Father Briar and The Angel Read online

  Father Briar and The Angel

  Title Page

  Chapter One: In the Beginning, There Was the War, and the War was Not Good.

  Chapter Two: On the Origins of Small Things Like Great Men.

  Chapter Three: Julianna in Her Slip Slips Into Nostalgia.

  Chapter Four: Lovers Walk on the Lake, but Not Like Christ.

  Chapter Five: Social Media Was The Same and Different Back Then and Up There.

  Chapter Six: They Are Called the Great North Woods for a Reason.

  Chapter Seven: Divination and Water Witching are not Sciences.

  Chapter Eight: How are You Going to Keep Them Down on the Farm After They’ve Seen Rome on the Silver

  Chapter Nine: Father Briar Counsels Worried Hockey Moms.

  Chapter Ten: Hockey is Religion, Religion is Hockey.

  Chapter Eleven: By Golly, Gosha.

  Chapter Twelve: Bless this Feast and Let us Eat Like Beasts.

  Chapter Thirteen: The Sod Busters Come to Town in a Cloud of Snow and Sin.

  Chapter Fourteen: Bjorn’s Needs a New Cook.

  Chapter Fifteen: In the Aftermath of Julianna’s First Night on the Job.

  Chapter Sixteen: At Home With the Olsens.

  Chapter Seventeen: Close Encounters Will Test Lovers

  Chapter Eighteen: Francisco Makes a New Friend.

  Chapter Nineteen: Francisco and Julianna’s First… Date?

  Chapter Twenty: Weren’t the Disciples Out on a Lake in a Storm and Christ Calmed it for Them? Few Su

  Chapter Twenty One: There is a Commandment About Respecting Your Mother, Right?

  Chapter Twenty Two: Fish Fry Brings Heat to the Relationship

  Chapter Twenty Three: Ralphie Roggenbucker Goes Repairing.

  Chapter Twenty Four: Ralphie is Laid to Rest.

  Chapter Twenty Five: Forgiveness Often Comes at the Price of Travel.

  Chapter Twenty Six: The Calm Before the Storm.

  Chapter Twenty Seven: After the Calm, the Storm.

  Chapter Twenty Eight: Dum Spero, Spiro is Latin for “As I breathe, I Hope.”

  Father Briar

  and

  The Angel

  Rita Saladano

  Published by Saladano Publishing, LLC

  Copyright 2016 by Rita Saladano

  Cover Illustration Copyright © 2016

  Cover Art by Dragan Bilic

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  “If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.”

  ― Julian of Norwich

  Description:

  Set over four weeks in the brutal winter of 1954, Father Briar and the Angel is an historical romance unlike any other.

  When a beautiful young woman from the Pacific Northwest falls for a Jesuit priest (and he for her) who has recently been called to a parish in Northern Minnesota, she chooses to move halfway across the country to be near him.

  Brannaska, Minnesota, way up North there where the seasons are dramatic and the locals eccentric, is a frozen place in the winter. But that doesn’t stop things between amorous folks from heating the place up!

  Filled with illicit love, dramatic twists, a beautiful natural setting, a big cast of charming and memorable characters, and an action-filled climax during “the Storm of the Century,”

  By turns sweet and charming, lusty and erotic, nostalgic and forbidden, Father Briar and the Angel will delight fans of literary romances, lusty romances, historical romances, and “man in uniform” romances.

  A complex and layered but easily accessible tale of forbidden love, Rita Saladano’s book is the must read of the winter, this winter, or any other.

  Don’t let the cold get you, invite Father Briar into your heart today.

  Prologue:

  Kisses can be scandalous.

  The priest was so pure, so sweet-hearted, so soft and tender, and yet so masculine. His thick, deep brown hair was mussed up and a little damp; August in Minnesota is muggy and the air thick with mosquitoes. He swatted a few of the naughty little bugs but knew it was futile; they always won in the end. Plus, he didn’t like to kill any living thing, even things as irritating as these.

  “They have as much right to dinner as I do,” Father Cedric Briar said, deciding not to swat one that was feeding on his arm.

  Such things made Julianna Warwidge love him even more. He wasn’t just thoughtful and moral; he put those thoughts and beliefs into action in the most literal of ways, even doing unthinkable things, like not swatting mosquitoes.

  They were picnicking on the banks of the Mississippi River. The massive, cross-continental waterway had its headwaters a couple of hours south of where they sat. Father Briar was always inspired by the power of the river and came down to eat, rest, and pray beside it whenever the state’s notorious weather allowed it. And the last winter had been so notorious that he and his love had to come here a lot this healing, healthy, hot summer.

  Kisses can be wild.

  Wild like the pine forest around them. Deer, black bear and timber wolves still roamed those woods and despite being an animal lover, she always felt a little unsafe when they walked out to their special, private lunch spot among the towering trees.

  But that unsafe feeling was thrilling, too. “Isn’t that part of the reason you keep doing this?” she asked herself, “because of the illicit thrill?”

