by Gene Logsdon
“Not if it was as dark as it is in here,” Blaze replied. “I never realized it before, but when you can’t see your hand in front of your face, kissing someone you are talking to is not necessarily a natural sequence of events. Kissing someone implies that you look into the other’s eyes first, doesn’t it? If I were to try to kiss you now in the dark, it would be sort of like trying to kiss a peach.”
If she had laughed before, it was nothing close to the heartiness with which she burst out now. None of the boys in college would ever have come up with such an observation. Certainly not her boyfriend. Encouraged, Blaze blundered on. Talking about sex seemed to be an effective stratagem for doing nothing about sex. “I wonder how the seminary authorities would react if they learned that I was bundling with a university coed?”
“Not nearly as angrily as my boyfriend would.”
Now Blaze laughed. “There was a girl I liked a lot one summer when I was home on vacation from seminary high school. Guess what. She went to the convent.” He had thought she would laugh at that, but when she remained silent, he started telling her stories about the madcap adventures of the SBDC Boys, although he referred to them simply as the Davy Crockett Boys, without the usual adjective. He related how, when Very Reverend Lukey decided to take up rock collecting as a hobby, they had moved a huge boulder that required four of them to lift into the center of his room while he was absent. He told her about the time they had dismantled the hay wagon and reassembled it in Prior Robert’s room, the front wheels in his bedroom and the back wheels in his office and the connecting wooden frame running through the little aisle between the two rooms. He told her about the Cure, elaborating it into a long and complex story. When she did not laugh at what he considered to be the hysterical climax of Fr. Abelard staring at The Very Reverend Lukey swaying above the cauldron of the Cure, he stopped talking abrubtly. Her breathing came in long, steady measures. He whispered her name. No answer. Again. Her answer was something close to a snore. He grinned in the darkness. She was sound asleep.
CHAPTER 14
As a part-time snowplow driver for the county, Kluntz had seen his share of freakish blizzard events. But he was not prepared for what he found in the middle of Township Line Road. “It was weirder than blue gumbo, I tell you.” he remarked, as he related the story in George and Clare Puckett’s kitchen where he had delivered Oblate Blaise and Marge Puckett. “There was this absolute mountain of a drift in the middle of the road so I stopped and had me a look-see. Under the snow was, well, you are not going to believe this, a pile of hay bales, and under the hay bales was a car. And when I dug down through it all and brushed off the windshield, damn but what there weren’t these two kids in there not atall froze but sleepin’ snug as two kittens under the stove.”
The Pucketts listened with rapt attention, their gazes shifting from Marge to Blaze in something close to adoration. As the story unfolded, they became convinced that Blaze had saved their daughter’s life. Clare pushed a heaping platter of ham and eggs and breakfast rolls in front of him and begged for more details. Neither Blaze nor Marge had much to say, mostly because Kluntz would not stop talking, which worried Blaze. How soon would it take Kluntz to carry this tale to Ed Hasse, who would surely speculate keenly on what a seminarian and a coed did all night alone in a car. But at least Kluntz’s babbling gave him a chance to study Marge in the flesh rather than as a barely discernible body in heavy clothes in a dark car. Blaze thought that her demeanor did not do justice to the voice he had heard through the night. He had expected piercing dark eyes, pert lips, and a certain saucy, sexual purposefulness in her manner. But her eyes were an unremarkable blue-grey, her face broad and innocent, her lips thin, and her manner circumspect and matter-of-fact.
Marge was not that impressed by Oblate Blaise’s appearance either. He looked younger than he had looked at the altar in church regalia. His face was almost childishly innocent, reminding her of the barefoot boy of Whittier’s poem. For all of his forthrightness in the car, he now acted hesitant and diffident. The main difference between them at the moment was that she stared straight at him as he described their adventure, as if she had not been in the car with him all night. As if she were curious to know what had happened. He, on the other hand, found it difficult to meet her eyes, as if more than just talk had occurred between them.
