by Gene Logsdon
From that night on, he had brooded over the incident, going out of his way to drive past Ascension Seminary whenever he could think of an excuse to go that way and even when he couldn’t. First, he drove in daylight to look the place over, but observed nothing strange except two lunatics on an old tractor passing him at a tremendous speed. He eventually decided that he was hardly going to see a nekkid monk in broad daylight, if, indeed, that was what he had seen. So for a month, he made a nightly trip past the place. Nothing.
Now, as he watched the mercury rise in the thermometer on the still, he once more ran mentally through the possibilities. Perhaps he had seen not a monk, but a vampire. What if he had encountered an alien from a UFO? He had seen UFOs land down by the river more than once. What if he had seen a streaker who just happened to be in the vicinity of the seminary? What if the nekkid man were fleeing an angry husband who came home early? What if the phantom he had seen was a wild creature, like a Big Foot? What if, and this was the most troubling “what if” of all, he had only imagined the sight, and if so, why had he not imagined a nekkid woman which would have been more to his liking? Maybe the creature was a woman. He could not really tell, although whatever it was, it ran like a man. Women ran like Holstein cows, with their knees turned in and their feet splaying out.
The still demanded his attention. The first drippings were coming out of the cooling coils and he jumped up to make sure they did not go into the savings jug sitting under the coil spout. He once knew a man who had gone blind drinking the first stuff out of the coils. He did not test the purity of the liquor, however, mostly because he did not have a hydrometer and did not even know there was such a thing. He let the spout drip for the length of time that, from long experience, he knew was sufficient. Then he replaced the jug under the spout. He would watch the temperature gauge now. When the distilled alcohol rising from the corn and sugar mash reached about 195 degrees F., and the level of liquor in the jug reached the height he wanted, he would quit saving the clear white liquid and throw the rest away. He did not intend to do a third run through the still to get really good whiskey. His customers were not that choosy.
Then he went back to his ponderings. Since it appeared that two other figures with clothes on had been chasing the nekkid one, perhaps one of the monks had simply gone crazy and gotten loose from wherever he was kept and the others were trying to catch him. But if so, did they catch him? If not, where had he gone? If there had been a nekkid man hiding in the swamps, dead or alive, Axel Barnt would have known it. Nothing escaped his notice in the swamps on either side of the river, five miles up or down the river from Shakopee. He made a show of running trap lines throughout this area, but was really checking his moonshine aging in various stashes he cleverly placed inside old muskrat lodges in the swamps. He had enough hooch hidden there to keep him in cash for a year or two in case his still ever got raided.
Axel Barnt never did anything fast, except make whiskey, so now after weeks of turning over the question of the nekkid man in his mind, he knew that he would have to visit the monastery, which he pronounced moNASStry, and find out, if he could, what was going on there. He would stop at the barn where he had seen the monks at work although they did not look much like monks to him. He could pretend he wanted to buy or sell livestock. That’s what he did anyway, as a front for his moonshine business.
Melonhead and Gabe were busy in their laboratory, studying a mat of swamp peat that they had dried. The matted peat appeared to be cohesive enough to use as a poultice. A dozen little squares, cut four by four inches, ought to sell for a dollar a box anyway, Gabe thought. Concentrating on their latest brainstorm, they did not notice the figure standing in the doorway until it cleared its throat. It hardly looked human, but must have been because animals do not go in for throat-clearing.
“Howdy,” the figure said. “I’m Axel Barnt. I’m a cattle buyer. I live across the river, over by Shakopee.”
The man was wearing a leather apron, the kind favored by horseshoers of an earlier age, strange garb to all those who did not know how protective it could be when working around a hot still. The apron was open at the back, revealing a worn pair of corduroy pants. A brown wad of what looked liked dead leaves stuck out the rear pocket. Above the apron, the creature wore a dirty flannel shirt, the pocket of which held a pen and notepad, which seemed equally incongruous to anyone who did not know that a livestock and moonshine trader needed to keep track of the numerous transactions in which he was involved. His face was so bearded as to completely hide it from inspection and his head was covered by a crumpled felt hat. He wore glasses with round and oversized lenses, which had the effect, along with the bristly, bedraggled facial hair, of making him look like an owl.
