by Gene Logsdon
“Yeah. It’s kind of rare.”
Patroux nodded. “You collect books?”
“No, not really. I’m just a westerns fan. I read all the historical stuff I can get hold of. Younger wrote that book while he was in the Minnesota State Prison, right? After the Northfield raid.”
“That’s absolutely right,” Patroux said. It was rare that anyone coming into the saloon knew anything about his passion, western outlaws. “Who might you be and can I getcha a beer?”
Blaze was not about to reveal who he might be. “Yeah. I want a Royal Bohemian and so do those two guys at the table. We farm across the river up Chanhassen way.” He tried to put the accent on the second syllable the way the locals said it—ChinASSen, but it didn’t ring true. “Name’s Jack.”
Soon the two were deep into a discussion of the Earps and Doc Holliday and the Youngers and whatever really happened to Frank James. Gabe, back at the table, kept shaking his head. All their years together, and he didn’t know that Blaze could carry on a conversation about outlaws. In fact his sidekick seemed to know more about Wyatt Earp than he did about Thomas Aquinas. Eventually a waiter brought over the beer, but Blaze stayed at the bar in animated conversation. Actually, he was not thinking so much about what he was saying as about how to steer the conversation towards possible recent train robberies without sounding like an idiot. It was only now that he realized there was no convincing way to ask a perfect stranger about a train robbery in which nothing was stolen and about which no one but the almost-victims and the almost-robber knew. Who would believe a weird story like that?
“Yep, them were the days,” he said, lapsing into a kind of slangy drawl that made Gabe, nursing his beer at the table, roll his eyes and shake his head again. “You hafta wonder why nobody robs banks and trains anymore. World’s tamed some. I bet it’s been years since there was a train robbery around here, right?”
“You gotta talk to Jesse James down there at the end of the bar about that,” Patroux said, keeping up his perennial joke but remaining poker-faced. “He’s our resident outlaw.” He had raised his voice so Jesse would hear him and now winked broadly at Blaze, since the young man’s face had unaccountably paled as if something terrifying had just occurred. He felt he better explain, too low for Jesse to hear. “Jesse is our village idiot. But be careful, he isn’t always as crazy as he really is.”
“J-Jesse James?”
“C’mere Jesse, man here wants to talk to you.”
Blaze had thought the man at the end of the bar was one of the waiters taking a break, since he wore a pistol. But the would-be waiter made no move to come closer or even to turn his head to acknowledge the boss’s order. Blaze stared at him. That there could be two people alive in the same locality within the same time frame, one named Jesse James and one named Frank James with a hankering for robbing trains, was fantasy beyond anything even Blaze could imagine. The face of the man on the train had been hidden by the bandanna and so there was no accurate way to determine if he were the same as the fellow at the end of the bar. This guy did have greying hair, but it was combed somewhat neatly, and tied in a ponytail, not stringy like the train robber’s.
Jesse’s heart thumped so loudly that he was sure the Pinkerton and that goddam Patroux could hear it. For a moment he wished there were bullets in his pistol so he could whizz one past Patroux and scare the hell out of him. The son of a bitch didn’t know that his goddamn joking was no joke and that he was getting Jesse into a pile of trouble. He tried to put on his ape grin but he could tell from the mirror that it only made him look guiltier. The strange man was walking toward him now, smiling, his hand out in a gesture of friendship. A Pinkerton for sure. Just exactly the way they did in the Jesse James movies.
“My name’s Jack and pleased to meetcha,” Blaze opened, trying to sound friendly.
“Sorry, I gotta see about Blaze. He’s getting mighty curious about where I been,” Jesse said, and scooted out the back door.
Blaze, mouth open and eyes wide, watched him leave. Oh my God. He could not see that Jesse circled the restaurant to the front hitching rail, climbed onto his horse and rode hastily away. What the hell was going on? How did the village idiot know his name? He looked at Patroux who remained as solemn as a deacon at a gospel reading.