“Well, I never felt we were in any real danger,” he said for the third time at least, making sure he acted in a manner befitting a seminarian who only hours earlier had been standing before the altar at Midnight Mass adorned in priestly robes. He was especially careful not to cuss which required a certain amount of concentration. “After Miss Puckett fell asleep,” (he thought he saw a faint smile flash over her face when he called her Miss Puckett), “I started and stopped the motor once more, and then I fell asleep too. I don’t think it ever did get down to freezing in the car.”
How could the Pucketts ever repay him? Blaze tried to point out that it was Marge, not he, who had really saved them by insisting on staying with the car. Marge looked pleased. It was not like a man to admit that.
“But can’t I pay you something?” George asked.
“More ham and eggs will do just fine,” Blaze said. “And maybe help me get that truck back on the road with your tractor.”
“That’s all been taken care of,” Kluntz announced rather grandly. He was fidgeting now, wanting to get away and spread the news of the rescue. For once he knew something that Hasse was still ignorant of and it would be interesting to hear how the dirty old bastard would speculate on Blaze and Marge in a car alone all night.
Talk among the kitchen full of people gradually shifted to other neighborhood matters: “the electric” still was not on “over to Waconia and Chanhassen”; folks with more cows than could be milked by hand were having a hard time; someone near Carver—didn’t have a name yet—had tried to walk home from a stalled car and was found frozen to death. Blaze was hardly listening because Other Blaze was already writing the night’s adventure in his head. “It is almost impossible to overstate the curiosity one feels upon actually confronting in the flesh a person one has only talked to all night out of the flesh. She seems much more serious in mien now than her disembodied voice had sounded then. In fact there is a calculatedness about her that I would not have expected from the playfulness in her voice in the dark. (Note: check if calculatedness is a word.)”
Back at the seminary, Prior Robert had panicked. He had presumed that Oblate Blaise would spend the night at the rectory in Grass Prairie since only an idiot would have tried to drive in the fierce blizzard. When he heard nothing by mid-morning, he began to worry. He called Fr. Lardigan. At least the phones were working. Lardigan told him that Oblate Blaise had indeed driven away after Midnight Mass. Having heard nothing, the pastor presumed the young man had made it back to the seminary.
Prior Robert, overcome with dread, put down the phone. The poor boy was out there on the road somewhere frozen to death like the man near Carver. Maybe the man near Carver was Oblate Blaise. The Prior sank weakly into his office chair. With fatalistic certainty he knew the poor boy’s death was his own fault. He had sent Oblate Blaise out into the night more to indulge his disapproval of the seminarian than to train the young man in God’s ways. Now God had punished him. A dead oblate on his hands. No Prior had ever managed that in the history of the Josephian Order. He trembled. He had never wanted to be a Prior. He loved just being a simple pastor of the little parish church in Broken Bow, Nebraska. Why had his superiors promoted him? He had tried to decline. He hated being in charge of a community peopled with enough eccentrics to provide behavioral psychologists with material for years of study. Hated the way he was too weak to stand up to their petty, pretentious little plots, acting as if he didn’t know how they were manipulating him. Why, oh why, had God wanted him to accept leadership? No one listened to him anyway. What happened to a Prior who allowed a seminarian to freeze to death on the road? What was a seminarian doing out on the road any
way? Serving as subdeacon in a rural parish hardly seemed a legitimate excuse, since Oblate Blaise was not yet an ordained subdeacon. Would the Prior be stripped of office? That would be a blessing in disguise. Would he be excommunicated? Oh, God, help me, he prayed.
He rushed into the chapel and knelt in prayer. “Heavenly Father, ordain that Oblate Blaise still lives, that this whole terrible error of mine punish me and not this young man.” And then, as good men often do, he went one prayer too far. “I promise you, Lord Jesus, that if you see fit to save this boy’s life, I will never again exercise my power over him in any spiteful or mean way, neither in body nor in spirit.”
He felt better now. He called the sheriff’s office. The frozen man near Carver had been identified and was not an Oblate Blaise, which the sheriff thought a queer name indeed. The county road superintendent said the highways were open to one lane and that the snow plows and front end loaders were digging their way down the back roads. No, he had not heard yet of an Oblate Blaise or an old truck. The hospital reported a few cases of frostbite, but no Oblate Blaise.
