The Morels Grandma Found Across the Creek

Ferris had gone a little way off and was standing with his back to us, leaning on his stick and looking at the water. I do not know what he was thinking. Probably the same thing I was.

By a little before noon we had both mesh bags full. Not half full. Full, and heavy, and starting to smell the way morels smell, like the inside of the woods.

There was a fallen log near the creek crossing, mossy on top and about the right height for sitting. Ferris had dragged the brush off it that week, and I had not even noticed it on the way in. Grandma sat down on it with her cane across her knees and one bag in her lap.

“I want to count them,” she said.

“Grandma, there’s a hundred of them.”

“Then I’ll count to a hundred,” she said. “I’ve got time. I’m eighty-seven.”

So she counted, out loud, taking each morel out of the bag and handing it to Paisley, who put it in the other bag, and then counting them back. Ferris stood beside her with his stick. I crouched down in the mayapples next to the log with the second bag.

The sun was full on the creek by then. It was warm enough that I had unzipped my olive rain jacket. My ponytail was full of little bits of leaf.

That was when I heard the truck.

It came down the field road on the other side of the creek, on Grandpa’s side, Dusty’s side now. It stopped up at the top of the timber. Two doors slammed. After a minute I heard men talking, coming down through the woods on the old logging trail.

I knew Dusty’s voice. The other one I did not know.

They came out on the bank across the creek about fifty yards upstream, walking the line. Dusty had a can of paint in one hand and was looking at the trees, checking his stripes. The other man was older, maybe sixty, in a canvas coat, carrying a five-gallon bucket and a clipboard.

They were talking about the season. I heard the man say something about the gray ones coming on late this year, and Dusty said something about the bottom ground being better than the ridge.

Then Grandma laughed. Paisley had said something to her, I never did find out what, and Grandma laughed out loud the way she used to laugh at Sunday dinner when Grandpa was alive, and the sound of it went right across that creek.

Dusty stopped walking.

I watched him look over. I watched him see her. An eighty-seven-year-old woman in a red bandanna on a log in the sunshine, holding up a mesh bag so full of morels it was bulging, with an old man in overalls beside her and a little girl in a pink hoodie laughing with her.

I watched his face change.

The man from Quincy stopped too. He looked across at us and then at Dusty.

“Who’s that?” he said. “That your ground over there?”

“No,” Dusty said. “That’s Ferris Wolken’s.”