unsuspected (perhaps even by themselves) talent or gift. Every one has his niche.
Let me tell you, for instance, about Otis McVeigh, as I shall call him. I went to school back in Ohio with Otis. Otis was quite simply a clunk. He was not the stupidest person I have ever met, though he never displayed any great intelligence. That is not the same as saying he had none—for some bizarre reason, straight young men in the Midwest of the fifties had an aversion to letting it be known they had brains. I had yet another classmate who, if memory serves, was never more than a C student, who later turned out to be a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, a job you don’t get without some smarts.
What was worse in Otis’ case was that he had no wit. He was neither good-looking nor spectacularly unattractive. He was not unkind nor rude nor evil, which can at least be fascinating. If, some years back, you should have asked me if there weren’t at least one exception to finding something interesting in everyone I met, I might have been tempted to mention Otis.
Some years after our school days had ended, I was back in Ohio to visit my mother. It was spring. Mushroom season. Which is to say, sponge mushrooms—morels if you want to be fancy—but to us they were sponge mushrooms. Oh, to be sure there were some sub-categories. Dog’s peckers looked like, well, you know, and were among the least prized. But mostly we called them sponge mushrooms, and they did indeed look like little brown and golden sponges on their all too fragile stems.
In Ohio mushroom season is brief, two or perhaps three weeks. The weather must be just right. A good shower and the following day a warm sun. They often come back to the same field where they were found the year before, but some springs they hardly make an appearance, and even when they lie at your feet in abundance they are so well camouflaged that they can be all but impossible to see. It is not uncommon for a hunter to return home with his sack no fuller than when he set out. Locals tend to guard their favorite spots with a secrecy that would be envied by a James Bond villain.
On this occasion, on the first morning of my visit, my mother fixed me an omelet filled with the precious delicacies and the butter they had soaked up—enormous, meaty, savory specimens. Between mouthfuls I asked her where she had found such bounty. She smiled a bit shame-facedly and told me she had paid a visit to Otis.
“Otis?” I almost choked on my food. “Not Otis McVeigh?”
The very same, as it turned out. “He’s the Mushroom King,” my mother explained.
It seems that though others might spend hours in the woods and return home empty-handed, Otis had no such problem. He found mushrooms by the sack full, by the basket. He was never, during the season, without a generous supply of them, which he was more than happy to sell to those less fortunate.
Of course everyone wanted to know where he found them. Mushroom hunting is serious business in Ohio, in the springtime. Each morning during the season there were those who would attempt to follow Otis when he left his house, to discover where his particular fields of plenty might be; but to no avail. Around and around Otis would drive, down country roads and rutted lanes, through covered bridges, past this barn and over this hillock, into town once more and out another route—until he had lost his trackers or they had given up in disgust.
Later (unless their own search had been fruitful, and supposing they really craved some fruits of the field, as by this time they surely did) they must park at the curb outside Otis’ house, follow the cement walk along the side of the house to the back porch, knock at his kitchen door and purchase—at a hefty price—the objects of their desire. I am even told that there were those who came late at night, under cover of darkness, and afterward pretended that they had found these mushrooms themselves. But I am quite certain that my mother would never have stooped to such subterfuge.
There was nothing for it. I had to see for myself. My mother placed a call and that very evening we found ourselves following the cement walk about the side of Otis’ house, only a short stroll from my mother’s own.
Otis gave every sign of being happy to see me, though we had never been chums in any sense of the word. He invited us into his kitchen. We sat at a big round table covered with oilcloth. There was a murmur of voices from a television, or perhaps a radio, in another part of the house. The aroma of cooked cabbage and the dishes stacked neatly in the sink spoke of an early supper. Otis and I struggled to make conversation, as people will who wish to be polite but have little to say to one another. Finally I mentioned that we had hoped to buy some mushrooms.
He went to his pantry and returned with what he said were his very best, just picked that same day. They were in a shoebox lined with a clean, neatly folded dishtowel, a dozen or more of the loveliest mushrooms I had ever seen. The largest of them was a giant, easily seven inches tall, and there were a good half dozen who were only a shade smaller.
I looked them over, holding them one at a time in my hand. They were all but weightless, clean, smelling faintly of the earth from which they had recently come—the scent of dead leaves and cleansing rains and an unspoiled wood in the springtime sun. It is a scent like no other and the finest of perfumes to the aficionado.
We bought six of them, which Otis put into a brown paper bag for us. As I was counting out the money, I glanced up once and found him looking at me with an expression that I could not read and which vanished so quickly I thought perhaps I had imagined it. Was that a twinkle in his eyes, a spark of amusement? I blinked and looked again, and now I saw nothing but the dull gaze with which in the past he had always regarded the world.
We shook hands and parted with the usual polite suggestions to look one another up again. But I was disconcerted. That sense of having surprised something heretofore unsuspected in his expression teased at my mind. Had I missed something all along about Otis? I have always counted myself an astute judge of other people—that, after all, is the essence of the writer’s business. It was troubling to think that I might have been entirely off the mark where Otis was concerned.
As we strolled homeward, I asked my mother what she thought of Otis, what impression she got of him. She thought for a moment and said, “He seems very contented.”
As she so often did, my mother had hit the nail precisely on the head. Real contentment is far rarer than one might suppose. In most people you can almost always sense a feeling of wanting, of needing, of searching for something more than, different from, their present circumstances. Sometimes it is only a wish for the workday to end, or dinnertime to arrive, the trivia of a day’s impatience, and sometimes it is great ambition, and sometimes great resentment at ambition thwarted.
There are few who you feel are truly satisfied in any given moment with their lot. Walking at my mother’s side on that moonlit Ohio night, with Otis’ mushrooms in a bag in my hand and the memory of that glint of amusement I had seen earlier still fresh in my mind, I realized that Otis was one of those rare few.
I had to laugh, partly at myself. Who would ever have dreamed that there would be a story to tell about poor Otis, but there it was. He had found his niche.
He was the Mushroom King.
(Excerpted from Spine Intact, Some Creases)
I’LL SEE YOU HOME
It had been a bad year: a slow spring, the crops late planted, and just when they had been about to harvest, winter came ahead of himself, so they lost more of the wheat than they reaped, and most of the corn. They would have to make the long trip into town to buy provisions, if they weren’t to starve over the winter, but money was short, and she had put off going just one day too long. When Janet finally said they must go, as the larder was nearly empty, another storm came out of nowhere, and she stood at the stove, stirring the oatmeal—all they had left now—the
