The Lords of Folly

by Gene Logsdon

  Hasse, being informed of the trade of magazines, told Gabe that Farm Journal was, in terms of belief in myths, in the same general category with The Sacred Heart Messenger, only on different subjects. “You can’t believe all that agribusiness bullshit that farm magazines print,” he said. Gabe, taken aback by this first showing of the real Hasse, let that remark slide by unchallenged for the moment, making a mental note to teach Hasse a little practical theology, if not agriculture, at an opportune time. The second thing Hasse told him was how to stack bales on a wagon so that they would not slide off when negotiating steep hillsides. As might be expected from a man of his nature, Gabe no sooner learned the skill involved than he discovered what he thought was a better way to do it and thereby lost a whole load when it slid off the wagon and tumbled down a hill. Brother Walt, who had been drawn into Gabe’s schemes whether he wanted to or not, watched the bales go end over end down a slope that should never have been cultivated in the first place. “Mighty lucky they ain’t them new round bales or they’d roll right off the edge of this farm and end up in the river.”

  At the very first chance, Gabe attempted a studious discussion of agriculture with Hasse.

  “My plan is to build a herd of purebred Holsteins using Rag Apple Curtiss bulls for artificial breeding,” he said, spooning huge helpings of food from Mrs. Hasse’s steaming bowls that she pressed unctiously on him, pleased to have a man of God in her house for a change.

  “Be better off to buy cheap three-titters that give a lot of milk,” Hasse grunted, “and run a bull with them so they all get bred before next Christmas. Artificial insemination ain’t what it’s cracked up to be.”

  Loretta Hasse glared at her husband. Three-titters and breeding bulls were subjects she would prefer not be discussed at her table.

  A second attempt at agricultural education ended as abruptly when Hasse allowed that he would not pay out good money to have his soil tested for trace elements because he grew all the corn, oats and hay he needed and he did not much care if the manganese content was where the university thought it should be or not. “All dat advice is ladled out chust to make a farmer spend money,” he said.

  Hasse looked forward to having the Josephians around because he wanted to argue religion. To prepare himself, he read at his wife’s Bible when she wasn’t watching and dipped into a tome called A Book of Christian Homiles For Everyday Meditation that Loretta had brought into the house. Conversations with Gabe about religion took on a certain strange similarity to their conversations about farming.

  “Vel, if Lucifer was da first devil, who tempted him?” Hasse said to start their third day working together.

  “Lucifer was tempted by his own pride. You don’t need to have a devil around to blame for everything that goes wrong,” Gabe replied. He cared little about the fine points of religion, but he felt obliged to defend his calling in life.

  “Den vhy do you haf devils at all? Dere is more dan enough pride and lust and greed around to explain all the bad t’ings that happen. Why inwent devils?”

  “Satan is right there in the Bible. Nobody inwented him.”

  “Well, maybe da feller who wrote the Bible inwented him like all dat nonsense about Noah’s Ark.”

  “The Bible is not always to be taken literally,” Gabe said with righteous exasperation. “Sometimes it has an allegorical meaning.”

  “Heh? What’s that?”

  “The words sometimes should be taken in a figurative sense.”

  “Hah!” Hasse crowed triumphantly, socking his hay hook into a bale. “How can you say what is alleygoretical and what ain’t?”

  Realization flooded Gabe’s mind. The wily old bastard had set him up. He glared. The gauntlet was thrown. If Hasse wanted to argue religion, then by God, he’d oblige.

  Blaze tried at first not to laugh at the two adversaries, but by the end of the first week, his restraint in that regard abandoned him completely, and tears would come into his eyes as he giggled wildly at them. So perfect did the debate between the wily farmer and the wily Gabe mirror Blaze’s own doubts about most theories, theological and agricultural, that for once he was not tempted to inject his own thoughts into the fray. Every evening, back at the seminary, he would regale the other SBDC Boys with the day’s conversations, and then put it all down in his diary. Never had farming been so much fun.

