At first, Susan Johns was happy when the squirrels came back. So were the little children. They thought it exciting to have squirrels in their trees. Everybody was happy except my uncle Ezra. All he did was grumble. But he was never happy about anything, so no one paid him any mind.
The squirrels left twenty years ago, when land developers turned Green Meadows Park into the upscale Green Meadows housing subdivision. Back in those days, we didn’t think of the destruction of the park as environmental rape. But that’s what it was. We just didn’t know it, not then. Big-eyed children watched huge yellow bulldozers rip the park apart, bludgeon the trees, and drag them away like trash. Susan Johns, barely out of diapers at the time, watched the bulldozers from her kitchen window. She asked her mother where the squirrels would live after the trees were gone, but her mother was too busy feeding her cat to answer.
Other children also worried about the squirrels. Even little children knew that squirrels need trees. When the trees were hauled away, the fuzzy-tailed critters left. It was that simple, no trees: no squirrels. The developers planted a ring of red-leafed Japanese maple seedlings around the perimeter of the subdivision and lined the streets with tiny flowering cherries. Then they proudly proclaimed that paradise had arrived and was available for sale.
It wasn't paradise for the squirrels. They need trees, not seedlings. Uprooted, they had no choice but to head for parts unknown. However, they remembered Green Meadows. And they passed that memory from generation to generation. When the trees grew big enough, their descendants returned to their ancestral homeland. Now grown up, Susan Johns worked at the library. Five days a week she left for work shortly after sunup, and returned at sundown. Susan still lived on the edge of Green Meadows in the house her father built thirty-five years ago, when Green Meadows was still a park, not a collection of houses, lamp posts and paved streets. She was still there, but not her parents. Her dad disappeared not long after the squirrels left, and her mom, now senile, or something like that, rotted in a nursing home.
Although she barely noticed them when they first came back in scattered groups, Susan liked the squirrels. Her problem began when a big gray male staked out his turf in the oak tree in her back yard. And a majestic squirrel he was, walking proudly with head and thick bushy tail held high. The bird feeder Susan kept filled with deluxe wild bird seed added a good part of the attraction. Susan certainly had no doubt of that. Birds are messy eaters and downright finicky. Picky sparrows flicked a splendid array of seeds onto the ground and the garage roof. Other birds, in their haste to eat and fly to safer perches, knocked many more seeds off the feeder, adding to the bounty. All in all, one way or the other, an abundant supply of seeds slopped off the feeder, providing fruitful foraging for the big gray. Smaller squirrels watched enviously. The sunflower seeds and corn routinely discarded by the sparrows and finches were ambrosia for the big squirrel, manna from heaven. Scarcely a day went by without him feasting on leavings from the feeder. Keeping a watchful eye out for neighbourhood cats, he made himself at home in Susan’s back yard, even daring to take bits of popcorn and potato chips out of her hand. It became a daily routine. Between bird seed, snacks from Susan, and acorns from the thirty-five year-old oak tree, Big Gray ate well. Some might say too well. Indeed, he prospered, battened, and grew fat. And so it was that he became a pet and she became very fond of him.
Susan shooed away any cats that came around while she was home. She didn't know whether a cat would attack a squirrel, but she wasn’t taking any chances. And although her mom had adored cats, she disliked them. Perhaps it was her mom smothering cats with kindness all those years, but Susan wanted nothing to do with domesticated animals. Certainly she had no desire to get too attached to a pet. She remembered how weird her mom got after backing the station wagon over the family cat. It wasn't her mom's fault. No one checks under the car every time they go out - although Susan did. She desperately feared becoming like her mom. When you think about it, Mrs. Johns was a sad case, a normal healthy woman losing it like that at such an early age. Susan's dad couldn't take it and left a within a year after the cat got itself squashed.
Mr. Johns tried to take Susan with him. However, in those days, society stacked the odds against fathers in custody battles. Mother won; Susan stayed. It was the two of them, until her mom, who never got over the guilt from running over her cat, went into a nursing home - or something like that. While Susan’s mother languished, the squirrels thrived. They loved it in their historical Green Meadows woodlands. Big Gray thrived above all others.
The neighbourhood children loved the squirrels. They had great fun as their parents had done before them. Little girls fed the squirrels; little boys tried to catch them. Uncle Ezra told spooky stories to the young children about the way little furry beasts used to terrorize the old park, the same furry beasts that had now come back to frighten little children. The little children laughed nervously at the funny make-believe stories. They sort of knew they were make-believe, but weren't sure until older kids teased them for being gullible. At the end of the day, everybody knew that squirrels were never scary, everybody except Uncle Ezra. Uncle Ezra had been senile as long as anyone could remember. Bats in the belfry, we used to say, and we weren't talking about his house. However, he did have his stories about squirrels and other creatures, the same stories he used to tell when Susan Johns was a little girl. But that was long ago. As far as I know, no one ever believed the stories, at least not for long. But you never know for sure. Maybe some did. Maybe deep down inside, Susan did.
