by Gene Logsdon
Lardigan, acting automatically out of years of habit, re-delivered the host. The woman was staring straight ahead now, tongue back in her mouth, puzzled at the delay, but Blaze, still acting automatically, snapped the edge of the paten against her throat. She jumped a little and her mouth flew open. Lardigan placed the host on her tongue with the speed and skill of a hundred thousand deliveries, and barged on to the next communicant. The whole problem and its solution had occurred so fast in real time that no one beyond the three ministers seemed aware of it.
When the celebrant strode back to the altar, he stepped right along like a referee marking off a fifteen-yard penalty. Blaze shuffled furiously to keep up. At the steps ascending the altar, he took hold of the alb with his free hand, like a lady in an evening gown, bunching it together in his fist so that he could lift it more or less demurely as the trio ascended to the altar. But on the top step, his shoe came down on the alb once more, and the last fold tucked under the cincture pulled loose. Only his innate athletic agility kept him from falling to the floor. He swayed awkwardly and landed on his knees, a type of genuflection never anticipated or called for by the rubrics. The celebrant showed no indication that he was willing to stop the service while his subdeacon made the necessary adjustments. He took the paten from Blaze without looking at him, not even wondering why the peculiar young man was on his knees instead of standing beside him as he should be. He was not sure he should dismiss his subdeacon as a clumsy idiot or, considering his actions just minutes previously, as a very dexterous genius.
Free of the paten, Blaze struggled erect and improvised a quick solution. Lifting first one side of the alb and pinning it under one elbow, and then doing the same on the other side, he could safely walk, so long as he kept his hands devoutly folded and his elbows clamped against his sides, holding the alb up.
And so he hung on for the rest of the Mass, out of his mind with embarrassment and self-revulsion, making no effort to move the missal from the gospel side of the altar to the epistle side or vice versa, as he was supposed to do, nor to prepare the empty chalice for the celebrant to carry from the altar, nor to hand him his biretta as they marched off into the sacristy.
Neither the pastor nor his assistant said anything about what had happened. All that mattered to Fr. Lardigan was that a grave theological crisis had been avoided. The idiot subdeacon had not actually picked up the wafer, had touched it in fact only with the tip of a fingernail which is not exactly a living part of the body and so, broadly speaking, had skirted sacrilege. More importantly, he had not actually touched the poor woman either. Would have served her right, though, he thought, for wearing a dress like that. Who did she think she was, Marilyn Monroe? With that, he dismissed the whole event. It never happened. He pawed through the collection baskets, a pleased look on his face. “Looks like a five hundred dollar take,” he said jovially to the assistant pastor, who looked away in embarrassment. Fr. Lardigan had planned to invite Blaze to the rectory for a bit of “schnapps” but thought better of it now. Blaze was relieved. He had suffered all the sacerdotal company he could handle for one night. But most of all he could hardly wait to get back to the seminary and tell the SBDC gang about what he was already in his mind calling “The Sacred Host Caught Between the Horns of Dilemma.”
CHAPTER 13
Not until he was clear of the village did Blaze understand the full fury of the snowstorm. Out on the country roads where there were no clusters of houses to block the wind, snow flew horizontally across the sweep of the headlights, the drifts inching out from the ditch on the west side. With the temperature sliding towards zero, he slowly realized that he might be in some real danger. The road was normally wide enough for two cars to pass easily, but now there was only one lane and one set of tire tracks broken through the rising snow ahead of him. Even those tracks were quickly disappearing under new snow. It was easier to stay on the road by watching the telephone and electric poles on either side as they loomed into view in the headlights, and try to steer exactly between them.
