The pig grunted softly and pressed her snout against Maggie’s palm. “Don’t you think bad of me.” Maggie whispered. “Don’t you think bad of any of us.” That afternoon Warren rode the four miles to his father’s place to borrow a stout rope and a pair of leather hobbles. While he was gone, Maggie let Bess out of the barn to root in the yard.
The way she did every afternoon and watched the pig amble off toward the oak grove at the back of the property where the leaves lay knee-deep and the soil stayed soft even after the first frosts. Bess had been going to the grove every day for two weeks now. Maggie had not thought much of it. Pigs rooted.
That was what pigs did. Today, for some reason, she pulled on her shawl and followed. The oak grove ran along a low ridge above the South Creek. 12 trees in all, some of them 6 ft across at the base. Their roots heaving up through the leaf mold like the knuckles of buried hands. Bess stood near the largest of them with her snout deep in the dirt, snorting with a happy concentration Maggie had never quite seen before.
When Maggie came up beside her, the pig lifted her head and there in her mouth, smeared with black soil, was a lump the size and shape of a child’s fist. It looked like a knot of burnt wood, but the smell that rose off it stopped Maggie where she stood. Sweet and earthy and strange, like nothing she had ever known.
Maggie’s first thought was of Mrs. Henrietta Cauley who had taught women’s literary circle in Salem the previous spring. Mrs. Cauley had lived 10 years in Paris before her husband brought her back to Oregon. And she had once described, with great feeling, a dish of veal she had eaten on the Rue de Rivoli that had been shaved over with something called a truffle.
A fungus, Mrs. Cauley had said, “Costlier than gold by the ounce. Hunted by trained pigs in the forests of France, the women in the circle had laughed. Maggie had not laughed. Maggie had written it down in her commonplace book. Maggie knelt down in the wet leaves and took the lump from Bess’s mouth as gently as she could.
The pig let her with only a small reluctant grunt and went back to digging. Maggie turned the thing over in her palm. It was warm from the pig’s mouth and rough on the outside, almost scaled like the bark of a tree. And where Bess’s tooth had broken the skin, she could see the inside, marbled cream and chocolate with thin white veins running through it like rivers seen from a great height.
She lifted it to her nose and breathed in, and the smell went straight through the cold and the worry and into some older part of her, a part that recognized richness the way a starving body recognizes bread. She sat back on her heels. Bess had already found another one, smaller, and was nosing it free from beneath a tangle of fern.
Maggie watched her work. The pig’s whole body was tense with purpose, her ears pricked forward, her stub of a tail flicking. She seemed to know exactly where to dig. She would walk three steps, stop, snuffle deeply, walk on, stop again, and then commit to a spot with her front trotters and root down through the leaf mold to the bare dirt below.
In half an hour, she had unearthed seven of them. Maggie gathered each one into her apron as Bess produced it, gently taking them from the pig’s mouth, and offering in exchange small pieces of dried apple from the pocket of her dress. After the third one, Bess had begun to look up expectantly each time she found one, and to wait for her apple before going on. Maggie’s apron grew heavy.
The smell of the truffles climbed up and surrounded her, sharp and rich and unmistakable. She thought of Mrs. Cauley standing in the front room of the Methodist Church, gesturing with her gloved hands. She thought of Bess as a piglet in the basket on the porch. She thought of Warren riding home with the rope and the hobbles.
When the light began to go thin and gold through the oak branches, Maggie tied the corners of her apron up into a bundle, slapped her thigh, and Bess came to her at once, snorting cheerfully. They walked back together through the long grass, the pig shoulder bumping companionably against Maggie’s leg. Warren was already at the barn when she came up the slope.
He had a coil of new rope over his shoulder and the leather hobbles slung from his belt. He stopped when he saw her face. “What have you got there?” “Come inside,” Maggie said. She laid them out on the pine table, all nine of them, side by side on a clean square of muslin. They ranged from the size of a hazelnut to the size of a man’s fist.
In the lamplight, their dark surfaces glistened where she had brushed the dirt away. “What is it?” Warren said. “Smell.” He bent down. He frowned. He bent down again and breathed in deeper, and his eyebrows lifted. “That’s not like any mushroom I ever met.” “It isn’t a mushroom, not exactly. It grows underground. It’s called a truffle.” “A what?” “Mrs.
Cauley spoke of them last spring at the Women’s Circle. They use them in France, in the great kitchens. She said a single pound could fetch as much as a man earns in a month splitting rails.” Warren straightened up slowly. He looked at the muslin, at the nine dark lumps, at Maggie’s flushed face. He picked up the largest one and weighed it in his hand.
