The Little Red Chairs by Edna O’Brien Page A

people waved to us from their passing cars. It was a sunny day and it was nice to reach the woods, where there was shade. Leaves were just beginning to sprout and were, as he said, at their most tasty. The boys were running and scampering around, climbing trees and one boy peed from a height, but the Doc just ignored it. He looked a bit funny in a long black smock, with his white beard and his white hair tied up in a topknot. Lena Lally asked him if he was married and he just smiled and said that perhaps she had a wife in mind for him. He had brought illustrated books with pictures of trees in them and another with pictures of mushrooms and in his chip basket there were two knives, a secateurs and a trowel.
Then it was time to pick some leaves. We were allowed to eat them or put them in the basket for a salad. One girl, Cliodhna, said hers was buttery and so everyone said buttery and we were all laughing and vying with each other to describe the tastes – lemony and apricoty and peachy and orangey and nutty. Thelittle wild violets under the trees were minute, and we did for them, gobbled them up and they had no taste at all. In our copybooks we wrote down the properties of each tree, the leaf, the flower, if it were a flowering tree, and the root. The oak leaf was fibrous, so everyone wrote fibrous. He told us then the medicinal value attached to each tree. Hawthorn for the heart, something else for the liver, willow for the gall bladder. The needles of the big cedars were oily, good as a breath freshener, but too intense for the mouth. Eating the catkins was like eating maggots. Lime flower, which was moist and mucilaginous, was a cooling yin tonic and especially, as he said, suitable for women during menopause. There were a few giggles at that.
Then it was time to pick mushrooms. Before we did, he warned us Never touch a mushroom that you are not sure of , as many were deadly poisonous. From his book, we looked at pictures of mushrooms, including the poisonous ones and they looked identical to the harmless ones. They were on very thin little wobbly stalks and had a vivid red cap with thick white spots. The mushrooms we were allowed to pick were called chanterelle. He knelt down and got one knife to sever the stems and then the second knife to lift it away from the root, so that more mushrooms would grow next year. They grew in clusters, clinging to one another. While he was cutting, his topknot fell down over his face and he looked like one of those hags in a fairy tale who steal children and boil them in a big black pot. There were several kinds of chanterelle and they crumbled easily in our hands, like soft biscuits and we devoured them.
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Later we were on a summit, with a view of the wood all around, the trees so nice and breezy and the sky above as blue as in the holy pictures of Our Lady, ascending into Heaven. We sat in a circle, our frocks spread out neatly at our sides and the boys stood, or else sat on their haunches, just to show how cool they were. Two bigger girls that were in charge of the picnic laid out a big plastic cloth and then plastic tumblers for the lemonade. The Doc said that in times of old, kings and queens always built their castles and their keeps on high places, so as to spot the encroaching enemy and then from the slit holes in the masonry aimed their bows and arrows, which were already dipped in poisons made from plants. He said how people barely realised the potency in plant and vegetable life and then he talked of poisoning, state poisoning and individual poisoning, saying that in the larger scheme of things, all wrongs were avenged and there was a cosmic payback for every bad deed.
In ancient China for instance unwanted people were disposed of at ceremonial dances. Feathers already soaked in several poisons were thrown onto very hot coals and the fumes asphyxiated the unlucky ones, who minutes before had been dancing merrily. In Roman times, it was also at banquets that unwanted family