We used to shoot them for fun when I was a kid. Squirrel hunting was its own kind of joy too, not that I gloried in the killing, even then.
What I remember best about it was sitting and waiting in the
lakeshore woods. What I never knew
before I did that—just sat quietly amid the trees—is that things come alive in
remarkable ways if you sit in stony silence.
I hail from Wisconsin, where hunting is the state pastime. Come deer opener, we’d regularly have half a
class in the high school where I once taught.
It’s hard for me to say anything negative about hunting because hunters
I know who hunt are great naturalists who most love and honor the
outdoors.
Still, I’m with Thoreau, who says every boy (call him
sexist) should hunt, but once he
grows up he should put the gun away.
It’s not something I’d carp about, but it’s true for me. But once upon a time, I actually shot
squirrels out of trees, thoughtlessly. It
was, as Thoreau would say, a rite of passage.
This morning on my way to school, a car came steaming along,
going too fast, I thought, and I heard a clunk and saw a red squirrel drag
himself off until he reached the neighbor’s porch. He scrambled quickly enough to make me to hope
he wouldn’t die, but the sound argued otherwise.
Squirrels have entertained us in this house for years with
their jaw-dropping gymnastics. Lately,
they’ve been chasing each around the lindens so fast they create orange stripes
up the bark. Chubby ballerinas, they’ll
risk life and limb in our ornamental crabs, determined to get every last berry,
no matter how thin the twig.
When I heard that thump and saw that squirrel drag its hind
end up the lawn and beneath the porch, it just about took me out at the knees,
I swear. I was actually shaking.
How it is that a young me once shot them out of trees
without a conscience. How is it that this
morning, 60 years later, that awful sound nearly did me in? Do we soften in old age? Does our heart somehow get outsized? What else gets lost when there’s less testosterone?
Nathan Englander’s “Free Fruit for Young Widows” appears in
this year’s Best American Short Stories,
and tomorrow we’ll talk about it in class—or I will if they don’t. It’s a gem, really, and, like all Holocaust
stories, its power is in its ideas or theme because the Holocaust can’t simply
be a setting. No car chase or budding
romance can outreach demonic treachery.
An Israeli vet named Shimmy offers kindness to a man, a
comrade who nearly killed him quite unjustly during the 1956 Sinai campaign. That vet, now a father, runs a fruit stand in
Jerusalem. There’s a coming-of-age story
too in “Free Fruit,” the story of a boy named Etgar who only slowly begins to
understand why his father dispenses grace in the volume he does, even to those
who are, to the boy’s mind, totally undeserving.
When Etgar is a kid, Shimmy simply tries to tell his boy
that nothing in life is easy, simply black and white—there’s only shades of gray,
he says.
One day, they watch a fish market next door, where the boss
is taking care of business, the catch of the day flopping around on a block
before getting killed with a mallet. Shimmy
tells Etgar that his son doesn’t understand suffering: “God forbid you should have to live with the
consequences of decisions, permanent, eternal, that will chase you in your head,
turning you from this side to that,” he says, “tossing between wrong and
right.” They’re watching those fish.
But Etgar still couldn’t grasp what his father was telling
him, “couldn’t comprehend how his father saw the story to be that of a fish
flip-flopping,” Englander writes, “when it was, in his eyes, only ever about
that mallet coming down.”
Still a kid, Etgar doesn’t understand suffering.
Sometimes literature helps us see—helps me anyway. Once upon a time I was Etgar.
But this morning I was Shimmy, even though I’ve never come anywhere near Treblinka or Dachau.
I saw—and I felt, I guess—that fish flip-flopping, and I
wasn’t thinking about that mallet like I was in those days, as a boy, when I
held the rifle myself.
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