

Father Briar

and

The Angel

Rita Saladano
Published by Saladano Publishing, LLC

Copyright 2016 by Rita Saladano

Cover Illustration Copyright © 2016 by Dragan Bilic

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
"If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love."   
― Julian of Norwich
**Description** **:**

Set over four weeks in the brutal winter of 1954, _Father Briar and the Angel_ __ is an historical romance unlike any other.

When a beautiful young woman from the Pacific Northwest falls for a Jesuit priest (and he for her) who has recently been called to a parish in Northern Minnesota, she chooses to move halfway across the country to be near him.

Brannaska, Minnesota, way up North there where the seasons are dramatic and the locals eccentric, is a frozen place in the winter. But that doesn't stop things between amorous folks from heating the place up!

Filled with illicit love, dramatic twists, a beautiful natural setting, a big cast of charming and memorable characters, and an action-filled climax during "the Storm of the Century,"

By turns sweet and charming, lusty and erotic, nostalgic and forbidden, _Father Briar and the Angel_ will delight fans of literary romances, lusty romances, historical romances, and "man in uniform" romances.

A complex and layered but easily accessible tale of forbidden love, Rita Saladano's book is the must read of the winter, this winter, or any other.

Don't let the cold get you, invite _Father Briar_ into your heart today.

**  
**
**Prologue:**

Kisses can be scandalous.

The priest was so pure, so sweet-hearted, so soft and tender, and yet so masculine. His thick, deep brown hair was mussed up and a little damp; August in Minnesota is muggy and the air thick with mosquitoes. He swatted a few of the naughty little bugs but knew it was futile; they always won in the end. Plus, he didn't like to kill any living thing, even things as irritating as these.

"They have as much right to dinner as I do," Father Cedric Briar said, deciding not to swat one that was feeding on his arm.

Such things made Julianna Warwidge love him even more. He wasn't just thoughtful and moral; he put those thoughts and beliefs into action in the most literal of ways, even doing unthinkable things, like not swatting mosquitoes.

They were picnicking on the banks of the Mississippi River. The massive, cross-continental waterway had its headwaters a couple of hours south of where they sat. Father Briar was always inspired by the power of the river and came down to eat, rest, and pray beside it whenever the state's notorious weather allowed it. And the last winter had been so notorious that he and his love had to come here a lot this healing, healthy, hot summer.

Kisses can be wild.

Wild like the pine forest around them. Deer, black bear and timber wolves still roamed those woods and despite being an animal lover, she always felt a little unsafe when they walked out to their special, private lunch spot among the towering trees.

But that unsafe feeling was thrilling, too. "Isn't that part of the reason you keep doing this?" she asked herself, "because of the illicit thrill?"

It was 1954 and the Catholic Church was a still one of the most powerful institutions in America. To be involved with a priest was definitely wild, wild to the point of being a little bit dangerous. Every time she contemplated it, the love affair made her titter. Julianna was a good girl; very good girl, and she didn't do things that went against Minnesota's conservative culture, much less things that went against God's command for his priestly representatives on Earth, so this was most certainly wild.

Kisses can send one up with the birds and the stars and the other travelers through the sky.

The day was so lovely he couldn't help but turn his thoughts to God. A couple of Whooping Cranes flew overhead, their majesty lifting his thoughts along with them. " _Grus Americana,"_ the Latin scholar and rigorously educated cleric noted. The spring thaw had filled the river with crisp, cold water, proving that winter didn't last forever (although it often felt as though it did) and that life could renew itself indefinitely.

And if life could renew itself, why couldn't love? With this smart and dedicated woman, even that felt possible to Father Briar. Her eyes were pools of compassion and curiosity, her skin soft and fair and he grace unparalleled by any woman he'd ever known.

This was not a man who ever thought he'd be challenging the rules and restrictions of his church; no, Cedric Briar was a lover of order. He'd joined one, even. The Society of Jesus, the Jesuit Order.

But love was trumping order.

She spread out the contents of their picnic basket. They had rye bread with butter and thick slices of ham with which to make sandwiches. There were ruddy red potatoes, first boiled and then sprinkled with dill and lemon juice before being chilled overnight in the refrigerator. There were fresh carrots and spring onions. And there was chocolate, a brand new treat that they both loved, a confection known as M&M's.

She hummed a poppy little tune as she prepared their lunch. "Did you bring the mustard, Cedric?"

"Forgot to pack it, sorry! There is more butter in there, though. What is that you are singing?"

She was a little embarrassed. "I heard it on the car radio when I was driving to pick you up. It is a new song called "Rock Around the Clock" by a young man named Bill Haley."

"Haley like the comet?" Father Briar asked.

"Yes, exactly. In fact, that is the name of his backing band. Bill Haley and the Comets."

"It is a catchy little tune."

"It is, but popular music like that isn't going anywhere. It's all a flash in the pan. Speaking of which, why did you bring a pan?" she asked, lifting the heavy cast iron thing out of the wicker basket.

"I thought I might catch a fish and fry it up," he said, motioning to the river.

"I never knew you fished."  
"Avidly! This is the "Land of 10,000 Lakes," after all. Everybody here fishes."

Julianna was a transplant for the Pacific Northwest, a place both very much like Northern Minnesota and very different. But she was a city girl and Brannaska was a small town in the woods, surrounded by the famous lakes, German Catholics, and Scandinavian Protestants who were all united by a love of hockey and a folk hero lumberjack of gigantic proportions named Paul Bunyon.

So there had been some culture shock. "An adjustment period," he'd told her, reassuring. "You'll grow to love the quiet and the fresh air. The people will grow to love you, as I did, and you'll flourish. "Bloom where you are planted," I always say! And, tumultuous as it was, fate has planted you here. Thank God."  
"Thank God," she agreed, passing him a sandwich.

He ate greedily. This was another thing that attracted her to him; he was, as her mother would've said, "a good eater." Although, had her mother known she was involved with a priest, well, all hell would've broken out.

Kisses can make liars of the most honest of men.

They held hands. As a working person, a lady who'd done noble labor with her hands, her knuckles were round and her palms calloused, although her nails were immaculate and painted a space-age color. His seminary ring was cool as she laced her fingers through his.

"Do you ever take this off?" she asked, spinning it around on his finger.

"Sometimes I think I should," he said, suddenly serious. A cloud passed over the sun and he wondered if the mercurial weather wasn't about to go bad.

"Why do you say that?" she asked, wiggling a bit closer to him, trying to keep the mood light and summery. The winter had been so harsh. Seattle is rainy, to be sure, but the snow laid over Minnesota like death blanket, a burial shroud, for unending months.

But now, like the blooms around them, their love was flourishing.

"Every time I kiss you I wonder about the vows I took. As joyful as our love is, it is impossible for me to forget that I am breaking a solemn vow to God."

As if to prove a point ("or make a dare to the divine," she speculated), he kissed her, soft and sweet but full of longing and desire.

"Sweeter than those little chocolate candies," he said.

"More nourishing than bread and water," she agreed, taking a bit of both and enjoying the view of the river while he held her close.

Thus the afternoon passed. They ate all the sandwiches but rationed the M&M's, eating only three an hour so they'd last through the sunset and into the night.

They'd rarely had so much uninterrupted time together. It had been a long time coming, Julianna's move to Minnesota. It wasn't that she wasn't committed to him, oh, she very much was! But he was a priest, a working, wonderful priest, with parish and congregation to worry about and watch over.

Life in the Upper-Midwest was harsh and unpredictable, even when it was beautiful and bountiful. Father Briar was known throughout the woodsy and hardscrabble region as a pillar of the community and an organizer of care and relief for the afflicted and the needy. The church was a necessary part of the social safety net in a country where the government had only recently developed one.

She loved to be so close to it, and therefore to God. And yet so far away! Despite herself, she too had doubts about the morality of their affair. "What does Jesus think of me?" she wondered, laying back into the arms of Father Briar, "how could he find something so pure and so blessed to be sinful?"

As if reading her mind, Cedric said, "now is not the time for deep thoughts, my dear heart, now is the time for enjoying the evening."

A man and his son drifted by in a wooden canoe, fishing for bass. They were well up river from home and he didn't believe anybody would recognize him, but he reflexively pulled his hat a little lower over his eyes to shield them, just in case.

Feeling him tense up, she asked "do you ever dream of being free from it? Free from the hiding and the secrets? Free to be ourselves, free to be in love? Free to think about the future?"

"Ah, the future. The first stumble of many doomed lovers," he joked, a little darker than he'd meant.

"We aren't doomed."

"No," he agreed, "far from it."

"We almost were."

"This last winter was a killer."

She lay her head down on his lap.

"It'll make a good story, in the future," she said, a cold shudder tearing through her.

It makes a good story for now...
Chapter One: In the Beginning, There Was the War, and the War was Not Good.

Julianna's father, Gordon Warwidge, had been a lumberjack, a real woodsman. He was the kind of man they stopped making a long time ago, even long before 1954. Her father was one of the reasons she'd been able to adjust to life in frozen Brannaska, way up there in Northern Minnesota, because the local tall tales about a folk hero named Paul Bunyon reminded her of her father.   
Paul Bunyon was an archetype of masculinity, but exaggerated to make him memorable. He worked twenty two hours a day in the forests and could fell trees with only one swing of his ax. He was sixteen feet tall and eight feet wide. His beard was thicker than steel wool and his eyes were glacial pools.

But Paul Bunyon was a myth, a tale told to inspire people to work hard in the face of nature's capriciousness. Julianna's father had been a real man of flesh and blood and flannel and whiskers and gun oil and chainsaw grease. He'd been across the country twice and worked in a dozen of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal labor projects. He'd dammed rivers in the West, strung power lines through the Midwest, and logged dark forests from Maine to Washington State.

He had shoulders as wide as a Burma Shave billboard and an equal way with silly rhymes and terrible puns. Terribly entertaining in a corny way, his laughter and goofiness were infective. Despite the brutal toll a life of hard, physical work had taken on his body, he was in constant good-spirits, if hyper-critical at times. His criticism was just motivated by his perfectionism, she knew, so most of the time she was able to forgive him for it.

Gordon was a natural born entertainer and had entertained the rough men of the logging camps with ribald stories and songs. To this day, he was prone to telling an off-color joke in the presence of his daughter, just to see her blush, and then laugh in spite of her churchy decency. He favored Aqua Velva cologne, already iconic by then and nice ties, but oddly, he was indifferent to the quality of his suits.

Of all of the influences on her life, her father was the greatest. Gordon was big and lusty and hilarious; he was at the same time humble and smart and self-deprecating. She always tried to emulate him when she was in situations where she felt as though she was in over her head or uncomfortable, not knowing what to say.

When she'd joined Women's Auxiliary Corps in 1944, he'd bubbled over with support for her. His left leg had been partially crippled during his tenure as a lumberjack when a tree had been felling came down upon it. This had excluded him from military service, much to his everlasting regret.

"You are going to be the jewel of the Armed Services," he'd told her.

"Aw, dad, it's not really the Armed Services," she said. "They'll do some testing and see what sort of job I'm fit for."

"It is great nonetheless. You aren't a shirker."

Her father couldn't abide by "shirkers" and spent a great deal of his post-retirement time ridiculing them. He'd scour the newspapers looking for them, usually in the government or local sports teams, then spend the rest of the day ridiculing them.

Her mother, Angeline (the family had a tradition of names ending in "ine," as her sister was Geraldine and her auntie was, somewhat awkwardly, Bernardine), was a reticent beauty, shy and retiring by radiant anyway. A staunch, proud, and devoted Catholic, her three kids were her _raison d'être,_ her reason to exist, her pride and joy.

She'd wanted more but making it through the depression with that large a brood was still a remarkable accomplishment. Her husband having to travel the great, groaning nation meant that she was alone a great deal while raising them. She met this considerable challenge with both grit and grace without so much as a complaint.

Faith had done her right, rewarded her, and filled her life. She volunteered every Monday and Tuesday at the parish office, answering phones and filing papers. She volunteered Wednesday and Thursday at the church library, shelving concordances and confirmation texts and calling folks whose books were overdue. She worked (without pay) Friday and Saturday at the Catholic Charities Branch #3 Food Bank, stocking cans of bean and corn for the neediest of families.

Sunday was for mass.

Mass was still said in Latin and none of them could imagine it any other way. The priests retained an air of mystery as they went about their duties. Julianna had always loved the arcane rituals of the church and was happy every time the service began.

There was real comfort in the ancient words, the endings were rhythmic and lilting, their cadences repetitive and trance-like. There was a little hidden menace in them, too. Anything you don't understand can mean whatever you want it to, manifesting your desires and your fears equally. She often wondered if the priests were cussing at her, secretly, or gossiping amongst themselves about which of the parishioners was most sinful and which ones the most reverent and godly. __

Julianna inherited so much of her mother's attractiveness. They had the same wide, round eyes that gave them a perpetual look of joyful surprise. Their hair curled in the same coy way, in soft rivulets and graceful curves, down around their swan-like necks and onto their shoulders. When they wore it up it was equally elegant, showcasing their high and intelligent foreheads and dimpled temples.

While the family rarely had money to spare, Angeline was crafty with a needle and thread and was able to stitch and stretch them into fashionable, if conservative, clothes. Busty and tall, Julianna wore them well and was popular with the boys. Popular but untouchable, their old-school Catholicism saw to that.

"I'm proud, too; I am just worried something bad is going to happen to you," she'd fussed over her daughter the evening before she left for training school.

That was understandable. It was wartime, and there were constant rumors about Japanese submarines being sighted off shore, of scout planes and long-range bombers bearing the rising sun of the Imperial Flag on their wings, of foreign spies posing as fishermen with plans to bomb the port.

"Oh, mom," she'd shushed, "I'm not going overseas! I'll be just down the road, really."

And so in March of 1944, she packed up and went to the Women's Auxiliary Corps training center in Spokane, Washington, farther away from home than she'd ever been, but closer to her destiny.

The WAC girls were first trained in three major specialties.

Young women who'd tested in as the brightest and nimblest were trained as switchboard operators. Switchboards and the telephones they controlled were becoming indispensible to modern life in general and the war effort specifically.

Next came the mechanics, who had to have a high degree of mechanical aptitude and problem solving ability. Julianna had been classified as a mechanic and she threw herself into her job with typical enthusiasm.

Last were the bakers, poor girls who had difficulty with reading and numbers. This was later, as America's appetite for war remained un-satiated and its endless list of enemies unconquered, expanded to dozens of specialties like Postal Clerk, Driver, Stenographer, and Clerk-Typist. These workers were sometimes stereotyped as dumb or lazy by their fellow WACs, but Julianna Warwidge, good girl, was careful never to indulge in such nasty gossip.

She'd gossip about other things, sure! She loved the movies and the magazines that covered them. Her father had been a voracious reader of pulp magazines and she picked those up whenever she saw them, too, although due to rationing, paper was sometimes scarce or expensive. But she'd keep up with the screen idols and chat about their romantic (mis)adventures with the machinists and her fellow WAC mechanics.

Although it sometimes sounds, if not idyllic, at least egalitarian, that is true, to a degree. But these were remarkably different times; different even from 1954. The war had ushered in so many changes and the role of women in the workplace was just one of them. About 150,000 American women eventually served in the WAC during World War II. They were the first women other than nurses to serve with the Army. Julianna was always proud of that fact.

