Father Briar and The Angel

by Rita Saladano

  He certainly carried himself as though he did. Despite his unremarkable body, there was lightness in his step and a gentle bigness to his heart that made him very attractive. There was nothing that screamed “look at me” about him, but then if there had been, she assumed, their relationship would’ve been discovered at its outset.

  A snow hare bounded in front of them, just barely light enough to leave its tracks in the snow. It puffed along like popping corn, bouncing across the frozen upper layer that lighter creatures were fated to trudge through.

  “There is nothing remarkable out him, either,” Julianna noticed, “he’s perfectly camouflaged by fitting in to his environment.”

  While out on their walk, Cedric drilled a few more hole in the ice and dropped down lines on heavy lead sinkers. These he would check later in the afternoon, after the black and plump worms had hopefully lured gullible fish on to the small tin hook.

  This was one of the first times they’d been able to hold hands in public. Some of the thrill was lost because they were wearing thick knitted mittens. And it wasn’t exactly public; there were acres and acres of open lake spread out around them and a tiny scattering of icehouses.

  “America is vast and America is empty,” she thought. The emptiness of it all was almost overwhelming and made her feel lonely, so she clutched Cedric’s arm a bit tighter.

  He was a bulwark against the wind and the loss.

  When they got back to the icehouse, Cedric dried his clothes by the fire, the flames flickering. His jacket, now hung on the three rusty nails that served as their makeshift door knob, steamed in the heat.

  He was silent in prayer as he sat in his chair. The hours rolled on. Julianna sewed and the pair sat in silence; they acted several decades older than their actual age.

  They behaved as though they had been married for a half a century instead of secretly courting for a scant and separated few years. The sun lowered and dusk approached.

  “We had better get back to the lake and check the rest of the lines, unless, of course, you would prefer to stay here and sew?”

  Julianna smiled back at Cedric, she had always appreciated his mild-mannered cheek.

  They walked with a marathoner’s purpose back to the holes. The tops of them had now crusted over with ice and he poked his way through with a little claw-hammer he’d stuffed in his coat packed. Julianna looked down at the borehole he’d drilled in the ice. Cedric pulled up the line. It seemed to take an eternity. The anticipation grew.

  “Yes, there is something on the end of this, for sure, Jewels.”

  She was curious.

  “Here we are,” Cedric said as he pulled out a sizeable walleye pike from the depths. The sight of its long and slender body emerging from the murky water excited Julianna and she couldn’t help but giggle.

  This winter season, however, was a record breaker and it soon drove them inside, back to the shelter of the icehouse.

  “Uff da, it’s a harsh one,” as the Minnesotans would say. The plains were buried under drifts of snow for months on end. The winters seemed relentless and the past few years, for whatever as yet undiscovered reasons, had been harsher than normal.

  Cedric tried to open the door to no effect. The heat from the cabin had thawed on the panel and refrozen around the frame of the door.

  “Weather is bad huh?” Julianna said to Cedric.

  “Sure is!” Cedric put his hand on the door as he looked down on the ice. Inspired, he grabbed his claw hammer. “We’ll be alright,” he reassured her, and chipped away at the new, clear ice for a few minutes until the door swung open with a groan the both appreciated.

  He stoked the flames, the wood cracked and embers whirled up the chimney, which he’d fabricated out of empty cans of Folgers Coffee and Swift’ning Brand Pure Lard. Julianna liked the red and white tin that the shortening came in and she made a note to remember in the future that Cedric liked the tins for his bait.

  Finally tired, she heaved a sigh.

  “What is troubling your mind?” he asked.

  “This dark cold place, that’s what.” The winter months had this effect on many Minnesotans; it was exponentially different for transplants like Julianna.

  “I’ve endured this before and together, we’ll endure it again. Plus Jewels, these cozy nights in have their charm.” Cedric shrugged off these bad moods. You had to in these parts. It was too brutal to do otherwise.

  “You know Jewels; being stuck in this shack does remind of Jesus suffering in the desert.”

  Julianna rolled her eyes. She had heard this parable countless times. She huffed in her chair and wished she could escape the confines of the tiny wooden shack.

  “I’m trapped in here with the world’s most repetitive man!” Julianna poked the fire, the discontent in her heart showing in the agitation with which she poked the fire. A few sparkles flew out and landed in the snow, sizzling briefly before puttering out

  She worried their love would do the same thing. Would it burn hot and then be extinguished in the snow?

