The General's President (2 page)

"Used to be a lot of them around here," Haugen was saying. "The harder winters the last thirty years have set them back. That and fewer fires to open up the timber and grow feed for them. Taking off the wolf bounty probably cut the deer down, too. Although I'm glad they did it. And the moose have made up for the deer decline; they've come back like gangbusters."

A moose, Father Flynn decided, was something he'd definitely like to see. To see a wolf seemed too much to hope for.

"Arne," he said, "why does the water look like this?"

"Like what?"

"It looks like tea."

Haugen chuckled. "It is tea. Tea made with sphagnum moss, leatherleaf, blueberries, and spruce and tamarack needles. It even has Labrador tea in it! The Bigfork drains miles and miles of muskeg swamp between here and Craig." They rounded a bend, and Father Flynn could see a grassy field that came down to the river. The back end sloped to higher ground, where there was a log house with green asphalt shingles. Outbuildings stood near it, some of them also of logs. "That's it," Haugen said. "That was home for me till I was eighteen."

The old man dug deeply with the paddle, quickening the canoe diagonally toward shore. The Jesuit stroked too, till they were near, then took his paddle dripping from the river. He was not an accomplished paddler; it seemed best to let Haugen beach her by himself. A creosoted log extended down the bank into the river, and as they pulled up to it, he saw that it was anchored to steel fence posts driven deeply into bank and bottom. The older man thrust the canoe gently against the bank, and Father Flynn got out, rope in hand. Haugen followed, crouching, the light ease of his movements belying age and thick body. Taking the nose of the canoe, the old man pulled it well up on the bank, then removed the huge Duluth pack from it while Father Flynn tied the rope to a clump of brush, hoping it was the right thing to do. Growing up in Albany and serving always in cities, he was unsure of himself here, although in black jeans and checked flannel shirt, he looked somewhat like a local.

They followed a short steep path up through freeze-dried grass and sweetclover to the meadow. On their feet, they looked a mismatched pair, Haugen a bit less than average height, the priest tall and angular, if a bit thick in the waist. The meadow grass was waist deep on Haugen.

"Timothy," Haugen said, and for a moment Father Flynn thought he was saying someone's name. Haugen's right hand was brushing, almost caressing, the heads of the grass as they hiked through it toward the log house. As if sensing the other's confusion, Haugen added, "the grass. Timothy hay. I rent the field to an old friend. No charge, actually. He raises a crop of hay or oats every year. If hay, he only takes one cutting. Leaves the second for the wildlife.

"Farming it keeps the field from coming in to woods; keeps it the way it used to be. He maintains the buildings, too. The house and sauna, mainly, and the
hyysikkä
, the privy. Every ten years or so, he gets the roofs fixed on everything."

The log house had four square rooms on the ground floor, plus a frame kitchen added on the back. Haugen led through them, looking them over. Someone had been there before them with broom and mop. And ax, for there was split firewood beside the living room stove, which was made of a thirty-gallon oil drum, and more in the big woodbox near the kitchen range. The kitchen table was covered with clean oilcloth, red and white-checked. The only gesture toward modernity was a white refrigerator powered by propane. Haugen opened it; it held a few fresh groceries and a bottle of whiskey. In one of the bedrooms, two single beds had been made up with crisp sheets and woolen blankets.

What might be upstairs, Father Flynn did not expect to see. Dust and cobwebs, he suspected. Actually there were no stairs up, just a ladder spiked against a living room wall, with a larger trapdoor at the top. Haugen followed the priest's eyes, and gestured upward with a thumb. "We boys used to sleep up there." He pointed to a grill in the ceiling above the barrel stove. "That's all the heat we got; not much at forty below. Or even twenty below, which we had a lot of. The frost used to get an inch thick on the window frames, and we had so many covers on the bed, we had to wake up to turn over."

