Father Briar and The Angel Read online

  They seem to go on forever. One can be lost in them for weeks, if one could last that long. They are tall, even after the logging. They are silent.

  Silence is what always struck Julianna when she and Cedric went on their long, meditative walks through the trees.

  “There are so many critters out here,” she thought, “how can it be so quiet?”

  There were critters, different creatures by the dozen, various and sundry, banal and exotic. Grey squirrels and field mice, black bears and bald eagles and everything in between. But the size of Northern Minnesota dwarfed them all and blanketed them in pine needles and boughs heavy with snow.

  Cedric was teaching himself to snowshoe. It was going poorly.

  The snow in Brannaska got so deep that special footwear for walking over it. Snowshoes work by distributing the weight of the person across a broader footprint in order that the person does not sink down into the waist, or even deeper, and get stuck and stranded.

  Snowshoes provide a quality called "flotation and it did often feel to Father Briar as though he was walking on water; however, given the theological implications of that impossibility, he avoided the metaphor and merely thought of himself as floating on air.

  Traditional North American snowshoes, invented by the Indigenous Peoples, were a remarkable thing. The design that Father Briar wore on his feet hadn’t changed much in centuries. It was made of a single strip of some tough wood, usually white ash or birch, curved round and fastened together at the ends with rawhide and strengthened through the middle by a lighter cross-bar. The space within the frame is filled with a close webbing of dressed caribou or treated deer hide strips, leaving a small opening just behind the cross-bar for the toe of the warmly-shod and wool-stockinged foot. They are fastened to the boot (or if you were a Native American, a moccasin) by buckles or ties.

  Such shoes are still made and sold by the Indigenous Peoples around Brannaska. In fact, Julianna had a pair that she’d purchased from her neighbor, an Ojibwa woman named Millicent. Father Briar had a half-dozen pairs in the closet of the parish house, inherited from various members of the congregation, given as Christmas gifts, or taken as donations.

  “In addition to distributing the weight, snowshoes are generally raised at the toe for maneuverability. They must not allow snow to pile up on top of them, hence the interior latticework, which allows it to fall through!” Cedric sometimes explained things that didn’t need explaining. It annoyed Julianna sometimes but to complain about it felt rather petty.

  They trudged through the snow. Here, it wasn’t really deep enough for them to need the special footwear, but that was sort of the point. “You wouldn’t go swimming in the deep end of the pool first, now, would you?”

  “You were the Navy man. Didn’t they just throw you boys in head first?”

  He laughed and they fell into silence as they walked. The landscape felt ancient, immutable, unchanging. That was untrue, but time here did move on a geological scale, on the scale of epochs and ice ages.

  As the glaciers moved down from the north, overtaking most of the continent, burying under a mile or two of ice, they remade the landscape beneath them. As these unimaginably huge things advanced and retreated through the area that would become Minnesota, some of the ice became harder, thicker, and more stagnant. These stubborn chunks were slower to melt than others and the glaciers continued to deposit sediments around and sometimes on top of these isolated, icy holdouts. Finally, as the ice blocks melted, they left behind depressions in the landscape. The depressions filled with snowmelt and rainwater producing kettle lakes.

  There was such a kettle lake just south of Brannaska that Father Briar and the pastor from the church in Mille Lacs fished for walleye pike in during the summer months. As they’d sit in the little aluminum boat, Cedric would often think of the origin of it, how deep it was, how old, and yet how malleable and fragile. “How wonderful was God’s power,” he thought, “that he can so easily shape the land.”

  In northeastern Minnesota, the glaciers were over 12,000 feet thick.

  That number is so enormous it requires a moment of pause to contemplate. There are just over 5,000 feet in a mile. During the great ice ages, Brannaska was two and a half miles under the ice. “And this wasn’t even that long ago,” Julianna marveled. She’d read in one of those tourist manuals that it was only 14,000 years ago. That didn’t seem like very long ago and she wondered if another one was coming soon.

