by Lia Matera
James blinked at me. “You cooked that for me a few years ago. Told me never to harvest it alone.”
“It’s easy to mistake for destroying angels.” I bent over my basket of agaricus, pulling out a young specimen. “But that’s the beauty of it. Very few people have the expertise to harvest it.” I glanced at a table set up with hot plates and frying pans for the mushroom tasting. “People coming today probably won’t ever get to taste it again.”
James took the agaricus from me, turning it over. He knew enough about mushrooms to spot differences and appreciate similarities—if someone else made the initial identification.
Don walked over to the row of spindly pines, pulling them a few inches farther from the window. He always sweated the small stuff. He looked at me like I should back him up. When I didn’t, he scowled. “Even experts make mistakes, Lucy.”
James didn’t bother moving the trees back. Later, I knew, we’d find them where he wanted them.
Don scratched his thick beard, squinting at me like I’d wimped out on him. “Guy who taught me everything I know about rock climbing fell and broke his neck in the Tetons last summer.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.” I took the agaricus back from James. “In the history of mycology, no expert—I don’t mean guys who take a class or two and go out with their field guides—no professional has ever died of mushroom poisoning.” I could feel myself flush. People are so damn afraid of mushrooms. It’s irrational, something you don’t see in other cultures, where families routinely go mushroom hunting together. “Look, no one ever worries about their parsley being hemlock or their bay leaves being oleander. People don’t get scared that whoever harvested it—”
“Uh-oh,” James said. “Lucy’s hobbyhorse.”
There was a tapping sound from the front of the museum. Someone knocking on the glass doors. Probably several people. The Fungus Fair always attracts a big crowd: amateur naturalists, people with kids, hippie types into natural dyes and psychedelics, mushroom gourmets, people who just like a colorful display.
By the time I finished the yarn-dyeing demonstration and spent some time identifying mushrooms people had found in their lawns, there were maybe fifty people jammed into the main room.
Time to cook some mushrooms.
I started with shaggy parasols, went on to horns of plenty, chanterelles, the prince, coccoli, ceps. So different from each other, with flavors ranging from brothy to herby to fruity, and so very different from that Velveeta of fungus, the supermarket mushroom.
It got pretty frantic: people trooping by with little Dixie cups and plastic forks, and always a couple of gourmets to tell you a better way to cook whatever you’re cooking (as if you can go wrong sautéing in butter), and then every time James had the tiniest problem, he wanted me to leave everything and come solve it, so I ended up sweating and rushing around replacing maggoty mushrooms from baskets of extras in the basement, and getting more butter, and checking to see if the yarn from the dyeing demonstration was drying okay.
One thing I did make time to do: I bent down and looked through the basket of woodland agaricus. A couple of caps had snapped off their stipes, but that always happens when you transport mushrooms. No volvas on any of the stipes.
By the time I started frying the agaricus, the place was so crowded, you could hardly move. I felt clammy from the buttery steam, tired from days of gathering and planning and getting the museum ready. It sort of hit me all at once, and I remember thinking as I sliced up the agaricus how glad I was I’d gone out to the woods that morning. The woods were a tonic, just to think about.
James’s wife came in and interrupted my meditation. Karen Ransome was a voluptuous, big-eyed woman with fluffy yellow hair and a lot of wiggly, giggly mannerisms. I didn’t know her very well even though I hung out with James a lot. Mostly I heard about her from Mary Clardy, who runs the museum gift shop. Mary told me Karen didn’t like to hike, and wasn’t it too bad because James enjoyed it so much, and you’d think Karen could take the kids to their soccer games once in a while and let James have a free Saturday, and wasn’t it awful that Karen expected James to watch the kids on weekends, considering she left them with baby-sitters all week long even though she didn’t work for a living, and Karen must realize it didn’t help James’s career when she got drunk at Museum Committee parties and flirted with the city attorney.
Karen came and stood beside me while I cooked. She chattered about a shopping excursion, but I wasn’t really listening to her. Her breath smelled of booze, and she laughed and said, “This isn’t one of those mushrooms you can’t eat if you’ve been drinking, is it?”