“Are you certain?” “I’m certain of the smell and of the way Bess hunted. Mrs. Colly said in France they use pigs because pigs can find them 6 in deep in the earth where no man could ever know to dig. Warren set the truffle down. He sat in the ladder back chair and put his hands on his knees and looked at the floor for a long time. Saturday, Maggie said.
Saturday is 3 days from now. I know it. Warrant, I know it Meg. She came around the table and stood beside him and put her hand on his shoulder. Outside the wind was rising in the oaks, a long slow sound like water in a riverbed. From the barn came the soft contented grunt of Bess settling herself into her straw.
Tomorrow, Warren said at last. Tomorrow we take one to town, we find out what it is and then we decide. In the morning Maggie wrapped the largest truffle in waxed paper and then in a square of clean linen and Warren put it in the inside pocket of his coat and rode the buckskin gelding he went first to the grocer Mr.
Plummer who had bought Maggie’s preserves through the autumn and who was a careful watchful man with a thin gray mustache. Warren laid the bundle on the counter and unfolded the linen and waited. Mr. Plummer leaned down. He sniffed. He pulled back and then he leaned down again. He looked at Warren with a new expression neither friendly nor unfriendly the way a man looks at a card he is not expected to be dealt.
Where did you come by this Mr. Bell? Off my land south of town. You have more? I might. I want to know what it’s worth first. Plummer thought for a moment then took a small key from a chain at his waist and opened the drawer beneath the counter and took out a notebook. He wrote an address on a slip of paper and pushed it across. Mr.
Eve Marchand, he said. He keeps the kitchen at the Esmond Hotel in Portland. He was here in September buying chanterelles off Mr. Buford. He told me then if anybody in this country ever found him a true black truffle, he would pay handsomely for it. He thought there might be such a thing in our oaks. He had a theory.
I did not credit it at the time. Portland is 2 days by wagon. There’s the train, Mr. Bell. There’s the train from Salem to Portland three times daily. And Mr. Marchand keeps a telegraph clerk at his back door. Warren rode home through the early dusk with the truffle returned to his coat pocket and the slip of paper folded into his hat.
When he came up the lane, he saw Maggie standing on the porch with a lantern and he understood with a sudden tightness in his chest that he had been gone half the day and she had stood there waiting most of it. He told her what Mr. Plummer had said. They ate their supper of beans and cornbread and they did not say much. After supper, Warren wrote a careful letter to Mr.
Eve Marchand at the Esmond Hotel describing what they had found with a measured sample of dirt from beneath the oaks pressed into a fold of paper as evidence. He carried the letter to town the next morning and sent it by the early mail. Three days passed. They did not take Bess to Olsen’s on Saturday. They took her to the grove instead.
She found 11 more truffles on Saturday morning, six on Sunday, eight on Monday. By Tuesday, Maggie had begun keeping a little notebook of her own in which she recorded the date, the weather, the spot, under which tree, and the weight of each truffle on the brass kitchen scale. On Wednesday, a telegram arrived at the Salem station addressed to Mr.
Warren Bell. Warren rode in to fetch it and stood by the stove of the depot office while he read it twice. We’ll pay $6 per server sound specimen stop arrive Salem Friday afternoon train stop wire confirmation soonest stop why Marchand stop $6 an ounce 16 oz to the pound $96 per pound.
Warren stood at the depot window and did the arithmetic three times because he could not the first two times believe his own pencil. By Friday morning Maggie and Warren had 4 lb and 3 oz of clean dry truffles laid out on muslin on the pine table in the cabin. A neat dark fortune. Warren had brushed each one with a soft hairbrush.
Maggie had weighed each one and noted it in her book mister. Eve Marchand was a small brisk Frenchman of about 50 with very black eyebrows and a long traveling coat. He arrived in a hired buggy at 4:00 in the afternoon. He greeted Maggie with a slight bow, removed his hat in the doorway and walked straight to the table and bent over the muslin without speaking for a full minute.
When he straightened up his face had changed entirely. “Madam,” he said, “Monsieur, I have been looking for these for 11 years.” He weighed each truffle himself on a small brass scale he produced from his case. He counted out the money in $20 gold pieces. When he was done, he had laid $404 on the pine table and Warren and Maggie stood looking at it as though it might at any moment become leaves and blow away.
Bess slept in the barn that night with a folded wool blanket laid over her broad black back and a fresh pile of last summer’s apples beside her. Maggie went out twice with a lantern just to look at her the second time near midnight and stood scratching the spot behind the great pig’s ear that Bess loved best. “You saved us.” she whispered.
