The Lords of Folly

by Gene Logsdon

  “You hardly ever wear your ‘frock’ anyway, you heathen,” Lukey said. “But here’s what I think.”

  He allowed for a dramatic pause and then continued. “You know how you are beginning to wonder whether the attempted train robbery really did occur?”

  “Not me, Lukey. That’s you. I know it happened.”

  “Okay, okay, don’t get hot. Let us say that certain types of people would begin to doubt what they had seen if they had seen what we saw. Okay? Now let us say that Abs is that type of doubter. You have to admit that what he saw in the slaughterhouse was bizarre enough to make him wonder whether he really did see what he thought he saw. Now what would make him doubt the sight so much that he would not dare repeat it?”

  “I can hardly wait to hear.”

  “Obviously, my dear Watson, if he could not identify the figures he saw in the slaughterhouse, he would be without proof that he had seen anything, right? My back was to him and I blocked a clear view of you and Melonhead, along with the steam. And he fled almost as soon as he switched on his flashlight. It was just a blur. He doesn’t know for sure what he saw.”

  “Whom he saw.”

  Lukey ignored that too. “Now go one step farther.”

  “Further.”

  “We, or at least some of us, may doubt what we saw on the train, but we still talk about it because, as goofy as it sounds, the sight of Frank James returned to earth does not of itself denigrate our reputations other than that we might be going crazy.”

  Blaze stared at the ceiling. “Maybe you shouldn’t do any thinking after all.”

  “However, if Abs tells the Prior he thought he saw a naked man floating above him, that’s a little more self-revealing than saying you thought you saw somebody robbing a train. Seeing a train robber who might not have been there could be simple hallucination. Seeing a naked man levitating in the air who might not have been there, suggests possible personal mental problems of a sexual nature, does it not? Abs would fear that the Prior would suspect him of something dreadful if Abs could not substantiate what he thought he saw. Now here’s the critical point upon which this all turns. What could that dreadful sexual something be? Surely something connected to homosexuality, right? Priest. Thinks. He. Sees. Naked. Man. Floating. In. Air. That has to be homosexual, otherwise he would think he saw a naked woman floating in the air, right? Would it not be logical to reason that Abs himself might suspect that he was only stricken with fantasy, especially if he had indeed entertained such fantasies on other occasions.” Lukey paused, puffing up with his own cleverness. “That’s why he can’t talk about it to anyone, don’t you see? It would reveal his own sordid character. That’s what’s driving him crazy. That’s why he’s drinking so much.”

  “Wow, maybe you are learning how to think,” Blaze said, almost admiringly. But then he wondered if maybe Lukey was able to construct such a marvelous piece of logic because he entertained homosexual fantasies himself. Hmmm.

  “Why don’t you test your theory?”

  “Whaddaya mean?”

  “Go to Abs and pretend you have a sudden provocative interest in him. See how he reacts.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that.” Lukey answered hastily.

  Later, re-thinking the idea, he decided maybe he could, if the right opportunity came along.

  CHAPTER 10

  Clutch gazed proudly at his masterpiece. Only someone familiar with the distillation of alcohol would recognize the contraption as a still. He had used an old pressure cooker for the boiler. He had removed the top valve and replaced it with a short piece of two-inch copper pipe upon which perched a copper cylinder about four inches in diameter and two feet tall. The cylinder he had filled with porcelain insulators, the kind used to hold electric livestock fence wire in place. Axel said marbles worked better, but Brother Walt made extensive use of electric fence around the farm, so cracked insulators, no longer usable for fencing, were plentiful. From the top of the cannister, a one-inch copper pipe led into an innocent looking five-gallon bucket in the sink next to the table where the boiler sat. Inside the bucket, out of sight, the copper pipe turned into the telltale coil of a homemade condenser spiraling downward and emerging from a hole near the bottom of the bucket.

  “You mean that’s all there is to it?” Melonhead gasped in wonder.

