Father Briar and The Angel (23 page)

“
I’m tired of playing
these games Cedric?”

“
Games? Julianna, I would
go to the ends of the Earth for you. You must realize that this is
a deep spiritual conflict in my soul. It is about the very
foundation of who I am as a person. This is my church, my
livelihood, my life.”

“
Well go and take your
conflict and your soul elsewhere I am not your play thing.”
Julianna attempted to shut the door but Cedric had his hand placed
on it with all his body weight.

“
This is no way for a man
of god to behave you would be wise to get your hands off this door
before I alert the authorities.”

“
Julianna” Cedric’s
piercing gaze stopped Julianna right in her tracks.

“
We need to get to the
icehouse.” Cedric and Julianna remained locked in a
stare.

“
You had better let me get
changed then,” she said as she ran upstairs. Cedric closed the door
to prevent any further heat from escaping. Minutes later Julianna
appeared, dressed in a Parka and looking beautiful they drove off
along the snowy road.

A hundred miles north the
Alberta Clipper was growing in intensity. News on the local radio
fills the airways. A warning goes throughout Brannaska - several
villages have lost contact with the town but only those cooped up
within the comfort of their homes receive any warning.

Gosha entered the parish
house. She had hoped to inform Cedric of the dire weather. She
looked at the notes that were sprawled out on his desk and the
ashes on his hearth that had long since cooled.

“He has driven out, driven
out into the path of this oncoming storm. Has no one told him? This
is madness. May God provide him with safe passage.” Gosha said her
rosaries and left the empty church.

The timber wolf made its
way across the iced over lake in a speedy yet elegant fashion. It
moved with a hypnotic rhythm. Its cadence was measured; every step
looked like it had been planned out well in advance for its paws
landed on the icy ground in an exquisite, balanced
manner.

Although elegant, it knew
that it was being chased. Was it another beast? No, this was no
mere Grizzly with a sizeable attitude and an even more sizeable
appetite this was a quite literal force of nature. The clipper was
drifting south. Alberta was notorious for whipping up such
ferocious weather systems, this year had reached a whole new level
of carnage. It seemed that the hand of God was working against the
people of Brannaska.

The hand of God lay gently
upon the shoulder of Ernestine Roggenbucker. There had been little
talk of her husband’s death; all of the farmers, Protestant and
Catholic, dealt with grief in the same way: silence.

The telephone family were
Lutherans, so Cedric had no clerical responsibility in the funeral.
The Church would’ve never sanctioned such strange and quite frankly
sacrilegious burial arrangements, anyway, no matter how happy
they’d made Bjorn. Father Briar had fought with Julianna about
attending. He thought it necessary, she did not.

In the end, he’d ceded
control. This was new enough to be refreshing and reaffirming. She
thanked God for small miracles.

The smallest miracles are
sometimes the most necessary. This was true for the funeral, too;
of all the days that winter, the afternoon of the burial was the
nicest. The sun shone and the wind stilled, if only for a moment,
and Ralphie slept the sleep of the just.

His choice of caskets would
prove to be remarkably full of foresight. The Naughahyde that made
up the faux leather of the booth and the hardwoods and solid steels
beneath it persevered his wolf-mauled remains for two thousand
years, until his wounds had healed (time heals all things) and he
looked like the strongest mummy ever discovered.

It is hard to argue with
two thousand years of peace.

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

Cedric and Julianna looked
at one another across her living room.

He’d come over, driven his
own car, even, as a small show of acquiescence. Julianna, although
irritated with him, still managed to give him a little
smile.

Pausing to assess the
gravity of his words Cedric looked out of the side of his car
window as they traversed the frozen Minnesotan
landscape.

“
I’d be the disgrace of
the Catholic Church this side of the states, no this side of the
Atlantic.” He’d been thinking about the consequences of their
relationship for miles. Both of them were worried he wasn’t
concentrating on the road.

“
Cedric, you are a decent
man” Julianna put her hand on Cedric’s lap and squeezed lightly.
Fighting the urge to go further, Cedric moved Julianna’s hand from
off his lap.

“
Jewels. Has nothing I
said sunk in?” Cedric said in annoyance.

“
I’m trying to comfort
you.” Julianna, defensive and a little rejected. He was usually so
amorous, and this was an exciting weekend away, a weekend of makeup
sex and sweet talk.

Silence filled the car. The
atmosphere was bearable, as the long drives in the light and frothy
snow had a way of tempering all but the most fraught of
situations.

The forest spread out
around them like a woolen blanket for a king sized bed. They walked
in the happy silence unique to lovers. On the morning’s drive up
here, they’d spent a long time talking about the ethics of their
affair and the remnants of the conversation lingered.

“
I think it is immoral
that they make you remain celibate. I think it’s damaging to not
let you have normal human relationships. And, when I say you, I
don’t necessarily mean you Father Briar, I mean you as in priests
as a group.”

