The Lords of Folly

by Gene Logsdon

  “Everything you say tells me that you need to settle into a steady job awhile and learn your own mind.”

  “Oh, you can’t mean that. Do you know your own mind? Are you willing to settle into a steady job working for someone else?”

  She started to say that she did know her mind, but stopped. He was right. She wouldn’t want to work for someone else either. That’s the main reason she wanted to farm. “We’re not talking about me right now. I’ll try to say this a different way. You are the most exciting person I’ve ever met. But I’m so blasted practical, I won’t risk my whole life on that. I’m incapable of that. If I weren’t so damn practical, I’d marry you in an instant. But a woman going into marriage gets very cautious. At least this one does. I want a stable life. I think of marriage as forever, you know. Al is okay and he’s safe.”

  “And you don’t think I am? Don’t you realize that you’re the reason I’m playing out this seminary business? I’ve got no choice because I’ve got no money. Do you have any idea of the kind of bondage one lives in when you don’t have any money at all and no way to make any except very very slowly at the most menial of jobs? Would you marry me quicker if I quit the seminary and fried hamburgers at a lunch stand?”

  Tears came to her eyes. This was a different Blaze. A Blaze as calculating as she. If she listened to this one very long she’d change her mind. Again she kissed him and then ran, sobbing, down the sidewalk. He started after her but stopped. She had to come back on her own or not at all. He sat on the bench a long time, feeling as if he were falling into a dark hole that had no bottom.

  CHAPTER 29

  The warm spring winds that sent coeds to sun bathing naked on the roofs of their dormitories were working their wonders out around Wassermensch Lake too. Farm wives who swore they never did it, took to tractor driving stripped to the waist like their husbands. Every back yard, every private woodlot, every stretch of river bank or lake shore became lovers’ trysts in those lovely few weeks before the mosquitoes arrived. Fen swam to the island daily, even though the water was still brutally cold, then lay in the sun, warming up, determined to doze and dream of Mermaid. Sometimes he did. Mostly he wandered restlessly around the island, stopping repeatedly to look longingly toward the landing on the far side of the lake, as if his looking would make her appear. As the weather warmed, he was sure she would come.

  Hasse could not stand the young man’s agony any longer. He stopped Kluntz on the road one day when both of them should have been plowing.

  “Kluntz, we’ve got to do something for that poor Fen and I think you’re the man for the job.”

  “What the hell you talkin’ about. I’m no shrink. That kid’s a loser any way you want to call it.”

  “Kluntz, there’s something you need to know. I saw Mermaid too.”

  Kluntz choked. It took him a full minute to regain his composure. Then he tried to grin. “You saw the nekkid lady too? Haw, Hasse. You been hangin’ around monks too long.”

  Hasse remained unmoved. “Yep, I really saw her. The day it all happened I was mowing the hayfield that looks right down on the lake. And there she was, stark naked, running down off the island and jumping into her canoe with that poor Fen, bare too, chasing after her. I don’t carry binoculars in the tractor over at the lake just to watch birds, you know.”

  Kluntz looked bug-eyed. Hasse wasn’t fracturing consonants, so he was probably telling the truth. “But why haven’t you spoken up? I mean that poor boy might be sane after all, and you coulda said so.”

  “I did say so, more than once and none of you damn fools would listen. Fen knows he’s sane. I know he’s sane. I kinda think he’s doing the right thing getting away from that looney seminary. But I’m tired of watching him waste away. How can anyone be that goddam loyal to a cunt?”

  “What the hell you want me to do about it?”

  “Kluntz, you know everything that goes on in this part of Minnesota. I think you can find a blue 1953 Ford pickup with a red Outfitter canoe in it, with one helluva beautiful, dark-haired girl, mid-twenties, driving. That combination ain’t gonna be repeated too often in the whole Twin Cities area.”

  Kluntz drew himself up importantly. It was true. What he didn’t know about his tramping grounds he could, by God, find out. And if Mermaid came from farther away, that was a challenge that a snoop of his caliber could rise to. A brunette with a red canoe and a blue pickup narrowed the field considerably. He’d find her.

