The Lords of Folly Read online

  “It ain’t proper to get folks stirred up about religion,” answered Kluntz, who had no cows and who therefore milked the neighborhood for gossip. “It’ll just cause trouble. Why, it’s just like, like, well, like talking about that damn blue clay gumbo you try to farm on the flats. You can’t tell nobody how to farm it. About all you can say is that if you step in the goddam stuff when it’s wet, it’ll stick to your boots so hard you have to shake your leg five times before it’ll come off.” Then he added, as if to add credence to his observation, if not to a connection with theology, “Four’s not enough and six is too many.”

  Hasse bent under another cow to hide his smile. Kluntz had made an art out of not exerting himself any more than absolutely necessary and that probably was theology to him. “How many times you suppose you’d have to shake a boot if you stepped into a pile of religion?” he asked.

  “See what I mean? You get talkin’ like that, it’ll just cause trouble. Look. I’m not sayin’ the Christians are right. I doubt it. But, by God, I mean to go along with them because if I’m wrong, there’ll be hell to pay.”

  Hasse considered Kluntz’s remarks with as sober a mien as he could muster. After all, he had his reputation as a barnyard theologian to maintain. Fathered by a Methodist, mothered by a Lutheran, and wedded to a Catholic, he considered himself something of an authority on religion. The subject was, indeed, of much interest to him—not as much as the subject of money, but he nevertheless studied the fervor for religion around him with the same perspicacity that he applied in studying the fervor for money. But his interest in religion had not borne fruit in the logical way that his interest in money had: religion only turned him into a closet atheist who secretly sneered at the versions of Christianity that had impinged upon his life. He kept his heresy to himself, however, because alienating Christians was not good for business. Since he led a moral life by Carver County standards, which is to say he drank little and confined his amorous intentions to his wife on those rare occasions when she would allow him, the neighbors hardly suspected. Who ever heard of a moral atheist?

  Even Kluntz was not exactly sure where Hasse stood on religion because he knew his neighbor to be a master of disguise. Although Hasse was as genuine a farmer as Minnesota could produce, his farming was also or mainly, a front for the small loan business that he ran out of the breast pocket of his bib overalls. Hasse had long ago made the simple deduction that if bankers, most of whom, he observed, were not very bright, could lend his money out and get rich off it, so could he. Yet he affected an old-country accent and dressed, even at bank board meetings, in his weatherbeaten felt hat and faded, sometimes manure-specked, bibs to keep everyone guessing (including the IRS, Kluntz suspected) about his financial situation. The Hasse name was respected in banking circles in the Twin Cities, but locally he was just a middle-aged farmer who was liable to speak of other men’s religious beliefs in the same tone of voice he used to point out their crooked corn rows and skinny steers.

  That religion should be discussed at all in Hasse’s barn, or anywhere else around Chaska and Shakopee for that matter, was because of the arrival there of the Oblates of St. Joseph. To have a group of monkish beatniks descend upon a rural populace that thought Henry Wallace should have ascended to the Presidency, was itself a subject of considerable moment. But for the Oblates of St. Joseph to take possession of a farm in an area where competition for farmland was savage, made them about as welcome as the Klu Klux Klan. Moreover, the farm that the monks had taken over bordered both Hasse and Kluntz, land which the two blunt-knuckled, grizzled farmers had been trying to snare for years but which Harriet Snod, the pious old widow in Chaska who owned it, wouldn’t sell. To spite both farmers, people said, she gave it to the Josephians.

  “They don’t have to pay taxes,” Kluntz reminded Hasse, referring to the exemption that religious groups enjoyed. That was the neighborhood’s major objection to the Oblates of St. Joseph and Kluntz was chewing it for all the juice he could get out of it.

  “Well, they don’t believe in government subsidies either, so we may come out ahead on that score,” Hasse replied. “Harriet had that land enrolled in so many government programs that she was making more money by not farming it than farming it.”

  “Well, monks shouldn’t be competing with regular farmers,” Kluntz grumbled. “We’ve got surpluses enough the way it is.”

