Father Briar and The Angel

by Rita Saladano

  Chapter Three: Julianna in Her Slip Slips Into Nostalgia.

  Julianna had a habit of wandering around her house in a slip. Certainly, most women will wear a slip to bed, or in the mornings as a cool and comfortable garment. But most women don’t wander.

  “Nostalgic child, that one,” her mother often remarked, “even at such a young age, she loves to live in the past.” And while she wandered, she remembered.

  “Such tumult in the weather last year,” she thought, staring out at the snow. Tonight was a rare night that it wasn’t blowing and her yard looked tidy, peaceful, safe, even. Her Christmas lights were still out there and she thought about plugging them in and turning them on, but decided better of it. No point in her neighbors thinking she was silly.

  A puffy plastic pink diary lay on her bedside and she picked it up as she walked. It was for a much younger girl, but she indulged in its purchase anyway; the girl on the cover was cute and blonde and bobby-soxed; she looked like she was recording a life filled with love and socially approved lust (for her husband and her husband alone, of course, but every night, Jewels figured, and twice on Saturdays, after he’d had a few bottles of beer). It had a lock over the pages that was already rusting and didn’t look like it could keep the book closed from the efforts of a determined kitten, but “what does that matter,” she said aloud to the empty house, “who would want to read my thoughts anyway?”

  Flipping through the pages, she went to one year ago today, January 19th, 1953.

  “I’m still in Spokane, although I wanted to leave today, just like I wanted to leave every day,” she’d written, in her schoolmarm’s script, “and I thought of him. I got together with my girlfriends and watched I Love Lucy. How I love that sweet and brassy and funny woman! Oh, to live like her. I’d find a better man than Ricky, though. I have found a better man.” There, she’d underlined “have” twice and traced it in #2 pencil to make it bold. But she couldn’t and wouldn’t name the man, even in a private diary, that would be too dangerous.

  “Lucy had her baby tonight. A few of us gals cried. It is supposed to be a funny show and all, I get it, and we laughed, too. But with so many of us still single, and without babies of our own, well, we were all a little jealous of Lucy, and proud of her, too.”

  The next day, Eisenhower succeeded Truman as President of the United States, and Julianna had cried then, too. She and the nation had been through a lot with Harry and she felt affection for him; he was small and avuncular and handsome, in his noble and unassuming way.

  And merely two days after that, although Julianna certainly wouldn’t have noticed it at the time, The Crucible, a drama by Arthur Miller, opened on Broadway. Later, Cedric would explain it to her.

  “It is about that son of a whore Eugene McCarthy,” Father Briar he said. It was the first thing out of his mouth to shock her, but it certainly wouldn’t be the last. She’d noted that in her diary, too, but she made certain to make it clear she’d not found that out in a romantic setting and it wasn’t said by the man she was constantly confessing a crush on in the pages of that very diary. Still, that was too dangerous.

  The house was cold. Her breasts, truly beautiful even free under the slip, noticed and perked up; making her wonder if she ought to put on a housecoat. Again, she decided against it. Again, she wandered. Again, she picked up her diary. How she wished Cedric was here to break up the monotony of her routine with the glory of his body!

  “May 11. More Terrible Weather. Waco Wounded.” Julianna had no idea why she’d composed that day’s entry like a newspaper headline. She wasn’t very good at it, sacrificing accuracy for alliteration. Waco had been nearly destroyed by one of the largest tornados on record and an astonishing one hundred and fourteen people had been killed.

  Then, later that spring, another tornado killed one hundred and fifteen in Flint, Michigan. By then Julianna had moved to Minnesota, partly in pursuit of Cedric, partly to make a new start away from her old life.

  The first place she’d landed in Brannaska, after church, of course, was Bjorn’s Café.

  Like most visitors, the first person she’d met was noted local lecher, the spectacularly named Francisco Montana. Despite his Latin-sounding name, he was as Norwegian as they come. There had been, as the modest and uncritical Minnesotans had put it, “a little bit of a mix-up at Ellis Island.”