Blaze walked to the table in a daze and swigged on his Royal Bohemian. Gabe for once was no help. He too was astonished. Walt of course could not appreciate what was happening and he only wondered, once more, if seminarians might all be as weird as barn owls. Blaze kept repeating Jesse’s two sentences in a near whisper, looking for hidden meaning. “I. gotta. see. about. Blaze…. He’s. getting. mighty. curious. as. to. where. I. been.’ How could the guy know that?”
Gabe by now was shaking his head, as if trying to become fully awake. Something really creepy was going on but he did not want to say out loud the theory that was suggesting itself to him. Blaze would only sneer and say the Royal Bohemian was taking hold. But he said it anyway. “What if the train robber, alias Frank James, alias the village idiot who is also alias Jesse James is really a kind of phantom? Maybe he is Christ, or the devil, or an angel, appearing in the guise of a man, to tell us something? A second coming?” He paused. “Well, don’t look at me that way. Scripture and church history are full of examples. Or maybe God is simply acting through a mere mortal to give us a message.” He paused. “Problem is, wouldn’t God, even speaking through a village idiot, use grammatically correct English?” He decided it was time for his favorite word. “Pretty chthonic, ain’t it?”
Blaze laughed. “You’re the village idiot if there ever was one.”
CHAPTER 3
In the weeks that followed, Blaze experienced a kind of happiness he had not known since taking vows as a Josephian. The long summer days of farm work hardened his muscles and cleared his mind of the spiritual fog that had often hung over him because of the worries that bedeviled him about religious life. He was no longer really leading much of a religious life, but escaping into the world of the local community, a world of farms and villages. Getting to know people beyond his hitherto cloistered life, he and Gabe reveled in the normality of normal people who faced only normal worries like adverse weather in hay time or the closing of a factory or a drunken husband, and who otherwise seemed to think not much beyond the next bit of entertainment that they could find. More important, these people accepted the two oblates. No more the curious and circumspect looks which had so often made Blaze feel as if he were a monkey in a cage when for whatever reason, he had gone forth from the seminary in religious garb. Now, just a farm worker in jeans, he could laugh, joke, even cuss with them. Moreover he had a mystery to ponder and pursue that was so much more earthy and interesting and real than the mysteries of religion for which he had no solution or even belief. The phantom train robber was far more absorbing a puzzle than three divine persons in one God, or the number of angels on the head of a pin. The mystery of Jesse James and the village idiot truly was chthonic. With a life fully satisfied on both a physical and mental level, Blaze began, as in earlier years, to love life again.
On the mornings when he was not on barn duty and so had no excuse not to attend chapel, he actually seemed to remain deep in thought during the meditation period instead of dozing off as he had done formerly. But in trying to solve the mystery of the Second Coming of Frank James, his mind could only run in circles. He dismissed out of hand Gabe’s theory about God sending them messages through unlikely mortals. If God wanted to send him a message, there were surely easier or plainer ways to do it. And Fen’s notion that the whole affair was mere coincidence or happenstance just could not be true either. No one robbed trains anymore, not even a village idiot who thought he was Frank James. He’d rob banks instead. Logically he’d do his robbing over around Northfield, not Savage, if he wanted to keep alive the memory of the famous outlaws. But it seemed even more improbable that the village idiot, whose name actually was Jesse James Brown, as Blaze had learned, would rob a tr
ain and openly identify himself as the robber even if he was crazy. Unless of course he really was a phantom or a word-made-flesh and then all logic was out the window. Maybe that was why the idiot from the outlaw past didn’t take their wallets. Maybe he was just trying to make a statement. Which would mean that he was not really an idiot. And how the hell did he know my name?
The human mind can ponder a mystery for only so long before it manufactures an explanation or flees to the firmer ground of proven fact. So Blaze, unable by nature to be content with manufactured explanations, put his thoughts about the mystery on hold, and turned his attention to the landscape around the seminary, which revealed its own haunting mysteries. The complex of buildings, barns and fields sat on a sort of low sandy ridge, surrounded by a peculiar mingling of marsh and weedy tussock that lay between the Minnesota River less than a mile to the south and the high bluffs of the river valley to the north. There seemed to be no apparent geological reason for the swamps, which paralleled the river much of the way to its conjunction with the Mississippi at Minneapolis. Blaze wandered through the mucky terrain, learning with deepening fascination that if he jumped up and down, the soil surface shook like a giant mattress. Soon Gabe and Fen were accompanying him into this quivering landscape interlaced with crystal clear streams full of trout and muskrat and overgrown with watercress, marsh marigolds and cattails. Eventually the whole class except Very Reverend Lukey and Little Eddie, took to disappearing into this wilderness whenever their schedule allowed.
