Kathleen Kent - The Heretic's Daughter

She paused here and turned her face to the light of the sun, closing her eyes to its warmth. “She told me that hoarding anger is like hoarding grain in a lidded rain barrel. The dark and the dank will cause the seeds to sprout but the lack of light and air will soon force the grain to spoil. So I told her my resentments and my complaints, such as they were, and she listened to me. When we left this field, she was good to her word and we never again talked of those things. But I was unburdened and it brought more harmony between myself and my mother.”

She opened her eyes and her gaze turned to me in a questioning way. For a moment we looked at each other without speaking, but I knew for what she waited. She waited for me to reveal all of my angry thoughts, but I did not open my mouth to speak. I did not believe she had enough of Grandmother’s sympathies to be kind to my disappointments or painful losses. And if there had been such harmony created, what had happened all those years later to cause Grandmother to lock her daughter out of her own house for a time? But there was something else as well, something deeper that I could not confess: my fervent prayers to be returned to Margaret and her family. As much rage as I had felt in my mother’s presence, I could not admit to her that I had wished her dead. So I continued to stare off into the waving grasses, making my back as rigid as my mother’s ever was. She sighed in a way that was both tired and accepting and she said, putting equal emphasis on each word, “You are so very hard.”

“You have made me so,” I said bitterly.

“No, Sarah. This hardness is native born.” She placed herself in front of me and said softly, “But I have done little to tender it.” I turned my back to her, unbalanced by her sudden gentleness, and the grasses swam like kelp through the tears I would not let fall.

“Do you think I don’t know what it is that you want?” she said impatiently, and I expected the burn of her fingers on my arm, but she did not touch me. She kept her distance and then said tightly, “And so we are to keep our disharmony a while longer. Then you and I will talk of petty things.” She started to walk about, aimlessly, I thought, looking down at the ground, kicking away bits of scattered limbs or piles of fallen leaves. She knelt down, her dark skirt pooling around her legs, and uncovered something white growing under a bit of bark. She called for me to come, and I walked reluctantly to stand at her shoulder and saw that she had found a mushroom. I had been mushroom hunting many times with her before. Hunting morels in May in the wild-apple orchard, gathering chicken mushrooms growing in stacks upon the trunks of elm and ash during the hot summer months, and picking Devil’s snuffbox along the banks of the Skug River. Mushroom hunting was a slippery task, though. You had to know the differences between the healthful mushrooms and the unhealthful ones. Some of the differences were slight indeed. A bit of carelessness, and death could come hiding under a milky dome or a purple gill.

“Do you know what this is?” Mother asked, taking off her cap to let her black hair blow free.

“A meadow mushroom,” I answered, trying to sound as uninterested as possible.

“Are you certain?” To which I nodded, crossing my arms again.

I released a short, impatient breath. Meadow mushrooms could be eaten fresh from the ground. They had a strong musklike flavor with a dense flesh. A dozen or so could be boiled together with a bouillon of dried fat to make pocket soup, and meat lacking for the stew would not be missed. The white cap was about three inches across, dry and smooth, and it had a short stem.

“Yes,” I said, “a meadow mushroom.”

“Eat, then,” said Mother, gesturing for me to take it.

The well of my mouth overflowed as I squatted down to pluck it from its shallow root. A weak amends, I thought as I opened my mouth to receive the offering. The iron grip of her hand clamped down on my wrist and held my hand a few inches from my tongue. Her face was close to mine and for the first time I saw that her hazel eyes had equal shares of blue and amber coloring in them.

“Sarah, look underneath the cap,” she said as she forced my wrist around, exposing the underside of the mushroom. The gills were white and the mushroom had a white skirtlike ring on the stem just below the cap. “It is called a destroying angel. If you were to eat this, you would surely die. Not today and perhaps not tomorrow. But after four days of spitting every bit of water from your belly and your ass, you would welcome your death.”

She released me and I threw the mushroom from my hand as I would have released an oiled rush torch. I wiped both of my hands on my apron.

“The signs are varied and subtle. You must look carefully, not just at the top of the thing but at its underside, where the poison often gathers. The meadow mushroom when early has pink gills that turn to brown upon maturity. If you didn’t know the lore, you would liken the dark underside to unwholesomeness and the light underbelly to goodness. The morel can be dark but it is always pitted, whereas the false morel is dark but smooth. That which is scarred and pitted in nature can mean sustenance and life, whereas a smooth and pretty skin can mean destruction and death. People, too, are not often what they seem, even those whom you love. You must look closely, Sarah.”

The warmth from the sun, the gentle cooling breeze, the velvet moths floating past my head all seemed at odds with my mother’s words. My wrist ached from her touch, and I wanted her to let us go home. But she would not stop her lecturing.

“You love your cousin and my sister and that is the natural course of things. But you also have a great love for your uncle, and he is a man not worthy of that love. He is one who appears outwardly all smooth, all right with his fellows, when inwardly his heart is filled with poison. If he could, he would turn you out of your house in the time it took to take off his boots, and where he goes, his family follows. He has done it before, long ago, when he cheated your father and me out of land that was rightfully ours. Your uncle talks from two sides of his mouth and works even now to destroy our standing in Andover.”

Thoughts of Uncle’s misdirection performing his bits of magic rose up in my head, but I would not be put off him and said under my breath, “You need no help in that regard.” I steeled myself, waiting for the slap to my face. She rocked back on her heels, her arms about her knees, as though I had slapped her . In that moment of surprise, with her widening eyes and parted lips, she appeared somehow younger, more unguarded. But her gaze darkened, the amber in her eyes consuming the blue, and she looked at me for so long a time, it made me lower my eyes and bite the inside of my lip. A cardinal sounded again his “Quit-it, Quit-it” and was answered in kind across the field. She opened her mouth once to make a sharp retort but closed it again, and I could see that it stung her to swallow her words, like swallowing a thistle that had been stirred into a plate of greens.

“There is an old saying,” she said as she idly plucked at some weedlike runners about her skirt, “and it is as true now as ever it was. It goes ‘If not for king, then for county. If not for county, then for clan. If not for clan, then for my brother. If not for my brother, then there is naught but home.’ Do you understand what I am trying to tell you?”

“If you mean that I am to give up my love for Margaret because you have a quarrel with Uncle, I will not do it. And you cannot beat it out of me. Margaret is everything to me.” My voice had risen, and I realized that against my wishes she had worked me around to speaking my mind.