A STORY WITH NO MOREL
A Widow Bit – April 11, 2010
By Mary Koch

            I don’t know how many books I read aloud to my husband during his years of disability. Countless many, but never enough. I continually find books I wish I could’ve read to him.

            With every page of “Driftless,” a novel by David Rhodes, I ached to be reading aloud to John. Rhodes’ true-life story is as dramatic as any fiction he dreams up for his novels. He was an up-and-coming writer in the 1970s when a motorcycle accident left him paralyzed from the chest down. “Driftless” was published in 2008 after a 30-year silence.

            Rhodes is the kind of writer who touches the common cord. You recognize yourself in his characters; the events in his story could be part of your own history. Despite Rhodes’ paralysis, “Driftless” is not about disability but about relationships. Yet there’s particular authority in his account of the relationship between two sisters, one physically disabled, the other her caregiver.

            “The fragile balance between full-time caregivers and full-time care receivers … required more deep-breathing concentration than most people were capable of,” Rhodes writes. I took a remembered breath, deeply, as I read that. And I could not deny the naked truth of this passage:

            “Not that Olivia [the disabled sister] had any complaints about Violet’s [the caregiver] supervision of her medications and foods, which was quite conscientious and competent in a slightly dictatorial and fascist way.” Guilty as charged. John, who patiently tolerated my “slightly” fascist care, would have laughed aloud.

            The chapter that would have touched him to the core, however, begins: “Not everyone could find morel mushrooms. It was hard to know where and when to look for them, and this unpredictability lent to the fungi an allure of mystery.” What follows is an eloquent, insightful two-page essay on the pathology known as morel hunting.

            Rhodes affirms what I already knew. For some people, my late husband among them, morel mushrooms are a passion, part of their DNA, at the core of their belief structure, a testimony of faith, a raison d’etre. Stories about John’s morel instincts are legion. My favorite: the time we were driving on a forest road about 20 mph when he declared, “I saw a morel back there.” It was fall. Morels are spring mushrooms. I scoffed. John put the car in reverse, hopped out, hiked in about 20 yards and returned with a healthy, four-inch morel.

            So on Easter Sunday afternoon, I sat alone at John’s gravestone and read, as a soliloquy, Rhodes’ passage about morels. No, I wasn’t deluded into thinking John was “there,” listening to me. I can’t say why it seemed the right thing to do, why it afforded such comfort. Maybe I was expressing my own belief in resurrection – a belief I do not understand and certainly cannot articulate.

            Someone else’s crystalline words about mushroom hunting were as close as I could come, especially when raindrops began to fall gently on the page – the spring rain that provokes morel spores into action.