Mushroom Picking
by Eliot Ku
I was seven years old when Father decided I was old enough to pick mushrooms with him. It was just two of us, since Mother died when I was a toddler. He and I lived an insular life together, and thus I accepted Father’s words and ways as absolute. It wasn’t until many years later that I could even begin to comprehend how much I had normalized his behavior while I was growing up. I don’t mean to say that the mushroom picking itself was abnormal, but rather that the specific type of mushroom Father became obsessed with, an extremely rare species of perfect texture and flavor, of an almost seductive appearance, that blessed its user with a heavy euphoria, could only grow on corpses.
I still remember my first mushroom picking experience. Father took me into the mossy inferno of an old growth forest toward the end of winter. We had had rain for weeks and it was pouring rain that day too. After traipsing off trail for an hour over large fallen Douglas fir trees, through seas of fern, and beneath curtains of Spanish moss, we came upon a decaying cadaver the color of a radical sunset. Father said it had been a suicide. I was shocked by the abhorrent beauty of it. Dozens of mushrooms sprouted from the body in striking and colorful clusters like daylight fireworks: they grew from the eye sockets, displacing those deflated bags of dark gelatin, and they emerged from the gaping jaw and between the intercostal spaces like the gnarled fingers of an impish creature tearing its way out in slow motion. I helped Father fill a trash bag, not leaving a single mushroom behind. He asked if I felt bad once we were back at the house and stripping the cold from ourselves beside the oil-fired furnace.
I said, "No, not really."
And he replied, "Good."
Our infrequent pilgrimages revolved around Father’s scouting trips to find suicide victims in the forest. It was a better bet in the early spring when those unfortunate folks made it through the long dark winter only to discover there was nothing waiting for them in the light. Father would carefully meter out our supply of mushrooms through the following winter and make inky-iridescent preserves in case there was a shortage of bodies to be found. The mushrooms replaced the sunshine during those winters and bridged us to summer when our spirits were up once again, and we didn’t have as much of an emotional need. At least, at first.
But Father was changing. For one thing, his liver was failing, and we didn’t realize it because he never saw a doctor. His behavior also became erratic. He began experimenting on neighborhood cats and dogs that he killed and then placed in terrariums in our shed, hoping their corpses would be suitable as growth substrate. None of that worked, however. He fixated on gathering more and more mushrooms, even year-round, and he was increasingly irritable as attempts to grow his own went belly-up.
I started growing sick of mushrooms prepared with nearly every meal of the day, and I didn’t eat them much anymore. Now a teenager, I no longer had interest in going mushroom picking either. I wanted to break free of the spell, face my own internal darkness in a different way than Father. But I was afraid to tell him. I was not worried about disappointing him, so much as something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on. One day, as he was leaving for a harvest, I told him I didn’t want to go anymore. He looked down at the threshold of the door for a long time and did not speak. Then he looked up and directly into my eyes.
"Son, what am I going to do with you?" he asked. Then he repeated it, the second time more a statement than a question.
It was around that time that our life became more social than it had ever been. Father began bringing guests to the house on a regular basis, young men and women who were either passing through town, looking for odd jobs, or both. At first, I was jealous of Father’s apparent affection for these newcomers until I realized he wasn’t exactly taking them mushroom picking. Even though I felt I had grown beyond it, the tradition was still mine and his after all. In this way, it was always going to be a part of me, no matter how far I tried to distance myself. But I stopped caring for the most part. I would learn the names and faces of these young men and women and then never see or hear about them again. Like most teenagers, I was largely indifferent to the lives of strangers.
Then Father brought Laura around. I only met those he introduced me to once or twice at most, but Laura stuck around for a little while, and I was happy about that. One look at her awoke such emotion within me that I didn’t know I possessed. I was always at a loss for words and stumbled hopelessly in her presence. And although our exchanges were brief, that week she hung around was the longest and sweetest of my life. It’s silly when I look back on it now. I had a way of recreating and embellishing the events into an unspoken budding romance. Oh, the sneaking glances she used to give me. The subtle brightening of the eyes. The little half-smiles. And each night I dreamt of kissing those full lips I believed would cure me of the loneliness I carried through life, the loneliness which had returned now that I stopped eating the mushrooms.
