The Lords of Folly

by Gene Logsdon

  Cries of wonder erupted from the watchers as potatoes rolled out of the Josephian rows over the shaker rods at the rear of the digger and fell in a steady stream onto the ground. “My God,” Kluntz swore, “there must be thirty spuds in every hill!” So as not to lean too much towards God in his expletives, he added: “Hell, that’s going to be an eight hundred bushel per acre yield!”

  But when the digger bit into Hasse’s rows, the murmur from the crowd buzzed with even more electric charge. Though perhaps fewer in number, potatoes bigger than softballs tumbled steadily from the rear of the machine. “Godallmighty and great balls of fire,” Kluntz said, playing it both ways again, “some of those spuds must weigh a pound apiece.”

  Volunteers swarmed over the potatoes and gathered them in the sacks Hasse had provided. Each crop was weighed in turn by the County Agent at the scales, closely watched by the supporters of God and mammon, organicists and chemicalists, moon signers and PhDs.

  As the weighing of God’s potatoes ended, a murmur went through the crowds. Sixty thousand, two hundred and forty pounds, the county agent cried excitedly. Over thirty tons per acre! Who had ever heard of such a yield? Surely a new record. God be praised, the oblates all whispered. Except Blaze.

  The county agent then tallied up the list of figures from Hasse’s patch. He glanced up nervously at the crowd, a queer look on his face. He added the figures together again. And again. He recalculated God’s potato yield. And again. He shook his head. How could this be? The crowd edged forward, craning at his every blink. He sighed. “This is amazing, but I get the very same yield on Ed Hasse’s acre. Sixty thousand, two hundred and forty pounds.”

  Stunned silence gripped the crowd. The awesomeness of the fact that both plots had made exactly the same yield slowly sank into the collective mind. What were the odds against that happening? Finally The Very Reverend Lukey spoke aloud what the others had dared not put into words: “It’s a miracle.”

  The crowd buzzed. How else explain what had happened? Even Hasse shifted nervously from one foot to another, looking as discomforted as if he had tried to swallow one of his big spuds whole.

  But if it’s a miracle, the Prior thought, along with everyone else, who is it a miracle for? Was it miraculous that organic, zodiacal potatoes equalled scientific, chemical potatoes in yield or vice versa? Was it a miracle for God or for mammon? Was God trying to be politically correct? Was that what the Bible meant by instructing the faithful to make friends with the mammon of iniquity? Would he lose his position as Prior for exposing the Josephians to this thorny theological question? He turned to Oblate Gabriel for some assurance, but Oblate Gabriel was loading sacks of potatoes on the Josephian truck as fast as he could.

  Uneasy and disappointed, the crowd broke up and drifted toward the parked cars. The reps from the chemical companies could not snicker at the organic gardeners nor vice versa. The Extension Service could not maintain its usual unctious air of superiority over the moon signers or the organic farmers. All the Farm Bureau president could think to say was that government subsidies were bad except when farmers needed them, which was almost always. Blaze, delighted at the outcome, went to the barn to get the Zephyr so he could tell Fen and Marge the outcome.

  Eventually, only Hasse and Gabe remained in the field, loading the last of the potatoes on their respective trucks. They would ponder the meaning of the even yields later. Right now, business. Both were trying to figure out in their heads how much 30 tons of potatoes came to at $1.59 per five-pound bag. The loading completed, Gabe delivered what he had planned as the final victory of the contest. He handed Hasse a bill for $80, rental charge for one acre of farmland. Hasse looked at the bill a long time, but in place of the cussing he could barely stifle, a grin broke through, widening to his ears to match Gabe’s own gleeful visage, the two men recognizing the full depths of their commonality. Then they turned away and climbed into their respective trucks, each pretending great weariness, telling each other they were going home to get a good night’s rest. But both of them were thinking the same thought: As soon as I’m out of sight of that conniving bastard, I’ll beat him to the Farmer’s Market in Minneapolis and get a better price.