  Hasse, after being sandbagged by Gabe’s habit of quoting various Church authorities to support his contentions, went to the library to look for appropriate authoritive support for his arguments too. After all, he knew his way around books, at least a little. In his younger years, when he believed logic ruled the way people thought, he had wanted to understand how his wife could accept her religious doctrines so unquestioningly. He had spent considerable time among the tomes of philosophy and theology. So now he dipped briefly into Kirkegaard, Tillich and Aquinas, looking for quotes that would turn Gabe’s arguments on end. Thereafter, debate took the form of even stranger repartee.

  “Oblate, even your own Thomas Aquinas says you can’t prove that the world had a beginning. You have to accept it on faith. You know dat?”

  Gabe didn’t know that, but he did not let on. He did not want to go in that direction either. After a short pause, he replied, “Hasse, if you’d have your soil tested, so you could maintain better nutrient balance, you could raise better crops at less cost.”

  “And dat Tillich feller, he really agrees with me. He says God exists in your head, not out dere in the clouds someplace.”

  “And if you used herbicides, you’d save a lot of time and not open the soil to erosion with all that row cultivation.”

  “Yeah? If your experts know so much, how come they ain’t farmin’?”

  “And just because your fancy philosophers write books, doesn’t mean they’re saving their souls either.”

  Haymaking gave way to wheat and oat harvests. Gabe and Blaze joined the neighborhood farmers, following the thresher from farm to farm, growing daily more dark-skinned from the sun and more muscular from the work. They went to great pains pointing out to the Prior that becoming part of the communal harvest was the cheapest way for the seminary to get its own oat crop harvested. Whether Gabe continued to work in order to learn more about farming, or simply to argue with Hasse, even he was not sure. Blaze stayed on because he thought the two debaters, with Kluntz occasionally joining in, provided a show funnier than the Marx Brothers. But more than that, he was for once content with his life, going forth by day to meaningful work, able to retreat at night to the security of the seminary. But what made that experience singularly precious to him was his realization that the farming he was partaking in was passing out of history, just as was the kind of monastic life he was almost living. Communal threshing had ended in Ohio when he was a boy, except in the Amish communities, and it would end here in Minnesota, soon as more and more farmers bought their own grain harvesters. Monastic life was also declining everywhere. How many young people of the future would be daft enough to accept a life of poverty, chastity and obedience? Blaze realized that he was standing at an important juncture between past and future time. That realization tinged his peace with sadness, but it was the kind of bittersweet sadness that appealed to him. He thought that he ought to write something some day about how by an accident of history he was the only person in the world to be both farmer and monk at the precise time when farmer and monk were passing away before his very eyes. It was like being lucky or unlucky enough to watch the last dinosaur roll over and die, knowing it was the last dinosaur.

  Blaze could see the signs. The Josephian leaders were talking about sending their oblates out from the enclaves of religious community to become educated at, and to teach in, more worldly universities. This change would keep the Order from becoming irrelevant and obsolete in modern times, so the younger Josephians argued. The same kind of thinking affected rural life. Farmers were becoming irrelevant and obsolete, like monks, forced off the land by financial competition. Their only hope
, stated the high priests of economics, was to “go to town and get a job” so that the land could be consolidated into large, profitable “units” of production. As Kluntz complained, “Pretty soon the farmers left won’t have any neighbors.”

  Blaze’s father had been one who went to town and got a job. He sold the farm to pay off the debts he had incurred on it, and was thought to be better off for the move, although he never once said so himself. Now, when he, by force of habit, launched into a conversation about farming, he would suddenly stop, remembering that he was no longer involved, and stare silently into the distance. Away in the seminary, Blaze was left without a home to come home to. That was the real reason he was loathe to leave the seminary. Whatever its drawbacks for him, the Order provided a secure haven, a home.

  But for how long, he asked himself desperately. If the oblates were going off to universities, that would be the end of the secure haven. Then they would be truly homeless, like those salesmen who travelled endlessly in search of money; bums with briefcases. Blaze suddenly wished he had joined the Benedictines, the ones who took a vow of stability, a vow to stay home.

