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  Some of the blessings were mixed. Before “The Discovery,” as it came to be known, the Bayou Perdu Council, K. of C., had existed more or less on the charity of its more prosperous brother councils within the consistory. Its members had, B.D., been uniformed in perfectly satisfactory, if somewhat faded, uniforms acquired from a used-clothing dealer. (They had seen previous service as usher suits for the New York World’s Fair of 1939-40.)

  In response to a summons from the Grand Exalted Royal Keeper of the Golden Fleece, accompanied by a check for twenty-five thou as earnest money, a somewhat effeminate traveling salesman flew by chartered private jet to the newly constructed Bayou Perdu International Airport to fit the Knights in uniforms more in keeping with their new affluence.

  The new uniforms, resplendent with gold braid, gold lace, and glistening swords, and featuring hats patterned after those worn by Admiral Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar, were without question the most splendiferous ever worn by the Knights of Columbus— or for that matter, anyone, anywhere.

  As the uniform salesman’s jet took off, another jet landed, this one bearing a salesman from the firm that sold buses to the Greyhound people. Horsey de la Chevaux had learned that while one might put a Knight behind the wheel of a new Eldorado, one couldn’t make him stay on the roads, especially after any sort of K. of C. function at which intoxicating beverages had been disbursed.

  Six buses arrived a month after the salesman’s visit. Patterned generally after those used by Greyhound, these vehicles were equipped with seats purchased from the people who made the first-class seats for Boeing 747 aircraft. (Mr. de la Chevaux’s company now owned three Boeing 747s, as well as thirty-six other aircraft.)

  The buses had, in addition to on-board restroom facilities and enroute television, fully equipped bars and storage space for the musical instruments of the Bayou Perdu Council, K. of C., Marching Band. They were painted a brilliant yellow, and on their roofs were batteries of silver-plated airhorns that, when special buttons were pushed, played “Onward, Christian Soldiers!”

  There was some grumbling in the ranks of other councils of the Knights that eventually reached His Eminence. Mr. de la Chevaux was escorted into the archbishop’s presence by Father dePresseps.

  The litany of complaints from other councils was brought up. Certainly, the archbishop said, there was some merit in the complaints of the other Knights that the all-around aura of dignity, nobility, and Christian service of the Knights of Columbus was tarnished by the Bayou Perdu Council’s behavior.

  “Not that I mind, of course, Horsey,” His Eminence said. “I rather like ‘There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,’ even when played on three trumpets, four bass drums, two tubas, six kazoos, and a glockenspiel, but do you really think it’s appropriate for the annual Feast of the Assumption Processional? The choice of music; the suspiciously, staggeringly cheerful condition of the musicians; and, to be blunt, the baton twirlers in what must be described as extremely abbreviated costumes has caused some talk.”

  “Horsey’s sorry, Archbishop,” Mr. de la Chevaux replied. “It’ll never happen again.”

  “That’s very good of you.”

  “The Bayou Perdu Council, K. of C., is out of business as of right now,” Horsey went on.

  “I don’t really think it’s necessary to go that far, Horsey,” the archbishop replied.

  “It’s now the Bayou Perdu Council, Knights of Bienville,” Horsey said. “We been talking about it, anyway.”

  “I don’t quite understand you, Horsey,” the archbishop said.

  “Well, a couple of things, Archbishop. We’re not so dumb. We know the other Knights think we’re a bunch of bums. But the real thing is, we don’t think we belong in the Knights of Columbus.”

  “But of course you do,” the archbishop said.

  “Nah,” Horsey replied. “Columbus was an Eye-talian who landed on Cuba and thought it was India.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” the archbishop said.

  “Bienville, though,” Horsey went on. “He was a Frenchman, like us. And he discovered Mobile and New Orleans. He didn’t think he was in India. He knew better. I got some of the shysters drawing up the papers.”

  “I think that the gentlemen who practice law would prefer to be called ‘attorneys,’ Horsey,” the archbishop said.

