Father Briar and The Angel (4 page)

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.