  Since Cedric had written in his letters (oh, those beautiful, graceful letters!) had sometimes mentioned how much “these farmers like to talk about the weather,” that had been her opening conversational salvo at Bjorn’s over eggs and bacon and coffee.

  “Horrible tornados,” she’d said.

  Never one to turn down talk with a pretty lady, Francisco leaned over and said, “it’s because the Army just tested nuclear artillery. Imagine that,” he crowed, “Howitzers with nukes in ‘em. That’ll scare the Commies outta Korea! But it’s wreaking havoc with the weather. ”

  Mr. Montana wasn’t right about that, there’s no evidence of nuclear testing causing tornados. But the Korean War did end that summer, much to her and Cedric’s delight. Like most Americans, they still had friends in the various armed services. To see them out of harm’s way, at least for the moment, was a relief.

  “My cousin Carrington came home from overseas today,” she’d written in October, “

  There were, naturally, things she couldn’t know and couldn’t record in her diary. In December of ’53, a scant few months ago, Hugh Hefner published the first issue of Playboy magazine. It cost fifty cents.

  Father Briar had been given two copies, found under beds by scandalized wives and mothers. He kept them both and enjoyed them frequently, and not just for the articles.

  Julianna was semi-nude herself, so she wouldn’t have been so scandalized. She was the sort of girl who loved the glorification of the female form and would’ve had tastes in line with Hef’s, had she been a man.

  But despite how great her tits looked in the slip, she could, in fact, see them out of the corner of her eye in her only antique, a full length floor mirror; she was cold enough to put a sweater on.

  There was one hanging over the back of a kitchen chair, there always was. But she was so lost in memory, and half-reading her diary, pulled the chair back too hard and bumped the table, sending the centerpiece teetering, tottering, and finally toppling to the floor, where it shattered.

  “This truly is a time of science and wonder,” she said to nobody. “Things sure are safer today. When I was a young girl the center piece on our table was a kerosene lamp. I could’ve burned the house down.”

  In her months here, Julianna had heard stories about the depravations of rural life. Mostly from Francisco Montana. “We didn’t have electricity or running water until just a few years back. No indoor plumbing, of course. Many of the fellas in the further-flung regions around here still don’t have it. Can’t be bothered. An outhouse is good enough for them.”

  Fuelled by caffeine and bacon grease, Francisco was on a roll. Bjorn, ever attendant, poured a refill.

  “We used an outhouse until I had a great crop a few years back and installed an indoor biffy. When it was cold, you had to use the chamber pot. Otherwise your butt would freeze to the wooden seat of the outhouse.”

  “When I was a youngster,” the last word nearly unrecognizable to Julianna underneath his amazing accent, my greatest fear was falling down the outhouse hole. This was a place, my brothers had told me, that no boy had ever returned from,” Bjorn told her with a wink.

  “When did you get electricity and running water?” Julianna asked, trying to change the subject from outdoor bathrooms and falling into them. She didn’t find it tasteful over breakfast and found the men’s conversation course and crass and somewhat bothersome. How she wished she could be with Cedric.

  “We got running water and electricity when?” Bjorn wondered aloud. “Heck, just a few years back. We got it when we moved into town so we could better take care of the cook’s older brother. He inhaled poison
gas during the war and it scratched up his lungs real good. When he got home, ya know, everything was fine for a while.

  But it eventually caught up with him. He was hospitalized in the VA down in Minneapolis for a couple of years, off and on. So we had to leave the farm and come down here to help him. I didn’t mind a bit, our farmland was pretty poor, so we’re probably doing better after moving into Brannaska,” he explained, pouring more coffee all the while.

  “Most small towns didn’t have running water in those days, so a lot of my relatives had an outhouse and an outdoor hand pump,” Francisco said.

  “I don’t think they had residential water anywhere outside of town, for as far as a couple of hours north of here, until just last year. You had to get water at a community pump, unless you had a well,” Bjorn told her. Each man was clearly trying to one-up the other with their tales of heartiness and toughness and she didn’t feel like talking anymore. So she’d gone home, where she was now, still lost in memory.