Bess opened one small intelligent eye, grunted once, and closed it again. In the cabin, Warren had set the gold pieces in two neat stacks on the mantel beside the photograph of Maggie’s mother. They glinted in the firelight. $404 was more cash money than the Bells had ever held at one time in their lives. The news did not stay in the cabin.
It could not, mister. Marchand had taken the early train back to Portland on Saturday morning, and by the following Wednesday, a short item had appeared in the Oregon Statesman under the heading Curious Find Near Salem, in which a local farmer was described, without his name, as having delivered to a Portland hotelier a quantity of the celebrated European earth mushroom.
By Friday, a longer piece had appeared in the Portland paper, and by the following Tuesday, a reporter had ridden out from Salem with a notebook and a pencil, and had stood at the Bells’ gate asking questions. Warren had been polite. He had said little. He had said only that the find had come from beneath certain oak trees on his land, that he was not yet ready to discuss the particulars, and that he wished the gentleman a pleasant ride home.
The reporter rode home and wrote what he had. Within a week, two more buyers from Portland had written letters asking after additional supply. A man from Seattle had written as well. So had a hotel in San Francisco, having heard of the find by way of a guest who had dined at the the Esmond, and had spoken of nothing else for the rest of his journey south.
But the letters were not the trouble. The trouble was the men who began to appear in the lane. The first one came on a Tuesday afternoon in late November, riding a roan mare. He sat his horse at the gate and called to Warren in the yard. He gave his name as Mr. Silas Pike and said he represented a syndicate of investors in Portland.
He had heard of the Bells’ good fortune. He wished to make them an offer. He had been authorized to pay $1,000 cash for a 5-year lease on the truffle ground with the Bells to retain residence in the cabin and the use of the cleared 11 acres for farming. Warren stood with his thumbs in his belt and listened to the end of it.
He thanked Mr. Pike for riding so far on a cold afternoon. He said he and Ifs would have to discuss the matter and he wished Mr. Pike a safe return to Portland. Mr. Pike smiled in a way Warren did not like. He said he would return in a week. The second man came on Thursday. He gave the name Boone and said he was a representative of a Mr.
Crowder in Salem who was prepared to offer $1,500 cash for the grove outright in fee simple with surveyors to come on Monday. The third man came on Saturday morning. He did not give his name. He did not dismount. He sat on his horse at the foot of the lane and looked at the cabin for a long while and then turned the horse around and rode back the way he had come.
That night Warren did not sleep. He sat by the stove in his stockin’d feet with a quilt around his shoulders listening to the wind in the oaks. Three times he stood and looked out the window toward the grove. Each time he saw nothing but moonlight on the wet ground. Each time he sat back down and tightened the quilt and listened harder.
In the morning he saddled the buckskin and rode the south fence line and the east fence line and the line along the ridge above the creek. The fences were nothing more than three strands of barbed wire on cedar posts set when he had first cleared the 11 acres. They would stop a cow. They would not stop a man with a shovel and a lantern.
When he came back to the cabin, Maggie was at the table with her notebook open totaling that week’s finds. She looked up. Her cheeks were still flushed from the cold of the grove and there was leaf mold on the hem of her dress. “11 more today,” she said, “the biggest one yet, nearly 4 oz.” Warren hung his hat on the peg and did not answer.
The first frost came hard on the night of the 3rd of December. Warren walked the lane in the dark with a lantern and found nothing. But in the morning when he went out to the grove with Maggie and Bess, there were boot prints in the rhyme along the south side of the ridge, two sets. They had come up from the creek and gone back the same way.
Maggie knelt down by the largest of the prints. “He stood here a long time,” she said. “See how it’s pressed deep? He was waiting. For what? For us? For where she’d dig?” Warren stood looking down at the print. The lantern in his hand swung a little in the wind. Bess, free at his side, was already nosing toward the base of her favorite oak, but Warren laid a hand on her broad black back and held her still.
“We’ll go back to the cabin,” he said. “We won’t bring her out today.” In the cabin, Maggie made coffee while Warren took down the old single shot from the pegs above the door and oiled the lock and set it on the table. He did not load it. He looked at it for a long while, then carried it back to the pegs and hung it up.
“I won’t do that,” he said. “I won’t have that be how this ends.” Maggie set the coffee down. “Then what?” Warren sat in the rocker by the window and put his face in his hands. For 2 days they did not work the grove. The The shifted around to the north and a thin dry snow came down out of the foothills.
Bess paced in her stall and grumbled at the closed barn door. Maggie went out with a pail of warm mash, and apologized to her twice, and the second time the pig butted her gently in the stomach, as if to say, “Enough of this, woman. The truffles are waiting.” On the third morning, Warren rode into Salem and was gone all day.