  “What I pay them, I’ll call them what I want. You can stop worrying, Archbishop, the Bayou Perdu Council, K. of C., ain’t ever gonna embarrass the archbishop no more.”

  It took all of the archbishop’s considerable powers of persuasion to convince Horsey that he and the Knights belonged in the K. of C., and then to convince the rest of the Louisiana Consistory—finally, to announce ex cathedra—that the Bayou Perdu Council belonged, and would remain, in the consistory. . . .

  Two months after that, shortly after being appointed colonel on the governor’s staff, Horsey took the archbishop fishing. Not, as the archbishop had expected, on the new seventy-four-foot diesel yacht Evangeline Chevaux Petroleum had acquired to ferry its crewmen to and from its offshore drilling platforms, but in his pirogue.

  As the two sat in a remote corner of the bayou quietly hoping to attract the attention of a channel catfish, Horsey spoke. The archbishop, who had known Horsey since Horsey had been a student at St. Paul’s School for Unmanageable Boys, had known that something was on his mind.

  “Archbishop,” Horsey said. “I been thinking.”

  “About what, Horsey?”

  “All the trouble me and the guys caused you, the embarrassment and all.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about it, Horsey. I’m sure that you’re going to try harder in the future.”

  “We sent the baton twirlers back to the Hotsy-Totsy Club on Bourbon Street,” Horsey said. “But I want to do a little something to make it up to you.”

  “What did you have in mind, Horsey?” the archbishop asked, somewhat warily.

  “How about a hospital?” Horsey said.

  “A hospital?”

  “It would have to be a secret between you and me,” Horsey said. “I wouldn’t want anyone to know.”

  “A hospital?” the archbishop repeated. “Do you know what hospitals cost, Horsey?”

  “I had one of my shysters find out for me.” Horsey reached into his shirt pocket, pulled open the drawstring on his bag of Bull Durham, and extracted a crumpled piece of paper. “Here’s enough to get it started,” he said, handing His Eminence a certified check. “Let me know when you need some more.”

  The check was for three and a half million dollars. ...

  The Gates of Heaven Hospital opened its doors a year later. Horsey never changed his mind about keeping it a secret. He would be happy knowing he’d provided the money, he said, and given it a name. Neither the archbishop nor Reverend Mother Superior Bernadette of Lourdes, M.D., F.A.C.S., its chief of staff, could bring themselves to suggest that the name Horsey had chosen might possibly be misinterpreted.

  Chapter Four

  Over lunch at Brennan’s, Monsignor John Joseph Clancy had learned, to his considerable and undisguised relief, that the previous two weeks had been relatively uneventful for parishioners of the Church of the Immaculate Conception and the Bayou Perdu Council, Knights of Columbus. There had been two births, one death, and a marriage. Since the christening celebrations and wedding reception had been held in the Bayou Perdu Council House, no merry revelers had had a confrontation with the forces of the law. The sheriff of Bayou Perdu Parish, moreover, who looked fondly upon the Bayou Perdu Council, K. of C., especially since they had presented him with a black-and-white Cadillac Fleetwood limousine for a patrol car, had been very understanding about what had taken place at the wake. He had simply “detained” a dozen people overnight in the bastille, and had filed no official charges for public drunkenness, inciting to riot, or using provoking language to a sheriff in the execution of his official office.

  “I only got one bum in the slammer,” Father dePresseps reported. It was a sou
rce of some annoyance to the monsignor that what little English Father dePresseps had picked up was mostly vernacular.

  “Who’s that?”

  “François Mulligan,” Father dePresseps said.

  “And what did François do to incur the displeasure of the authorities?” Monsignor Clancy asked. He was a bit ashamed to realize that he was really curious— personally curious, rather than professionally interested in the woes of one of his flock.

  François Mulligan was one of the few inhabitants of Bayou Perdu who had spent much time, B.D., away from the bayou. Mocked as a child because of his mixed blood,* François had run off at sixteen to join the Marines.