  He listened with keen enjoyment but with no support for either side, while Gabe and Hasse argued devils and eternal hellfire, which Gabe acknowledged, and whether chemical fertilizers were better than manure, which Hasse denied. Over the grain thresher’s hum, they shouted purgatory and limbo, which Hasse ridiculed, with occasional digressions like whether oats, if used in proper proportion with corn, was just as valuable a feed as corn, which Gabe doubted exceedingly. They wrangled predestination and divine grace as they filled siloes with corn. While hauling the manure out of Hasse’s barn, they dissected the theological proofs for the existence of God as well as the claimed nutrient value of high-moisture corn. Whether Gabe stood high on his tractor and hurled verbal thunderbolts with the sublimity of Zeus, or whether Hasse, hunched against the barn wall, spoke in his thickest old-country accent, neither gave an inch to the other’s tenets. Old-time religion was good enough for Gabe and old-time farming was good enough for Hasse.

  Kluntz, who found excuses to show up at Hasse’s barn almost as often as he showed up at his own, grew more and more distraught. By August he had all but forsaken his own farm to follow as a disciple of both God and mammon. Alone with Hasse, he could cleverly disclose what he thought were gaping inconsistencies in Christian thought; cornered by Gabe, he would not only renounce Hasse and the devil but even the issues of the new Playboy magazine he kept hidden on a beam in his barn beside his bottle of Old Grandad. When all three were together, he delivered his oration on gumbo and religion. It became an obsession with him. One rainy day, he even scurried down into the flats, scooped up a handful of wet gumbo, brought it back and plastered it on Gabe’s boot.

  “There, by God!” he roared. “Just try to get it off in less than five kicks!” Gabe stared at him in astonishment. He kicked. Sure enough, the glob did not let go until the fifth try. That mystified Gabe into silence for a whole afternoon, and Kluntz felt he had done theology a noble service.

  CHAPTER 6

  Melonhead’s enthusiasm for do-it-yourself medicine, sparked by The Cure, flowered through the summer days. He set up a makeshift laboratory in the old building that had once been the milkhouse next to the barn and began investigating, among other home remedies, the springs of sulfur and iron water that in Mudpura days had been captured in picturesque round stone wells along the edge of the swampland behind the main building. He mixed the two waters in varying combinations, hoping to retain the bowel-cleansing attributes of the sulfur water while masking its rotten-egg taste with the pure-tasting iron water. Gabe figured that they could call the stuff Ascension Mineral Water and sell it for three dollars a bottle. Fen suggested that on the label after the name, a phrase should be added: “Ascend to the highest heavens of good health.”

  “This place looks like a medieval alchemist’s study,” Blaze observed, staring in wonder at the bottles and carboys and jugs and test tubes and hotplates that Melonhead had collected. “What’s this pill bottle of white shit?”

  “You are looking at the cure for cancer that will make me as famous as Mendel,” Melonhead replied without taking his eyes off a pan of jewel-weed stems he was boiling. “He was a monk, you know. That white shit, as you call it, is milkweed juice. My theory is that it will cure skin cancers. All I hafta do is figure out a way to squeeze the stuff out of the plants in quantity. Took me all afternoon to get that much.”

  “Why will milkweed juice cure cancer?”

  “Folk medicine says it will take off warts. I tried it and it worked. If warts, why not cancer?”

  Shaking his head, Blaze walked next door into the main barn to start the evening milking. Everyone was crazy, he said to himself once again, but some, like Melonhead, were crazier than most.

  But Blaze was working on an idea that would have struck Melonhead as crazier than the milkweed juice cure. Blaze’s idea had begun to take shape when Walt purchased a used tractor that had the name, “Farm Zephyr,” painted in silver on its red hood. Blaze, who had been around farm tractors all of his growing-up years, had never heard of a Farm Zephyr before. Walt had bought it because it was cheap. He soon discovered why. Though it reputedly had the horsepower to pull a three-bottom plow, it could barely manage a two-bottom one in the lowest gear. It was a curious affair, with, so the dealer had said, a Buick motor and an Oldsmobile transmission. Nobody seemed to know what company had actually produced it, but Walt joked that it must have been an auto theft ring, using parts from stolen General Motors trucks. Its strong point was that it could maintain a speed of 40 mph on the open road. With the front wheels together, tricycle style, it was extremely dangerous at that speed. Turning the front wheels sharply might flip the tractor end over end or simply snap the front axle post from the frame.