Maggie did not know where he had gone. He came home after dark with his coat collar turned up and a cold pink in his cheeks, and he sat down at the table and laid out four sheets of paper. They were carefully written. Three of them were copies. “What is this?” “A petition to the county to register a claim of unique cultivation upon the grove.
” “Unique cultivation?” “The lawyer in Salem helped me write it. We argue that the truffles grow only because Bess hunts them, and that no man can harvest them without a trained pig, and that therefore the truffles are not a wild fruit of the land, but a cultivated crop of our farm, like wheat or apples.” Maggie read the top sheet slowly.
Her lips moved over the legal words. “Will it hold?” “The lawyer says it will hold for now. He says the men in Portland will think twice before sending their diggers if there’s a registered claim against the grove. He says it buys us 6 months. By summer, we’ll have the income to fence the grove proper and to hire a hand to live on the place.
” “And tonight?” “Tonight,” said Warren, “I sleep in the barn.” He slept in the barn that night with Bess, and the next night, and the night after that. Maggie carried his blankets out at dusk and brought him hot coffee in a tin pail at the cold middle of each night. On the fourth night, the moon was a thin pairing above the oaks, and Warren, half asleep with his back against a bale of straw, heard the soft rasp of a shovel meeting frozen ground. He stood.
Bess was already awake. Her small eyes glittered in the lantern light. Warren did not take the rifle. He took the lantern and the dinner bell he had carried out from the porch that evening. And he walked out the barn door and up the lane to the grove with the lantern held high and the bell ringing steadily in his other hand and Bess trotting at his heel. The two men ran.
Warren heard them crash down through the brush toward the creek, and he heard the splash. And then he heard nothing. He stood at the edge of the grove in the cold ringing silence and held the lantern high. They had been digging at the foot of the largest oak. They had pried up the leaf mold in a broad ragged crescent.
In the lantern light, Warren could see scattered around the disturbed earth three broken truffles shattered by the edge of the shovel, their dark insides bleeding out into the dirt. Bess walked forward and stood over them and made a low unhappy sound in her throat that Warren had never heard her make before.
Warren sat on the porch step at first light with the lantern guttering beside him and a cup of cold coffee in his hand. The grove looked the same as it always had from the cabin. The oaks stood. The ridge ran east. He could not see from here the place where the soil had been opened. Maggie came out in her shawl and sat down beside him without speaking.
After a while, she took the cup from him and drank what was left and gave it back empty. “How many did they ruin?” she said. “Three, maybe four. I couldn’t see all the holes.” “That’s not so many. It isn’t the truffles, Mag. I know it.” They sat together on the cold step. The first thin light was reaching the tops of the oaks.
From the barn came the soft, small sound of Bess waking, the rustle of her great body in the straw. “We sold our cow to pay the lean on the wagon,” Maggie said at last. “We lived 2 years on flour and beans and what came out of my garden. We didn’t lose this place then. We won’t lose it now.” “I don’t know that, Mag.” “Then I’ll know it for the both of us.
” She took his hand. His fingers were stiff with cold and would not at first close around hers, but after a moment they did. “We have to think bigger,” she said. “We can’t just guard the grove. We have to grow it.” Warren turned to look at her. “Grow it how?” “The oaks aren’t the only oaks on this land.
There are 20 more in the back pasture, 40 along the south creek. If Bess can find truffles under these 12, why not under those? And if she found them by accident on land we never planted, what couldn’t she find on land we tended on purpose?” “You’re saying we farm them?” “I’m saying we already are. We just didn’t know it. And if we are farming them, then we aren’t a couple sitting on a lucky grove.
We’re the only truffle farm in the United States.” They began that morning. Warren saddled the buckskin and rode into Salem and came back at dusk with a coil of fresh barbed wire, a bundle of cedar cedar posts cut from a neighbor’s lot, a sack of corn, and a thin smiling man in a brown coat named Mr.
Joseph Penfield, who got down from the wagon and looked around the yard with great interest. Mr. Penfield was a botanist from the agricultural college at Corvallis. The lawyer in Salem had given Warren his name. He was 36 years old, the son of a Methodist preacher, and he had ridden the 2 days from Corvallis with a wooden case of glass jars and a folding microscope packed in straw.
He had read the newspaper accounts. He had written Warren a letter the previous week. He wished, with the Bell’s permission, to study the grove. Maggie offered him supper. He ate two helpings of beans and asked her three questions about the soil for everyone she asked him about Paris. By the time the lamp was He had laid out his microscope on the pine table and was studying with a delight he did not trouble to hide, a thin shaving of truffle Maggie had paired off for him.
