Grandma finished counting. One hundred and forty-three morels in the first bag, ninety-one in the second, not counting the double handful she gave Dusty. She told everybody the number for a month.
I took her home and she fried a skillet of them in butter for dinner, rolled in flour and salt and pepper, the way she has done it my whole life. She made me take the rest home to my kids. She called Ferris that afternoon and told him to come up for supper the next Sunday after church, and to bring Paisley.
He did. He brought a rhubarb pie that Paisley had helped him make, a little burnt on one side.
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Some of it got around, the way things do in a county where everybody’s grandmother knows everybody else’s. Paisley told her whole fourth grade class about the old lady who taught her to pinch morels the way they did in 1946. Her teacher mentioned it to me in the hall at school, smiling.
Eldon at the farm store heard about the man from Quincy, I do not know from who. When Dusty went in for fence staples the next week, Eldon asked him how his grandma’s mushroom season went. Dusty told me later that was the longest walk out to his truck he ever took.
I will say this for Dusty. He made his land payment on the first of May, the twelve hundred and the rest of it, by picking up weekend work running a backhoe. He did not ask anybody for help. He did not ask Grandma for a dime, and she did not offer.
Sometime in May the purple paint on the creek side of his timber got painted over. Just the creek side, the stretch that faces Ferris’s place. Brown paint, the color of bark. He left the road side posted for the deer hunters, which is his right.
He drives Grandma to church now on the Sundays I can’t. She told me that last week like it was nothing, but I could tell it was not nothing.
And here is the last of it.
The next time I drove out Ferris Wolken’s lane, a week or so after the morels were done, there was a new board hanging on his gate. He had cut it out of a piece of old barn siding and painted it white, and lettered it himself with a brush, not very straight.
It said: Marjorie’s woods, every April.
I asked him about it. He said it was just so nobody new would get confused about who was allowed on that north slope.
“Verla would have done it,” he said. “I’m just the one with the paintbrush.”
Grandma has not seen it yet. I have not told her. I am going to let her find it herself next spring, when I pick her up on the third Saturday in April and we drive the long way around, and she sees it hanging there on the gate, waiting for her.