The Yoo-hoo I was expecting, the rest of the dishes I was not.
“Sure have a thing for mushrooms,” I say.
“Eight years I’ve been planning. I can imagine every one of ’em dishes too… the textures, the smells, the complexity…” Puff closes his eyes and moves toward the visitor booth glass, his mouth dangerously close to where the previous inmate had cow-licked or spat. “It was the last thing I saw before they locked me up.”
“What last thing?”
“Mushrooms, I saw mushrooms. Last thing I saw on the outside.”
I want to scream that, no, it was my beautiful wife gored and dying beneath him, that was the last thing he saw. But all I say is:
“Mushroom it is.”
The shopping takes more time than the cooking, but I don’t mind; Mary would have wanted me to do right by Puff. I’m at the farmer’s market on the Rice University campus, inspecting fava beans and asparagus, when Peter calls.
“Texas Board of Pardons is almost sewn up,” he reports. “Cost me a ton of markers. Your letters helped a lot; nobody’s gonna make a fuss on this one if you don’t. You sure about this?”
“Mary and my unborn child would have wanted it this way.”
As I’m thumping an organic cantaloupe, Bill Reater, owner of Texas Mushroom Farms, presents a bag full of fresh Morchella esculenta as if holding out a newborn.
“Dug ’em up thirty miles east of Austin; going back this afternoon to find me some more,” Reater says. “Mighty healthy walk out by the Pedernales River. God’s country. Helps work stuff out.”
Somehow he knows I need stuff worked out in the worst way.
Maybe the old farmer sees the sin whirling in my brain, smells the most wicked fantasy I’m baking. It was impossible, but yet I cannot let go of the puzzle:
How do I get my beautifully efficient switchblade on the table for Puff’s last supper?
I agree to go mushroom hunting with Reater.
We spend the afternoon drudging through an elm forest, noses down, eyes glued to the undergrowth. Reater talks in a low whisper, as if he might spook the mushrooms and they would fold up their caps and slurp themselves back into the soil. He peppers our hunt with juicy morsels: “mushrooms are like people; some good, some bad, some downright poison” and “all you need for shiitakes is olive oil, salt, and pepper.”
Puff may have been obsessed with mushrooms, but Reater was in love with them.
“There, a fungus among us!” he shouts at one point.
“What are those?” I ask, ever the obedient student.
“Highly caespitose,” Reater reports, pulling fresh specimens from under a juniper bush. “Those gray ones are forest mushrooms, and these are clamshells.”
“Look the same to me. I can never tell them apart.”
The afternoon ages and soon my basket is stuffed with strange, twisted, alien fungi: morels and meadow mushrooms and what not. An owl hoots above in the elms. I sit on a fallen tree and bury my face in my hands.
“ Told you,” Reater says, giving me space. “ ’Shroom hunting works stuff out.”
The old farmer is dead right. The tears are there but the revenge is gone, the hate is gone, the emptiness, gone. For the first time since Mary passed, I feel whole, I feel alive. I look up into the sun streaming through the forest canopy, clasping my hands in prayer.
“Took me eight years, Mary,” I mutter, eyes wet. “But I finally got those mushrooms you asked for.”
The old man of the woods shouts from a clearing: “D’you know one Portabella mushroom has more potassium than a banana?”
I stand up, a great weight lifted off my shoulders.
It was time to cook.
Puff’s last day.
Peter calls three times that morning, apologizing profusely, the Board of Pardons hasn’t gotten around to the appeal. I tell him that he did all that he could do.
I pass through security and into 12 Building at Huntsville at dusk pushing a luggage dolly loaded with two thermally insulated plastic bins. The guards follow me, anxious to inspect the chef priest’s meal. I pass them a grocery bag filled with cookies.
“Two dozen with cinnamon and walnut, two dozen plain,” I announce.
“Will go nice for our party,” the shift captain says. The guards always threw a party the night before an execution.
“There’ll be plenty of leftovers, too,” I say. “I made twelve servings of everything.”
As the guards inspect my bins, I encourage them to sample the cookies. My distraction fails. One of the guards hands the captain my 9-inch Switchblade CarbonFiber knife.
“Can’t take this in, Reverend.”
“How’s he supposed to cut the lamb?”
“We’ll give you a plastic knife.”
“Plastic? That will just shred the meat and make a mess. Can’t I just cut it for him?”
“Nope. State reg.”
“It’s not like I’m gonna try to kill him or anything.”
The captain shrugs. “But he might try.”
At last I’m allowed into the dining cell. Puff is wearing all white, smiling like an angel. “I could smell it cooking all week,” he says, pining over the warm bins. He catches himself, embarrassed, then shuts his eyes and prays. While he recites obscure scriptures even I can’t recall, I cover the table with plastic utensils and paper plates and a rainbow assortment of Tupperware bowls.
I join Puff in grace. We bow our heads together, for a moment, brothers.
“First, an aperitif,” I begin when he is ready. I pass him a plastic shot glass filled with brown liquid. “Kombucha, a mushroom- infused tea to cleanse your palette, best served cold. Compliments of the chef.”
“Yum. Tastes like apple cider.”
I take the empty cup and slide Puff a small plate.
“Next, a wild duck and mushroom pate served on a fresh bed of baby greens and arugula…
One by one I present each course. Puff eats like a horse, bare-toothed. His appetite is unstoppable. Between bites he chants: “Puff in heaven. Puff in heaven.” I worry that there won’t be leftovers for the guards’ party.
At last maple sweetness fills the air and he’s shoveling his way through the candy cap mushroom dessert. That’s when I make my confession: “Mr. Perkins, I tried to stay your execution. I have friends in Austin and I thought they could get a clemency granted. But they couldn’t. I’m sorry.”
Puff drops his spoon. “Why the hell you do that?”
“So you wouldn’t die, of course.”
“But I wanna die! Been waiting eight years to see Joe Bryd! And this is exactly how I want to go, too, with a belly full of the best food ever cooked!”
I don’t know what to say. I ask Puff if he wants to join me in prayer.
He says no.
“Preacher, you don’t make no sense. I don’t know why you wanted to cook for me like this, and I don’t know why you’d stop my injection after what I did to you. All I can figure is that the good Lord is deep inside you.”
“What you did to me?” I ask.
“Well, not you. Your woman.”
“You know who I am?”
Puff wipes a dab of pots de creme from his charcoal lips. “Won’t never forget. I’m sorry about your Mary. I pray