While most women, like Julianna, served stateside, some went to various places around the world. She was sometimes jealous of these girls, but not often. They got to go to interesting and exciting places, including Europe and North Africa, and some girls even landed on Normandy Beach just a few weeks after the initial invasion!

But Julianna was content there in Seattle, and like all Americans, happy when the war ended. And like a lot of female Americans, she was ready to find a man!

So many of the boys had been away, been overseas, and been gone so long, so many of them were ready, randy, and pent-up, and so many of them were single and unattached to anything for the first time in years.

Cedric Briar wasn't one of those men.

He was committed to his Order.

**  
**
********

Chapter Two: On the Origins of Small Things Like Great Men.

Ignore the white clerical collar; it didn't stop him from being a man.

Cedric Briar was a handsome man in the Great American sort of way, conventional, dignified, and enduring. His hair was brown and wavy, the kind that would've been called "unruly" had he let it grow even a fraction of an inch too long, which, being both a Jesuit and a Navy man, he never, ever, ever did.

Father Briar filled out both uniforms like the tailor intended, like a man ought to, like the ladies liked. His chest was broad and although it lost definition over the years, he was never out of shape; instead of fat, he tended towards thickness, even in his happy and well-fed later years.

He was gentle with babies and old women. He was quick with a sports analogy with the men, a commiseration about "this miserable weather," with the farmers, and somehow even the teenagers found him funny.

Cedric Briar had been born the fourth of six children in a family as duty bound to God and Country as any America family has ever been.

The brood of kids consisted of Catherine, whom everybody called Kay as a child, later she became Sister Catherine. Next came Margaret (Maggie) who was slow to develop, both mentally and physically, and lived at home for the bulk of her life. She was followed by the family's first son, John, who became Captain Jake and was killed in action in Guadalcanal. Then came Joan, who was Sister Joan from the time she was eighteen years old, and Cedric, who became Father Briar.

Cedric Briar's heritage was a reflection of the American Immigrant's Experience. His maternal grandparents had come as children from Cork Co. Ireland, and their daughter and Cedric's mother Mary, still spoke with an Irish brogue so thick her children often struggled to understand her.

Mary was the defining force in Cedric's life. A large, redheaded woman of indomitable will and a devotion to community almost as strong, she shepherded her brood through childhood and into lives of obligation and duty and still managed to have a few laughs along the way.

Cedric was a typical lad in a typical, big Catholic family in pre-Depression and Depression era America. He loved playing with his siblings, especially the doomed and rowdy John. They invented all manner of games to keep themselves occupied, one or two of which didn't even involve punching. Apples were his favorite food and he'd sneak them from the neighbor's trees whenever they were ripe in the autumn. He also loved popcorn and corn on the cob, which he considered to be as close as he and his brother John.

The family was poor, even before the Depression, but somehow never went hungry. Later in life, Father Briar would attribute this to their deep ties with the Church. Educated by Jesuits from the time he could walk, Cedric and the rest of the Briar lot spent a great deal of time at school and there was always food around, scavenged and cooked by charitable and caring nuns.

"There were potatoes. Sliced so thin as to be almost translucent," he'd later tell Julianna, "but still, potatoes. For us Irish, that was necessary. For some reason, I remember there being an abundance of carrots and that Maggie's pee turned orange one winter month from eating so many of them. Could that be real, could that be true? Or is my memory playing fun little games with my childhood?"

Although his upbringing was scholastic, his rough and tumble siblings ensured that he had physical intelligence and toughness as well. He grew up tall and hit puberty early; his chest broadened and his voice deepened. He started beating John, three years his senior, at their constant punch-ups. By the time he was twelve, it was clear he'd be an athletic star at Central Catholic High.

And that he was, playing quarterback and middle linebacker. Already hugely attractive to girls because of his light Irish brogue, excellent morals, and early manliness, his athletic accomplishments made him irresistible. But Cedric was a good boy, and even after he'd quarterbacked his team to a 9-1 record as a senior, he never did much more than kissing.

There was never any question of a steady girlfriend or college athletic scholarships, he was going to concentrate on his studies at Creighton University and enter the seminary after that.

The Catholic Church that Cedric had been baptized into shortly after his birth and the one that he found upon her ordination into the priesthood were fundamentally different institutions.

The growth of the American Catholic Church in terms of membership, as well as its slow but genuine acceptance and assimilation into the culture had given it much more influence.

Cedric's time at Creighton was focused on classics; Latin, both ancient and medieval, Greek both classical and modern, Hebrew, with a smattering of Coptic and Aramaic thrown in.

His time in the seminary was interrupted. He was about halfway through the long process of ordination in 1941 and was happily contemplating his future. A small parish church in a small Midwestern town, maybe a dog.

But, of course, Hitler and Tojo had other plans.

Like his brother John, who by now everybody was calling "Captain Jake," although he'd not officially earned that rank yet, Cedric enlisted. Jake went into the Army, Cedric the Navy.

He had what soldiers and sailors call "a good war," if a little dull. The best war is the war in which you don't get killed. Jake wasn't so lucky. He'd been a fighting soldier.

"Heck," Cedric had to admit to Julianna later, when they'd reminisce about their families, "he'd been a fighter since we were kids." He died a hero's death (aren't they all?) on Guadalcanal.

Due to his intense Catholicism, future priestly calling, and Jesuit education, Cedric had assumed many of the duties of the destroyer's chaplain. The man had been a drunk and a terrible minister, whereas Cedric had already acquired a priest's humble touch, inspiring courage, and quiet, resolute faith. So while he'd officially been trained as a JOB, he'd taken over the role of counselor, confidante, and Christian companion to the sailors on board.

After the war, he returned to Nebraska, to Creighton, to complete his training as a Jesuit. Before the war, he'd finished his time as a novitiate, which had taken two years of study.

A novice learns to create a community of brothers who grow in prayer, knowledge of the Society, apostolic work, and personal enrichment. He meets the Lord through the 30-day Spiritual Exercises retreat. At the end of these two years, he pronounces vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

Throughout the war, he'd upheld his vow of chastity. This made him nearly unique among sailors. So he had a clean and clear conscience as he resumed what were called his "First Studies." This had taken three years.

During this time, the newly-vowed Jesuit moved into his academic work as a brother or a scholastic. Cedric had stayed close to home, teaching at Creighton first, then at a Catholic high school in Minneapolis, his first exposure to Minnesota. He studied philosophy and theology, and he deepens his Jesuit identity through other ministerial work which strengthens or challenges his gifts.

From there, he moved into his period of "Regency" and continued teaching around the Midwest, and at the very end of those years he moved to Spokane.

He then did the deep and profound study required for the ministry in his period of "Theology." During this time, he moved to Spokane to work at a parish church there as a way to enhance his effectiveness for ministry.

There he was ordained in June of 1952. **** His mother wept with pride and joy.

Then came the most difficult challenge of his young life; the war notwithstanding. He fell in love with, and was separated from, Julianna.

Julianna was magic.

The first time he saw her, she was standing in a field, far away from any houses or buildings, open, alone, alluring.

She was a portal to the future. She was ageless and timeless and now. He didn't know it, but his vows crumbled right then and there. Not all of them, but the ones involving celibacy and putting God above all other worldly and physical desires.

Father Cedric Briar, Jesuit, never wavered from his duty to his God and his congregation. Not for the forty years he served, humbly and happily. But she became his heart.

What a name. Julianna Warwidge. "Have you ever heard anything so alluring?" he marveled to himself. "So utilitarian, so unassuming, so straightforward.

Even her nomenclature attracted him!

How silly he felt, staring at her there, standing in the pasture. Some fool had though it a great idea to try to import buffalo to the great Northwest.

"A magnificent substitute for boring old cows!" he'd declared. "Their meat is mighty tasty and cheaper by the pound, too. I'm going to make a killing!" the rancher had thought. But it was the buffalo who'd done the killing, rampaging through the flimsy fence the wannabe cowboy had made for them and trampled Mrs. McGuillicuty's chickens as they slept in their coop.

That isn't quite the tragedy it first appears, their deaths were instantaneous and utterly painless. A half dozen chickens vs. three hundred thousand pounds of rampaging buffalo isn't much of a matchup. Plus, McGuillicuty was known for breeding particularly ill-tempered roosters and their hens were doubly vicious just to keep them in line.

No, the broken fence and smashed coop and the empty pasture were no tragedy at all, because Julianna Warwidge was slowly making her way across them to the little church he was sitting in, sipping a glass of wine and enjoying both the golden rays of sunset and the Songs of Solomon.

Like him, she was new to Spokane, the town in which they'd first met. Like him, she'd done her service and was now taking advantage of the new stability and new wealth peacetime had brought. Like him, she was full of desire for something new and exciting after the years of depravation during the war.

She looked there, amongst the stubbly grass, like she was born to it.

Like she ruled it.

He'd seen wild animals with that same sort of poise and composure. Although her dress and hair were prim and conservative, there was certainly something wild about her.

Later, in letters lovingly preserved by the family, he'd struggle to describe her beauty and the feelings she inspired within him. Variously, he would describe her as a lynx, a fox, a queen elk, a gazelle, a chipmunk (which wounded her a little bit but he found both adorable and highly flattering) and a doe.

That morning, though, he didn't know how to describe her, other than simply beautiful. She was doing nothing but enjoying the view but she may as well have been dancing nude around a brass pole, so aroused was he. When she started making her way towards the church, he had to still and steady himself.

"Are you Father Briar?" she'd asked, after finally making her way over. "I've heard there is a new pastor here in this parish and I'm new, too. So I wanted to come over and introduce myself. I'm Julianna."

"Yes, ma'am, the outgoing father told me. I've seen you in the registry."

Beauty like hers stood out.

She wasn't entirely new to the congregation, like he was. Julianna had been away for a month, the month while he was transitioning into his role at this church, St. Matthew's. She still did work two months a year with the WAC and had been away in Seattle during his first masses.

"It's so nice to meet you, and it's so nice you are active in the church. Without the strength of the parishioners, a church cannot function."

They drifted into small talk and coffee. He'd put the wine and the writings of King Solomon away, they were notoriously lusty songs and poems and he didn't want her to get the wrong idea about him.

They sipped weak church coffee and talked about their recent past. They caught up on each other's service during the war years which was only natural, this was 1951 and it still dominated people's living memory. He liked that she'd done her time as a nurse's aide, like many women; she loved a man in a uniform.

Did clerical robes count as a uniform? They certainly must've, because her attraction to him was instant, and so forbidden. How silly she felt, developing a crush in less than an hour. On a priest, of all people; her priest!

He told stories of his time at sea, told them modestly and without mention of his own valor. "A humble priest on a humble boat," was how he described his time. She talked about helping wounded soldiers return to health, crying over the ones they lost and smiling with pride at the ones they saved.

Soon the hour was late; well, not late, but improper for a priest and a single woman. Were somebody to see them there together, both attractive, both fit, both young and ready to inherit the good fortune of post-war America, well, that would give the wrong impression.

Even upon their first meeting, they had to be cautious.

From word one, she'd transfixed him. And, as he well knew, in the beginning, there was nothing but the word, and the word was, as he'd heard the teenagers say, cool.

From the beginning, she was cool.

Even before he knew what the word meant (he was still pretty unsure about it, honestly, and had misused it a half-dozen times during his youth group meetings over the last month), he knew she was cool.

Their attraction was immediate and otherworldly.

This was the word he kept coming back to, over and over again, "supernatural." He couldn't think of another word; he had been trained to deal with Earthly matters, and moreover, he'd had a rigorous education in all things Heavenly.

But this love for this woman? This was so far out of his realms of experience he felt as though it had to come from somewhere else.

They'd yet to make love when he was assigned to the church in Brannaska, halfway across the continent from her in Spokane. Their celibacy was not because they hadn't wanted to make love. No, they'd both wanted to desperately, but they'd not yet mustered the courage to match their desire. 
**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 line 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.

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.

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 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."

Like love, ice itself is not very abrasive. But like love over time, it can grow in power and passion; it can change the very shape of the world. By picking up and moving boulders and gravel, the glaciers were able to scrape away flora and fauna and everything else beneath it.

"In the past, snowshoes are essential tools for fur traders and trappers. Brannaska still has a lot of both, although it is an old man's game now. Mainly, though, I just use mine for fun," he admitted.

"Before people built snowshoes, nature provided examples. Several animals, most notably some types of white rabbits, have evolved over the years oversized feet enabling them to move more quickly through deep snow," Cedric told her.

Julianna kept an eye out for the rabbits she had seen on prior walks. How she envied their camouflage, their ability to disappear when need be. That they had another special power, snowshoe feet, made her even more jealous.

Many were the times she wished she and Cedric could be like those rabbits and just disappear together forever.

Chapter Seven: Divination and Water Witching are not Sciences.

Meteorology then, like now, was more divination than science. But the war effort had furthered the field somewhat, since weather is so crucially essential to botching an invasion. "Ask Hitler, he found out," as Cedric said. Julianna said "Yeah, what a dummy. Nobody could invade Brannaska in the winter, much less Russia!"

It was only in 1948- after the war, even- that the first correct tornado prediction was made, by scientists in Oklahoma's "tornado alley." Thousands of mobile homes were saved in the process. Two years later, in 1950, a bunch of spectacular nerds at Princeton University, using one of America's first super-computers, the acronymic ENIAC, made the first successful computer-simulated weather prediction experiment.

This lead to the formation of the National Severe Storms Project, a branch of which was located on a long and lonely tract of government-owned land near Brannaska. It was one of the many ways the government was reshaping itself in the heady and giddy years after the war.

This morning they were tracking a storm the likes of which they'd never seen.

"How long do we have, chief?" one of the young meteorologists asked.

"Weather conditions this coming spring are ripe for the possibility of the storm of the century!" the senior forecaster informed him.

The senior meteorologist wasn't a meteorologist at all. He was a con-man from Dublin, Ireland, who'd forged some credentials (not that the incredibly trusting Minnesotans even looked) and used his knowledge of North Atlantic storms to convince everybody he was a forecasting genius.

They had a local "media liaison" whose main job was to call WCCO Radio and tell them any tiny new fact, rumor, or speculation coming out of the meteorologists mouths.

"WCCO, weather updates at eight minutes after the hour, eighteen minutes after the hour, twenty eight minutes after, thirty eight minutes after, forty eight minutes after, and fifty eight minutes after the hour!" the broadcasters announced, and they held to this schedule like Father Briar held to the Catholic religious calendar.

"I've seen nary a North Sea squall with the power of this Alberta Clipper, laddy," the Irish conman told his assistant, "we better alert the media."

"Again? We just phoned the radio station fifteen minutes ago."

"Then they are twelve minutes behind on our new prognostications! Get on the horn at once."

"A possible storm of the century?" the switchboard operator at WCCO asked, "that is huge news. We'll run with it immediately."

They knew their audience. All over farm country, farmers looked north, brewed more coffee, and fretted over winds yet unfelt, snows yet unseen.
Chapter Eight: How are You Going to Keep Them Down on the Farm After They've Seen Rome on the Silver Screen?

