“Kind of an odd little coincidence, though. This Father Baker vanished out here in the 1930s when they were building this reservoir. Turned up dead a week or so after he went missing. And now a name he mentioned in those papers is cropping up here.”
“Really!” Father Hannigan said sounding surprised. “Well, life is full of coincidences. Is this stuff you can use for your book?”
“I don’t know. It’s just a bit odd that I’m out here in the middle of nowhere and this old story about the devil in Massachusetts gets connected to a family that used to live out here.”
“Not sure I’m really following you, Phil.”
“Well this Father Baker collected all these papers, did all this research, and kept tracing the history of this one family. Starting way back with the Jesuits in the early 18th century in North America. I guess he figured there was some connection with this family and some bad stuff that had happened over many years. Father Baker was on his way to visit some distant relative of this family when he vanished.”
“So what’s happening now Phil? I still don’t get the connection.”
“Soldier killed in Vietnam 25 years ago. They found his bones. Going to rebury him in a town near here on Memorial Day. The soldier’s name is the same as the family name that old Father Baker was so worked up about.”
“Crazy old coot,” Father Hannigan said. “You know, to be honest with you, Phil, some of the old priests here remember him from the 1920s, 1930s. Obsessive type. Laser focus but only on what interested him. He had this thing about evil and the devil traveling in human form over centuries. I think that’s why Father Nickles gave you his papers. All sorts of good stuff there about how we seek to understand God by encountering his opposite, the devil. The devil in our daily lives.”
“So here I am, “Father Phil said. “Backstopping old Father Baker. Saying Mass with the Franciscans every morning at 5. But hey, I told you I’d check it out and now I actually have something to check out.”
“Stay in touch, Phil,” Father Hannigan said, sounding apologetic. “I wish we had more for you to do. I mean you were a star in the law school and a star in politics. And you’re the one who wrote the book on good and evil. Maybe you can use some of this stuff. Really! I mean the whole concept of the devil through the ages. It’s not really bogus. This is small potatoes for you. I know. But look, we’ll play some golf soon. The course here in Weston is great.”
Father Phil DiMarco smiled, said goodbye and hung up the phone. He was a tall, thin man in his late 60s with close-cropped white hair and a thin but almost permanent smile, the type of smile that started with pursed lips and gradually opened into a semi-mischievous grin. He dressed all in black, all the time—heavy plain black shoes, the types that cops and security guards wore; black pressed chino pants, blank long sleeved dress shirt with a white priest’s collar. He was, after all, a Jesuit.
Now he shook his head and smiled that smile again. He glanced again at the newspaper article that he had been reading before calling Father Hannigan.
A family’s 25 year wait to learn the fate of a son who was reported missing in action in North Vietnam in 1969 ended with a call from the Pentagon earlier this week that said their son’s remains had been recovered and identified. Kevin Flanagan of Belton, Massachusetts was reported missing in action on April 9, 1969.
Flanagan’s remains were expected to be flown to flown to Massachusetts sometime in the next several days. Services are planned for Memorial Day in his hometown of Belton, in Central-Western Massachusetts near the giant Quabbin Reservoir.
* * *
Chapter 9
Father Philip DiMarco, pushed the newspaper aside as he rose and moved three steps over to an elegant teak filing cabinet next to the window. The cabinet had been a gift to him over 30 years ago by Phyllis Morgan, the only woman he had ever loved. He had left her for the Jesuits and the priesthood, but he’d never forgotten her. He still had the teak filing cabinet she had given him for his birthday, just months before his decision to leave her for the Jesuits. It was a lovely cabinet—a work of art, divided into filing space with runners for hanging folders on the top and three drawers on the bottom. He had tried to give it back to her that evening long ago when he told her he was entering his novitiate with the Jesuits and leaving in a week for Chile and two years of working in the slums of Santiago with the poor.