“
I love it when you speak
so forthrightly. My calling is so filled with jargon and
obfuscation that it is refreshing when people speak their mind with
intelligence and honesty.”

She knew she was being
flattered, but she did not mind. Few people do…

“
I knew well the
restrictions and responsibilities placed upon me when I joined the
Order.”

“
Did they deter
you?”

“
No, far from it. They
attracted me. The rules drew me to it. They gave me a sense of
clarity and they seemed not only logical, but natural and
just.”

“
Wow, cool.”

“
Cool?” he asked, an
eyebrow raised.

“
Yes, I heard it from some
of the boys on the hockey team. It means something is interesting
or entertaining. I think.”

“
Rules are
cool?”

“
No. I don’t think so. I’m
not very clear on the concept yet,” she said with a
laugh.

Her laugh was full of rich
tones and complex chords. He wished he were funnier, like W.C
Fields or Bing Crosby. Heck, even Ed Sullivan got off a good zinger
now and then. He wanted to be funny so he could hear that melodious
laugh of hers more often.

It wasn’t as though Father
Briar was humorless, far from it. He very much enjoyed others
people’s jokes and when he made them himself, they were dry and
clever and with an erudition and wit rare in the cornball
era.

But while lightness came
easy to him, and he was acquainted with joy and even religious
ecstasy, he was unable to muster the acerbic insight and momentary
meanness required for most humor. Cedric was simply too empathetic
and kind to tease someone, if only for a passing moment.

Julianna, on the other
hand, was a constant tease. She took great delight in poking at
people’s foibles. It was her way of making them feel included and
part of the gang. She was never ever looking to hurt anybody’s
feelings, but if it happened for a second in search of a big laugh,
so be it. It was only jokes!

In this and so many other
ways they complimented each other.

“
It is just too bad that
the restrictions of your church don’t allow us to show how good we
are together in public,” she mused.

“
We could try to spend
more time together at church functions,” he offered.

“
No,” she countered, “I
think we both would be too worried about being too obvious in our
affections. I think we would end up acting, and putting on a show,
a contrivance, a performance. And that would be a lie. And lies are
sinful.”

“
That is an excellent
rationale,” he agreed, and they drove in silence for a few miles,
the birch trees whirring alongside the road like a slide show in
fast-forward. Life was a blur and she wanted it to slow down. She
and Cedric had so few moments together that she wanted to pause
every one of them and savor it, like a photograph or a
painting.

“
Do you think priests will
ever be allowed to marry?”

“
I sure hope so. I hope
Pope Pius overturns the millennia-old rule next week. If he does,
I’ll marry you and officiate the ceremony myself, if they let
me.”

She was tickled, but still,
it was a non-answer. So she grinned and let him drive in silence
again for a while.

He was so mature, so grown,
so manly, that she wanted to climb into the back seat and curl up
and fall asleep. Julianna had done this as a kid while her father
drove and the same sense of patrimonial safety and warmth washed
over her. The car rocked with an easy, hypnotic beauty and her
thoughts drifted, drifted to the comfort and safety of that sturdy
wooden shack, of the solitude they’d enjoy together there, and the
sex.

Oh, yes, she was
anticipating the sex as she fell asleep. She may have even dreamt
of it, but what man can tell of a woman’s dreams?

Chapter Twenty Six: The
Calm Before the Storm.

All was quiet on the
western front.

It was the northern front
that the trouble was coming from. Gosha peeped out of her window.
The sky was a steely blue everywhere she looked, everywhere, that
is, except the north. An imposing dark cloud was amassing in the
distance. It looked like an anvil; black and heavy and immobile and
indestructible, but the storm was moving at a great and terrible
speed. The Alberta Clipper was tearing its way southward, towards
Brannaska, towards her.”

“
Good heavens. In all my
days, even in the Old Country, I have never seen anything as big as
that!” she gasped as she continued to look at the approaching
storm. “The radio said it wouldn’t be here this quickly. Those
fools never know a damn thing.”

Gosha looked down at her
window side table. It was a cluttered mash of newspaper clippings
and religious paraphernalia.

“
May God help this small
town. This will be one to remember for the ages.”

Gosha fortified her windows
and doors, she’d already storm-proofed her windows but she wasn’t
willing to take any chances. She sealed them with plastic weather
stripping, just to be safe.

She went outside to get
wood from her shed. In the short time that she spent filling the
wheelbarrow with logs, the temperature dropped a few degrees and
the wind had picked up a few miles an hour.

It was still a ground
blizzard; the winds were picking up snow from the ground, of which
there was plenty, and whirling it into the air. The snow hadn’t
started falling from the sky yet. When it did, their troubles would
be compounded exponentially.

“
Come on, Gosha,” she said
to herself as she heaved and strained under the weight of the
wheelbarrow. She’d shoveled a path and kept it clear every day but
some of the blowing and drifting had already taken its
toll.

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.