Clover (9 page)

They held each other that first night.

Theirs was not the embrace of youth. There was no smooth skin, no frantic passion born of unlimited energy. Theirs was the gentleness of time, two water-tumbled stones that had resisted the vagaries of life only to have the sharp edges worn away. And in so doing, the true nature of both lay open in the unity of love.

“Good morning, Mr. Caddler.”

“’Mornin’, Missus Caddler.”

He stared at his new bride with the wide-eyed disbelief of a child. He had found a long-sought treasure, something he had had no hope of ever finding twice in his life. Memories of his long-dead family filled him with the ambivalence of sorrow and guilt. Did he deserve this dear woman so late in life?

In the manner of all women, and to the wonderment of all men, she intuitively knew what he was thinking and put her arms around him once more. That embrace became another game of whimsy for the Fates. The pressure of his chest elicited a sharp pain in her left breast.

“Y’all right, Sophie?”

The old farmer and soldier was not one to miss the sudden flinch.

“I’m okay, Lem. It felt like a stone got between us. Maybe I’m one of those ‘princess and the pea’ girls.”

She tried to laugh but her left hand felt the small firmness, the difference in texture underneath her skin.

He put his callused fingers over hers and together they explored the calling card of danger within her breast.

“I’m calling Doc Galen, Sophie.”

She shook her head.

“It’s nothing, probably a bruise from moving my stuff into the cottage last week. Or maybe you kissed me too hard, you big brute, or…”

“Now don’t argue with me, woman!”

He said it firmly but without the slightest trace of harshness.

She stopped barraging herself with rationalizations and stared into her new husband’s worried gray eyes.

“Okay, Lem.”

The word crashed in his consciousness: cancer.

Light zephyr winds herded their good-weather sheep across a watermelon sky. The night moisture had been driven off by the rising sun and the early morning rainbow was now just a memory.

He moved slowly, lumbering along side paths only he had walked. This time he was not alone.

“Where are we going, Galen?”

“Look, Sandy, there they are!”

“You brought me out here to see mushrooms? Are you going senile, old man?”

Fallen trees, slowly returning their substance to the forest floor, were now covered with various growths of unusual fungi, delicacies for the intrepid mushroom hunter but also potential bearers of prolonged agony and death to the uninitiated “’shroomer.”

He was stunned by her reply. He had thought she would share the same curiosity about nature that he had, would like the shapes, colors and textures of the amazing fungi.

He half-turned and stared down at his hiking partner.

“What? I hurt your feelings? Okay, okay, show me more, nature boy.”

Galen knew her well enough to hold back a reflexive and stinging reply.

Why am I showing her this? I never showed this place to anyone, not even Edison.

He shrugged.

“We can go back if you want, Sandy.”

“Mushrooms, huh? Bear, we got them all over the place in Africa.”

He gritted his teeth then started to point out his favorites.

The King Bolete stood proudly, its brown-white cap a throne for gnomes and elves. The furrowed and pitted morels, like poor, hormone-challenged, acne-faced teenagers, poked their blunted spears up through the composting forest loam. And, yes, there they were, “chicken of the woods,” growing on the dead tree trunks. Shaggy Manes, Horns of Plenty with their oyster-like flavor, all offered the connoisseur a visual and gustatory delight.

“Look at them, Sandy. Aren’t they amazing? Life rising from death.”

She smiled.

Rainbows and mushrooms: underneath all that blubber is a true romantic
.

“You’re right, Bear, they are beautiful.”

She patted his arm.

She’s just stroking my ego now. I’ll play the game.

He smiled back. Old Galen knew that Mother Nature was an equal opportunity employer. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was world famous for its cultured edible mushroom industry, but it also had its share of bad actors, poisonous wild beauties that would entice the unwary amateur with their similarity to safely edible ones.

“Hey, old girl, don’t you remember that ER case you helped me and Dave with back in ’64?”

Once eaten, the cascade of symptoms from drooling and sweats to diarrhea accompanied by hallucinations was just the beginning. The ultimate cruelty of the poisonous mushroom was the toxin-induced kidney and liver failure that would kill just as surely as a knife or bullet, but slowly over agonizing time. You knew you were dying, but you couldn’t do a thing about it.

“Yeah, that guy from Goochland who taught high-school biology. Thought he was an expert on mushrooms. Didn’t he croak?”

Subtlety was never her forte.

“Yes, he ... uh ... croaked, Sandy.”

My Leni and Cathy would never have been that crude.

He spotted them,
Amanita phalloides
, the death-cap mushrooms; the even-more deadly
Amanita brunnescens
, sometimes called the cleft foot, with the cup-like volva at its base.

Siren-like, their beauty called out to the ignorant: “Eat Me.” But unlike the Reverend Dodgson’s Alice, there would be no sudden growth or shrinkage, only sickness and possible death.

What fascinated Galen most was the manner in which these fungi grew and spread. Within the soil the threadlike mycelia would run, sowing themselves in circles that the ancients called “Fairy Rings.” Mother Nature’s cleverness also installed a backup system, the tiny particles in the gills under the spreading caps that get knocked into the air from bumps by passing animals. The black benign and white malignant spores restart the cycle of life once more.

But as with certain other cycles, the organisms that prospered killed off what had once been there. Within the Middle Earthean dancing circles the grass died.

What did that remind him of?

The train of thought led him to the lyrics from a song by the group Kansas:

Dust in the wind,

All we are is dust in the wind
.

“Answer the damned phone, Bear!”

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Thanks, Sandy.”

He hasn’t changed a bit. When he starts focusing, the world could come to an end and he wouldn’t know it. My Josh was so different.