Prior Robert summoned the community to chapel. He strode to the front, turned, and with grim face, told the assemblage that Oblate Blaise had disappeared in the blizzard on his way home from Grass Prairie and there was every possibility, and here the Prior’s voice quavered, that Oblate Blaise might have frozen to death like the man near Carver. A murmur went through the little congregation. Even the Very Reverend Lukey bowed his head and prayed fervently that Oblate Blaise was not dead but just frostbitten enough to hurt like hell when he thawed.
In the silence, the oblates, bent in supplication, suddenly heard the front door of the building bang open and slam shut. There was the sound of a familiar cheery whistle, of boots stamping off snow in the entrance way, and footfalls clomping down the hall towards the chapel door. The door swung open, and there stood Oblate Blaise, a Santa Claus smile wreathing his face. “What are you all doing in here,” he asked, puzzled. “Isn’t it lunch time?”
CHAPTER 15
In other circumstances, Blaze would have gloried in the story of how he had not only survived the blizzard but saved the life of a damsel in distress. He would also have pondered with great but mystified delight the unctuous solicitude that Prior Robert now heaped upon him. There was something going on here that he didn’t entirely understand.
But he could not get out of his mind the awful realization that had flooded over him in the middle of the Midnight Mass: that he was sure that he no longer wanted to be a priest. He was not even sure that he still wanted to help people. Making matters worse, the face of Marge Puckett kept intruding itself into his mind’s eye. He could not say that he had any romantic feelings about the person behind that face, but he could not say that he didn’t either. But more unnerving than that, he often found other oblates staring at him when he turned suddenly their way.
“What’s going on, anyway?” he asked Fen finally.
“You really don’t know, do you?” Fen replied.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean.”
Fen laughed and looked at his friend with amusement. “They think you were makin’ out with that girl in the car.”
Blaze stared at Fen. Did his fellow oblates consider him so reprehensible that he would do such a thing? Did they suspect such behaviour because that is what they would have been trying to do? Or wanting to do? He shook his head. For having the reputation of being the seminary’s bad boy, maybe he wasn’t so bad after all.
“Do you think I did that?” he asked Fen, turning to him quickly.
“I know you didn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do. Not you.”
Blaze stared at him, puzzled. He was as suspicious of Fen’s assumption of innocence as of the others’ assumption of guilt. And Fen seemed somehow uneasy in his support. Did Fen think he was gay or something, for Chrissake?
From then on, Blaze’s enjoyment of Josephian community life began to wane. Where before he had found comfort and identity in the companionship of his brethren, the only world he really knew, he now sought solitude. Where he had judged the conduct of his fellow oblates to be droll and charming, even when petty or narrow-minded or stupid, he now viewed them as simply pathetic. Nor did it help that as the winter deepened and there was less work on the farm to occupy him, the schedule of classroom studies intensified to make up for the summer hiatus. He grew morose. The more dissatisfied he became, the more he felt like lashing out at others. The more he examined church dogma, the less he believed in it. The problem was where to draw the line. He had previously concluded that if people wanted to believe absurdities like angels carrying the mother of Jesus bodily into heaven, it was all right. No harm done. But once he questioned one doctrine, he found that it became easier, in fact logically necessary, to question another, and then another. Reading Luther, he was startled to find his mind telling him that no matter what his textbooks said to the contrary, the errant Dominican was correct—that there was no good reason for insisting that the bread and wine be changed literally into the body and blood of Christ when it could only symbolize the body and blood of Christ. So much more practical. Why invent a miracle when none was needed? But the doctrine of the Eucharist, asserting that the bread and wine actually became the body and blood of Christ, was the central dogma of Catholicism. He could reject it only by rejecting the whole Church.