“One of the time-honored beliefs of monastic and seminary life is that students can be better protected from the evils of the world if they are isolated in a natural rural environment far from the fleshpots of urban life,” Other Blaze wrote in The Story of My Weird Life. “What a boner. For me, wild nature is a more seductive mistress than Marilyn Monroe could ever be.”
With permission from Prior Robert, the “most troublesome class in seminary history” was able to arm itself with rifles and shotguns previously belonging to Josephian priests who had passed away and whose belongings had been shipped to the seminary for storage. The weapons were necessary, Blaze believed, to actualize his vision of their woodland, swamp and river haunts as a frontier. They rarely shot at anything and when they did they missed. Rather than Lou Boudreau, Blaze now imagined himself the resurrection of Daniel Boone or Kit Carson. As an excuse for their wildlife wandering, he and his comrades maintained, with considerable good intentions if not logic, that they were preparing themselves for missionary work in the African bush where the Josephians had mission churches.
But most of the faculty and the other students were offended by their unseminarian-like colleagues. When Fr. Abelard could not persuade Prior Robert to confiscate the guns, which he called “penis substitutes” (Prior Robert loved to go jackrabbit hunting), he angrily dubbed the class “The Sonuvabitchin’ Davy Crockett Boys.” The SBDC Boys liked their new name and flaunted it.
The community of oblates came to almost despise the SBDC Boys. They just seemed to be having too much fun. Maybe the Provincial should expel the lot of them instead of treating them as if they were superior because of their high IQs. But since they had taken vows after the Novitiate, becoming with this step bonafide members of the Josephians even though they were not yet ordained priests, there was little chance of getting them expelled unless they lapsed into something deemed really dreadful like homosexuality or wreaking physical violence on a priest. Blaze fantasized delivering a hefty blow to Fr. Abelard’s chin, but harming a priest carried the punishment of automatic excommunication. Besides, Abelard was built like a middle line-backer which is why he was called “Abs” for short. Blaze feared that if he were dumb enough to hit Abs, the priest would crush him. There was no excommunication involved in annihilating a lowly seminarian.
So for a time the swamps distracted Blaze, Fen, and Gabe from their fixation on the train robbery. One of the streams flowing from the swamps had been captured to provide a never-failing supply of water for the former sanitarium and it was still in use. Gabe galvanized his confreres into building a second one. He found these reservoirs most interesting to his long-range purposes. The water was pure and did not freeze, even when temperatures sank below zero. Gabe also figured that the watercress and the trout might be turned into low-cost, high-profit market crops. But whether or not that ever happened, these foods, along with cattail roots which he learned were quite tasty and nutritional, were always available no matter how cold the winter weather. The community could never starve or die of thirst. How marvelous. With the seminary restored to its former Mudpura glory, it could be self-sustaining in food and water and perhaps, medicine.
What if, mused Melonhead Mullaney, the would-be doctor, the peat in the swamps, if not the water itself, really did possess curative powers, as the old Mudpura doctors believed? That idea had brought the sanitarium to the site in the first place, Melonhead pointed out to the others. Naturopathic doctors in the 1920s believed that the peat, steamed hot and wrapped around the human body, could cure rich people of whatever they thought ailed them. If that didn’t work, sulfur water flowing out of one of the springs might offer a cleansing so invasive that the peat treatment would appear to be effective anyway. Blaze, in a state of excited agitation, related some Mudpura history from an old book he had found in the attic. “Those goofballs actually dug that peat up, hauled it to the building on horse-drawn carts, warmed it up with steam, and wrapped those poor rich people in it.”
“I wonder if it worked?” Melonhead asked, more than once.
