by Gene Logsdon
“I would not do that right now,” Blaze answered hastily, before Gabe could voice his opinion. Blaze knew that Gabe would vote for putting Fen under the vow to come back because he could not fathom what Blaze knew to be true: that Fen had reached a state of mental conviction where threats of even excommunication would mean nothing. Excommunication would just make it more difficult for Fen to come back in case he had a change of mind.
The Prior tapped his fingers on his desk, trying to think through a course of action. Finally he spoke. “I want you to be sure that the poor boy has enough to eat, clothes to wear, and some kind of bed. Oblate Blaise, I put you in charge of this. Take what he needs over to him. But I don’t want either of you telling the others, including the faculty, that you are taking care of him. I don’t want it to look like I condone his action in any way. For now we’ll just treat it as a mental problem for which Oblate Christopher can’t be held accountable in the eyes of God.”
CHAPTER 22
Blaze decided that maybe the institutional Christian God did exist after all, because the Prior’s decision played right into his sub-rosa schemes. Not only would he be able to take care of his friend, and talk with him about his plot to overthrow the Church hierarchy with the promulgation of the Eleven New Theses, but he now had a perfect alibi for being out on the roads on the Farm Zephyr almost whenever he felt like it. This situation would allow him to visit Marge Puckett on his way to and from Fen. Blaze had reached the point where he could no longer think of not visiting her. The Puckett farm was only a few miles away from Lake Wassermensch. The fact that the Prior stipulated some secrecy in the care and nurturing of Fen helped also the secrecy necessary in the care and nurturing of Marge. Using the Zephyr, it would just appear to the other oblates that he was going over to the rented farm to do farm work. The fact that the Prior had not included Gabe in the care and feeding of Fen surprised him, but so much the better, since seeing Marge Puckett was something he did not want even Gabe to know about. At least not just yet.
He filled a grain sack with enough food from the kitchen storeroom to last Fen a week, loaded it on the trailer behind the Zephyr, together with a mattress and blankets and a laundry bag of clothes from Fen’s room. Fr. Abelard, who had for the length of about a month, again foresworn liquor and was hard at work spying on the community from his third-floor room, noted Blaze’s strange departure and duly reported it to Prior Robert. The Prior told him that he would take the information under advisement but said it so icily that Abelard knew there was something going on he didn’t know. Maybe Robert had found out about the night at the slaughterhouse. He went back to his room and started drinking again.
Blaze had noted previously that at 30 miles per hour the Zephyr’s front wheels went through a violent wobble that would have suggested slowing down to most drivers. But then as he increased the speed to 40 miles per hour, the wheels lost their wobble and rolled smoothly along. It was sort of like breaking the sound barrier. On country roads he encountered more vehicles going 35 miles per hour or less than on the highway, so he could amuse himself almost constantly by passing astonished drivers. He did it to Kluntz once, who, in trying to identify the tractor operator, drove right off into the ditch.
Fen was busy at work remodelling the kitchen, while he kept one eye on the island. Blaze told him about Kluntz and Fen laughed, seemingly as normal as ever. “That story will be all over the township before you get back to the seminary,” he said. “Kluntz has been here already, having found out about me from Hasse. You’d never believe what he brought me. Copies of some new girlie magazine called Playboy. Man you should take a gander at the women in it. I think Kluntz understands me better than anyone.”
Blaze looked and was embarrassed. So that’s what a woman looked like. Oh, wow. He told Fen what Prior Robert had said. Fen seemed disinterested. He now lived in a world where Priors and oblates and seminarians meant nothing to him. But he was glad for the food, admitting that he was getting tired of eating crappies.
“No sign of Mermaid yet,” he said, as if he expected her at any moment. He had found an old rowboat along the lake shore and patched it up so that when the weather got too chilly for swimming in the approaching autumn he could get around the lake, just in case.
“Fen, aren’t you having any second thoughts about this?” Blaze asked. Fen had not shaved in days and his hair was growing long. He looked like one of those beatniks wandering the roads, especially when he played his guitar.
“Actually, this is a pretty good life,” Fen said. “I’m rather enjoying it. Winter is going to be tough, but she’ll be back by then. If not I’ll cut wood and feed this old stove.”
