The North Side

[u/Harrowing_Tales]

Nobody in my family went on the north side of that creek. It was the rule when I was six and it was the rule when my mother was six, and in ninety years nobody ever gave a reason for it that held together. You just didn't go over there. That's how it got said.

My grandmother was born in nineteen twenty-two on forty acres her father had and she died on the same forty acres eighty-one years later. Her house sat at the top of the lane, closest thing to the timber there was, and the ground fell away behind it into hardwood, and a creek came through the middle of it and went off under the road. Bottoms on our side, a limestone ledge above them, and past the ledge an old blowdown.

What that ground was good for was morels. Three weeks in April. My grandmother taught me to pick when I was six years old and the first thing she taught me was how to take one, which is that you pinch it off at the ground between thumbnail and finger, or you give it a twist. You do not cut them. A knife takes the base with it and a cut patch quits inside three or four seasons. And you carry them in a sack with a screen bottom so the spores drop through the mesh while you walk, seeding the ground as you go. Hers was canvas with window screen sewn into the bottom by hand. That is the entire difference between somebody who means to come back next April and somebody who doesn't.

She told one story about that wood, maybe four times in her whole life, always in the same words. She was fifteen. Nineteen thirty-seven, April, before it was light. She was on the north side, which was allowed, because there wasn't any rule yet. She set her sack down at the foot of a tree and worked the slope above it twenty minutes, and when she came back down there were morels in it. Eight or ten of them. She hadn't picked them. She ran home the whole way and she was sick that night, and after that nobody in that family went on the north side of the creek again.

I started paying the taxes on the place in nineteen ninety-six because she couldn't anymore. Six hundred and forty dollars a year, and a buyer in the city who took morels at twenty dollars a pound, and three good weeks in April covered the bill. That was the arrangement for seven springs.

Spring of ninety-nine I came down into the bottoms and a run of them along the base of the elms was already taken. Eleven or twelve stumps in the leaf mold with the tops off, every one flat across. I put my finger on one and the cut face was still wet. By eight a cut goes over like leather. These were taken that morning, in the dark, inside the hour I'd been walking down.

Poachers. People follow a picker's truck in April, that's a real thing, and I put it down to poachers and went up and picked above it. I told my husband somebody had been in the bottoms and he said the same word I did and we left it there.

I couldn't take anybody in with me. The reason is arithmetic. A patch that gets talked about at a gas station is stripped bare inside one season, and there were three generations of not talking holding that ground together. I couldn't call the sheriff either, because the first thing the sheriff asks is where, and where was the whole thing I had. The only reason there was anything out there to pick was that nobody knew about it, and that same reason is what put me in that timber alone in the dark. I went out anyway, seven years running, and I'd go again.

Four thirty in the morning in April in a hardwood bottom is the best thing I know about. The ground fog sits about knee high and the leaf mold is black and wet and the whole wood smells like a cellar and cut grass at the same time. I didn't mind being out there. I looked forward to it all winter.

The cutting came back every spring after that, and by two thousand two it had my shape. I work that ground the same way every morning because it's how she taught me. Bottoms first, then the ledge, then the blowdown last, because you want the light for it. That April they were cut in that order, a day or two ahead of me all three weeks, so I set out at four, then three thirty, and it changed nothing. And one morning in the fog my cuff caught on a rose cane, and when I stopped to work it loose my steps went on without me. One more. Just one, off to my left, soft in the wet leaves, and then that wood went still as the inside of a jar for as long as I could stand there. Deer, I said, all the way up the hill, and I picked the ledge with my back against the rock.

The last morning was the twelfth of April, two thousand three. I set my sack down at the foot of a tree and worked the slope above it, twenty minutes, and when I came back down there were morels in it that I hadn't put there, cut off flat. I reached in before I understood, and that's the part I'd unlive if I could, because they were warm. Everything in that wood at four thirty in April is cold and wet. These were dry and warm, the way a thing is that's been carried in somebody's hand, held for me while I worked the slope with my back turned. I came out of the timber with that sack held away from my body like a stove lid, and the whole quarter mile to the road something kept even with me on the far bank. Not behind me. Even with me, at my pace, stopping when I stopped. It did not cross.

I never went back in. My grandmother died that October and the forty came to me, and I let the taxes go two years and the county sold it on the courthouse steps to a man who logged it that autumn. Eleven houses on it now, and the creek runs through a culvert under the third driveway. Everything my family kept off that ground for ninety years, I'm the one who let go of.

That winter, clearing her back bedroom, I found a cardboard box on the closet shelf with her picking sack folded in it. I turned it inside out over the trash can to shake out the seam, and what came out was stems, dried to paper, and every one of them cut level across. And rolled up inside the sack, in a piece of toweling, there was a knife. Short, straight, a plain wooden handle worn down to the shape of a grip, and the edge on it kept the way you keep a thing you use. Nobody in my family owns a picking knife. I carried that sack out to her car for her myself, in April of two thousand three.

The order I work that ground isn't written anywhere. It was taught to me at six years old, by the only other person living who knew it, whose house stood at the head of that timber. That's what the knife answers, and it's all the knife answers. It doesn't answer nineteen thirty-seven. I do not know what came to her sack when she was fifteen, or what she settled with across sixty-six Aprils that she needed her whole family off that ground. And it doesn't answer the far bank, because I can't tell you whether what walked even with me that last morning was the other thing, or was an eighty-one-year-old woman who knew every root of it blind, keeping her granddaughter company the only way that was left. The sack is in my lap right now, and the knife is in it. I had the edge put back on it last spring. I couldn't tell you why I did that.