  Julianna’s bookshelves were stocked with J.C. Penney and Sears Roebuck catalogues, their pages thick, yellowing, and thumb worm. These were the inspirational tomes for the working and middle classes, the Bibles of consumerism, and they were flipped through almost as often as the real King James Version.

  She wasn’t much of a spender, though; the frugality of the war years had remained with her. The war in Korea had just ended, “a stalemate,” Cedric had told her quietly, once. Just once. But she knew their boys had fought well and won; America always had in the past and would in the future. Such was the great security of the new Eisenhower presidency.

  Julianna had a big console radio, the wood was of rich mahogany, and the material covering the speakers was fuzzy and studded with little balls of lint. She loved Jack Benny the best but that hardly made her unique; everybody loved the oddball comedian’s radio program; Jewels didn’t have a television yet so she had no opinion on Benny’s work in that fledgling medium.

  The Lone Ranger was also vital and exciting on the radio; she tuned in regularly and didn’t like to miss an adventure. Amos and Andy was popular and made Jewels laugh, as did a silly little bit of trifle called The Modern Adventures of Casanova. She knew it wasn’t very good and that she had a weakness for melodramatic romances (such as her own!) but it featured Errol Flynn, a fixture from her childhood fantasies, so she loved it anyway.

  She had an old telephone on the wall. It had no dial, it was the sort where you picked up the speaker and waited.

  During the early 50’s, Brannaska’s local telephone company was owned by a local couple named Ralphie and Earnestine Roggenbukker. They were the phone company; Ralphie installed the telephones and did various maintenance on the fussy things. He was great with his hands and clever with logic, so this was an ideal occupation for Ralphie, and entire system was his responsibility. He had an old Coca Cola utility truck, an old thing that he kept in good condition through hundreds of thousands of miles, through many unusual places.

  His wife, “Ma Earnestine,” as everyone called her, was the switchboard operator.

  Mrs. Roggenbukker had earned her nickname partly, of course, as a play on the ubiquitous “Ma Bell,” as the monopolistic phone company was called, but also because of her knowledge and personality; two things shaped by her unique and demanding job.

  She ran the company office and the billing and ran Ralphie Roggenbukker ragged. She handled all manner of various and sundry emergencies as well as the town’s informal news service. Ma Earnestine Roggenbukker was also the first sort of messaging service or voicemail; when people didn’t answer their phones you could always count on her to call the person later and tell them your information, plus share a little gossip of her own.

  And, of course, she ran the switchboard. The switchboard was probably the most important piece of mechanical equipment in town. The only other thing that was as valued was the Zamboni, the miraculous creation that cleaned and smoothed the ice at the hockey rink.

  The poor Roggenbuckers had no social life, even within the limited social options available in northern Minnesota at the time. Due to the manual nature of the phone system, there always had to be somebody at the switchboard, and that somebody was Ma Earnestine.

  Every single call from your own line, the line in your house, had to be physically connected by Ma Earnestine, who sat in front of her switchboard plugging wires into different sockets. So somebody, usually Ma, had to be there twenty four hours a day and seven days a week, lest an important call go unconnected.

  Connecting calls was accomplished through what was known as a party line system. Each party had about seven or eight families in it, and every house was connected, so you heard every ring! You knew when one of your neighbors was calling someone, and you knew when. And boy, did that make you want to know why. But more on that later…

  There were codes in the rings that served as each family’s signal to pick up the receiver, somebody wanted to talk to you. Julianna’s ring was two rings long plus two shorter ones. Cedric’s was, although she tried to never call him at home, one long ring, followed by another long ring.

  Sometimes she called. She couldn’t help it. She’d call and have Ma Earnestine put her through and then before he picked up, she’d drop the phone and run away.

  This was girlish nerves and this was because, as her mother always told her, “nothing was private!” There was always somebody listening. People are nosy and people get entertainment starved, her nosy neighbor Gosha especially.