  (* His father was “Bitter Ed’* Mulligan, an Irish bootlegger from New Jersey who had come to Bayou Perdu for a load of White Lightning never dreaming that a little dalliance with a comely Cajun would see him propped up with a double-barreled L. C. Smith 12-bore before the altar of the Church of the Immaculate Conception as the wedding vows were recited.)

  At the Parris Island recruit depot, Mulligan had become something of an instant celebrity. A long-cherished Marine tradition is for a close-combat drill instructor to toss a bayonet to a recruit with the admonition, “Try to kill me.” Normally, the recruit somewhat timidly attacks the D.I., and instantly finds himself flat on his back, whereupon the drill instructor can proceed with the instruction.

  “Izzat an ordair, sair?” sixteen-year-old François had politely inquired in his thick bayou dialect.

  “That’s an order!” the drill instructor had barked, delighted that he had a cocky recruit to tame.

  Fortunately the drill instructor, to maintain the erect posture and flat stomach expected of drill instructors, was wearing, under his stiffly starched uniform, an undergarment constructed of thick rubber and canvas reinforced with steel strips. For, with a quick flip of his wrist, François had sent the gleaming bayonet spinning end over end toward the drill instructor, so that when it came to rest, the point, protruding through layers of canvas, rubber, and steel strips, drew just a little bit of blood from the D.I.’s navel.

  “My God!” the drill instructor had cried.

  “It is nothin’, sair,” François had said modestly. “Actually, I am one of zee worst knife-throwers of Bayou Perdu.”

  Twenty years later, after a distinguished career, Master Chief Gunnery Sergeant François Mulligan, U.S.M.C., retired from the Corps and returned to Bayou Perdu. He was welcomed, of course, into the Bayou Perdu Council, K. of C., where his natural talents (he was six-five and weighed three hundred pounds) were recognized in his appointment as Grand Exalted Knight Guardian of the Sacred Serenity, a position that in another body would have been entitled “sergeant-at-arms.”

  There was not a Knight in the Bayou Perdu Council who could muster the courage to deny Grand Exalted Knight Guardian of the Sacred Serenity Mulligan’s soft-voiced entreaties (which were generally phrased, “Shut up, youse bums!”), for François expected the same instant, unquestioning obedience from his fellow Knights that he had grown accustomed to as a Master Chief Gunnery Sergeant, U.S.M.C., and he became rather spectacularly violent when he didn’t get it.

  He became, after The Discovery, one of the first employees of Chevaux Petroleum Corporation, International. Horsey took him from the bar of the Council House the day the pool was discovered and asked him to keep the curious away from the well-head.

  He was now carried on the rolls of the corporation as Vice-President, Employee Relations. He travelled the globe (Chevaux Petroleum operated in sixteen different countries) settling the little disputes that from-time to time arose between Chevaux employees and their supervisors....

  “You sure talk funny, Monsignor, you know dat?” Father dePresseps said.

  “What I meant to ask, Father,” Monsignor Clancy clarified, “is, why is François in the slammer?”

  “The usual reason,” Father dePresseps replied. “He said something he shouldn’t have about some broad.”

  “Could you be more specific?”

  “François , he don’t like Latin broads,” Father dePresseps explained.

  “Father, please don’t take offense, but I would like to suggest that the term ‘broad’ is somewhat derogatory. ...”

  “You know it!” Father dePresseps said. “Ol’ François can’t stand them Latin broads.”

  “Go on,” the monsignor said.

  “Well, he was down at site fifty-six, in Venezuela, and there was some sort of party . . . you sure you really want to hear all this, Monsignor?”

  “I think I should,” the monsignor replied.

  “Well, one of the guests heard what François was saying about Latin broads at the bar....”

  “And what was that?”

  “I’m a priest. I don’t like to use words like dat,” Father dePresseps said.

  “I understand,” the monsignor said. “So what happened?”

  “They had to call out the Venezuelan National Guard,” Father dePresseps said. “To stop it. Six of our guys, and twenty-one of theirs, went to the hospital. The bill for damages to the hotel came to about six thousand bucks, and, for a while, they were going to shoot François . But Horsey talked the president into a presidential pardon, on the condition that we don’t never send François back to Venezuela. He should get outta the slammer tomorrow.”

