The Lords of Folly

by Gene Logsdon

  Classroom hours were only a little more tolerable than the chapel hours. Blaze could not understand the logic of cosmology. Two objects could not occupy the same space at the same time, Professor Rowan said, his face beaming as if divine truth were issuing from his mind. Wasn’t that too obvious to take note of? “Three,” Professor Rowan gushed in ecstasy, trying to impress upon them the beauty of a statement that could not be contradicted, “is one plus one plus one.” Blaze looked at Fen. Both rolled their eyes. What poetry did the priest see here that so totally escaped them?

  Gabe could see that his fellow SBDC Boys, losing the freedom they had enjoyed in the summer, were sinking into a fit of the blues, as he called it. He considered himself above that weakness, but he had been noticing with a little trepidation, that the petals of the artistic floral design on the front of the altar curtain looked remarkably like a swirl of very feminine bare legs emanating from a central crotch. Some sort of distraction was in order, and he thought he had come up with one. It was time to help improve Lukey’s thinking process in case the regular classroom courses in Philosophy didn’t get the job done. Gabe’s scheme was actually just a minor part of a grander plan he wanted to pursue to make Ascension the first financially profitable seminary in the world. “Scientific data demonstrates that the mud out there in the swamp will make one healthy,” he said to Blaze. “Maybe it will help one to think better too.”

  “And just what do you have in mind?” Blaze asked with a delicious smile.

  News of near miraculous cures began to filter out of the slaughterhouse next to the barn where the farm crew and other SBDC Boys gathered after the evening meal to smoke. Nothing definite. Just continuous and provocative rumors. When asked about the rumors, the farm crew members dismissed them as totally wishful theorizing on the part of people who hadn’t learned how to think yet.

  “Well, sure, Gabe had a bad cold, but it went away like colds always do. Had nothing to do with the hot peat fomentation and compote he tried,” Blaze explained.

  “Yeah, it’s true that Blaze had a bad cut on his leg where the dumb butthole jabbed himself with a hay fork,” Gabe admitted, “but it healed up okay on its own. You surely don’t believe a poultice of that swamp mud did it, do you?”

  “Of course there’s instances in folk medicine where poultices of one kind or another have healed sores and cuts,” added Fen, who had finally wangled his way onto the farm crew. “But come on, there’s instances of Lourdes water healing sickness too, and surely you don’t believe that, do you?”

  In a week or so, strange stories drifted back to their starting point in the slaughterhouse. “Did you know that Oblate Gabriel had a temperature of 106 and he soaked himself in hot peat and got well almost immediately?”

  “Did you know that Oblate Blaise healed a festering infected dog bite on his leg with a poultice of peat from the swamp?”

  “You’re not going to believe this, but Brother Walt put a wad of swamp peat and cobwebs on a cow bleeding from being dehorned, and the flow of blood stopped almost immediately.” This story Blaze considered the best of all, because it was actually true.

  The idea of soaking in hot peat seemed almost practical because in the slaughterhouse was a huge tank with a firebox under it and a rope and pulley affair over it. The tank was used to scald the hair off hogs in the process of butchering, the hog carcass hoisted aloft by the rope and lowered into the big tank. Conceivably a person might sit in the tank, as in a bathtub, and soak away his miseries if he didn’t make too much of a fire underneath.

  Digging the peat proved so troublesome that the SBDC Boys almost abandoned their plan. The stuff would not dig with shovels and only barely with forks. To get enough of a supply on hand in the slaughterhouse, Blaze used an antique hay saw he found in the barn. Sawing straight down the walls of a pit that they had dug initially, he could shear off slabs of peat about six inches thick. But he did not have to strain himself because Melonhead, with a vision of a life in medicine, soon took over and sheared away at the peat deposit with an awesome energy no one would have thought he could draw upon. His yen for doctoring had found an outlet. He immersed himself in hydrotherapy studies and by the time he had finished all 600 pages of Jethro Kloss’s Back To Eden he had convinced himself that hot peat treatments were truly healthful and that what the SBDC Boys were contemplating as trickery was actually noble experimental medicine. “God works in wondrous ways,” he said piously.