Father could tell I had feelings for Laura despite my attempt to maintain my usual detached demeanor around her. One evening as he and I sat at the dinner table together, he paused to rotate a mushroom on his fork, holding it against the light and eyeing it like a gemologist with a precious stone.
"She reminds me of your mother," he finally said.
"Who?" I asked.
"You know who."
I did not see Laura again.
I was angry with Father for a long time after that, but not forever. Considering the intimacy--if that’s what one would call it–that he and I had developed over the years, I expected him to tell me honestly and explicitly what it was he had been up to, and what had become of Laura. Yet he remained silent. He was more at peace than ever before, as his health continued to decline. The day I finally built up the courage to confront him, he was too encephalopathic to converse. Father was a miserable spectacle at the end. He had become large and yellow and often short of breath like a storybook beast. He raved and repented and then retracted those repents. He told me never to tell anyone what we did.
"What you did," I corrected him.
"You always knew," he said with a withered smile. "You were a good boy, too. You kept quiet. I never lost my trust in you."
And then he was gone. His pupils were already so dilated, I could barely tell the difference.
He’s buried at the old church down the road. I visit his grave every year or two, usually in the spring, about the same frequency and timing of our early mushroom foraging together. I brush the remaining dead leaves away from the gravesite and tidy up a bit. If there are mushrooms growing on that little mound of earth, I leave them alone. It’s never easy like I hope it will be, now that I have little else to quell the darkness that squeezes from within and pulls from without. The mushrooms are hypnotizing as an act of violence, always beckoning, and they will do in place of memorial flowers on Father’s grave.
Maybe a small part of Father would be content that I’ve tried to be my own person, that I’ve tried to overcome those weaknesses of his that I can recognize within myself, but I will never be sure. Sometimes I get the sense that he is smirking down on me from Heaven, like he still knows something about me that I don’t. I worry maybe the view is much clearer from up there.
I still remember my first mushroom picking experience. Father took me into the mossy inferno of an old growth forest toward the end of winter. We had had rain for weeks and it was pouring rain that day too. After traipsing off trail for an hour over large fallen Douglas fir trees, through seas of fern, and beneath curtains of Spanish moss, we came upon a decaying cadaver the color of a radical sunset. Father said it had been a suicide. I was shocked by the abhorrent beauty of it. Dozens of mushrooms sprouted from the body in striking and colorful clusters like daylight fireworks: they grew from the eye sockets, displacing those deflated bags of dark gelatin, and they emerged from the gaping jaw and between the intercostal spaces like the gnarled fingers of an impish creature tearing its way out in slow motion. I helped Father fill a trash bag, not leaving a single mushroom behind. He asked if I felt bad once we were back at the house and stripping the cold from ourselves beside the oil-fired furnace.
I said, "No, not really."
And he replied, "Good."
Our infrequent pilgrimages revolved around Father’s scouting trips to find suicide victims in the forest. It was a better bet in the early spring when those unfortunate folks made it through the long dark winter only to discover there was nothing waiting for them in the light. Father would carefully meter out our supply of mushrooms through the following winter and make inky-iridescent preserves in case there was a shortage of bodies to be found. The mushrooms replaced the sunshine during those winters and bridged us to summer when our spirits were up once again, and we didn’t have as much of an emotional need. At least, at first.
But Father was changing. For one thing, his liver was failing, and we didn’t realize it because he never saw a doctor. His behavior also became erratic. He began experimenting on neighborhood cats and dogs that he killed and then placed in terrariums in our shed, hoping their corpses would be suitable as growth substrate. None of that worked, however. He fixated on gathering more and more mushrooms, even year-round, and he was increasingly irritable as attempts to grow his own went belly-up.