She had looked at him and started to cry, quietly and softly, almost like a child confused and lost in a huge store. He remembered her now as a tall, thin, quiet young woman with a big smile and an almost angelic face. He had hurt her badly. “You’re leaving me for God,” she said. “Five years of my life gone, wasted waiting for you. For what? So you can find Jesus. So you can serve the poor. Keep the filing cabinet. Maybe someday you’ll look at it and miss me.”
And she had been right. Every time he opened the cabinet, he remembered Phyllis. When he was teaching at Boston College, he had tried to find her, and succeeded. She was married, living on the Cape, mother of two college-age kids, happy and content with her husband Bob, a plumber. “It all worked out for the best for both of us,” she said on the phone that day. They had vowed to get together and almost had on several occasions. And then she was gone. Icy roads, bad driving conditions: “Dump truck plows into two vehicles on I95 during rush hour, one dead, three injured.” That had been the headline in the local news section of the “Boston Globe” that caught his eye one cold morning in January. Good bye Phyllis, he thought. Thank you for the good times, and thank you for once loving me. And why did I keep putting off our get together?
Father Phil opened the second drawer of the teak filing cabinet and took out a map. He smoothed it open on the top of the teak cabinet before reaching into the top drawer to withdraw a heavy brown manila envelope. He pulled from it an old and yellowed manuscript.
Beautiful handwriting. His own was so bad—illegible really. Thank heaven for computers and printers. This manuscript was from around 1936. Typewriters were certainly available back then, but the transcriber, Father Geoffrey Baker S.J. wrote in longhand.
“To my successor in the Society of Jesus assigned this terrible case.”
That was the beginning of a 50 page manuscript that Father Phil had read over twice since being given it by Father Hannigan a year ago.
“First some background,” Father Baker had written. “This manuscript is a compendium of letters, diary entries, and historic documents that I have assembled over the past 30 years while studying what appears to be real and documented appearances of a devil in human form.”
Father Phil put the manuscript aside and glanced again at the cover letter. It had been written in 1940 by the then head of the Jesuits in Massachusetts, a Father Timothy Frydel.
To Whom It May Concern in the Society of Jesus:
The author of this manuscript, Father Geoffrey Baker, S.J., died in 1936 while collecting historic data in the Quabbin Reservoir area in what was once the town of Enfield. Father Baker vanished while doing some of his research, which included visiting relatives of a family in the area who were about to be displaced by the construction of what is now Quabbin Reservoir. His body was discovered a week after he vanished in an abandoned quarry filled with water in the area of Curtis Hill. He died, apparently, after falling from a high ledge into the quarry located in a wooded area.
Father Baker requested on numerous occasions that his research and papers be passed on to another qualified Jesuit in the hopes of solving what he saw as a real and present danger presented by an evil entity in human form.
Those of us in the Society of Jesus who knew and respected Father Baker cannot testify to the historic accuracy of his speculative research, but we can state that he was of sound mind at the time of his death.
Provincial of the New England Province, Father Timothy Frydel, S.J.
Father Philip DiMarco, S.J. put the letter back into the heavy brown manila envelope and stared out the window for a moment before sitting down in his favorite Li
ncoln rocker. He reached over to a small pine table next to the rocker and picked up a slender volume by Friedrich Nietzsche. There must be a quote or two that he could reach for here. Nietzsche was his favorite philosopher—just so quotable. By far the greatest generator of notable commentary of any of the writers and philosophers that he admired. He picked up the silver-plated Parker pen inscribed with his name and given him upon his forced retirement from the law school at Boston College and underlined the following passage: “And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
He made it a habit to read a page or two from Nietzsche before bedtime. He’d started reading Nietzsche at bedtime when he taught Philosophy 706 for the grad students at Boston College in the late 1960s. And now out here in west-central Massachusetts living with the Franciscans in their drafty monastery and rattling around in his two-rooms, he found the great German philosopher oddly soothing.
