by Gene Logsdon
But the first person Lukey saw when he walked into the saloon was Blaze. He came close to fainting again, especially since Blaze was in the arms of a girl. Surely, Lukey thought, I have stumbled into a hangout of devil-worshippers who must have kidnapped Blaze and bewitched him into joining them. Looking around, he noticed Frank Jameses all over the restaurant, pretending to be waiters. Vampires in western drag? One of them approached him, smiling, to usher him to a table. Oh, my God, they want to seduce me into their lair of witchery, he thought. He turned and fled out the door.
Blaze had been as surprised to see Lukey as Lukey to see him. But instead of relishing the obvious fact that Lukey was frightened out of his mind, Blaze suddenly felt pity for him.
“Marge, hold on a sec. I gotta settle something.”
He ran out the door after Lukey. Lukey, over his shoulder, saw him coming and crying out again, ran faster. Surely he was being pursued by the devil in the disguise of another devil.
“Lukey, for heaven’s sake, stop!”
Blaze had to tackle him half-way across the parking lot and wrestle him to the ground. Lukey began to pray out loud.
“Oh for crap’s sake. Calm down, you idiot, “Blaze said. He was surprised at how kindly he sounded, talking to a man he had always thought he despised. “There’s an explanation for all of this.”
Lukey abruptly stopped his whimpering prayers. “Some kind of elaborate joke you’ve been playing on me, you sonuvabitch?”
Blaze had to laugh. Lukey would always be Lukey. “No, Lukey. No joke. Awful things have happened.” Blaze’s voice broke. “Gabe is dead, Lukey.”
“Whaaaaat?”
“Gabe is dead. He turned that goddamned tractor over on himself.” And suddenly Blaze was sobbing helplessly. He had not cried like this since he was a child.
Lukey did something he would never have predicted of himself, especially where Blaze was involved. They were both sitting on the parking lot. He reached over and put his arm around Blaze and pulled his weeping comrade close against him. And Blaze made no effort to stop him, did in fact surrender to him. They sat there, then, on the blacktop, bound to each other, crying. And they both knew something. It was okay to show love for another man. Didn’t have to have a damn thing to do with sex.
“Come back inside and have a beer with us,” Blaze finally said. “Melonhead’s here too. There’s more happened in the last few hours than you’d ever believe could happen in a lifetime.”
Nash Patroux herded the Lords of Folly into the upstairs party room and shortly joined them. It was a very quiet party, considering the people present. Not a word of banter. Not one laugh, not even a quiet chuckle. The events of the last few hours had driven the merry playfulness of seminary life out of them. They were feeling real-world suffering. To help Lukey understand, Blaze made Jesse put his bandanna over his face and brandish a pistol and make noises like a sawwhet owl. At any other time, Blaze would have been pounding the table in glee at Lukey’s total embarrassment, but because of Gabe, he could not. Gabe was gone; the Blaze of yesterday was gone too.
About that time Hasse and Kluntz walked into the room. They had come to tell Fen about the accident. Kluntz was a little nettled that everyone already knew.
Blaze and Fen stared at Hasse. They had never seen him so visibly in agony. Always the old farmer was the cool one, looking down on miserable stupid human beings in the way he figured God would observe them if he believed in God.
“He was like a son to me,” Hasse said, seating himself heavily at the table. “A son. I never had a son.” He looked at the others. It was obvious that he needed comfort, that he wanted someone to hug him, but who would ever hug a man like Hasse and live to tell about it. “The last three years have been better for me than all the rest before,” he said, in a forlorn, lost tone of voice that Blaze had never heard before. Hasse was not murdering consonants. He was not being sarcastic. Blaze decided to risk it. He hugged Hasse. Hasse looked startled, then hugged back.
“Gabe lost his life to keep me from losing my mind,” Blaze said. No one responded so he said it again.
“Gabe lost his life to keep me from losing my mind.”
