The Lords of Folly

by Gene Logsdon

  But Clutch was now back to being the Engineer of Ascension. “It’s an intriguing experiment,” he explained. “I got to thinking about all the herbal teas and tinctures and such that Oblate Mel was boiling and how I might make the process more efficient. Why not, I thought, capture the steam from the boiling and make distilled water from it. For Oblate Mel’s potions, yes, but also for the car, tractor and truck batteries.”

  The Minister General nodded gravely as if he understood what Clutch was saying. Then he indicated that he was ready to move on to the barn. It must be getting near the time of Matins and Lauds. Fr. Abelard fished a handkerchief from his pocket and, affecting a cough, covered his mouth and nose with it. Might block the odor of liquor on his breath as well as the smell of manure from the barn.

  Brother Walt was putting the Jerseys in their stanchions. The Minister General remembered his own father’s barn. Tears came to his eyes either from memories or the rank odor of urine in the gutters. Fr. Abelard was sure that now he could detect a more winey smell than what came from his breath, and he sniffed around for a source. He might have noticed some faded purple stains in cracks and crannies of the walls that the last coat of whitewash had missed, but just then a cow raised her tail and arched a stream in his general direction. He clamped his handkerchief tighter and backed out of the barn followed closely by the others.

  CHAPTER 12

  At four o’clock on Christmas Eve, Prior Robert learned that Fr. Abelard had “slipped” again. He was too inebriated to go to Grass Prairie to help out with the midnight Solemn High Mass as planned. Nor could the Prior rearrange assignments, because all the other priests had already left for duties at various parishes in the Twin Cities area. He was about to call Fr. Lardigan, the pastor at Grass Prairie, and tell him of his dilemma when another thought occurred to him. A Solemn High Mass required three ministers: a celebrant, a deacon and a subdeacon. Fully ordained priests almost always served in all three capacities, but technically, Canon Law allowed in an emergency, just about anyone familiar with the rubrics to serve as a subdeacon. The position required no exercise of powers strictly reserved to a fully ordained priest. He would send that smart aleck Oblate Blaise who was always finding some devious way to get out of chapel exercises. Time for Oblate Blaise to grow up and realize he was in the seminary to learn how to be a priest, not to grow corn.

  Prior Robert knocked on the open door to Oblate Blaise’s room, trying not to appear gleeful. Blaze looked up from his desk trying not to appear as if he had been dozing instead of studying.

  “I need your help, Oblate Blaise,” the Prior said, with all the earnestness he could muster. “Grass Prairie needs a subdeacon at Midnight Mass tonight, and I have no priest available. Fr. Abelard was supposed to go but he is, uh, very sick. I’ve decided to send you. You can drive the farm truck. The snow’s getting heavy, but after all your experience with that truck, you should have no problem. I have full confidence in you.” He dropped a book of rubrics on the young man’s desk, waiting only to enjoy the look of dismay that flooded Oblate Blaise’s face before he retreated down the hall, smiling broadly.

  Blaze stared stonily at the book of rubrics. The realization of what it meant came slowly. He’d been had. And in a way, it was his own fault. If he had not pushed The Cure so energetically, Abs might not have lost his way and dissolved into alcoholism. He opened the book and started to read. He ought, of course, to know all about the role of a subdeacon at a Solemn High Mass, having witnessed a hundred such Masses anyway and even serving as acolyte at more than a few. The truth was that he barely paid attention to the conduct of the ceremony even when he was up there in the sanctuary.

  He tried to concentrate on the rubrical details before him. His mind went as stolidly blank as it did when he tried to study metaphysics, another subject whose logic totally escaped him. A Solemn High Mass was the rubrician’s dream come true. The entire troupe of celebrant, deacon, subdeacon, master of ceremonies, and passel of altar boys occupied themselves for nearly two hours with ringing bells, swinging censors of smoking incense, carrying cruets of wine and water to and fro, sprinkling holy water hither and yon, all to the cadence of mumbled Latin prayers and hymns that hardly anyone knew the meaning of. Every single move of the actors on this stage was supposed to follow detailed directions that hailed back to the Middle Ages at least.

