Burying a Monk

At the first funeral I ever attended I ended up in the grave.

This happened one freezing Saturday in January of 1975 at a Catholic men’s college.  The school was run by a Benedictine monastery and sat in the middle of Minnesota.  The campus was five miles from the nearest town, a booming metropolis with 967 citizens.  My roommate and I worked on the school’s grounds crew that frigid day.  We trudged from the cafeteria to the maintenance shed at 7:30.  The snow squeaked with each step we took because the thermometer read 23 below.  A halo of ice crystals and two sun dogs circled the brilliant sun.  

To better understand these conditions and the feel of that day read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”.

My roommate was named Bede after Saint Bede the Venerable who died on May 26, 735.  I didn’t know that Bede, I knew the younger and more alive Bede, the guy from Rib Lake, Wisconsin.

He was the most gifted athlete I ever met.  Bede stood six feet three inches tall with extremely wide shoulders and a massive chest.  He had a body mass index of around negative five.

Here’s an example of his athleticism: One balmy spring evening I left the school dining hall and stopped to talk to a friend, Dan.  He was wearing a baseball glove and standing on the sidewalk in front of a five story dorm. As he stared up at the roof of the building I followed his gaze and asked, “What’s going on?”

He replied, “Wait a sec.”

At that moment, a softball soared over the top of the dorm.  Dan stepped back a full stride and reached up.  The ball made a loud smack as it hit the glove.

I said, “Only Bede could make that throw.”

Dan replied, “Only Bede.”

I played tennis against Bede just once. He smoked me.  No matter what I did he returned the ball.  At one point I sent a shot screaming to his off hand, his left – he can’t ever get to that one I dreamed.  He tossed the racket to his left hand and with his outlandishly long arm returned another winning ball.  Damn him. I couldn’t compete.

Yet despite all his gifts, Bede would not be on any team – ever. He must have had some traumatic experiences involving coaches or teammates.  Bede bridled at all authority figures and loathed jocks.

He possessed a peculiar mind.  One weekday afternoon I came into our room in a dormitory built in the late 1800’s. There were 12 foot ceilings and maple floors.  Bede stood in the middle of the room wearing only basketball shorts.  He stuck his bare right foot in front of his body.  Without saying a word, he threw a dart straight up about eleven feet and watched it hit the wood next to his foot.  He repeated the throw and the dart stuck in his big toe.  Without saying a word he pulled it out, and tossed it skyward again.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Seeing how many times out of a hundred throws I hit my foot.”

I could not watch, but admired his commitment to science.

Finally, Bede was a bit of a savant.  He had perfect pitch.  Then there was the thing with dates.  When you named a date in the past or the future and he could tell you what day of the week it was.  This confirmed my long held belief that every human is the best in the world at something.  Most things are completely useless, like Bede’s date trick.

Upon arriving at the maintenance department the supervisor, Father Oglethorp – a surly old monk, told us to don ragged and filthy coveralls, grab ancient long handled shovels and get into a beat up station wagon.   The monk did not like students.  He drove us to a railroad siding a couple miles north of campus.

The school was just east of nowhere – literally off the electric grid.  It had a coal fired heating and electric plant.  The coal was delivered in railroad hopper cars that sat out there on the edge of the prairie.  It was then trucked to the power plant.  In the winter, the coal froze in the corners of the cars.    

Bede and I climbed into the first hopper car and knocked the frozen coal from the corners into the openings at the bottom, so it could be trucked to the power plant.  Over the decades hundreds of students had climbed into the coal cars with those shovels.  

While a dump truck ferried the coal back to the campus, we sat in a tiny corrugated tin shed next to an ancient iron stove with a coal fire.  At 10:00 we ate hot roast beef sandwiches that father O’Reilly or whatever the hell his name was brought from the school kitchen.  The monks baked fresh bread each day, except Sunday.

After cleaning out a coal car we moved it down the track with seven foot long steel rods called Johnson bars.  In the same way, we levered the next car into position.  It helped that Bede was there.  I could have faked I was pushing on my bar and let him move the train cars.

Around eleven thirty, the temperature had risen to a balmy fifteen below and our job at the railroad siding was complete.  Father Dominic or whatever the hell his name was drove out in a beat up 1957 Dodge pickup truck, with license plates that had expired in 1963.  He stuck his head in the shack and commanded, “Get in the truck and bring the shovels.”  

He drove us to the monastery’s cemetery, a serene grove of pine trees on a hill overlooking a frozen lake.  A group of monks wearing heavy black wool robes with cowls over their heads and their hands tucked up their sleeves had gathered around an open grave.  With their frozen breath hanging in the air, they looked like a scene from a gothic horror film.

I said, “I think I know why we’re here.”

Bede rolled his eyes and said, “Don’t tell me.  Let me guess.” 

Fun fact – in Minnesota and Wisconsin before the invention of backhoes and steam generators people who died in the winter weren’t buried until the ground had thawed in the spring. 

Back in the cemetery – Father Fergeson or whatever the hell his name was said, “Get out and grab the shovels.”

I suggested, “We’ll stay in the truck and warm up.”  I thought we weren’t dressed for the occasion.

“You gotta get out, say the prayers and sing the hymn.”  

So there we stood behind the monks with the vapor from our breath mingling with the monks’ vapor, wearing filthy overalls hats and gloves, holding shovels with coal dust darkening our noses and foreheads, like something out of a Dickens novel.

The dead guy was a tiny monk in his late nineties.  After some very brief prayers, a hurried hymn, and the fewest word ever spoken over a grave the mourners hustled inside to warm up and get on with their day. 

That left Bede and I to finish the job.  We lowered the casket, a simple handmade box made of white oak harvested from the school’s forests (the students on the grounds crew cut down the trees and hauled them out of the woods to a saw mill).  We struggled to place the heavy concrete top on the burial vault.  Well, we screwed that up; it was not properly seated.  What do you expect from a couple of amateurs?  

Then Father Waldo or whatever the hell his name was said, “One of you morons gotta climb down there to straighten that out.”  

I looked at Bede.  

He said. “I’m not getting into a grave with a dead guy.”

I jumped down and levered the closure into position with my shovel.  While I was down there father Schultz or whatever the hell his name was sneered at me and growled, “Pack some dirt around the sides, as long as you’re there.”  I was really beginning to not like father Klinger or whatever the hell his name was.  Bede tossed dirt into the grave so I could cram it down the sides of the burial vault.

That day I learned that when you’re in a grave with a person throwing dirt in you think about stuff.  I realized I could jump into occupied graves and Bede couldn’t.  Maybe that was the one thing that I could do better than anyone in the world – how useless.

After filling in the hole we spent the rest of the day standing in the back of a That ancient pickup truck throwing cinders from the power plant’s boilers onto the icy walking paths and roads around campus.  Today the school’s insurance company and lawyers would not approve this practice.  I guess we students were expendable back then.

Bede and I lost touch after graduation.  He wanted to be a pharmacist.  I hope he succeeded and has had a happy life.  I became an accountant.  It’s a genetic problem; the drug companies are working on a cure.  I hope that, like me, he fondly remembers the arctic January day we worked together on the grounds crew and buried a guy.