There’s a kind of inky cap that turns your nose and fingers red and makes your heart pound wildly for a few hours if you consume it with alcohol.
I scooped some mushroom into a Dixie cup. “No. Here, be my guinea pig. Woodland agaricus.”
James came out of the gift shop, saw Karen eating the agaricus, and turned a little red. He pushed across to us in time to hear Karen repeat, “Woodland ‘garicus,” and giggle.
James looked embarrassed. He usually did in public with his wife. He murmured, “Karen, where are the kids?”
She wrinkled up her nose. “Guess I better go relieve the sitter—boy next door, honey, with all the freckles, you know who I mean. Let me just go to the gift stop—gift shop—”
“No!” James looked alarmed. “The neighbor boy can’t be ten yet. Go see what the kids—” He put his arm around her, marching her to the door. I heard him ask where had she been, anyway.
I thought maybe he should have called her a cab, but he was a better judge than I was.
People were lined up to taste the agaricus. I watched their faces as they tasted it. Many had never tasted wild mushrooms. They looked like they’d gone to heaven.
I decided to fry up a second panful when James came back. “Everyone loves it,” I boasted.
James seemed distracted. He helped me wipe off a couple of caps, then worked his way through the crowd toward the gift shop.
A young couple, wrapped in woolly scarves and looking like refugees from Woodstock, stood beside the table, Dixie cups at the ready. The woman, long-haired with a vaguely foolish expression, was flipping through a pamphlet of mine they sell in the gift shop, titled “Edible Mushrooms and Their Nonedible Look-alikes.” The young man, whose smile was irresistible, asked me what I was cooking, and I told him.
The woman pointed to a photograph of the woodland agaricus in my pamphlet. “This one? The one it says not to pick unless an expert says it’s okay?”
“Well, she’s an expert,” the man pointed out. “We usually stick to fly agaric.” He grinned. “No mistaking that.”
The fly agaric is bright red with cottony white “warts” (actually bits of a burst veil). It’s psychotropic. Used for thousands of years in places like Siberia where alcohol made a late appearance.
I tried not to look too disapproving, but I hate people who think of mushrooms as just another way to get high.
Mary Clardy materialized beside me, her porcelain cheeks flushed almost as red as her curls.
“I saw Karen leaving. ‘A happy drunk.’” Mary’s tone was sarcastic. “They always think that about themselves, don’t they?” Her chin was thrust forward.
The scarf-wrapped couple was exclaiming about the woodland agaricus, but Mary had interposed herself between me and the compliments.
“It’s been ridiculous around here lately,” she complained, pulling furry puffs off her sweater. “James having to run out of meetings to pick up those kids. Someone should report Karen for child neglect.”
Don Herlihy joined us, homing in on Mary’s pheromones, damn him. He was supposed to be giving a demonstration on how nurseries coat sapling roots with spores. The mushroom mycelia provide a protective sheath for the roots. Trees grow twice as tall when they grow with mushrooms.
I turned off the hot plate, not looking at Don. We’d covered thousands of acres together looking for mushrooms, looking for night herons, looking for obscure strands of fescue for his botany masters. It was the closest I’d come to romance. He and James and the classes I taught were my entire social life.
Don shuffled a step closer to me, standing stiffly. His clothes smelled of damp grass. “I guess I’m getting old.” He sounded guilty: hadn’t even told me he was thinking of going. “The knee’s bothering me more and more. And with the wet weather this year … The money …”
I knew he was just squeaking by, that’s how it always is with us. But I guess I thought it didn’t matter to him. I guess I depended on it not mattering. Because if it mattered to him, maybe it should matter to me. If Don Herlihy put on a suit, maybe I’d have to, too, someday soon.
James wandered back over, looking a little surprised to find the three of us—the help—huddled together, not identifying, demonstrating, or selling anything.
I glanced at Don and found him giving Mary a heart-on-his-sleeve kind of look.
Mary had the same look, but it was aimed at James.