“You know something, Blaze,” Fen replied. “Even when you speak a plain truth, you’re still fantasizing.”
Where sorrow is deepest, laughter is only a breath away. Funeral goers often start laughing inanely through their tears. So now, after that remark, there was no way to keep the Lords of Folly from laughing, relieving the crushing burden of their sorrow.
“That’s exactly what Gabe would have said, you know,” Blaze remarked.
Through the night, the Lords of Folly pretended to tell their antic seminary adventures to Marge and Mermaid, but they were really telling them to each other as soldiers do. “Remember when …” “You won’t believe this but …” “How we managed to live through that …” Marge and Mermaid pretended to find the stories funny rather than boring. They understood. Men told their war stories over and over again because that was how they taught themselves to almost accept death.
Patroux listened with rapt attention. When he would withdraw to get more beer, he made notes. He had always wanted to write a western and the Lords of Folly had inspired him. He would write a novel called The Second Coming of Frank James and His Apostles. It would be a best seller, he just knew.
The eastern sky was beginning to pale by the time the Lords of Folly ran out of stories and tears. But no one wanted the gathering to end.
“What are you guys going to do?” Lukey asked because he had no idea what he was going to do.
Marge spoke up. “I know what Blaze is going to do.”
Dry laughter. Almost like the SBDC Boys of yesterday.
“And we all know what Danny and Banana have decided,” Melonhead said. “And Fen.”
“What about you, Melonhead?” Fen asked.
“Well, Gabe had it all figured out, you know. How we were going to establish our herbal medicine center for poor people. He said he had a way to convince the Minister General to go along with the idea. He said he knew where we could get the money. He figured that the Josephian authorities would never turn down money, even if it were for a gambling casino. But Gabe never told me the source of that money.”
“I know,” Hasse said and all eyes swivelled to look at him in astonishment. He smiled, retreating back into his disguise. “Dat sonuvagun found out somehow dat I was rich.”
Again laughter, but subdued.
“I’ve got an idea,” Marge said. They all looked at her in surprise. She and Blaze had become so engrossed in each other that she did not seem to be listening to the conversation. Hasse’s admission happened to jell with an idea she had been toying with ever since she had learned what her father had done. “There’s something even Blaze doesn’t know yet. My father sold our farm. There’s a big development coming into our area. Neighbors sold out too. Big money.” Kluntz, hearing such news, fidgeted like a rabbit in a pen surrounded by foxes. He hadn’t heard. He must be slipping in his old age.
Blaze started to express his surprise and disappointment, but Marge put her finger over his lips and continued: “I’m going to have some money too, Mr. Hasse. I am going to buy a farm for Blaze and me. Here’s what I’m thinking. Why don’t you sell the farm at Lake Wassermensch to us at a ridiculously moderate price. That would mean that Fen and Mermaid could go on living there. And Melonhead could make his medical center there. And we could sort of adopt Jesse to live there too.”
Once more, Blaze looked at Marge in awe. She had never seemed particularly interested in the visions of Gabe and Melonhead. But she was looking at Hasse. She knew the right button to push. “Then you could actually use your money to build and furnish the medical center.”
“And Clutch could go on perfecting his gasahol plant,” Melonhead said, his eyes as wide as full moons as he contemplated all the possibilities.
“And, just think, Hasse. You would have a built-in hay crew for as long as you live,”
Fen said.
Hasse trained gimlet eyes on each of the Lords of Folly in turn, taking a long time to answer. They could almost hear the calculator in his brain clicking away. Finally, he reached a conclusion. “That Gabe. He is something, isn’t he. He’s getting the best of me even when he’s dead.”
Then Kluntz, lips pouting and not with snuff this time, added: “Hey. What about me? I’ve got some money too, you know.”
“Can I join you?” The voice came from Lukey, but did not sound like Lukey. It was a voice of surrender, of finally learning almost how to think.
