The Morels Grandma Found Across the Creek

“Who’s the old lady?”

Dusty did not answer right away. He stood there with the paint can in his hand, and I watched him try to decide what to say. I will give him this much: he did not lie.

“That’s my grandma,” he said.

The man from Quincy looked at Grandma for a long time. Then he looked at the purple stripe on the tree next to him, and then back at Dusty.

“She the one sold you this?”

“Yes sir.”

“She used to hunt it?”

Dusty swallowed. I could see it from across the creek. “Sixty years,” he said. “Every April.”

The man did not say anything for a while. He set his bucket down. He looked over at Grandma again, at Paisley, at Ferris standing there with his stick.

Ferris did not say a word. He did not wave and he did not call anything across. He just stood there and looked at Dusty, an old man who had known Dusty since the day he was born, who had stood at his daddy’s graveside with his hat in his hands. He let Dusty look back at him.

That was all Ferris did. It was enough.

Grandma had stopped counting. She sat on the log with the bag in her lap and looked across the water at her grandson. She did not look angry. She did not look hurt. She just looked at him the way she has looked at all of us our whole lives, like she is waiting to see what we will do.

Then she lifted her hand and waved. A little wave, the same one she gives from the porch when you pull out of the drive.

I do not think I have ever seen a grown man look the way Dusty looked right then.

The man from Quincy picked up his bucket. “Son,” he said, loud enough that we heard it, “I’ve got leases in three counties. I don’t need one that’s got a story like that attached to it.”

“It’s a fair lease,” Dusty said. “It’s my ground.”

“I know it’s your ground,” the man said. “I’m telling you I’m not going to pick a hillside while that lady sits there and watches me do it. I’ve got a mother.” He tucked the clipboard under his arm. “You can keep this year’s money. I already paid it. Next year, find somebody else.”

He turned around and walked back up the logging trail toward the truck.

Dusty stood there by himself on the bank with his can of purple paint.

Nobody on our side said anything. Paisley looked up at me like she wanted to ask what had happened, and I shook my head at her, and she went quiet.

Grandma went back to counting. Out loud, slow. “Sixty-one. Sixty-two.”

After a while Dusty set the paint can down at the foot of a tree. He walked downstream along his bank to the gravel bar below the big sycamore, the same crossing Grandma and Verla used to use.