  Hasse snorted. “I don’t think you need to worry on that score either. The way they farm ain’t about to contribute to the surpluses.”

  It was not that he viewed the Josephian farming effort any more favorably than Kluntz did, but Hasse had already thought of a way to turn this seeming setback to his expansion plans into an asset. His method of farming, which Kluntz sometimes referred to as “early Amish” was built on a precept Hasse expressed as: “Never spend more in a month than you make in a week and you’ll come out okay.” But his secret could be expressed even more succinctly: “Never borrow money and be careful who you lend it to.” His first cows were “three-titters” bought dirt cheap at auctions because no one else wanted them. Hasse knew that three-titters almost always were heavy producers. That’s why they went bad from mastitis in one quarter in the first place. And in any event, the ones his practiced eye selected for purchase gave just as much milk from three teats as most cows gave from four, and seemed to have built up an immunity to further attacks of mastitis too. And they threw calves that were heavy producers. If they did prove to be poor milkers, he butchered them and ground the meat into hamburger that he peddled privately for twice the money he had paid for the cow—the meat wrapped in packages stamped “Not For Sale” as government regulations required.

  Hasse still used horses in his farming. Horses always started in the morning no matter how cold the weather, and they produced more horses with no pain to his bank accounts and no contribution to John Deere, as he put it. The tractors he did own were so old that they had not only ceased to depreciate but were growing in value as antiques.

  To avoid borrowing money, Hasse always resorted to cheap labor, whether horse or human, rather than expensive machinery. And this was where the Josephians fit into his plan. Cheap help was not easy to come by since farm offspring were all going to town to work for the government or the banks. Hasse was tempted to say, sarcastically of course, that God had sent the Josephians along just in time to solve this dilemma for him. As he stood on his high hill where he could look down into the Minnesota River valley on the oblates at work, he felt almost sorry for them. Much of the land was either swampy, kept wet by springs, or lowlands flooded regularly by runoff from the hills on one side and the river on the other, or the sandy stuff in between that wouldn’t raise a bushel of corn on a sack of fertilizer. The blue clay gumbo adjacent to the swamps that might raise a good crop needed drainage, something the Josephians apparently did not appreciate. They did not seem to appreciate anything about practical farming in fact, and spend much of their working day scurrying back and forth from the fields to the old sanitarium livery stable that they had retrofitted for a chapel, as if, Hasse remarked to Kluntz, they had to hurry back to church every hour or so to get instruction from on high. The Josephians represented to him a ready supply of cheap manpower waiting to be harnessed. And he meant to do the harnessing.

  As Kluntz took his leave, dispirited by Hasse’s lack of righteous anger over the Snod land slipping through their fingers into the hands of God, Hasse smiled mysteriously and reverted to the old-world vernacular of his father and which he himself tried to mimic when he wanted to appear stupid or ignorant, or, in front of Kluntz who knew better, to sound droll. Now he echoed his father, in sentiment as well as pronounciation: “Let da udder guy t’ink he’s smarter dan you and den you got ’im.” Then he added: “Dis vill all verk out chust fine. Chust you vait and see.”

  As he watched and waited for an opportunity with the Josephians, Hasse noticed from his lookout on the bluffs that a few new men had appeared on the scene below, after which th
e monks’ farming operations took a more purposeful, if not professional, turn. The new look had begun the preceding summer and was now quite apparent. Instead of the meek, head-bowed manner with which the others went about their weedy gardens and forlorn fields, these new fellows seemed always in haste, heads held high, occasionally raving and ranting and even shaking fists when a tractor quit running. Their corn rows seemed to get planted straighter, fences seemed to sag less, and the oat crop became a bit more visible above the weeds.

  One day as Hasse drove by the Josephians at work (slowly, to take in all he could), he spied the Josephian tractor mired at the swampy edge of a pasture field. That the tractor had bogged down was not a surprise to Hasse since he knew most of the Snod farm laid too wet. One reason he had not been very upset when Harriet refused to sell him the place was that he figured some fool would eventually buy it, go broke and then he could move in and pick up the farm for the value of the unpaid mortgage. Now the canny old farmer saw a chance to insinuate himself into the Josephian community. He sped away to his barn, hitched up his horses and drove them back to the scene of Josephian agony as if he were just casually passing by.

