The Morels Grandma Found Across the Creek

So she sold him Grandpa’s forty acres of timber for a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. A real estate man in Mount Sterling told her it would have brought closer to a hundred and seventy on the open market, maybe more, with the deer hunters paying what they pay now.

She did not care. She said family was worth the difference. She did not put anything in writing about the mushrooms because it would never have crossed her mind that she needed to.

Dusty went to the Farm Credit office and borrowed most of it. I knew that much. I did not know until that Saturday morning what he had done next.

I called him from the driveway while Grandma stood looking at the paint.

He picked up on the fourth ring. I could hear a skid steer running somewhere behind him.

“Dusty, it’s Lacy. I’m out at Grandma’s. There’s purple paint all down the timber.”

“Yeah,” he said. He did not sound surprised. “I meant to tell her.”

“Tell her what?”

He was quiet long enough that I heard the skid steer shut off.

“I leased the mushroom picking,” he said. “Fellow out of Quincy buys morels for restaurants. St. Louis, Chicago, some place in Kansas City. He pays twelve hundred dollars for the season to pick it exclusive. I had to post it or he won’t pay. That’s the deal.”

“Twelve hundred dollars,” I said.

“Lacy, my land payment is due the first of May. I paid more than I could afford for that ground. I know Grandma gave me a deal, I know that, but a deal on a hundred and twenty thousand is still a hundred and twenty thousand. That twelve hundred makes my payment. I’m not proud of it.”

“She’s standing next to me,” I said. “She’s eighty-seven years old, Dusty. She brought her onion sack.”

“I know,” he said, and for a second he sounded like the fourteen-year-old boy at his daddy’s funeral. Then he didn’t. “It’s my ground now. I can’t have people in there while he’s picking. He’ll walk off the deal.”

“She’s not people.”

“I’ll bring her a mess of them,” he said. “I’ll buy her a pound from him. I’ve got to go.”

He hung up.

I stood there with the phone in my hand and looked at my grandmother, and she looked back at me, and I could tell she had heard every word, because Dusty has always talked loud on the phone.

“He’ll buy me a pound,” she said.

“Grandma, we could call somebody. I could get my dad on the phone, or the sheriff’s office might, I don’t know, they might say something to him.”

“Say what?” she said. “I sold it to him. I signed the paper at the bank and I shook his hand on the porch. It is his. I am not going to go back on my word because it turned out I don’t like what he did with it.”