could see.
“A toadstool?” I said.
He shook his head. “A morel, tastiest mushroom there is. Been a long while since I went hunting morels. Here,” he said to me. “Take this and go see if you can find any more along the river.”
It was brown, four inches long, and looked like the ratty cap some gnome might wear in a Grimms’ fairy tale. It didn’t look appetizing in the least, but I was a whole lot more interested in locating mushrooms than in working up a sweat on that old cottonwood.
“You find ’em,” the pig scarer said, “you bring ’em back here directly.” He winked at me with his one good eye. “I know what you’re thinking, that you’re getting out of the hard work. There’ll be plenty waiting for you when you get back, I guarantee it.”
I walked away. At my back I heard the saw teeth begin to bite into the cottonwood.
I went slowly among the trees on the riverbank, looking closely at the ground and all the wild things that grew there. I found several more of the odd-looking mushrooms. The river curved around the edge of the orchard, and very soon I was completely out of sight of the pig scarer and Mose. I was intent on my mission, eyes to the earth, when I looked up and realized I wasn’t far from the lone oak tree where the pig scarer had knelt the night before and had wept his heart out. I glanced back to be sure I couldn’t be seen and ran to the oak.
What I found was a little graveyard, a family burial plot. I’d seen them before in rural areas, where the laws that governed interment didn’t reach or were ignored. Some that I’d seen had fences around them, but not this one. There were a number of wooden grave makers, upright plaques so bleached by the sun and weathered that whatever had once been written on them was now obliterated. There were also three graves with no markers whatsoever, but they were clearly outlined by wild clover. I stood there thinking that probably I was looking at the pig scarer’s family, those who’d come before him and had maybe first tilled the soil. Because he was the only one at the farm, I wondered if he might be the last of them, the end of the line. I considered our one-eyed Jack, and how lonely it must feel believing that you’re all alone, with no one to remember or grieve for you when you’re gone. I had Albert and Mose, and now Emmy. The pig scarer seemed to have no one.
Still, those three unmarked graves gave me pause, especially coupled with the fury evident in the torn-up attic room, and I left the little cemetery full of unsettlingly dark speculation.
When I returned with my hands cupped full of morels, I found the cottonwood had been felled and Mose and the pig scarer were taking a break from their labors, sitting atop the trunk, which was prone on the ground. They had their shirts off, and their skin was glistening with sweat. The pig scarer was smiling, as if he loved the work. And, oddly, so was Mose.
“The hunter home from the hill,” the pig scarer declared exuberantly, and when he saw the mushrooms, he clapped me on the back and said, “A fine haul, boy. This’ll spice up our chicken dinner tonight real swell. Put them under the wood cart and get ready to sweat.”
They’d already sawed several sections off the trunk, and the pig scarer put me to work lifting those sections and loading them on the cart. They were heavy and the labor was hard, and while I was at it, Mose and the pig scarer continued working the saw.
We took another break, and the pig scarer said, “You got a name?”
“Buck,” I said.
“How about our mute friend?”
I looked at Mose. He spelled out in sign, Geronimo.
The pig scarer laughed when I told him. “Sure it is,” he said. “What tribe?”
“Sioux,” I said.
“Let me show you boys something.” He took a pocketknife from his overalls, cut a slender branch from the cottonwood, and showed us the cut end. “See that star in there?”
He was right. At the heart of the branch was a dark, five-pointed star.
“Your people have a story about this,” he said to Mose. “They say that all the stars in the sky are actually made inside the earth. Then they seek out the roots of cottonwood trees