It had been a long time since Julianna had been this excited.

Cedric was taking her down to Minneapolis ("the Twin Cities," in the local lingo, as Minneapolis was separated by its twin, the capital city of St. Paul, by nothing more than the Mississippi River and a century of good-natured rivalry) to see the new Christian epic movie, _The Robe._

She had filled her car with gas, stocked the trunk with a winter survival kit, and prepared tuna fish sandwiches with extra crunchy celery and mayonnaise with a little mustard. It would take them all morning and a bit of the afternoon to make the drive down Highway Ten, so she had been up early and with a song in her heart.

Then Gosha showed up.

"Ms. Warwidge, I have rabbits, baby rabbits. But I don't have sugar. A trade, maybe, a trade?" She held up two little rabbits by the scruff of their necks.

"They are pretty adorable," Julianna thought, "but whatever would I do with rabbits?"

As if reading her mind, Gosha said "they are good for pets and for stews!"

"I don't need any rabbits, sorry Gosha."

"I can see you are making preparations for a trip. Where are you going?"

"I'm not going anywhere," Julianna lied. She hated to do so, but it was necessary in this case. "I'm just stocking up in case a blizzard hits. It is good to be prepared."

"Eh, prepare, don't prepare. Nothing matters when Soviet tanks roll through your village."

It was tough to argue with that point, although Jewels didn't see any T-35's on the horizon.

"Well lady, you have fun wherever you are going. Thanks for the sugar. Let me know if you change your mind about the rabbits, eh?"

Julianna didn't remember giving her the sugar, but there she was, holding the cup anyway. She didn't give it any more thought, she was just happy the old woman was gone.

She picked up Father Briar at the church and she could barely resist kissing him, although she did.

Richard Burton portrayed Marcellius Gallio, an officer in the Roman Legions and a notorious, well-known ladies' man. "That isn't exactly a big stretch in his acting range," Cedric had wryly commented. However, lusty Lothario is captivated by the reappearance of a childhood sweetheart, Diana, portrayed by the lovely and talented Jean Simmons.

Marcellus rides into Jerusalem on the same day as Jesus' triumphal entry on Palm Sunday. Jesus is arrested and condemned. Marcellus reports to the infamous Pontius Pilate, who informs him that the emperor has sent for him. Before he departs, Burton's character is ordered to take charge of the detail of Roman soldiers assigned to crucify Jesus. Marcellus wins the Robe worn by Jesus in a dice game and is told it will be a morbid and gruesome reminder of his first crucifixion.

Returning from the crucifixion Marcellus tries to shield himself from a rain squall with the Robe, but feels a sudden crushing guilt for the crucifixion of Jesus and tears the Robe off.

This was the scene that brought Cedric to tears. "The emotion Burton showed when his shame hit him should earn him an academy award," he opined. "I haven't seen acting that good since Jimmy Cagney in _Angels With Dirty Faces."_

They were sipping coffee in a roadside café, halfway home. The film had inspired and moved the both of them. Since Cedric wasn't usually comfortable talking about deep matters while driving as he believed that it distracted him, they'd stopped in a little town of no consequence called Elk River, where they were having weak brew and waiting on a couple of slices of banana crème pie.

"I loved it when Richard was acting like a madman," Julianna said.

Cedric smiled. "Richard? You two are on a first name basis?"

Far from being chastised, she was engaged by the game.

"Yes. Liz and I go way back. She introduced us at an ice cream social a few years back."

He laughed, loud and long, and this made the waitress smile as she brought their pie.

"It must have been awful to be Marcellus, haunted by nightmares of the crucifixion. I occasionally feel the pain of Christ as I'm giving Communion. To have lived through his agony every night must have been nearly unbearable."

He flipped through a little yellow notebook, spiral bound at the top and careworn at the bottom. Cedric, ever the Father, had been taking notes in it throughout the course of the movie. He would be going to the church library tomorrow, as well as the public library in town, to research the various accuracies and inaccuracies in the film.

"No matter what my research indicates," he said, taking Julianna's hand, "I had a great time at the movie."

How she loved holding his hand in public. Feeling especially titillated, she leaned across the table and kissed him, spilling a bit of coffee on the table in the process. This annoyed him; he didn't like mess of any kind, especially near pie. Delicious pie! But he concealed his irritation because he wanted Jewels to know what a fabulous time he was having. He didn't like it when her face darkened and her mood changed. She could be, for all her wonderful traits, a bit like the Minnesota weather. She could change from beautiful to stormy in a moment.

"The movie was great," she agreed. "The sound was loud and the color so vibrant! Everything we see in Brannaska is washed out and tinny. I have to strain my ears to hear."

"The popcorn was nice and salty and slathered in butter." They'd had two boxes.

Their small talk was sort of silly, they both knew it. They were just biding the time, being polite and proper, until it was too late to drive. Then, they'd have to get a motel. She couldn't help but notice that he'd chosen a café with a motel directly behind it, a little place with a red buzzing neon sign that cast a pink glow across the frozen parking lot.

"Another cup of coffee for you two? Or maybe even another slice of pie? You have such a trim figure, you can indulge yourself!" she told Julianna, trying to flatter her way into a sale and a bigger tip.

They silently calculated. Cedric's eyes must've drifted back towards the motel and Julianna's to the clock, because the waitress picked up the silent, electrical attraction.

"I can fix that pie to go. I can also ring over to the front desk at the motel if you would like; my husband is the night manager and we can check you right in!"

"That sounds great," Julianna said, before Cedric could disagree.

Within minutes, they were in the room.

"I missed you so much," she whispered, not knowing what else to say. The train ride over the endless prairie had felt endless, so she'd taken her sweet time in preparing a lovely and loving (and maybe a bit sexy!) opening speech, but it had fled her memory.

"Not as half as I missed you, my Jewels."

"That is funny," she thought, "that nickname still irritates me a little."

But she pressed that tiny thought from her mind and fell back into love with him with the whole of her heart. She leaned forward, but not before looking around to make sure they were well and truly alone, and then kissed him on the lips, those firm, warm lips.

Desire for her flooded through him anew. He wanted so much from her, he wanted it all, and he wanted it now.

"I've waited so long," he mumbled, in between kisses.

"As have I," she told him.

He put his hands to her breasts but she pushed them away. She was filled with sexual feelings as well, but she wasn't ready to acquiesce, not yet. So he accepted what she offered, her hot open mouth, and her sweet pink tongue.

Julianna slid her way up on to his lap. He groaned and re-positioned her body for maximum pressure on his ever hardening penis. How she loved the feel of it against her! Again his hands went to her breasts, and it was her turn to groan. But again she denied him. She wanted to prolong the pleasure. He wanted to dive right in.

Instead, she pulled his head to her breast and put his ear to her heart. She wanted to feel his hair, soft and tightly trimmed. She wanted him to hear the quickening of her heartbeat. The fingers in their other hands intertwined, locked, held.

How soft her hands were and what power they had over him. Even her slightest touch was erotic and sent little trembles through him. She rocked back and forth, drawing his attention away from her hands and back on her beautiful hips. It was a strain to not let him enter her right then. Her body warmed and her breathing got raspy. At the very core of her there was a new need, an urgent desire. Julianna wondered if he could detect it.

He could.

Cedric kissed her deep again and unlocked their hands. His tongue flirted and flitted around hers and adjusted himself beneath her as she sat on his lap. His cock was ready to explode.

"Julianna, I love you, I need you."

"I love and need you too," she said, enjoying the bluntness and the truth in the words.

They stripped without ceremony, without thought, without embarrassment. The bluntness of this, too, aroused her. "How easy sex can be," she marveled, "when you are with the right man."

"Please," he asked, voice ragged and raspy, "are you ready now?"

"I'm aching for it," she said.

She lay back on the bed and spread herself. He rubbed his hard body against her soft, sweet spots. He wanted to thrust himself into her without grace or control or restraint, but he was too kind, too decent, and still to unsure of his prowess as a lover. Were he to finish too quickly, as quickly as he wanted to, the whole evening would be ruined.

So he waited. Waited long enough for her to say, "please."

"What would you like me to do, my Jewels?"

Her dislike of that nickname took her out of the moment for the briefest of time. But Father Briar wouldn't be dissuaded. He felt fully in control, full of power, and now he wanted to fill her up.

He needed to hear her express her desire, he wanted her beg him, and he wanted to know she wanted him as much as he wanted her.

"What would you like me to do?" he repeated.

"Make love to me. Put it in me," she moaned.

That was what he needed to hear.

Julianna focused on the incredible feel of him. The missing of him had been impossible; the last couple of days had been a study in snow-swept boredom. She'd read East of Eden. She'd done crossword puzzles.

It felt like Heaven to be here with Cedric now.

His kisses made her wiggle and writhe, they were the only thing in this brutal February that warmed her and she took great glory in the joy she felt. She could also feel the hardness in his pants, urgently pressing against her.

Cedric pulled up for a moment, he stopped kissing her, his eyes lingering on his body. She was tired of waiting and was ecstatic when he put both of his hands on her hips and brought her towards him.

He ran his hands from her neck down to her belly then raised her shirt, showing off her new Sears Roebuck bra. His fingers drifted close to her nipples, to the clasps on her bra, but he left them alone, for the moment.

She was amazed at the forbidden desire he was able to command with just his hands. Julianna wondered if there wasn't real holy, Heavenly power in those hands. He could arouse her with a single touch.

Then he stopped touching her with his fingers and began kissing her with his tongue. Her knees got weak and he had to hang on to his waist to stay vertical.

"Cedric?" she asked her voice still and small.

"Yes, my darling Jewels?"

"Please..." She couldn't finish that sentence. She couldn't ask, even if she wanted to. She'd waited so long to be with him. She could wait a little more.

He helped out. "Soon, my darling dear, soon we will make love."

One hand around her neck, the other came up to help her undress. They pulled her blouse over her head and shoulders and she reached back and unhooked her bra, but she didn't let if fall, not yet.

Those long moments made her desire him even greater. Both of his hands went to her breasts and stars exploded behind her closed eyes. What a release, and what a builder of tension!

Father Briar kissed her earlobes and the hidden spots behind them. He took in the lush, jasmine scent of her hair. His teeth nibbled at her and for a moment, she wanted to be bitten, for him to draw her blood, just to know what it would feel like.

"Bite me like a wolf," she thought, but did not have the courage to say.

He put his lips to the top of her cleavage and he savored the soft skin at that special place, now free from that pesky bra. He brought his hands to her breasts and squeezed softly. Julianna felt the hairs at the base of her spine rise.

Hands still on one another's hips, they slow danced (with room still between them for the Holy Spirit) towards the bed. They stayed this way, dancing to music only they could hear, for a long while, enjoying the closeness (but not too closeness!) until they could stand to wait no longer.

Father Brier brought around the side of the queen-size bed. The girl at the check-in desk asked if they'd wanted "the Honeymooner's suite but Julianna, fearing it had something to do with that wife-abusing Jackie Gleason, had quickly demurred. So here they were in a simple single room with a big bed and not much else.

Putting what little they had to proper use, Cedric lay her down on the bed and she helped him with her skirt; he was still amazed by the complexity of women's dress. What clothes he had left on came off quickly.

She saw him naked, in his birthday suit, in all his glory, for the first time. It was everything she'd imagined and more. She couldn't help but notice how hard he was, and how hard he was fighting to control his desire. Every bit of him was tight and straining. Control was very important to him, and she knew he didn't want to lose it.

He joined her on the bed and with an athlete's easy effortlessness; he got on top of her and pressed a bit of his weight down upon her. Cedric lowered himself even further and she could now feel the strange, powerless joy in being immobile beneath a powerful man.

Again her eyes fluttered shut. She never knew what to do with them when she was near to him, and she'd never been this near to him before. To guide herself in the blackness, she grabbed his ass and adjusted his hips for him, putting him just inches away from her hot, throbbing sex.

Julianna kept her hands on him, delaying, denying, enjoying. She did not know how much longer she could control himself; she didn't know how much longer he would let her keep control.

He nudged her forward a little, and then straddled her. "My Julianna, if I would've known you were this beautiful, I wouldn't have waited this long to make love to you."

She would've blushed, but her face was flushed red already. His penis was right there. Right there! How huge it looked from this (and any!) angle and she was ready to have it. Would he give it to her?

To her disappointment, he didn't. He knew she wanted it but he needed to maintain his hold upon her.

Julianna's disappointment didn't last long, thought, because he gave her one of the best kisses in her life, a real movie star sort of kiss, a kiss that reclaimed her and restarted their race towards climax.

Cedric's slow, self-controlled rhythm had its desired effect. Julianna was no longer in control of her body. She felt as though she was nuclear powered, like her heart and soul were some new power source that could run on lust and faith forever.

Julianna's need for him was beyond what she had even imagined possible, and she could tell by the glassy, faraway look in his eyes that he was ready to finally make love to her. To have intercourse. To fuck, as the teenagers said.

Despite his great desire to keep control, he wanted this first time together to be about Julianna. He wanted her to know only his touch; he wanted to be faithful as faithful to her as he was to God.

He kept himself out of her as long as he could, feeling her warmth with the hard end of himself, enjoying the wetness, and how alive everything down there felt, how very alive.

Her breasts were firm and warm as he rubbed his chest against them, inflaming her one last time before entering. Every fraction of an inch, every shift of weight, and every upcoming thrust, he imagined in advance. This way he had the power to enjoy everything twice.

Cedric had to insert himself into her now or the whole moment would be lost, spoiled by his insistence on his own pace. He put his hands on her thighs and helped her wrap her legs around his waist and muscular butt. He needed her now, no, it was deeper and more meaningful than that; they needed each other.

Desire to possess the whole of Julianna was a devilishly elusive and strange feeling, one he knew he'd need again and again, a feeling he thought not might be satiable. Nonetheless, he knew he had to go forward now or be lost forever. So he wiggled her thighs apart with his hard dick and said a final sentence as a celibate priest.

"Your lust, your body, and your love are mine and mine alone. Only God may tell me to stop," he whispered in her ear, and then he took her as her own.

Although they slept the just sleep of the dead, they woke up in the morning realizing what they'd done and where they were. Suddenly nervous, they dressed quickly and without words.

In the car on the way home, Julianna fiddled with the radio until she found 830 clearly coming in on the dial. WCCO was just finishing up the commodities prices and the weather report came on after a commercial for Armor Brand canned hams.

"There is a storm brewing to the north of us right now," the news-reader's cheery voice said.

"Why do they think that is news?" Cedric said, sour, "there is always a storm brewing north of here."

Julianna ignored him, focused on the weather report.

"An Alberta Clipper has been reported by our sources at the National Weather Service."  
"Their so-called source is a drunken Irish fisherman."

"How does he report the weather from his boat in Europe?" Julianna asked, the sweetness in her voice masking the mocking in her question.

"I'll ignore that," he said, putting his foot on the accelerator a bit harder, hoping to get home faster.

"Concerned residents of Brannaska and other towns in the storm's path should be prepared and take all precautions."  
"As if we wouldn't have done that already, given how nasty this winter has been."

Sex was shaping up to be more wonderful, but infinitely more complicated, than she'd ever though. 
Chapter Nine: Father Briar Counsels Worried Hockey Moms.

