The Mushroom Ring

In summer the old barn smells of dry straw so sweetly your mouth turns sweet. But that night it gave off rotten milk and warmth, like from under a brooding hen. The spade sank for the second time into something soft, though the earthen floor there is trodden bone-hard, since the grandfathers' time. Hnat gripped the handle, and a callus creaked. Around the hole stood a ring of pale mushrooms, thin as children's fingers without nails.

Every last one leaned inward, toward the pit. He had buried the sack here five years ago. The fog at the center did not stir. Before that, Hnat had climbed into the miller Ostap's house at night, after the money paid for milled grain. He hadn't meant to kill, and I believe that to this day. Ostap woke at the crack of the chest. They grappled in the dark, both silent, like rabid beasts. An iron hook lay itself into Hnat's hand of its own accord.

"One blow" - that's what he whispered to himself afterward. In the doorway stood Mykhas, Ostap's twelve-year-old son. The boy recognized Hnat in the strip of moonlight and screamed. That same instant every dog in the village began barking at once, from the first house to the last. Over their coffins the keening went on for three days after. They chased Hnat all the way to the forest with pitchforks and torches.

Vekla's father was in that chase and remembered one thing to his dying day: "the coins poured out after the fugitive from under the ground, and there was no ringing. They fell like leaves." Having broken away just before the forest, Hnat managed to bury the sack in the old barn at the forest's edge - that I learned later. He never came out of the barn. The pursuers were afraid of the too-dark fog outside and decided he would freeze to death on his own, and I decided so too.

Only they decided to wait a little... At the time I thought I must have heard it somewhere in the village. Now I know: it was Hnat. Only his fingers had stayed young, smooth, without a single callus. And let no one ask how a murderer dared return to the village where they had chased him with pitchforks. The community never forgave him, because it had no one to forgive: to the village, Hnat had lain dead for five years in the abandoned barn by the forest.

Nobody recognized the gray-haired stranger, and I poured for him from three steps away. He walked to the barn at night, when the village sleeps, and not one dog barked. I saw him from the porch. What happened in the barn... let me take a swallow and I'll tell it... Vekla and her father were coming home late past the barn and heard voices from inside: first one, then two, then a whole street was talking, though of course there is no street there. Dig. "Dig here. It's warm."

The fog wrapped around them, the father pressed Vekla to the ground, and they lay in the weeds until dawn. Hnat was digging - they saw it and felt it through a ragged tear in the fog. Roots crackled, the earth warmed and scorched the palms. And the pale mushrooms turned their caps to follow the hand: wherever the hand went, so did they.

First the crickets fell silent all around, all at once. Then the air pressed on Hnat's ears, and he heard his own pulse like someone else's footsteps. There came a smell of wet flour, of a stove gone cold, and of a dead body, like in a house with a coffin on the bench. His spit thickened, his tongue stuck to his teeth. Out of the fog came a boy. Hnat knew Mykhas by his walk before he saw the face.

He was older than on the night of the murder, and younger than he should have been by now. He stopped behind the mushrooms and asked: "Have you come for what's yours, or for what's my father's?" Hnat answered: "For what's mine." The mushrooms moved a finger's width closer, soundlessly, like an hour hand in shadow. He dropped the spade and walked away, counting his steps to calm himself.

No one ran after him: the chase with pitchforks was five winters past, and that night the village slept, and Vekla and her father lay behind the wattle fence, unable to lift their heads. Nine steps to the open gates. On the tenth he was standing over the hole again, earth in his hand, his palm hot from it. "The barn turned me back," he sighed, sheepish.

The second time he set out through the gates straight toward the lights of the village. The lights scattered into pale mushroom caps, and under his feet the same pit opened. The barn held him, but not with doors or a bolt: it simply slid the pit under his tenth step each time, the way you slide a bowl to a dog. "It's my money. I suffered for it," he said into the fog. The square of the doorway narrowed.

The boy was suddenly almost beside him; Hnat never noticed him take a step. The steam from Hnat's mouth came in ragged bursts, and from Mykhas's mouth came none at all, though the lips were moving. "And why did you strike the second time?" About the second blow neither the chase, nor the community, nor I had known. After the first, Ostap was still getting up, holding onto the chest and looking Hnat in the face. He recognized him.

Then Hnat struck the second time, no longer out of fright, but so as not to be recognized. From behind the fence Vekla and her father heard the boy repeat it in the very words Hnat had been telling himself for five winters. Then the fog parted wider. Ostap came up. In a shirt white with flour, with wooden measures under his arm. He stood by the pit and began to measure. One measure. A second. A third.

The knock of wood on earth matched Hnat's heart beat for beat, and Hnat already understood which of them was knocking after the other. "Come at last to settle up?" "The barn could still have let him go," Did Ihor said afterward: "confess aloud that he'd come to take, not to give back, leave everything and walk away empty-handed, without looking back until first cockcrow."

The old man told of old villages, where once the whole community decided such things. A debtor-murderer was locked in the barn for the night: by morning he settles up, or he comes back forever to keep counting. The community has forgotten that custom, but the earth forgets nothing that has gone into it. The barn gives the criminal a village: the same houses, the same wells and fences. A woman carries water from the well for the third time.

A householder greets him and holds out the same palm. And on every corner stands Mykhas, a different age each time, asking: "Have you come for what's yours, or for what's my father's?" In the morning Vekla's father went in. By the pit lay Hnat's sheepskin coat, its hooks fastened up to the throat, the sleeves folded on the chest. No one dared take the coat. They buried it in that same pit, and from under the floor there came a sweet smell until Spas, the Saviour's feast.

The priest rode as far as the barn gates, went pale and turned his horse, explaining nothing to anyone. Around the pit a fresh ring came up. The pale caps were all turned toward the gates and the path from the village.