I excused myself and dashed down to the basement. It was cool and dark down there, just me and the stuffed coyotes, the boxes of mushrooms, the mountain of leftover duff. I sat at the fungus-strewn conference table and I could almost see my students emptying their baskets, chattering about what they’d found in the woods, about the “one that got away,” that inevitable boletus (“this big”) that was riddled with maggots.
I was thirty-one years old and nobody loved me. I was too broke to afford a decent car, even secondhand. I was forever choosing between housemates or a hovel (just now, it was the hovel). I wore my clothes until the flannel turned to powder. But I had my classes, didn’t I? I’d generated a lot of enthusiasm for fungus over the years, and I’d knocked down a lot of silly phobias. I was out in the woods most days. That should count for something, shouldn’t it?
It should count for something with Don, bad knee or not. I should count for something.
The basement door swung open. “What I wish,” Don said from the doorway, “is that I had a rich wife, like James. In fact”—a gloomy frown—“I wish I were James. I wish I had a silver Audi and a big house. I wish I had a job where people did what I told them.”
“James isn’t happy,” I replied, though I’d never considered the point before.
Don shrugged. “Mary’s crazy about him because she can’t have him.” I knew the feeling. “Even his problems work to his advantage.”
“Where are you going?”
“Big box store nursery. In Encino.”
Encino. Endless, unshaded concrete.
Please, God, may I never end up in Encino.
The lab technician at Community Hospital handed me a box of glass slides. This made the third time in eight years I’d done them this service. The third time in eight years they’d suspected mushroom poisoning and summoned the local expert. But it was different this time. I heard the slides rattle as I took the box in hand.
I pulled out a slide and, with a sterile swab, smeared some brown matter over the center. It was from a petri dish labeled “Feces—Peterson, Robin J.” I dropped a coverslip into place.
I knew I would find some spores. I knew it because I’d watched Robin Peterson eat mushrooms. I’d watched him taste my woodland agaricus and smile a charming smile and try to tell me how much he loved it (with Mary Clardy in the way).
I told them at the hospital, “I didn’t make a mistake—honest! Peterson ate a harmless mushroom. If he’s sick, it’s some kind of one-in-a-million allergy. Those pass really fast.”
But they said he was showing signs of liver damage. They worried about kidney failure. The kind of symptoms produced by amanita toxins. By the destroying angel.
I maneuvered the slide back and forth until I spotted two quivering spores in the miasma. One was brown and oval. The woodland agaricus has brown oval spores. The other was white and round. I sat back. It was an Amanita (not an Agaricus) spore.
All Amanitas have round, white spores, but not all Amanitas are poisonous. There were three, maybe four edible species fruiting in nearby woods and fields. I closed my eyes and envisioned them, trying to influence the spores on the slide. Maybe Peterson had gotten hold of one of the edibles. Maybe this wasn’t a death sentence.
I reached for the tiny stoppered bottle I’d brought with me. It was full of Melzer’s reagent, an oily, yellow-red iodine solution. It stains certain spores—“amyloid” spores—gray. The deadly Amanitas have amyloid spores. The edible Amanitas don’t.
I put a drop of Melzer’s at the edge of the coverslip and watched it seep into the broth, tingeing the whole mess grenadine. I breathed deeply, hoped deeply, and looked into the microscope.
The spore had turned light gray. It was amyloid.
Robin Peterson was lying there with a bunch of tubes coming out of him and a computer monitor blipping beside his bed. His mouth was hanging open and his skin was a dull apricot color with bruises all over it. I was too shaken to ask him if he’d gone collecting on his own, if he’d found himself some Amanitas and made a meal of them.
The poor man began retching. A nurse peeled the sheet off his abdomen and legs, and I could see that he lay in a pool of bloody excrement. It was the most awful sight I’d ever seen. I backed out of Intensive Care. I backed into James.
James was talking to a doctor and the doctor was saying, “Judging by the extent of liver and kidney damage—I believe it’s been sixteen hours since he ingested the fungus?”
“Usually it takes longer,” I said mechanically. “As long as three days for symptoms to show up.”