  “Yep. Have to do a bit more soldering. Gotta use silver solder. Lead might contaminate the alcohol, Axel says. Then all we do is put the fermenting grain or fruit into the pressure cooker along with any herbs you want to infuse into the alcohol, and turn on the hot plate. Alcohol boils sooner than water and rises as steam up through the cannister of insulators which is called a stripping column, according to Axel. The insulators act like a whole bunch of little condensation plates and the steam keeps vaporizing and condensing as it passes upwards. The low-quality alcohol keeps falling back into the still for redistillation and the more refined, drinkable stuff goes on out through the cannister and over to the coil in the bucket where the steam condenses back into alcohol and drips out the end. Gotta have cool water going into the bucket all the time. You can set up or dismantle this thing in a minute. But even in operation, it looks innocent enough. You can’t see the coil. To the ignorant, distillation will look pretty much like we’re canning peaches or something and need to pipe off the steam to keep moisture down in the lab.” He paused. “Well, you could say that, anyway.”

  “You can go to jail for doing this,” Fen pointed out once again.

  “I think you can only go to jail if you try to sell your hooch,” Melonhead said.

  “So. No,” Axel said when he was asked about that later. “You can’t distill alcohol for drinking, whether you sell it or not. Uncle Sam can bust your ass even if you’re just a bystander at the still. You can make beer and wine for yourself, but you can’t distill liquor unless you pay a fortune for a permit. That’s the kind of tyranny we live under in this free country.”

  “Well, we’re just making medicine,” Melonhead said, defensively.

  “Canon Law does not say anything about distilling alcohol,” Blaze observed. “We are merely carrying on monastic tradition. Rendering to God the things that are God’s and Caesar can just mind his own damn business.”

  “The process is just so beeeyoutiful,” Gabe kept saying, in rapt joy, ignoring all risks involved. “After you distill a batch, the leftover mash is very nutritious for animal feed, especially if you’re doing corn liquor. Could make human food out of it in fact. Make money coming and going. God, it is just beeyoutiful.”

  Meanwhile the elderberry juice fermenting in a crock under the table that held the still was making the lab smell like a winery. Melonhead had read in an old herbal that elderberries were good for warding off colds. To his way of thinking, fermented elderberries would do the job even better and might make a dandy cough syrup if distilled.

  “We gotta get this stuff bottled up before one of the priests comes in here and smells it,” he said now.

  “I don’t think it’s ready. It tastes like furniture polish to me,” Fen said.

  “That’s because you’re trying to drink it in a barn atmosphere saturated with the odor of cow piss. It’s probably absorbing the smell,” Brother Walt replied.

  “Medicines aren’t supposed to taste good,” Melonhead added.

  “If you hadn’t crushed the berries and stems together in that dumb mop squeezer, it might taste better.”

  “Speed was of the essence,” Blaze replied, looking nervously up the lane from the barn to the main building from which the Prior, their very own version of a revenue officer, might appear at any moment.

  They racked off their first wine, corked the bottles, and hid them in the hayloft above the cows. “No one needs to catch colds in our community next winter,” Melonhead observed proudly.

  Four mornings later, when Gabe and Blaze entered the barn to do the milking, they gazed, aghast, at garish purple streaks coursing down the whitewashed walls in front of the cows.


  “Oh, shit,” Gabe said. “Some of the bottles must have exploded.”

  “Looks kind of pretty,” Blaze said. “Smells kind of pretty too.”

  “Darn it, for once get serious. We gotta get this cleaned up before anyone sees it.”

  They raced up the loft stairs and pawed around in the hay for the bottles. Even as they searched, another cork blew out with a muffled fire-cracker pop down in the bowels of the hay. They finally recovered all ten bottles and poured the liquid remaining in them back into the crock in the lab. Then while Blaze did the milking, Gabe worked furiously to blot out with fresh whitewash the surreal purple paintings on the wall.

  “We’ll not clean out the gutters behind the cows for awhile,” Gabe instructed solemnly. “Maybe the stench of fresh manure will mask the wine smell till it goes away.”

  “There’s enough kerosene wine left for Melonhead to distill some elderberry brandy,” Blaze said, and then he scared the cows with one of his patented hyena-like laughs. All was still right in his world.

