by Gene Logsdon
Banana and Danny were evidently not as sane and normal as Blaze had once thought either. They had become uncommonly secretive, rarely even coming to the barn in the evening to smoke. When they asked to take courses at the university as Melonhead was doing, Blaze figured something unusual was going on.
“What are you guys up to?” he asked while they were playing catch one afternoon. It was late fall, far beyond baseball season.
Danny gloved the ball, motioned Banana to follow him and walked over to Blaze, looking around as if afraid he might be overheard.
“Promise you won’t say a word?”
“Sure.”
“We think we can get on the university baseball team in the Spring.”
“Robert will never let you do that,” Blaze replied.
“Hildy has a plan.”
“You’re kidding.” Blaze paused, finding the idea wonderful because it was so absurd.
“He thinks somehow if we try out for the team, even if we don’t make it, it will help him finagle a game between the university and us.”
So maybe everyone he liked was looney, Blaze told himself. But what of his own case? What could be crazier than suffering along in the regimented life of a seminary because he actually enjoyed it even though he actually hated it?
CHAPTER 25
In November, a new lay brother arrived at Ascension, relieving Blaze of his barn chore duties. It hardly mattered now, since he had another way to avoid much of the regimen of the seminary that he found odious. As Fen’s official caretaker, he had reinforced his position by telling Prior Robert that he feared Fen would take his life when he realized that Mermaid was a figment of his imagination. Blaze did not really believe that, but Prior Robert did.
“He not do that, pal,” Jesse said when he and Blaze were alone. “He not crazy.”
“How do you know?” Blaze asked. Getting Jesse to talk about sanity was bound to be interesting.
“Jesse know, pal. You’re the one I worry about.”
Blaze looked sharply at him even as he laughed. Jesse never kidded. Jesse didn’t know how to do that.
“You look faraway in the eyes,” Jesse said. “You going to put me in institution.”
“No I’m not.
“Promise, Jack?”
Blaze had promised numerous times before, but maybe here was a chance to get at the truth. “Under one condition. You must tell me if you’ve ever tried to rob a train.”
This was the first time Blaze had directly confronted him with the charge. But Jesse was ready. If he admitted that he had tried to rob a train, he’d admit that he was crazy and have to go to an institution for sure. “Rob what train? You going crazy, Jack.”
“Why does he call you Jack?” Melonhead asked one day.
“Because Blaze is his horse’s name,” Blaze said, as if that were a perfectly logical answer, which of course it was. Melonhead walked away, wondering if Blaze were sampling his herbal teas too often.
Jesse followed Blaze around now like a faithful dog, afraid that if he did not stick close to his pal, the Pinkertons would grab him and put him away. Blaze at first did not mind having Jesse as a constant companion, even when he stopped at the Pucketts. Having someone with him made his visits with Marge seem merely social and not personal, as if he had no special interest in her, although he was hoping, contrarily, that she would understand that he did have a special interest in her and he brought Jesse along to obscure that fact. But Jesse could be trying. Making small talk for ulterior purposes was impossible with him around. For example, to one of Blaze’s sly attempts to compliment Marge, he butted in.
“No, Jack, Fen never said that Marge was the prettiest girl he’s ever seen after Mermaid. You make that up.”
This caused Marge to double up with laughter while Blaze glared helplessly at his shadow.
Blaze had figured that he could get away from Jesse by driving the Farm Zephyr. Jesse was grievously afraid of the Zephyr and would not ride on it. He would not willingly ride in any vehicle powered by a piston engine. He would grow nervous and tremble in a car, and the faster the car went the more afraid he became. “Car not have feet and legs,” he said once when Blaze insisted that he explain his fear. “Car monster.” Blaze thought about that for days. Jesse was of course correct. Accident statistics proved it. Once more he wondered: who really was sane?
But not wanting to ride on wheels did not deter Jesse in the least. He turned to his reliable old horse and galloped recklessly along behind the tractor. Often, Axel, on his way to the new location of his still at the lake, would follow them, the three forming a curious caravan: the flying Zephyr, the galloping horse, and the groaning old truck. Once Marge encountered them as she drove home from college and was surprised that the strange sight did not amuse her as it did everyone else in the neighborhood. Why did Blaze insist on making a fool of himself, she wondered. Why did she care?
If Kluntz spotted the caravan headed for the lake, he would pursue it in his pickup. Sometimes Hasse was with him and they would joke that apparently Axel would soon join the Josephians. “Birds of a feather,” Kluntz said once, but didn’t finish the saying because suddenly he realized that it included him. Hasse didn’t mind being included. The greater the number of people gathering at his ramshackle farmhouse, the bigger the haying crew. He had in fact put out an extra field of alfalfa in anticipation of the free labor. Meanwhile, he was experimenting with milkweed stems in the roller mill he had installed in the barn on the floor above Axel’s still. Milkweed juice was the stickiest stuff he’d ever encountered. If it wouldn’t cure cancer, it might make a helluva glue.
