Short Weight
The chanterelles came out of the Sol Duc valley that autumn in numbers nobody had seen since the nineties, and for six weeks the buying tent at the Sappho junction smelled of them: apricot and wet earth and the cold green breath of moss. The pickers came down off the Forest Service spurs every afternoon from three until dark, in rain gear gone black at the shoulders, carrying their mushrooms in mesh bags and wicker baskets and, once, in a child’s plastic sled. They stood in a line under the dripping edge of the tarp. Marit Asplund weighed what they brought, graded it, and paid them from a steel cashbox, and at nine the reefer truck came up from Seattle and took everything away.
The scale was a platform scale on a folding table, white, with a red display that could be read from the back of the line. When something settled on it, it chirped twice, quickly, the way a bird does in a hedge. Marit heard those two chirps in her sleep that October. Her daughter Nell, who was four, had learned to make the sound with her tongue, and at bath time she climbed onto the bathroom scale and chirped and announced her own grade. Number one. Thirty-seven pounds. Ready for the truck.
The station had been Ivar Asplund’s for forty-two years. He had bought mushrooms at the Sappho junction since the mills were still running, from loggers’ wives and then from laid-off loggers, and then from the families who drove up from California and Oregon in old vans and slept in them at the campgrounds along the river. He paid fair, and the pickers knew it, and in a trade where people sold to whoever was nearest he had a line every night of the season. In March he’d had a stroke. He could walk now with a cane and say most of what he meant, slowly. He sat in the camp trailer behind the tent in the evenings with the door open and a blanket on his knees, and watched his daughter work.
Marit was good at it. She had a head for the distributor’s prices, which moved every day, and she was not soft. She graded hard, and she took a dockage.
Every buyer docked, or every buyer she’d talked to. A picker came in out of the rain with a bag of mushrooms that had been sitting wet in the bottom of a pack for three hours, with fir needles in the gills and soil on the stems, and you did not pay chanterelle prices for dirt and water. So she took ten percent off the weight for anything that wasn’t brushed clean. She said so on a sign. Her father had never done it. He had brushed the dirt off himself, with a paintbrush he kept in his shirt pocket, while the picker waited, and he had talked to them while he did it.
“Ten percent,” Ray Olander said one night, reading the sign. Ray was seventy and had picked the Sol Duc since before Marit was born. He brought in clean mushrooms, always, cut at the base with a short knife and laid in his basket stems-down. “These are clean.”
“Most of them are.”
“Your dad would weigh them.”
“I did weigh them, Ray.”
He looked at her a while. Then he took his money and put it in his coat and went out under the edge of the tarp, and the rain closed behind him like a curtain.
The season ended in the first week of November, the way it always did, not on a date but on a feeling. The rain turned colder, and there was snow on the ridges above Lake Crescent in the mornings, and the flushes in the low second growth came up slower and smaller, and the pickers began to drive south. On the last buying night there were only nine of them in the line. The truck came at nine and went. Marit counted the cashbox under the lantern and wrote the totals in the ledger, and her father came out of the trailer on his cane and stood at the edge of the light.
“The scale,” he said.
She knew what he meant. She had known it all her life, the way you know the words to a grace you stopped saying. On the last night of the season the Asplunds did not pack the scale. They set it on the table, empty. They pressed the button that zeroed it, so the display read nothing at all, and they left the lantern lit beside it and went to bed. In the morning, before the frost came off the tent, someone went out and read it.
Most years it read nothing. Some years it read a little. Whatever it read, it was paid, at that night’s price, in cash. The money went into a lidded lard pail that was wired to a cedar stump at the head of the old burn spur, a mile up the logging road where the 1951 fire had come over the ridge. Nobody watched the pail. Nobody took the money; or nobody who was ever seen. When Marit was a girl she had asked who it was for, and her father had said it was for the woods. When she was older and asked again, he had said it was for the season, and then that it was for the people who sold to them, and then he had stopped answering.
She zeroed the scale. The display went to a row of little dashes and then to nothing. She left the lantern burning on the table and helped her father up the two steps into the trailer, and they lay in their bunks and listened to the rain ease off and stop, and the cold come down through the trees.
Some time after midnight, from under the tent, the scale chirped twice.
Marit lay still. Across the trailer her father’s breathing did not change. A truck went by on the highway, a long way off, and then there was nothing but the river, which at that hour was louder than anything.
At first light the tarp was white and stiff with frost, and the table was furred with it, and the lantern had burned down to a blue bead. The scale’s display glowed red in the grey air. It read forty-one pounds, six ounces.