  “God wills it too,” Gabe answered.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Very Reverend Lukey is sick with the flu or something.”

  “You mean it’s time to teach him how to think?” Blaze responded.

  “No time better.”

  A committee of SBDC Boys was formed to visit the sick Lukey in his room. Although he was miserable with fever, cough and throbbing head, Lukey was not so far gone as not to be suspicious of SBDC solicitude. But because Melonhead seemed to be the leader of the group and appeared totally convinced of what he was proposing, Lukey listened. Melonhead deserved trust. He was very good at giving enemas.

  Melonhead thrust a thermometer in Lukey’s mouth and at the same time took his pulse, all in a manner so swift and sure as to make one wonder if he were not at least a registered nurse.

  “A hundred and five. Wow. You’re really sick,” he said, studying the thermometer which actually registered 103. “If we don’t get that temperature down, you could have brain spasms.”

  “Brain spasms,” Blaze echoed with a shudder.

  “Could lose your hair from prolonged high temperature, I’ve heard,” Fen offered. Lukey was especially vain about his curly brown hair.

  “Brain spasms,” Blaze said again. “Might deter one from learning how to think.”

  Lukey glared at him, but Blaze’s countenance displayed only disarming, innocent concern.

  “This is going to sound a little crazy,” Melonhead intoned, and then proceeded to explain to Lukey how Mudpura began and why, and the numerous claims of renewed health and vigor that people with a lot of money gained from being wrapped in hot peat for a few hours. He, Melonhead, had gathered a sufficient amount of high quality peat in the slaughterhouse, and proposed to cure Lukey in the old Mudpura manner, which apparently had helped Gabe and Blaze. Melonhead’s faith in his cure being somewhat genuine, he sounded convincing and Lukey was inclined to give The Cure a try. “Don’t be hasty now,” Melonhead counselled, playing reverse psychology not out of trickery but earnestness. He gave Lukey a book on Naturopathic Medicine, and the entourage left the sick man to think awhile.

  Lukey’s flu worsened. Wracked with aches and pains, he staggered to Melonhead’s room the next evening after chapel. “I’m ready for The Cure,” he gasped. “I’m ready for anything.”

  “We’ll have to wait until tomorrow during recreation period,” Melonhead replied, still inadvertently playing hard-to-get. “You understand we have to do this with some secrecy. I doubt the Prior would look favorably upon homeopathic medicine.”

  “Gotta do it now. Tonight,” rasped Lukey. “I won’t live till tomorrow.”

  “But it’s against the rules to be out and about after lights out.”

  “I don’t care. I’m gonna die.”

  “Well, okay,” said Melonhead. “We’ll get the scalding tank, er, the steam bath, fired up and after everyone goes to bed we’ll come for you.”

  Exiting the building after “lights out” required considerable stealth. There was no lockdown in the seminary, of course, but Prior Robert was given to walking the halls at night, alert for mischief, or, horrors, homosexual dalliance. This night, all seemed as quiet and peaceful as an oyster in a cloister. Robert retired. When the light in his bedroom went out, a flashlight in the hands of Danny Danauau on the roof of the building wing across from Robert’s quarters, blinked twice. Melonhead, from his room on the top floor of Robert’s wing, flicked his flashlight on and off in reply, then slipped out of his room and tiptoed to Lukey’s room. Th
e fever-wracked oblate was waiting. Together they made their way silently to the fire escape and to the ground. Once free of the building, they could relax somewhat, but still dared not turn on flashlights for fear of attracting the attention of Fr. Abelard whose self-appointed job was, when not teaching theology, to oversee everything that went on at the seminary. This responsibility was fairly easy for him to accomplish since he had commandeered the top third floor of the priest professors’ residence for his room. Nearer my God to Thee. From its windows, he could observe, especially with the marine telescope he had found among the possessions of Josephians who had gone to their eternal reward, everything that went on at the main building in one direction, to the barn across the road in the other direction, as well as all the fields and most of the swampland surrounding the compound. As theologian and overseer of Ascension, there was very little that went on there, in the heavens above or on earth below, that Fr. Abelard did not take great pride in knowing about.