Sometimes, Jesse could be talked into staying with Fen awhile, and then Blaze would roar off to the Puckett farm alone. If Marge was not there, he visited her parents and helped with chores. The Pucketts still believed that he had saved Marge’s life and since Marge was planning to marry the young man on the neighboring farm when she finished school, they saw nothing particularly untoward about a seminarian hanging around. They thought, in fact, that his influence might be good for her. Al, her boyfriend, was a rather unimaginative soul.
In the presence of the Pucketts, Blaze surprised himself by acting pensive, even serious. He had no inclination to be the jokester or to rend the air with his harebrained laughter. He asked question after question about the farm and its lack of dependency on the outside world.
“You two could teach the Josephians how they should be living,” he observed one day, much to George Puckett’s amusement.
“I doubt that,” he said. “What Mom and I do here is too tedious. It takes discipline and the experience of generations. I learned it mostly working on Amish farms when I was a kid.”
“But from what I see, it is a fact that people can live like this quite satisfactorily,” Blaze insisted. “Do you know that Marge wants to live and farm like you do?”
“Oh, she’s just trying to be loyal to us. You can overdo loyalty, you know. The world is passing people like Mom and me by. The younger generations don’t want to live a life based on husbandry. When you farm like this, you have to be here almost all the time to care for the animals. Young people today don’t want to be tied down like that. Can you blame them? Not enough money in it anymore anyway. College will make her see that there’s no future in farms like ours. Hell, if you’ll excuse my language, the agricultural school actually teaches that.”
“Well, I’m a young person and I find being tied down to a place to be quite exciting,” Blaze replied. “Do you think someone like me could live this way?”
Puckett laughed. “I don’t know if you’re steady enough.”
“But Marge said you travelled through five states before you found what you wanted. Couldn’t that be true of me?”
“Well, I knew from the beginning what I wanted.”
“Maybe the reason I didn’t is that I wasn’t lucky enough to experience what suited me until now.”
George did not answer. This Blaze fellow was not easy to fo
llow.
When Marge was home, she and Blaze took long walks across the meadows around the lake. They were seldom at a loss for words. Marge intended to take over the farm whether her father liked it or not, and with Al inheriting the farm next door, they would do okay. She had some new ideas about grassland farming and solar energy she wanted to try.
Blaze described again the ranch he wanted to own, in a valley where the sun came up at one end and set in the other, with comforting hills on either side.
“And I’m going to have a portable record player in my saddlebag that plays the ‘Song of the Faraway Hills’ over and over again,” he said. She could not tell if he were joking. The oblates had recently been allowed to go to the movie Shane in which that song was used as a background theme. Blaze stayed to see it twice and after that he scratched “Blaze” out of all the textbooks he had written his name in, and replaced it with “Shane.” But he was not totally romantic about cowboying. He wanted to raise sheep.
“Shane would not have approved,” Marge said, smiling.
“Sheep provide meat and wool both, and I’ve been reading about flocks in Europe that are milked just like cows for dairy products,” he explained. “And if a ewe gets muley I can pick her up and throw her where I want her to go. Can’t do that with a cow.”
Here was yet another Blaze, Marge thought. A Blaze completely, almost brutally, practical. He continued in that vein. He saw in her father’s self-subsistent farm a way out of his dilemma as a man with no money who did not particularly care about making money either. A self-subsistent farm life would require only a little cash flow and he’d be freer than a rich man, he told her. “I can’t stand the idea of sucking up to some boss all my life. That’s why I like the seminary even though I hate it. I’ve figured out how to do just about whatever I please, even with the vow of obedience, not to mention the vow of poverty.”
Marge laughed. No one else she knew could come up with such droll and contradictory observations. “You would never have to worry about becoming a nine-to-fiver,” she said. “You’d get fired regularly.”
More than once Blaze pointed out that they really wanted the same lifestyle. It would be about that time that Marge would grow uneasy and mention her boyfriend. Until Blaze came along, she had decided that since she was bent on farming, Al was prime material for a husband. Now after being with Blaze, she was starting to argue with herself about Al and she felt guilty about doubting him.
Blaze knew that he was falling in love, but he kept the conversations on a chatty, joking plane, afraid to speak of his desire for her, afraid that she did not share a kindred feeling for him. He feared that after one of those sudden silences that came between them, in which they stared fondly at each other, she would say that she just wanted to be friends. If that ever happened he knew that he would have to excuse himself, go someplace private and throw up. He was in denial. When she talked about getting married and where she and Al were planning to live, he did not hear her. He concentrated only on the fact that she and Al were not yet engaged.
Occasionally Al was at the Puckett home when Blaze arrived. He was a nice enough fellow, Blaze thought, but so terribly sure of himself or else so dull that he didn’t recognize even the possibility that Blaze might be a rival. Blaze pretended to be pleased with Al’s and Marge’s plan to marry. That’s the way a really cool guy should act, he figured. But he didn’t mind fantasizing about what a hard right might do to that cocky jaw of Al’s. When Al was at the farm, Blaze would soon leave. Marge would watch him go, a troubled look on her face.