Marit stood and looked at it with her coffee steaming in her hands.
She knew about load cells. They drifted in the cold. Moisture got in. A heavy frost could put weight on anything. She brushed the platform with the side of her hand until it was bare and dry. She zeroed it. The display went to dashes, and then back to forty-one pounds, six ounces. She took the batteries out, warmed them in her armpit, put them back. Forty-one pounds, six ounces.
Above the table, from a nail in the tent pole, hung the old brass spring scale her grandfather had used, with a hook and a round dial, which nobody had weighed anything on since the eighties. It was there for luck, her father said. It hung empty. The hook was pulled down an inch against its spring, and the needle stood a little past forty-one, and as she watched it the spring creaked once, like a branch under snow.
Her father came to the trailer door. He looked at the dial and at the display, and then he looked at her, and he did not ask what it said.
“That’s a lot,” was all he said.
“It’s the cold.”
“It’s never been that much. You know what it’s been.” He went back in and came out again with the ledger, the old one, cloth-bound and swollen with damp, and opened it on the frosted table with his good hand. In the back, on the last pages, a column of numbers ran down in his square handwriting, one line a year since 1984. Two pounds, one ounce. Nothing. Nothing. Six ounces. One pound, ten ounces. Nothing. They were small numbers, always. In some years, beside them, he had written the dollar amount and a tick.
“What were they?” Marit said. “Those years.”
“Rounding,” her father said. He tapped one line. “I’d give half a pound to a family with kids. Or take it, if I was tired. It adds up.” He closed the book. “I never docked.”
She went to the cashbox. She did not need to; she knew the numbers in it better than he did. But she opened her own ledger anyway and ran down the dockage column, the ten percents, six weeks of wet bags and needles in the gills, and added it twice on her phone in the cold, and it came to forty-one pounds and six ounces.
The price on the last night had been seven dollars a pound. It came to two hundred and eighty-nine dollars and some cents. There was more than that in the cashbox. It was not the money.
She thought about it while she broke down the folding tables and her father sat in the cab of the truck with the heater on. She thought about Ray Olander with his clean mushrooms, laid stems-down. She thought about the sign. She had made the sign because she was running her father’s station without her father, with a distributor in Kent who paid thirty days late and a reefer truck she was leasing at a rate she didn’t like to say out loud, and because every buyer from Forks to Shelton docked for dirt, and because she was good at this, and the margin was hers to find. She had not cheated anyone. She had weighed what they brought. If the woods wanted to be paid, she thought, then the woods could be paid like everyone else.
She counted two hundred and sixty dollars out of the cashbox. Ten percent off, near enough, for whatever had been dirt.
“Marit,” her father said through the cab window. He had seen her count it. His face was grey in the early light, and one side of it did not move. “That’s short.”
“It’s the same terms everybody got.”
“It isn’t everybody.”
“Then it’s the same terms you’d get.” She put the money in an envelope. “I’m not paying more for dirt than I paid the people who picked it.”
He looked at her for a long moment, the way he had looked at Ray’s basket all those years, deciding something about its weight. Then he turned his face to the windshield and said nothing else.
She drove up the burn spur alone. The road was frozen in the ruts and soft at the crown, and the second growth stood close on either side, Douglas fir and hemlock seventy years tall, planted in rows that had long since stopped looking like rows. The moss on the cutbanks was white with frost. At the head of the spur, where the road ended in a turnaround of crushed rock, the old cedar stump stood waist-high and charred black down one side. The lard pail was wired to it, dented and rusted at the seams, its lid held down with a loop of fence wire.
She undid the wire. The pail was empty and dry and smelled of nothing. She put the envelope in it, and put the lid back, and twisted the wire tight.
The woods made no sound. There was no wind. Somewhere far down the slope the river ran on in its own noise, and nearer, all around the turnaround, in every direction, she could hear the frost beginning to come off the trees: a slow, scattered ticking of drops on the moss, like a great many small things being set down.
They were home in Port Angeles by noon. Her father slept in his chair by the window all afternoon. Marit unloaded the truck in the driveway and hosed out the bins and did not look at the scale, which she had packed in its foam case in the back seat, and which made no sound at all.
At bath time Nell wanted to be weighed. She stood on the bathroom mat in a towel with her hair dripping, and climbed up onto the scale, and made the two quick chirps with her tongue before the real ones came.
“Number one,” she said. “Ready for the truck.”
Marit looked down at the display.
It read forty-one pounds, six ounces.
AI was involved in writing this story.
