had no taste for bloodsports.
One afternoon in May he asked as he often did though and this time I accepted. I think I was angry with Anne for some reason and felt the need to get out of the house that day. Anne could be bossy or else she and Mary Jo would side together against me in an argument and that could make me furious. Whatever the reason, I went.
My father and I never talked much and didn’t that day either. I followed him through the tall fieldgrass into the woods and found his well-beaten trail down to the brook, both our .22s held at port arms. I had no intention of using mine. It was there because my father wanted it to be. I was a miserable shot and my father knew it but it was a formal thing with him. You didn’t go hunting unarmed. It simply wasn’t done.
His habit was to walk first to the brook and then approach the stand of oaks from there, the fast-running water masking whatever sounds we might make along the dirt embankment. It had rained the day before, the brook swollen with water the color of coffee with a dash of cream. I could never have found the exact spot to cut up to the trees from there amid the tangled foliage had I been alone but my father had no problem and I saw that he’d worn a path of sorts there too barely noticable amid the scrub. I could see the six tall trees about forty yards away up a gentle slope.
We walked twenty of those yards and stopped at the edge of the clearing and knelt each of us on one knee and my father started firing, small sharp cracks in that wide open space that could have been branches breaking and the first squirrel slammed against the tree-trunk twenty feet up as though a hand had pushed it and then fell and my father worked the bolt and chambered another round and fired as another raced across the high branches of the same tree and tumbled bouncing from limb to limb. By then squirrels were racing barking across the ground and pouring down off the trees but my father took his time and squeezed off two more rounds. I saw one big grey somersault across the ground and another skitter and roll just as it reached the bushes. He missed with the fifth round but the sixth caught another where the bole met the root system of a second tree and flipped it on its back, the .22 round going through the squirrel entirely and chipping at the green wood behind him.
“Five’s enough,” my father said.
It had taken just moments.
We stood and he took the canvas sack off his belt and we went to harvest them.
“Good shooting.”
“Thanks.”
“Five out of six and they were really moving!”
“They were, weren’t they.”
I wasn’t nearly as excited as I was trying to sound but something told me my father expected it. The greys were still barking angrily at us yards away in the safety of heavy scrub. My father moved slowly and methodically, prodding them with a stick to make sure they were fully dead and wouldn’t bite and then picking them up by the scruff of the neck with one gloved hand and shoving them into the sack.
“Uh-oh. Damn.”
“What?”
We had four of them in the sack and were walking toward the scrub. My father suddenly picked up his pace considerably, the closest I ever saw him come to running.
“The one I shot at the edge here. I think he’s gone.”
We got to where the grey ought to have been and wasn’t.
“Maybe you missed him.”
“I didn’t miss him. Look here.”
He was looking at a cluster of ferns. I could see blood speckling the leaves, glistening in the sun. Behind them the scrub was all thick briers. The day was hot. Neither of us was wearing much. A short-sleeve shirt for my father, a teeshirt for me.
“We’ve got to find him. You can’t leave an animal like that. Come on. He couldn’t have gotten far.”
We plunged carefully into the scrub, my father plucking the stems away and holding them back for me with his gloved fingers while I did my best to keep them at a distance with the barrel and stock of my rifle.
The briers were thickest down low so we couldn’t try to follow a blood trail. We’d have cut ourselves to shreds trying. We might have had more luck splitting up but he knew I needed him to hold back the briers for me. We searched for well over an hour. By the time my father gave it up my skin felt like it was crawling with small biting insects and my arms and face were streaked with sweat and blood. I washed them in the brook and we headed home.
My mother and sisters had gone to town shopping so the car was gone and the yard was empty. We crossed the field of waving grass in silence. I remember glancing at my father and that his face was grim. He hated losing that squirrel.
I don’t know how it was that I should be the one who saw it first because only a year or so later I’d be wearing glasses and my father’s vision was 20-20 and we were walking side by side. We were about eight feet from the porch. I remember thinking he should have been the one and not me. I don’t know why I felt that way but I still do. That somehow it wasn’t right.