And then one morning, still half asleep, something in his subconscious brain clicked, almost audibly. The flash of insight that had sprung on him during the Midnight Mass debacle, but which in his duress he had not paid much further attention to, now came back in full force. Humans created their gods, not vice versa. He sat up in bed, marvelling at how that idea solved for him, in one broad sweep of clarity, all the inconsistencies of institutional religion that so bedevilled him. If men created their gods, of course their religions would be at times absurd or self-serving or illogical and at other times noble and honorable. No omnipotent, infallible intelligence was involved because such intelligence would rule out all the absurdities of religion. He tried to reject this most sinful of all doubts against faith, but it would not be rejected. He might just as well have tried to convince himself that one plus one added up to something other than two. Now he was not just a heretic but an atheist and apostate. Oh, God.
One day he heard a loud argument going on in a classroom between classes. A contingent of oblates led by The Very Reverend Lukey had surrounded Fen and were shaking fingers and heads in pious outrage. Blaze leaned in the doorway to listen.
“I can’t believe you would say that,” Lukey was shouting at Fen. “Look, it’s right here in our moral theology textbook.” He waved an open book. “You can’t get to heaven without Baptism. You can’t be saved if you remain a pagan, stubbornly rejecting the true Faith.”
“I say not so,” Fen replied, unperturbed. “A heathen has just as much chance for eternal life as anyone.”
“But you can’t say that. That’s heresy.
“I just said it. It’s just common sense and justice. If it’s heresy, change the law,” Fen said.
Blaze smiled. So doubts about dogma were not his alone. But it had seemed unlikely to him that Fen would be the one to go public. Gabe seemed better suited for attacking dogma, except that the fine points of theology only bored him. He didn’t care. He knew how to manipulate dogma to his own designs, and beyond that what difference did it make? Blaze eyed Fen admiringly. There was more courage in him than he had reckoned. It was no accident that he was the one who had stood up to the pistol-waving thief.
The Very Reverend Lukey appealed to Blaze in the doorway for help. “Fen’s a heretic. He thinks heathens can get to heaven.”
Blaze tried to look serious. “Heaven? What’s that?”
He began experiencing another difficulty. Absorbing information and repeating it on test papers had always been easy for him. Now his mind rebelled. It seemed unable to focus itself on the belabored eth
ics and dogmatism of moral theology and Thomistic philosophy. Church dogma and Canon Law too often struck him as just plain silly. For example, as he tried to study the finely-spun minutiae of Church regulations about the administration of the Sacrament of Baptism, he could scarcely believe the words of Canon Law. Even the kind of water that should be used for Baptism was specified, and what other fluids might be used in an emergency if regular water was not available. Among the fluids that could not be used, even if the person to be baptized was dying, were “milk, blood, amniotic liquid, tears, saliva, foam, fruit juices, wine, beer, oil, thick broth, and ink.” But, and here was where his mind closed down completely, possible but “doubtful” fluids for Baptism included “weak soup and weak beer.” He laughed and shook his head. What kind of insane quibbling possessed theologians who would okay 3.2% beer but not Royal Bohemian? Why weren’t they wondering, like Fen, about whether the whole idea of Baptism for salvation might not be absurd?
Things came to a head in a discussion of sexual sinfulness in Fr. Alexus’s Moral Theology course. Alexus was reading a sentence from their 1951 edition of Jone and Adelman, the standard English translation of Canon Law used in all American seminaries: “Because of the varying degrees of influence they may have in exciting sexual pleasure, the parts of the human body are sometimes divided into decent (face, hands, feet), less decent (breast, back, arms and legs), and indecent (sex organs and adjacent parts). The breathless young seminarians leaned forward in their desk chairs, anticipating with both rapt curiosity and dreadful embarrassment what might come next.
What came next was a grating laugh.
“What’s so funny, Oblate Blaise?” Fr. Alexus asked in a voice heavy with warning.
Blaze started to mumble an apology and to lie that he had seen something amusing out the window. But suddenly all of his intellectual frustration boiled over. “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Is everyone going crazy? You can’t divide the human body up into safe and unsafe zones like that. How can your back be less decent than your foot? Jeez, what if you’re one of those idiots with a foot fetish.” The more he talked, the bolder he became. “If body parts adjacent to sex organs are indecent, where do the adjacent parts end? This is insane. And moreover, if God made the human body, how can a penis be indecent? How can sexual pleasure ever be bad?”