Still he was not really worried. The old truck, which had come along with the purchase of the seminary property, had been used to haul cans of milk from farms to dairy plants in an earlier life, a mission that, even more than the mail, had to go through or farmers would run out of milk cans for the next milking. It had dual back wheels and with the load of milk cans (or hay bales), possessed enough traction to push through a foot of snow or more. He felt fairly sure that he could manage the fifteen miles back to the seminary, come what may. And if not, what the hell. With his fur cap, old lined Army surplus pea jacket, heavy boots, wool mittens and insulated coveralls, he was ready for anything. These were his vestments. Survival tactics were his rubrics. He had even thought to bring along a thermos of hot coffee and a box of sweet rolls he had swiped from the seminary kitchen. Let the blizzard roar. The threat of it cleansed his tortured mind. He was his old self again, and yet not his old self. His old self would have been chuckling, mentally turning the Solemn High Mass and the blizzard into a comedy of adventure to amuse the SBDC Boys later. Instead, he now found himself settling into a resolve unfamiliar to him. He felt calm and self-reliant, keenly alert to the situation. Purpose flooded his mind, bringing meaning to his existence for once. He needed to stay alive.
Suddenly a car shape loomed through the blinding snow ahead of him. Barrelling along as fast as the old truck could go under these circumstances, he knew he could not stop in time to avoid the car, so he gunned the truck and pulled into what would normally have been the other lane. For a few seconds he thought he would plow right on through the snowdrifts and regain the middle of the road. But the extra weight of the bales, good for traction, now acted as a drag, whipsawing the back of the truck further into the drifts as Blaze tried desperately to pull back into the center of the road. The more the back wheels spun, the more they dragged the truck sideways until they slipped from the pavement altogether and sank deep into the snow-filled ditch.
A few attempts to free the truck failed. Now what? He tried to collect his thoughts. There was, first of all, someone in that car. The door on his side of the truck was up against a wall of snow, so he had to crawl out of the cab on the other side. The wind was moaning high in the sky now with a sound he had never heard before. It sent shivers through him that were not from the cold. The air and wind sucked his breath away. This must be the granddaddy of all blizzards. The car’s headlights had flashed on when he had lurched into the ditch, so he could find his way, wallowing in the snow, to the car door. When he approached, the overhead light inside turned on and the window lowered but only a little. The face wreathed in fur collar and hat looked at him with apprehension. Not easy to tell, but the face appeared to be female. She also appeared to be afraid of him, a notion so novel to Blaze that he had to smile despite the desperateness of the situation. The smile disarmed her. She peered closely at him and relief replaced fear.
“Oh it’s you, Father,” she said and then with apology in her voice, “I got you stuck, didn’t I?”
He started to explain that he was not a priest, but decided that would take too long and accomplish nothing at the moment.
“Are you okay?” he shouted above the moaning wind.
“Sort of,” she said, managing a rueful smile, “but I can’t budge this car another inch.”
“I’ll push,” he said.
He tried. Nowhere. The snow was so deep it was lifting the car off the road as the wheels spun. “How far have you got to go yet?” Blaze asked, shouting in the wind.
“About three miles I think.”
“Well, I guess we can walk that far. Have you got boots?”
“You don’t walk in blizzards like this, Father.” She sounded almost patronizing.
“Well, we can just follow the power line.”
“No, Father. You can get lost between poles. You can get lost and freeze to death thirty feet from your barn.”
Blaze looked at her. He had read about blizzards like that, b
ut he was surprised to find a woman, who looked and sounded quite young, with that kind of survival sense.
“I’m gonna stay put,” she continued. “That’s what Daddy always said to do. The snowplow will be along pretty soon. Get in here before you freeze to death. I got a good heater which I bet that old truck of yours doesn’t have.”
She was right. “Just a minute,” he said and retreated to the truck to retrieve the coffee and rolls.
“Can’t let the motor run,” he said, settling himself in the car beside her and unscrewing the lid on the thermos. “Carbon monoxide.”
“Can if you keep the window cracked a little,” she countered, “and don’t run the motor constantly.”
He stared at her. Damn, she just knew everything, didn’t she. “What if the snow plugs the exhaust and we get gassed anyway?”
“We won’t let that happen,” she said. She sipped the coffee he offered her.
