The Morels Grandma Found Across the Creek

He looked at the water. Then he walked into it in his work boots, right across, the water up over his ankles. He came up the bank on our side and stopped about ten feet from the log.

He took his cap off.

“Grandma,” he said.

“Dusty,” she said. “Seventy-four. Seventy-five.”

“Grandma, I’m sorry.”

She stopped counting then. She put the morel she was holding back in the bag and folded her hands on top of it.

“I know you are,” she said. “I knew you would be. I just didn’t know how long it would take you.”

“I should have asked you. I should have told you. I didn’t think…” He stopped. “No. I thought about it. I thought about it and I did it anyway, because I needed the money and I figured you’d let it go.”

“I did let it go,” Grandma said. “Lacy here didn’t.”

Dusty looked at me. I did not say anything. I did not have to.

“I’ve got the land payment,” he said. “First of May. That’s why. I want you to know that’s why. I wasn’t trying to run you off.”

“I know why, Dusty,” she said. “Your daddy used to do the same thing. Get himself in a corner and then do the first thing that got him out of it, and think about it later. Your daddy was a good boy. So are you. But you did a wrong thing.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“You posted your grandmother off her own woods for twelve hundred dollars.”

“Yes ma’am.”

It was the only time she said it out loud. She did not say it mean. She just said it, plain, so it was out there in the air between them, so they both had heard it.

Then she held out the bag.

“Here,” she said. “You take some of these home to your wife and the kids. You haven’t had a decent mess of morels since you were a boy. You were always too busy.”

Dusty looked at the bag like he did not know what it was.

“Go on,” she said. “There’s plenty. Ferris’s slope is better than ours ever was anyway. Verla always said so.”

He took a double handful. His hands were shaking a little. Paisley, who did not know any of the story and did not need to, held the other bag open for him to put them in.

“You pinch them at the ground,” she told him. “You don’t pull.”

“Yeah,” Dusty said. His voice was not right. “Yeah. She taught me that too. A long time ago.”

Ferris finally spoke then. It was the only thing he said to Dusty all day.

“You come over here next April,” he said. “Bring your boys. Your grandma can show them.”

Dusty nodded. He could not say anything. He put his cap back on and went back down to the gravel bar and waded back across, and we watched him climb the hill on his side and go up the logging trail.

He left the paint can sitting at the foot of the tree.