  “Now you keep your mouth shut about this,” Hasse said dourly. “If Fen learns for absolute sure that he wasn’t dreaming, and we never find her, he just might really go crazy and I’d be out a hired man.”

  Kadie Crockin opened her eyes one fine early May morning, feeling the breath of spring flowing softly through her window, and realized that her winter-long depression had all but left her. She went downstairs, fried three eggs and four strips of bacon, ate them and decided to fry three more. Her mother, hearing the activity in the kitchen, came to investigate, and a smile of immense relief spread across her face. “Honey, you’re eating.”

  “I’m starved,” Kadie replied.

  Ann Crockin hugged her daughter’s emaciated body. The poor child had hardly eaten since that day late last summer when she had come home and announced that she was through with the Escort Business. Nothing Ann had said could change her resolve. Nor would Kadie tell what had induced her change of heart. All she said, all winter, after long periods of silence, was a short sentence spoken with intense feeling: “He was a Greek god.” Occasionally when her mother asked her what she was thinking about during her long periods of silence, she would answer, almost absentmindedly. “Greek God.”

  Attacking her fifth egg and sixth piece of bacon, Kadie spoke to her mother. “I figured it out last night. Really simple. I’m in love with Greek God and I’ve got to either do something about it or not. I screwed all those men but was never in love. Instead I’ve fallen in love with someone I hardly had sex with at all. Isn’t that amazing?”

  Her mother gazed at her in astonishment, almost afraid to speak lest she plunge the poor girl back into depression. “I wish I knew what you were talking about,” she said. “Who the hell is this Greek God?”

  Kadie told her the story, which was really a rather short story to tell. The strange experience of suddenly lying down on top of a man she did not know and had never spoken to, of his tortured effort to push her away and pull her towards him all at the same time, and then the way he shuddered in climax and looked up into her eyes in utter adoration—it had left her unstrung. Over and over in her sleep she heard him crying, begging her not to run away. The memory made it impossible for her to continue the escort business. She had tried to go back to it, had looked at the poor old potbellied man she was escorting, and suddenly the idea of sex had seemed to her as sickening as the idea of food to an anorexic. She had fled the room and vomited.

  Suddenly snapping out of her depression did not mean that she resolved immediately to go back to that ill-fated lake. First she thought she might, and then, thinking of all the risks involved, she thought she might not. Some days she drove out towards Lake Wassermensch but lost courage and returned home. Each time, however, she got closer before she turned back. Back home, or fishing on another lake, she would absolutely convince herself that whatever had happened, was over and for the best if left that way. But a few days later she would find herself driving towards Lake Wassermensch again. Sometimes it seemed like the pickup was driving itself.

  Then one Saturday, on her way from canoeing Rice Lake to canoeing Lake Bavaria, which was close to Lake Wassermensch, she noticed that the rusty pickup behind her was the same one that had been parked close to her truck at Rice Lake. The old man driving the truck had been eyeing her as she loaded up her canoe. He had seemed to be working up the courage to approach her and so she had scooted away as quickly as possible. Being ogled and trailed by men was a pain in the ass and she could hardly believe she had once been amused by it. She stomp
ed the accelerator and sped off down the highway. To her surprise, the old truck stayed right behind her. Had she known that under the hood of that old wreck of a truck was a newly rebuilt engine, she might not have been surprised. Kluntz always pointed out, to anyone who was surprised at the performance of his truck, that a new pickup cost $4000 but a rebuilt engine cost only $400.

  Kluntz was the master snooper. Soon he fell behind, deliberately, assured that after the last turn the girl in the blue pickup was headed for Lake Bavaria because there weren’t any other lakes down that road. He knew another way to get there, a dirt road not marked on the maps.

