Driftless (44 page)

“Someone’s having a meeting and Grahm, when I asked him not to go, Grahm said he wouldn’t promise not to go, so I went over to—”

“Cora, get hold of yourself.” Gail put her arms around Cora, and when the older woman struggled to get away, Gail continued to hold her until she settled down.

“Come on,” said Gail. “We’ll do it together—one thing at a time. First we’ve got to pick up the kids, leave them with Bernice, see if Wade can milk the cows, and borrow some money to get Grahm out of jail.”

On the way into the city, while Cora explained again everything the judge had said, Gail thought how strange it was to be picking up her brother in jail. Of all the people she knew, Grahm seemed the most unlikely to be there. It was easier to imagine him putting people in jail than being in jail. For as long as she could remember
he had been, in one way or another, trying to lock her up. He was prudential. How could the rules of society ever turn against him?—they were too closely aligned.

His entire personality had been manufactured to the exacting specifications of social expectation. His sole pursuit in life always seemed to be the approval of those perceived to have authority, living or dead. His agrarian ancestors had hammered him out like hot steel on an anvil. He had had no life of his own, really—he had been released from the bondage of his grandparents and parents to the servitude of his wife and children without experiencing even a single afternoon of freedom. Even his cows, crops, buildings, and machinery staked him by a short tether.

In some very important ways, she concluded, Grahm had always been in prison. But it still seemed odd for him to be in this kind of prison, built to hold those who refused to accept the voluntary one Grahm had always lived in. For him to be in this kind of prison—it didn’t seem right.

The policeman at the desk looked at the bank check.

Cora said, “We would like a receipt for that.”

When Grahm was finally brought up from downstairs—where Gail assumed the jail must be—he looked terrible. His eyes did not meet hers. Cora rushed forward to see if the handcuffs had left marks, but he brushed her aside as though they did not know each other.

All the way home, he remained silent. He sat next to Cora in the back seat and even refused to eat anything at the drive-thru.

As soon as Gail pulled in the farmyard, he climbed out and went to the barn.

“You’d better stay here,” said Gail. “I’ll bring the kids back. Somebody like Grahm should never be like this. It’s dangerous for everyone.”

THE HEARTLAND FEDERAL RESERVE

N
OT EVERYONE COULD FIND MOREL MUSHROOMS. IT WAS HARD to know where and when to look for them, and this unpredictability lent to the fungi an allure of mystery. They were elusive, even cunning in their habits, popping up overnight in secluded nooks to grow unobserved, their tops bearing an unnerving likeness to sponge-brains.

The varied shapes, colors, and sizes added to their appeal. They could leap out of the ground in perfectly symmetrical configurations, their conical gray bodies as small as dollhouse accessories. They also appeared in drab yellow—lumpy, flabby, and grotesque, over a foot tall. In other words, they were wild.

Partly because of these vagaries, morels were highly prized. As condiments, they were considered delicacies of the highest order and in some markets assumed an almost magical status, believed to possess life-enhancing, aphrodisiac properties.

Winifred Smith could find them. Her mother had known how to find them and she had followed in her mother’s footsteps. When others would return empty-handed from an afternoon’s hunting, Winnie would return—from the same woods—with a filled sack.

She had once found forty pounds of morels during a dry spring in which many hunters hardly found any. Everyone heard about how the trunk of her little car had overflowed. She’d donated them to the nursing home in Grange and the smell of the earthy, rich fungi had accompanied her as she carried them into the basement kitchen.

Some of the home’s kitchen workers said it was her natural instinct to find mushrooms—the ability to act knowingly without actually having conscious knowledge.

Others disagreed. They said humans didn’t have natural instincts. After the forbidden fruit debacle, womankind had been doomed to
remain fully conscious. No more doing things without knowing why they were done. Now, only the lower animals had natural instincts and only God arranged for people to find or not find mushrooms.

Others said it was simply luck, meaning, of course, there were no adequate explanations.

