Father Briar and The Angel (6 page)

Them being discovered as
lovers could certainly lead to his defrocking, although she
(willfully) didn’t want to know much about how the Jesuits punished
their own. Furthermore, Cedric hadn’t talked about it, either, not
wanting to put a jinx on their love by speaking of the consequences
of it.

They’d discover more about
those consequences over the course of the coming year.

And “Yankee Clipper”
(sports writers back then were so clever with nicknames) and the
Blonde Bombshell’s marriage had consequences, too, ones Julianna
had never imagined in her girlish daydreaming. The problems began
almost immediately. DiMaggio had a temper, and he was a
self-admitted control freak.

Cedric had no temper, his
made her feel safe. Some of the boys who’d come back from the war
were a little unstable, a little hotheaded. Not Father
Briar.

He was a bit controlling,
however, and this gave her pause. He was very careful about where
they might be seen together and planned and scheduled every meeting
with naval precision.

They fought rarely, but
they’d had a bit of a shouting match last week that had left her
unsettled. He’d needed volunteers for a post-Christmas cleanup; the
weather had been so cold that people hadn’t bothered to yet take
down their decorations. Father Briar had organized a pancake
breakfast (both buttermilk and sourdough!) for the helpers and
Julianna wanted to come into the church an hour before everybody
else and help him with the flapjacks.

“
My father was a
lumberjack,” she’d told him, “he was a master of the batter.” She
was proud of her silly little rhyme and expected some
acknowledgement and affection for it. Instead she received
reproach.

“
What would everybody
think if they arrived for breakfast and saw us
together?”

“
That I was helping you
cook?”

“
Or that you’d stayed with
me all night and you were there for breakfast, too.”

“
That is
paranoid.”

“
No, it is logical. What
would you think if you arrived at church to find a woman there with
the priest? Especially that early in the morning? We’d be
pilloried.”

“
People would just think
I’m here helping!”

“
You don’t know the people
in this town yet, Jewels.”

“
Don’t call me that. I
don’t like that nickname.”

He smiled, trying to be
patient.
“Yes you do.”

“
Don’t tell me what I
like, and don’t tell me what I know. Or who. I’ve been in town for
a few months now. I’m looking for a job. I’m making friends. I’ve
met a few people.”

“
That is all news to me,”
he said, trying to keep his face composed. He wanted to look calm
and in control, not taken aback.

“
You don’t know
everything. You don’t need to know everything.”

And he didn’t.

Monday morning Father Briar
awoke to new snow on top of the old snow. Although he had no way of
knowing it, the very morning in Rogers Pass, Montana, the coldest
temperature ever in the contiguous United States was recorded, the
thermometer reading a horrifying minus seventy degrees
Fahrenheit.

There were still wisps of
tinsel fluttering about the trees on the grounds of the church. A
discarded Christmas tree was browning near the garbage collection
area; the “sanitation engineers” hadn’t been out to pick it up due
to the roads being so slick with black ice.

The special Christmas
hymnals had been put away, the lights unstrung and spooled up (only
to somehow become mysteriously tangled up over the upcoming months)
and the tree was browning out back of the church.

In 1953, the entire Mass
was still being said, recited, chanted and sung in Latin. Cedric’s
command of the language was good due to the rigor of the education
required and conducted by his Order.

The congregation kept
silent. Catholic mass was not an “interactive fan experience,” had
the term even existed. Silence was kept because it was thought to
enhance the reverence toward the Eucharistic mystery. Father Briar
loved the quiet and thought that God lived in it, travelling about
from silent spot to silent spot on beams of light.

While we tend to think of
the 1950’s as a time of conservatism and stagnancy, especially
before the reforms of the council known now as “Vatican II,” but
change in the structure of the Mass as Cedric and the other Jesuits
conducted it, and changes to the Holy Sacraments themselves were
common, almost commonplace.

The most significant change
in discipline came in 1953. It was the introduction of afternoon
and evening vigil Masses. For these Masses the Communion fast was
set at three hours for food and at one hour for non-alcoholic
beverages.

Cedric was still adjusting
to this change, although he appreciated it. Holy Communion was an
important sacrament, more important in Father Briar’s mind even
than Confession. That maybe he himself would’ve had sins, sins he
could be defrocked for, to confess, might’ve contributed something
to that.

He had to be up and around
early. The parish school children attended the 9:00
a.m. Sunday Mass as a group and also came Wednesday mornings.
Their masses had recently changed, too, and he was struggling with
the naughtiness of a couple of the boys. Brett and Ryan, he
thought, “were just nasty kids. No hopers.” Although in his heart
of hearts, Father Briar didn’t really believe any boys were without
hope.

Back in Spokane, Cedric had
in his parish a couple of African American kids, brothers, who’d
both served as altar boys. As he was preparing his church this
morning, he thought back upon them, how cute they looked with their
shining teeth and soft, childlike smiles.

Not that there were any
African Americans in Brannaska, but the schools were still
segregated, and would remain so, for another few months. Another
few months in legality, anyway, as the Supreme Court’s historic yet
impotent ruling in
Brown vs. Board of
Ed
would occur in May. The spring seemed a
long time away for anybody living through this winter and the truth
was actual desegregation was a long time in coming, too.

Now, while there weren’t
any black folks, that doesn’t meant the community was entirely
homogenous. Cedric heard a pickup truck, with a new and
immaculately tuned engine, pull up outside. The crunching the tires
with their inch thick steel snow chains, let him know it was By
Golly Gosha.

Julianna’s neighbor was the
talk of the town. She’d made it out of Warsaw, Poland, through a
daring escape via a North Sea fishing boat. She’d arrived in
Bangor, Maine, screaming about deserving political asylum and
refugee status, which she promptly received.

“
Truth was, she frightened
me,” the Immigration Officer said to his supervisor when questioned
later, “and I thought she was kinda sexy, too.”

“
She was old!”

“
So am I,” came the
response, the truth of which was impossible to deny.

From there she’d made her
way eastward, across Pennsylvania, where she’d had a brief affair
with a legendary vaudeville comedian, a thing so torrid and
explicit that the neighbors were scandalized for years afterward
and she’d had to flee.

From there, she’d made her
way, by various means, through the Midwest. Father Briar had heard
of her plight from a parish priest in Des Moines, Iowa, and had
invited her to become a member of his congregation. She’d acquired
a reputation as something of a troublemaker but Cedric was sure he
could help her adjust.

“
She’s just having a hard
time adjusting to our culture of freedom and opportunity here,” he
told his flock one Sunday morning, “and it is our Christian duty to
help her.”

It was a decision that
would frustrate him in the months to come.

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

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.”