  “Heaven sends us help,” the one who liked to shake his fist cried jubilantly as Hasse approached. He stuck out his hand and with a bold, unmonkish briskness said: “I am Oblate Gabriel, just call me Gabe. And this here’s Oblate Blaise spelled B-l-a-z-e as in horse, and this here string bean is Fen. We’ve got a log chain and careful those horses don’t go down in this quagmire too. You must be Ed Hasse.”

  Hasse nodded, a little taken aback by the forthrightness of what he assumed was a monk. He brought the horses around in front of the tractor which was hub deep in the ooze and still sinking. He started to say something, but Oblate Gabriel didn’t give him time.

  “Mr. Hasse, you know we ought to drain this swamp. Most of the water comes down from your side. You could reclaim, right here, six or seven more acres and so could we.”

  “Many people haf tried und failed to drain dis swamp,” Hasse said thickly, slipping the log chain through the iron ring of the doubletree.

  Gabe, standing behind him, slapped at a deer fly. “I can drain it,” he said, drily.

  Hasse looked around sharply. “Vel now. Too much cost. For chust six acres, dat is for me not verth it. I can use dose acres for late pasture in drout’ time widdout draining it.” To himself he decided that he was perhaps spreading the accent on a bit too heavily. He never was consistent about which ‘th’ should be pronounced ‘d’, as his father had rendered it. And ‘chust’ might be too much to fool even a monk.

  “Well, eventually we intend to revert almost entirely to a drylot feeding program and pasture the cows only rarely, so we won’t need pasture,” Gabe said primly. He confided, in a tone that sounded as if he had read it somewhere, that grazing livestock wasted grass. “I suppose you’ve observed,” he said, “that cows crossing to and fro across pastures tend to make paths.”

  This declaration astonished even Blaze, who stared at his comrade and only with great effort refrained from bursting into laughter. Hasse’s face remained as fixed as a boulder. Harnessing all this puffery to his benefit was going to be easy.

  Blaze started up the tractor and Hasse clucked to his horses. Three tons of horseflesh strained against the harness, and the tractor, its wheels churning, wormed its way up out of the mud to firm ground. The oblates were grateful. Perhaps they could repay the favor.

  Indeed they could. Hasse, assuming the look he supposed would properly mimic a poor sharecropper in Alabama, launched into a pitiful refrain about the hardships of farming, the scarcity of good help, milk prices so low that he had to keep on farming with horses instead of buying a new tractor. Haymaking was just about to start and he could sure use some help.

  Blaze, born and raised on a farm, stared at the horizon, a wee smile on his face. But Gabe was sympathetic. He would talk to the Prior. Surely the Josephians could spare a couple of oblates to bring in the hay. “Then perhaps we can talk about draining this swamp again,” he concluded pointedly. “I suppose six acres out of eleven hundred and twenty does not mean much to you, but we can use all the land we can bring into production.”

  Though elated, Hasse went home feeling a little uneasy. This Gabriel fellow would bear watching. There were people who lived in the county all their lives who did not know Hasse owned 1120 acres and who evidently did not know that all they had to do was look at a county plat map to find out. He farmed only a fraction of it himself, which is why few knew the extent of his holdings. He had found it more profitable to cash rent his land out at the highest possible price to other farmers and let them work it for what amounted to slave wages, or worse, in bad years, while he pocketed almost pure profit without doing anything. “No one ever made any real money farming,” he liked to say, “but only from investing in land.”

  As he passed Kluntz’s farm, Kluntz was working along the road cutting weeds out of the fence row. It was obvious that he was merely waiting for Hasse to return from the Josephians, since he had never cleaned out a fence row in his life. He put a fresh wad of Copenhagen under his lip as Hasse approached and prepared to enjoy the gossip. But Hasse paused only long enough for one sober question.