Despite the wind whipping outside and the frost clouding the inside of the windows, Father Briar's office was cozy and warm, if not particularly friendly-feeling at the moment. Racks of books lined the shelves on the walls. Cedric wished he could worm his way into one of the volumes, that C.S. Lewis volume of talks during the war, perhaps, _Mere Christianity,_ instead of dealing with the frustrated and uncomfortable mothers that were sitting in the Naugahyde chairs across from his desk.

"Is it natural for them to be so much like rabbits?" Mrs. Herbertson was trying to be discreet and talk around the "problem" of her daughter's libido. "They just want to be together at all times. Day and night, night and day, at school and on the weekends. Talk of Trigger never stops!" Mrs. Olsen complained. "I know more about your son, Jenny, than I do about my own husband!"

"Well maybe that is a problem the two of you ought to address," Father Briar said quietly and without judgment.

"We are not here to talk about my marriage," she responded sternly. Father Briar wasn't used to being reprimanded, especially by the a mother of a teenage boy who was a broken condom (or no condom at all, given that they were Catholic, and we all know that teenage boys aren't exactly precise when it comes to ejaculatory control...) away from being an unwed father.

Trygve "Trigger" Olsen was the star of the Brannaska High School Hockey team. He played center and was the co-captain. He was on course to graduate and the go on to the University of Minnesota, Duluth Campus, the beneficiary of a full athletic scholarship.

But all of that would fall apart if he got Ramona Herbertson "in a family way," as her ever delicate mother had put it. The two had been dating for five months and both had undergone a recent hormonal explosion and all its attendant side effects. They'd been caught, _en flagrante delicto,_ and pants around their ankles, twice now. Poor Mrs. Abraham, the history teacher and debate coach, had walked in to his classroom during a free hour when students were supposed to be at a pep rally. "Well, there was a lot of pep going on in that room!" the horrified educator had told the principal.

One such incident could be chalked up to teenage impulsiveness and maybe even a bit of a freaky streak. The second incident was much more serious, as it had taken place in the Church itself.

The amorous couple had taken advantage of the parish's "open door" policy and snuck into the sanctuary one snowy day after school to explore not their faith, but their bodies. There weren't heretical enough to get it on right there in the pews (having spent many a Sunday mass sitting in them, they knew how sore they could make a clothed butt, much less a naked one) so they went down to the nursery, which they knew to both be empty and have padded play mats that would be comfortable to lay, and get laid, on.

It was By Golly Gosha who'd spotted them.

She was out driving around town, up to nothing much, just watching the machinations and movements of its denizens. This was her entertainment, her movies, and it was far better than anything that was on the flickering, static-ridden, newly popular television. From the cab of her Ford truck ("Where does she get the money for such vehicles?" the locals wondered, "selling rabbits can't be **that** profitable") she'd seen Ramona and Trig sneak into the church and, knowing what teenagers do alone in the dark, had gone to investigate.

She phoned Father Briar, although not immediately; no, she took in ten minutes of the show beforehand. She envied their teenage energy; their coupling was positively electric, athletic, and arousing.

Upon his arrival, Cedric gave a sharp rap on the door with his weathered knuckles. In the small room it sounded like a shotgun going off and poor Trig leapt away from his girlfriend and lost his erection in world record-breaking time.

Father Briar and Gosha could hear the jangling of belt buckles and the zipping of zippers, so he waited until they were properly dressed to preserve their modesty.

Then he chewed them out using language he'd learned as a sailor.

Those events had led to this meeting, with both concerned mothers. "I don't want this to be seen as a bigger problem than it actually is. Young adults, especially these days, as they are so under the influence of trashy media like movies, rock and roll, and romance novels, are beset with sexual desires. It is that they learn to control them that is important." Here, Cedric couldn't help bit feel like a bit of a hypocrite, as he had no desire to control his sexual urges when he was around Julianna.

In his heart of hearts, he sympathized with Trigger and Ramona, sympathized with them deeply. If Father Briar, with all of his Jesuit rigor and deeply abiding Catholic faith, as well as years of training and practice, couldn't control himself, how could the teens?

He'd had a simple childhood and his future had been planned and predetermined since the morning of his birth; his was to be a life of service to God and Country. So it was easy, at least for a while, to subvert his sexual nature in pursuit of said service. These kids had so many options; the whole world was laid out in front of them. There was talk of Trygve going to the National Hockey League. "Getting paid to play hockey," Cedric marveled as he looked at the boy's kindly and rotund mother, "who could imagine such a thing?"

So he empathized with her concern, too. Father Briar was never short on empathy. If Trigger got Ramona "in a family way," that would ruin his chances at a glamorous future and sporting career. They'd be stuck here in Brannaska forever, as if frozen in ice. They'd live a traditional, conventional life, a difficult one, not like the Joe and Marilyn life his talent could earn them.

As if paralleling his thoughts, Mrs. Olsen asked, "do you think they should get married?"

Cedric was surprised by the speed and fervor of his response. "Absolutely not," he commanded. "Eighteen is far too young."

"I was married at eighteen," Mrs. Herbertson volunteered.

"I was married at sixteen," Mrs. Olsen said, "best decision I ever made."

"Twenty two years with Ty Olsen seems like a long, long time," Cedric thought, but of course didn't say anything. "After all, what do I know about marriage?"

And this, of course, made his thoughts turn towards his beloved Julianna and how if she stayed in love with him, and stayed faithful to him, she would never be married. He wondered how much that weighed on her, how much it hurt. It was something he'd never considered. He'd always assumed he'd be a priest, and he'd also spent some years assuming he'd be killed in the war, like good old Jake. But didn't every little girl grow up believing she'd be married, didn't she grow up dreaming of the day?

"I don't think they should be married, either. I just want them to stop having sexual intercourse."

For whatever reason, the other woman's use of such a formal term made Mrs. Olsen giggle. Her laughter was infectious and soon Cedric had caught it. He felt rather undignified but he couldn't help it. Knowing she had such effect on people (living all those years with a goofy and notorious eccentric had taught her a thing or two about comedy) she would deploy her good cheer with strategic intent, often to defuse tense situations.

"Well, I'm glad we've all had this little chat," Father Briar said, even though nothing had been resolved and no conclusions had been reached. There wasn't much he could do in this situation, anyway, other than to recommend Scripture and other readings about morality and family and conscience. Those were three things very much on his mind and he wanted some space in his office to think. These women with their catalogue ordered and mail delivered perfumes and bouffant hairdos were overwhelming him.

"Are you making the trip up to Thief River Falls for the big hockey game this weekend? We play Mille Lacs tomorrow here at home, but we'll smoke them." Mrs. Olsen asked.

"I certainly am," he said. He was planning on a way to finagle a seat next to Julianna, too, but he didn't mention that. He'd already arranged for her to come to the home game tomorrow, but would he be able to get her to come on a road trip with him?

Oh, how he longed for a weekend away!

What would these women think if he was giving them advice from personal experience, experience neither he nor any other priest was supposed to have?

"Our family was thinking of making a weekend of it in the big city. Maybe you could join us and have a talk with Trigger after the game? Maybe Saturday morning? We could have breakfast?"

Cedric couldn't help but smile at hearing her call Thief River Falls "the big city." There were six thousand people there.

"And, quite frankly," Father Briar thought, "I was hoping to spend Saturday morning in bed with Julianna." It may not have been a bustling metropolis, but Thief River Falls was big enough to provide a cover of invisibility and anonymity for the illicit lovers. But his holy clerical duty called.

"Breakfast it is. And tell Trigger and the rest of the boys good luck from me!"

Hiding your true feelings is a gift given through the grace of God. 
**Chapter Ten:** **Hockey is Religion, Religion is Hockey.**

"Come on boys, get to fore-checking!" Ty Olsen shouted.

Julianna was stunned by his passion for schoolboys playing a children's game. But she had to admit, there was an adrenaline rush to it; the rush of the team up the ice, the building roar of the crowd, and the hot slap of the stick against the puck, launching it towards the net. Whenever Brannaska scored, Cedric would jump up and down beside her. His excitement was exciting. When the locals won, he hugged her.

Oh, yes, she could get in to hockey.

"When do they play again?" she asked.

"This weekend, up in Thief River Falls."

"What an odd name for a town. Are there really thieves up there?"

"None that I am aware of. But there is a river, and there are falls, lovely little falls. And a high school hockey rink, of course."

Of course. Every town in Minnesota had at least one place for the teenage team to play, in addition to a dozen or more for the neighborhood kids.

"Would it be alright if I attended that game, too?" This was a leading question; she darn well better be able to attend the game with him!

Your support for the team is always welcome," he said with a sly smile, knowing that she wanted a little more. She got a little squirrely, he could see her positively vibrating in her puffy down overcoat, but he wasn't quite ready to let it go yet.

"The Church is, as always, chartering a bus to take the congregation's fans up there. You could ride with them."

"With them?" she asked. "Aren't you going?" She tried not to let her frustration show. Her faced turned red and she pursed her lips up into a pouty, kissy, fish face.

Now he figured he'd been winding her up long enough.

"Yes, of course I'm going, I have to drive up a little early to have lunch with a fellow pastor in Thief River Falls, and then I'll go to the game." He grinned his trademark grin. Thanks to the Navy's generous dental program, his teeth were perfect. She wanted to kiss him right on the mouth. "Why don't you take the Church bus up and we'll find a way for you to ride back with me."

"That is exactly what I wanted to hear," she said.

So that is exactly what they did.

The church bus was lively and fun. It was a three hour ride and so they occupied themselves by singing songs and playing bingo. Julianna watched the Northern Minnesota countryside unfold outside the windows, and when they frosted up, she put her fingertips to them and pressed little peepholes so she could see the world.

Sometimes she felt as though her relationship with Cedric was like watching the world through a peephole. She could see a bit of life, sometimes beautiful things, sometimes a bit of the sun or the sky, but never a whole picture, never a whole moment, never the whole of love.

It was as though she would always have to wear blinders, that she'd never be able to see or feel what the rest of the world saw and felt, that she'd miss out on so much.

But it was beautiful, too! And safe. If she never could experience all of love, she could never then feel the crushing loss when it ended, right?

The wheels of the bus went round and round, rolling towards Thief River Falls.

Outside the arena, the atmosphere was festive as the townspeople tried to shake off the winter blues with some good old fashioned rivalry. People materialized from the frozen over fields; Julianna couldn't believe how many people turned out.

"It must be everybody in three counties," she thought.

It was, and probably more. Thief River Falls High School Loggers were the best team in the state of Minnesota, a place that takes high school hockey as seriously as they took their farming, their religion, and their complaining about the weather.

What prep football is to Texas, prep hockey is to Minnesota. Games between great teams routinely drew over five thousand souls, and tickets on the "black market" could get expensive. The black market in Brannaska consisted of Bjorn's Café, a breakfast spot favored by farmers and fans alike, as their apple fritters and Sunday Smorgasbords were unrivalled throughout Central Minnesota. A twenty five cent ticket could, sold by the proprietor-cum-auctioneer, who was Bjorn himself, fetch two whole dollars.

The arena smelled like fresh popcorn and stale, sweaty wool. Socks and mittens and hats and coats steamed as their wearers warmed up, the air was thick with competitive anticipation and teenage hormones. The cheers from the girls in bobby sox and poodle skirts (often with two or three layers of nylons to keep their pink legs warm; with war rationing over, nylons were once again an affordable luxury) bounced around the arena, boosted by the echo off the ice.

Brannaska came out in green and white, Thief River Falls in black and white. Their sticks were taped at the handles and curves with obsessive care. Skating through their warm-ups, the teams carved graceful curves on the new ice, elegant calligraphy with a grammar all its own.

There was something reverent and worshipful about the crowd.

Julianna had never been much into sports. As a child she'd been studious and her family moved about the country like gypsies while her dad chased interesting jobs.

She marveled at how the players could turn on a dime, throwing their bodies sideways at the last moment and sending a fine cloud of shaved ice skyward. Julianna was impressed with their ability to skate forwards so fast, so when they skated backwards with equal aplomb she could barely believe her eyes.

"Our guys look tiny out there next to them," Cedric worried.

"Slow, too," the Mr. Olsen said. He'd made the trip in "The Meat Wagon," the pickup he used to search for and haul the various specimens he was stuffing around in. He was known to plunder road kill, then mount and sell the unfortunate critters as though they'd had died noble deaths at the hands of hungry hunters.

"All rise, for the national anthem," called the public address announcer over a crackling loudspeaker.

This, too, had strong religious connotations. God and Country were still inexorably linked; this was yet another lingering after-effect of the war. Eisenhower's White House was popular and, riding a wave of prosperity, Americans felt as though they'd been divinely blessed.

"...and the home, of the braaaaaave." Cedric always drew out the last syllable of the song, even if no one else around him was. It was a bit of cheek from an old sailor, who felt he'd earned the right by dint of his service. "Heck," he thought, "even when we were on the boat, taking fire from Japanese fighters and kamikaze pilots, we weren't as deadly serious about Old Glory as these people seem to be."

The Brannaska Bunyons fought hard, too, but they were soon under attack by the potent Thief River Falls offense, which featured a right wing that would go on to a fifteen year career in the National Hockey League. He scored twice in the first six minutes and the Bunyons' side of the bleachers was very, very quiet.

Cedric thought about the families of the players as they skated. He thought about their lives, their tragedies, their traumas, and their triumphs. Winger Ryan Platz lost his father to hypothermia when he got lost on a hunting trip. Hunting had claimed Jeremy Driver's father, too; well, not hunting so much as the combination of whiskey and shotguns.

Kent "Whitey" White (Brannaskans were never any good with nicknames) lost his grandfather when he went out to milk the cows in a blizzard and the rope he had tied to guide him to the barn had blown free. It was flying loose in the wind, like a child's kite. Poor Whitey Senior walked out to the middle of nowhere, holding a rope that promised false truth.

Whenever Cedric thought of this story, he shuddered, and in spite of his best efforts and hardest prayers, he wondered if his belief in God wasn't the same thing as that rope. He didn't think faith worked like that, but still he was a man of intelligence and experience, so occasionally he had to question things, question everything.

His grieving parishioners would approach him at wakes and ask, "why does God take innocent people? Why does he take good people?" Sometimes Father Briar wanted to tell them, "God didn't take your husband, that blizzard did."

But what sort of answer was that for the faithful?

"Darn it," Cedric said, coming out of his meditation as Thief River Falls scored again.

She giggled a little bit to herself. Had they not been in public, around others from church, he might have used the harder curse word there. Julianna loved having this little bit of intimate knowledge about him.

"They will come back here right quick, you betcha," Ty said. "Our squad is too plucky to stay down long."

Then Thief River scored again, "a slapper right through the five hole," Ty lamented.

Cedric saw Julianna's shocked face and instead of laughing out loud, decided to translate that obtuse bit of sports jargon so she didn't feel like even more of an outsider.

"He said that the player hit the puck really hard with a 'slap shot' and it went through our goalie's legs and into the net."

"Well thanks!" she said, much cheerier than those around her. The Brannaska faithful were taking the trouncing hard.