  Because the seminarians were well aware of Abelard’s constant surveillance, the other SBDC Boys in the slaughterhouse had not dared to turn on the lights in the slaughterhouse, as they filled the scalding tank with water and started the fire below it. Nevertheless, under Gabe and Melonhead’s direction and Blaze’s constant running off at the mouth, they eventually had a tank of warm peat steaming away. As their contribution to the effort, Banana and Mart merely giggled nervously. Fen paced around in what little light escaped the door of the firebox. He did not like chancy escapades like this, but wouldn’t think of not being there. Gabe appointed Clutch, the community’s boilerman, to keep the firebox under the tank properly filled with wood, but continued to give orders on tending the fire. This irritated Clutch. Every time Gabe cautioned him about not getting the fire too hot, Clutch threw on another chunk of wood.

  “Here they come,” Fen whispered, and the assorted giggles lapsed to silence. By the light of the firebox, they saw Melonhead and Danny troop through the door followed by the feverish Lukey. Danny and his flashlight went back to the barn to keep watch from the hayloft in case anyone approached from the main buildings. In that case, he was to signal the others in the slaughterhouse.

  Even in the semi-darkness, the apprehension on Lukey’s face showed clearly. Only fever and aching pain drove him onward. Melonhead explained the process. “There’s a nice layer of peat already in the tub,” he explained. “We’ll lower you gently into the tank and then we’ll cover you with another layer of peat. Should take about an hour to soak out the poisons that are causing your flu. It’s sort of like a sauna but the peat increases the lavatation.”

  Blaze looked at him, startled. What the hell did lavatation mean, he wondered. Melonhead did not know either. The word had just come to him and it sounded terribly impressive.

  Lukey removed his bathrobe. “You might as well take off your pajamas too,” Melonhead said. “You’ll want something dry to put on afterwards.”

  Lukey hesitated only a second. In the semi-darkness, his nudity did not seem embarassing and by now the warm steam rising from the tank promised comfort beyond caring about modesty.

  “H-H-How do I get in there. It’s too high off the ground to step in,” Lukey muttered in resigned misery.

  “Reach up and get hold of that hoist rope,” Gabe instructed. “We’ll pull you up and lower you down.”

  Done.

  Lukey groaned with relief as he settled into the warm peat and water. All his aches and pains seemed to vanish. A miracle. The SBDC Boys piled on more peat until only Lukey’s head stuck above what now appeared to be a little pool of steaming algae. Or perhaps, spinach. Meanwhile, Clutch threw another log chunk into the firebox. Lukey groaned again in pleasure. “This is great.” And a little later, “I haven’t felt like coughing once since I got in here. I guess you guys are okay after all.”

  A seemingly long spell of silence followed. The only sound was the crackling of the fire. The more or less wet, uncured wood that Clutch had used for the fire was now drying out. The drier it got, the hotter it burned, which in turn made it dry even faster. And so forth unfortunately.

  Meanwhile, Fr. Abelard, making a last sweep of the property with his telescope before going to bed, thought he saw strange shimmers of light coming from the slaughterhouse. He decided to investigate.

  Back at the slaughterhouse, Gabe said: “Do you think he’s done yet?” That was too much even for serious Mart. Everyone laughed. Except Lukey.

  A human body in hot water tends to adapt to the situation remarkably well. It can stand surprisingly high temperatures if the increase comes very slowly, as it was now doing in the tank. Moreover the layer of peat under Lukey somewhat insulated his naked body above it, at least for awhile. But slow increments of heat can be accommodated only so long and then the resulting need for relief is sudden. Very sudden.

  “God, I’m getting hot,” said Lukey, suddenly. “Oh, God.” He reached for the top rim of the tank only to find that it was too hot to grab so that he might vault out of the tank. He yelled.

  Events started happening very fast right about then. Fen at the slaughterhouse door saw the warning blinks of Danny’s flashlight from the barn loft. “Someone’s coming,” he said in a hoarse whisper. Most of the SBDC Boys broke for the door and disappeared into the night. Melonhead, after an agonizing second, decided, like a good doctor, to stand by his patient. Blaze, allowing his natural instinct for helping people to overcome his instinct for personal survival, decided to stay too and help Lukey out of the tank.

