Father Briar and The Angel Page 17

  She hadn’t been out and about for a week, other than to attend Mass and do the most necessary of chores. The icicles hanging off the gutters of the house had grown several inches and dangled in a menacing manner over the door frame. Gosha had managed to carve out a path along the garden but the freshly blown snow concealed the compressed icy layer beneath it; the entire path had become a slippery gauntlet. Little avalanches feel down the conifers that lined the periphery of the garden, winter’s icy grip had tightened its hold, viselike, mean, frustrated, and violent.

  Gosha hunkered down for the weekend, as did the rest of Brannaska. They were quite obviously experienced people when it came to dealing with bad weather, but this Alberta Clipper was a monstrous weather system; it had the feel of a once in a generation storm.

  The first snows hit Brannaska in a gently, but that changed at an alarming pace. With the winds came more and more snow so dense it was that when Gosha took the opportunity to take a peak outside she could not see the mailbox at the end of her front yard, and it wasn’t far away– the whiteout had begun.

  Before the days of radio, the townsfolk of Brannaska would often get caught out in blizzards. Storms such as these would rise on sunny and temperate days. The fear of such death had yet to disappear from the collective psyche of Brannaska.

  Therefore, the citizens depended on reliable old WCCO for weather updates and the storm hits with terrifying swiftness and brute force. “It is like a combination of Ezzard Charles and Sugar Ray Robinson,” the NWS meteorologist told them about this particular storm referencing two champion boxers of the year.

  “Charles has the power, Sugar Ray the speed. This storm has both!”

  The wolf was not intimidated by the storm or the boxers. No human could defeat him. So the wolf ran, ran towards people, those weak things of flesh and no belief, no meanness, no order in the face of their creator, and ran towards his food. He was not searching for everlasting life, no, he was a rational creature who was unable to speculate on greater things.

  He just wanted this life to continue. Which makes a lot of sense. Wolves have been around for eons and it’s hard to argue with that run of success.

  Chapter Twenty Seven: After the Calm, the Storm.

  As they looked back upon it many years later, in the comfort and warmth of their homes, they’d look back and wonder, “how did we not know the storm was coming?”

  But they weren’t the only ones who missed it. A few people were caught so unawares that they died essentially where they stood, such was the swiftness of the blizzard’s attack.

  “The Storm of the Century” dropped sixty three inches of snow on Brannaska and the rest of Northern Minnesota. To this day, the blizzard holds Minneapolis’s record for heaviest snowfall in a two hour period and resulted in the deaths of sixty two people.

  The magnificent, murderous snowstorm created havoc across the state, leaving around seven hundred buses and thirty thousand cars abandoned on the streets and highways.

  Massive snowfall totals don’t always signal a troublesome blizzard. Some storms can be marked by less snow coupled ferocious winds. When combined with temperatures dozens of degrees below zero, the wind deadly.

  This storm combined all three factors. It had both terrible winds and frigid temperatures and it combined them with a thick, heavy, heartbreaking snowfall.

  It was one of those rare snowstorms that exceeded all forecasts, broke all records, and caused massive amounts of devastation and death. But Cedric and Julianna didn’t know that, not yet.

  Defining what actually “the Storm of the Century” is can be a tricky task. Sometimes, the worst storms involve average snowfalls which are whipped, ice in the blender like, into zero-visibility by hurricane-force winds. This one had huge snows along with zero visibility and howling gales.

  Some storms are worse than others because they hit big cities at busy times, or because their diameter is so huge that they swallow up entire regions. This one hit all the major cities in Minnesota over three full days.

  Timing can play a role as well -- a storm during weekday rush hour is worse than one on a Saturday morning, and a freak early storm when leaves are still on the trees can cause enormous amounts of damage. Because of the seemingly endless (for those who lived through it) duration of this storm, it started before Friday’s afternoon rush hour and ended many days later.