  But Blaze and Walt loved the Farm Zephyr. They would take it out on the highway and wait for an old car or pickup to sputter by at 30 mph. Then they’d yank the gas lever on the Zephyr wide open and pass the slower vehicle with a blare of the Farm Zephyr’s horn. This stunt never failed to jerk the other vehicle’s driver bolt upright in fright and amazement and send Blaze and Walt into whoops of laughter.

  And the Zephyr gave Blaze his grand idea. No seminarian was allowed to use the truck or the community cars without permission, and even Prior Robert was not going to allow him to go driving off without some very good reason. Going to the Western Range would hardly do it. And Blaze did not yet have a Minnesota driver’s license. He complained that both Church and State were working against him. But now he saw a way to outwit both God and Mammon. He could drive the tractor without either the State’s or the Church’s permission. Aha! Since the Zephyr could cruise along at 40 mph, he could get all the way over to the Western Range in half an hour, to continue his theological research into the Second Coming of Frank James. If he pulled the farm trailer behind the tractor, he could say, if that creep, Abelard, spied him on the road, that he was going to the farm supply store after protein supplement for the livestock. He waited now only for a proper time to make his first foray into Frank James territory. He had to bide his time. All things come to him who waits.

  Ed Hasse stuck his head in the barn door with a cheery greeting, but then turned around and entered Melonhead’s lab. He, of all people, did not think that Melonhead was crazy. Or if he did, he also thought that there might be some opportunity in this craziness that had not as yet made itself evident. Even if not, there was little in his life by way of diversion, tied as he was to milking morning and evening no matter what. Compared to the languidness of his cows, not to mention his wife, the antics of the Josephians were marvelously entertaining. It was like living next to a circus. In fact, he had purchased most of Melonhead’s lab equipment so that he had an excuse to drop by whenever he felt like it.

  “Do you really think dat mineral water is good for you?” he asked Melonhead.

  “If you don’t think so, kind sir, drink a bottl
e of it sometime,” Gabe said before Melonhead could reply. “I guarantee you that you will stick pretty close to the bathroom for a day or so.”

  Melonhead explained. “I can tone down the sulfur taste with the iron water and control just about how far from the bathroom you dare to wander after you’ve taken a good dose. And the iron is good for you too. Food from today’s chemically enriched farm fields lacks minerals like iron, Louis Bromfield says.”

  Hasse did not know who Louis Bromfield was or if that claim were true, but he more or less supported Melonhead’s belief in what was being called “organic” farming. He had leafed through Organic Gardening and Farming magazine and had a notion that those feverish people were commies, but he would take any opportunity to stand against the arrogant know-it-alls of the university who, in his mind, really were commies.

  “Do you t’ink dat milkweed juice would squeeze out if we ran da plants through a roller mill?”

  “Would you quit talking as if you just came over from the old country?” Gabe replied drily. “Why don’t you try it?”

  Hasse did not answer, but he knew where there was a mighty stand of milkweeds that he wanted to get rid of without spending money on herbicides.

  Meanwhile, on the outskirts of Shakopee across the river from the seminary, a solitary figure hiding out in a crumbling vault of a long-abandoned brewery was about to collide with Melonhead’s alchemy in ways no one, even the worldly wise Hasse, could have predicted. Axel Barnt sat on a makeshift chair he had assembled out of bricks from the crumbling vault wall and watched the fire under his moonshine still. The floor was strewn with hundreds of old beer bottles stamped “Rolling River,” indicating that the vault must have been used for commercial beer storage sometime in the dim past. Axel’s mind was not on his distilling, however, or even on the beer bottles which he thought might someday make him rich at five bucks each from bottle collectors. As had almost always been the case for months now, he was thinking about the man he had seen in his headlights running nekkid across the highway in front of the monastery last year. Up until that incident, Axel Barnt had led an amazingly humdrum life, considering his career as a moonshiner. Since his old cattle truck had a top speed of barely 35 mph, he had plenty of time to observe the strange sight of the nekkid man, and there was absolutely no doubt in his mind of what he had seen until the figure had disappeared into the darkness. Then he began to wonder. “By God, I’ve been drinking too much moonshine,” he had said out loud, used to talking to himself.