CHAPTER 26
“Carpe diem,” Blaze said to Gabe one day as he mused about when to implement his decision to leave the seminary. Gabe pretended not to know what the words meant, although, come to think of it, at the moment he really couldn’t remember what they meant. He had pretended being slightly addled so long that he sometimes wondered if he really were slightly addled and only thought he was pretending. Blaze wondered too.
Alone with his shadow, Jesse, Blaze asked: “Do you think that Gabe is losing his mind?”
“Gabe lost his mind long time ago, Jack.”
“How do you know that?”
“He thinks I’m crazy. He don’t know I’m pretending.”
“How do you know you’re pretending?”
“If I really crazy I wouldn’t know that I was pretending.”
By Christmas time, Blaze could see that the part of the Josephian life he had loved even though he pretended not to, was disintegrating before his eyes. Fen was gone; Gabe might as well be. Melonhead, Danny and Banana were at the university much of the time. He rarely got to work with Brother Walt. Clutch, as usual, kept to himself, although, curiously, he was spending more time at Fen’s house than Blaze was. Clutch told Prior Robert that he was repairing and installing household appliances which Hasse had brought from one of his other rental properties, so that Fen could live with a little more comfort.
But that was only a minor part of Clutch’s agenda. He told Blaze that he was building something in the barn that was going to save the world. Obviously, he was going crazy too. Maybe he was nipping at Axel’s moonshine.
Lukey, believing he was headed for Rome, became so pompous that Blaze could no longer irritate him by asking innocently whether Abs had made any advances toward him lately. Even suggesting that “gays can always tell other gays” failed to get any kind of response other than “You are so pitiful, Blaze.” Little Eddie and Mart, without the full SBDC Gang to give them security in numbers during escapades they would otherwise never have dreamed of becoming involved in, allied themselves with other, safer oblates in other cliques. They had by now convinced themselves that the train robbery was a case of group hysteria induced by breathing too much sulfurous smoke on the train, compounded by the excitement of travelling to a new home in the company of idiots like Blaze and Fen.
Even Jesse started to draw away from Blaze in a startlingly unforeseen development. He was growing fond of Josephian life in inverse ratio to Blaze’s disgust with it. He had mastered chanting and amazed the oblates by sing-songing whole psalms without reference to a breviary. Where he had previously sung “The Old Grey Mare” in the empty silo at the barn, he now blasted out psalm verses from memory. Jesse was happy. He loved sitting in the community rec room in the evening, listening to the oblates joke among themselves. He liked the kind attention they paid him. Working in the barn and the kitchen gave him a sense of worth. Most of all he loved the regular meals. Never before had so much good food been available to him and he stowed it away in massive portions. His gnarled skinny frame filled out and his stomach began to bulge. When Nash Patroux brought him a present at Christmas time, the bar owner laughed outright. “My God, Jesse, you’re turning into Friar Tuck.”
“You still a smartass, pal,” Jesse said, grinning his old idiot grin. “You turning into Fire Fuck.”
Little incidents like that struck Blaze as so hilarious that he wondered if he could ever quit the seminary. He decided that he had to set a deadline for himself. He would seek dispensation from his vows in the spring and go live with Fen. Since it did not matter one bit to him if he got dispensed or not—such legalities were just meaningless idiocies of papal power, he kept telling himself—he realized it was ridiculous to set a deadline. His conscience would allow him to walk away any time he felt like it, dispensation or no dispensation. The truth was that he put off the day of departure because he was afraid to go penniless into an unknown world. He loathed himself for his fear. But it was much shrewder to remain within the financial security of the Josephians while he courted Marge and took care of Fen.
Not that Fen needed his companionship any more. With the constant flow of visitors seeking various medical potions at the farmstead plus Hasse, Kluntz, Axel, Gabe, Clutch, and Melonhead dropping by routinely, Fen had more comforting company than Blaze did at the seminary. Blaze had in fact started calling the farmstead “Seminary Two.”
Besides, Fen had begun to find his
way. To preserve his sanity, he often spent most of the night playing his guitar and singing. He made up forlorn songs about Mermaid, his favorite being one he called “Succubia”: “I’m in love with a mermaid/ and I cannot yet tell/ If she’s an angel from heaven/ Or a devil from hell. But whether from hell or the heavens above/ Makes no difference to me/ She’s my one true love.” Nash Patroux, at the farmhouse to transact a little business with Axel, heard Fen singing one day and stayed to listen for a long time, transfixed by the sound.
“You’re pretty good, Fen. Would you come and sing in my restaurant? I could pay you well. Fifty bucks a night. You are just one whole helluva lot better than a lot of the stuff on the juke box.”
Now it was Fen’s turn to be transfixed. He could not believe his ears. God, he could make a living with his guitar maybe. But he had no transportation.
“You could ride over on Blaze (the horse),” Jesse said. “People come all the way from Minneapolis to see that.”
“Oh, wow,” Blaze (the man) said. “You are a genius, Jesse, no doubt about it.”
“Can I sing all the verses to ‘Succubia’?” Fen asked, warming up to the idea. Mermaid might hear about him and come to the restaurant. “Some of the verses are a little, well, dirty.”