I think I came close to falling then. I know I staggered, that it felt like somebody had pushed me suddenly hard in the chest and that was what had forced the gasp out of me like a silent call for help, my body calling for help where there was none.
“What?” my father said and then looked where I was looking at the blood-trail leading up the three porch steps to the landing, smeared across the landing as with a single long stroke of a half-dry paint-brush all the way to Charlie’s trap door, a direct and determined line to that door he’d painted with the very life of him.
I knew what we’d find in there, that it was impossible for him to have come this far bleeding this much and still be alive and when my father flung open the door and we saw him on the rug, lying on his side and shot in the very same shattered shoulder that once had housed a broken leg, I saw that I was right, though we’d missed him by a matter of minutes only. His body was still warm. I touched him and looked into his glazed open eyes and tried hard not to cry. We knelt there.
“He came home looking for us,” my father said quietly.
I don’t know why I said what I did. It wasn’t anger or accusation and it wasn’t just sadness either but it came out of me like a fleeing bird and it was true.
“He came home looking for you, dad.” I said. “Not us. You.”
I’ll never forget the look on my father’s face that day.
I remember it better than the look on any face I’ve ever seen before or since except maybe this one here on the pillow in front of me, sleeping now but only hours ago curled in on itself and nearly unrecognizable in anger and hurt which is the face I’ll remember when she leaves tomorrow, not this familiar face but that one. She told me early on even before we were married that the one thing she couldn’t handle was if I were unfaithful because that’s what her father was and that was what I was and what I was again and since she knows it now she will leave. She’s as good as her word.
My father never hunted again. The rifle went into the basement to rust away. Something in him changed after Charlie. He went out with my mother more on Sundays for one thing. We were old enough to fend for ourselves by then. And then later he began to drink more.
And later still, once we were in college, stopped drinking. And when he was old and sick became a bitter man.
We’re many things, all of us, blown by so many unexpected winds.
And I have to wonder, who am I now and what will I be tomorrow?
What have I done?
And what will I do with my own Sundays once she’s gone?
For Anush and Misty
Twins
For June and me since our earliest rememberings and except for our years in New York City the world’s always been a hostile place.
So this is nothing new, really.
We were born fraternal twins at three minutes past midnight and ten past midnight respectively on October 31, 1956 in the first windy minutes of Halloween. Mischief Night as it was called then. While we two were screaming our first tiny outrage at being thrust out of someplace wholly warm and secure—that single place on earth I believe in which there’s never any need or any good reason to scream—much older kids were out soaping windows or letting air out of tires or setting fire to brown paper sacks full of dogshit on their neighbors’ porches.
There’s a Scots belief that when a woman bares a boy-child and girl-child together she’ll never have another. Our mother never did.
But that was okay with both our parents. My mother Hanna didn’t care much for sex in the first place. She had us and that was all she wanted. Sex was kids. Period. The act itself was ugly, slippery and revolting. Hanna’s feeling was that enough was enough. And now that my father Willie had satisfied her in the only way she was capable of being satisfied he was happy too. He could fuck around all he wanted on the side. He had a sporting-goods store right down by the lake. A prime location both for business and for poaching because there were more and more tourists coming in every year and all those ladies in sundresses needed all that good advice on bait and rod and tackle.
I suspect my father died happy.
That summer we were six years old. For some reason unknown to us Hanna decided to visit my father at the shop around lunch-time and brought along June and me and I remember seeing a big ruddy-faced man in a cowboy hat standing at the counter with Pete Miller the hired help, the big man sighting down an over-and-under shotgun while Pete placed upon the counter a yellow box of shells, Pete looking worried at my mother as we passed through the store and saying something to her and she just waving back at him and marching us down the aisle to the back storage room where my father would be taking his lunch. Which he sort of was.