Gabe and Melonhead recovered enough to nod a greeting while wondering how they could get around him and out the door, should he attack.
“Yep. I buy cattle,” Axel said again, stretching the words out to make them last longer, not knowing what else to say.
“We don’t have anything for sale at the moment,” Gabe said, hastily. Axel, having expended all the bravado he could sum up, nodded and started to leave.
“But why don’t you wait a sec until the farm manager gets here,” Gabe continued, suddenly realizing that he might be overlooking a very interesting opportunity. Axel turned back and stared queerly around the room. The shelves and tables filled with Melonhead’s various incantations reminded him of making liquor. He looked questioningly at the seminarians.
“We’re, ah, trying to learn something about herbal medicine,” Melonhead explained.
“So,” Barnt said. He examined a bottle of greenish liquid. “Smells like jimson weed.”
“That’s exactly right,” Melonhead blurted, surprised.
“So. Jewelweed’s better for pizzen ivy,” Barnt said.
“Is that so?” Melonhead said, warming up to the bony old man.
“So. Actually, first drippin’s of new moonshine is better’n either.” Axel bit his lip. He had not intended to let that slip out.
“How do you know that?” Gabe asked, his intellectual antennae rising almost visibly from his head.
“My ole man knew all kinda things,” Axel said, shrugging off the question. “So. You sure you don’t have no cattle to sell? Lookin’ for a good cow?” He fished what looked like a dead leaf out of his back pocket and from somewhere under the apron drew out a tobacco pipe. As the two seminarians gazed in awe, he crumpled the brown leaf into the bowl, struck a match and puffed away.
Gabe stuck his head out the door and yelled toward the barn. “Blaze, come here.” This was going to be another Precious Moment, he was sure. “I take it that’s tobacco you’re smoking?” he asked, turning back to Barnt.
“So. Don’t think it’s maryjane, do ya?” Axel said, a little huffily.
“Where do you get your tobacco?” Gabe continued, giving Blaze, who had just entered, the look that meant something important was going on.
“Well, I growed it. Where do ya think I got it.” These monks were nosy bastards.
“Grow tobacco in Minnesota?” Blaze chimed in, doubt in his voice. He thought of his days of gathering cigarette butts.
“So. They grow lots of it over in Wisconsin. It grows here too. Not so good but good enough for me.”
“This man’s a cattle buyer,” Gabe said to Blaze, but never taking his fascinated gaze off Barnt. “He knows all kinds of herbal stuff. And he lives across the river outta Shakopee.”
Blaze wasted no time. “You know the Western Range?”
“So,” nodded Axel readily. He was about to add that he frequented the place but thought better of it, since it was one of his moonshine drop offs. “But I don’t go in there much.”
“Know a guy they call Jesse James?”
“So.” Axel grinned for the first time, revealing almost perfect teeth, exactly the opposite of what Dr. Melonhead would have guessed. “Jesse’s not wrapped too tight.”
“Has he ever been known to d
o anything, like, illegal, like stealing anything?”
Barnt went on guard. Who were these guys anyway, ATF agents? They asked too goddam many questions. “Naw, Jesse’s harmless. If he drinks alcohol he gets so sober he’s boring. Why you ask?”
“Oh, just wondering. Say, I think we can do some cattle business with you,” Blaze said, glancing at Gabe with the look that meant he was to go along with whatever Blaze said. “We need another cow. Let’s talk about it when the farm manager gets here.”
Axel pulled his notepad officiously from his pocket and pretended to study it intently. Some of it was in code. He never dealt in goats which he thought despicable animals because he had seen bucks suck their own peezils, for God’s sake, so every reference to goats or kids in his notepad meant quarts or pints of whiskey. “Ah, yes, it so happens I do know where I can get you a mighty fine cow,” he said, although no such notation appeared on the page he was staring at.