A fire had already been laid in the kitchen range, and Haugen lit it with a match from a box of big kitchen matches. Then he took a blue-enameled pail and they walked out together to the pump just behind the house. There was a private dirt road, somewhat graveled, and tracks that Father Flynn decided were of a pickup—driven by Haugen's friend who had so nicely set things up for them. Another pail, galvanized, sat by the pump, with water in it. Haugen poured a little in the top of the pump, then worked the handle, and in a few seconds a copious flow began to surge out the spout into the blue pail. When the pail was full, he left it there and led the way to the sauna, where he checked the stove reservoir for water, then fired the sauna stove with birchbark and dry wood.

"Swedish kerosene," he called the birchbark.

Before dark they'd eaten a supper of fried potatoes, bacon, eggs; and oven-toasted, buttered white bread strongly enriched with sugar, tasting almost like coffee cake. Afterward they used the sauna, lit by a kerosene lamp, then doused each other with icy water from the well. That done, they dressed, then took coffee, yellow and sweet, into the living room, and sat for a while.

"Is this the way it was when you were a boy?" Flynn asked after a period of silence.

"Nothing's the way it was when I was a boy." Haugen grinned, broad tan face creasing with it. "I'd hate to have to sleep now on the beds we used to have. And these chairs..." He patted the one he sat in. "The ones we used to have were homemade. Not bad, but not like these. And the fridge is new, of course, I never saw a refrigerator till I was in high school. Or used a telephone."

He sipped his coffee reminiscently. "We didn't even have a wagon road till I was two years old. The river was the road. It was the main road till I was eleven, when the CCC graded and graveled the wagon road and put culverts in—made an auto road out of it. The country got a lot of good out of those hard-times projects. And when we had a real road, Dad bought an old truck; I learned mechanics on that klunker. Every month or so the whole family'd go in to Littlefork to a movie; it cost a dime each. And we'd eat popcorn! We thought we really had it made."

Haugen laughed and shook his head. "That was a different world."

Father Flynn nodded soberly. That had been "the Great Depression." Now they were in another, in some ways worse.

"We were kind of crowded here," Haugen went on. "There were three of us boys that slept in the loft, and my sister slept in the living room. Mom and dad slept in that room"—he gestured—"and grandma in that one. We had a grandmother in the house till I was grown up and drafted. Sometimes we had two grandmas in the house. Grandma Salminen—we called her 'Mummo'—was with us all my childhood, and Grandma Haugen came to America when I was nine. She was 'Bestemor.' " He chuckled. "Neither one spoke English, and of course, Finnish and Norwegian are completely different. They lived in the same house together for years, sharing a bedroom, but they never had a conversation together. Each learned some words of the other's language and a few words of broken English, but not enough to really talk to each other."

"How did they get along?"

Haugen laughed. "Well, they didn't argue. Actually they were a lot alike. Both were old-country farm women, peasants, and both had a lot of patience. Except for cussedness. Neither had much patience with cussedness."

***

The two men talked for a while longer, then Haugen took a small, battery-powered alarm clock from the pack, set it, and they got ready for bed. The bedroom was not totally dark; there was faint starlight through the newly washed window. Father Flynn knelt silently beside his army-style bed for a few minutes, then got between the sheets.

"Steve," Haugen said after a minute, "I haven't prayed, actually prayed, since childhood. But while you were kneeling there, I was remembering. When Lois and I were younger, she used to drag me to church now and then. Lutheran. And we'd recite the creed. And there were things I used to wonder about."

Father Flynn lay silent, waiting. After a moment, Haugen continued, reciting from memory.

" 'I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth.' " He paused. "That part I had no problem with. Understanding it, I mean. But then it went on—'And in Jesus Christ, his only Son our Lord,
Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost.
' That's where I started to have problems. What does it mean by the Holy Ghost?"

The priest paused only for a moment before answering. "The Holy Trinity," he said, "is important to our understanding of God. First of all, love is essential to God; it is basic to Him; and it's the basis of the Trinity. God the Father knows himself utterly, and his awareness—his image!—of himself is the Son. And the Holy Spirit is the bond of love between Father and Son."

The priest lay silent then, and after a moment, Haugen spoke again. "I once read somewhere in the New Testament where Jesus said 'Ye are all sons of God.' How does that fit in?"

"We are, in a sense, though originally not in the same sense as Jesus. But because Jesus came to us on Earth, he raised us all to his level."