Winnie had her own thoughts on the subject and would have shared them with anyone who asked. For her, morel hunting was a passion. She found more mushrooms because she valued them more. The satisfaction she took in discovering morel hiding places knew no limits. The sight of their Lilliputian gatherings—the moist and mossy conference rooms where they carried on their growing rituals—was like nothing else. No surprise could compare to the sudden recognition of those happy little trolls crouching beneath a fern, staring up at her with the haunting bewilderment of truly wild things. Then after recognizing one, seeing another, then another and another, engaged in their haphazard conformity, delight magnifying delight.

Others simply didn’t want to find mushrooms as badly as she did, nor imagine it as fully, or ascribe to it such significance. They didn’t begin dreaming of mushroom habitats as soon as the snow melted, and would never consider lying all day in a wooded glen, the sides of their faces pressed to the ground, for the chance of seeing one rise up from the earth—witnessing its birth.

The ways of mushrooms, she thought, were completely different from those of people. It was part of their charm. How many people could you walk by and not even notice—then once you were past them, turn around and because you were looking in the other direction discover them as though they had just materialized? People never acted like that, but morels acted like that all the time. Also, from what she’d read about mycology, and she was careful not to read much for fear of losing her special feeling for morels, they had a marvelous method of reproduction. They propagated through cloning spores. Separate male and female ingredients were not required. They did not need to wait around for pollinating bees or compliant mates to set loose the next generation. They
were
the next generation. Their fertility depended upon simply being themselves,
not doing something with someone else. They did not even need to leave the church to be fruitful. They contemplated the drama of reproduction privately, inwardly, and this accounted for, she suspected, their pensive, occult nature. To apprehend a morel was to be in the presence of an alien life form, evolved during the most recent ice age, from yeast.

Horrified that the season had arrived without her, she felt betrayed by her own sensibilities. She hadn’t been herself lately. It seemed inconceivable she could have let this happen.

She raced home, parked in the yard, and ran into the parsonage, shedding her clothes. Redressing, she stuffed the cuffs of dark green cargo pants into heavy wool socks in order to keep ticks and chiggers from crawling up the inside, then put on her hiking boots. She feared the socks were too heavy for this time of year but was too much in a hurry to look for different ones. A loose-fitting, tightly knit gray cotton shirt tucked into the pants completed her attire, and she bounded downstairs to search for bread bags.

Winnie knew where she wanted to hunt—a place she had discovered several years ago, deep in the Driftless, ten miles away.

The fragrances of warm spring blew across her face as she sped away from Words.

The Heartland Federal Reserve had been created by government fiat a generation before. Ten thousand acres of rocky, hilly farm-land had been declared public domain and stripped of buildings in preparation for damming the Heartland River and impounding an eighteen-hundred-acre recreational lake. The project would be good, it was thought, for flood control and even better for injecting tourism into an underdeveloped county.

Land values had risen quickly as investors bought up potential resort sites. The Army Corps of Engineers began constructing the dam, but not before several environmental groups had gone to court. A temporary injunction halted the project while agronomists and other scientists scrutinized the soil and plants around the dam and drainage basin.

Due to water quality fears, the project was permanently abandoned. The thirteen-million-dollar dam remained as a concrete fossil
of foolishness, never impounding a single drop of water. Perhaps to keep it hidden from sight, a seventeen-mile federal security fence topped with three strands of barbed wire was placed around the entire area, which remained, thirty years later, undeveloped and uninhabited. The misfortunes of real estate investors who lost money and farmers who had been forced to sell their farms created a veritable paradise for committed nature lovers. Inside the prohibited reserve one could walk all day and never step on a sidewalk or a road or meet another person.

Winnie parked her car beside the tall fence and stuffed bread bags into her pockets. She walked a hundred yards on the gravel road, beyond the sign: KEEP OUT DANGER GOVERNMENT PROPERTY TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. After a distant vehicle passed beyond hearing, she crawled through an old ragged hole in the fence, hidden by a mulberry bush, and moved quickly into the forest.