Now it was time for Blaze to prove that he really was born to help others in his own weird way. “No, Lukey, you belong in the priesthood and you know it. And now that we have taught you how to think, finally, you’ll make a good one.”
Lukey frowned at Blaze, trying to figure out if his adversary were making fun of him again.
“No, I mean it,” Blaze said. “You will make a good priest. When you thought I was in trouble being shanghied off that train, what did you do? As much as you despised me, as much as you wanted to keep on going, you came to look for me.” Then winking at Fen, he added, “And besides we’re going to need an inside man in Rome when we take over the Church.”
The sun had risen now, and the bustle of the world had to go on, sleep or no sleep. Lukey, Danny, Banana and Melonhead went back to the seminary, Lukey to stay, the others to prepare to leave. Hasse went home to milk his cows. Kluntz went scouting for more gossip about the new development. Fen and Mermaid returned to Seminary Two. Marge and Blaze drove on to the Puckett farm to tell her parents that they were getting married. Blaze refused to go back to the seminary. They would stay with Fen and Mermaid until they had sorted out their lives. They then climbed up to the high pasture hill overlooking the Lake Wassermensch farm that would be theirs, and with many a contented sigh, began their life together.
EPILOGUE
A 1999 Ford Taurus stopped in front of a large, institutional brick building crumbling into ruins. Faded lettering over the entrance read “Ascension Seminary.” The driver, a tottering old man in clerical garb and Roman collar, climbed painfully out of the car and stretched carefully. At 89 Fr. Robert probably should not have been driving anymore, but no one in the Josephian Order had the guts to try to make him quit. His superiors barely had the courage to demand that he retire as pastor of the church in Broken Bow, Nebraska, where he had happily ministered to the people for forty-four years. He had been largely left alone in Broken Bow after the “unfortunate incidents” that had occurred right at the place where he now stood. Forty-four years. He could hardly believe that this place had been so full of life such a short time ago and was now crumbling into ruins. A painful smile spread over his face as scenes of the past flooded into memory. He stared a long time at the pathetic field of drought-wilted corn right south of the crumbling building. Forty-four years ago that field had been a sandy ball diamond where a bunch of seminarians under him had beat the ass off a semi-professional baseball team. What mad mayhem! But was it any more madness to try to grow priests on ball diamonds than to try to grow surplus corn on soil so poor it would barely raise sand burrs? He looked through the sagging door of the building into the hallway, hearing in memory, the voices of a community of men happy to do God’s work without pay, to sing, to cook, to paint, to build, to craft, ora et labora and as that imp of a Blaze used to say, plenty of sporta too.
He did not go inside. His heart was in bad enough shape. It had been broken forty-four years ago. For the same reason, he did not go across the road and into the barn with the words, “Ascension Seminary,” still faintly visible, painted on its grey, faded siding. He just stood there while the tears rolled down his cheeks. Trees had already grown up along the barn foundation. How quickly the forest reclaims all signs of human activity if given a chance. How puny is the work of humankind.
Robert had not kept close track of the place after the Josephians had sold it. He had heard it changed hands several times, but he had not imagined that finally it would be allowed just to fall into ruin. Sad as that was, it seemed symbolic to him of what had happened to the traditional Church. It was gone, gone, gone, like the traditional farms, the traditional villages, the traditional people. Gone, gone, gone. All that an old man could do was weep. Weep and drive on. Drive on, drive on, drive on. That was history in two words: drive on.
But before he drove on, he had another stop to make. Over the years, he had exchanged letters several times with Blaze and Fen, who had caused him so much pain and grief. They had been the cause of the biggest furor ever raised within the 400-year-old Josephian Order. By some absolutely remarkable miracle, they still lived here, at what forty-four years ago was known as the Lake Wassermensch farm, or, to a few, Seminary Two. He meant to see what had become of them before he went on to Chicago to die.