  CHAPTER 24

  As the Josephian authorities were making their final decisions about which seminarians would be sent to Rome, Prior Robert and the faculty noticed a change in Oblate Gabriel. Their prize candidate was almost flunking his classes. At first they attributed the change to a troubled mind brought on by Oblate Christopher’s shenanigans and perhaps by the excitement of the Great Potato Race. Oblate Gabriel would in time recover, they were sure.

  Gabe secretly sneered. He was dumbing himself down on purpose and if the others had any brains they should have suspected. He didn’t want to go to Rome or any other university to complete his studies for the priesthood. The agricultural, mechanical, and particularly the economic possibilities that he had found on the farm had opened a new world to him. He had been brought up in a city and gone directly into the seminary before he could gain experience of any kind of work at all. Now he realized that the business world was far more interesting to him than the academic life and required more intelligence. If the Josephian Order wanted to stanchion him and milk his talents, they should encourage his cunning to further their financial interests, he believed, not send him to decadent Rome. Since they didn’t seem to understand that, it was up to him to educate them.

  His scheme was to demonstrate that those stupid I.Q. tests indicating a high intelligence in him were wrong. If he could demonstrate that by his actions, his superiors would not require him to study for advanced degrees. Then he would not have to violate his vow of obedience by refusing to go to Rome to get degrees in Scripture Studies or Biblical Archeology or whatever the hell they were planning for him to become expert in. Such studies required learning ancient, difficult languages like Sanskrit. And although learning weird languages required only memorization and, therefore easier than figuring out how to make a profit from watercress, his superiors didn’t know that. Playing stupid at bookish knowledge, he could pursue business.

  As he tried to make his show of stupidity more believeable, chance, or as he would always say, God, came to his rescue. Replacing the fence around the barnyard, he was trying to loosen and pull an old, half-rotted oak post out of the ground. As he jerked violently on it, the post suddenly snapped off at the base and the upper end smacked him hard in the forehead. He slumped to the ground, blacking out for a brief moment. Regaining consciousness, he was aware that Blaze was bending over him, laughing as usual, but also concerned because blood from the blow was streaming down his face. Gabe continued to sit on the ground in a daze. “You really do see stars, you know,” he finally said. “I think I saw the whole Milky Way.”

  “You okay?”

  “Who are you?” he stared at Blaze, feigning, or at least thinking he was feigning, dull confusion.

  “We better get you to the infirmary,” Blaze said.

  Gabe was seized with a marvelous idea. He would pretend he had been knocked witless, or at least half witless. “What infirmary? And who the hell are you?” He jerked away from Blaze, noting with immense satisfaction that Blaze was fooled. Serves the idiot right for always wanting to help people. But he consented to let his comrade lead him to the infirmary, taking steps in the wrong direction occasionally to underscore his pretended delirium. What an actor he might have made!

  “Wow, that’s pretty nasty,” Dr. Melonhead said, pleased to have someone to practice medicine on. “How’d you do it?”

  “He hit himself with a post,” Blaze said, unable to suppress his usual chuckle.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Nosh so good,” Gabe said, slurring his words. “An’ jush who the hell are you?”

  Melonhead stepped back, delighted. This might be serious. “How many fingers am I holding up?” He held up three.

  Gabe stared a long time, frowning and breathing heavily. “Four, I guesh.”

&nb
sp; Melonhead duly reported Gabe’s injury to the Prior, who after a short conversation with Gabe, in which the latter proved he really did have talent as an actor, drove him to a hospital in Minneapolis to have a few tests run. Melonhead begged to go along. The Prior sighed. Okay.

  “It’s a nasty blow, no doubt about it,” the doctor said crisply, “but there seems to be no fracture. He’ll be fine.”

  “A hairline fracture might not show up on the Xray,” Dr. Melonhead said. Dr. Armbuster directed her gaze at the young man. “Well, if it’s that hairline, it isn’t serious,” she said, archly.

  “Would it help if I fixed him a willow twig tea for the head pain?” Dr. Melonhead continued, having gained her attention.

  She stared at him good humoredly. That was exactly the kind of question that she might have imagined a monk would ask, even a monk that didn’t look like a monk and who couldn’t have been much older than she was. “Well, I suppose, but an aspirin is a whole lot easier. How did you know willow contains the same ingredient as aspirin?”

