Summer of the Squirrels
By Katherine Rooks
The summer of my father’s last garden was hot and wet, near perfect conditions for Minnesota’s short growing season. I was eight. I didn’t care about gardening, but I loved wading barefoot into the leafy rows to pull up the bright carrots, washing the mud off with the garden hose, and eating them, sweet and crisp, and unlike any other carrots I’d ever tasted. That last year, for the first time, he also planted corn.
My father had never grown a thing before we moved to Minnesota but something about being in a farming state moved him to plant. Every summer he dug up the latter half of our St. Paul yard and planted tomatoes and lettuce, carrots and cucumbers, string beans and zucchini. To fertilize his new obsession, he composted everything, even attaching a meat grinder to his work bench in the basement so he could pulverize our table scraps and freeze them in bags until the Minnesota winter relented and he could compost outside again. The smell of rotted meat wafting from that unwashed grinder terrorized our whole house, but we all acted like we didn’t smell a thing. Our long-standing family code was to pretend that nothing was wrong even when something was obviously wrong.
Under my father’s exacting eye, the garden flourished. The green beans and lettuce arrived first. The zucchini showed up early and kept showing up all summer long until I couldn’t take another bite of the soft, bland, green flesh. The tomatoes arrived mid-July, also objectionable with their sometimes mealy and wormy hearts. The corn was due to arrive last.
It was the first year that we’d planted corn, and I was excited. It’s a big, fast-growing plant and in the slow world of watching small things grow, it impressed me. When the plants were about four feet high, I noticed the tiny buds pushing their way out of the stalk. I wasn’t the only one who marked the development.
The garden attracted the local city squirrels, fat and gray, who ran vegetable sorties from the stained redwood fence that separated our yard from the alley. That same summer, the city cut down the twenty-eight Dutch Elm trees that shaded our street, making the squirrels extra frantic. I was happy to let them make off with as much zucchini as they wanted, but I wanted that corn.
All summer I flung pebbles at the squirrels to drive them away from the tender, developing ears. Most nights, the raids picked up in intensity as the evening wore on so after dinner, if my parents were still speaking to each other, we’d troop out as a family to fend off the hordes. They cheered me on as I attempted to pelt the squirrels out of existence.
“Beat it thieves!”
“Take that suckers!”
I never hit a single squirrel, but it felt good to be sanctioned to be loud and angry, to be free to express feelings of any variety.
It had been a summer of rocks and insults even before the squirrels showed up. My parents’ marriage was splintering, and a deep sense of unease had settled into my chest, weighing me down with the bone-deep knowledge that all the yelling and screaming, fighting and crying, wasn’t just the new normal, but the terminal skirmishes that advanced the death of our family.
One night, as the corn was nearing its peak, the squirrels jacked up the frequency of their raids. They weren’t waiting for ripe. Close was good enough for them. I was—we were—enraged. All of us picked up rock after rock and flung them. My mother, rooting around the periphery of the house, found a brick and handed it to my father.
“Here,” she said. “That’ll get those fuckers.”
Without hesitation my father grabbed the brick and chucked it. In the soft evening breeze, it soared over the bright green lettuce tips, over the twisting tomato vines, over the yellow corn tassels, over the squirrels prancing on the fence and into the alley where we heard it crash into metal and glass.
I froze. I’d been tiptoeing around my parents for months trying to not to trigger them but, as was too often the case, I was just standing there when they set themselves off. I’d observed that some grownups would lower their voices or sequester themselves in another room when they fought, but my parents were unconcerned with discretion. They played to type: They were the main characters in our story.
“Fuck!” my father said. My mother was the more profane parent, but that summer my father matched her swear for swear.
He stomped through the garage to the alley to confirm that the brick he’d hurled had, in fact, landed on his car.
My mother wasn’t one to placate or mitigate his anger, anything. Let it burn was more or less her motto with the added caveat to add gasoline if it’s burning too slow.
“You threw the fucking thing,” she shouted.
I stood there staring at the ground as they screamed at each other about who was responsible for what. I wanted to run to my room, but I also didn’t want to move and remind them that I was still there, better to be still, better to be silent.
We never threw rocks at the squirrels again and they proceeded with some help from the birds to pick off all our corn. We didn’t get a single edible cob from that patch that had once looked so promising.
Later that year, my mother moved out. My father had been the gardener, but he didn’t replant and that corner of the yard became a scabby, weed-choked reminder of what had been. Even though I never got to taste that corn, I found missed it, missed watching it grow, missed putting my heart into protecting it, missed the anticipatory crunch of it, missed the sweet, yellow promise of it.
Some days, I still miss it.
Every summer, when I see the piles of neatly tasseled ears stacked in the grocery stores or the bins of green sheaves at the farmers’ market, or the folding tables stacked high on the side of the road with their hand-lettered signs, I marvel at the abundance and the ease with which some families are able to grow corn.
Katherine Rooks a writer in Denver, Colorado whose work has been published in The Portland Review, The Masters Review, The Hong Kong Review, Stone Canoe, The New Guard, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the PEN /Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize. In 2018 her story, "One More Thing," won the Robert Colley Fiction Prize. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The Warren Wilson Program for Writers.
Katherine can be found on the following social media platforms:
Twitter: @Ottelia FB: Katherine Rooks Instagram: @woodstock210 and @rookswrites Threads: woodstock210