  Kadie was surprised, therefore, when as she was taking her canoe off the pickup, up pulled the old man in the rusty truck. This time he drove right up to her, his teeth almost falling out of his mouth in a friendly grin. Staying in his truck was another sign of just how clever he thought he was at professional snooping. He had noticed that girls, like wild animals, were less afraid of men approaching in trucks and on tractors than approaching on foot. Sure enough, when he asked from the window of the cab if she needed any help, Kadie only grinned. Even though he was leering at her, he was trying very hard not to look as if he were leering at her. She decided he was harmless enough and if not, she could just throw the dried-up, pukey little thing in the lake.

  “If I needed any help I’da brought my own,” she said, tartly. The old man laughed, not at all offended.

  “’Spect you wouldn’t have no trouble finding help either,” he said. “Actually it’s me that needs help. From you.”

  Kadie looked at him sharply. Kluntz did not give her a chance to speak.

  “I’m meanin’ no harm to you, Miss, believe me. I’m a family man, just an old coot of a farmer, lives not so far from here, and, now don’t be alarmed, I’ve been lookin’ for you. At least I think I’ve been lookin’ for you. No harm now, nothin’ bad, in fact something pretty good, I think.” He still made no move to get out of the truck, a move that might alarm her.

  “Why would you be looking for me? I don’t know anyone around here.”

  “You ever canoe Lake Wassermensch?” Kluntz asked, trying, as he would later dramatize the exchange to Hasse, to look as innocent as the Angel Gabriel informing Mary that she was the mother of God.

  Kadie was immediately wary. This guy must be connected somehow to Greek God. They were going to get her after all.

  “Don’t know that I have,” she answered.

  “Well, okay, but will you stand still long enough to hear a true story? I think I can promise you that you’ll be glad you did.”

  And then Kluntz told Fen’s story, turning it into a melodrama worthy of a B movie, but leaving out the grittier details. “I know this really wonderful young man,” Kluntz began, “and he’s suffering turrible. It started one day when he was dozing on an island in Lake Wassermensch. He wakes up, he says, to see the absolutely most beautiful woman that ever lived kneeling over him. He didn’t know if he was awake or asleep until she bent down and kissed him, etc. etc.”—Kluntz thought his etceteras extremely clever, given the circumstances—“and then he knew he was not dreaming. But she ran away and jumped into her red Outfitter canoe just like yourn and paddled away faster than he could follow to the other shore and shoved her canoe into a blue 1953 Ford pickup just like yourn and off she went. Now this young man, and I can vouch for him being a helluva lot nicer than most men, he’s pined away all winter long for this girl he thinks he saw. He gave up his career, can you believe it, and lives now in an old farmhouse beside the lake, and every day the weather is warm, he rows or swims out on that island where he saw her. He calls her Mermaid. And the rest of the time, he watches from the house. He is absolutely sure she will come back and he’s startin’ to kind of waste away with sorrow. Don’t that just about tear your heart up?” He paused to emphasize the tearing heart. “You know if he never sees that girl again, I think it just might kill him. He’s that much in love with her. A girl’d be mighty lucky to find that kind of devotion in this crazy world.”

  Kadie’s face remained immobile. She did not say anything, but continued to finger the boat rope in her hands. Kluntz knew he had found the right girl, because such a crazy story would have caused anyone else to walk away in disbelief.

  “Well, I just wanted to pass that story on to you, and I’ll be leavin’ now,” Kluntz said. He started to drive away, then stopped again. “Oh, yeah, this guy plays guitar and sings over at the Western Range outsida Shakopee. Every Saturday night. A person interested could check him out over there.” He chugged away. If this approach didn’t work, he’d get more insistent, but she didn’t need to know that now. He wrote down her license number on an old grain elevator weigh card stuck in the ashtray of his truck.

  If the middle of May, before mosquitoes and deer flies and hot sultry weather, could remain all year, Minnesota could easily pass for paradise, Fen thought. All that would be necessary for earth to become heaven then would be to halve the human population and find an herbal medicine that would allow a person to live forever. Living forever and reducing population were contradictory goals, he understood, but nevertheless that would make Minnesota mighty heavenly. At his age, however, life still seemed forever, and his little corner of Minnesota was sparsely populated. He was so busy practicing a new song for his show at the Western Range that he almost decided not to go to the island today. But the warblers were moving through, tiny blobs of color as violently red, yellow, orange, and blue as any rain-forest could boast. The air was so full of the warmth and vibrancy of fertile new growth that his body ached for release, for the outdoors, for the sounds of nature, for baring itself totally to the gentle sun. Maybe today she would come.