  Fire wasn’t hell to Julianna, ice was. Out of morbid curiosity she imagined herself that deep, immobile, and cold. No air, no light, no sound other than the cracking as the glacier inched its destructive way across the continent. This sounded like hell, like Dante’s hell, like Biblical hell.

  As the glaciers moved through the area, they ripped and tore away the landscape, the same way some muscular man was tearing away the bodice of a buxom woman on the cover of the romance novel she’d stashed under the winter survival kit in the trunk. She was embarrassed to have Cedric seeing her read it. “But who cares!” she thought, “those stories fire me up! They give me what I want. They let me escape from a life where I’m in love with a man that I can never marry.”

  Like love, ice itself is not very abrasive. But like love over time, it can grow in power and passion; it can change the very shape of the world. By picking up and moving boulders and gravel, the glaciers were able to scrape away flora and fauna and everything else beneath it.

  “In the past, snowshoes are essential tools for fur traders and trappers. Brannaska still has a lot of both, although it is an old man’s game now. Mainly, though, I just use mine for fun,” he admitted.

  “Before people built snowshoes, nature provided examples. Several animals, most notably some types of white rabbits, have evolved over the years oversized feet enabling them to move more quickly through deep snow,” Cedric told her.

  Julianna kept an eye out for the rabbits she had seen on prior walks. How she envied their camouflage, their ability to disappear when need be. That they had another special power, snowshoe feet, made her even more jealous.

  Many were the times she wished she and Cedric could be like those rabbits and just disappear together forever.

  Chapter Seven: Divination and Water Witching are not Sciences.

  Meteorology then, like now, was more divination than science. But the war effort had furthered the field somewhat, since weather is so crucially essential to botching an invasion. “Ask Hitler, he found out,” as Cedric said. Julianna said “Yeah, what a dummy. Nobody could invade Brannaska in the winter, much less Russia!”

  It was only in 1948- after the war, even- that the first correct tornado prediction was made, by scientists in Oklahoma’s “tornado alley.” Thousands of mobile homes were saved in the process. Two years later, in 1950, a bunch of spectacular nerds at Princeton University, using one of America’s first super-computers, the acronymic ENIAC, made the first successful computer-simulated weather prediction experiment.

  This lead to the formation of the National Severe Storms Project, a branch of which was located on a long and lonely tract of government-owned land near Brannaska. It was one of the many ways the government was reshaping itself in the heady and giddy years after the war.

  This morning they were tracking a storm the likes of which they’d never seen.

  “How long do we have, chief?” one of the young meteorologists asked.

  “Weather conditions this coming spring are ripe for the possibility of the storm of the century!” the senior forecaster informed him.

  The senior meteorologist wasn’t a meteorologist at all. He was a con-man from Dublin, Ireland, who’d forged some credentials (not that the incredibly trusting Minnesotans even looked) and used his knowledge of North Atlantic storms to convince everybody he was a forecasting genius.

  They had a local “media liaison” whose main job was to call WCCO Radio and tell them any tiny new fact, rumor, or speculation coming out of the meteorologists mouths.

>   “WCCO, weather updates at eight minutes after the hour, eighteen minutes after the hour, twenty eight minutes after, thirty eight minutes after, forty eight minutes after, and fifty eight minutes after the hour!” the broadcasters announced, and they held to this schedule like Father Briar held to the Catholic religious calendar.

  “I’ve seen nary a North Sea squall with the power of this Alberta Clipper, laddy,” the Irish conman told his assistant, “we better alert the media.”

  “Again? We just phoned the radio station fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Then they are twelve minutes behind on our new prognostications! Get on the horn at once.”

  “A possible storm of the century?” the switchboard operator at WCCO asked, “that is huge news. We’ll run with it immediately.”

  They knew their audience. All over farm country, farmers looked north, brewed more coffee, and fretted over winds yet unfelt, snows yet unseen.

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

  It had been a long time since Julianna had been this excited.

