Squirrel Hunting
David Cohen illustration
During my early childhood, John was like a grandfather to me. Though he was a neighbor—the husband of my babysitter, Dora—I called him Grandpa and believed he was my grandpa, just as I considered Dora my grandma.
Dora, a lady in her 60s, and John, in his 70s, lived at the top of the street where I grew up. Ours was a close-knit neighborhood, very rural then in the early 1960s. Many houses, including Dora’s, still had outhouses in the backyards. I stayed with Dora on weekdays while my parents worked in a Marion hosiery mill.
Our routines were simple: My father and mother dropped me off early in the morning, sometimes still in darkness. My father carried me into the wood-frame house, a blanket wrapped around me, and laid me on Dora’s settee in the front room. Dora would then guide me into a bedroom and tuck me under patchwork quilts. After I had slept a while, she woke me, and my day would begin. I liked to play outside making mud pies. At noon, we ate dinner, and later I settled in with Dora on the settee for an afternoon of black walnut shelling and television watching. Dora’s favorite shows were Queen for a Day, Art Linkletter’s House Party, The Edge of Night, and The Secret Storm. Then my father came to take me home.
But on warm summer days, I enjoyed sitting in the front yard with John, he in one chair and I in another. With his pocket knife, he cut a slice off his tobacco plug, placed the chaw inside his cheek, and began talking to me. He told me stories about squirrel hunting, how he traipsed through the woods and spied squirrels in the tall trees. I had watched him heading into the nearby woods with his rifle and wished I could tag along. Sometimes John, Dora, and I ate a meal of fried squirrel and mashed potatoes for dinner. My father was not a hunter, so wild game was new to me. But I developed a taste for it at Dora’s table.
At some point, John must have said to me, “One of these days I’ll let you go squirrel hunting with me,” and my imagination made this promised hunting trip seem as if it had happened. I told my father that I had gone squirrel hunting with Grandpa. So one day when he picked me up, he said to John, “Julia told me she went squirrel hunting with you.”
I was mortified my father had exposed my fib.
But to my relief, John didn’t say anything. I didn’t stretch the truth again.
My time with Dora and John ended when I was six and started to school. But our families remained close. Through the years, Dora would occasionally bring us a black walnut cake, and we would take Dora and John Christmas gifts.
As the years passed, Dora died, leaving John a widower. At Dora’s viewing at McCall’s Funeral Home, John wept and had to be led from the parlor. This was a heartbreaking moment, revealing a tender side of John I had never seen. Several years later, my family learned that John had been moved into Hilltop House, a local nursing home. On a December day, my father and I visited him, taking him a shirt for his birthday. When we entered his room, he seemed to remember us. While we sat and talked to him, he said, “I’m coming home in the spring.” Later in the car, my father said to me, “He’ll never come home.” And I felt sad at my father’s observation, which turned out to be true.
That following June, my father and I stood at John’s casket in McCall’s Funeral Home. I looked down at his frail frame, weathered by his 90 years and felt a deep loss. Since then, I’ve wished I would have asked John questions about his life, which began in 1888. What stories he could have told. But as a child, I wasn’t interested in such things. All I cared about then was hearing about his trips into the woods and his squirrel hunting.