  “And where is François going then?”

  “Horsey’s gonna send him to the North Slope in Alaska,” Father dePresseps replied. “François gets along O.K. with the Eskimo broads.”

  François, in fact, the monsignor remembered, got along with most ladies rather well. Far too well, actually. In point of fact, the only man who got along better than François with ladies of various shapes, nationalities, and descriptions was the archbishop’s favorite opera singer, Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov, whose activities in that area were something of a legend.

  It was only with Spanish-speaking females that François had difficulty. The sound of a soft Spanish voice or a glimpse of dark Spanish eyes was enough to turn what was normally a rather shy man (in the presence of females) into a woman-hater.

  “But it would be your judgment, Father,” the monsignor went on, “that, presuming François is released from confinement tomorrow, that the incident is over?”

  “Yeah, all we gotta do is make sure that we keep François away from Latin broads,” Father dePresseps said. He had then turned over to the monsignor the three weekly checks. The first check was the tithe payment from Chevaux Petroleum Corporation, International. The second check represented twenty percent of the profits from the operation of the canteens operated by the Bayou Perdu Council, K. of C., in Bayou Perdu and in twenty-eight locations around the world. The third was the Conscience Fund check. The Bayou Perdu Council, K. of C., each week presented to the Archdiocese of New Orleans a check matching the fines paid by its members to various courts all over the world.

  This third check was for $1,150. Monsignor Clancy glanced at it, thought that it was a bit small, and was a little disappointed. Just in time, he remembered what the check represented, and stopped himself from commenting on its unusually low dollar value.

  The two clerics finished the brandy with which they were concluding their lunch, and then went back to their places of work—Father dePresseps by helicopter from the roof of the Chevaux Petroleum International Building on Canal Street, Monsignor Clancy by motorcycle to the office of the chancellory. . . .

  He had been back in the office only a few minutes when Sister Fortitude, his faithful and efficient secretary, told him there was a Spanish-sounding priest from Miami on the phone asking about the Ms. Prudence MacDonald Memorial School of Nursing.

  “Monsignor J. J. Clancy at your service, Father,” Clancy said when he finally picked up the phone. “How may I help you?”

  “Father Pedro Huaretto, Monsignor. I speak for the family Gomez y Sanchez.”

  “And how may I assist the family Gomez y Sanchez?” Monsignor Clancy replied.

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p; “It’s the other way around, Monsignor. The family Gomez y Sanchez wishes to make a contribution to a New Orleans medical institution.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Are you familiar with the Ms. Prudence MacDonald Memorial School of Nursing, Monsignor?”

  “Why, yes, I am,” Monsignor Clancy replied.

  “And is it a reputable institution?”

  “Quite reputable,” Monsignor Clancy said. “In point of fact, it is the nursing school connected with our own Gates of Heaven Hospital.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear that, from you, sir,” Father Huaretto said.

  “May I ask how the school came to the attention of the family Gomez y Sanchez, Father?”

  “It is a debt of honor, Monsignor,” Father Huaretto said.

  “Oh?”

  “A splendid Christian gentleman from New Orleans paid a hospital bill for a member of the family, in the belief that he could not pay it himself.”

  “Well, isn’t that nice? I don’t mean to boast, Father, but we try here, from the pulpit, to remind our good people of the Good Samaritan. You didn’t mention the Samaritan’s name?”

  “De la Chevaux, Monsignor. Horsey de la Chevaux.”

  “Oh, yes,” the monsignor said. “I’m acquainted with Mr. de la Chevaux.”

  “The family is naturally curious, Monsignor, about Ms. MacDonald ,” Father Huaretto said. “How long has it been since she’s gone to paradise?”

  “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, Father Huaretto,” Monsignor Clancy said, suddenly turning white in the face. “I’m going to connect you with the archbishop himself. Will you hold a minute, please?”

  He covered the microphone with his hand and pushed the intercom switch.