The doctor shook his head angrily. “And a small amount can be fatal?”
“Two cubic centimeters.” My voice seemed disembodied, like something out of the PA system. “That’s the smallest known fatal dose.”
“One mushroom, in other words.”
“Yes, but—”
“But nothing.” The doctor rubbed his knuckles over Peterson’s chart as if trying to erase it. “Your mushroom’s going to kill this man if we don’t find him a new liver pretty damn soon.”
“I gave him a harmless Agaricus, a relative of the supermarket mushroom. I know my mushrooms. Honestly! I wouldn’t have—I didn’t—make a mistake.”
James put his arm around me, wincing. “Of course not, Lucy. Of course he didn’t get the mushroom from you. As soon as he can be asked, he’ll tell them.”
The doctor looked like it cost him a lot not to slap us. He pushed past us and went back into Intensive Care.
James pulled me onto a padded bench. There was a sheen to his pale skin. “Don’t let this get to you, Lucy. You know this isn’t your fault.” He searched my eyes. “You know that.” But it sounded like a question.
“What about the other people?”
“What other people?”
“Who had mushrooms at the Fair. They’ll get scared when they hear.”
He sighed, looking away. “The Museum Association and the city attorney have insisted we broadcast an appeal, telling everyone who had mushrooms at the Fair to come to the hospital.” He looked at me again. “But it’s just to satisfy the lawyers. Don’t take it as a vote of no confidence. People who know you aren’t going to bother.”
“We’ll never be able to serve mushrooms again, will we?” Whatever happened to Robin Peterson, the Fungus Fair was dead. Such a good little fair too. And no one would want to take my classes anymore.
I felt selfish thinking about that, with Peterson in there passing blood.
A woman drifted out of the elevator toward
us. Peterson’s companion of the day before, with her lank, center-parted hair and layers of sixties clothes.
She stopped when she saw me. She bent close, close enough for me to smell incense and damp wool.
It was easier to focus on her scarf than her face, under the circumstances. “Jack-o-lantern mushrooms,” I murmured.
She fingered the scarf. “Uh-huh. We boiled them and put in chrome and iron and alum to get these colors.”
“You know about mushrooms.”
She nodded.
“Did Peterson go collecting? Before the fair? Or after?”
“No.” She startled me by stroking my hair. “But it’s not your fault. It’s Robin’s karma. I’m not sick. You’re not sick. It must be Robin’s karma. He’s a fisher. A tuna fisher.”
“Are you sure he didn’t go collecting?”
“We didn’t go out. We had Soma at home, dried. We ate that.” Her face crinkled, as if the memory disturbed her. “We saw dolphins, ones that drowned in Robin’s nets.”
Soma. The subject of a six-thousand-year-old treatise in the Rg Vedas, the oldest specimen of written language. Soma the ingestible god. Also known as Amanita muscaria, the fly agaric, psychotropic but “poisonous” only in the way alcohol and recreational drugs are poisonous. Its spores weren’t amyloid. It wasn’t a fly agaric spore I’d found and stained on that glass slide.
The doctor came out and stood over us. “Peterson’s dead.”
James wrapped his arms around me. The young woman dropped to the floor, curling into an upright fetal position.
“I can feel his soul,” she whispered. Her head snapped back and she stared at me. “He’ll speak to you in Soma.”
James stayed with me that night, brewing me pots of herb tea that I couldn’t drink and talking to me about anything, everything: his kids, his holidays, what we could expect from the wet weather in terms of timing the Wildflower Festival.
I knew that outside our cocoon, Fungus Fair attendees rushed themselves to the hospital. botanists who knew nothing about fungus fueled the public’s phobia with misinformation. newspapers published alarmist lies. I’d spent a career trying to change people’s attitudes about one of the world’s most intriguing (and often health-preserving) life-forms. It was all wiped out now, all my work—seven six- session classes a year for eight years, the expeditions I’d led, two editions of my field guide, the edible mushrooms pamphlet. Now people would remember me as the mycologist who’d killed a man at a mushroom fair.