He looked at the caller ID and flipped open the phone.

“Yes, Lem.”

“Says here we’re going to have a mushroom shortage this year, Nancy.”

Edison sat in the living room, his favorite wing-backed chair holding him in its tulip cup seat. The heaviness of his thick eyeglasses had caused them to slide down somewhat on his acne-scarred face.

“What’s happening this time, Bob? Didn’t they have a problem awhile back with some bacterial infection killing off the mushrooms?”

She sat facing him, looking up from her daily crossword puzzle.

“Yeah, it’s another infection. And speaking of mushrooms, where’d Sandy and Galen go? Is he romping around the forest with his girlfriend?”

“Let’s just say that he and Sandy went for a walk in the woods.”

“Hah! She’s probably already wishing she was back in Africa. He ain’t no Hansel to her Gretel”

The ringing house phone interrupted Nancy’s reply.

They walked carefully down the path to the little cottage he and Edison and Nancy had bequeathed to Lem and his new bride after Ben passed away. His footsteps crunched on the decaying leaves, a counterpoint to Sandy’s delicate pitter-patter.

The memory of his friend, the old state trooper, his wide-faced grin complementing his off-color Polish jokes, made Galen laugh out loud.

“You flippin’ out on me, old man?”

“No, little girl. I’m just thinking how Lem and Sophie are going to shove you in the oven and cook you. Haven’t had turkey in a while. I ... ow! Why did you punch me, McDevitt?”

“Guess, you big galoot!”

“Come on in, Doc, Missus McDevitt. Thanks fer comin’.”

Caddler’s scarecrow frame stood in the doorway beckoning them. This time there was no smile, no “how’s it goin’” from the sunburned old man.

Galen saw the haunted look in his eyes.

Sophie Caddler, the new bride, sat in Ben’s old high-backed chair. She rose quickly as Galen and Sandy entered the living room. She took Sandy’s hand and whispered, “When are you going to make Doc an honest man?”

“I don’t think he knows I exist,” Sandy whispered back.

The two women exchanged knowing smiles, then Sophie turned to Galen.

“Sorry to bother you, Dr. Galen. I told Lem not to call, especially so early in the morning.”

The floral print dress and newly made hairdo did little to conceal the stress in her voice.

“Sophie, I never expected to be called over here the day after your wedding. That’s the type of call I used to get a long time ago when my teenage and young adults ... uh ... shall I say made too much whoopee.”

He turned toward Lem and smiled then turned back to Sophie.

“What has that rascal husband of yours been up to?”

Lem didn’t smile.

“She’s got a lump in her breast, Doc.”

Galen closed his eyes as Sandy muttered an “oh, no” under her breath.

Sophie lay on her bed and waited as Galen and Sandy washed their hands in the bathroom. Lem knelt by the side of the bed and held her hand.

“Okay, now I’m going to pull back the sheet on your left side, Sophie. Hope my hands aren’t too cold.”

The petite doctor slowly moved her hands in circular motions. She hesitated as her fingers met the stranger in Sophie’s breast.

Galen frowned as he watched McDevitt perform the thorough exam.

Does she know about that hand tremor?

“Galen, check this out.”

How many times had both doctors done this? His arthritis-knobbed fingers moved carefully over the old woman’s left breast after he had studied the surface skin pattern. No redness, no surface thickening, no misleading apparently benign skin scaliness or retraction of the nipple, no red flag of bloody discharge.

He moved deliberately, ever so carefully using both hands to knead the living dough in circles and quadrants and extending their touch under the woman’s arms. He felt the age-induced changes from dense milk producing glands to fat and the shrunken milk-carrying pipelines.

As he had feared, he felt the sentinel firmness of the stranger, the one whose name must not be spoken.

“Dr. Galen, Dr. McDevitt, I’m sure it’s just a bruise. I did use my chest to carry stuff in here.”

She looked at them, searching their faces for the unspoken words.

“It’s always possible, Sophie,” Galen said, “but just to be sure I’d like to arrange for you to have an MRI mammogram. It’s a much better way of checking and eliminating the possibility of bad things.”

There, he had done it again. He couldn’t say the word even though it was fairly obvious.

Under the pretext of going outside for better cell-phone reception, Galen got far enough away from the cottage to speak privately. He tapped in a number he knew by heart. The perky young woman’s voice answered.

“Outpatient Imaging, this is Saouda.”

“Hey, there, youngster, what are you doing out of school?”

“Dr. Galen, you know I’m too old for school. What can we do for you?”

“Need an MRI mammogram with CT-guided needle biopsy to follow ASAP. Can your shadowbox boys and girls do it?”

He heard the sound of her tapping computer keys as the receptionist scanned her schedule program.

“I think we can do it this afternoon. Had a cancellation. Let me connect you with Dr. Feisler.”

Quickly, a new voice.

“Chris Feisler. Is that you, Dr. G.?”

“Yep. You still like to sit in dark rooms staring at shadows, young man? If memory serves there used to be a comedian by the name of Pee Wee Herman who did that, too.”

The radiologist laughed. Galen had been a tough professor, but a fair one. When he found out what Feisler’s interest was, he hooked him up as a tagalong with the best radiologist in the school. Now Feisler headed the Department of Imaging and Special Procedures at the county hospital.

“Okay, shoot, watcha got?”

Galen filled in the details and the younger man’s voice became quieter.

“I’ll do this one myself and let you know. Have Mrs. Caddler here at 2 p.m. for prep.”

“Thanks, Chris. I’ll call Pete LeNard and fill him in as well. He’s usually there on surgical rounds. Would you call him with the results, too?”