“Actually hot in here now, isn’t it,” she said, pulling her hat off. Damn, she was not only infallible, she was pretty.
“My folks don’t even know I’m on the road,” she continued. “Probably a good thing, or Daddy would be having a fit. I live in Minneapolis, going to college, and I told them I wouldn’t drive out here till tomorrow. Then I took a notion to surprise them and come home for Midnight Mass. But they weren’t in church. They had more sense than to go out on a night like this, I guess.”
Blaze stared at her in the dimness of the overhead light, then looked away quickly when their eyes met. “My name’s Blaze,” he said. “Actually, I’m not a priest.”
She turned toward him again. Quickly. “Y-you’re not?”
Blaze detected more relief than apprehension in her voice.
“Just a seminarian. I’ve got a few more years to go to ordination. Just about anybody can serve as a subdeacon.”
“Oh really. How about a woman?” There was challenge in her voice. Blaze knew where she was coming from. He thought he might like her.
“But why would any woman in her right mind want to be a subdeacon, much less a priest?” he countered.
She continued to look at him, sharply. Then smiled. That was not the answer she had anticipated, but she liked it.
“My name’s Marge. Marge Puckett. And yeah, you’re right. I wouldn’t be caught dead at the altar.”
The radio crackled with more bad news. Snowplows could not get to secondary roads any time soon. They were having trouble handling the main roads. Stay home.
“Have you got a flashlight?” Blaze asked, angry at himself for not having brought one. With a flashlight, he could follow the electric line from pole to pole down the road.
“No, but you’d never make it anyway,” she said, reading his mind. “You ever try walking in snow four, five feet deep?”
“Oh, well,” Blaze replied. “Be getting light in another three hours. “Wind’ll die down by then too. Maybe.” Marge turned off the motor to save on gas.
“I’ve never heard a wind quite like that,” she said.
“Me either.” Blaze cranked the window down on his side, leeside to the wind. The cold flooded in. In a few minutes the car began to cool noticeably. “I’ve got an idea,” he said. He rolled the window back up, pulled on his hat and mittens, and bundled up his jacket. “I’ve got a load of bales on that truck. I’m going to cover the car with them. You’re going to have to start the car up again and turn on the lights.”
He floundered to the truck, forced to use swimming motions to manage the mounting drifts. The wind was blowing away his breath and he could exert himself only in fits and starts and then stop to catch enough air to go on. Climbing on the truck bed, he flung off the bales. Then he dragged them and himself one at a time to the car and ranked them around and over it, literally boxing it in with hay. After he had broken a trail, the rest of the bales were not so difficult to move. On the lee side, he piled the bales a little away from the car so he could get the door open to let himself back in, and to allow air space next to the window, building a kind of chimney higher than the car to form a vent, should the snow pile deeper. He made a little tunnel of bales at the end of the exhaust pipe too, so the fumes could get away from the car.
“That was pretty smart,” Marge said after he had crawled into the car. “How did you think of that? A hay bale igloo. What in the world possessed you to drive a truckload of hay out on a night like this in the first place?”
Blaze laughed again and explained the unusual circumstances.
“Actually, my whole life is a rather unusual circumstance,” he added.
“Think we’re going to stay warm enough?” she asked, a slight tremor in her voice now.
“Well, the more snow that covers those bales, the more insulation we’ll have. We ought to be as snug as hibernating bears, if we run the motor occasionally. I’ve read about people surviving in snow drifts just fine so we ought to be okay.”
She shivered and involuntarily snuggled up next to him. Oh, God. He realized he might be the only man in America his age who had never in his life sat next to a pretty girl in a car in the middle of the night. No problem with freezing. He was sweating. “How about some more coffee? And a sweet roll,” he offered.
She squirmed erect, flicked on the overhead light, nibbled at a roll, sipped coffee. He watched her, relieved to note that he could discern nothing in her show of intimacy other than stark practicality. Suddenly she startled him by laughing.
