The Lords of Folly

by Gene Logsdon

It wouldn’t hurt to reveal something innocent. Besides, the beer was soaking away his caution. “Do you know that guy who rides the horse?”

  “Well, I see him down there, yes. It kind of makes me curious.”

  “He’s actually mentally retarded. Lives with his father across the river. I don’t know how he got started coming here on his horse, but Blaze pays him lots of attention. Really nice to him. So he likes Blaze. Calls him Jack for some reason. Blaze can hardly get him to go home in the evening. He wants to stay here.”

  “Stay here?”

  “Yeah. Being mentally retarded, I suppose he’s attracted by the security a seminary offers.”

  Abelard stared at him. Oblate Luke was too fuzz-brained to realize the full meaning of what he had just said. But it was important not to be critical at the moment.

  “You’ve been going to the barn quite a lot yourself lately,” he remarked.

  “Oh, just curiosity. Melonhead, er, Oblate Mel, is experimenting with herbal remedies that he thinks will be useful for the missionaries in Africa. I, ah, have had some luck with some of his concoctions, healthwise. He has a salve that took off a wart, can you believe it? You ought to see his lab down there. Have you ever gone to the barn?”

  “No, I don’t think so. All those defecating animals give me the shivers.”

  “You don’t think you’ve ever gone to the barn?” Lukey asked sharply. The beer empowered him. He thought maybe he should have become a lawyer.

  “I may have a time or two. I forget.” To himself: Why the hell did I say I think. What’s this queer up to? I have a dreadful feeling that he must know something more than he’s letting on. But I dare not proceed with this line of questions.

  Lukey was on a roll now. “Remember our escapade with the train robber?” he asked.

  Fr. Abelard snorted. The Royal Bohemian was affecting him too. “You can’t con me with that story, Oblate. What I don’t understand is what your classmates think to gain by spreading such a weird tale. Why are they always playing tricks?”

  “The train robber is hard to believe, I agree.” Lukey tipped the last swallow from the beer bottle. “But didn’t you ever see something so unbelieveable that you didn’t know for sure if you saw it or not?”

  “Of course not,” Abelard replied, too hastily. He jumped up and pulled another bottle of beer out of his refrigerator, but did not offer a second one to Lukey.

  “Well, when the disciples witnessed Christ ascending into heaven, for example, don’t you think they must have wondered whether they really saw what they thought they saw?” Lukey knew that he definitely should have been a lawyer. He hadn’t even planned to say that. It just popped into his mind.

  “Are you questioning Church dogma?” Fr. Abelard asked archly.

  Lukey shrugged. “Maybe the disciples only imagined the Ascension and thought the rest of the faithful would be smart enough to understand that it was an allegory. I dunno. I’m just saying that sometimes you don’t know if what you have seen is real or only something you think you have seen. Don’t you agree?”

  Abelard swigged his beer. Oblate Luke could not be as smart as he was proving to be or he would know that burned-out light bulbs couldn’t be fixed. Why was it that nothing made sense where the SBDC Boys were involved? They were all looney. It was evident that he was not going to find out much from Oblate Luke without revealing his vision of a naked man suspended in thin air, which may not have been a vision at all. He glanced at his watch. “It’s time for Matins. You better get moving.”

  He did not go to Matins himself, however, but drank another beer. By nightfall, he was back in the drunken stupor from which he had, with so much effort, freed himself for nearly a month. He kept staring at his beer bottles, asking himself over and over if the disciples actually saw Christ ascend into heaven anymore than he had actually seen a naked man ascending to the ceiling of the slaughterhouse.

