THE NEXT MORNING, as Kat and Genya stood waiting for the school bus together, Kat wanted to talk to her sister about what her grandfather was going through, but Genya was not interested.
"If Dido truly cared about us, he would pack his bags and move back to Ukraine," said Genya. "He's obviously done something, and now we're all paying for his past." Genya's face got a bit red as she continued, "We could lose our home because of him. And I probably won't be able to go to medical school."
Kat looked at her sister coldly, "Don't blame the victim."
"If what they say is true, then he's no victim," responded her sister.
"I don't even know what it is they're saying," said Kat hotly. "What is it that he's supposed to have done? And where's the proof?"
Genya glared at her in stony silence. Mercifully, the bus came moments later. Genya sat in the front seat, and her sister walked to the back.
Ian was sitting in the very last row, with Lisa. He looked up at Kat when she walked onto the bus and motioned for her to come and sit with them.
Lisa, for once, did not look too annoyed with the suggestion.
"Ian told me about the parachute," she said. "It sounds perfect."
"It is," said Kat.
"We should practice putting it up," said Lisa. "Can you come to school tomorrow morning?"
"I could stay late tonight," said Kat.
"Can't do that," said Lisa, looping her arm around Ian's elbow proprietarily. "It's Friday. We're going to a party and it's going to take me forever to get ready."
Kat smiled awkwardly. Ian was her friend, but he was Lisa's boyfriend. She'd known that all along, so why did she feel jealous? She tried to imagine what it was that Lisa was planning on doing to herself that would take so long. It had to be a Goth party. Even Lisa's everyday make-up and clothing probably took an hour to assemble. What constituted party wear?
"How about tomorrow, midmorning?" asked Ian. "I'm pretty sure the school's going to be open in case some people need to practice for the concert.
"Can't do it in the morning," said Kat. "And I'll probably be too zonked by the afternoon."
"You're going to a party too?" asked Lisa.
Kat smiled. Wouldn't it be nice to have nothing more serious on her mind than partying, and what to wear to a party? "No," she replied. "I'm getting up at the crack of dawn tomorrow to go mushroom picking with my grandfather."
Kat expected Lisa to laugh at her, but instead, Lisa perked up with interest. "You're kidding," she said. "I do that every spring with my grandparents. We never go in the fall though. Where do you find mushrooms now? We buy dried mushrooms from the Vietnamese store, but there are a couple of days in the spring when we can find this one kind of mushroom that's almost like one of their favourites from back home. And fresh picked mushrooms are so awesome."
"We like them fresh too," said Kat. "But we pick a bunch and dry the rest to use all year round."
"Wow, you dry your own? I'm going to have to tell my grandparents," Lisa said. "They'll be impressed."
Ian looked from Lisa to Kat, and then grimaced. "I can't imagine eating a mushroom that I just picked from the ground. What if it was poisonous?"
Lisa looked over to Kat and they both smiled. It was the classic Canadian response.
"It is something you just know" explained Kat.
Lisa nodded.
Kat rolled out of bed the next morning just after dawn. It was an inhuman time to be awake, especially on a Saturday. But pidpenky were worth the effort. Kat figured she'd have a shower when she got home, so she quickly splashed cold water on her face and then threw on an old pair of jeans and a flannel shirt and headed down the stairs.
Danylo was already dressed and waiting impatiently at the kitchen table. After all the sadness and uncertainty of late, the thought of picking pidpenky seemed like a relief— a refuge — for Danylo. Whenever he held an autumn mushroom and breathed in its wholesome mustiness, it made him think of Nadiya. They had met at the Displaced Persons camp after the war. Nothing as fine as pidpenky was served to the DPs, but he and Nadiya had devised a game. As they ate their thin wheat gruel or their onion stew, their stomachs would rumble as they would try to top each other with fantastic tales of pidpenky past. Nadiya claimed she could bake them into a pastry; Danylo claimed he could make a pidpenky soufflé. Stuffed in a noodle for borscht, or thinly sliced and fried in butter, nothing beat pidpenky for delicious dreams.