I started growing sick of mushrooms prepared with nearly every meal of the day, and I didn’t eat them much anymore. Now a teenager, I no longer had interest in going mushroom picking either. I wanted to break free of the spell, face my own internal darkness in a different way than Father. But I was afraid to tell him. I was not worried about disappointing him, so much as something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on. One day, as he was leaving for a harvest, I told him I didn’t want to go anymore. He looked down at the threshold of the door for a long time and did not speak. Then he looked up and directly into my eyes.
"Son, what am I going to do with you?" he asked. Then he repeated it, the second time more a statement than a question.
It was around that time that our life became more social than it had ever been. Father began bringing guests to the house on a regular basis, young men and women who were either passing through town, looking for odd jobs, or both. At first, I was jealous of Father’s apparent affection for these newcomers until I realized he wasn’t exactly taking them mushroom picking. Even though I felt I had grown beyond it, the tradition was still mine and his after all. In this way, it was always going to be a part of me, no matter how far I tried to distance myself. But I stopped caring for the most part. I would learn the names and faces of these young men and women and then never see or hear about them again. Like most teenagers, I was largely indifferent to the lives of strangers.
Then Father brought Laura around. I only met those he introduced me to once or twice at most, but Laura stuck around for a little while, and I was happy about that. One look at her awoke such emotion within me that I didn’t know I possessed. I was always at a loss for words and stumbled hopelessly in her presence. And although our exchanges were brief, that week she hung around was the longest and sweetest of my life. It’s silly when I look back on it now. I had a way of recreating and embellishing the events into an unspoken budding romance. Oh, the sneaking glances she used to give me. The subtle brightening of the eyes. The little half-smiles. And each night I dreamt of kissing those full lips I believed would cure me of the loneliness I carried through life, the loneliness which had returned now that I stopped eating the mushrooms.
Father could tell I had feelings for Laura despite my attempt to maintain my usual detached demeanor around her. One evening as he and I sat at the dinner table together, he paused to rotate a mushroom on his fork, holding it against the light and eyeing it like a gemologist with a precious stone.
"She reminds me of your mother," he finally said.
"Who?" I asked.
"You know who."
I did not see Laura again.
I was angry with Father for a long time after that, but not forever. Considering the intimacy--if that’s what one would call it–that he and I had developed over the years, I expected him to tell me honestly and explicitly what it was he had been up to, and what had become of Laura. Yet he remained silent. He was more at peace than ever before, as his health continued to decline. The day I finally built up the courage to confront him, he was too encephalopathic to converse. Father was a miserable spectacle at the end. He had become large and yellow and often short of breath like a storybook beast. He raved and repented and then retracted those repents. He told me never to tell anyone what we did.
"What you did," I corrected him.
"You always knew," he said with a withered smile. "You were a good boy, too. You kept quiet. I never lost my trust in you."
And then he was gone. His pupils were already so dilated, I could barely tell the difference.
He’s buried at the old church down the road. I visit his grave every year or two, usually in the spring, about the same frequency and timing of our early mushroom foraging together. I brush the remaining dead leaves away from the gravesite and tidy up a bit. If there are mushrooms growing on that little mound of earth, I leave them alone. It’s never easy like I hope it will be, now that I have little else to quell the darkness that squeezes from within and pulls from without. The mushrooms are hypnotizing as an act of violence, always beckoning, and they will do in place of memorial flowers on Father’s grave.
Maybe a small part of Father would be content that I’ve tried to be my own person, that I’ve tried to overcome those weaknesses of his that I can recognize within myself, but I will never be sure. Sometimes I get the sense that he is smirking down on me from Heaven, like he still knows something about me that I don’t. I worry maybe the view is much clearer from up there.
Eliot Ku is a diagnostic radiologist living in New Mexico who specializes in emergency and trauma imaging. He lives with his wife and two young children. He loves to climb rocks, read, and write.