  It was 1954 and the Catholic Church was a still one of the most powerful institutions in America. To be involved with a priest was definitely wild, wild to the point of being a little bit dangerous. Every time she contemplated it, the love affair made her titter. Julianna was a good girl; very good girl, and she didn’t do things that went against Minnesota’s conservative culture, much less things that went against God’s command for his priestly representatives on Earth, so this was most certainly wild.

  Kisses can send one up with the birds and the stars and the other travelers through the sky.

  The day was so lovely he couldn’t help but turn his thoughts to God. A couple of Whooping Cranes flew overhead, their majesty lifting his thoughts along with them. “Grus Americana,” the Latin scholar and rigorously educated cleric noted. The spring thaw had filled the river with crisp, cold water, proving that winter didn’t last forever (although it often felt as though it did) and that life could renew itself indefinitely.

  And if life could renew itself, why couldn’t love? With this smart and dedicated woman, even that felt possible to Father Briar. Her eyes were pools of compassion and curiosity, her skin soft and fair and he grace unparalleled by any woman he’d ever known.

  This was not a man who ever thought he’d be challenging the rules and restrictions of his church; no, Cedric Briar was a lover of order. He’d joined one, even. The Society of Jesus, the Jesuit Order.

  But love was trumping order.

  She spread out the contents of their picnic basket. They had rye bread with butter and thick slices of ham with which to make sandwiches. There were ruddy red potatoes, first boiled and then sprinkled with dill and lemon juice before being chilled overnight in the refrigerator. There were fresh carrots and spring onions. And there was chocolate, a brand new treat that they both loved, a confection known as M&M’s.

  She hummed a poppy little tune as she prepared their lunch. “Did you bring the mustard, Cedric?”

/>   “Forgot to pack it, sorry! There is more butter in there, though. What is that you are singing?”

  She was a little embarrassed. “I heard it on the car radio when I was driving to pick you up. It is a new song called “Rock Around the Clock” by a young man named Bill Haley.”

  “Haley like the comet?” Father Briar asked.

  “Yes, exactly. In fact, that it the name of his backing band. Bill Haley and the Comets.”

  “It is a catchy little tune.”

  “It is, but popular music like that isn’t going anywhere. It’s all a flash in the pan. Speaking of which, why did you bring a pan?” she asked, lifting the heavy cast iron thing out of the wicker basket.

  “I thought I might catch a fish and fry it up,” he said, motioning to the river.

  “I never knew you fished.”

  “Avidly! This is the “Land of 10,000 Lakes,” after all. Everybody here fishes.”

  Julianna was a transplant for the Pacific Northwest, a place both very much like Northern Minnesota and very different. But she was a city girl and Brannaska was a small town in the woods, surrounded by the famous lakes, German Catholics, and Scandinavian Protestants who were all united by a love of hockey and a folk hero lumberjack of gigantic proportions named Paul Bunyon.

  So there had been some culture shock. “An adjustment period,” he’d told her, reassuring. “You’ll grow to love the quiet and the fresh air. The people will grow to love you, as I did, and you’ll flourish. “Bloom where you are planted,” I always say! And, tumultuous as it was, fate has planted you here. Thank God.”

  “Thank God,” she agreed, passing him a sandwich.

  He ate greedily. This was another thing that attracted her to him; he was, as her mother would’ve said, “a good eater.” Although, had her mother known she was involved with a priest, well, all hell would’ve broken out.

  Kisses can make liars of the most honest of men.

  They held hands. As a working person, a lady who’d done noble labor with her hands, her knuckles were round and her palms calloused, although her nails were immaculate and painted a space-age color. His seminary ring was cool as she laced her fingers through his.

  “Do you ever take this off?” she asked, spinning it around on his finger.

  “Sometimes I think I should,” he said, suddenly serious. A cloud passed over the sun and he wondered if the mercurial weather wasn’t about to go bad.

  “Why do you say that?” she asked, wiggling a bit closer to him, trying to keep the mood light and summery. The winter had been so harsh. Seattle is rainy, to be sure, but the snow laid over Minnesota like death blanket, a burial shroud, for unending months.

  But now, like the blooms around them, their love was flourishing.

  “Every time I kiss you I wonder about the vows I took. As joyful as our love is, it is impossible for me to forget that I am breaking a solemn vow to God.”

  As if to prove a point (“or make a dare to the divine,” she speculated), he kissed her, soft and sweet but full of longing and desire.

  “Sweeter than those little chocolate candies,” he said.

  “More nourishing than bread and water,” she agreed, taking a bit of both and enjoying the view of the river while he held her close.

  Thus the afternoon passed. They ate all the sandwiches but rationed the M&M’s, eating only three an hour so they’d last through the sunset and into the night.

  They’d rarely had so much uninterrupted time together. It had been a long time coming, Julianna’s move to Minnesota. It wasn’t that she wasn’t committed to him, oh, she very much was! But he was a priest, a working, wonderful priest, with parish and congregation to worry about and watch over.

  Life in the Upper-Midwest was harsh and unpredictable, even when it was beautiful and bountiful. Father Briar was known throughout the woodsy and hardscrabble region as a pillar of the community and an organizer of care and relief for the afflicted and the needy. The church was a necessary part of the social safety net in a country where the government had only recently developed one.