“If it does, we’ll get into the business as Mudpura Retreat House,” Gabe remarked, more than once. “I can see it now. Come to Ascension to heal thy body as well as thy soul.”
Very Reverend Lukey sniffed disapproval at these musings which he blamed on Blaze’s propensity for fantasy and his ability to sell it to the more gullible of his classmates. He was tired of being associated with the SBDC Boys. He had not joined religious life to dig septic tanks, or lay bricks, or to start a sanitarium, but to study for the priesthood. “I’m here to learn how to think,” he told Blaze earnestly.
Blaze replied with his familiar grating laugh. “Learn how to think? How the hell can you NOT think?”
“I mean to think properly,” Lukey said, giving Blaze a pitying look.
“You mean you haven’t been thinking properly up till now?” Blaze asked. “You weren’t for instance thinking properly when you decided to join the Josephians? How about when you fainted on the train. Would proper thinking cure you of fainting under duress?”
“You are so arrogant,” Lukey said, turning away.
“Since you haven’t completed Thinking Properly 101, how do you know you’re correct when you say I’m arrogant?”
Lukey whirled so fast that he caught the big rosary hanging from his wide, black Josephian belt around his pleated black Josephian tunic, on the door knob and jerked it loose from the two metal hooks that held it in place on his belt. The rosary clattered across the floor.
“I don’t know why you’re here at all,” he blazed at Blaze while gathering up his rosary and fumbling it back in place. “You really are a Sonuvabitchin’ Davy Crockett Boy.”
Blaze hurried off to find Gabe and Fen to inform them that they didn’t know how to think yet. He promised himself that when he took over the Josephians or became Pope, his first official act would be to put Lukey to work operating a soup kitchen in a ghetto. That would help his thinking considerably.
As summer passed into fall, the new lifestyle that Ascension Seminary seemed to provide for the SBDC Boys began to fade away. With the school year once more starting, the age-old rhythms of seminary and monastery began to reassert themselves. Classroom time dominated the daylight hours: Aristotle, Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Canon Law, Ethics, Cosmology, Metaphysics, courses in Greek and even Hebrew. “I learned today in Ethics that married people can have sex as often as they want to, even every day,” Other Blaze wrote in his diary. “My God, I don’t think
I’d even like to play baseball every day. I also learned that if a fly crawls across a page of Hebrew text and leaves a speck, it might change the meaning of the whole sentence.”
Blaze and his cohorts were still able to avoid some of the chapel sessions because of their mundane duties in kitchen, barn and boiler room, but more and more they were pulled back into the ancient schedule of the chanted hours of the breviary, Matins and Lauds at four o’clock in the afternoon, (better than at two in morning as the Trappists did, Blaze reminded himself), Prime, Terce, Sext and Nones in the morning along with Mass and meditation, and Vespers and Compline in the evening. Blaze found himself feeling again what he called “the miseries” that had often afflicted him in the seminary days before coming to Ascension. In chapel, he studied the other seminarians and priests as they chanted away or stared with such piety at the altar in front of the pews. They seemed at peace. Some of them anyway. Fen was asleep as usual and so was really at peace until Prior Robert made him kneel in the aisle as punishment. Gabe was looking out the window as if planning an escape, which is precisely what he was doing. But for the most part the others seemed content to be chanting psalms, oblivious of how much they resembled a flock of sheep, bleating back and forth at each other across a meadow.
Yet he understood that there really was something peaceful and tranquil about their life of prayer and study. Occasionally he felt it himself. But for him the peace was shattered almost constantly by his conviction that they were all insane to live this way. And when he quashed that line of thinking, he was battered by naggings of sexual desire. Sometimes desire was so intense that he thought his penis was about to explode. Sex every day? What about every hour? At least when engaged with farm work, he was not so besieged. Were the others similarly disturbed? Only rarely did anyone speak of it. Once, Melonhead remarked jokingly that upon waking up in the morning he found himself glued to the sheet by dried semen. Blaze was appalled. Although it had happened to him too, he would never dream of saying so out loud. He tried to pretend, out loud, that sex did not exist. But he started referring to them all as semenarians.