It was about to get worse. That talented winger scored again, "a gorgeous backhander from right outside the faceoff circle," the despondent taxidermist wailed.

The rout continued from there. Trigger Olsen got a goal, much to his father's delight, but the Bunyons lost 8-1.

The dejected Brannaska fans filed out of the rink. Even through the thick padding of his coat, Julianna could see that his shoulders were slumping.

"I know how I can cheer you up," she told him, unbuttoning the top of her blouse.

"Here in the car?" he asked mouth agape.

"Why not? I read about it in a romance novel I bought at Mimsie's Five and Dime."

"Jewels," he said, using her nickname with a rare note of disapproval, "don't be filling your mind with that trash. Romance novels are pithy distractions written by alcoholics not talented enough to make a living writing screenplays but too pretentious to write pornography."

She laughed and he was secretly proud. So few people got his humor.

"Really?" she questioned, "most of the writers that I've known have been more fond of that reefer."

"Sometimes I miss a city. Brannaska is nice and all, but I miss jazz music and all of the funny smells that come with it."

"You never cease to surprise me," she said, "I'd never pegged you as a jazz guy."

"Oh, I'm not. And I've never been to a concert or non-religious performance in my life, aside from the USO shows during the war. But I like that it exists and we could go, if we wanted."

"Yes, there isn't jazz or reefer in Brannaska," she agreed, "so how about a quickie in the car?"

"It's not been very long since I've started having sex. I think sex in the car might be a big ask," he said, trying not to stammer. He quickly estimated the dimensions of the interior of the car. "It is possible, physically," he conceded.

"Of course it's possible. You just put your big fat penis in my cute little vagina."

This broke him up. She was the funniest and most fun creature he'd ever encountered. She was also beautiful, and, by her own admission, horny. So he turned his attention away from her humor to the situation at hand.

"We can't stop at any of the motels on the way home. The dejected Bunyon faithful fans will be strung out from here back to Brannaska. We'll be recognized for sure."

He drove slowly through town, concentrating. Then there was a bounce in the seat next to him and Julianna squealed, "how about down there!"

There was a big depression in the ground next to a brick elementary school and the locals had flooded it and turned it into a hockey rink. The icy playground was still lit and there was sweet-smelling wood smoke coming from the chimney of the little building known as the warming house.

"Looks cozy," he said, "let's hope there is nobody in there!"

Thankfully for his by now rather urgent erection, the warming house was both warm and empty. He unlocked the trunk of his car and brought a blanket out of the winter survival kit so they'd have somewhere soft and comfortable to lie.

Cedric put her down gently and lifted up her sweater. He kissed her nipples with great tenderness and care. "Harder," she commanded. "Take them deeper into your mouth."

Ever the obedient lover, he obliged. This was very unusual. They'd skipped foreplay entirely, no kissing, no necking, no touching. Just fast, needy stripping and then trading favor after favor until they were on the edge insanity.

"I am going to have to put it in you soon," he gasped.

"Yes, yes, yes you are," she said.

"I wish I could see your body."

"Then go ahead and turn the lights on."

This was a bridge too far, too soon.

"Rather, I'm happy like this."

She laughed. "I'd be happier if you put your cock in me. It is so hot against my tummy and that heat could be better used elsewhere."

"Soon enough. I need more of these immaculate breasts first," he said.

"You could do both," she begged.

"I am," he joked, holding each one of her tits in his hands.

"You are a square, man."

He reminded himself to ask about that new bit of slang later. But later. Now? Now was the time for sex.

Cedric slid into her with such precision, power, and grace that she thought she might climax right then and there. Much to her great delight, she managed to hold off, and the pace of his rhythm was set. Then it increased. Then it got faster still and she had to hold on for dear and blessed life.   
Then, at once, he lost his erection. He blushed.

"What is wrong, my dearest love," she panted.

"I, um, I have to urinate," Father Briar confessed, quiet and under his breath, half hoping that she wouldn't hear.

But she did and she laughed. Laughed long and long, and this relieved his tension and he went to relieve his bladder.

"What a wonderful thing it is, making love," he thought, looking down at his penis as if discovering it for the first time.

In his modesty, he'd dressed between bed and the bathroom.

Cedric walked back to the makeshift bed and lay down next to her, now slowly disrobing again as he did. Julianna took a deep breath, since the last time she'd made love; she'd been looking forward to this. She was still almost pure and maintained some nervous energy and sexual nervousness about this moment, her thighs quivered and her nipples got taut and nubby. Her lover took her face into his hands, softly caressing her cheeks before he kissed her. Her cheekbones were high, defined, and elegant, her lips still carrying lipstick traces, and her eyelids heavy but the eyes be

"I love this, and I love you," Julianna said, a trace of the Pacific Northwestern accent from her growing up still audible around the soft corners of her voice, "but it's hard." Julianna wondered if what was coming next would be hard, too, and then she giggled at her own naughtiness, deflating the potential tension of the moment and putting them both at ease.

She, too, had dressed while he was in the bathroom. It was out of modesty, pure and simply, but now she was glad she had. It prolonged the moment. Cedric unbuttoned the top of her nightgown, fumbling a bit with the opposite-side arrangement. He wondered for a moment if she wore her bra to bed and worried that he'd fumble with that, too. Father Briar was still quite the novice at lovemaking and all the layers of clothing removal in necessitated. Julianna helped him out, bringing it down around her shoulders and exposing the top of her naked chest.

"You have beautiful breasts," he blurted, like an over excited kid. Which, in many ways, he was. Her breathing got more and more rapid, shallower and shallower, as she struggled to maintain her composure.

She knew that soon, even more of her would be exposed and she lusted for it, wanting to grind herself against him in delirious anticipation, but still, she maintained her control. But when he started kissing her neck, slow at first then more pressing, hungrier, harder, she thought she might lose it.

"Oh how I'm trying!" she bragged to herself, "and how good the release will feel." She was free of Catholic guilt, she was free of nagging worries about the sinfulness of her love affair, and she was now free of her nightgown!"

"Good job Cedric," she said with a smile, now wearing nothing but her birthday suit.

She said something that sounded like, "a fish dish a wish-pish full frontal Monday mental-ish," slurred together as all one word. Her body, he realized, had the amazing power to make him lose command of the English language. And without the word, what was he? Nothing. All he had was the word, and the word was good.

"Surely I am the most amoral priest this snowbound state has ever seen," he thought, not out of shame, but out of pride, pure and horny pride.

"What wild magic does she possess?" he thought, smiling down upon her before kissing her neck yet again. He didn't want her to know that he thought she possessed some sort of supernatural powers. Cedric was willing to indulge a little Halloween fantasy every now and then.

"I am lying in bed with my parish priest and the man who I love more than any other," she thought, and like Father Briar, this wasn't out of shame but great pride.

"Are you impressed?"

"I could not be more impressed. I'm at the edge of bliss. Paradise itself couldn't be more appealing."

This excited her and her nipples were happy and aching and she wiggled her breasts in his face, teasing and tickling his chin as they swung. He took ruby nipples in his nimble teeth, treating them like the precious jewels they were. She cried out, loud enough that she was convinced that if there was anybody in the room next door, they would've heard.

Now more than ever she wanted to experience all the earthly pleasures a man could give her. She felt as though she was now no longer tethered to the planet and might fly free to Heaven.

Cedric laced his fingers through her shining hair, pushing her down, down, down. They rolled over and over and she wound up on top, smiling like she'd just won the wrestling championship of the world.

Now it was his turn to cry out. She took him into her mouth and he thought he might climax right then and there. Noticing this, she eased back a little bit, slowly and with great care not to nibble at him, although she wanted to.

He held her shoulders and the back of her neck, feeling the fine and downy hairs there and even they trembled at his touch. So close to finishing too early, he thought about unappealing things to control his volatile erection. Eugene McCarthy. Joe DiMaggio's buck teeth. Hockey fights.

But it didn't work. His heartbeat got faster and his face more flushed; he wondered how there could be any blood left anywhere in his body but that fueling his hardness.

He massaged the firm yet delicate area between her shoulder blades as her mouthed moved all over him. She kissed his thighs and his belly and then moved back to his penis again. His hips swiveled a bit (a move soon to be made both famous and scandalous by a young singer from Tupelo, Mississippi) and he pressed against her.

"Could I feel this way about a normal man with a normal job?" she questioned herself. Julianna didn't think so. She felt as though there was something outside the realm of everyday Catholic experience for her.

"No man has touched me like this, aroused me like this, inflamed me like this." She felt hot enough to melt the snow outside in moments, a process that would, in actuality, last well into July. Far, far to the north, a storm of ungodly proportions was building.

But that was in the future. Now was the time for making love.

He placed his hands on her chest, softly but with authority, and every fiber of her being became his. He activated pleasure zones she didn't know she had; Julianna's neck and her abs and the dimples above her bum and the backs of her knees all felt little jolts of electric power, like a current running straight between her legs. It amazed her that the human body was so complicated and so chemical.

"My Jewels, my gorgeous girl, my chatty starling, I have been singing songs to you since day one." Father Briar's hands explored the geography of her body, mapping its secret hidden places, its mounds and curves and exotic dead end places, those special places where love blossomed.

Although inexperienced, Cedric was trying not to be a selfish or inconsiderate lover. He studied her like the scholar he was, giving attention and affection to her, timing the movements of his body to hers, trying to make her needs his own, even trying to sync the very beating of their hearts.

They kissed, their tongues coiling together like ropes on the deck of a fishing boat. Soon their clothes were entwined with the bed sheets and their bodies were coupled, everything in the universe seemed to have paired off.

"Kiss me other places, places deeper down," pleaded Julianna. He rose up from the bed for a moment to better take in the spectacular view of her. From this angle and all the others, she looked wonderful.

Father Briar took this moment to be bold. His lips traced a line down the center of her, between her breasts, across her stomach, past her navel, and down to her folds; lust and love made her shiver, quiver, and then gasp. She could hear the cheap box spring mattress squeaking and straining to beneath them as she bucked and robe and grabbed his lush chestnut hair.

"Oh, my, I can't believe I have waited so long to experience this," she cried. While he was kissing her sweet folds, Julianna thought she might climax right then and there, so new and overpowering and delirious was the sensation. He tickled parts of her that changed her life, tickled them with the tip of his tongue and she cried out again, then again, with such animal rawness that he pulled back.

"Have I hurt you, my dear?"

"Far from it," she responded, not embarrassed by her volume, but liberated.

Father Briar's head dipped back between her legs and she put them around him like a scissors, squeezing him tight. She didn't want him to ever move, never to stop.

But, oh! he didn't want to go anywhere but he also didn't want her to think she was in control. That would give her too much power, too early in their illicit love. So he pinched her buttock hard enough for her to cry out and let him go, then he wiggled away.

Cedric didn't wiggle far away, though, just back on top of her She pressed her breasts up against his muscular body, and wondered for a another moment how a priest kept his body so tight, then just thanked his Navy training and his Jesuit rigor and went back to enjoying her pleasure.

"He has this sudden and terrible power over me," she thought, "how I love it!"

He started moving like a wave, up and down across her body, his energy peaking and cresting as he moved from breasts to pussy and back again, as powerful as the tide.

Julianna bobbed up and down in the wake of this for a while before she couldn't stand the pressure building up for another single second. She had to take control of this, she had to wrest the power back from him, she had to have him and take him, she had to have her orgasm or she might drown in lust.

She took hold of the root of him and slid down upon it. This was both an increase in desire and a release of long-held sexual tension. She loved the feel of him inside her; he was certainly the most endowed man she'd ever known. Their hips came together and he slid in and out, over and over again.

Cedric felt hot and hard inside her. She knew she was being loud and she tried to quell her sounds, what of them she could hear over his ragged breathing and own cries of passion.

He lifted her bum off the bed with an athlete's strength; he hadn't lost much of his high-school ability. He then penetrated her deeper and harder, an unbelievable feeling that she never wanted to stop.

"Please," she begged. "Please keep your hands on my ass."

Father Briar loved this new power, this sexual discipline, and even her lust. Lust had always been a sin in his mind, but now it felt liberating. Julianna's eyes widened like illuminated moons and her mouth pursed into an equally rounded smile.

"What a glorious woman my Julianna is," he marveled, close to climaxing.

She, too, was near, near enough to feel as though consciousness was only fleeting, and then in the face of that sex induced glory, she came and came and came. This spurred him on and he soon followed.

Finally finished and wet with everything sex entails, she lay on his chest, her mind both drifting and racing. She felt alive and asleep, satiated but somehow still hungry, and very close to God.
Chapter Eleven: By Golly, Gosha.

Gosha, the nosy next door neighbor, came to the door the next morning, about fifteen minutes after Julianna had pulled up in her car, still un-showered, tired after the drive home and smelly from sex with Cedric.

Her neighbor was both snooping and asking for a cup of sugar. She also had a basketful of bunnies. Jewels always gave it her, but was slightly annoyed.

"She always takes all the sugar and never brings the cup back. Gosha doesn't know better, though, she's from Poland."

In 1954's Minnesota, a Polish émigré was an exotic creature.

In their happy ignorance, the Brannaska locals often mistook her for a Gypsy (that wasn't an offensive term back in '54, these days, those folks are called Roma) and there was always comical speculation as to what she was doing with those rabbits.

She always had baby bunnies. Her primary occupation seemed to be driving around town in her pickup truck, asking people if they needed rabbits.

Rabbit demand had been down in Brannaska lately.

Then finally she gets around to what she came over for; she is there to ask about the priest and what the relationship between the two of them might be. She's an Old World Polish Catholic and she doesn't like the new world priest.

"Could I ask you how you properly say your full name?"

This made the Polish woman bristle. "These thick, simple, American tongues cannot pronounce the multisyllabic majesty of my full name, Malgorjata, so I make them call me Gosha."

But she liked Julianna, as much as she liked anybody. So she would try to explain now. Once, and only once.

"Mal-Gor-Jah-Tah. But you must say if fast."

Julianna tried.

"Close," the Pole lied. "But just to say Gosha is better."

She was once a woman of considerable and substantial beauty, but age, liver failure, and the Soviets had managed to strip her of some of it. Some, but not all.

Even at seventy four years old, her eyes possessed a mischievous twinkle and a keen intellect. There was something impish and elfin about her.

"They are good for pets or for stews," she'd say about her rabbits. She had always had a way of making innocent statements seem somewhat morbid, but in a humorous and exciting Eastern European way.

Gosha dressed in a manner that the locals called "different." She made almost all her clothes by hand, and was fond of using bright threads to accent and accessorize her woolen garments. She'd been known to string Christmas tinsel through her scarves. Although she stood out by a mile with her attire was a mish mash of ill co-coordinated colors, which was how the locals of Brannaska had arrived on the nickname By Golly Gosha, she was never cold, under-dressed, or under-prepared for the terrifying Minnesota winters.

She had a house on the edge of town, right next to Julianna's. It had been added on to with parts of various other dwellings: an icehouse, an engine-less school bus, part of a permanently beached tugboat. She could often be heard singing old Polish folk songs when the windows were open during the brief Minnesotan summers, ribald and raunchy things, although she never whistled in the house for this caused one's money to fly out the window.

