The Stone of Blood (31 page)

What was happenin
’
here wasn’t normal. At least not what I had come to believe was normal.

And I sat there at the table I lost myself in deep contemplation over what ‘
was
’ and what ‘
was not normal
’.

“
What happens?
” I wondered to myself. “
When stories, myths and legends become real?
”

I wondered what story was now playin’ out in my life. Was it some kind of distorted version of ‘
Peter and the Wolf’
or ‘
Little Red Riding Hood
’? I wished this all
was
just one big old fairy tale! Cause if I could just stop readin’ it …
I would
!
And then I’d close the whole ‘
danged
’ book!

Eighteen

Through Tangled Woods

Y
ou ever just know when somethin’ was right? I mean when it just felt so smooth that it hardly even took any effort at all? That’s how it felt for me to be around my grandpa. He always had my back.

One time when I was a kid and sick with a fever and there weren’t nothin’ that my mama could do to make me feel better, my grandpa come over to see me just cause my mama had told him I was sick. And just like that, when he got there …I got better!

“Dad, I did everything I was supposed to do.” My mama told him. “He just keeps on running a temperature.”

“He just misses his grandpa, that’s what it is!” Grandpa said with a wink and a smile.

And you know my fever just went away!

I liked him alot! It just came natural.

It has been said that we all have some “
Grandpa
Joe
” in us! All of us grand kids that is! And whenever there was some sort of stubbornness that came up out of one of us, that’s when we’d hear it! “
Boy, you sure can tell you’re kin to ‘Grandpa
Joe
!
” They’d say. And then they’d laugh about it and mess up our hair and all. I never really liked that part, the part about gettin
’
my hair messed up. But I didn’t mind bein
’
compared to my grandpa at all!

Grandpa was born in nineteen and thirteen. I remember this distinctly cause he was always lookin’ for one of them nineteen and thirteen V nickels. There was only five of em’ made, and I think one of em’ was found by a man at the bottom of a can of beans one time when he’d opened it up to eat out of it. Now that was one lucky man! Good thing he was hungry for some beans that day!

“
Toby, you keep a look out for a V nickel like that”
My
grandpa would tell me. “
They’re worth a quite a bit of money!
”

Now Grandma and Grandpa lived way up on Heaven Hill; up on the top through tangled woods that stretched along a windin’ and darkened graveled road. The road crossed a couple of rollin’ creeks by way of two thick and heavy wooden bridges. There was an old yellow bar gate that sat down in the holler at the entrance right across from Heaven Hill Distillery. It was a place where moon shiners would’ve set up their ‘
moonshine
s
till’s’
durin’ the times of prohibition.

Their house set all the way back up in there on the cleared out part of the hill, and it was surrounded by great big large and beautiful trees with limbs just made for climbin’ on! There was one tree that was so big that it would’ve taken six or seven grownups stretchin’ there arms open wide to reach all the way around it! It was an awesome old tree! And me and my sister Anna always liked to play on it! Especially Anna! She liked to swing from its long thick vines!

The house was kinda small, but it had a real ‘
home
’ kinda feelin’ to it …so we liked it too! But in the winter time it could be a real ‘
booger
’ gettin’ up there to visit! But we did it, several times! One time we even walked the whole mile and a half or so back there on foot! I remember the snow bein’ all the way up to my knees! But my dad said that “
it wasn’t so bad.
” And that I “
wasn’t knee high to a grasshopper back then anyways!
”

I could hardly wait to see my grandpa and talk with him about all the stuff that me and Colby had discovered. I wondered what he’d think about what we’d seen or if maybe he already knew about that kind of stuff …and was just waitin’ for one of us to ask him about it. My grandpa was real smart like that.

I sat there by the window in our livin’ room and looked out at our front yard. The lavender skies that had come up that mornin’ had led to an overcast and otherwise dreary lookin’ day that was filled with intermittent sprinklin’s of rain. Small droplets of water lay upon the windows glass as I looked out through it. It made the whole outside seem to me, a little bit colder.

I called Colby on the phone, but nobody answered. The rain probably hadn’t stopped him from playin’ ‘
Huck Finn
’ on the boat he’d found down by the creek. And since his mama and daddy didn’t even know about it, they probably didn’t know enough to tell him
not
to go down there!