  Cedric looked on in surprise; usually such a placid woman, calm and contemplative, Julianna’s visible frustration was new to him. So many things about her were new to him; this was the first month that they’d ever spent together, despite being in love for the past few years!

  He knew the ice beneath their feet was a stronger foundation than their love. But he believed, he had faith, and so he knew they’d work through these trivialities.

  Less trivial? The drive home. The lake was a good hour and a half from Brannaska. There were closer lakes, sure, four hundred and sixty two of them within twenty five miles of town, but they felt safer and more private the further away they got.

  Cedric didn’t like to drive after dark, especially in the icy conditions. But tonight they had no choice. He had to be back at the parish house, he had duties in the morning.

  So they reluctantly packed up and he drove home with all the concentration and safety he could muster. The car tires picked their way across the dangerous roads, which offered no purchase or solid footing the entire trip.

  WCCO Radio played on the AM dial as he drove; the fifty thousand megawatt behemoth out of Minneapolis was the boon companion of many a farmer throughout the Midwest.

  Kept awake by the talk and big band tunes from the radio and warmed by sitting a little closer together in the front seat than they maybe should’ve, they made it home safe and with the grace of God.

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

  It was the Wedding of the Century and Julianna was jealous as hell. Marilyn was marrying DiMaggio. She was a first name, he was a last. It was the ultimate All-American romance, the ultimate in lusty glamor, the ultimate fairy tale. Joe DiMaggio was the tall, skillful hero of the country’s national pastime, one of the greatest players the game had ever seen. Cedric wasn’t a baseball fan, so he was indifferent to DiMaggio and his exploits.

  The same thing could not be said for Julianna’s feelings about Marilyn. She loved the Hollywood idol and curvy sexpot, star of the silver screen and the world’s greatest pinup girl, loved her like a best girlfriend. Through the tabloid papers and glossy gossip magazines, she’d followed the progress of their courtship the way men (other than Cedric, who was a hockey fan) followed the baseball box scores in the newspaper.

  Two years prior, in 1952, the New York Yankees star DiMaggio asked an acquaintance to arrange a dinner date with Monroe. Such was the power of fame! The buxom blonde model wasn’t a huge star, yet, but had been in a few movies, movies that Julianna had loved, like the hilarious Monkey Business and Julianna had thought that Marilyn had done an “award winning job” in her leading role in noir thriller Don’t Bother to Knock, which could charitably be called a B-movie.

  Really due more to DiMaggio’s fame than Monroe’s (he was the biggest star in the biggest game in the biggest city) the press started to cover the relationship, giving ink gallons of in and acres of column space.r />
  According to what Julianna had read from the gossips, Monroe and DiMaggio preferred to keep a low profile. “Ha, like that is possible!” laughed Julianna that frozen January morning, flipping though some old magazines. One article read, “the new couple are the same as most young lovers, spending evenings at home or in a back corner of DiMaggio’s restaurant.” That most young lovers didn’t own their own restaurants had somehow escaped the author.

  Today’s marriage, much to Julianna’s chagrin, was at San Francisco City Hall, not at the church.

  “DiMaggio is a really strong Italian name, he’s a Catholic, he’s got to be. Why aren’t they getting married in the church?” she wondered.

  The newlywed pair were mobbed by reporters and fans. Monroe had stage-managed the whole thing, giving the wedding plans to someone at her film studio, who subsequently “leaked it” to the press.

  Julianna imaged what their marriage would be like, she imagined what being married to DiMaggio would be like, and she imagined what being married to Cedric would be like.

  “I think they’ll get a pool. Surely they’ll have a house in Hollywood and an apartment in New York. Here, folks are content with a homemade, hand-flooded, do it yourself hockey rink and a cabin at the lake. Heck, I’d be happy with that!” she thought.

  “Think of all the glamorous places they’ll go, think of all the fun they will have. Next week they are off on their honeymoon to Japan, and that is just the start! With that much money and that much love, what could go wrong?”

  After being both envious and proud of Joe and Marilyn for a while, she imagined what marriage with Cedric would be like. Lots of kids, she assumed, since he’d come from a big family and had naturally, a Catholic view of birth control. Probably enough kids for a hockey team. They’d need a “home team,” since she knew he’d use the green garden hose to flood the backyard to create one of the rinks that Minnesotans considered as essential as pools were to Californians.

  What circumstances could lead to it? He could leave the priesthood. That was it. And he didn’t want to do that, and she wasn’t even sure that she wanted him to do that.

  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 c
oming, 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.