  The winds were supernatural, averaging forty two miles an hour with gusts peaking at over eighty! Gales like this would've made for a nasty storm at any time, but the winter of ’54 had already been unusually cold and snowy winter, with a half-dozen feet of loosely packed and icy snow already fallen.

  As if that weren't bad enough, snow covered much of the frozen surface of nearby the nearby Great Lakes, giving the wind even more snow with which to create its devilish drifts. The result was zero visibility and roads blocked by snow.

  The storm brought intense cold (the temperature dropped more than thirty degrees in just three hours) and stranded people at work or, worse, in their cars.

  The conditions were so awful that they led to thirty eight deaths as far away as Western North Dakota and Southern Ontario.

  But all that was still to come.

  Cedric was slowly overcoming his fear of being distracted by conversation while driving and they’d talked the whole way up.

  He couldn’t give up his calling as a priest. He was as much a Jesuit as he was a human being. To give up the Order was to die.

  And, whether it was scandalous, intellectual, emotional, or some sort of emotion God had invention just for them, she loved him as a priest.

  “I love the job, I love your duties, and I love your connection to the Lord. I love your ministrations to the poor and the sick and the needy. I love your patience. All of these things are connected to your calling. I won’t ever ask you to leave the priesthood again.”

  Now he had to pull over to the side of the road. Tears had filled his eyes and he tried to blink them away without success.

  Sometimes the great romantic questions of our lives are answered on long drives to nowhere. Just because it is banal doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful.

  Trig and Ramona were in the ditch. He’d refused to take the weather seriously while driving out to nowhere so he could make out with his girlfriend. Now they were going nowhere fast.

  “Could be a while until somebody gets here,” he noted.

  “Don’t get your hopes up, Trigger. Don’t get your penis up, either.” She’d taken to that word recently, for reasons she couldn’t quite figure out. The silly sounding clinical term demystified things, somehow, and took some of the power away from him.

  “Oh come on.”

  “Oh heck no.”

  This being the strongest language she ever used, Trig backed off, for the moment.

  “I think its time to bring out Beauty and the Beast,” Gosha told herself.

  She’d named her truck.

  It was quite the contraption; a welded-together amalgam of a 1937 Ford commercial delivery truck and an Army Troop Transport Vehicle.. She’d been blowtorching the thing (two things, when she’d started) off and on since last summer because something in her bones told her the coming winter would be troublesome and she’d need military grade transportation to get through it.

  Gosha had no reason to be going out anywhere. She had enough canned, pickled, and dried food to keep herself (and any and all possible guests) fed through May. Her larders and pantries and woodpiles were well-stocked. Her fire had plenty of fuel and her house was a brazen eighty seven degrees.

  But she had to move. Storms produced in her a great wanderlust, an urge so powerful that to ignore it was both foolish and painful. She could no more stay within the walls of her house than sprout wings and fly away.

  So out to the garage armory she went to fire up Beauty and the Beast.

  Ramona’s beauty had Trig all fired up, too. So far, she’d only let him get as far down as her neck, which he was layering with hicke
ys.

  “I’ll be wearing thick turtleneck sweaters for three months anyway,” she thought, “so he might as well go to town.” This was a bit of new slang that had been going around the girls of Brannaska, letting your boyfriend “go to town” on you.

  “I don’t really know why they call it that, but I like how it feels,” she thought, and leaned back in for more.

  Gosha was going to town, too.

  Brannaska spread out before her like the “February” painting in a complimentary calendar your John Deere dealership sent out every year. Surveying it, she gave out a satisfied little grunt.

  “This place has a certain rugged charm,” she said to herself. “Sort of like that bishop.”

  The bishop, in fact, possessed all the ruggedness of Liberace (and the tiniest fraction of his charm) but Gosha was bored with nowhere to go, so she turned down the country road towards the parish house, hoping to find him around.

  Her left turn down that country road killed Trig’s erection but it almost certainly saved his life.