  On the island, a Blackburnian warbler worked the catkins of an oak tree for insects. A redstart flitted in shrubs low to the water. There was only one boat out on the lake. Ahhhh, spring! Fen shed his cut-off jeans, settled back on the grass, closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on Mermaid. He had played at the Western Range until two o’clock that morning, so he soon fell into sleep so sound that even dreams of Mermaid were slow to come. When they did, he was surprised that she was not naked, as usual, but wearing shorts and a blouse.

  Then with a start, he realized that he was not dreaming. She was standing over him, her face a battleground between joy and fear. Joy won. A great sigh escaped Fen as he realized it was really Mermaid. But he made no move, not even to cover himself. Even to breathe might make her disappear. Neither of them spoke, each drinking in the sight of the other. Finally Kadie stooped down and touched his face, her finger moving slowing over his forehead, around his eyes, along his nose, circling his mouth as if she were painting him on a canvas. He still did not move nor speak. No words were necessary as the long-suffering loneliness drained from their faces and peace flowed in to replace it. Slowly, deliberately, Kadie removed her clothes and lay down beside him. He still did not, could not, move. Slowly and deliberately she turned toward him and slid one leg over between his. Slowly and deliberately she rolled over on top of him and pressed her lips against his. Only then did he move, his arms wrapping gently round her in simultaneous conquest and surrender.

  Afterwards, they sat and stared at each other, wondering who would speak first, knowing it was not necessary to speak at all.

  “I listened to you sing over at the Western Range last night.” She smiled. “You didn’t recognize me because I had clothes on.”

  Fen smiled.

  “I had to watch you awhile to make sure. I guess I knew I was in love with you all winter but when you sang, I loved you even if I hadn’t before. I was going to introduce myself to you, but then I thought it would be better this way.”

  Fen still could not speak, afraid of breaking the charm. But she understood the question in his expression.

  “There’s an old man lives around here someplace that you owe a lot to. Or rather we both do.”

  Fen smiled. “That would be Kluntz or Hasse, but how did they find you? Nob
ody believed my story.”

  “This guy knew I owned a red Outfitter canoe and a blue 1953 Ford pickup. Did you tell them?”

  “No. Never thought to. That means someone else must have seen you that day. Musta been Hasse. That’s why he’s supported me. He knew. Son of a gun.” And then he laughed. “Wait till you get to know these two old owls. You’ll like ’em.”

  “Do you live around here?”

  “Right over there in that old farmhouse. I’ll show you.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Perhaps because they were spending so much time at the university, Danny and Banana had started to think in very un-Josephian ways. Or perhaps what happened was just sheer logic that anyone with all the facts could have predicted. At any rate, when they asked Prior Robert if they could play baseball on the university team, he reacted predictably, that is with utter amazement. “No, you can’t play baseball at the university,” he replied sternly. “Whatever has gotten into you? Did Fr. Hildebrand put you up to this?”

  “Oh, no,” they assured him. “Hildy, er, Fr. Hildebrand, was just trying to pave the way for a game between us and the university. He never thought we’d make the team.”

  “Is Oblate Blaise in on this?”

  “Oh, no. He said you would never allow it.”

  “Well then, what in the world are you thinking?”

  Danny and Banana, having exhausted their courage for one day, left his office without saying anything more. But their plan was far from over. When the Provincial announced that Ascension Seminary would be closed within a year, sooner, if a buyer was found before that time, the two were the first to react because they had already made a grave decision. They knew that the SBDC Boys were to be broken up and some of them sent to Rome, Montreal, St. Louis or Catholic University in Washington to finish their studies. If Ascension closed, their last chance of playing college baseball was over.