  CHAPTER 11

  With four days off from classes over the Thanksgiving weekend, Melonhead and Clutch decided to give the alcohol still its maiden voyage. Prior Robert and the faculty would be fully occupied with the annual visit of the Minister General from Rome and the Provincial of the American province. The SBDC Boys would hardly have to worry about any of them barging in on their medical research at the barn. The elderberry wine had turned to vinegar or to kerosene, depending on the opinion of the researcher who was tasting it, but a batch of wild plum juice had fermented nicely with a generous addition of sugar spirited out of the kitchen. Melonhead intended to make wild plum liqueur from it and infuse it with a concoction of herbs that included angelica, wormwood, chokecherry bark, and walnut husks. If nothing else, it would be very effective against intestinal parasites, he figured. Only he, Gabe, and Fen knew the exact formula and Melonhead was not really sure that Gabe and Fen remembered it, but “if three Carthusians can keep a liqueur recipe secret, so can three Josephians,” he said primly. After he had quaffed generously from a jug of the wild plum wine he added grandly: “We’ll be able to supply the poor with medicine enough to free them from the tyranny of high-priced doctors.”

  Gabe intoned a passage from Matthew in the New Testament that he had been saving for such an occasion: “And they brought to Him all the sick suffering from various diseases and torments, those possessed, and lunatics and paralytics, and He cured them.”

  Blaze, getting into the mood, also with a little help from the wild plum wine, escalated the endeavor to even loftier heights. “Perhaps we shall, in this humble milkhouse, achieve eternal life, literally, and heaven will be now.”

  The hot plate was turned on, the pressure cooker full of herbs and wine set in place on it, the copper pipes all connected properly, and the New Religious Revolution began, as Other Blaze wrote that night in his The Story of My Weird Life.

  In the meeting room of the priests’ residence, Prior Robert was making an impassioned plea before the Minister General. He was sure that it would mean that he would eventually be demoted back to the pastorage in Broken Bow, Nebraska, but that was fine with him. For an hour, the younger professor priests, with much nodding of assent from Fr. Basil, the Provincial, had argued before the Minister General, Matix Suenarich, who was a Belgian by birth and of rather liberal leanings by Church standards, for a new approach to the education of seminarians and to religious life in general. It was time for the Church to rid itself of the last vestiges of medieval tradition and march resolutely into the 20th century. It was time to close down seminary schools like Ascension and send the seminarians into mainstream universities for their education. It was time to make celibacy voluntary, not obligatory, for priests. It was time to realize that seminary education was inbred, perpetuating a hopelessly outdated kind of religious life. Young Catholics were falling away from the Church in droves. There was an alarming decrease in the number of young people entering the religious life. Josephians with advanced degrees from universities would become educators out in the real world and bring prestige to the Order—look what it had done for the Jesuits. This prestige would attract new and highly talented candidates to the Josephians to keep the Order growing. What’s more, these professors, through their fame in the classroom, in scientific and philosophical research, in their writings, would command good salaries and bring in much needed money to the Order. After all, taking care of old and dying Josephians was becoming a heavy burden and the number of faithful willing to subsidize religious Orders was decreasing each year. It was time for the Josephians to take a page from the book of capitalism.

  “All these points are well taken,” Prior Robert said, when his turn came to speak. “But may I plead for a little caution. Are we sure this is the true spirit of our religious life, as Josephians. We were founded as a mendicant Order to help ordinary laypeople, especially the poor. Will such a purpose endure once one Josephian after another starts making his own way among the educated and the wealthier levels of society, while our religious houses become merely places to sleep at night, if that? The Josephian
s are a community”—he repeated the word for emphasis, “a community of men living together. We have more in common with monasteries at a time when regretfully monasteries are in decline. We are men who are drawn to this life because we like living in a brotherly, secure haven, because, among other reasons, let’s face it, we don’t have to worry about the day-to-day burdens of making money and raising a family. Within our rules, we can follow our talents unencumbered by the commercial and social pressures of life out in the world. In such a community, we gain a rare kind of freedom in which to pursue ideas. Furthermore, as a community outside the mainstream world, we can supply something unique to the intellectual and moral makeup of society. If we send our people out into the universities, or wherever, we will inevitably lose the ability to think differently from the world’s philosophies, unable to provide that choice, that alternative to the commercial and intellectual world beyond our communities. And the more secular we become the less reason for people to be financially generous to our work.”