  Why hadn’t Robert picked The Very Reverend Lukey? Lukey revelled in rubrics, the pious, hypocritical bastard. Lukey knew every detail of the service. Why me?

  He knew why. Robert was trying to remind him of what he was supposed to be doing at Ascension Seminary. But the idea of wriggling into those rich brocaded vestments was alone enough to make him feel queasy. Why the hell had he decided to become a priest?

  He knew the answer to that, too. His mind drifted back to sixth grade. In memory, he watched again the grainy, sepia-toned silent film that Sister Monica was showing in the school auditorium. The only sound was the projector whirring along like a coffee grinder. The movie was about Francis of Assisi. Blaze remembered it well, first of all because a little boy in front of him became so engrossed that while Francis was talking to the birds, he evidently didn’t realize that nature was talking to him, telling him to go to the bathroom. At the end of the show, when the poor little thing stood up, there were brown streaks down the back of both his pants legs. He apparently was not fully aware of what had happened to him. In fact, Blaze had himself been so fixated by the movie that he had at first thought the little boy’s rank odor that had assailed him during the movie came from the tattered beggar that Francis had embraced in the last reel.

  It was the first movie Blaze had ever seen, and Francis of Assisi so captivated his imagination that for weeks he wandered around his father’s farm with a piece of hay rope tied around his waist, trying to get barn pigeons to perch on his arm. When that fantasy wore off, he had reached the part in his sixth-grade American History book where Isaac Jogues, the Jesuit missionary, was getting himself martyred while trying to convert the “Heathen Indians” to the “One True Religion.” The book said that the savages pulled Isaac’s fingernails out, one by one, before killing him. Even to a farm boy, inured to hog stickings and chicken beheadings, that was luridly gruesome. For about six months, Blaze became the fearless missionary in the wilderness of the farm woodlot, practicing the sacramental ritual of Baptism on stick Indians and praying that he would have the courage to lose his fingernails and his life when the time came. There were definite benefits to martyrdom. Martyrs went straight to heaven when they died, even if they had been masturbating just the day before.

  Francis of Assisi and Isaac Jogues remained the moving forces in the make-believe world that propelled Blaze toward the priesthood until Lou Boudreau replaced them in 1948, but by then it was too late. He had already entered the seminary high school and become enmeshed in the life there, which was much more fun than he had imagined it could be. Undistracted by conditions “out in the world,” he could dream of becoming a great missionary, hunting lions in Africa like Ernest Hemingway. In the meantime, he could play shortstop for the seminary team to prepare himself for becoming the Famous Shortstop Priest, the Lou Boudreau of Catholic Action. The alternative of leaving the seminary was not particularly attractive, even though it would bring girls into his life. He had no money. His family had no money. His family had moved to a town from the farm, the only home he knew. In the town, he knew no one. He had no training or degree for a good job. Owning and operating his own farm, the only work idea that attracted him, required more money than he could ever dream of acquiring. Besides he was farming pretty much on his own now, except for having to put up with that looney Gabe. Out in the world, he would get married and get stuck in some boring job for the rest of his life, making just enough money to keep on making just enough money.

  But he hadn’t foreseen until this moment that the comfortable life he had managed to create for himself in the seminary would soon end. In another three years he would be ord
ained and would have to go out and do all those priestly things he didn’t like to do but had decided he could put up with on the chance that he would eventually be assigned to Africa. There he could disappear into the jungle and save souls while living as he damn well pleased. He had a fuzzy, developing notion that he would teach the natives not the hopelessly obscure metaphysical theology of Catholicism, but the potential for paradise available through their own native animism. The so-called African heathens had a lot going for them, he believed, a life of simplicity not unlike what Francis of Assisi preached, if they would just raise their cultural sights a little. That’s what Blaze, Great White Theologian Hunter, would teach them. Yes, yes. It was coming to him. A new garden of paradise in the African bush. His superiors would think everything was wonderful when they heard how the natives were flocking to get baptized, which they would, once they understood that they were more truly Christian in their native religion than those First World white heathen materialists. He would recruit and train a whole new cadre of hunting and gathering priests. Yes, yes. And Melonhead could build a hospital in the jungle like Albert Schweitzer and teach the people homeopathic medicine, using cures that came from the jungle itself. He would begin the new reformation of the Church. Eventually, his black African priests would come to the United States to convert heathen Americans to true Christianity.

