Boys and Girls Together

By Dr James T. Baker

Having solved murder mysteries in Mississippi, Korea, Scotland, and Italy, everyone’s favorite monastic sleuth, Father Columba, finds himself on vacation in Music City, U.S.A., Nashville Tennessee. There he finds an all too familiar tragedy, one based in love. How he stumbles his way through conflicting clues to solve, the mystery provides his fans with still another highly enjoyable story. In December of 1999, Mother Maria Angela Reynolds of the Convent of Saint Mary Magdalene in Nashville Tennessee penned this missive about Father Columba’s Nashville adventures:

"This brief memoir came into my possession 20 years ago, that is in 1979, arriving addressed to me at our convent but without the name or address of the sender, postmarked La Trobe, Pennsylvania. I have kept it with me until now when I will place it in our archives. Perhaps after I am gone, it will be discovered and published, and by then all who are mentioned herein will be dead, which is what Columba wanted and quite likely for the best.

When I read it for the first time—I have read it many times since then—I discovered that the dear man we knew as Father Quentin, the man who solved our curious mystery and helped save us from the curiosity of journalists and the greed of realtors, the man who made sure we survived the awful 60s and 70s, was in truth Father Columba, who is now known throughout the world for having solved other mysteries for Mother Church."

Become immersed in the backdrop of the 1960s Nashville as an undercover Father Columba once again rides to discover the truth behind a tragic death. Along the way, Father Columba discovers a hidden lover’s secret, Nashville’s country music scene, and nuns on roller-skates in Boys and Girls Together.

The clever and quirky Father Columba Mystery Series is the invention of Western Kentucky University history professor, James T. Baker. Boys and Girls Together is the third installment of the Father Columba Mysteries Series. Following on the heels of Prior Knowledge and Good for the Soul, Boys and Girls Together is a wonderful introduction to the world of an amateur sleuthing monk who’s no saint..

• Language: English
• Publisher: Grave Distractions Publications
• Release date: Jul 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310936166

Dr James T. Baker

James Baker developed his passion for history and religion while in high school, during his days as a Bulldog. He is a graduate of Baylor and Florida State Universities and has for many years taught at Western Kentucky University. Throughout his career he has been a prolific writer, authoring 22 books and over 60 articles. His articles have appeared in such places as Christian Century, Commonweal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The American Benedictine Review. His creative talents and his unique points of view and insights have also made him a highly sought after speaker. He has delivered addresses and papers in the United States, Italy, Korea, Taiwan, China, and other Asian countries. He often appears in a one person show-presentation of industrialist-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. In addition to his teaching duties, James directs the Canadian Parliamentary Internship Program.

Book preview

Chapter 1: Before That Fall

I shall be brief. I have learned, from giving countless lectures, speeches, and sermons over many years that this statement always makes an audience look forward to what I have to say. For anyone who finds and reads this informal and personal memoir, if anyone ever does, this promise of brevity should be an incentive to read on. I’ll be gone by the time you find it, but I still aim to please, even into the future, when I’m sitting on that Great Arctic Ice Floe in the Sky.

We never know what life will bring us. It’s probably just as well. I know that if I had been given the power of precognition, if I had had an inkling of what I would be doing after I reached the ripe old age of 65, when most men nod off into placid senility and vegetation, I might have decided to go bungee off a cliff, jumping with the hope I would have been given a faulty elastic band and hit the valley bottom very hard.

Not that I would really have taken my own life—I know that is a sin—and whatever people say I am a very orthodox Catholic in most ways—but I might have taken some unreasonable risks, secretly hoping for the worst, all just to avoid the chaotic twisting and turning road I have been forced to walk in my last years. That old Asian comment about the curse of living in exciting times is apt. I would say it’s a curse to live an exciting life. Of course mine was nicely serene until I was elderly, but then it turned exciting—and agonizing. I didn’t choose the excitement, the agony; it found me.

For most of my life I was a simple Benedictine monk: no wife, no children, no family, I lived in a small room all to myself, my meals and clothing provided, surrounded by other monks, which gave me company, but able to close them off by shutting the door to my cell when I chose. I had a Ph.D. in history from Notre Dame and taught at various Catholic colleges, much in demand because those colleges needed professors who worked for monastic wages which were, and are, a pittance. I enjoyed the life, teaching classes of adolescents, some headed toward the priesthood, some working their way through school as athletes, some hoping to strike it rich in business. I had summers off, I got a few short articles published, I even wrote a history of my Mother Abbey, Saint Vincent’s of Latrobe Pennsylvania. I was respected, if not loved, by my fellow teachers and brothers. At 65 I returned to Saint Vincent’s, in a kind of retirement so was my intention, but I continued to teach a class or two each year and thought that would be the way I would end my allotted three score and ten.

Oh But No!!!

First, my Father Abbot called me out of retirement to go down south and look into trouble at one of our priories in Mississippi, Saint Luke’s near Oxford. I was named Interim Prior there, and just after my arrival I found myself embroiled in a murder case. It fell my duty to try to solve the mystery involved, and I worked with a dull but persistent local sheriff and a dazzlingly smart young Chinese American newspaper reporter to do it. I blundered about like an amateur at that task, but so did they, and to the surprise of everyone, from Pennsylvania to Mississippi, the three of us together solved the mystery. In the process we altered the lives of about twenty people.