  At about that time Lukey started snarling. “Get me outta here! I’m burning, BURNING!” Melonhead swung the rope hoist down to where Lukey could grab it and he and Blaze prepared to pull him from the soup. Lukey was by now standing in the big tank, hopping from one foot to the other, holding on to the hoist, trying to pull himself free of the scalding water. Melonhead and Blaze gave one more mighty heave, just as the slaughterhouse door swung open and a flashlight flicked on. There stood Fr. Abelard, his eyes bulging, realizing that his beam of light was revealing a naked body floating in the air above a steaming cauldron. The body was screaming in what might have been pain or some sadistic pleasure. About that time, Melonhead and Blaze, on the other side of Lukey and so shielded partially from Abelard’s beam of light, grabbed the swinging body by the legs and pulled it away from the tank. All three fell to the floor in a tangle. What Abelard thought he saw was two or maybe three masochistic sadists involved in some sort of heinous sexual orgy.

  “Holy Mother of God,” he gasped, crossing himself several times. Then wrapping the rosary hanging from his belt around his neck as if to ward off vampires, he bolted out the door and did not stop running until he was in his protective aerie on the third floor of the priests’ residence. Nearer my God to Thee. He went to his closet, withdrew a bottle of Old Fitzgerald and took a long pull on it. Nothing in his theology books covered the situation. The worst part was that the apparition had been so sudden, so ghastly, so shocking, that he, the Overseer of All Things In This World Or Out of It, did not know for the life of him which seminarians he had actually seen. Maybe they were not seminarians at all, but devil worshipers using the seminary property, where they would likely never be discovered, for their fiendish covens. The naked one had its back to him but he realized with chagrin, he probably would not have recognized him if it were someone he knew, because he had no clothes on. The suspended body had blocked the view of one or more other figures so he could not identify them either. Perhaps they were satyrs, not devils. Then an even more horrible thought came to his reeling mind as the whiskey took hold. Perhaps they were only the result of his own loathsome sexual fantasies. Oh, my God. He took yet another swig. Had he imagined the whole thing? Or dreamed it? Had he noticed furtive lights at the barn or only imagined that he had? Had he, in fact, ever left his room really? He looked out the window toward the barn. Only darkness. Oh, God. He would not dare tell anyone what he had seen because maybe he had not seen it. He tipped the bottle again.

>   Gabe swore later that Lukey ran naked through the barnyard, across the highway and all the way back to the main building before he had the presence of mind to put on the pajamas, bathrobe and slippers that he had grabbed up in his mad dash from the slaughterhouse. “Had he run any faster, he might have overtaken Abelard and that could have been very interesting indeed,” Gabe said. Melonhead spent the night deciding which medical college he would attend after he was defrocked and expelled.

  About four in the morning, gleeful chuckling suddenly emanated from Lukey’s room. He burst out into the hallway, threw open the door to Blaze’s room, and kicked the bed. He was by now laughing loud enough to awaken the Prior, but he didn’t care. His days in the seminary were ended anyhow, he figured, so what did it matter.

  “Blaze, guess what, you smartass.” He waited for Blaze to come to full wakefulness. “It worked, damn you, it worked. I’M WELL!” Then he ran, still giggling loudly, back to his room, and fell into the restful sleep of those who have had the last laugh.

  CHAPTER 4

  There was urgency in Kluntz’s voice as he sat on an overturned bucket in Ed Hasse’s barn, scratching at his unshaven chin with one hand and continually yanking at the right strap of his bib overalls with the other.

  “I don’t like it. I don’t like it a-tall,” he said, referring once more to the sudden, distressing interest in religion around the neighborhood.

  “What’s it to you?” Hasse snorted, bent over, only half-paying attention to Kluntz as he checked the teat cup that was sucking air on Old Blackie’s front left quarter. Because he was a dairy farmer and therefore always in the barn at milking time, morning and evening, Hasse, like the blacksmith of yesteryear, had to suffer a steady flow of visitors whether he wanted to or not.