The Morels Grandma Found Across the Creek

That was the whole of it for her. She had sold it fair, and she would not take back what she had given, and she would not drag her own grandson in front of a deputy over a patch of woods. I knew better than to argue. I have known her my whole life.

She folded the onion sack and put it in her windbreaker pocket. It was the lavender one my daughter gave her two Christmases ago. She had tied a red bandanna over her hair the way she always did in the woods, to keep the ticks off.

“Take me home, Lacy,” she said. “I’ll make us some coffee.”

We sat at her kitchen table and drank the coffee, and she did not say one word about Dusty. She talked about the weather and about the mayapples coming up and about how the lilacs were early this year.

But I watched her look out the window over the sink, the one that faces down the hill toward the timber, and I watched her do it about every two minutes.

That was what got me. Not anything she said. Just that she kept looking.

I want to say plainly that my husband would have gone over there and said something to Dusty that afternoon if he had been home. He was hauling corn to the river terminal at Meredosia all that week for the elevator, leaving before daylight and getting in late, and I did not tell him until later because I knew what he would do.

That was a man fight I did not want. Grandma would not have wanted it either.

So I did the only thing I could think of. On Monday, on my lunch break at the school, I drove out the blacktop to Ferris Wolken’s place.

Ferris is eighty-three. His farm sits on the other side of the creek from Grandpa’s timber. The creek bottom runs through both places, and the best north slope in that whole bottom, the one with the dead elms, is on his side.

I had heard Grandma talk about that slope my whole life. She and Ferris’s wife, Verla, used to hunt it together, back when they were young wives. They would cross on the gravel bar below the big sycamore and work both sides of the creek all morning.

Verla died six years ago. After that, Grandma stopped crossing the creek. She said it did not feel right without Verla, and she had plenty on her own side anyway.

Ferris was in his machine shed when I pulled in, sharpening a chain on a bench grinder. He had on his bib overalls and a seed corn cap so old the patch on it had worn off. He shut off the grinder when he saw me and wiped his hands on a red shop rag.

“Lacy Kirchner,” he said. “Somebody sick?”

“No sir,” I said. “Not sick.”

I told him about the paint. I told him about the twelve hundred dollars and the man from Quincy and the land payment due the first of May. I told him how Grandma had folded the onion sack and put it in her pocket.