Father Briar and The Angel (24 page)

“
Charles has the power,
Sugar Ray the speed. This storm has both!”

The wolf was not
intimidated by the storm or the boxers. No human could defeat him.
So the wolf ran, ran towards people, those weak things of flesh and
no belief, no meanness, no order in the face of their creator, and
ran towards his food. He was not searching for everlasting life,
no, he was a rational creature who was unable to speculate on
greater things.

He just wanted
this
life to continue.
Which makes a lot of sense. Wolves have been around for eons and
it’s hard to argue with that run of success.

Chapter Twenty Seven:
After the Calm, the Storm.

As they looked back upon it
many years later, in the comfort and warmth of their homes, they’d
look back and wonder, “how did we not know the storm was
coming?”

But they weren’t the only
ones who missed it. A few people were caught so unawares that they
died essentially where they stood, such was the swiftness of the
blizzard’s attack.

“
The Storm of the Century”
dropped sixty three inches of snow on Brannaska and the rest of
Northern Minnesota. To this day, the blizzard holds Minneapolis’s
record for heaviest snowfall in a two hour period and resulted in
the deaths of sixty two people.

The magnificent, murderous
snowstorm created havoc across the state, leaving around seven
hundred buses and thirty thousand cars abandoned on the streets and
highways.

Massive snowfall totals
don’t always signal a troublesome blizzard. Some storms can be
marked by less snow coupled ferocious winds. When combined with
temperatures dozens of degrees below zero, the wind
deadly.

This storm combined all
three factors. It had both terrible winds and frigid temperatures
and it combined them with a thick, heavy, heartbreaking
snowfall.

It was one of those rare
snowstorms that exceeded all forecasts, broke all records, and
caused massive amounts of devastation and death. But Cedric and
Julianna didn’t know that, not yet.

Defining what actually “the
Storm of the Century” is can be a tricky task. Sometimes, the worst
storms involve average snowfalls which are whipped, ice in the
blender like, into zero-visibility by hurricane-force winds. This
one had huge snows along with zero visibility and howling
gales.

Some storms are worse than
others because they hit big cities at busy times, or because their
diameter is so huge that they swallow up entire regions. This one
hit all the major cities in Minnesota over three full
days.

Timing can play a role as
well -- a storm during weekday rush hour is worse than one on a
Saturday morning, and a freak early storm when leaves are still on
the trees can cause enormous amounts of damage. Because of the
seemingly endless (for those who lived through it) duration of this
storm, it started before Friday’s afternoon rush hour and ended
many days later.

The winds were
supernatural, averaging forty two miles an hour with gusts peaking
at over eighty! Gales like this would've made for a nasty storm at
any time, but the winter of ’54 had already been unusually cold and
snowy winter, with a half-dozen feet of loosely packed and icy snow
already fallen.

As if that weren't bad
enough, snow covered much of the frozen surface of nearby the
nearby Great Lakes, giving the wind even more snow with which to
create its devilish drifts. The result was zero visibility and
roads blocked by snow.

The storm brought intense
cold (the temperature dropped more than thirty degrees in just
three hours) and stranded people at work or, worse, in their
cars.

The conditions were so
awful that they led to thirty eight deaths as far away as Western
North Dakota and Southern Ontario.

But all that was still to
come.

Cedric was slowly
overcoming his fear of being distracted by conversation while
driving and they’d talked the whole way up.

He couldn’t give up his
calling as a priest. He was as much a Jesuit as he was a human
being. To give up the Order was to die.

And, whether it was
scandalous, intellectual, emotional, or some sort of emotion God
had invention just for them, she loved him as a priest.

“
I love the job, I love
your duties, and I love your connection to the Lord. I love your
ministrations to the poor and the sick and the needy. I love your
patience. All of these things are connected to your calling. I
won’t ever ask you to leave the priesthood again.”

Now he had to pull over to
the side of the road. Tears had filled his eyes and he tried to
blink them away without success.

Sometimes the great
romantic questions of our lives are answered on long drives to
nowhere. Just because it is banal doesn’t mean it can’t be
beautiful.

Trig and Ramona were in the
ditch. He’d refused to take the weather seriously while driving out
to nowhere so he could make out with his girlfriend. Now they were
going nowhere fast.

“
Could be a while until
somebody gets here,” he noted.

“
Don’t get your hopes up,
Trigger. Don’t get your penis up, either.” She’d taken to that word
recently, for reasons she couldn’t quite figure out. The silly
sounding clinical term demystified things, somehow, and took some
of the power away from him.

“
Oh come on.”

“
Oh heck no.”

This being the strongest
language she ever used, Trig backed off, for the moment.

“
I think its time to bring
out Beauty and the Beast,” Gosha told herself.

She’d named her
truck.

It was quite the
contraption; a welded-together amalgam of a 1937 Ford commercial
delivery truck and an Army Troop Transport Vehicle.. She’d been
blowtorching the thing (two things, when she’d started) off and on
since last summer because something in her bones told her the
coming winter would be troublesome and she’d need military grade
transportation to get through it.

Gosha had no reason to be
going out anywhere. She had enough canned, pickled, and dried food
to keep herself (and any and all possible guests) fed through May.
Her larders and pantries and woodpiles were well-stocked. Her fire
had plenty of fuel and her house was a brazen eighty seven
degrees.

But she had to move. Storms
produced in her a great wanderlust, an urge so powerful that to
ignore it was both foolish and painful. She could no more stay
within the walls of her house than sprout wings and fly
away.

