Click to play THE MUSHROOM HUNTERS
Read by Clareine Cronin
Two brothers stayed up there longer than the rest, Renato and Aldo. They were children, not good for anything else. They knew the name of every flower and had given new names to every rock. When the others sold their cows and abandoned the hillside to work in the lichenspread of factories on the valley floor, the forest washed back across the slopes like water from a bucket. Without cattle to nip away every shoot it sprang up with all the energy of seeds long thwarted.
One day they found a hollow where mushrooms grew. The mushrooms tasted of wood and damp leaves. They were delicious, better with each successive autumn. It was for mushrooms they returned to the forest when work and family claimed the time they used to give to the wild.
The trees of the forest grew higher and broader and eventually the brothers lost sight of each other among the trunks, but each read the other's tracks so they knew who had beaten them whenever they found the mushroom hollow empty. On discovering that the mushrooms had been gathered, the brother who’d lost cursed or smiled according to his mood or hunger.
Ted met the eldest brother, Aldo, on the day he married Aldo’s daughter. I don’t think Nora had been trying to keep them apart but that’s how it happened. Aldo was, by then, a local success, owning a factory in the valley that made scientific lenses, but he was still something of a weekend embarrassment to his family, never quite having lost the wildness of his young years. Ted told me that there was something of the green man about him, of Cuchulain, or Baloo. And yet he had grown old while the forest remained young.
It was winter when first Nora took Ted to her father’s hillside home. There was no talk of mushrooms. They walked with Aldo in the snow and he pointed out animal tracks, sang folk songs, mused on some WWII vehicles a local landowner had grouped in a field. Ted could speak Italian only poorly but Aldo wove simple phrases eloquently. His laughter shook snow from the branches. Ted realized his wife’s professed embarrassment for her father was much exaggerated: in knee-high drifts she kept to her father’s footsteps like the squire of Wenceslas. Her knowledge of the woods equaled his.
That the forest around them was no more than fifty years old astounded Ted. It covered every hill in sight and, sunk in the snow, seemed not just ancient but sleepily eternal.
"Everything is old for you children," Aldo said. " You feel nothing can be otherwise. But this happens when you don't look."
Ted often walked with Aldo after that but never when he went for mushrooms. Nora assured him it wasn’t personal. The brothers alone knew where the mushrooms grew, she said, and Ted marvelled that nobody else had come across this mucky treasure. A town of ten thousand never looked up from their TVs, while two brothers elbowed between trees in the long light of morning, locked in a decades-old contest for mushrooms.
"It wouldn't even occur to them that mushrooms were there to be found," Nora murmured. "It's his great secret. He goes to the bar on the corner and talks lambing, flowering. He's generous with advice about growing aubergines and tracking deer but keeps the mushrooms to himself."
"Have you ever thought of ... following him?" Ted asked, regretting it immediately.
"Of course not! And don't you think about it either because he'll know. He can tell if you've walked across a rug with your shoes on. He carries that stick in case he comes across a wolf, not to stay upright, and I'm not sure he wouldn't turn it on you."
"Wolves?" Ted prickled with an ignorant thrill of wonder.
"Oh, the last was killed a hundred years ago but it's always been his dream that he might see one. I think he carries that stick as a sort of wilful act of summoning."
"And to club one dead when it appears?"
"Papa always says that in the forest you kill as well as dream, but he'd be the first to tell you there's nothing to fear from wolves. Anyway, it's not about preparing for a fight, it's about talismans, wonderment – nothing comes of it but it enriches the world. Even putting it into words like this spoils it. It's the same with mushrooms, so stop asking eh!?" She slapped Ted’s hand and he, chastened, promised not to walk so clumsily over family fairy stories.
Aldo always fried the mushrooms in butter, with salt and garlic. As often as not he served them just like that, with bread. Sometimes, if he left them unattended, Nora tossed them with tagliatelle or stirred them into a risotto. At this, Aldo feigned anger but happily wolfed down the meal, expressing regret that he never pushed himself even so far as to prepare these simple dishes.
Mushrooms, thrumming up through the soil, set the rhythm of the years. Ted was there in weeks of rain or full moon, and in those days Aldo left his boots by the door to set out early every morning. Once he came back with nearly two kilograms of the thick ribbed leaves, but generally the trove weighed half that. Often enough he came back with nothing at all: Renato had beaten him to it. Those times, he’d stroll up laughing and speak instead of the morning forest, of the cuckoo. He praised his brother's wiles and cursed his own late rising. You’d have thought he’d just returned from a game of chess, the way he cheerily discussed the strategy and strengths of his opponent. Ted was surprised he’d never sat up at midnight to watch for the mushrooms as they sprouted and Aldo said that while he hadn't the patience, he wouldn't put it past Renato.
Sometimes Aldo would have unbroken weeks of success in which he'd laugh with Nora over Skype and she’d implore her father to maintain a varied diet. She had no real cause to worry: Aldo couldn’t maintain such a streak for long and, even when he did, he’d eventually let the mushrooms go uncollected so his brother could have a taste. For Aldo, there was nothing as sad as a season passing without tasting its bloom, and he wouldn’t impose that on anyone.
Renato wasn’t so soft, though, and there were autumns and springs when Aldo went without a single mushroom. Worse than the umpteenth day when he returned with nothing were the days he returned with just one. It’d be torn up and left in the middle of the ragged soily circle, just to make it clear it hadn't been missed, but left. Aldo dried these sigils and kept them in a number of jars on a shelf in the kitchen. Ted told me that sometimes he found Aldo holding one of the jars as if gauging the weight for a bet.
“Do they not ever just share what they find?” Ted asked his wife one day.
“Oh no,” she said, “They’re past that now – the contest’s everything. Papa loves it like that, despite the losing streaks.”
“How come I haven’t met his brother yet?”
“You won’t, probably.”
“What? Why? When did they last see each other?”
“Oh, long before I was born.”
“You’re kidding! Where does he live?”
“The valley over. I mean, I say they haven’t seen each other since before I was born but, really, they see each other every day. They see each other more as they get older. Papa’ll return from a hunt and say “his knee’s acting up.” He can tell from his brother’s prints in the earth. If he was in a hurry, or taking his time, Papa can tell. If he was careless, breaking branches, Papa will say “something’s on his mind.” It’s extraordinary, but it’s also too easy: let’s them forget they’ve stopped talking.”
In the autumn of last year, Ted’s father-in-law went through an extraordinary winning streak: so many mushrooms he was drying them in batches, a process normally reserved for the single finds. He was freezing handfuls too, though he was seldom happy with the taste afterwards.
I know that, by this point, Ted had long since stopped viewing the mushroom hunt as a healthy pursuit but he honoured his old promise and said nothing. He did have mischief in mind, though, when he pointed out that Aldo had gone the season without laying off for his brother to have a share.
“Oh, Renato will be fine,” Aldo said, smiling widely as he emptied his sock drawer to make more space for drying his harvest. “I love my brother more than I can say but there are some things I think he never learned. He can have a thin season and I a fat one. I think I’ve earned it.” As he spoke, there was all the warmth in his tone that he usually reserved for his brother; Ted couldn’t hold his eye for the fervour.
Towards the end of that week Aldo served a breakfast of only meat and cheese.
“So you finally let him have them, eh?” Ted said, lightly.
“No. No, in fact he beat me to them this morning. Took him longer than usual but he beat me. To tell the truth I think there’ve been periods this year he hasn’t been visiting the woods. Something may have been keeping him away. That cheese is from my cousin’s farm in the mountains. Please try some.”
On the day before Ted and Nora were due to leave, Aldo returned with one more basketful. Despite himself, Ted told me he was happy for a last taste of mushrooms. Nora met Aldo on the slope leading up to the house and went to take the basket from her father’s hands.
“Wonderful Papa! A last mushroom supper!”
“No! No!” her father cried, twisting a little to shield the basket with his body. “No.”
They followed Aldo inside to find him spreading the mushrooms out on the table, turning each one and inspecting it closely. He had his field guide open beside him, which they’d never seen Aldo take down from the shelf. Apparently coming to a conclusion, he sighed and slumped into a chair.
“What’s wrong, Papa?”
“They’re poison, all poison.”
“What? How can that be? They look identical to the others!”
“They don’t, and these kill within hours. I found them this morning, where I always find mushrooms.”
“But one colony doesn’t just replace another overnight,” Ted said.
“No, they don’t. These were brought from somewhere else and spread about. They grow in the valley over. We used to leave each other messages in the forest, crossed twigs, looped blades of grass. You can spell out a lot in such ways to someone who can read.”
“This message isn’t very subtle, Papa,” Nora said, taking her father’s hand.
“No indeed,” he said, “he has called time on our game. I think I’ve quite lost my appetite.”
But he hadn’t lost his appetite, and Ted woke that night to the smell of garlic and butter. He found Aldo at the kitchen table. A bottle of prosecco at his elbow was nearly empty. The basket of poison mushrooms, which had been left by the back door, was empty. The plate on the table was empty. Aldo picked up a crust of bread to wipe at a glaze of butter.
“Why would you ...?” Ted began to say, but his voice broke.
“I couldn’t help myself,” Aldo said, pouring another glass of wine.
Ted turned and left the kitchen, climbed the stairs to wake his wife.
(c) James Field, 2013
James Field is the editor of a children’s literary journal, Lamplands. He currently finds himself in London where he is reconciliatory. His typing speed is 65 wpm, he has 27 Steam achievement points, and he has recently become comfortable with swearing around his family.
Clareine Cronin trained at Drama Studio London. Stage work includes Susan in The Future (Pentameters), Tanya in Paper Thin (Barons Court Theatre) and Eva in Tough Luck (Hen and Chickens). Screen credits include Tiz in Forna, Teresa in Making It Mean Something and The Bill. She is also an experienced voiceover artist. www.clareinecronin.com.
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