Nietzsche had carved out so much space around the twin subjects of truth and evil and what each meant that you couldn’t really add a thing to his view. You read Nietzsche and just shook your head in agreement--nailed it again.
Truth was not obvious and evil was real. It helped to keep that in mind. He’d written and thought about good and evil his whole life, and now he found the old papers from Father Baker challenging him. Here you had a Jesuit priest of apparently sound mind who had spent his career chasing the devil in and around this region. A true believer, for sure, but how do you figure the devil is responsible for this or that heinous crime? Couldn’t the perpetrator just be one of the many sad-sack, vicious humans who walked this good earth?
He’d been in Congress when his first book on the subject of evil was published--serving his second term in the U.S. House of Representatives; on leave from the Law School of Boston College. He’d been speaking out passionately and loudly against the Vietnam War back then. Newspaper headlines took to calling him a leader in the anti-war movement. No problem. A priest crusading for peace. That was fine. That was OK. This was, after all, the early 1970s so leading peace marches and speaking out against the war in the Congress of the United States hadn’t been the real problem.
Abortion rights had. He was a Catholic priest. He was supposed to speak out against abortion, but instead he had voted to support and fund abortion rights. The heavy hitters from the Catholic conservation right; William F. Buckley, Jr. Pat Buchanan, and others got fierce and came after him. They got the attention of Pope John Paul II. His presence in the House of Representatives had been sanctioned by the previous Pope, Paul VI, as well as by the U.S. episcopate, the cardinal of Boston, and his own Jesuit superiors. But that all changed mighty fast when the right-wing conservatives came after him.
He had been excoriated, that was the word, for his views. A bishop from the Midwest had written an open-letter addressed to him and published in The Word, the Catholic weekly. “How you as a Catholic priest can justify the murder of the unborn is beyond me. Social justice is one thing, and you are an acknowledged leader there, but supporting abortion in your legislative career is beyond the pale.”
Jesuits take a vow of loyalty to the Pope, no questions asked; no back talk. By the end of the 1970s he had become controversial. Pope John Paul II ordered him to get out of politics and leave Congress. That was the end of his political career. He’d been Dean of the Boston College Law School before winning that seat in the 4th Congressional District covering the western suburbs of Boston. But now he was out. Not even room for him to teach a single class at the college.
He’d ended up out here in central Massachusetts away from it all. “All for the best,” his friend, Father James C. Hannigan told him at the time. “You lay low for a few years. Publish another volume of your study of evil. You come back to the law school. Things change with time.”
He was still waiting for that change. But in the meantime, he worked on his second book on evil, and read Nietzsche every night. The first book, Good and Evil: Chasing the Devil Through the Portals of Time, had been an unexpected best seller 15 years ago. Which was why, when his Jesuit superiors, bowing to pressure from the Buckley’s and Buchanan’s who saw themselves as the only true Catholics still standing, looked for a place to exile him to, they chose the remote Quabbin region and later handed him the unpublished Father Baker manuscript from the 1930s.
Father Philip DiMarco wasn’t sure how much he could believe the old story he had read in the Baker papers. A series of Jesuit priests chasing a human devil for nearly two centuries, a special stone cross inlaid with a blue gem used to summon the evil presence, the evil being coming to ground in the Quabbin region when they buried four towns underwater to create a great reservoir in the 1930s, the remains of the evil entity lost along with his special stone cross in the process of digging up 7000 bodies from the local cemeteries and reburying them outside the Quabbin.
Father Philip DiMarco loved a challenge. Stranded out here in the middle of Massachusetts, hardly connected to his beloved Boston College anymore, doing penance for offending the wing nuts that had taken over the Catholic Church, he needed something to occupy his mind. This old manuscript would do just fine.
* * *
Chapter 10
Father Phil pulled the heavy manila envelope toward him once again and reached inside for Father Baker’s manuscript.
“To my successor in the Society of Jesus assigned this terrible case.”