So out to the garage armory
she went to fire up Beauty and the Beast.

Ramona’s beauty had Trig
all fired up, too. So far, she’d only let him get as far down as
her neck, which he was layering with hickeys.

“
I’ll be wearing thick
turtleneck sweaters for three months anyway,” she thought, “so he
might as well go to town.” This was a bit of new slang that had
been going around the girls of Brannaska, letting your boyfriend
“go to town” on you.

“
I don’t really know why
they call it that, but I like how it feels,” she thought, and
leaned back in for more.

Gosha was going to town,
too.

Brannaska spread out before
her like the “February” painting in a complimentary calendar your
John Deere dealership sent out every year. Surveying it, she gave
out a satisfied little grunt.

“
This place has a certain
rugged charm,” she said to herself. “Sort of like that
bishop.”

The bishop, in fact,
possessed all the ruggedness of Liberace (and the tiniest fraction
of his charm) but Gosha was bored with nowhere to go, so she turned
down the country road towards the parish house, hoping to find him
around.

Her left turn down that
country road killed Trig’s erection but it almost certainly saved
his life.

The young hockey hotshot
had managed to maneuver Ramona out of her sweater and down to her
white cotton bra and had even managed to undo the button and the
zipper of her pants.

The car containing the two
lovers was, of course, still in the ditch. The amorous teenagers
had forgotten about that entirely and the fact that they’d not
gotten far enough out of town before “going to town.”

When Gosha’s space-age
Frankenstein’s monster of a battle truck pulled up behind them,
Trig and Ramona couldn’t have been more frightened if it was the
FBI, sirens blaring and guns drawn, had arrived to arrest
them.

With a sprightliness that
gave no indication of her advancing age, she jumped out of the
driver’s seat (which really should’ve been called the captain’s
chair or something equally commanding) and tossed the winch around
his rear bumper, the teenagers struggled to get their clothes back
on and preserve their decency.

“
Have no shame around old
Gosha, you two, I grew up on a farm and seen everything there is to
see.”

In fact, she’d found
herself turned on by what little she’d seen, and she’d hoped to see
a little bit more. Feelings within her were awakened by the first
time in decades.

Now, with the amorous kids
being towed home for fresh punishments on the back of the oddest
machine Brannaska had ever seen, Gosha had a new purpose to keep
her occupied during the storm: a sexual conquest. When Father Briar
wasn’t at the parish house, she dumped the kids at the Herbertsons
and went off to find the bishop. Father Briar wasn’t home, Julianna
wasn’t home. Something besides the 10,000 lakes was fishy. Now she
had two missions before storms’ end: a sexual conquest, and to
finally catch Father Briar in the act. Then she could revel in
righteous justice.’

Over the next twelve hours,
the temperature dropped, the wind got worse, and the wolf
waited.

“
This reminds me of Jesus
in the cave,” Father Briar began again.

“
If you tell me that story
one more time I’m going to take a long, shoeless walk outside,” she
exploded.

“
Why, dearest, I had no
idea…” he stammered and stumbled for words, sad and ashamed and
feeling stupid. She had no idea the effect she had on him when she
was angry. It was as though he returned to being a little boy,
looking to his mother for shelter, safety and
forgiveness.

“
A parable doesn’t change
meaning every time you tell it. It isn’t something you can return
to over and over again, teasing new themes and new ideas out of.
They are simple stories! For simple people!”

This was a big can of
worms.

Coincidentally (or maybe
not, the Lord moves in mysterious ways), as Cedric was backing away
from the raging Julianna, he kicked over their can of
worms.

“
Now look what I’ve done,”
he said, shoulders slumped, voice defeated. The Swiftn’ing Pure
Lard Brand Shortening tin rolled around the icehouse, a sad little
accompaniment to the fight.

She knew she’d gone a
little too far and gave a little emotional ground. “It is okay,
they are easy to clean up. Here, I’ll help.”

Julianna scooped up the
dirt and stuffed it back into a handy Folger’s can. It was the same
color as grounds and she wondered if it would be as tasty when
brewed up. If they were stuck in here much longer, she might have
to. Then she slowly and carefully picked up each individual worm
and put it back into the car. The care and meticulousness with
which she performed the task made her feel better, repetitive
motion calms the brain.

“
Do you still love me?” he
asked, clearly afraid.

“
Of course.”

“
It is that
simple?”

“
Nothing with us is
simple. But nothing is so complicated that we can’t deal with
it.”

That was reassuring, but
not quite true. The storm was still raging outside. At times the
wind was so loud that they had to pause their conversations, and at
times they just gave up entirely and held each other, stoking the
fire.

The fire was the most
important thing in the world. Without it, they’d be dead within two
hours at the most. The icehouse was sturdy but would retain no
heat, so they had to keep generating it constantly. They were
stocked with blankets and a little bit of canned food, but the rest
of their emergency supplies were still in the trunk of the
car.

The car was fifteen yards
away.

In this blizzard, that may
as well have been fifteen miles. So they waited. While they did,
the storm rose in intensity.

Every fifteen minutes,
Cedric had to get up and push the door open and shovel out around
it, lest the two be trapped inside, buried by blowing and drifting
snow.

“
There is a very real
possibility,” he told Julianna, “that this whole icehouse could
just disappear beneath the pileup.”

Although she didn’t tell
him, for she was trying to be strong and resolute, but these were
great fears of hers, being buried alive and frozen. She took three
deep breaths to calm her panic, one for the Father, one for the
Son, and one for the Holy Ghost.