  Cedric was taking her down to Minneapolis (“the Twin Cities,” in the local lingo, as Minneapolis was separated by its twin, the capital city of St. Paul, by nothing more than the Mississippi River and a century of good-natured rivalry) to see the new Christian epic movie, The Robe.

  She had filled her car with gas, stocked the trunk with a winter survival kit, and prepared tuna fish sandwiches with extra crunchy celery and mayonnaise with a little mustard. It would take them all morning and a bit of the afternoon to make the drive down Highway Ten, so she had been up early and with a song in her heart.

  Then Gosha showed up.

  “Ms. Warwidge, I have rabbits, baby rabbits. But I don’t have sugar. A trade, maybe, a trade?” She held up two little rabbits by the scruff of their necks.

  “They are pretty adorable,” Julianna thought, “but whatever would I do with rabbits?”

  As if reading her mind, Gosha said “they are good for pets and for stews!”

  “I don’t need any rabbits, sorry Gosha.”

  “I can see you are making preparations for a trip. Where are you going?”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Julianna lied. She hated to do so, but it was necessary in this case. “I’m just stocking up in case a blizzard hits. It is good to be prepared.”

  “Eh, prepare, don’t prepare. Nothing matters when Soviet tanks roll through your village.”

  It was tough to argue with that point, although Jewels didn’t see any T-35’s on the horizon.

  “Well lady, you have fun wherever you are going. Thanks for the sugar. Let me know if you change your mind about the rabbits, eh?”

  Julianna didn’t remember giving her the sugar, but there she was, holding the cup anyway. She didn’t give it any more thought, she was just happy the old woman was gone.

  She picked up Father Briar at the church and she could barely resist kissing him, although she did.

  Richard Burton portrayed Marcellius Gallio, an officer in the Roman Legions and a notorious, well-known ladies’ man. “That isn’t exactly a big stretch in his acting range,” Cedric had wryly commented. However, lusty Lothario is captivated by the reappearance of a childhood sweetheart, Diana, portrayed by the lovely and talented Jean Simmons.

  Marcellus rides into Jerusalem on the same day as Jesus' triumphal entry on Palm Sunday. Jesus is arrested and condemned. Marcellus reports to the infamous Pontius Pilate, who informs him that the emperor has sent for him. Before he departs, Burton’s character is ordered to take charge of the detail of Roman soldiers assigned to crucify Jesus. Marcellus wins the Robe worn by Jesus in a dice game and is told it will be a morbid and gruesome reminder of his first crucifixion.

  Returning from the crucifixion Marcellus tries to shield himself from a rain squall with the Robe, but feels a sudden crushing guilt for the crucifixion of Jesus and tears the Robe off.

  This was the scene that brought Cedric to tears. “The emotion Burton showed when his shame hit him should earn him an academy award,” he opined. “I haven’t seen acting that good since Jimmy Cagney in Angels With Dirty Faces.”

  They were sipping coffee in a roadside café, halfway home. The film had inspired and moved the both of them. Since Cedric wasn’t usually comfortable talking about deep matters while driving as he believed that it distracted him, they’d stopped in a little town of no consequence called Elk River, where they were having weak brew and waiting on a couple of slices of banana crème pie.

  “I loved it when Richard was acting like a madman,” Julianna said.

  Cedric smiled. “Richard? You two are on a first name basis?”

  Far from being chastised, she was engaged by the game.

  “Yes. Liz and I go way back. She introduced us at an ice cream social a few years back.”

  He laughed, loud and long, and this made the waitress smile as she brought their pie.

  “It must have been awful to be Marcellus, haunted by nightmares of the crucifixion. I occasionally feel the pain of Christ as I’m giving Communion. To have lived through his agony every night must have been nearly unbearable.”

  He flipped through a little yellow notebook, spiral bound at the top and careworn at the bottom. Cedric, ever the Father, had been taking notes in it throughout the course of the movie. He would be going to the church library tomorrow, as well as the public library in town, to research the various accuracies and inaccuracies in the film.