  The young hockey hotshot had managed to maneuver Ramona out of her sweater and down to her white cotton bra and had even managed to undo the button and the zipper of her pants.

  The car containing the two lovers was, of course, still in the ditch. The amorous teenagers had forgotten about that entirely and the fact that they’d not gotten far enough out of town before “going to town.”

  When Gosha’s space-age Frankenstein’s monster of a battle truck pulled up behind them, Trig and Ramona couldn’t have been more frightened if it was the FBI, sirens blaring and guns drawn, had arrived to arrest them.

  With a sprightliness that gave no indication of her advancing age, she jumped out of the driver’s seat (which really should’ve been called the captain’s chair or something equally commanding) and tossed the winch around his rear bumper, the teenagers struggled to get their clothes back on and preserve their decency.

  “Have no shame around old Gosha, you two, I grew up on a farm and seen everything there is to see.”

  In fact, she’d found herself turned on by what little she’d seen, and she’d hoped to see a little bit more. Feelings within her were awakened by the first time in decades.

  Now, with the amorous kids being towed home for fresh punishments on the back of the oddest machine Brannaska had ever seen, Gosha had a new purpose to keep her occupied during the storm: a sexual conquest. When Father Briar wasn’t at the parish house, she dumped the kids at the Herbertsons and went off to find the bishop. Father Briar wasn’t home, Julianna wasn’t home. Something besides the 10,000 lakes was fishy. Now she had two missions before storms’ end: a sexual conquest, and to finally catch Father Briar in the act. Then she could revel in righteous justice.’

  Over the next twelve hours, the temperature dropped, the wind got worse, and the wolf waited.

  “This reminds me of Jesus in the cave,” Father Briar began again.

  “If you tell me that story one more time I’m going to take a long, shoeless walk outside,” she exploded.

  “Why, dearest, I had no idea…” he stammered and stumbled for words, sad and ashamed and feeling stupid. She had no idea the effect she had on him when she was angry. It was as though he returned to being a little boy, looking to his mother for shelter, safety and forgiveness.

  “A parable doesn’t change meaning every time you tell it. It isn’t something you can return to over and over again, teasing new themes and new ideas out of. They are simple stories! For simple people!”

  This was a big can of worms.

  Coincidentally (or maybe not, the Lord moves in mysterious ways), as Cedric was backing away from the raging Julianna, he kicked over their can of worms.

  “Now look what I’ve done,” he said, shoulders slumped, voice defeated. The Swiftn’ing Pure Lard Brand Shortening tin rolled around the icehouse, a sad little accompaniment to the fight.

  She knew she’d gone a little too far and gave a little emotional ground. “It is okay, they are easy to clean up. Here, I’ll help.”

  Julianna scooped up the dirt and stuffed it back into a handy Folger’s can. It was the same color as grounds and she wondered if it would be as tasty when brewed up. If they were stuck in here much longer, she might have to. Then she slowly and carefully picked up each individual worm and put it back into the car. The care and meticulousness with which she performed the task made her feel better, repetitive motion calms the brain.

  “Do you still love me?” he asked, clearly afraid.

  “Of course.”

  “It is that simple?”

  “Nothing with us is simple. But nothing is so complicated that we can’t deal with it.”

  That was reassuring, but not quite true. The storm was still raging outside. At times the wind was so loud that they had to pause their conversations, and at times they just gave up entirely and held each other, stoking the fire.

  The fire was the most important thing in the world. Without it, they’d be dead within two hours at the most. The icehouse was sturdy but would retain no heat, so they had to keep generating it constantly. They were stocked with blankets and a little bit of canned food, but the rest of their emergency supplies were still in the trunk of the car.

  The car was fifteen yards away.

  In this blizzard, that may as well have been fifteen miles. So they waited. While they did, the storm rose in intensity.

  Every fifteen minutes, Cedric had to get up and push the door open and shovel out around it, lest the two be trapped inside, buried by blowing and drifting snow.