He was sipping a cup of tea with lemon, and on top of Kat's place mat was a cooling cup of tea and a piece of soggy buttered toast that looked like it had been sitting there for awhile.
"Eat up," urged her grandfather.
Kat didn't even bother sitting down. She took a huge bite out of the cold toast and washed it down with a gulp of tea. "I'm ready," she said. They wouldn't be the only ones out this early looking for pidpenky so there was no time to waste. Her mother would be delighted if she and Dido actually found some this year.
Cawthra Bush was an old growth forest that backed right onto Cawthra school property, and that's where Kat and Danylo had decided to try this year. Danylo tucked the two canvas bags underneath his arm as he stepped onto the bus. Kat was right behind him, and she noticed with a smile that they had their choice of seats.
Perhaps they wouldn't run into too many people with the same idea after all. Sensible people had decided to stay curled up in their warm beds on this chilly autumn morning. It seemed odd to be taking the Cawthra bus route on a Saturday and especially odd to be taking it with her grandfather.
Kat had not taken a bus ride with her grandfather for almost two years, nor had they gone mushroom picking. Her grandmother's illness had immobilized them all. Danylo chose to sit right behind the bus driver. As Kat sat down beside him, she looked over at his profile and was struck by how worn out he looked. It was as if a light had gone out inside. She could feel tears welling up in her throat. This past year had been so hard on him: first Baba dying, and then this trial.
She remembered the first time he had taken both her and her sister pidpenky picking when they were children. Genya didn't enjoy it at all, but then, she wasn't much of a nature lover and hated getting dirty. Kat took to it right away. Aside from the fact that she liked spending time with her grandfather, she had always found great satisfaction in seeing the sparkle in her Baba's eyes when she brought home a big sack of delicious pidpenky.With Baba gone and this dreadful accusation against her grandfather, Kat's family needed comfort food more than ever. She also hoped that this adventure would help her grandfather forget his worries, if only for a little while.
When the bus dropped them off in front of the old Cawthra House, there were already several cars parked in the lot. "Not a good sign," said Kat.
"We'll see, zolota zhabka," said her grandfather.
They walked past the cars and along the walk at the side of the house until they reached the path that dipped into the ravine and the woods beyond. It was like stepping into another time. The floor of the woods was covered with a deep carpet of autumn leaves and pine needles and the air around them was astonishingly still considering the woods were in a suburban area. Kat filled her lungs with the lovely damp woody smell.
Voices broke the stillness. Two elderly women were crouched down picking through the leaves not a dozen meters away from them.
"Come with me," said Danylo. Then he took Kat by the hand and led her in the opposite direction. Down a path, across a stream, and deep into the woods.
Kat was chilly and her running shoes were already damp, but she agreed with her grandfather. This is how they always did it: they'd find the others and then go in the opposite direction. "There's a mushroom," she said excitedly. Kat reached down and gently squeezed the barrel-shaped stem until it snapped. She had picked their first mushroom of the season.
"Let me check it," said her grandfather.
Kat held it out to him, although she was sure it was a pidpenok because of the distinctive brown cap.
Danylo held it up to his nose and breathed in the musty aroma. "Very good," he said approvingly.
Kat opened her bag, and he dropped it in.
Danylo and Kat worked industriously a few dozen meters apart from each other. It really was an excellent day for pidpenky. The best, in fact, that Danylo could remember. After picking more than a dozen clustered under a tree, Danylo stood up and stretched his legs. It was exhausting for him to crouch down and pick the mushrooms, and it was painful to stand back straight again.
He was thankful that Kat was much quicker at this than he was, so they would only take a few hours to fill both bags. As he stretched his back, he spotted another clustering of pidpenky a few feet further away so he walked towards them, making sure that Kat was always not too far away.
One time when she was about seven years old, he had lost her in the woods for about a minute. That was one of the longest minutes of his life. He could see her now, squatting amidst a good-sized clustering of mushrooms, methodically picking only the freshest ones. When she was finished in an area, she would stand up quickly. No aches or pains in his granddaughter's joints, that was for sure.