After a few seconds, Haugen continued. "Then it goes on to say: He 'was crucified, dead, and buried. He descended into hell.' Now what was that about? Why did he descend into hell?"

"Well, first of all, hell is for those who are utterly ruined, utterly cut off from God and his redemption. Actually, as the story has it now, it was to purgatory that Jesus went, for three days. Purgatory is where souls go to be purified, souls not eligible for heaven but not beyond redemption. Jesus went there to gather the souls already there."

There was another moment of silence. The Jesuit was a little embarrassed. He always felt that way when trying to explain theological matters to a highly intelligent analytical mind that lacked the background. If you looked at these things superficially, they could sound foolish.

"All right," Haugen said next. "Then it goes on to say, 'I believe in the communion of saints.' What's the communion of saints?"

Father Flynn's voice was quiet, soft. "In this case, 'saints' means all undamned souls, living and dead, and all are in communion with one another. We have a solidarity with the dead and with each other, and they with us. All are one. The living support the dead and vice versa, and we all support each other. For example, the prayers of the living help the dead to rise from purgatory, and the prayers of the dead help the living."

"Hm-m. Interesting. Okay. And it ends up, 'the resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting.' I suppose I know what's meant by life everlasting, but how about the resurrection of the body? It seems to me that God would only need to think it to give you a new body. Why resurrect the old one?"

"It's not the old one he'll resurrect; not in the strict sense. When Jesus comes back, he'll create your body anew, but he'll do it with the material of your old body. It doesn't matter what's become of it. If you are saved, he'll recreate a perfect body for you from the material of the old.

"At the final judgment, Saint Thomas tells us, the world will be recreated. And if you've been good, your body will be recreated in perfection. If you were evil, on the other hand, it will be recreated in corruption."

He paused, then went on. "But a current notion is that you
ensoul
your body. Your soul creates your body and your body creates your soul. And when you die, you ensoul the universe."

He waited then. Haugen asked no further questions. "What do you think of all this?" the priest asked finally. "It's quite a meal for one sitting."

"I don't think of it," Haugen said. "Not now. I'm just letting it percolate. But I'll tell you again, I'm an unlikely candidate for the Church. Even the Lutheran Church." He chuckled, then sobered. "But if there ever was a good time to pray, this feels like it."

Nothing more was said then, and Haugen's breathing quickly took the slow and measured cadence of sleep. Father Flynn lay awake for a bit though, thinking. The year AD 2000 was getting near, the year some claimed would bring the final judgment of man, complete with scourges, plagues, and Armageddon. Times were hard; unemployment was forty percent, and poverty was becoming the mode. More than two million AIDS cases had surfaced, and no one knew how many were latent. The cold war still was cold, but the potential was there for disaster, perhaps holocaust. There'd been a resurgence of religion; his own Church, the Protestant churches, all were finding their pews more and more full, while the apocalyptic sects were doubling and redoubling their membership.

A hooting outside took his attention from his thoughts. An owl; he hadn't heard one since boys' camp twenty-five years earlier. He listened, waiting for it to repeat, until images began drifting across the screen of his consciousness, and shortly became dreams.

***

Morning dawned with white frost on the grass and a pane of ice on the pail outdoors. Haugen fixed a robust breakfast, and after they'd eaten, took a small shortwave radio from the pack and verified their pickup. Then they walked back to the canoe and set off down the river again. A couple of hours later, Father Flynn could see a steel bridge ahead, and farm fields by the river. Near one end of the bridge, on the road shoulder, a pickup truck was parked. A man stood fishing from the bridge, and when he saw them, waved, then walked with his tackle to the truck. Tall and long-armed, gray-shocked, he was waiting at the water's edge when they got there.

"Hello, Haugen, you old sonofabitch," he said, and the two old men pumped hands vigorously.
"Åssen går de'
?"

Haugen laughed.
"Å, de' henger og slenger."
He paused, half turning to the priest. "Vern, this is the friend I told you about, Father Steve Flynn. Steve, this is Vern Stenhus. Vern and I went to school together, sixty, sixty-five years ago. He worked for the Two Emils, too."