It was cooler here, and she felt her body relax as she threaded through the calligraphy of underbrush. She climbed several hills, crossed a shallow creek by walking on stones, clambered over a steep, rocky ledge, and continued along animal trails for another couple miles to a place she had found, by chance, several years ago.

Here, she turned north and crawled through a narrow ravine choked with prickly ash and blackberry, the thorns often tearing through her clothing. Several times she became so entangled that she was forced to retreat and look for another way.

Finally, gratefully, she emerged on the other side, at the opening of a secluded valley protected on all sides by steep, rugged enclosing hills. The earth seemed to have a better smell here; the sunlight held a unique golden color. The air itself felt more filled with oxygen and invigorating ions.

Winnie sat for several minutes with her back against a maple, picking rambarkle out of the tops of her socks. The sun was now higher in the sky and she took off her boots to let her feet air out. She had paid the price for entering her private park and now wished to enjoy it undistracted—rid of every troubled thought. Her breathing slowed down, her moist skin dried, and the thorn pricks stopped smarting. Several red squirrels and a brown thrasher, convinced of
her harmlessness and needing to get on with business, rustled in the leaves.

She put her boots on and moved forward through ferns, blood-root, jack-in-the-pulpit, and Indian pipes. She looked for dead elms with bark still clinging to the smooth limbs—a possible source of fungi nutrients.

A chipmunk darted ahead to crouch on a flat rock. Behind him grew a morel, about two inches tall, fat and gray, in perfect condition. Her spirit soared. The chipmunk scampered off and she surveyed the area, searching for a vein running up the gently sloping forest floor, connecting the mushroom by an underground fungal trellis to other mushrooms.

She saw another morel, then another, leading into a patch of mayapples. She knelt and reverently worked the first mushroom from the earth, its cool, hollow, fleshy body pressing against her fingers. It came free without breaking the trunk, with gossamers of dirt clinging to the root threads. She gathered the others and carefully approached the mayapples.

Beneath the low, spreading canopy a colony of morels huddled together like tiny monks in a garden. Sunlight fell in places through the lattice of watery green, creating a scene of such enchantment that Winnie sat down to contemplate it more fully. Wonder merged with beauty, and tears came to her eyes at the sound of a woodpecker hammering on an overhead limb. Approval flooded out of her.

After the moment passed, she gathered up all the mushrooms and placed them in the bread bag, filling it over halfway.

Her appetite now whetted, she moved toward a place along the western slope of the valley where she had found the forty pounds of mushrooms several years ago. It called to her as she moved between the trees.

The sun entered the late- morning sky, assuming a more somber nature. She walked around an outcropping of sandstone and found nothing until she stood in the middle of the sacred spot. Then she saw a broken mushroom trunk, then another, and another. In a number of places were pieces of smashed mushrooms, stepped on.
Someone had been here and took them all, and her sense of personal violation soon compounded.

“Winifred,” said a voice behind her.

Winnie turned in the direction she had just come from and beneath an enormous oak, dressed in jeans and a tight-fitting white T-shirt, stood Jacob Helm. He held his head high, his black hair as wild as a jay’s.

She was so surprised at not being alone that it took her several moments to adjust.

He came ahead several paces, his movements quick and sure. “You shouldn’t be here, Winifred.”

This seemed like a particularly strange thing to say, she thought. No one should be here—it was a restricted area.

“I think I have as much right to be here as do you.”

He moved forward again, narrowing the distance between them. “You shouldn’t be here. This area isn’t safe.”

“Don’t come any closer to me,” said Winnie, looking at his thick hands—hands that would probably look the same if they were helping her or hitting her.

He took another several steps.

“I told you to stay back.”

“Winnie, it’s me, Jacob. I’d never hurt you.”

“I’ll be the sole judge of that.”

“This is their practice area. You could be shot.”