Tuber gibbosum, he said, or something very like it, native to this country. The oak roots feed it. It feeds the oak roots. They cannot live without each other. You have a marriage going on under the ground here, Mrs. Bell, and your pig has the gift of seeing into it. He stayed 3 days. He walked the grove with Bess and Warren and Maggie.
He walked the back pasture. He walked the line of oaks along the South Creek. He took soil samples in his glass jars and labeled each one in a small, careful hand. On the third evening, he sat at the pine table and drew a map on a sheet of butcher paper, marking every oak on the Bell property and the soil conditions around its base.
You have, he said, perhaps 80 productive trees, perhaps 100. With care, you might double that within 10 years by transplanting young oaks into the spaces between. How long does it take an oak to bear? Warren said. 15 years to maturity, but the fungus colonizes the roots within five, if the soil is right and the inoculation is done well.
Inoculation, mister? Penfield smiled. Mrs. Bell, he said. If you will permit me, I should very much like to come back in the spring and stay through the summer. I believe we can teach these oaks to bear on purpose what these oaks have been bearing by accident. Through the long winter, the Bells worked.
Warren and a hired hand from Salem named Caleb Whittaker fenced the Grove proper, 8 ft of close-set boards with a single locked gate. They built a small smokehouse to store dry-cured truffles in waxed cloth. Maggie kept her notebook every day, recording each find of Bess’s by tree, by weight, by depth. By the second week of February, they had sold through Mr.
Marchand and through two other buyers in Portland just over 14 lb of truffles, for which they had received $1,148 in gold and banknotes. They paid off the lien on the wagon. They bought a new milk cow, a young Jersey Maggie named Pearl. They bought six laying hens and a sack of oats and a sack of seed corn and a good winter coat for Maggie and a pair of stout boots for Warren.
They sent $50 to Maggie’s mother in Indiana. With a letter Maggie wept while writing. They put $200 in the bank in Salem, the first money the Bells had ever held in a bank. They did not sell Bess. They did not consider it. In March, Penfield returned as he had promised and stayed through July. He and Warren transplanted 40 young oaks from the woods above the creek into the cleared margins of the Grove.
They prepared the soil with mulch from the established trees and with the spores Mr. Penfield carried in his glass jars. Bess walked the rows with Maggie, sniffing each new sapling with the air of a foreman inspecting his crew. By the second autumn, the Bells had a hired man living year-round in a small cabin Warren built behind the smokehouse, a serious young Norwegian named Anders Berg, who had a way with animals and a head for figures.
By the third autumn, they had a second pig, a half-grown gilt Maggie named Pearl after the cow, which Bess herself seemed to take in hand and instruct, walking ahead of the younger animal through the grove and pausing significantly over the right spots. By the fifth autumn, the Bell Farm was supplying the Esmond Hotel, the Portland Hotel, two restaurants in San Francisco, and a private buyer in New York City.
In the spring of 1894, 5 years after the morning Maggie had followed Bess into the grove, the Bell Farm was shipping 40 lb of truffles a week through the season, and the bank in Salem held on deposit in the Bell account the sum of $14,612. The cabin had a second story now, with two real bedrooms and a glassed-in kitchen and a parlor with a Brussels carpet and a piano Maggie had ordered from a catalog, and on which she could not yet play more than the simplest of hymns.
Bess was seven that spring and beginning to grow gray about the snout. She still went to the grove every morning with Maggie. She was paid in apples by old habit, although her stall was warm and her feed was good and her sides were broad and gleaming. In June of that year, on a soft, warm evening with the windows open and the smell of cut hay coming up through the screens, Maggie sat at the new piano and worked carefully through a hymn called Blessed Assurance, and Warren stood in the doorway with his coat over his arm,
watching her. Outside, in the yard, Bess and her young apprentice and a third pig newly purchased lay together in the cool grass by the water trough, all three of them sleeping in a black and pink heap, twitching their stub tails in unison at flies that were not there. The lamplight in the cabin window had a different quality now.
It fell on a polished pine floor, on a brass fender at the hearth, on Maggie’s mother’s photograph in a real silver frame. Warren stood at the gate of the grove with a lantern in his hand and his old wife’s notebook open against the gatepost, checking the weights against the buyer’s order for the morning train. Bess walked up beside him in the dusk and leaned her great old shoulder against his leg.
Warren reached down and scratched and scratched the spot behind her ear that she loved best. The first snow of the new winter began to come down out of the foothills, very softly, settling on the bristles of her back. The first snow of the new winter began to come down out of the foothills, very softly, settling on the bristles of her back.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