  She loved to be so close to it, and therefore to God. And yet so far away! Despite herself, she too had doubts about the morality of their affair. “What does Jesus think of me?” she wondered, laying back into the arms of Father Briar, “how could he find something so pure and so blessed to be sinful?”

  As if reading her mind, Cedric said, “now is not the time for deep thoughts, my dear heart, now is the time for enjoying the evening.”

  A man and his son drifted by in a wooden canoe, fishing for bass. They were well up river from home and he didn’t believe anybody would recognize him, but he reflexively pulled his hat a little lower over his eyes to shield them, just in case.

  Feeling him tense up, she asked “do you ever dream of being free from it? Free from the hiding and the secrets? Free to be ourselves, free to be in love? Free to think about the future?”

  “Ah, the future. The first stumble of many doomed lovers,” he joked, a little darker than he’d meant.

  “We aren’t doomed.”

  “No,” he agreed, “far from it.”

  “We almost were.”

  “This last winter was a killer.”

  She lay her head down on his lap.

  “It’ll make a good story, in the future,” she said, a cold shudder tearing through her.

  It makes a good story for now…

  Chapter One: In the Beginning, There Was the War, and the War was Not Good.

  Julianna’s father, Gordon Warwidge, had been a lumberjack, a real woodsman. He was the kind of man they stopped making a long time ago, even long before 1954. Her father was one of the reasons she’d been able to adjust to life in frozen Brannaska, way up there in Northern Minnesota, because the local tall tales about a folk hero named Paul Bunyon reminded her of her father.

  Paul Bunyon was an archetype of masculinity, but exaggerated to make him memorable. He worked twenty two hours a day in the forests and could fell trees with only one swing of his ax. He was sixteen feet tall and eight feet wide. His beard was thicker than steel wool and his eyes were glacial pools.

  But Paul Bunyon was a myth, a tale told to inspire people to work hard in the face of nature’s capriciousness. Julianna’s father had been a real man of flesh and blood and flannel and whiskers and gun oil and chainsaw grease. He’d been across the country twice and worked in a dozen of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal labor projects. He’d dammed rivers in the West, strung power lines through the Midwest, and logged dark forests from Maine to Washington State.

  He had shoulders as wide as a Burma Shave billboard and an equal way with silly rhymes and terrible puns. Terribly entertaining in a corny way, his laughter and goofiness were infective. Despite the brutal toll a life of hard, physical work had taken on his body, he was in constant good-spirits, if hyper-critical at times. His criticism was just motivated by his perfectionism, she knew, so most of the time she was able to forgive him for it.

  Gordon was a natural born entertainer and had entertained the rough men of the logging camps with ribald stories and songs. To this day, he was prone to telling an off-color joke in the presence of his daughter, just to see her blush, and then laugh in spite of her churchy decency. He favored Aqua Velva cologne, already iconic by then and nice ties, but oddly, he was indifferent to the quality of his suits.

  Of all of the influences on her life, her father was the greatest. Gordon was big and lusty and hilarious; he was at the same time humble and smart and self-deprecating. She always tried to emulate him when she was in situations where she felt as though she was in over her head or uncomfortable, not knowing what to say.

  When she’d joined Women’s Auxiliary Corps in 1944, he’d bubbled over with support for her. His left leg had been partially crippled during his tenure as a lumberjack when a tree had been felling came down upon it. This had excluded him from military service, much to his everlasting regret.

  “You are going to be the jewel of the
Armed Services,” he’d told her.

  “Aw, dad, it’s not really the Armed Services,” she said. “They’ll do some testing and see what sort of job I’m fit for.”

  “It is great nonetheless. You aren’t a shirker.”

  Her father couldn’t abide by “shirkers” and spent a great deal of his post-retirement time ridiculing them. He’d scour the newspapers looking for them, usually in the government or local sports teams, then spend the rest of the day ridiculing them.

  Her mother, Angeline (the family had a tradition of names ending in “ine,” as her sister was Geraldine and her auntie was, somewhat awkwardly, Bernardine), was a reticent beauty, shy and retiring by radiant anyway. A staunch, proud, and devoted Catholic, her three kids were her raison d’être, her reason to exist, her pride and joy.

  She’d wanted more but making it through the depression with that large a brood was still a remarkable accomplishment. Her husband having to travel the great, groaning nation meant that she was alone a great deal while raising them. She met this considerable challenge with both grit and grace without so much as a complaint.

  Faith had done her right, rewarded her, and filled her life. She volunteered every Monday and Tuesday at the parish office, answering phones and filing papers. She volunteered Wednesday and Thursday at the church library, shelving concordances and confirmation texts and calling folks whose books were overdue. She worked (without pay) Friday and Saturday at the Catholic Charities Branch #3 Food Bank, stocking cans of bean and corn for the neediest of families.

  Sunday was for mass.

  Mass was still said in Latin and none of them could imagine it any other way. The priests retained an air of mystery as they went about their duties. Julianna had always loved the arcane rituals of the church and was happy every time the service began.