“Well, you know, when Mermaid comes back, you’ll want to look like you did when she saw you, right?”
Fen stared at him, then nodded.
“Well, if I were you, I’d shave and keep myself clean. I can have Clutch come over and give you a haircut. She won’t recognize you the way you look now.”
Fen thought a moment. “Yeah, that’s a good idea.”
Blaze congratulated himself on his ability once again to help others. He climbed back on the Zephyr and zoomed out the long lane to the road again. Out of Fen’s view, although Fen surely would not care, he turned in the opposite direction from the seminary, his heart pounding in anticipation of his next stop.
Marge Puckett, working in the garden, could hear the unearthly whine of the tractor before it came into view. She leaned on her hoe and watched with astonishment as it careened past her and wheeled into the barnyard. Blaze hopped off his steel steed, raked his cowboy hat off his head, and walked jauntily to the garden fence.
“It’s you,” Marge said, not able to keep a little squeal of pleasure out of her voice.
“Yep, it’s me. I just happened to be over at our rented farm, and thought I’d come around this way on my way back to the sem. Saw you in the garden.”
“I saw you at the ball game,” she said, knowing that he was well aware of that. “That was some catch you made.”
He grinned. God, life was good. But he didn’t know what to say, a condition in which he rarely found himself.
“What kind of tractor is that?” she asked, wrinkling up her face to stare at it and then coming out of the garden to inspect it.
“The fastest tractor in the world. I’m going to enter it in one of those tractor rodeos and win a million bucks with it.”
“You’re crazy,” she said, good-humoredly. “I thought you said you were going to leave the seminary?”
“Oh, yes. I am. Just not the right time now. Too much going on.”
She looked at him in amusement. Having spent a night with him, however preternaturally, she felt somehow at ease in his presence, as if she had known him forever. “You’re a strange case, you know. I don’t think you’ll ever leave the seminary.”
“Well, there’s things going on that I have to see the outcome of,” he said. “And once I made the decision to leave, I found that I felt no compulsion to do it right away. There’s no hurry. I am a man without a country, without a place, without any particular identity. My purpose for the moment is just to see what happens and maybe write about it. As Yogi Berra says, you can observe an awful lot, just by watching.” In his mind, he wondered why it was so easy to run on talking to her.
She shook her head, amazed and still amused. Her mind was racing for a way to keep him from leaving too quickly. “You should observe this farm, then. It is kind of unusual. I’ll show you why I would rather stay here than go back to college this fall.”
“Oh? Back to college? I thought you said you were going to quit.”
Touché. She laughed. “C’mon.”
She led him up a lane behind the house and farmstead buildings, across a fairly extensive stretch of cropped fields that ended at the top of a low ridge. On the other side was a sight that would have compelled a George Inness to reach for his brushes. They were looking down on a small lake, perhaps no more than twenty acres in size, ent
irely hidden from the road. In fact it was entirely hidden from all directions by the surrounding hillsides, a bowl of water with the sloping sides above the water covered by pasture fields. Cows, horses and sheep grazed the hillsides. The ridge that formed the top lip of the bowl was forested all around, except on the side where they stood. Marge waited for Blaze to react, wondering if he would understand more than just the beauty of it.
“Oh, wow,” Blaze said. He understood the beauty and that was enough for him.
“If you look between here and the house, there’s about thirty acres of cultivated ground,” she pointed out. “Then there’s maybe eighty acres of grass around the lake, twenty acres of woodland above, and the water itself. Our property completely surrounds that lake. For all practical purposes it is our own private pond. See how the fences divide the pasture into seven fields, all with access to the water. Dad can rotate the animals from one to the other and they always have water. He’s big into grassland farming, as they’re calling it, and he’s learned how to manage grass so the livestock live mostly on it and only a little from cultivated grains. We don’t have to do much farming at all. The pasture more or less renews itself constantly and the animals do all the harvesting. No erosion. No fertilizer. No chemicals. Pretty neat, don’t you think? Very low-cost farming.”