She had furnished her house simply, for her first love was the outdoors. The walls had few photographs spare a couple of pictures of the countryside in West Pomerania. The sofa bed was well worn and the nightstand was fully stocked cupboard of knitwear and other knickknacks that she had lovingly hand crafted.

Gosha found knitting pleasing for it took her mind off the long hard winters and the true and existential boredom that they posed. The one thing she did miss was Polish food; she often had to improvise and bemoaned the fact that she missed her native dishes to the locals of Brannaska.

"Why oh why does the grocery store not stock Kielbasa? I miss my Polish sausage," She would often be heard as she wandered the meat section much to the bemusement of the butchers.

The butchers, of course, stocked all manner of bratwurst and other German sausages. However, she'd have soon starved than eaten the meat of the enemy nation.

All of these quirks were forgivable. A bit harder to deal with was her busybody temperament and meddlesome nature. Her pastimes peering through Julianna's bay windows and listening in on the local phone lines, for Brannaska was still such a small town that the whole place functioned on one group line. Her gossip was innocent and mild-mannered, but it was also irritating enough for some of the locals to pretend they hadn't seen her as she went about her day.

"There goes Gosha. By Golly, you had better avoid that woman if you want your reputation intact," and similar such words were often exchanged amongst the locals while they ate breakfast at Bjorn's and bought earthworms, leeches, minnows, and other fish bait at Ed's Bait Emporium and Lure Menagerie.

Julianna liked the woman; she seemed to live a purpose driven life. Gosha shoveled her own walk and driveway, she chopped her own firewood, she was a master of tools both modern and improvised, and Julianna often saw flashes of torchlight coming from her garage workshop and wondered what she was welding in there.

But she never had the courage to ask.

Chapter Twelve: Bless this Feast and Let us Eat Like Beasts.

Every little town has a cultural institution that it could not live without.

There was a quiet small café in the flatland community of Brannaska called Bjorn's that was just such an institution. It came alive each and every morning at 5:15am.

That is, it is alive that early if all of the farm work is temporarily done, or if the wife has no pressing jobs for the man of the house to do. Brannaska was surrounded by farms of various sizes, some prosperous and others not so much; these farmers needed to break away from the solitude of the work and the winters, so they gathered around the long, white, and coffee-stained counter of the café.

"A person can do no better than five cent cup of Joe and arguing about differences between fertilizer brands, politics, government regulations for farmers, and the ridiculous conservation plans that the President has just proposed," Bjorn would tell newcomers (not that they got many), "whatever regulations that might be and whichever president might be in office!"

He'd put a big, hand-painted sign behind the cash register that read "No Gambeling" and he was stout and steadfast in his refusal to change the misspelling.

"The whole sign is a joke anyway," he'd say. He'd put it up because some of the guys liked to 'shake' to see who has to pay. Ty Olsen, Bjorn's most enthusiastic and regular customer, always had a pair of dice in the front pocket of his flannel shirt. Low roll paid. While he found it hugely entertaining, the practice wasn't too profitable for the owner, though, because these guys can drink a lot of coffee and refills are always free.

Some of the other men found that sinful, since it is a form of gambling. They always paid for their own, or if they were feeling especially generous that morning, would pay for their neighbor. Now, these positions could change as quickly as the weather, just for the sake of argument.

While the coffee was strong, it wasn't caffeine that fuelled the social set at Bjorn's, no, it was jovial disagreements. Fellows would often change sides of the argument they were continuing from the morning before, just for the sake of novelty.

Bjorn's was known for its extravagant dishes and huge spreads on the weekends, and this weekend was no different. As bored as everybody else by the stifling winter weather, he was looking to stir up a little entertaining trouble, and had decided to play host to an impromptu, but carefully set up and manipulated by Bjorn himself, eating contest between Dale, "the Bishop of Glutton," as Bjorn loved to call him, and the Ty the Taxidermist.

Each Saturday evening people from all over the county descended on the cafe for Bjorn's weekly smorgasbord. Instead of the not-so-clean men in their dirty overalls driving their farm trucks, these people drive up in their Chevy four-door sedans and parked on the dusty main street. Most of the time, there were at least 4 people in each car because friends come together for this Saturday night outing. The men are wearing clean plaid shirts, or maybe even a church-worthy white shirt! The women have jazzed themselves up into dresses, low heels, and always clip-on earrings. Actual holes in your ears were a sign of immodesty and were the same sort of body modifications as tattoos, which were also very much frowned-upon as sinful.

Unfortunately, this restaurant is much too tiny to accommodate all of the wannabe eaters, so a long line formed outside. Ty and the bishop, however, were already inside, having been given the VIP treatment by Bjorn's wife, who was usually a co-conspirator in his goofy schemes. The line had begun almost an hour before the smorgasbord ("which is never, ever, to be referred to as a "buffet" Bjorn scolded) began.

This line serves two purposes. The first is to make sure that there is an orderly flow into the café, the second is that it provides a time for visiting with each other and maybe even a bit of gossip. No arguing is allowed during these times, and, unlike the "No Gambeling" rule, this one was strictly enforced.

The locals gossiped while they ate.

"That there nuclear-powered submarine is gonna be a game changer. Commies won't be messing around with us anymore," Francisco Montana told Paul Livingstone. "It is called the _Nautilus_ , I believe, the _USS Nautilus._ Funny name, if you ask me."

Nobody had.

"I don't think it is powered by nukes, though. Who would want something like a bomb powering your vessel? I'm pretty sure they're lying to us about it being nuclear powered. I'm sure they got some sort of secret engine in there, something weird and unknown that they discovered underwater or at the top of a mountain somewhere."

"I think those claims smell a little funny," Paul said, ever rational and taciturn in the manner of lonely Norwegian farmers.

"Was sure launched by a funny looking woman," Francisco continued.

"How dare you talk about Mamie that way. The First Lady is a very classy dame, and much better looking than Eleanor Roosevelt," Bjorn joked as he stopped by their table to pour more coffee.

That was hard to dispute, but Francisco did, just for the sake of argument.

"Now, see here. Mrs. Roosevelt had her fine points..."

The conversation went round and round like this. They talked about the famed journalists Edward Murrow and Fred W. Friendly and their documentary, _See It Now_ : _A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy._

Everybody, of course, hated Communists, but not everybody was ready to believe, as McCarthy was accusing, that the "Reds" had infiltrated the U.S. government at the highest levels and were preparing to destroy the nation from within.

Ty Olsen was as obsessed with baseball as he was hockey and taxidermy (Trig played on the town team in the summers) and was as secretly in love with Marilyn as was Julianna.

"There is already trouble in the Monroe and DiMaggio household," he told his wife, while Julianna tried to eavesdrop while still doing a good job waitressing.

"They were on their honeymoon in Japan, Monroe was asked to travel to Korea and perform for the American soldiers stationed there. The war is over, but we've still got boys over there, so the Red Chinese don't try anything funny."

"You can't trust 'em," Trig, every the daddy's boy, agreed.

"She ran off to do her duty for the USO, leaving her unhappy new husband in Japan."

Julianna's heart sank. If Joe and Marilyn were already having problems, what chance did Cedric and Julianna have? Her grief was interrupted by Bjorn and his foghorn of a voice.

"Yes, yes, gather around folks, gather around," Bjorn gestured to the crowd that had filled his adorable, if a little dingy, café. "Come on don't be shy," he said in his heavy Swedish accent.

"Today we have a very interesting showdown between two much respected pillars of the community," said Bjorn.

"Yes, and we have a bishop too!" said Ty with a cheeky look on his face. People giggled and chuckled.

"I haven't agreed to this, this is the first of I've heard of this, and I don't appreciate you roping me into such shenanigans," Bishop Dale said.

The truth was, he loved it. It had been many years since he'd been a parish priest and he missed the attention and remained something of a ham.

"The rules are as follows," Bjorn paused and looked serious for he, too, relished the theatre of it all, "eat as much of the food as you can." Bjorn smiled as he laid out his upturned hands toward the food that was laid out before him.

Finally, it had come time to eat. Not just for Ty Olsen and Dale, but everybody. The newcomers were wowed by the aroma and variety of the food. Returnees were comforted by the fact that the food was always about the same. The trump card was Bjorn's now-famous barbecue baby back ribs. Other staples were the homemade Swedish meatballs and the original orange baked chicken, which had been coated with Rice Krispies Cereal, which was fusion cuisine for foodies many decades before any such things existed.

There were mashed potatoes, never the instant type but always homemade, and scalloped potatoes, but these were often from the Betty Crocker box, were always on the table. The salads are rarely the "good-for-you" type, but are instead the "good-for-your- taste buds" ones. This was long before the days of fad diets and "paleo menus;" these people ate like dinosaurs because they were, dammit! Jello and Cool Whip were the main ingredients in these desserts masquerading as sides, with fruit cocktail or pineapple or pistachio pudding as part of them.

Oh, and how about the bread! There was a newly -acquired rotisserie oven which bakes many loaves of fresh bread and buns at a time. These are the frozen bread loaves. They cannot be made from scratch because the labor would be far too intensive, but are delicious anyway, especially when served right from the oven.

Desserts are dolled-up puddings, chocolate dump cake or if the pie baker lady is up to it, there will be fresh fruit pies or maybe even banana cream. In season, rhubarb pie was the best.

"The winner of this eating contest gets to donate $25 to the local charity of their choice!" the small crowd gasped in amazement at the substantial prize.

"Is Ty's Taxidermy a local charity?" Trigger asked, teasing his dad. He was sitting with Ramona's family, so the pair was well-chaperoned, lest they leave the smorgasbord for more carnal hungers.

"Bjorn has never given out such a sizeable donation for an eating contest before," Mrs. Herbertson gasped.

"And a substantial one at that. Oh what a wonderful man her is," Ramona said in glee.

"Gentlemen, you first must demolish the beef ribs, then the mashed potatoes, and followed by the tinned pineapples. To finish, you must drink two quarts of milk from Mr. Shacklesbury's goat. Are you clear on the task at hand?" Bjorn smiled at the bishop and taxidermist who savored the gluttony to come.

"We begin in... three... two..." Bjorn paused for several moments and smiled as everyone hung his countdown, "...one."

And the two men were off to the eating races.

The downside of this evening is that there was no time for laid-back dining. The line continued way down the street and the usually-jovial owner is not so jovial if he notices a booth of people taking too long to eat. Any booth, of course, other than the one occupied by Ty and the bishop. Bjorn would bring coffee to each table but after long so long (not very long); he will bring the check instead of the pot. That is a big indication it is time to gobble up the last bit of ribs and hit the road. Of course, a hint for everybody but Ty and the bishop. He wanted them to keep gobbling.

The crowd cheered and looked on in astonishment. The rate at which the bishop consumed the ribs was incredible. The sauce dribbled down his clothes but he carried on in spite of his embarrassment.

"Golly, look at Bishop, he is really going through those ribs," said an astonished Ramona.

"Dad, on the other hand, doesn't look so good," Trig noticed.

"My goodness..." he spat, the ellipses actually audible in his voice, "the spice... it's unbearable."

The taxidermist, through watered eyes, strained to put the third rib in his mouth.

"Bjorn, what on God's good Earth did you put on these?" asked the bishop, eyeing the plate before him.

"A bachelor farmer from down in Minneapolis sent me up some fiery new peppers," Bjorn smiled in pride at his concoction. The crowd gasped in a mixture of amazement and concern at the taxidermist as he continued to try to cool down his mouth. More than a few jaws hit a few flannelled collars.

"Milk... I need milk..."

Bjorn opened the ice box and laughed at the taxidermist as he sputtered and spat.

"Think of the cause. It's a very worthy one," said Bjorn as he passed the cooling beverage to the taxidermist.

Bjorn loved these funny little pranks and he often pulled them on the unsuspecting. But he wasn't always as precise in his execution and payoff of the jokes as he was in their planning.

In this case, he'd meant to spice the Bishop Dale's ribs. He loved Ty the Taxidermist and appreciated his endless business and good humor. Bjorn had been trying to make a not-so-subtle point about the gluttony of the Catholic Church and the greed of the clergy.

And then things went further south of Heaven; the bishop started choking.

"Yes, I wouldn't worry, I..." The Bishop couldn't finish his sentence. A cherry from one of the sweet and sugary salads had lodged itself in his throat. Everyone looked on, frozen in shock and horror.

Everyone except for Bjorn. He was a man of action. The bishop continued to struggle, so Bjorn beat and thudded his chest.

"It's not working," cried Ramona.

"Dad, help him," begged Trig, but Ty was still incapacitated from the spicy ribs.

"Bjorn, do something!" As with all crises, the suggestions came from those who were too scared to carry them out themselves. Bjorn kept silent and paid no attention to their blindingly obvious and therefore frivolous commentary.

He reached down to the slushy floor and grabbed Dale by the ankles. He couldn't help but notice the gold and diamond ankle bracelet with a little dangling the man wore. With one effortless pull of his mighty arms he turned Dale upside down and began to shake him. The spectacle was ludicrous - a big Scandinavian man shaking a bishop up and down – but it was effective.

While ludicrous, it was necessary. The Heimlich Maneuver wouldn't be invented for another twenty years, so Bjorn solved this problem with brute force.

After one last shake, the cherry sprung free from Dale's throat and, after two bounces, came to rest in some fresh snow, just shaken from the shoulders of somebody's coat. Trig couldn't help but note it looked like a sundae.

Throughout it all, the cook continued to perspire, give orders to the help, and give encouragement to the weary dishwasher, who was often her husband. While Bjorn was the face and the mouth, his wife was the backbone of this operation, getting up early and going to bed late.

About the only time the cook relaxed was on Sunday morning, when she sits down in her church pew, dozing off during the sermon. She preferred to stay back in the recesses of the kitchen and is rarely seen by the public, which was probably good because of the rib sauce on her apron and the sweat under her armpits.

She is reputed to be the best cook around and she credits that to her two favorite ingredients: lots of salt and brown sugar. According to her, not the FDA in Washington, you can't get too much salt in your food. And brown sugar is the secret ingredient in her ribs, orange chicken and other mainstays of her recipe box. Whoops! she didn't believe in writing recipes down; instead, they stayed in her brain. Therefore, they would not be copied by future generations of cooks.

Such are the minor tragedies of small town life.

Finally, the closed sign was put up, the line disappeared, the crowd left belching, saying that was a "darn good" supper, and make plans to return again soon. The owner counts his money, helps his co-owner, again, his beloved wife and cook, clean up. Then they headed home together to hit the hay.

Such are the small joys of small town life. 
Chapter Thirteen: The Sod Busters Come to Town in a Cloud of Snow and Sin.

The winter had been so long and arduous that Father Briar had taken the decision to host an unseasonal but wholly necessary social dance in Farmer McGuillicuty's barn in order to raise community spirit.

Cabin fever, although a bit of idiom, of slang, is very real. It is the claustrophobic feeling that one experiences in an isolated or solitary location and when stuck indoors in confined quarters for an extended period if time. Extreme irritability and restlessness are common, and dark feelings and depressions can violently manifest themselves over petty irritants and small problems.

One therapy for cabin fever may be as simple as getting out and interacting with your friends and neighbors. Cedric and the rest of Brannaska knew this well and so he was organizing this big get-together to keep everybody happy and healthy. It was also nice to see his parishioners having fun and interacting outside of a strictly church setting.