The countryside through which he drove was hardly recognizable. Roads that forty-four years ago had been narrow, gravel, one-lane affairs, were now two cars wide and paved. Many of the bucolic farms he remembered were now suburban landscapes. The Hasse farm, the Kluntz farm, the Puckett farm were houses and golf courses and office buildings and expansive lawns. The little lakes that forty-four years ago were surrounded by fields and cows, were now choked by human residences. Country villages had disappeared into a cauldron of feverish growth: subdivisions, office buildings, strip malls, new highways. He was lost.
Eventually, backtracking several times, he found the road to Seminary Two and what he saw there made him smile. The farm was still intact, though its appearance changed somewhat from forty-four years ago. Over the entrance to the lane back to the house and barn was a big sign that read: Folly Farm. The fields were dotted with sheep, groves of trees and small fields of strange-looking crops. A windmill turned on the highest knoll of the farm. Several long, one-sided greenhouses full of exotic plants bordered the lane, facing the southern sun. Was this, after all, the fruition of the visions of those seemingly zany former students of his?
With a start, he thought the young man who waved at him from a field beside the lane was Blaze. Sure looked like him. Would have to be Blaze’s son.
The old farmhouse had been remodelled. The barn looked about the same but restored somewhat. Chickens squawked and strutted everywhere. Ricks of firewood filled several sheds and nearly every roof was bedecked with solar panels. He noticed, curiously, that no electric power line ran back to the farmstead. A fairly new house stood on the hillside above the barn, but lower than the windmill. Evidently, in the old manner Robert remembered from his youth, water was being pumped by wind to the highest elevation from which it could flow by gravity to buildings below.
The lake shore was still wild and natural. No noose of housing development surrounded it as with the other lakes. Down the hill from the newer house an older couple was walking toward him. Despite the intervening years, they were unmistakably Blaze and Marge. And they knew their visitor was Robert. Aging had been kind to all of them.
For the longest time they just stood and stared at each other. Finally, Blaze spoke—bluntly as usual: “Can’t believe you’re still alive.”
“I remember thinking the same thing about you, on several occasions,” the old priest replied, smiling. And then they hugged each other. The years and the philosophies that separated them had only strenthened their mutual regard.
Yes, Marge explained, in answer to Robert’s question, that was their son in the field. He and his family lived in the old house, and had largely taken over the farm work. Yes, they raised sheep and the herbs and food crops that Folly Farm sold. Actually, Folly Farm was rather well known locally for its herbal products, sheep cheese and woolen goods. Yes, Melonhead was still alive and still doing a good business in herbs. Herbal remedies had become popular, just as Gabe had known they would, and Folly Farm made enough money selling them and putting out books about them to get by. “It’s kind of ironic,” Blaze said, “but the residential development we despise for filling up the
countryside with suburbs is actually the reason our farm thrives. People with money are crazy. They’ll buy about anything we produce if we take it to them. I think they’d pay us to spoon it in their mouths if we offered.” Blaze did his hyena-like laugh which had only grown louder with age. “Melonhead has just retired from teaching at the university,” he added. “His wife—that Dr. Armbuster, remember her?—died a few years ago. She helped us too, even though it cost her loss of status, and probably money, within the medical establishment. The AMA is a lot like the Church. Both afraid they will lose business to mavericks like the Lords of Folly.”
Yes, Clutch was still alive and lived on the farm too. He was away right now, working on a big alcohol plant that a private company was building. He had become a leading expert in ethanol fuel distillation. “We still use that first still he made for our own fuel,” Blaze said. “Clutch fixed the tractor to run on it quite efficiently.
Yes, Fen and Mermaid still live close by, down the shoreline a bit, in a little cottage they built themselves. They help with the sheep and the herb farming. But before we go on down to their place, we’ll have to ring the bell at the head of the path leading to it,” Blaze said, grinning. “Fen and Mermaid still don’t much like to wear clothes and on a nice day like this … well, we’ll be sure to ring the bell.”