  Dr. Melonhead beamed. Gabe, standing by, trying to look confused, decided that if he drank Melonhead’s willow twig tea that would prove that he was mentally deranged. He wanted to say that out loud but that might indicate that he was okay.

  “How about a mustard plaster,” Dr. Melonhead suggested.

  Dr. Armbuster smiled again at him and he noted with some awakening that she had a very lovely smile for a doctor. “He’ll be just fine.”

  But as the days went by, Gabe did not get “fine.” To be sure, he didn’t get worse. He just seemed to recede into a solitary dullness, mumbling nervous non-sequiturs when asked questions in class or out of class. Meanwhile, he kept close track of his tobacco drying high in the loft at the barn at Lake Wassermensch. Occasionally he chewed a leaf or smoked it in a pipe while carrying on learned conversation with Axel. Axel had moved his moonshine business to the barn.

  “Got a good bite to it,” Axel said.

  “Melonhead says he read that chewing tobacco is very good for settling bowel pains. Wish I had bowel pains so I could see if it’s true. You get gut aches?”

  “Naw. Or if I do, moonshine keeps me from knowing it.”

  Gabe made sure he passed key philosophy, theology and Canon Law tests, but just barely. He didn’t want to cash out of the priesthood altogether, just out of advanced studies in Rome or anywhere else. Much to his surprise he received a fairly good grade in Hebrew which he had not studied at all. Fr. Damien had decided that he needed to upgrade his requirements for passing the course and so made up a set of simple true or false questions in Hebrew for the seminarians to answer. By amazing good luck, or bad according to his viewpoint, Gabe put down trues and falses that he thought were wrong but which turned out to be mostly correct. This was not good. A talent for Hebrew would be interpreted as an indication of talent for Scripture Studies or Biblical Archeology overseas. “I have discovered an amazing paradox,” he said to Blaze. “To pass a test about which you know absolutely nothing, give answers that you think are wrong and 70% of the time they will be right.” Blaze considered this strange observation and decided the blow of the post was perhaps more serious than he had suspected.

  “Gabe, are you faking playing dumb?”

  “Faking? You can’t fake insanity because, as you have said, no one knows what sanity is,” Gabe answered. “Most people can’t think logically. They just emote. If they say something sane, it’s by accident. On the other hand, those who can think logically do not have all the facts in hand because no one knows all the facts. So if they say something sane, it is also an accident.”

  Blaze scratched at the corner of his eye. It was obvious that Gabe had been giving sanity almost as much thought as he had. Was there something in that homegrown northern tobacco affecting Gabe? Had he found some wild hemp to mix into it?

  Despite Gabe’s creditable grade in Hebrew, the rumors began to change. Maybe it was The Very Reverend Lukey who would go to Rome. The Very Reverend Lukey was thrilled. Blaze snorted. “Gabe, half witless is still smarter than you are,” he said.

  In any event, Blaze knew he could not yet leave the seminary and join Fen. Things were working toward some kind of unknown climax that he had to stay and see. He mulled over the delicious possibilities of Gabe’s insistence that sanity was beyond definition. On the subject of sanity, the seminary provided plenty of material to work with. Jesse, for example. Jesse was considered retarded, but had the memory of a genius. Or rather the memory that one would suppose a genius might possess although there was the possibility, which Jesse demonstrated, that good memory might be a sign of insanity.

  It was also intriguing that Jesse was adapting remarkably well to religious life. It suited him. He did not have to deal with the kind of stresses in life that frightened him. The Josephians took care of him. He liked to attend chapel in the morning when the oblates chanted the Little Hours of the Breviary. Something about the ebb and flow of chanted vowel sounds was as comforting as music to him, as in truth the chants were to many of the oblates, especially the older priests who had been doing it for years. At first he only listened, but soon he joined in, warbling his own bizarre sounds in place of the Latin phrases, in rhythmic cadence with the others. When the oblates, for example, chanted,

  Confitemini Domino, quoniam bonus

  Quoniam in saeculum misericordia ejus.

  it would come out of Jesse’s mouth as,

  Ohniaymeenee omeeo oheea ohnoos

  Oheeah ayuoum ezayrioria ayous.