Her long explanation gave Blaze the opportunity to stare intently at her without seeming to be staring intently at her. He only half heard what she was saying. Her face had lots of little smile wrinkles around the eyes and mouth, and was peppered with freckles he hadn’t much noticed before. But then she said something that turned his attention away from her.
“We are totally self-sufficient. We don’t even have electricity, did you notice?”
“What?” Blaze was all disbelief.
“I told you my father was an unusual man. Actually, we have a little electricity from a wind generator. For lights in the house.
“And the radio. Dad wouldn’t be without his radio. He draws water for the house and barn from the lake with a hydraulic ram. Needs only gravity for power. We heat with our own wood. We farm with horses. Totally self-sufficient except for the two cars. Daddy lived near an Amish settlement when he was young and decided he would live like them if he could find the right place. He wandered through five states until he found this farm. He would kind of like to join the Amish.” She laughed. By now Blaze was giving her words his undivided attention.
“You raise all your own food?”
“Well, almost. We have to buy salt and stuff like that.”
“You milk your cows by hand?”
“Yes. We only have ten and usually a couple of them are dry. Mom helps and I do too when I’m home. And my boyfriend down the road helps milk in the evening when Dad needs him.”
“Oh.” A frown, like a catspaw on water, rippled over Blaze’s face but he made it disappear so fast he thought she didn’t notice. Then he added: “My Mom and I used to milk the cows at home by ourselves when Dad was in the fields. But we never had more than six.”
“You do the milking at the seminary too, don’t you?”
“Yes, but we have lots of manpower down there. We could milk twenty or thirty cows by hand without difficulty. But of course hardly anyone knows how to hand-milk and I doubt that they could ever learn. Just not fit for that kind of work. We’re getting an electric milker soon. Do you make butter?”
“Mom does that. Cans and freezes a lot of food too. Long about this time of year it gets to be real work. But worth it. And all our own meat. You know, girls complain about this kind of work, but I’ve never minded it. I like good food too much.”
“So you’re going to college again?”
“Yes,” she said, not happy about it. “I told Dad I just wanted to farm and have kids, but he says I have to go to college first to learn what’s out in the world. If I don’t do that, he says, I won’t come back here with the proper conviction.”
“Your father is a wise man,” Blaze said. They had been walking back towards the house for some time now, ever since, in fact, the boyfriend had gotten into the conversation. Now Blaze said he had to be leaving and climbed on his tractor. “Tell your Dad if he ever needs help with the cows, to let me know.”
And he was off then, excitement over Marge mixed with dismay over the boyfriend. What did he expect? There was always going to be a goddam boyfriend. But she did not speak of him with a whole lot of portent, he decided. More like referring to an old shoe. Maybe he still had a chance.
CHAPTER 23
In a rural area where even a car passing on a country road was a Social Event, the Great Potato Race had taken on the trappings of festival: a cross between a county fair and a prayer meeting. Various interested parties began to descend upon Gabe’s and Hasse’s two potato patches. Horticulturists and agronomists led discussions in the use of sulfur in potato culture and on the increasing immunity of potato bugs to insecticides. Young farmers argued about whether close plantings producing a greater number of smaller potatoes would outyield wider plantings producing fewer but larger potatoes. Old farmers wondered if it made any difference whether big or small potatoes were used for seed. Harriet Snod’s Garden Club discussed whether Pisces, Scorpio or Capricorn was the better sign to plant under. Impromptu contests occurred to determine whether anyone could kick wet gumbo from a boot in less than five tries. Blaze arranged a special ceremony that involved the Prior walking up and down the rows of God’s potatoes sprinkling holy water, being careful not to do so in his usual ample manner, lest some of the precious liquid fall accidentally on mammon’s potatoes too. Blaze, with fiendish deviltry, had tried to persuade the Prior to include prayers of exorcism over Hasse’s potatoes. The Prior smiled and rolled his eyes.
In case holy water was not enough, Gabe turned to irrigation during a summer dry spell. He showed farmers and agronomists how he could easily irrigate his potatoes by damming up the laterals of his drainage system so that the everflowing spring water filled the ditches to the desired level, allowing the water to run out into the potato patch.
