The Morels Grandma Found Across the Creek

The first time I saw the paint, Grandma was standing beside my car with her cane in one hand and an empty mesh onion sack in the other, looking at the tree line like it had said something rude to her.

It was the third Saturday in April, a little after eight in the morning. The sun was already coming through the bare tops of the oaks, and the ground under them was the color of wet tobacco.

Every tree along the old fence line had a stripe of purple paint on it, waist high, fresh enough that the bark still looked wet in the low spots. There was a stripe every thirty or forty feet, as far down the hill as I could see.

“Well,” Grandma said. “Would you look at that.”

I knew what it meant. Everybody in Brown County knows what purple paint means. It means the same as a No Trespassing sign, and a game warden or a deputy will tell you so if you argue it.

“Grandma, let me call Dusty,” I said. “This has to be a mistake. He knows you come out here.”

“He knows,” she said. “That is why it is not a mistake.”

My name is Lacy Kirchner. I am forty-two years old and I am the school nurse for the grade school in Mount Sterling. I married a man from Versailles, kept my own name because everybody already knew me by it, and never left the county.

My grandmother is Marjorie Kirchner. She is eighty-seven. She has hunted morels on that forty acres of timber every April for sixty years, since the spring after she married my grandpa and moved into the white house at the top of the hill.

Before that she hunted them on her own folks’ place with her mother, down near the Illinois River bottoms. She told me once she could not remember a spring of her life she had not spent at least one morning bent over in the woods.

Grandpa died eleven years ago. Grandma stayed in the house. The cropland was rented out to a neighbor, and the timber, the forty acres of oak and hickory and elm that ran down to the creek, just sat there being woods.

Last fall she sold it.

She did not have to. She was not hurting for money, not exactly. But her knees were bad and she worried about the taxes, and she had it in her head that the timber should stay in the family after she was gone.

My cousin Dusty is thirty-four. He is my uncle’s boy, the son of my dad’s younger brother. My uncle passed when Dusty was fourteen, a farm accident with a hay baler that I do not like to think about, and Grandma has always had a soft place for him because of it.

Dusty wanted land. He works for a drainage tile outfit out of Rushville and runs a few head of cattle on rented pasture, and he told Grandma he wanted something with his own name on it.