And he hadn't organized any old ordinary barn dance. The Hoosier Sod Busters were going to be playing!

The Hoosier Sod Busters were famous across the land due to being one of the regular bands on the popular radio show, "The National Barn Dance Hour." A long-running staple of small town Saturday nights since 1933, it ran from 6:30 p.m. to midnight. The show featured famous bands and turned obscure ones into stars. Regularly featured acts included Gene Autry, The Three Little Maids"), The Williams Brothers (featuring future "Moon River" crooner Andy Williams),the awesomely named Arkansas Woodchopper, and of course, the Hoosier Sod Busters. The announcer was Jack Holden and it was once sponsored by Alka-Seltzer.

The barn had been a hive of activity in the hours before the dance got underway. Cedric, along with the help of Julianna and a few parishioners, applied the finishing touches.

"This place looks wonderful, I know its February, Cedric, but this almost has the feel of summer about it," beamed Julianna as the volunteers made the finishing touches to the barn's interior. She leant toward Cedric, but he moved away.

"Jewels," he said, worry in his voice, "we can't have the locals seeing this. They might suspect something," he whispered, so as not to draw attention to himself and Julianna. She sighed.

"Yes, you're right," she looked around the barn, dejected and hoping to see something or someone to cheer her up.

"I'm tired of living a lie," she wanted to shout, "I'm tired of skulking around in the shadows, my goodness, it's almost as if we should be ashamed for loving and enjoying sex. These are urges, I might point out, He must have given us. What kind of God would do that? and what kind of people are we to take such guilt with seriousness?"

This felt scandalous and she put such thoughts aside for the moment while she wandered around the barn, looking for somebody to chat with. "Julianna, this is a barn dance. Have some fun! This is hardly the time or place for deep discussions of theology."

"That's it boys. This place looks fantastic. The Hoosier Sod Busters have never played in such a nice looking barn, that is for sure." Cedric raised his hands in the middle of the barn at the glory of it all. Bunting crisscrossed the wooden beams, a fine buffet had been laid out and several braziers were placed around the periphery of the building so as to keep the cold at bay.

"Yes, you gentleman all did a fine, fine job," a voice from the makeshift stage echoed throughout the cavernous room. It was the lead singer of the Hoosier Sod Busters.

"Alas, they are turning up!" said Julianna as she peeped through the barn door.

The locals and were amassing in droves for this was a special event. Barn dances were rarely, if ever, held during the winter and no sane person from Brannaska was going to miss the dance or the great band that's for sure.

They pulled up in their Fords and their Chevys, nearly every vehicle a truck with big chains on the tires to give them better purchase on the snowy roads, trying their best no to skid and slide in the slush. Brannaska, for its harsh winter climate, still had a certain appeal. The oaks were stripped of their leaves but still retained some skeletal beauty as their bare branches were coated with a translucent coating of ice.

The conifers stood like upturned pure white ice cream cones. It was a calm night; the moon was full and reflected the snow, illuminating everything as though there was tiny magic and little miracles in the air. The stars shone brightly and the Big Dipper was prominent. The sky had a glowing sheen to it; it was not the usual obsidian-hued blackness.

"Good evening, Father Briar. I must say I like what you have done with the place, the spread, the warmth, oh and I shall be looking forward to the live music. God has blessed this night. Three cheers for Pastor Briar!" said Ty Olsen.

Trygve Olsen was at his side, showered and shaved and looking chaste, at least to Father Briar's approving eyes. He was hoping the teen would behave himself tonight. Behave himself, but have a good time. Cedric loved to dance, and he was good at it. He was looking forward to sneaking a dance with Julianna, and who was he to deny Trigger that same joy?

"Oh yes, three cheers to the magnificent Pastor Briar," Gosha clapped, sarcastic and snide, muttering to a nearby farmer who looked then scurried away.

Cedric wandered over to talk to one of his favorite parishioners. The old man was sitting in the corner of the barn and with an intense scowl on his face and a corncob pipe between his pursed lips. He was Paul Livingstone, an elderly pig farmer and deeply religious man.

Julianna made her way to the opposite side of the barn. She wanted to get as far away from his as possible, and she wanted him to see her doing so.

"How are we doing tonight Brannaska? Thank y'all so much for coming out in this cold, we sure do appreciate it. We are ready to Bust some Sod, are you?"

The band was firing up and so were the dancers. Everyone turned to look at them.

"Divine intervention does exist," Cedric thought to himself as he wiped the sweat from his brow with his pocket square.

"By the grace of God, who is ready to party tonight?" asked the lead singer, Lester Weeselstrom as he strummed his guitar. The crowd cheered and began to dance.

The Sod Busters opened up with their first song.

They were everything advertised and more. The tinny AM radio of the day didn't do their sound justice; live they filled a room with a huge and happy sound; fiddles and banjoes and guitars and drums and a variety of folk instruments all came together in unison to create a dance groove that moved everybody with a pulse, and even a few of the old Norwegian farmers who thought they'd been dead for years got a jolt of adrenaline and their hearts started racing.

The barn walls were silhouetted by moving bodies that cast their shadows amidst the warm orange glow of the brazier light. Bellies were being filled people were dancing, and much revelry was being had as the Busters kept sawing away. Everyone seemed happy; everyone, except Julianna and Cedric.

"I must say, the baked ham is rather delicious. Father Briar, you really have done well with this spread," said Misses Olsen, ruddy cheeked and with delight as she stood by the table surrounded by her family and warmed her hands by the nearby brazier. Trigger had behaved himself and Cedric was proud of the lad, but Julianna was once more glaring at him, as he'd paid no attention to her all night.

"Yes, he does well to satisfy everybody doesn't he? Everyone that is except me, Mrs. Olsen."

"Ha, well this is a fallen world, don't forget Julianna." Cedric laughed, nervous and angry, trying his best to paper over the cracks.

"Is everything alright Julianna?" Mrs. Olsen asked. Trig looked around the barn, hoping to spot Ramona, but had no luck. Julianna didn't acknowledge Mrs. Olsen's question. She tried not to cry.

"Oh, whatever is the matter, Julianna?" asked Mrs. Olsen.

Cedric was somewhat in luck for a few farmers had snuck in some hooch in their hip flasks and had passed it around to several of their friends. He snuck off to admonish one noticeably inebriated dancer.

"Yeah, we are on our grand tour, we're Busting Sod and breaking hearts all across America!" shouted the lead singer of the band. The crowd was raucous; it was a real barnburner of a night, metaphorically speaking.

The townsfolk who remained inside (some had gone out to their cars to cool down, to neck, or to check the weather updates on WCCO) were worked up into a lather. They had never partied like this before. Out of necessity, the women had all dressed themselves in thick nylon and woolen stockings. Sweat poured down their bodies. The men couldn't resist themselves at the sight of all these dripping women, oh, the raunchiness of it all!

The men at the dance, much to the dismay of the single women who had turned up didn't look quite so striking. For the most part they dressed in flannels and white cotton tees. As the night progressed though, the heat got too much even for the resilient farm hands of Brannaska. They stripped off their tees and revealed their bulging farmers pectorals much to the blushing and fainting of the on looking ladies.

"Oh, isn't he gorgeous," Ramona said to her friends as she blushed at a prominent example of Minnesota masculinity, the luscious Trig Olsen.

Her parents, based on Cedric's advice, had denied them access to one another throughout the last couple of weeks and their lust was boiling over. Ramona looked around for the pesky priest or the Polish crone who'd been so disruptive to their budding sexuality. They were nowhere to be seen.

"Hmm," Ramona thought to herself with maximum teenage sarcasm and scorn, "maybe they are off fucking each other." Not seeing them, she discretely grabbed her boyfriend and they went off to find one of their many love nests.

Teenagers have always been, and always will be, a step ahead. 
Chapter Fourteen: Bjorn's Needs a New Cook.

While Bjorn was in the front of the café acting as the host, greeting and teasing the customers, serving coffee, and taking their money, several people worked back in the kitchen to keep things running. Of course, Bjorn's wife, the cook, was the head honcho (even humble Brannaskans needed one of those), but she did have help during the rush hours.

If there was ever salt of the earth (and there was, Brannaska was one of the saltiest places on earth, per capita...), these women were it.

Some were of sturdy stock, born and raised in what they proudly called "the North Country," girls who'd stayed in town after high school and married young to the farmers who tilled the land. They were used to working side by side with their men, but often didn't see much in the way of earnings; fickle was the economy of family farming, so fickle, in fact, the profession doesn't really exist now.

Some were itinerant laborers of various qualities. More on those folks later.

When the word was spread that Clarice needed a cook or two, women came forward.

What a Godsend it was. Some of the women earned spending money of their own, a new concept for them. It made perusing the Sears Roebuck catalog so much more fun. And then, oh what fun to see the rural mail carrier deliver a package of fabric or a new girdle that they had actually paid for with their own money. A couple of girls even bought those huge cone-shaped bras that made them look like they had atomic missiles under their sweaters, but never had the courage to wear them out of the house.

Julianna was due to start tonight. Her job search hadn't lasted long.

She was replacing a woman named Rose, who always reminded the cook of a chickadee. She was small, thin, nervous, and perpetually grey-colored.

Bjorn thought she was too silly, but the customers liked to joke with her as she flirted and laughed with them and at herself.

"That woman can work!" he'd boom, after hours, when the cook complained about her. "There is nothing that she won't do."

The problem was, she had never learned to drive; therefore, her husband had to deliver her and pick her up each day. Now he was sick from a scary infection in his lungs caused by pesticides and so she couldn't come to work any more.

Before Rose had been Thora, the wife of a man whose primary accomplishment in life was overcoming an addiction to medicinal opium. The twenties were a wild time, even in Brannaska; snake oil salesmen came through town peddling all manner of exotic cures.

Thora had been a beauty in her day, but life had taken its toll; she drank in her car before and after her shifts but never during, so it was hard for Bjorn or the cook to fire her. What you did when you weren't working wasn't even of their business, or so they told one another.

Irene, a widow who lived a stone's throw from the front door of the café, was the pie maker. She would waddle down the street (unfortunately she ate too many of her own pies, not to mention her own and cakes and cookies) before the café opened each morning and roll out the best pie crust ever. She wasn't the most sociable woman, in fact the cook, herself a woman so taciturn she isn't even named in this story, had only heard her speak a handful of words over the last three decades. Therefore, these early morning hours suited her well. She could be back home, dusting the flour off her apron before the men came looking for their coffee and favorite piece of pie, which they often had after breakfast.

Irene had many specialties such as banana cream and coconut cream, pecan, lemon meringue, but none of those fancy French silk or key lime ones. That would have been, if not heretical, at least borderline treasonous. Probably the all-time favorite pie was fresh wild blueberry pie. She was not the blueberry picker. Her chubby, wobbly knees would have made it impossible to get up from the blueberry patch.

But this caused no problem, because if there was anything Bjorn and Clarice liked to do better than tending the café, it was blueberry picking.

In the middle of the afternoon, when there was a lull in the restaurant, they would head out in the July heat and humidity (yes, there were times when Northern Minnesota wasn't buried beneath a blanket of ice and snow) with their empty Kemp's Ice Cream buckets or milk pails, their mosquito spray, a couple of sandwiches, and a thermos of coffee.

There were acres of wild blueberry woods a few miles from town. Here, too, they had different duties. Bjorn was the 'scout' which meant that he didn't pick many berries but would walk around the woods looking for the best patch.

Finding one, he would yell out "Clarice, over here, they are better than where you are." She would get up off her knees, tromp over there, and say under her breath, "my other patch was better." This would be repeated time after time, until it was time for a quick cup of coffee and the rather warm bologna sandwich. Then into the car and get back just in time to serve the supper guests. But, oh, how they loved those trips in the woods, and what delicious pies Irene would make from those berries.

Julianna considered the salary of the job to be secondary to her access to fresh slices of pie, and couldn't wait to start. 
**Chapter Fifteen: In the Aftermath of** **Julianna** **'s First Night on the Job.**

She fell into Cedric's arms, crying.

"Oh, my dear, it was a disaster. A fiasco. A catastrophe."

"I'm sure it couldn't have been that bad," he said, trying to comfort her.

He was having a difficult time concentrating on her woes. He'd had to console many a tearful and emotional parishioner, but this was different. This was his girlfriend. You couldn't treat your crying girlfriend like a sad member of your congregation, could you? Even if she was? Love was complicated, much more complicated than he'd been told.

"It was terrible! I screwed up every order."

"How is that possible? At smorgasbord, doesn't everybody serve themselves?"

"Apparently so, but I didn't know that. I'm new here! How was I supposed to know? Nobody told me. That rascal Mr. Olsen kept sending me to the spread to get his pork ribs for him. Then the cook yelled at me because I was serving him and not bringing dishes out from the back. These people eat so fast. I've never seen food disappear like that before. Twenty pounds of 'glorified rice' was eaten in just a few minutes. What the heck is 'glorified rice, anyway?"

Cedric giggled a soft little giggle. "It's a local creation, I think. It is cold cooked rice with a mountain of whipped cream and sugar, all mixed together with canned pineapples and topped with maraschino cherries. It is quite the confection!"

"I couldn't tell it apart from the mashed potatoes. Both were so white and fluffy."

"White and fluffy, sort of like the bellies of the people eating it," Cedric joked, trying to cheer her up.

But she was in no mood. One of the things Father Briar would learn about their relationship was that when she wanted to cry and complain, she wanted to cry and complain, that was what would lift her mood, not joking or problem solving. He'd learn that her tears weren't a call to action, but to contemplation. She wanted to mull over her problems, to feel and appreciate them, not to aggressively solve them. This was a great difference between being a priest and a boyfriend. Clergy were supposed to help, boyfriends were supposed to listen.

"The cook was so mad at me! She didn't say anything, but you could tell she was mad."

This was true. When she was most angry, the cook said the least.

"I feel really stupid, Cedric. How could I have messed up such an easy job? I'm a smart girl, right?"

"Of course you are, darling Jewels, they just don't know that yet. They will. You impress everybody, eventually. You just had a tough night tonight, that is all."

His words weren't much of a comfort, but his strong arms sure were. Julianna pulled in a breath, and he squeezed her tighter. She loved this. She played this like a game, not letting it out until the last moment, then sucking in more as fast as she could, making him hold her tighter. Sometimes she wanted to shrink herself thusly until she was put a straw, then a toothpick, then a single strand of hair. Then she'd be safe.

After a while, she was almost afraid to let it out at all. She stared at him, eyes blurry and still red from tears. He felt the tension in her shoulders and the air puffing up her chest, that beautiful chest.

Oh, it felt good to confide in him, to vent to him, to put her troubles upon him. Finally she exhaled and pursed her lips together a bit. The long night at the café had bleached off all her lipstick and she looked pale and chapped.

She sat down on his couch. He wished they were in the bedroom, and then he was ashamed of himself, deeply ashamed.

"It is amazing what power romantic lust can have over a man," he thought, then pushed all prurience from his mind and vowed to help his love with a pure heart.