  Fr. Abelard, from his third floor conning tower of the faculty residence, was not so sure all was right in his world. He had overcome his drinking binge and was once again hard at work overseeing all activities at Ascension Seminary. There was entirely too much coming and going at the barn these days. Not just comings and goings of the SBDC Boys either. A man whom he had learned was Ed Hasse regularly stopped by. Another visitor, in an ancient cattle truck, visited even more often, always looking furtively about as if he expected to see something terribly shocking at any moment. A third man, sometimes with Hasse, sometimes alone, stopped regularly too. When a fourth person riding a bony grey horse started showing up, Fr. Abelard knew a closer investigation than he could do with his telescope was in order even if it meant discovering that his experiences in the slaughterhouse really were pure hallucination. When he noticed that Oblate Luke started frequenting the barn, he was particularly intrigued. Oblate Luke was not like the regular SBDC Boys. He even professed disdain for the barn and his classmates on the barn crew. The lad had lately reminded Fr. Abelard of someone whom he could not put into a proper time or place. Something familiar about him, something about the way his trim little butt curved away from his waist. Oh, God, was he gay to think such a thought? He put it out of his mind. But even if Oblate Luke were an occasion of sin, he decided to cozy up to him to see what he could find out.

  Clutch Pedali, without realizing it, provided the nearly perfect such occasion. Since Lukey had believed for a few days that a manure spreader was a marshmallow picker, Clutch wondered just how gullible he might be. With a solemn face, the Engineer of Ascension carried a box of spent light bulbs into Lukey’s room and asked him if he would take them over to Abs who, said Clutch, had the job of taking old lightbulbs and batteries to town to get them recharged. He did not bother to inform Abs of his little joke, wondering if the priest would go along with it, or even better, if he might be just as naive as Lukey.

  Lukey pretended to believe that light bulbs could be recharged. He needed an excuse to talk one-on-one with Abs. When he presented the bulbs to the priest, the latter did not so much as blink. He needed a reason to talk to Lukey. If the kid was daft enough to think that light bulbs could be rejuvenated, he could certainly be tricked into revealing what nefarious schemes were going on in the barn.

  Lukey concluded similarly. If Abs were dumb enough to believe light bulbs could be recharged, he would surely be dumb enough to reveal what he thought had happened on the night of The Cure. The two of them played it cool at this meeting, both fairly sure that they could milk the light-bulb maneuver indefinitely. A few days later Lukey stopped at Clutch’s room.

  “I’m going over to the priests’ house with the mail,” he said. “Got any more light bulbs to recharge? Abs took the whole bunch you gave me.”

  Something like perfect joy settled on Clutch’s face. He had only four dead bulbs today, but Lukey might as well take them along. “Ask Abs when that last batch is due back.”

  Lukey knocked timidly on Fr. Abelard’s door and the priest greeted him with a marvelously sober (in every way) expression on his face.

  “C’mon in,” he said warmly. “See you have some more light bulbs for recharging.”

  “Yes, Father,” Lukey said. “Just four today. Last batch back from the recharger yet?”

  “Ahhh, no. Haven’t been into Shakopee to get them. You are to be commended for your devotion to the vow of poverty. Would that all the oblates were so frugal.”

  Lukey had intended to say that the bulbs were from Clutch, but if Abs thought the project praiseworthy, it would help his own cause to take full responsibility. He beamed and nodded.

  “Sit down, Oblate. How about a beer?”

  Lukey looked at him, stunned. For a priest to offer a seminarian a beer in private like this was almost unheard of. Oh, my God, he’s going to proposition me, Lukey thought.

  “Y-Yeah. Don’t mind if I do.”

  Fr. Abelard opened two Royal Bohemians, gave one to Lukey and eased himself into a chair. He could see that Oblate Luke was extremely nervous about something, which gave Fr. Abelard cool confidence for a change. He would finally have the truth about what the SBDC Boys were up to and what had happened in the slaughterhouse that night if anything did happen. He’d lull this idiot who believed light bulbs could be recharged into a false sense of self-esteem and then draw the truth out of him.