  He wondered if he were talking in circles, but he continued. “If we decide to ape the present trends away from community life, which is also the trend out in family society, if we allow ourselves to be pressured by the same financial stresses that apply to the mainstream world, what will we have to offer intellectually that is any different from what the world offers? Where will truly different, new ideas come from, if everyone in society is forced to lead more or less the same modern lifestyle? Do not sell short the wisdom that has been accumulated by monasteries and religious Orders over the centuries. That wisdom may hold more useful and deeper relevance for true progress than the most advanced conventional science. I believe what you propose is a kind of slow move to secularization that will be suicide for our Order and a great loss to society.”

  Prior Robert did not think that he had ever spoken that long in one spurt before and evidently to no avail, judging from the reaction. Shaking heads. Murmurs of disagreement. Outright snarls of disgust. But having gone this far, he stumbled on. “Furthermore, who says that university life typifies something good and beneficial to society in any sense that involves us? I say it is one of the more artificial segments of society, an oligarchy, a trend to elitism. It cuts off the formal pursuit of knowledge from the way most people live. If we go in that direction, what is to keep us from ending up like a bunch of university dons in ivory towers intellectually emasculated from generating practical solutions to practical matters for the poor and lower middle class society that we have historically bound ourselves to minister to?”

  Mumblings of disagreement now became louder groans of dissent. The word, “anti-intellectual” could be distinctly heard above the rumbling. It was obvious to Prior Robert that it was time for him to sit down and so he did, head bowed in shame. It was unfortunate that the SBDC Boys could not have been in attendance. They would have stood at this moment and applauded, much to the amazement of everyone, including Prior Robert.

  The meeting shortly adjourned because the conferees were shocked at Prior Robert’s words and were not interested in arguing with him even if they had thought of an effective answer to his views. Robert was obviously an anachronism; why waste time arguing with him? After the meeting, the Minister General came over to Prior Robert and patted him on the back magnanimously. “I understand your fears, Robert,” he said in fluent English. Deep inside him, he had a troubling notion that the Prior was correct, but he had to be careful. The pressures toward modernization within the Order and without were very strong, especially in light of dwindling financial resources. Money always ruled, never more so than under what passed nowadays for the vow of poverty. “I found your remarks particularly interesting, Prior,” he said loud enough for all to hear.

  Robert’s face brightened. Did the Minister General really understand what he had tried to say? “Would you like to see some of the things we have been doing here?” he asked, with almost boyish enthusiasm. “If I could show you around and enlarge on what I was trying to say here, perhaps you might see some merit in what I evidently am not able to articulate very well.”

  Robert took the Minister General through the buildings, pointing out the carpentry and stonemasonry that the oblates had done themselves to make the residences livable and attractive. “Is it not extremely helpful to be able to base intellectual decisions at least partly on experience gained from practical skills?” he asked. The Minister General said nothing. Prior Robert showed him the new stone-walled reservoir that the oblates had built to hold the spring flow from the swamps for their water supply, replacing the one dating back to Mudpura times. “Where will metaphysics lead a student not grounded in concrete experiences?” Again the Minister General said nothing. “Look at their carvings on the altar front. They exhibit amazing talent, don’t you think? The seminarians didn’t realize they could do this kind of art until they tried. Is that not a valuable kind of education? To realize that you can do more than you thought you could do? Might not it be more fruitful for oblates to develop in this way than from mere book knowledge?” The Minister General still remained silent but he began to look alarmed. “Look how the oblates jacked up this foundation and reinforced it. To do such work without collapsing the building required much intellectual thought as well as mechanical knowledge. Oblates gaining experience in work like this will be in a much more informed position when making decisions about church and school and hospital structures which they inevitably will have to oversee. In mission countries they will be able to build their own churches where there is no one else to do it. Or fix their own trucks when there is no one else to fix them. A can-do attitude.” The Minister General was still not talking but some of the alarm in his countenance faded away. Prior Robert showed him the walk-in freezer. “Look at all this food. It was produced right here on our farm. The walk-in freezer itself is a product of our labor.” The Minister General managed a nod. He did not have the heart to tell Robert that the young professors had mentioned the monastic farm concept as a particularly dinosauric practice.