So began a relationship that neither the seminarians nor Barnt wanted to end. Axel found a cow for the Josephians and took their old bull in trade. He lost a little on the swap, but it gave him an excuse to return to the seminary. Sooner or later, evidence of the nekkid man would surface. The Josephians now needed another bull, and Axel knew just where to get one. After that, Blaze and Gabe talked Brother Walt into believing that they needed to be fattening a few more feeder pigs and Axel knew just where to get them too. Then they decided that Axel should find them a heifer calf, because the dairy herd wasn’t increasing in numbers fast enough on its own to suit Gabe. Little by little, Axel became enchanted with the SBDC Boys and became a fixture at the barn, like Hasse and Kluntz. One morning Walt found him in the lab, sleeping off a bout with his moonshine. Walt knew because the snoring Barnt still clutched a bottle containing fluid as clear as water and heavy with the smell of alcohol.
“Axel, where are you getting that whiskey?” Walt asked when he had roused him. “That ain’t bought stuff, and we both know it.”
“It’s none of your damn business,” Axel said. “You guys is the nosiest things I ever seen. I bought it from an old river rat up by Minneapolis.”
“You’re lying, Axel Barnt,” Gabe said, bearing down on the poor man. “A guy who’ll make his own smokes is surely making his own drinks too.”
“So, you got secrets. I got secrets,” Axel retorted, more or less awake now. “How about that man I seen running nekkid up the highway outside this barn one night?”
Blaze’s mouth gaped. “W-What are you talking about.” But his face betrayed his pretense of ignorance. Barnt pressed his advantage.
“So. Here you guys are askin’ me questions all the time and I axed you one, and you don’t have no answer. So. What do you know about that nekkid man. He one of yourn?”
Blaze broke into laughter, and the others joined in. They summoned Melonhead because it was really his story, and hunkering down on milk stools and straw bales behind the cows, they hooted and giggled while he told the whole story again. At first Barnt listened in pure amazement, but by story’s end, he too was laughing.
“I ’member when those doctor types was runnin’ Mudpura. There’d be Packards pull in there half a mile long. This was one fancy place when those rich folks let themselves be wrapped in that goddam swamp mud. And people say I’m crazy.”
“Thing is, the treatment cured Lukey when he was sick—you haven’t met him yet.”
“So. I bet some of my moonshine woulda cured him quicker.”
And with that admission, Axel told his story. Never know, he was thinking. These guys might become customers. Or go-betweeners. A monastery would be a perfect place for a moonshine distribution center.
“Can I have a taste?” Blaze asked.
“Naw. Let me bring you some good stuff. You need to get started right in moonshine. This here’ll rake the skin off your throat.”
CHAPTER 7
The theological and agricultural debate between Hasse and Gabe came to a head in early September, when the third cutting of alfafa on all the farms roundabout lay mown, windrowed and ready for baling. With rain threatening, Hasse had his ancient baler in the field early, even though the hay was not quite dry enough for ideal baling. Time was crucial. The hay he was taking in happened to be in a field across the fence from the Josephians’ mown hay. To his surprise, Hasse saw that the oblates were not also at work but instead, dressed in their long, flowing black robes, were marching in procession to the fields and singing hymns while the Prior sprinkled holy water generously over the cropland through which he was walking. Hasse, married to a devout Catholic, knew what the monks were doing—observing the ancient ceremony of Ember Days that marked the beginning of each season. One purpose of the Autumn Ember Days in September was to thank God for a good harvest. Amused, he stopped to watch, letting the tractor run at half throttle so that the plunger in the empty bale chamber clanged loudly and irritatingly. Gabe, who was itching to get started on the baling, could not contain himself and left the procession to speak to his godless associate.
“You are belittling the pious practices of worthy men, aren’t you, you reprobate,” he began by way of greeting.
“You don’t need to t’row water on dat hay,” the old farmer replied, glancing at the clouds. “It’s soon going to get plenty wet straight from God.”
“God protects those who trust in Him,” Gabe countered before he could think better of his words.
“You saying God’s not going to let it rain on your windrows?” Hasse shot back in a tone heavy with dark intent.
Damn him, Gabe thought. He’s got me again. Out loud he replied righteously: “You ought to read a little. Meditate sometime on something besides money. ‘Observe the lilies of the field, neither do they spin nor weave …’” he let the quotation hang in mid-air, unable suddenly to recall the rest of it, and stalked haughtily back to the procession.
The rain held off until Hasse had finished baling and the Josephians, their ceremony of blessing the fields ended, had just filled their first wagonload of hay. Then the skies opened and a downpour quickly rendered the hay still in windrows into a sodden mess unfit for anything except bedding when or if it dried out again. Hasse, his last load safely in the barn, drove his pickup back down the road to where he could watch the fun.
The sight of Hasse infuriated Gabe. His fellow Josephians huddled under the hay wagon gloomily staring at the rain. Blaze was the exception. He was smiling in anticipation of what Hasse would surely say. Gabe stood alone and defiant in the field, in the pouring rain, kicking at a wet bale and railing against his lot in life. Not only did he have to put up with the weather, poor machinery, and inexperienced help, but a flea-brained Prior who held religious ceremonies when there was hay to make. “Laugh,” he thundered at Hasse, grinning in his truck cab. “Laugh a hole in your heathen head. But you haven’t heard the last of this, I promise.”
What he would do, Gabe decided, in the middle of a night in which holy wrath would not let him sleep, was drain the swamp or at least some of it. Hasse said it couldn’t be done, so he would do it and shut the stiff-necked heathen up forever.
To that end, Gabe, with the canny power of persuasion he could work so well on Prior Robert, bent the energies of the whole religious community to swamp drainage. Through the swamp between Hasse’s land and that of the Josephians, he had a deep ditch dynamited. Then he put twenty seminarians to work with shovels, digging lateral ditches on the Josephian side every fifty feet to drain into the main ditch. The soil dug from the laterals was scattered evenly over the plots between the ditches, raising the level of the land there high and dry with a rich black peaty soil that, freed of water, crumbled into a soft, loamy seed bed.
“Vhat you going to plant dere,” Hasse said, trying not to notice the superiority in Gabe’s smile.
“Whatever. Have you ever seen such wonderful soil for a swamp that some folks used to say was useless?” Gabe replied. “The ways of the Lord are indeed mysterious. And if you have any decency about you
, you’ll help pay for the dynamiting since you’ll benefit too.”
Hasse stomped back to his truck and drove off in a huff. But he still had to put up with Kluntz, who was rapidly losing faith in faithlessness. “I guess he’s got you this time,” Kluntz spouted at him over a full lip of snuff.
Melonhead had, in the meantime, stumbled upon an interesting concept in his need to justify to the community, especially Prior Robert, the work he was doing. He had come across a book about monastic life that delved in considerable detail into how monks had been pioneers in the fermentation and distillation of alcoholic spirits in the early Middle Ages. To his surprise, the perfection of various liquors, not to mention all kinds of herbal remedies, had been the work of monks seeking medical cures. In fact, monasteries had been the research farms, so to speak, of the Middle Ages, the safe repositories of knowledge during the upheavals of war and plague. It was fitting for Ascension Seminary to continue that great tradition, Melonhead pointed out.
“Think of that, Gabe,” Melonhead said, knowing which of the SBDC Boys would respond with the greatest enthusiasm. “With this barn and this lab, we are carrying on the traditional work of the Church. Far from being chastised by pricks like Abs, we should be honored and encouraged. We are really engaged in saving rural culture and safeguarding traditional skills that are being forgotten by modern man. Making medicines, like making food, should be the divine right of the people, not just drug companies.”