“It figures. You not being a priest,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I saw you sit on that biretta,” she said, and giggled involuntarily.
Blaze was glad for the semi-darkness to hide his blush. All he could think to do was laugh with her. It was a way around the awkwardness he felt, sitting so close to her. “So you saw that. Then you have to know I really screwed up the whole thing.”
She laughed again. “I think you redeemed yourself when you flicked that host off Mrs. Chechory.” And then she erupted into a near gale of giggling.
“How did you know?” Blaze blurted.
“I was the next communicant.” And then she added, wickedly. “I’ve got good sidewise vision.”
Blaze could not remember her, but at that point in time, with the communion wafer incident still overwhelming him, he would not have remembered the next communicant if it had been the Pope. They both laughed, louder than the wayward wafer justified. That relieved the tension. He sensed in her an irreverent humor not unlike his own. Before he hardly realized it, he was relating the whole sad adventure with the sagging alb. That led to expressing deeper thoughts about his mental anguish. It was a profound relief to be able to talk about what lay heavily on his mind. At least it kept them both from dwelling on the closeness of their bodies and the deepening cold outside.
“You know when you said you wouldn’t be caught dead at the altar? Well, that’s me too. That’s what I learned tonight. I’m not cut out for the priesthood. The thought of having to give sermons and parade around in vestments and all that almost paralyzes me.”
“Why on earth are you in seminary then?”
“It’s a long story. Actually, I don’t really know. It just happened. It’s all so dumb. My life, that is.”
“So’s mine,” she said. “I don’t want to go to college, but Daddy insists. He says I need to know what’s across the fence before I make a decision about my life. But I like living on a farm and I’ll never change that.”
“I like farming too,” Blaze answered. “That’s part of my problem. Working on the seminary farm, I’ve learned that I like it more than studying to become a priest. Farming is so mentally clear and clean and straightforward. Theology only mystifies me. Instead of confirming God’s existence, it makes me doubtful about the whole business.” Having finally said it out loud to someone else, Blaze felt relieved.
“Try taking a course in anthropology if you want to have your faith rattled,” Marge said. “One of my professors says that every thinking college s
tudent becomes an atheist, but later on most of them unfortunately get over it.” She chuckled at that.
Blaze could hardly believe what he was hearing. She was saying without guilt the sort of sentiments he was afraid to say at all. But then she changed the subject. Religion was evidently not important to her. “I’m going to raise horses on my farm. Maybe I’ll name one Blaze.” And she laughed again, a laugh that to Blaze was beginning to sound like the loveliest music he had ever heard. She was amazing. Someone as witty as Gabe, but a girl. Impossible.
By now the snow had covered the bales so thickly that the two people in the car could not hear the moan in the wind. Maybe it was dying down. Marge turned on the motor again to warm up and listen for news on the radio. Elvis Presley was singing. Blaze rolled his eyes in the darkness because he couldn’t stand rock and roll. He called it “rock and wet your pants music.” But Elvis’s moan was at least better than the wind’s moan. And the noise filled the silence with something more than their breathing.
“You know what this reminds me of?” She did not wait for a response. “Bundling.” Again the merry laugh. She had decided that banter might get them through the delicate situation. Go straight to the heart of danger, she recalled from a Graham Greene novel.
“Bundling?” Blaze wanted to be sure they were thinking the same thing.
“Yeah. You know. Used to be common in New England before central heating. And if truth be told, in Minnesota too. Lovers visited in bed with plenty of covers between them.”
“If you believe the covers stayed between them, you’ve got more faith in mankind than I do,” Blaze countered. He could banter too.
Again she laughed. Why did she feel no apprehension? She decided to argue. “Oh, I don’t know. There were other family members around, probably in the same room. I bet that nothing much happened. Most of the time.”
“What do you mean by ‘nothing much’?” Blaze challenged mischeviously.
“Well there was probably a lot of furtive kissing.” She would not be out-bantered.