Hasse gave no indication that he knew of this cagey maneuver, but he added more mulch around his plants and let everyone know that this practice was much cheaper and not only as effective at holding sufficient moisture in the soil without irrigation, but also at controlling weeds without herbicides.
The director of the local Farm Bureau chapter dropped by, making his usual point about how his organization was against farm subsidies except when farmers needed them, which was almost always. The local Chapter of the Minnesota Organic Farmers set up a booth in front of Hasse’s potatoes and passed out literature on the effectiveness and benefits of organic food production. Hasse was more than a little embarrassed by this turn of events because he still suspected organic farming might be a socialist plot.
The organic farmers inspired an equal but opposite reaction. A hastily formed coalition of local custom spray applicators and chemical fertilizer dealers set up their own booth in front of the Josephian potatoes and proclaimed to all vistors how pesticides fed the world. It was now Gabe’s turn to be embarrassed. He secretly believed that chemical companies did not care a bit about feeding the world but only about how much money they could make.
To take advantage of the situation, Melonhead set up a booth from which he dispensed his herbal remedies, his “Ascension All Natural Poultice Bandages” and his new “Ascension Natural Wormer—For Livestock But Okay For People Too.” Some days his voluntary offering box was stuffed with dollar bills. Prior Robert worried about the efficacy and legality of Melonhead’s potions, especially the wormer. “Relax, Prior, this is an all-natural wormer,” said Melonhead. “You’d get a really terrible case of the runs and have to stop drinking it long before it could really hurt you.”
Before long both the organic and the chemical congregations were locked in a wordy contest to see which could appear to the public as the most environmentally-pure group. Hasse, standing beside Gabe, feeling for once more clo
sely allied to his adversary than to any of the groups supporting him, remarked out of the side of his mouth: “They remind me of two ministers using the size of their collections to measure which is the most god-fearing.”
As the organic-chemical debate reached fever pitch, a Wildlife Agent from the Soil Conservation Service showed up to spoil all the fun. He scolded Oblate Gabriel and Farmer Hasse for destroying a wet-land and ruining wildlife habitat. Until the situation was remedied, the SCS official officiously told them, both were disqualified from government subsidies. He then waited for the anguished objections and lame excuses that he was so used to hearing from farmers when informed of their sinfulness: they had not known, etc.; there was plenty of swamp left for wildlife, etc.; drained acres weren’t destroying anything really, but utilizing nature better and increasing the habitat for some wildlife including coonhunters, etc. etc. But neither Oblate Gabriel nor Farmer Hasse reacted at all, only staring at the official in amused silence. Finally Gabe said to him: “The Josephians aren’t in any of the subsidy programs.”
“Neider am I,” said Hasse, who despised all forms of government interference, good or bad. The official turned away, his crest drooping.
Harvest day in October found the area around the potato patches looking, with the various tented booths, more like a Medieval country fair than a farm field. A big crowd had gathered, with parked cars backed up a quarter mile both ways along the road leading to it, as at a farm sale. The potato vines had all matured and died and there was no way to tell, save from the bulging plant hills, just how good the crop was. But everyone knew that both God’s and mammon’s plots had grown as equally perfect during the season as any potato patch in the memory of Carver County. All that was left to see was whether Oblate Gabriel’s potatoes had gone to vine even a little, for ignoring the signs of the zodiac, or whether Hasse’s manure was as potent as he claimed it was to make up for his wider plant spacings. Bets were placed both ways and the odds stayed even. Caution ruled all pronouncements, agricultural and theological. The Prior, who was gripped by a secret panic that Hasse would win and he would be blamed for exposing the Church to ridicule, gave an invocation, asking God’s blessing upon all and hoping that out of the contest, love would flow between everyone in the community. That much could hardly get him in trouble with his Provincial who was already uneasy with the attention that the Great Potato Race had brought to the Josephians. The Farm Bureau president once more informed the crowd of the foolishness of government subsidies except when farmers needed them, which was almost always. The County Extension Agent pointed out that he was there to serve all the people, regardless of race, color, or agricultural philosophy. He had decided not to include creed in this particular instance because he feared that could be interpreted as violating the separation of church and state. Then the crowd pressed forward and the potato harvester began to make its way down the rows.