  “There is a very real possibility,” he told Julianna, “that this whole icehouse could just disappear beneath the pileup.”

  Although she didn’t tell him, for she was trying to be strong and resolute, but these were great fears of hers, being buried alive and frozen. She took three deep breaths to calm her panic, one for the Father, one for the Son, and one for the Holy Ghost.

  “So I’m going to go and shovel us out a little bit.”

  “Dear heart, don’t go. It’s so dangerous and cold!”

  “It will be okay. I’m going to tie this rope around my waist and tie the other end to the support beam in here. That way, I can’t wander off and lose my way, in case we get into a whiteout situation. I’m also going to shovel a path to the car, and tie the rope to the door handle. That way we can’t lose the car, either.”

  How he managed to sound so cheerful was beyond her. But she wasn’t a shirker, so she was tough and resolute, if only for him.

  Gosha fiddled with the radio dial while she drove, but she never wobbled or wavered, the truck stayed straight and true. Soon, the reliable voice of WCCO came through, smooth, cultured, cosmopolitan (well, out of Minneapolis, anyway, which might as well have been Paris as far as the Brannaskans were concerned) came from the tinny little speakers.

  “An Alberta Clipper of this magnitude and malignancy has never been seen before,” the WCCO weatherman said. “If you are in Northern Minnesota, seek solid, warm shelter immediately. Stay in your homes, I repeat: stay in your homes. And don’t think you are safe in your house. Precautions must be taken there, too. Shore up your windows with weather stripping. Stock extra wood for the fireplace. And for goodness sakes, keep your children and your loved ones near to you, its going to be a dangerous few days. Stay tuned to WCCO for ‘Weather Updates on the Eights.’ Young Sid Hartmann is up next with sports news.”

  “I was watching Lucy with you and dad the other night and something came to me. Came to me in a little and unused part of my brain,” Trig said, sounding almost eloquent. What he lacked up for in depth of vocabulary and elocution, he made up for in preacher’s heartfelt innocence and truth.

  His mother was wary but encouraged. Unlike most of his monosyllabic peers, Trig would often strike up conversations with his mother, conversations that lasted full sentences, full paragraphs, even. But they always concerned hockey or dinner, or, when he was feeling particularly loquacious and inspired, e
ating dinner while playing hockey.

  Not tonight. Not with Ramona, still sweaty from sexual exertion, standing by his side, ashamed, embarrassed by Gosha’s easy busting of them and yet somehow still a little defiant.

  Even boys of lesser moral fiber can rise to inspired heights, especially when standing on the shoulders of a benevolent God, the sort of benevolent dude-like bro-deity who puts his girl up on his shoulders at the rock and roll concert on a drunken summer’s evening, if only to better see a verse of her favorite song and flash her breasts at the bassist.

  “We were watching Lucy and I saw how Lucy and Ethel let their contest winnings slip through their fingers by carelessness and accident.”

  This was true. Lucy and Ethel had won a newspaper giveaway contest on that week’s episode but their carelessness had cost them both the winning entry receipt and their chance at a ten dollar windfall.

  “And I always hear about Father Briar talking about Jesus in the cave, and the patience it had given him, and how he’d recognized what was important in life.”

  Again, the hockey star had misunderstood a fundamental proverb and the lesson to be learned from it, but the old saw “Jesus Loves a Trier” had never been truer. Trig was a Trier.

  Ramona perked up next to him. A little color returned to her cheeks and he swelled from breast to thighs in anticipation.

  “And I have decided that I won’t let the prize of my life slip away through carelessness.”

  Ramona thought she might faint with joy right then and there. To her impressionable teenage years, that sounded like the beginnings of a marriage proposal.

  Trig’s mother was equally weak in the knees, but for different reasons. To her, this sounded like a prayer in which Trygve Thorbjorn Olsen was accepting Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior.