Pick

Where the mushroom grows is not a given, but he does put his pants on, one leg at a time before he leaves the house. Chains have links and Harry doesn't wear them on his cuffs or on his ankles; he eats them for breakfast lunch and dinner, even on Sunday mornings when Clara comes to call carrying knitting, accolades, and a toothy grin he pretends to find so unappealing but no longer says so in front of their ailing mother.

"Why can't you be here more? Your kids are in school all day. Just because I got laid off from the mill doesn't mean taking care of Mummy is my new occupation. Start stepping up to the plate Clara, before I break one over your head!"

Harry lurched his tide of uneasiness toward her, lusting to spook them both into normalcy between the walls of the narrow dying damp hallway they travelled since birth. She didn't flinch. She mirrored him. Veracious love stepped on lashes of sardonic eyes struggling to paint away the smile belonging to other faces. His idle threats were harmless, meaningless, an attempt at humor to nibble the mood down the death stair, before the mouse under the floorboards would also be seen snagged by a lethal trap.

Harry was his mother's son, the apple and the core hanging from branches refusing to acknowledge an impending fall. "She's driving me up a wall Clara. Up the wall around the bend and just about over the cliff." Harry bit his tongue on his P. T. Barnum hijink. "A free Sunday morning is not enough Clara. And by the way, wipe that shit-eating grin off your face. You're up. I'm outta here." Clara remained silent, stoic, suppressing her familial smirk. To each his own family rule. For them, the bigger the joke, the smaller the reality. Patting him gently on his right shoulder with a cupped hand, her slender fingers signaled him clocked out; it was time for a dog to shed. Puzzle pieces remained in their box when he left through the back door, and waited for his return.

Car keys in a pocket can be as idle as feet. Walking past his car, he chose the the later to occupy his fleeting floundering freedom, soil over asphalt, cardio over speed, one foot by two, venturing into the back forty where generations of his forefathers had previously planted, hunted and played. He'd finally taken to mushroom foraging. His father's passion had primarily gone unshared and under appreciated by Harry before his demise. He had even taken an online course, studying intermittently in between spoonfuls of food and pharmaceuticals, scrubbing bubbles, and the sound of a bell that he could hear in his sleep, even with the pillow over his cheeky curly brown head.

Not one hundred feet in, if it wasn't a little birdie, his dead father could have called from up above, "Look! Look behind the dead hemlock to your right; not that one; the other one!" And Harry obeyed without alarm, sticking his neck out to see, never assuming or considering anything supernatural in his midst.

"Well would ya lookie here. A doggone patch of reishi!" He knew the genus. Ganoderma tsugae. The cure for cancer. Or so they say.

His Daddy had searched this same path on his quest for a tincture cure when his beloved wife of 40 years was first diagnosed, praying upon spores in the atmosphere continually missing his plea only coming to rest at their own pace, for whom the bell tolls. For Harry's father, it had been an honor to do so in her hour of need. There was no tit for tat between them; never an empty cup, or an unwalked mile, just love and laughter.

Neither of them knew of an itch, but a love deeper than blood comes with consequence. A massive coronary put an end to his quest. The worry over her diagnosis and the stress of it all would become the last shovel of dirt upon his coffin.

It was Harry here now, not but a twinkle in their eye when his parents said "I do;" "to have and to hold, in sickness and in health," attempting to carry that load for his father and without thinking who he was speaking to, he spoke out loud without echo under the cloak of hemlock with another face.

"Do you think it's too late for her Pops? Should I pick them and cook them for her? Or sell them? I'm outta work ya know. I read on the blog I could fetch up to $35 a pound. This hear patchy's gotta be at least a few pounds. What am I babbling about? I don't care about the money! I'd do anything to save her Pops. Anything. I'm glad you are not here to see how frail, how weak, how sick she looks. She talks to you all the time. Thinks I'm you and I don't tell her I'm not when I kiss her goodnight. Clara and I, we've done right by her. You would be proud. Mostly me Pops. Mostly me. Yeah Pops. I stepped up to that plate you always chided me about. The plate. Me. Imagine. I'm up. Wish you could see me now Pops, and I you, Pops."

Harry bent down his life picking and picking the bright brownish red varnished creatures of death from the wood as if he was battling away a predator from swallowing him whole, without realizing he was too late to save her. Her last breath was taken with his best interest in mind, upstairs from where the comedy albums rested in their sleeves. Fragility collapsed into the cliff of a billowy cloud just minutes after he walked off from where he knew but didn't know she lay dying. They had already practiced a final good-bye with fiddly subterfuge. Death was not an egg needing to be flipped, it was a mother hawk protecting her nest, a structure well built for surviving a harsh winter and the decomposition of summer. It was she that had planted the conversational seed as she spread her wings, and the wind sprinkled mushroom spores into the atmosphere, salting love.

"$35 a pound is nothing to sneeze at son. Reap what you sow. There is a blanket for you in the closet. Cover yourself. Money does grow on dead hemlock trees."