Grand Lake
Nick was short for his age, painfully shy and gentle to a fault. He was separate too, probably because of his olive skin, bronzed dark by days in the fields under the burning Colorado sun. Or maybe it was his family heritage. His parents were new immigrants to this country, from far away, with a language unfamiliar, food spicy to the farmer palate, and traditions unfamiliar to local folk.
Nick was different, but never deserved some of the whispered slurs and mocking jokes. Some called him words more cruel even than the current heated rhetoric about “illegal aliens.” They called him foreigner, to be shunned by proper society.
Nick found his refuge elsewhere, in the fertile land down by the winding Fountain Creek south of Colorado Springs, a place of loamy soil caressed by spring sun and soft rains. He grew strong bucking hay bales twice his size, driving tractor 14 hours a day in the vegetable fields. Nick wasn’t much for book learning, anyhow nor the school cliques and the social life. He worked hard, kept to himself, devoted himself to family and farm.
His only excess was the practiced lightning swing of a bat, and a burning right-hand throw.
By the eighth grade, Nick was done with it all, and went to farming full-time. People would notice him in town at harvest time: a beat-up 1952 flatbed truck, loaded to the top with onions, pumpkins, sweet corn and tomatoes, headed for the markets and the grocery stores, always parked at the back door, never coming through the front.
He still played ball some, pretty well, in between the brutal hours and the back-breaking labor. By 20, he was noticed by others, too; some big shots from New York had hopped the midnight train, scouted Nick, signed him up in that humble farmhouse kitchen over bowls of steaming homemade tomato sauce and fresh grown peppers. Before the wagging tongues in town quieted, Nick had left the Fountain Valley, playing in the minors in Omaha, good enough for the Yankees next season, by most accounts. But later that year, he got a call. They needed him for harvest, didn’t have money to hire help; the farm family’s survival depended on him. Nick loaded up his worn leather glove and lucky hardwood Louisville Slugger, headed west, and never looked back.
But he still had a field of dreams. It wasn’t framed in freshly mown grass and baseball diamonds, but it was green just the same. Acres and acres of fertile river-bottom land, laced with vines – pumpkin vines. He took over that farm when his folks passed on, and he plowed the land, not for their famous vegetables and corn, but for golden pumpkins. They knew him better now in town, the mocking glances turned to smiles when the flatbed truck turned the corner, and they lined up three deep at the fenders to get perfect, round pumpkins from Nick’s farm, famous for their firm face to hold a carved jack-o-lantern grin. He was called the Pumpkin Man around those parts, and he wore it as a badge of honor. He never forgot the slights, never took revenge, and paid them back ten-fold.
You see, he started planting whole sections of his land in pumpkins. But those pumpkins would never go to town. They were grown and fenced: a no-man’s land, the place dedicated exclusively to children. It was holy ground; adults were forbidden, reserved only for the innocent and pierced by delighted squeals of youth. Nick started giving his harvest away, and after a couple seasons of 10,000 free pumpkins, word got out. Children of all colors and sizes came, year after year, poor and privileged alike; the only admission ticket was childhood. Some said he was plumb loco, squandering the wealth his poor immigrant parents had accumulated so painfully.
But I think it was something else. Nick Venetucci knew the bitter harvest of prejudice, the sting of discrimination, and chose kindness instead in the autumn of his life. A simple man found the surprise of forgiveness in every harvest, and gave it back in spades. He made it the gift of happiness, sharing it with thousands. And just for a moment, each frosty October morning, let them glimpse another way.
Paul Johnson (compasserve@comcast.net) is a consultant on organizational change and renovates old houses.