  “Kluntz, did you know that cows crossing to and fro across the pasture tend to make paths?” And then he drove on, whistling, leaving Kluntz with his lower lip protruding with snuff, his eyes protruding with bewilderment.

  CHAPTER 5

  With the coming of another season of farming, Gabe and Blaze were full of joyful anticipation. The school year had been cut short so that the oblates could continue to renovate the buildings and develop the farm land. With the coming of Hasse, Gabe had found a sympathetic ear for his schemes of making monastic life profitable. Although he may not have used the same words, Ed Hasse understood what Gabe considered the “metaphysical nature” of making money. If one were blessed by God and intelligence, one could make money despite the vow of poverty, not for financial profit, not out of love of filthy lucre or even out of need for it, but simply for the sheer spiritual enrichment that greedy people would attain when separated from some of their cash. In this way, the Lord’s chosen could teach weak human beings how to suffer a little and thereby build their characters. It was no different from exercising one’s ability at playing baseball in order to teach other players how to accept defeat graciously and thereby learn humility. Gabe assured Blaze that Hasse agreed with that kind of logic even if he did not express it with those words. Together they could pursue money as a holy grail, a way to inculcate virtue in the greedy and make the world a better place.

  “In other words, since rich men have a harder time getting to heaven than a camel through the eye of a needle, the way to save them is to take their money away from them,” Blaze said, delighted with that kind of logic.

  “Wellll, yes.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that always thinking about making money might be a mental disorder?”

  Gabe sniffed. He had to live in a world of do-gooders like Blaze who were blind to reality. It was up to a few saintly entrepreneurs to ignore the accusations of greed heaped upon them and save mankind in spite of itself.

  Presented with an opportunity to exercise his money-making missionary zeal to do good in the world, Gabe spent his hours of meditation in chapel (when he could not escape it) trying to figure out how to turn the Josephian farm into a profit center. He would drain that part of the swamp that was underlain with super-rich soil and grow high value truck crops on it. He would turn the undrainable part into a trout and watercress farm. If he could lure rich old Hasse into helping fund the project while keeping all the profit for the Josephians, so much the better. Here was a challenge far more interesting than the mystifications of Thomas Aquinas. Here was religion made practical. Why alienate and confuse people with all that crap about hylomorphism. Turn them to God by practical lessons, like how to make farming profitable.

  His first move was to talk
Prior Robert into allowing the seminarians, especially himself, Blaze and Fen of course, to help Hasse through the rest of the haying season. It appeared that Prior Robert could be talked into just about anything that might promise a pious result. In this case, Gabe spoke glowingly about how the oblates needed to mind their public relations. If the Josephians helped out their neighbors in need, farmers would be less inclined to view them as one more competitor producing too much grain and meat and so driving down farm prices. Helping neighbors in need might even soften the hearts of the rich landowners and incline them to contribute money to the future of the Josephians.

  Gabe did not mention his whole plot to Prior Robert. The real reason he wanted to spend as much time around Hasse as possible, was to learn a lot about farming in a hurry. He didn’t trust what Blaze told him. Blaze did not know a damn thing about making money. His father had gone broke at farming. Hasse was the man to listen to. To prepare himself to become an apt student, Gabe read studiously from the Year-books of Agriculture that had somehow found their way into the seminary library, as well as the University of Minnesota Agronomy Guide, and a complete run of Farm Journal magazines from 1925 to 1951 that he had reclaimed from the local junkyard. He and Blaze had gone there with Brother Walt to sell as wastepaper half a truck load of old Sacred Heart Messengers, Catholicism Todays, and Our Lady of Fatima Newsletters which Fr. Rowan, the librarian, wanted to get rid of because they were taking up space in the library he needed for books about theology and philosophy. Trading them for the farm magazines amused Blaze. “When historians look back,” he joked to Gabe, “this seemingly trivial little trade will be remembered as the first symbolic sign of our takeover of the Church.” Gabe did not ask him what that was supposed to mean. To live with Blaze, a person had to understand that it was not possible to understand him.