The accident wasn't Susan's fault. There was nothing she could have done. There was nothing anybody could have done. It was that damn cat. It tried to pounce on Big Gray just as Susan was pulling into her driveway. Big Gray bolted and darted across onto the driveway right under her wheel. Susan almost threw up at the crunchy-squishy sound. When she stepped out onto the driveway she did throw up. It was truly a shock how much blood and guts came out of that hapless squirrel. It shocked Susan. She was beside herself. Unwilling to leave him for the cat, or the big crows that were always looking to scavenge an easy meal, Susan buried the remains, and cleaned the driveway and her wheel. It was a big job. Then she went inside and cried - forgetting about her supper until almost midnight. Some folk say if you are prone to nightmares, you ought not to eat late at night. But she was and she did. Nightmares came the very first night. Susan got no waiting period; no gentle breaking-in, no transition, just scream-your-lungs-out nightmares that came right off the bat. I’m not sure if it was the nightmares or the hallucinations that started the next morning, but Susan became scared as well as upset.
Susan’s diary is quite interesting. I can say that because I read it. She kept a full log of everything that happened, or what she thought happened. It is hard to believe, but she didn't think they were nightmares; she thought they were real. Of course, nobody ever thinks that they are hallucinating. Strange how some people’s minds can go like that. Reading the diary, you get the impression that she half believed those crazy stories Uncle Ezra told. So I'm nosy enough to snoop in somebody else’s private thoughts, so what? When you have a mundane job like exterminating vermin, you look for ways to amuse yourself. The family has been in the extermination business for forty years. Uncle Ezra founded the business way back then. That's how he knew enough about rodents and bugs to make his stories sound believable. I took over the business ten years ago because nobody else wanted it. I reckon most of my kin are too high and mighty to sully their hands with bug and rat killer. But, I’m not and business is good.
Susan’s nightmares were something else, or perhaps it was the morning and evening hallucinations. Whatever the reason, Susan stopped going out to work a week later. She wrote that when she drove to work and back, every squirrel in Green Meadows lined up along the sidewalk and stared at her. Evil stares she said. The squirrels kept up the evil eye and the dreams didn't stop. They kept getting worse. As soon as she fell asleep, the squirrels stared through her bedroom windows and climbed onto the roof, trying to break into the house, their tiny claws scratching at the glass, their sharp teeth gnawing at the doors and roof shingles. She knew they were after her. She knew they wanted revenge. It's all there for anybody to read. She wrote so vividly, so intensely you can smell her fear. It's almost like it really happened.
Imagine sitting inside your own house, being afraid to leave because vermin with sharp teeth were waiting, and being afraid to stay because the creatures were slowly chewing a hole in your roof, and sooner or later, in the dead of night, would drop through the ceiling and land right on top of you while you slept in your bed. It would be enough to drive you insane. That's how she felt day after day, night after night. The nightmares got so bad that one night Susan phoned the police for help. Of course, the squirrels had already left when the fuzz arrived. The police took Susan over to Doctor Walton, a pretty strange bird himself. He put her in the hospital for P.O. - medical parlance for psychiatric observation. More than a few people think Doc Walton could use a little of that for himself, but that's another story. Because of never-ending budget cutbacks, the hospital was always short of space. The night the police brought Susan in, the wards were already full. To accommodate Susan in her hour of need, the orderlies wheeled a steel bed into a storeroom under the staff cafeteria. Then they strapped Susan in. Doc Walton - kind soul that he was - had ordered her restrained to keep her from harming herself. All she could do was stare at the loose plaster on the ceiling. She could barely move a muscle. She could move her eyes, but little else.
So there she lay, on her back, hour after hour, and stared at the damaged ceiling, waiting for the squirrels to gnaw through, drop onto her immobilized body and tear her to shreds. She knew they were coming - God, how she knew. Even sedated as she was, she lay in terror, waiting for the inevitable, waiting for the furry balls of evil to drop upon her like cluster bombs.
The night Susan came in, the night staff was too busy to check up on her. They had planned for weeks to a have a party in the cafeteria, right over top of Susan’s makeshift hospital ward. They didn’t plan to have to have a noisy party, but most parties get that way, especially after the moonshine starts flowing. After the dancing started, a hick fresh from the Notch Hills started a new dance he called the "Notch Hill Stomp." It wasn’t new for him, but no one else at the hospital had seen it before. It is, fortunately, easy to learn. You stomp your boots three times on the floor, leap high in the air, pirouette, scream "Yee-haw," as loud as you can, and land on the floor with an elephant-like thud. The new guy started it, but after a couple of drinks - or three or four or five - everybody joined in, everybody. The cafeteria rocked. The entire crew stomped, screeched, and crashed on the floor all night long. Underneath, the already-damaged ceiling shook, shuddered, and crumbled. Pieces of plaster rained down on Susan Johns, plaster squirrels that scared the life out of her.
In the morning when the nurse finally went in to check on Susan, it was the damnedest thing she'd ever seen. Small plaster chunks covered the floor and Susan. Susan was in no shape to complain about it. She was stone-cold dead. Judging from the rigor mortis and body temperature, she must have died shortly after midnight. The hospital officially attributed her death to a massive heart failure. Doc Walton was mystified. He'd given Susan a complete physical work-up and determined that she was as healthy and robust as any twenty-three year-old person he'd ever examined. The death certificate says nothing about the squirrels. But Uncle Ezra knows, and he is very happy, cackling and giggling. He has a new story with which to frighten little children.