  Perhaps the Minister General would like to see the barn where the oblates were breeding up a nice herd of Jersey cows and also raising the seminary supply of pork, processing all the meat and milk themselves. The Minister General brightened. He had not been in a barn since he was a boy half a century ago, and he would indeed like to see one in America. He beckoned the Provincial to accompany him, and Fr. Abelard decided it was a good time for him to tag along and surreptitiously spy for signs of suspicious behavior without drawing attention to himself.

  It was possible to get into the barn without going through the old milkhouse, but Prior Robert, now in a hopeful mood, believing he had impressed the Minister General, decided that Oblate Mel’s research into herbal remedies was precisely the kind of work he had been arguing for during the meeting. Leading the way, he pushed open the door to the lab and found himself confronted by six of his seminarians who appeared to be frightened out of their wits. Or five, anyway. Who the old fellow was he had no idea. They had obviously been so absorbed in their work that they had not noticed the entourage walking towards the barn. Prior Robert decided that the presence of the Minister General and the Provincial must have awed them.

  There were introductions and mumbled greetings and in accordance with tradition the seminarians each knelt in turn to kiss the Minister General’s ring, one of the customs the Minister General wanted very badly to do away with as soon as he had enough support in Rome where the Pope still, well, did not mind people bowing and scraping in his presence.

  “Oblate Mel has been working hard at learning which of the old herbal remedies might truly be effective,” Prior Robert explained breezily. “He has discovered for example that milkweed juice does indeed seem to have healing properties. And the peat from the swamps that surround us makes a good poultice to stop bleeding.”

  While he was talking, Blaze, Gabe, Melonhead, Fen, Clutch and Axel, the latter still confused about kissing the fat fellow’s ring and whether he should have
done it, had shuffled themselves together into a sort of knot blocking the eminent visitors’ view of whatever was bubbling away on the hot plate on the table. Fr. Abelard could have sworn he smelled something strangely like, but not quite like, whiskey, and realized, with a start, that his breath must still be heavy with Jack Daniels. Oh, God, had the Minister General detected it?

  “And what have we here?” Prior Robert continued with fatherly pride, pushing the group aside so that all could have a better look at the pressure cooker on the hot plate. “Don’t tell me you are canning peaches.” He had hoped to make a joke to relieve the dread that appeared to grip his seminarians. He thought it strange that at that remark, Blaze clamped his hand over his mouth so hard that tears formed in his eyes.

  It was Fen, good old reliable in situations of panic, who rose first to the occasion. “We are making an herbal tea from angelica, Gubanosa ferferalis,” he said. “A big batch actually.” Why he had felt compelled to add the fake Latin name he did not know. How many times had he gotten in trouble because he went too far?

  “It is slightly toxic and must be used carefully,” said Melonhead, having recovered his wits and deciding that Fen’s idiotic answer could be made more legitimate with some actual information about angelica. “I’m interested in it because among other beneficial possibilities, it is supposed to create a revulsion against alcohol. Think of how beneficial that would be to the Jo—er, in today’s society.”

  The Minister General and the Provincial were fortunately not quite listening and wanted to move along. They had more important things to think about than some idiot seminarian interested in herbal medicine, although it was impressive that at least one of them knew a little Latin. But proud father, Prior Robert, forged on where angels and devils both feared to tread.

  “And what is this clear liquid coming out of this spigot over here?” he asked, beaming again, thinking that for once his most problematical seminarians might do him honor. He could not understand why their faces showed grave dread instead of pride.