Danylo crouched back down so that he could reach the new clustering of mushrooms. There were quite a few dead leaves in the way, so he picked up a handful and placed it aside. As he reached for another handful, his fingers brushed upon something hard. He looked down and was startled to see a man's black leather shoe. Danylo's heart beat fast at the sight and he clutched his chest. His brain told him that it was just a discarded shoe, but it brought back a rush of horrible memories.
"Kataryna, come here," he called out urgently.
Kat stood up straight and strode quickly over to where her grandfather was. She could see that he was holding his hand to his chest and his face was contorted with pain. "What's the matter?" she asked.
"Help me to my feet," he asked meekly. "I just need to stretch out for a moment."
Kat pulled him to his feet, and then she looked down. A man's shoe. She nudged it with the tip of her running shoe, then bent down and picked it up. "Looks like it's been here awhile," she said, wondering why her grandfather would be so shaken by the sight of a shoe in the forest.
"Put it down," said Danylo.
Kat looked at her grandfather in confusion, but did what he asked. "Maybe we should go home?"
"I'll be fine," he said. "Just let me catch my breath." Kat looped her arm around her grandfather's back and led him over to a fallen log. They both sat down together.
"What's the matter?" she asked.
"That shoe reminded me of something," he said.
"Of what?"
"I can't talk about it," he replied in a husky voice.
It was a cold June morning in 1941. When word came that the Nazis were attacking, the Soviet administration left the area en masse and had taken with them all the food and supplies that they could carry. The locals were left with nothing to eat. And soon, they would be at the complete mercy of the Nazis. His father had gone out to find food days before and still hadn't returned. Danylo knew that if they didn't eat soon, he and his mother would starve. His family's one salvation was that they lived close to the forest. There was a chance that he could sneak into the woods and scavenge wild roots and mushrooms and bring them back before the Nazis arrived. Now that the Soviets were gone, it had to be safer.
In the pre-dawn darkness, Danylo knelt down and blindly felt a beautiful clustering of spring mushrooms behind a rotted log. He carefully placed them one by one in his hand-woven sack and then brushed aside a handful of dead leaves to grope for more mushrooms, but instead, he felt something smooth and firm. He brushed away some more leaves and felt what seemed to be a length of wood covered with cloth. Very odd. A few feet from the rotted log, Danylo felt some more mushrooms and so he picked those and placed them in his sack too, working quickly because the sun was beginning to peek through the tops of the trees. He stood up and brushed the dirt from the knees of his pants, and then bent down to pick up his mushroom sack. What he saw made him cry out in horror. The firm smoothness that he had felt was a handmade shoe, and there was a leg sticking out from it. The corpse of a man lay there, a bullet hole through the neck. Danylo felt the bile rise up his throat when he realized that the man was his father. The first rays of sunlight now mercilessly illuminated the area. His father's body wasn't the only one. There were more than a dozen, all with bullet holes in their necks. Danylo recognized them all. Each one of them had been involved in Ukrainian resistance activities against the Soviets.
Danylo gripped his mushroom sack close to his chest and ran home.
Kat wanted to go home right then, but Danylo wouldn't hear of it. " Zolota zhabka," he said, "my sad thoughts will be with me whether we get the pidpenky or not, so rather we pick them and I be sad then we don't pick them and I be sad."
Kat couldn't fault his reasoning, but she insisted that her grandfather rest while she finished. It was close to ten by the time she had filled both bags. Instead of waiting for the bus, Kat called home to see if someone could pick them up. Genya answered.
"I'll be right there."
Kat noted her sister's suppressed look of cool disapproval as she pulled up in front of Cawthra House in their mother's car. Kat held her grandfather's elbow and guided him into the passenger seat and then she sat down in the back seat. Once they pulled into the driveway, Kat had barely enough time to get out of the car and help her grandfather out before Genya had put the car in reverse and was backing out of the driveway, spewing gravel as she went.
By the time they got into the house, Danylo was grey with fatigue. He quickly washed and then lay down in his room.