Not that it would’ve stopped him anyways!

I wondered too, if he was bein’ hunted like I was. But I guessed that if he was …then he wouldn’t have paid any attention to it!

And he probably wouldn’t have even told me about it anyways!

So …since I couldn’t go outside until after my Dad had come home …and since it was rainin’ and all, I decided that I would find me a good book and do some more readin’.

I had begun to piece things together. And I had determined that somethin’ had transpired between the ‘
Prince of Blood
’ Louise Phillippe and Father Flaget that was much more than just the common niceties and the exchange of a few simple trinkets and paintings for the Cathedral.

John Fitch I surmised had been an unwillin’ pawn in this cruel game of chess, while at least three notable people from the pages of history had been listed as givin’ gifts to the church via Father Flaget; Louise Phillippe, the King of the Two Sicilies and the Roman Catholic Pope, were the three.

I found in Mama’s encyclopedias under
Louis Philippe
that: “
In 1809, he married Princess Maria Amalia of Naples and Sicily, daughter of King Ferdinand IV of Naples and Maria Carolina of Austria.
” and that “
Ferdinand (1751-1825), son of Charles
III
of Spain, was king of Naples as Ferdinand IV from 1759 to 1806, and
king of the Two Sicilies
as Ferdinand I from 1816 to 1825. Ferdinand became king of
Naples
as a boy when his father ascended the Spanish throne (1759) as Charles
III
.
”

So it appeared to me that the King of France could have
persuaded
his ‘
father-in-law
’ to donate items to the church. I didn’t know it for certain. But it could be assumed that he did.

The third person who was listed as bein’ a donor to the cathedral was Pope Leo XII. I read that:

“
Pope Leo XII
(
22 August 1760
–
10 February 1829
), born Annibale Francesco Clemente Melchiore Girolamo Nicola Sermattei della Genga, was Pope from 1823 to 1829.
”

“Leo XII’s domestic policy was one of extreme conservatism: He was determined to change the condition of society, bringing it back to the utmost of his power to the old usages and ordinances, which he deemed to be admirable; and he pursued that object with never flagging zeal.”[5] He
condemned the Bible societies
, and
under Jesuit influence
reorganized the educational system, placing it entirely under priestly control through his bull Quod divina sapientia and requiring that all secondary instruction be carried out in Latin, as he required of all court proceedings, also now entirely in ecclesiastical hands. All charitable institutions in the
Papal States
were put under direct supervision.”

The Pope had
condemned
‘Bible societies’
and anythin
g
‘
under Jesuit influence
’.

“Did that mean that he condemned all other faiths and religions?”
I wondered.
“And most specifically …the Jewish religion?”

I researched Pope Leo XII further, and I found a part of a speech that he once delivered.

“
1824
MAY
5 Excerpts from the:
UBI
PRIMUM ENCYCLICAL OF
POPE LEO XII
ON HIS ASSUMING THE PONTIFICATE

17. You have noticed a society, commonly called the
Bible society
, boldly spreading throughout the whole world. Rejecting the traditions of the holy Fathers and infringing the well-known decree of the
Council of Trent
, it works by every means to have the holy Bible translated, or rather mistranslated, into the ordinary languages of every nation. There are good reasons for fear that (as has already happened in some of their commentaries and in other respects by a
distorted interpretation of Christ's gospel
) they will produce a gospel of men, or what is worse,
a gospel of the devil
!”

I had read previously that this Pope didn’t like ‘
French
’ people as a whole, cause he had once been held hostage by em’ durin’ an earlier time in his life, back before he had been ordained as the Pope.

So it occurred to me, “
Why was he supportin’ Father Joseph Flaget, a ‘French’ priest? And if he didn’t like ‘non-Catholics’…then why did he present gifts to Flaget at all? Flaget was a friend to many regular people who could be considered ‘non-Catholics’?
”

I wondered if people remembered the things that this Pope had said or the way he had treated people. I mean, since this had been so long ago and all. And also, I wondered if it would matter to anybody. I mean, even though I wasn’t a Catholic, it mattered to me! “
If nobody remembered that the Head of the Roman Catholic Church had called all other Bibles the ‘Gospels of the Devil.”
I thought. “…
then maybe somebody should remind em’
!
”