I wrote a memoir of that experience; and it is safely locked in a vault at Saint Vincent’s, to be read, if at all, after I and all the people involved there have gone to our heavenly reward, if indeed any of us have one.

My mission in Mississippi completed, I returned to Saint V’s, ready to resume my interrupted retirement. Then Father Abbot gave me another assignment, one that took me much further away, into a much stranger environment, to look into another suspicious death. Because what happened in Oxford made him think that I had a knack for solving crimes, which I didn’t have, he sent me to Korea, to a priory out at the edge of Seoul, up near the demilitarized zone. A lot of people had died in that region during the Korean War (Police Action, as our government called it), and the priory there had even lost a few monks, caught in the crossfire. But the war had been over for more than a decade, and it was obvious that this death was not war related and not accidental; it was monk-on-monk. It was in Korea that I learned a lot about Buddhism and incidentally a lot about my own Catholic faith.

I remember fondly the first time I visited a Buddhist monastery, how when I saw the reverse swastika on the wall I thought an escaped Nazi had taken refuge there. Yet it was the bizarre world I found in my own Benedictine priory, Saint Simeon’s, that made for an almost ineffably comic opera, the monks playing their assigned roles, me playing mine; and in the ensuing several acts on that stage, singing the various arias I was called on to perform, I almost got myself deported. I still get the shakes when I recall my visit to the American Embassy in Seoul that autumn day, summoned by the political officer.

Father Columba, the fresh faced diplomat said in his clipped California accented English, you are in deep trouble.

I am, I gulped. Why?

I think you know.

Uh, perhaps, but it would be best if you told me.

He leaned back in his chair, eyeballing me, a sneer playing about his lips. It is the better part of discretion that I not speak of it directly. All I can say is, you have offended the government of South Korea, and in doing so you have embarrassed the government of the United States of America.

How could offending the Korean government offend the U.S.?

We are allies.

I never meant to offend either one.

The essay you wrote and sent to your abbey’s newsletter in America did it.

How did the Koreans learn about that?

They have clipping service. Anything published in any American journal or newspaper is sent here. Any criticism of the regime is considered an offense. A Korean who does it is accused of treason. A foreigner is accused of abusing the national hospitality. Anyone who criticizes the regime is punished.

Punished? How? I pictured myself hanging by a rope from a scaffold with a broken neck.

In your case it would be immediate deportation.

I was just describing what I saw here. It was just meant to enlighten my order. We have the priory here.

Yes. I understand. Nevertheless, I have been asked to inform you that if you do one more thing wrong here, if you make a public statement, if you send back one more essay critical of the regime, you will be given twenty four hours to leave the country. You may barely have time to pack.

I travel light, I said, trying to break the tension. I smiled.

Good, he said. He did not smile.

He stood and extended his hand. I took it, shook it, and stood looking at him, waiting for directions. He released me, took his hand back, and nodded toward the door. I went out on wobbly legs. I was out of Korea, fortunately of my own volition and not at the point of a gun, three days later. I remember well the sigh of relief I expelled when I looked down and saw the shore of that mountainous peninsula receding from view and knew I was out of Korean air space. Osaka, Japan looked good to me, San Francisco, California looked better, and fetid, decrepit Philadelphia, Pennsylvania looked like paradise. One of the brothers picked me up there and drove me to Saint V’s, and I dozed all the way home, a smile on my face.

I also kept a diary of the Korean fiasco, and it too is locked away until all concerned are gone. Since some of the Korean monks were young at the time, that could be a long, long time, likely beyond the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Back at Saint Vincent’s, I once more settled in for what I hoped would be a peaceful and contented rest of my life. Then our young Catholic president was assassinated. In response I started a study group so that both students and monks could discuss current events; perhaps better understand that world in which we had to minister if not approve; but an old wound from my years of theological battle opened up. During the discussions I guess I expressed myself too vividly, and I was accused by some naïve brothers, both young and old, of being a heretic. A heretic!

I Am Not!

Let me explain. My dad died when I was 12 years old, and ever since I have blamed God. You see, I think God has a mean streak. He took my dad. If He didn’t, who did? If He didn’t, then He isn’t in control of things, He isn’t omnipotent. I’ve been accused of being a kind of Calvinist. Calvin thought that God is totally in control of history, thus that He knows the future as well as the past, thus that everything that happens is predestined. I have never gone that far, close but not all the way. Anyway, God and I have a running feud. We talk a lot. I have been known to call Him an Old Bastard, and He sees that I am punished by giving me impossible jobs, like stumbling through murder mysteries. It’s an ongoing skirmish. Fighting with Him is like having athlete’s foot, not fatal but terribly annoying, both to Him and to me. Yet oddly I think we both enjoy the jousting.

The students and brothers were disturbed by my honesty, my frankness, my theology, and they complained to Father Abbot. He decided that I should relinquish my post as discussion leader, and he even thought it best for the good of the community if I went away for a while. He had read an article about the Holy Isle of Iona, off the coast of Scotland, where my namesake Saint Columba had once built a monastery. It had been abandoned and let fall into ruins when Protestant monarchs forcibly dispersed the monks during the sixteenth century. Now a local Scottish laird, one I suspect with a university