  His reverie was broken by a scoffing laugh at the door. The Very Reverend Lukey was staring at him, knowing that Blaze was daydreaming as usual.

  “You better get your ass in gear and learn those rubrics,” he said.

  “You’re just jealous because I get to go to an outside parish and serve as subdeacon and you don’t.”

  “I just wish I could be in that church to watch you screw up good.”

  By ten o’clock the winds were whipping the snow into a real blizzard and Blaze was glad for the truck instead of a car. But it was slow going. He had piled several dozen bales of hay on the truck to give it more weight and hence more traction. He drove the old crate as fast as it would go, hoping that it would slide off the road and make it impossible for him to go on. But no such luck. He stumbled into the sacristy of the church with only seconds to spare. Old Fr. Lardigan, already in vestments, looked relieved. “Roads pretty bad, eh?” he acknowledged. Blaze nodded. The assistant pastor, who would act as deacon in the Mass, was also vested and waiting. He managed a wan, milquetoasty smile of understanding. While the altar boys stared at him, Blaze went to the table where the vestments he was to wear were laid out. The Very Reverend Lukey had shown him how to get into them and Blaze proceeded in as knowing a manner as he could fake. He had trouble getting the cincture tied properly around his waist. The assistant pastor mercifully helped him. The alb was too long, so Blaze tucked it up under and over the cincture. Then he looped the chasuble over his head in what he hoped was an expert manner. It effectively hid the bulging alb. Not to mention a multitude of sins.

  Out of the sanctuary the entourage marched: celebrant, deacon, subdeacon, four altar boys. Blaze’s last hope had faded. He had banked on a master of ceremonies to guide him through his ordeal of ignorance, but, due to the blizzard, the priest who was supposed to act as one couldn’t make it. The choir was beginning a flat, nasal midwestern rendition of Gregorian Chant, making those sonorous Latin vowels sound as if they had been run over by a John Deere disk. Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison. Oh, indeed, Blaze thought. God have mercy.

  Fr. Lardigan, as celebrant, proceeded exactly as he did for an ordinary High Mass, that is, as if neither a deacon nor a subdeacon were present. Gradually it became clear to Blaze that this was his salvation. The celebrant did not know, or had long ago forgotten, exactly what to expect from a subdeacon. Standing to the left of the celebrant, Blaze didn’t even have to turn the pages of the big missal, as a subdeacon was supposed to do. Every time he reached, Lardigan beat him to it.

  Two of the altar boys, one holding the smoking censor and the other the little brass incense boat, knew more than Blaze did about how to proceed. Whenever the incense from the boat needed sprinkling on the hot charcoal in the censor, which was the subdeacon’s official duty, they approached him and looked up into his eyes like two puppies waiting to be taken for their daily walk. When Blaze could not remember if he was supposed to incense the celebrant only, or the deacon too, or the missal or the tabernacle, he incensed everything. A smoky haze moved out over the congregation, like fog rolling in off the ocean.

  The Very Reverend Lukey had told Blaze that he’d be okay if he just stayed on the celebrant’s left when he was in doubt, unless he saw the deacon headed his way. Then he was to switch sides, genuflecting on the step lower than the step the deacon was genuflecting on as they passed behind the celebrant. This Blaze remembered to do, faltering and bumping into the deacon only once.