  There was all sorts of strange electricity in the air that winter; the dry brings static and sparks jumped from person to person, like a little bit of naughty magic.

  Chapter Four: Lovers Walk on the Lake, but Not Like Christ.

  There was beauty in the ice, if you looked hard enough.

  “But you have to look hard,” Cedric admitted. They were fishing on a frozen lake, which Julianna would’ve found horrifying for dozens of reasons scant months before, but was enjoying now. Enjoying in spite of the fears she kept having of the ice cracking and swallowing her whole, enjoying in spite of the fact that standing on a lake was unnatural, enjoying in spite of the fact that the temperature was minus six degrees.

  He used a huge drill to get through the ice, a big blue hand-cranked thing that looked like a prop from one of the alien invasion science fiction movies that had become so popular, she’d seen one at the Brannaska Drive-In Theater that past summer.

  The shavings from the ice piled up like a giant snow cone and she wondered if it would taste as delicious.

  “Three feet of ice!” Cedric panted. The effort had left him perspiring despite the cold.

  Julianna, too, was toasty under her t-shirt, turtleneck, sweater, flannel button up, hooded sweatshirt and down parka. “And that is just on my top half,” she’d joked, “there are a dozen more layers on the bottom!”

  “Which is too bad,” Cedric thought, “because an icehouse is a surprisingly romantic place.”

  That was true. The pot-bellied stove burned pine logs which crackled and popped with comfort and regularity. Their little “lodge” was fashioned out of an improvised mish-mash of chipboard wood and rusted iron, in the depths of winter the cabin had a rustic charm. It could only fit two people within its cute, hand-fashioned walls, which weren’t perfect at retaining heat but the privacy was perfect for blossoming romances.

  It was cozy, and it was sexy. Julianna would not entertain such thoughts for the time being, her eyes were fixed on the hole carved in the lake. Cedric had prepared his fishing gear; a line, a hook and a heaping handful of wriggling earthworms to tempt to sleepy walleyed pike out of their mid-winter sluggishness.

  He was devoted to both his faith and his sense of duty for his beloved America; a man of god and patriot. The Jesuits had provided him with the independence, skills, and rigorous education to enable such self-sufficiency. He was somewhat content with that, but only somewhat.

  “We’ll leave this here, Jewels” said Cedric as he tied the l
ine to a peg he’d drilled into the ice. Only Cedric could get away with referring to Julianna as Jewels; he had a special place in her heart.

  “God willing, this line will have a mighty walleye on the end of it by the time we return,” Cedric smiled.

  “How long will this take?” Julianna wondered.

  “This is a game of patience, to be sure. “ Cedric rustled his hands together and donned his gloves. “Let’s take a walk on the lake!”

  Julianna enjoyed making the most use of the sunlight in the cold wintry days, for it lifted her mood and she enjoyed the long shadows it casted over the powdery white landscape. Brannaska was a magical place to be in during this time of year, if you could stand it, so she agreed to the walk. That she was walking on ice frightened her, though.

  “What an appropriate metaphor,” she thought ruefully. “Even when I find a great man to walk through life with, circumstances conspire against us so I can never be on safe ground.”

  “You really do get to see the splendor of God’s panorama out here,” Cedric said, motioning to the view spread out before them.

  The colors were so vibrant as to seem unnatural. “Or actually,” Julianna said, “completely natural. Like fruits, like the Platonic ideal of a fruit. Banana yellows and apple reds and grape purples. So rich that I think they were from the hand of some painter.”

  “Raphael used those sorts of colors,” he said. “I saw them in the Vatican when I went there right after the war on a tourist visit. “He painted with a hyper-saturated palate to give a heightened sense of realism. He did this so he could better glorify God.”

  “The wind is a bit raw, though,” she couldn’t help but comment.

  “You betcha it is,” he said, using a bit of the local lingo he’d picked up in his limited time there. She giggled. He had a sly way of being funny; never mocking, but a sideways appreciation of things that made her believe he always knew a little secret about the world that nobody else was in on.