Father Phil took a deep breath and began reading, skimming over much of what he had read before. Father Baker started by outlining his own connection to the manuscript.
In 1910, some five years after entering the priesthood and after completing my noviate and joining the Jesuits, I was summoned to the office of Father J. F. Murray, a history professor of encyclopedic memory and one of the legendary Jesuit figures of the twentieth century at Boston College. He handed me the manuscript you now hold and supporting documents in this file and asked me to write a report. This I have done, though I have not reached a conclusion or entered a final chapter. Father Murray passed into the hands of God in 1927, but I have continued this investigative work since.
Father Phil turned a page, carefully, so as not to bend or damage the original document. Father Baker began his narrative back in the early 18th century during the long ongoing conflict between the British and the French in North America.
Sebastien Rale was a name that Father Phil was familiar with, a Jesuit priest of remarkable valor, charisma, and leadership abilities who was mentioned often in historical studies of the period, especially in Francis Parkman’s two-volume history of the time: France and England in North America. Father Phil had read Parkman while a graduate student vacillating in his studies between the law and history. The law had won, but he still dipped into Parkman’s classic histories.
Sebastien Rale had served the Jesuits and the French in one of their most critical posts as a missionary stationed among the Norridgewock band of Abenakis on the banks of the Kennebec River, in what in now Maine. The Kennebec was important to the French who saw it as a natural boundary between their territories and New England, home to the vile Puritans. The mission of the Jesuits was to keep the native tribes loyal to the King of France and to the Catholic Church.
Religion and trade were the main tools by which the French sought to manage and control the native Americas tribes in New France. There were other Jesuit missions in those years 1713—1724; the Iroquois mission of Caughnawaga; the Abenakis mission of St. Francis, the Huron mission of Lerette—all served as outposts to guard against incursions by the English.
Sebastien Rale arrived at the American Jesuit missions in 1689; age 32, with a gift for language and a burning commitment to serve god and France. He ended up with the Norridgewock on the Kennebec at a mission that had anchored the territory for more than a half century and now included a stockade enclosure surrounding some 26 houses and cabins. He preached, exhorted, counseled, nursed the sick, mediated quarrels, tilled his own garden, cut his own firewood, studi
ed the Abenaki language, and, according to Parkman, “ being an expert at handicraft, made ornaments for the church.” Mostly though, he exerted a great humanizing influence on the Norridgewocks, teaching them to read and write and to obey the laws of the Church.
Long years of conflict and raids had embittered the Norridgewocks against the English The English, in turn, regarded the Norridgewocks and other Native Americans along the North American border as “vicious and dangerous wild animals,” wrote Parker. Into this caldron came Sebastien Rale, a priest, and a natural leader, determined to help the native people.
The English hated him, as they did all Jesuits, mostly because he taught the Abenakis not to sign away their lands to the English. He also taught and preached peace, urging his charges to cease raiding and killing settlers. Despite his good influences, the English, in 1724, struck at the Norridgewock settlement on the Kennebec, surprising the village, killing children, squaws, and warriors. They found Sebastien Rale in one of the huts. Parkman reports two accounts of Rale’s death, one in which he was killed as he fought off the English firing at them from inside a hut. The second story has Rale running out of the hut in attempt to save his flock by drawing English fire onto himself. In both accounts Sebastien Rale died that day.
Father Phil knew the outlines of the story, and its significance as an embittering potion in the long history of conflict between France and England in North America. But, he had never heard the follow-up story that Father Baker went on to describe in the papers he was now reading.
Sebastien Rale’s papers and correspondence were seized by the English raiders that day and brought back to Boston where they were examined. The Governor of Massachusetts used some of the correspondence between Rale and the Foreign Minister in France to justify the attack of the English militia and the slaughter of the Norridgewocks, claiming that Sebastien Rale had been an agent of the French and not merely a Jesuit priest.
Faces in the Night Page 4