  He was beginning to feel some inkling of control over the situation as the time for the singing of the Gloria approached. Celebrant, deacon and subdeacon descended the altar steps and strode to the three great chairs along the side of the sanctuary where they would sit while the choir performed. Blaze darted a little ahead of Fr. Lardigan and scooped the celebrant’s biretta from where it rested on his chair, as was the subdeacon’s job. But he handed it to Fr. Laridan backwards so that when the old priest set it on his head, the tassel fell down over his nose. He had to adjust it himself while Blaze was busy grabbing the celebrant’s chasuble and lifting it up over the chair back in the proper rubrical manner. So unnerved was Blaze because of the backward hat fiasco that he forgot about his own biretta and sat on it. Kyrie eleison. “If you make a mistake,” Lukey had counseled, “pretend you did it on purpose.” How does a subdeacon reach under his vestment-covered ass to pull out a crushed biretta while pretending, with great aplomb, that he had sat on it on purpose?

  The time came to say the orations in Latin that were part of every Mass, called the “Ordinary.” At a Solemn High Mass, the celebrant, deacon and subdeacon recited these prayers together. Although he had read them many times, Blaze could remember nothing. To save face, he babbled nonsensical sounds in rhythm with the Latin phrases the two priests were mumbling, his ear slyly cocked to pick up the last word or phrase they pronounced before a pause so that he could mutter it too, as if he were saying the prayers right along with the celebrant but a split second behind. Blaze could not believe he was capable of such duplicity. What in God’s name am I doing up here, his mind screamed. What are any of us doing up here? Were his empty babblings any different, really, than the Latin syllables that no one in the church, including the old priest, could translate any better than he could? Blaze felt as if he were in a nightmare, the kind where suddenly he found himself walking naked down a street. For the first time in his life, his gift for fantasy vanished. In a terrible rush of clarity, he knew that he could never, ever, be a priest. Then with an even more terrible realization, more like a leap of clairvoyance because it did not follow logically from the first conclusion and passed into his subconscious immediately, he knew that he did not believe in the kind of God to whom they were presumably praying. Humans created that God, not vice versa.

  If Fr. Lardigan were aware of his subdeacon’s desperate situation, he gave no indication. He proceeded mechanically on. Communion time came. The end in sight. Blaze heaved a sigh of relief. Too soon. His overly long alb was coming untucked from the cincture. Now as the trio headed out to the communion rail to distribute the communion wafers to the communicants, he stepped on the sagging edge of his alb, pulling it farther down onto the floor. He could hardly move now without stepping on it and lurching. Lurching was particularly inappropriate because it was his job, as subdeacon, to hold the gold-plated paten under each communicant’s chin so that neither the wafer, the body of Christ under the appearance of bread, nor even one crumb of it might ever inadvertently suffer the desecration of falling on the floor. Blaze found himself thinking, despite his own wretched situation, that communicants waiting to receive the Sacred Host with tilted heads, with ey
es open or closed, with tongues protruding, not to mention male Adam’s apples or female bosoms, looked comically obscene. Then lurching and slouching along on the dragging alb, he accidently bumped Lardigan’s arm just enough to make the celebrant fumble on his way from picking a wafer out of the chalice and delivering it onto the waiting tongue of the next communicant. The Sacred Host slipped from his fingers, fluttered in the air, and landed across the cleavage of a particularly awesome set of matronly breasts bulging above a low cut dress. It teetered there precariously. Any slight movement and it might be swallowed up in the folds of flesh. Kyrie eleison.

  The woman did not realize what had happened and remained motionless, like a statue, eyes closed and tongue waiting. The assistant pastor turned as white as his alb. A glow of crimson spread over Fr. Lardigan’s face. He looked zombie-like at Blaze and Blaze looked back just as dumbfounded. A grave theological dilemma confronted them. No one other than an ordained priest dared handle a Sacred Host under pain of sacrilege, so it would not be proper for the woman to retrieve the wafer unless there was no other alternative. But for the celebrant to retrieve it required groping into that heaving bosom. Where are you, Thomas Aquinas, now that we really need you, Blaze thought, his rational mind completely forsaking him. At first he thought he was going to burst into wails of insane laughter. Then he thought he was going to faint. But just before either insanity or unconsciousness overtook him, he responded. He did not think about what he did, or will it. His hands just did it on their own. With the paten held at the ready, he deftly hooked the Sacred Host with the nail of his little finger and flicked it from its precarious perch onto the plate. He then lifted the paten to the chalice and dumped the wayward wafer back into it. No problem.