  “I notice that you do quite well in class, Oblate Luke. What would you like to do as a priest? Have you thought about that?”

  He must be trying to soften me up for the big come-on, Lukey thought. He wanted to be a professor of Scriptural Theology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, but remembering his present purpose, he affected a softness of voice that he thought sounded slightly effeminate and replied, “Oh, I don’t know. I’d actually like to be an artist. I like to paint pictures.” That was true, but he mentioned it because somewhere he had read that artists are often gay.

  “Well, ah, that’s a noble goal. I’ve tried to do some painting myself. I’m not aware that we have any other artists in the Josephians. Do we? Just the two of us?” Lukey’s heart was pounding now. If that wasn’t a double entendre, what the hell was it? Was there such a thing as a single entendre?

  “I’m glad at least that you seem to have chosen a higher road than just working on that farm,” Abs continued, jerking his head at the window that looked out towards the barn. “What do you make of your classmates down there grovelling around in the manure. No future in that, is there?”

  “Oh, you might be surprised,” Lukey said, thinking of the lab. But he immediately regretted his remark. Might get Melonhead in trouble. The vows of poverty, chastity and obedience were as nothing compared to the seminarians’ traditional, self-imposed vow of silence to superiors about what other seminarians were doing that might not be permissable. To steer the conversation away from the lab, he added lamely: “But they will probably regret not concentrating on their studies more.” Then, almost in panic now, he went back to his original purpose. “I agree with you that the way they carry on with guns is a penis complex.”

  Abs stared hard at Lukey. Why had the kid brought that up? Freud wouldn’t be covered in class until next semester. Abelard regretted having made that observation about firearms and penises. It had irked the Prior, who loved hunting and who did not think much of Freud. At any rate, in present circumstances, making references to penises was not something Fr. Abelard thought he dared to do, Freud or no Freud. Was this little prick trying to patronize him as a teacher? Or was it more than that? Was the little prick trying to seduce him? He’d always wondered if Oblate Luke might be gay. Well, he could play along if that’s what it took. He could be super-friendly if it helped to find out what was going on at the barn. “There’s something about you that seems familiar in a strange sort of way,” he said. “Like in a dream or something. It’s like I’ve seen you in another life or at least in highly unusual circumst
ances. Could I have seen you someplace before?”

  “Before when?” Lukey was holding his breath almost as firmly as he held onto the beer bottle.

  “I dunno. Maybe before you came to Ascension. I can’t explain this feeling I have about you.”

  Oh, God, he must be coming on to me, Lukey thought. Or did he suspect that Lukey was the naked satyr hovering in the air of the slaughterhouse and was trying to trick him into admitting something? What the hell am I supposed to do now, he thought desperately. Damn Blaze.

  “You seem to be so out of place associating with those boors at the barn,” Abs continued.

  Oh, God, he is coming on to me. Out loud: “Well, they’re my classmates. I’m stuck with them whether I like it or not.” And then he took the plunge. “I’m sure you like some of the seminarians more than others, just as I like some of the priests more than others. You are my favorite professor.”

  By God, he is coming on to me, the priest thought, aghast. His wide-eyed stare only persuaded Lukey to proceed.

  “I just wonder sometimes, if you priests really like any of us seminarians. You all seem so distant, like we are outcasts, even though in just a few years we’ll all be priests together. You guys preach love but you show very little of it to us.”

  Abelard sucked in his breath. What the hell was going on here? He decided he didn’t trust this little conniver even if he did have a cute butt. He made a U-turn in the conversation. “Actually, I worry about some of your classmates becoming priests. That Oblate Blaise in particular. He is so irreverent.”

  “Oh, that’s just a front,” Lukey said. He did not really want to defend the smartass, but he was so nervous that he could not think of anything to say except the truth as he saw it. “Blaze really isn’t all that bad when you get to know him. He’s very serious about wanting to help people. He can be a sucker about it, like that—” He stopped short, realizing he was headed somewhere he shouldn’t go.

  “Like what, Oblate?”