  “No matter what my research indicates,” he said, taking Julianna’s hand, “I had a great time at the movie.”

  How she loved holding his hand in public. Feeling especially titillated, she leaned across the table and kissed him, spilling a bit of coffee on the table in the process. This annoyed him; he didn’t like mess of any kind, especially near pie. Delicious pie! But he concealed his irritation because he wanted Jewels to know what a fabulous time he was having. He didn’t like it when her face darkened and her mood changed. She could be, for all her wonderful traits, a bit like the Minnesota weather. She could change from beautiful to stormy in a moment.

  “The movie was great,” she agreed. “The sound was loud and the color so vibrant! Everything we see in Brannaska is washed out and tinny. I have to strain my ears to hear.”

  “The popcorn was nice and salty and slathered in butter.” They’d had two boxes.

  Their small talk was sort of silly, they both knew it. They were just biding the time, being polite and proper, until it was too late to drive. Then, they’d have to get a motel. She couldn’t help but notice that he’d chosen a café with a motel directly behind it, a little place with a red buzzing neon sign that cast a pink glow across the frozen parking lot.

  “Another cup of coffee for you two? Or maybe even another slice of pie? You have such a trim figure, you can indulge yourself!” she told Julianna, trying to flatter her way into a sale and a bigger tip.

  They silently calculated. Cedric’s eyes must’ve drifted back towards the motel and Julianna’s to the clock, because the waitress picked up the silent, electrical attraction.

  “I can fix that pie to go. I can also ring over to the front desk at the motel if you would like; my husband is the night manager and we can check you right in!”

  “That sounds great,” Julianna said, before Cedric could disagree.

  Within minutes, they were in the room.

  “I missed you so much,” she whispered, not knowing what else to say. The train ride over the endless prairie had felt endless, so she’d taken her sweet time in preparing a lovely and loving (and maybe a bit sexy!) opening speech, but it had fled her memory.

  “Not as half as I missed you, my Jewels.”

  “That is funny,” she thought, “that nickname still irritates me a little.”

  But she pressed that tiny thought from her mind and fell back into love with him with the whole of her heart. She leaned forward, but not before looking
around to make sure they were well and truly alone, and then kissed him on the lips, those firm, warm lips.

  Desire for her flooded through him anew. He wanted so much from her, he wanted it all, and he wanted it now.

  “I’ve waited so long,” he mumbled, in between kisses.

  “As have I,” she told him.

  He put his hands to her breasts but she pushed them away. She was filled with sexual feelings as well, but she wasn’t ready to acquiesce, not yet. So he accepted what she offered, her hot open mouth, and her sweet pink tongue.

  Julianna slid her way up on to his lap. He groaned and re-positioned her body for maximum pressure on his ever hardening penis. How she loved the feel of it against her! Again his hands went to her breasts, and it was her turn to groan. But again she denied him. She wanted to prolong the pleasure. He wanted to dive right in.

  Instead, she pulled his head to her breast and put his ear to her heart. She wanted to feel his hair, soft and tightly trimmed. She wanted him to hear the quickening of her heartbeat. The fingers in their other hands intertwined, locked, held.

  How soft her hands were and what power they had over him. Even her slightest touch was erotic and sent little trembles through him. She rocked back and forth, drawing his attention away from her hands and back on her beautiful hips. It was a strain to not let him enter her right then. Her body warmed and her breathing got raspy. At the very core of her there was a new need, an urgent desire. Julianna wondered if he could detect it.

  He could.

  Cedric kissed her deep again and unlocked their hands. His tongue flirted and flitted around hers and adjusted himself beneath her as she sat on his lap. His cock was ready to explode.

  “Julianna, I love you, I need you.”

  “I love and need you too,” she said, enjoying the bluntness and the truth in the words.

  They stripped without ceremony, without thought, without embarrassment. The bluntness of this, too, aroused her. “How easy sex can be,” she marveled, “when you are with the right man.”