  The oblates all smiled at Jesse’s renditions, understanding that that was not much different from their own. Hardly any of them took the time to translate mentally the Latin they were mouthing. Most of them couldn’t translate it if they tried.

  But Jesse soon memorized the antiphons that were repeated almost daily in the chants, and sing-songed them out with everyone else in perfect Latin. Eventually, he memorized every chanted psalm, refrain, and response he heard often. It was truly miraculous, most of the oblates believed, even when occasionally Jesse hit a wrong word or failed to remember the proper pause and chanted a solo. Then some of the younger oblates lapsed into helpless giggling fits.

  The problem of who was sane and who was not was unendingly delicious to contemplate, Blaze decided. Was the calming effect of chanting unintelligible syllables over and over again an activity more fitting for the “sane” or for the “retarded”? Should maybe the chanting of the Divine Office be introduced into mental institutions?

  Gabe was a different problem, but maybe not so different. Obviously he was faking his mental disorder to avoid going to Rome. But maybe he only thought he was faking. Even in fakery, he was acting differently than he would have acted in fakery before the post hit him, Blaze believed. What if there really was something wrong with Gabe, and Gabe didn’t know it? That thought made Blaze chuckle right out loud during the breviary chanting when no one could hear him. After all, to try to act insane when you were sane was surely more insane than trying to act sane when you were insane. But neither pretense could be as insane as trying to act insane when you really were insane.

  And what about Fen? Fen was not putting on an act. He believed that Mermaid was real and had hovered over him naked and had some sort of sexual experience with him. It was obvious that Mermaid was a fantasy, since Fen was confused over whether she had actually had sexual intercourse with him. How could anyone be confused about that? But what if Mermaid were real? That would mean that Fen was sane and all the rest of them were the idiots for not believing him.

  Fen’s case was eerily like their Frank James’ case. Blaze knew that Frank James had tried to rob him, or someone who called himself Frank James. His classmates knew it, but were in denial because the notion was so absurd. In Mermaid’s case, if Fen had started to doubt what he had experienced, Blaze would have considered him more sane than if he had believed that it really happened. But when Lukey, or Little Eddie, or Mart began to doubt that they had seen Frank James, B
laze considered them to be less sane than if they had believed that he was real. Sanity, like God, apparently meant whatever a particular mind wanted it to mean.

  Or how about the strange case of Abs and Lukey. Everyone involved knew without a doubt what Abs had seen in the slaughterhouse, but Abs dared not admit it for fear he would be admitting something about himself that no one had seen, which according to Lukey’s theory, was that Abs was gay and scared to death he would be found out. Lukey insisted that Abs really knew that the naked man hanging in the slaughterhouse was Lukey, but had blotted it out of his mind because he was physically attracted to Lukey even before that fateful night. To insist that he had seen Lukey hanging naked in the slaughterhouse would only prove how sexually depraved he was, especially if he only imagined it all. But might not such a preposterous theory be explained by arguing that Lukey fantasized it because he was himself suppressing a physical attraction to Abs?

  Melonhead was another absorbing study. He had wrung permission out of Prior Robert to take a short course in herbal medicine at the University of Minnesota School of Medicine. After Lukey’s adventures into the Kinsey Report, the Prior was not particularly keen on outside study, but he was proud of what Oblate Mel had accomplished. So when the Provincial gave strict orders to stop the distribution of home remedies at the barn because an embarrassing number of cars were stopping there, the Prior soothed Melonhead’s disappointment by allowing him to attend the university short course. What he didn’t know was that Melonhead and Gabe had moved their laboratory to the farm at Lake Wassermensch so that going to the university also allowed Melonhead to swing around to the farm and attend to matters there. In the meantime, Melonhead bored everyone within hearing distance with his enthusiastic admiration of some brilliant doctor-teacher by the name of Armbuster.