Joe Taylor, while a professor of English, has also, as Director of the Livingston University Press, been the publisher of over 200 books. Astonishingly, he has also edited at least ten volumes and written three volumes of stories and at least 13 novels, several in verse. His fiction is usually speculative. This volume, “Dappled Things,” is as close to realistic as Taylor is ever likely to get. It is, at its heart, a murder mystery, sort of.
In an Abbey near Cullman called here Our Lady of Seven Sorrows, Brother Benedict and Brother Julius, monk-artist, are together a few minutes after midnight on Christmas morning assembling a somewhat unusual creche: the infant Jesus is Black and the Holy Mother as well. This inspiration had come in a vision.
Just as Benedict is placing the stone infant into the manger, Brother Julius is killed by a bullet to the head. The scene evokes both the murder of JFK in Dallas and St. Thomas Beckett in Canterbury. The murder is racist, surely, especially since a butchered black cat and a severed Black hand had been found on the grounds some time earlier.
Two investigations ensue: police search for the killer and Benedict is tasked with writing a biography of Julius and thus investigating his entire life, at the monastery and before. “Dappled Things” is thus a murder mystery but it is not so simple. Benedict’s inquiries are guided throughout by his reverence for Thomas Merton, Thomas Aquinas and especially St. Augustine, who is reputed to have forsaken his “wife” and child to take holy orders. Was Augustine therefore a model of the perfect priest but a failure as a human being?
Benedict uncovers, peels back, like the layers of an onion, the secrets of Julius’ past, and as is often the case, consequences of the past are still very much alive. As he researches Julius, Benedict himself will encounter temptations. He, like Augustine, had a lively secular life before holy orders, much of it spent as a dissolute student at the University of Alabama.
The character Julius is based, as many readers will notice, on Brother Joseph, a monk at St. Bernard Abbey in Cullman who created dozens of replicas of holy sites at the Ave Maria Grotto. Brother Joseph, over nearly five decades, created miniatures of St. Peter’s Basilica, The Sanctuary of Lourdes and dozens of others, including The Alamo and the Tower of Pisa, using cast-off building materials, seashells, tiles, old jars, costume jewelry, virtually anything. Brother Julius, in this novel, works entirely in concrete on his “Meditation Trail.”
“Dappled Things” is an unusual, erudite mystery novel, and an intellectual challenge, not just a diverting page-turner, laced with references philosophical and theological. Be prepared to leave this book smarter than when you entered it.