Julianna closed her eyes tight, opened them, blinked, and looked at him fresh. He was handsome and caring and kind and, in the right light, sexy like a film star. She pushed her back against the plush coach, taking warmth from it. All thoughts of waitressing had faded from her mind, all thoughts of disaster, everything but thoughts and feelings for him. She needed comfort.

"Do you love me?"

"Yes."

"Does that bother you?"

Now was not the time for one hundred percent brutal honesty.

"Not at all."

"Really?"

"When we met, I felt a charge go through me, more than a charge, a change. I knew nothing would ever be the same. I'm so proud of how slow we went, how we explored, how thoughtful we were, how considered, and how considerate."

Now she got teary once more, but not out of frustration or disappointment, but from joy.

"Oh, my love," she said, and kissed him, because words failed her yet again.

In the quiet, he continued. "I shied away from the developing feelings for you because they had no place in my life of order and service."

"Not to mention chastity."

This made him laugh. More, it cracked him up. This unexpected bit of mirth lightened the mood in the room to such a degree that she felt the little, familiar stirrings of desire between her tingling thighs.

"Being in love is a strange thing, isn't it?" he asked, a note of melancholy playing through his voice.

"It is. But I know that love is real and that loneliness is painful." Julianna well remembered their time apart; those long months when they were halfway across the country from one another still hung with her.

Knowing this, he stepped in, filling the rhythm of her conversation with some of his.

"I am so glad that you came to Brannaska to be with me. I so very much want to be happy, and I hope you can be happy here, the winter aside."

"The winter isn't so bad. Yet."

Yet. It would get much, much worse. But neither of them knew that then.

"Was it hard for you to make the move out here?"

Julianna hadn't talked about it much; doing so seemed to violate the strange but stable truce she'd made with both God and Cedric about the affair. But the truth was, it had been hard, leaving home again after the war.

"Yes, yes it was," she confessed.

"You could've said something. I could've counseled you."

"I was worried."

"Worried about what?"

"I don't know. I didn't know if you really wanted me to come. I didn't want to be disappointed, to have my heart broken."

He kissed her and her heart nearly exploded when she realized they were close to intercourse again. She kissed and nibbled at his ears; he laughed a bit and his breath quickened. He pressed his hand between her thighs, found the soft cleft there, and held.

Julianna squeezed her eyes shut and concentrated on her pleasure. She was tired of waiting and tired of the space between them, wanted everything to touch, absolutely everything. She pulled the rest of their clothes away and they lay nude together on the couch.

His body was beautiful. She looked him over, wanting to commit everything to memory were they ever to be separated again. Cedric stood up and took her hand, leading her to the bedroom. She closed the door behind them. Before he lay her down on the bed, he brushed her cheek with the back of his warm hand, kissed her softly, and told her he loved her.

"You are the most gorgeous woman in the world, Jewels. You have no idea how beautiful you are."

His lips closed on her neck, then moved down to her breasts, on to her belly. Her impatience manifested itself in a lusty moan; the carnal, animal sound raised both of their desire.

Julianna raced her hands across his back and down to his bum, then lower even, pulling and grinding and enjoying the tense strength of his muscular thighs. She wondered how he stayed so fit, given that he ate mostly at Bjorn's, which was no health food establishment. She also didn't think the activities of the priesthood entailed much exercise.

Now it was her turn to roll him over. She put him on his back and put her mouth all over him. Julianna took him into her wet hot mouth, slowly at first, then quick and hungry. She was greedy and he was eager, thrusting his hips to let her taste the whole length of it. He tried to keep his moans muffled and quiet but she heard and she knew he loved it.

She was surprised then, when he spoke up.

"Jewels stop," he begged.

She realized he was at the edge of climax and wanted to hold off, so she let him slid from her mouth and tumbled to her back. He moved to the top position and kneeled between her legs.

The heat rushed to her face and then away again, down through her chest and then between her legs as he explored her folds and her wetness. He raised his head and refocused his attention on her nipples, moving from one to another. He took them between his teeth and saw how far he could go before she cried out with pleasure. It wasn't very far, she felt as though every nerve ending and every fiber of her body was on fire, even though he was being as gentle as could be expected of any man who'd endured a prior commitment celibacy as long as he had.

Father Briar used his strong arms to toss her legs over her head. He did this with a smile. He pressed himself against her and enjoyed the wiggling of her hips, her little noises, her groans of desire. He could feel the juices seeping from her and he wanted more and more of them. So he teased her with his purple head and then pulled away.

The repeated rhythm of this was enough to bring her to the edge, that glorious, dangerous edge. She spread herself even further for him and enjoyed the feeling of the warmth evaporating between them and the winter's chill, which was present in every room that year, cooling her.

Her exhibitionism (even if nobody but he was there to see) inflamed her, already aching, all-consuming pussy. She knew from previous experience with him, sleight as though it was, that he wouldn't enter her yet, he'd tease more out of the experience, if not for her, for himself.

But, oh Lord, she loved it too!

He proved her right. Taking his penis away from her, he decided to use his mouth to enhance their lovemaking. He blazed a trail passionate and inhaling kisses around her body, seeming to land his mouth on whatever random bit of physical geography pleased him best.

Finally his spectacular mouth landed between her legs and she screamed and drew her breath back in and screamed some more. This was unbearable, the combination of release and desire for more, the love of this and the wanting of something different.

Cedric decided to take things even further and closed the whole of his mouth around as much of her vagina as he could. He drew it all in, stretching her out in entirely new ways. Her insides felt warm and as though they might feel great enough to come out and explore a little. She gasped extended and interesting gasps that fascinated him and he thought there might be whole languages contained within them.

"I have been blessed by God," he told her. "And I believe myself to be the luckiest man on the face of the earth."

He hoped she didn't recognize that he was plagiarizing Lou Gehrig. She didn't, so he continued; now making shit up as he went along.

"I am so very lucky. I find myself between both of my worlds right now, and I am finding it equally easy to move among them."

"I came here to find happiness. And I've found it with you, so can we stop the talk of the Church and your duties there, and for now, at least, enjoy the balance? For as long as it may last?" When Cedric put his mouth to hers, she got a bit dizzy as the blood rushed from her head to regions further south. kissed her, the heat rushed to her groin. She'd never wanted anyone this much before, and she found herself questioning what would happen to them, with his obligations to his parish, his Order, and his God. She forced herself not to focus on the potentially devastating unknowns and instead gave her full measure of attention to the pleasure and the illicit thrill of their forbidden love.

He was ready for intercourse. As he ground against her with a gentle but insistent urgency, he said, "make eye contact with me, my dear, deep and real and soulful."

Lifting her lids, she stared into those deep brown eyes, those eyes that seemed to contain worlds. He thrust a few times, not putting himself into her, just enjoying the back and forth movement, the grinding of their bodies, the sweat, the heat, the warmth. Now he took both of her wrists in his hands, as though he was cuffing her. Taking complete and utter control over the sexy situation, he pushed himself in and out, pausing longer each time as he did. Julianna writhed with difficult but worthwhile joy under his strong hands.

Father Briar's rhythm increased but he lost none of his precision, or any of his gentle care for her. His thrusts became wild and strong but not savage or brutal. What little pain she felt only enhanced the pleasure, the utterly incomparable pleasure.

Julianna lost all self-control as he pounded. Everything but sex was lost, Cedric had taken over completely, and the chemicals and juices of sex coursed through her as his cock took over her vagina for what seemed like hours. After an orchestral build, he came with a long scream. Still new to lovemaking, this was a cry of ecstatic orgasm Julianna had not yet heard.

She loved it.

Lying next to Cedric while he slept in post-coital bliss, Julianna felt safe and just as importantly, warm. This winter, warmth was safety. But to him, his Order was safety, his parish was safety, his educational rigor and place in the Church's hierarchy was safety.

"What am I?" she thought.

She knew the circumstances of her relationship with unique and fraught with danger for Cedric, danger both professional and moral. She knew that they would have to have a talk about how to bring harmony and religious balance to a relationship that would not take easily to either.

"How is this going to work," she asked him when he woke. She'd had a sleepless night; he'd slept like a baby, without as much as a stir.

"I put it in you, take it out, put it in, for as long as both of us can last without coming," he joked quite seriously.

"This isn't a joking matter, Cedric."

"You are right, it isn't. But happiness and love like ours never falls into your lap. You must pursue it by being true to yourself first."

She laughed in his face. "You believe you've been true to yourself. The promises you've made to the Society of Jesus, your beloved Order?"

"What if I lose you? How could I deal with that again? Our first separation was so hard!"

"Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?" he said, quoting the book of Romans. "The same is from us, Julianna. We shall not be separated again."

You've been my constant, my reason, and a part of my religion, even. A part that I'm still figuring out, yes, but still, an integral and pleasurable part.

These winters aren't easy on me, either, and you're and my motivation get through them, to eventually get to spend a summer with you. First one summer, then many, many more. I know I love you and throughout the whole time we were separated, I prayed that you would, one warm day, love me, too."

"We'll get through it, Julianna "I know we will. We'll get through the morality, the amorality, the immorality."

"What we are doing is not immoral."

"I don't believe it is either. Sorry. I got a little of my "preacher's rhythm" going there for a m0ment. We will make it because you've changed me, you've changed my long-cherished views, and you've helped me through some long, cold nights."

"Making it through another long, freezing night together sounds wonderful. Can we try again tonight?"

There was nothing either of them wanted more. His body was wonderfully comforting, smooth and strong; his back was rippled and full of contours that she wanted to explore all night. She was warm and safe, but somewhere in her heart of hearts, when she woke up, she'd be alone.
**Chapter Sixteen: At Home With the** **Olsens.**

They were watching _I Love Lucy_ and arguing about morality, a combination that went like white wine with fish in the 1950's.

"Your father and I forbid you from seeing that girl," Trig's mother said. "She is a bad influence."

Ty Olsen was no dummy; he was pretty sure it was his son that was the bad influence, knowing well how teenage boys, especially those with extra testosterone from athletics, could be.

"Focus on hockey," he said with a smile he hoped was accommodating to his wife and stern to his son but was ridiculous to both.

Lucy and Ricky were arguing about Ricky's career. A nightclub singer was no respectable job.

"You are going to college, right?" his mother pressed, for the forty seventh time that day.

"If the boy can get a spot on a junior hockey time, that is a fine living."

"Semi-professional hockey? Why would he prostitute himself like that?" his mother scoffed. "The boy has an intellect which should be polished in college."

"Tough to polish a turd," Ty the taxidermist thought, but said instead "Semi-pro hockey gives him a shot at the big time."  
"I don't just have a shot at the big time," Trig piped up, "I'm a sure thing."

Ricky played his bongos to drown out Lucy's harping. Lucy was an attractive woman in Ty Olsen's eyes and he constantly pined for Ricky to get so goofy Lucy would leave her ethnic husband and settle down with a nice Norwegian farmer.

"Nothing is a sure thing, the Bible teaches us that," his mother said, returning to a theme that was as effective with teenagers than as it is now.

"Does the Bible teach us how to shoot a slapshot?"

"The Bible teaches us how to be saved."  
"Trigger Olsen shoots, Jesus saves, Trig with the rebound and he scores!" her son said in his best radio play-by-by announcer's voice.

His mother was properly offended by his blaspheming and left the room.

Once he did, his dad gave him a big old hug, because, well, boys will be boys.

"Trigger shoots, Jesus saves," his father chuckled. "Now that is funny enough to be on Ed Sullivan."

Trig wandered off, leaving his dad to the rest of the night's television. He was hoping to find a can of beer stashed somewhere, something to take his mind off of Ramona.

The _I Love Lucy_ theme played in his head, with the jingle modified by teenage hormones.

_I love Ramona_ _and she loves me._ _  
We're as happy as two can be._ _  
Sometimes we quarre_ _l but then_ _  
How we love making love_ _again._  
 _Ramona fucks like no one can_

_she's my girl_ _and I'm her man,_ _  
And life is H_ _eaven you see,_ _  
'Cause I love Ramona_ _, I fuck_ _Ramona,_

and Ramona loves me!

Had the boy been in any way theologically inclined (despite his mother and Father Briar's best interests) he would've noticed the link between sex, love, and Heaven in the doggerel he'd composed, but he didn't. Trig just thought it was a funny, filthy song. The great tragedy of youth is not that it is wasted on the young but because it fails to recognize the profound truth in the vulgarity and blasphemy it loves so much.

Chapter Seventeen: Close Encounters Will Test Lovers

Something sexy and strange had come over the residents of Brannaska.

These were gatherings for friends, crushes, flirtations, ex's, drinking buddies, and high-school reunions. There was renewed interest in sex. Trigger was all over his girlfriend, Gosha's nocturnal wanderings (and peeping!) had been more erotically rewarding, and Cedric and Julianna couldn't keep their hands off of one another.

They were in the parish house.

This was a big step in their relationship, being daring enough to sneak around and into one another's most private places. The risk of being caught only enhanced the appeal of the sex.

Furthermore, they were doing it in the morning, after not being satiated the evening before. Light streamed through the windows and both of them found this unbearably erotic.

Father Briar liked being in control; this was newfound and both of them were enjoying the discovery. Father Briar had been making her undress in front of him. There was something so wonderful about the female form; did his fellow priests know what they were missing?

"I'm not taking off my clothes by myself again," she informed him, stubborn and sexy.

"Fair is fair, I suppose," he admitted, and stood up, and slowly took his shirt off. This brought a smile to her face. His body was still young and firm and strong, his skin free of blemishes, and his cock stiffening.

She took off her bra. It was a new one for her, unhooking in the front. This he found impossibly and inexplicably sexy.

He dropped his pants, the belt buckle tinkling like wind chimes as it fell. He kicked them and his underpants away from his ankles.

Her panties were another story entirely; she wanted to keep wearing them for a while. They, too, were new, cherry red, and very lacy. Julianna tried to pull him to the bed, but hobbled by both his erection and his embarrassment about having to strip himself, he fell on top of her, sending them tumbling ass-first on the bed.

They laughed and laughed and rolled around in one another's arms.

"Nobody told me and I had never imagined, that making love would be so funny! I had many, many thoughts about it, many anticipations and expectations, but I did not think it would be so humorous. This must be what true love feels like," he concluded.

Cedric slid off of the bed and down to his knees on the carpet. He spread her legs at the knees and marveled at the sight of her. Then he began his kissing. Thighs first, then upward. But he was clever, and he made her be patient. The kisses landed on her tummy, the soft curve of her hips, her excited breasts, and all the way up to her neck. Then he dropped back down again.

Oh! His pace and his timing were fantastic. It was different every time with him. Now he was keeping his kisses tender and easy. He loved their time together and wanted this lovemaking to last hour after hour after hour, he wanted savor every inch of her, wanted to remember her pale, fine skin, wanting this to last forever.

Then, as suddenly and unexpectedly as a winter storm, Julianna seemed uncomfortable being so naked. He noticed the change in her body language and asked about it; usually it was him that was shy. Julianna closed her legs.

But Cedric didn't want allow it. He lightly parted them again, this time using his chin.

This bit of daring thrilled her and reignited her libido. "Let me see you. All of you," he said, his voice raspy and full of lust. She took a deep breath and pressed her breasts together. She exhaled. Her breath was sweet and minty and he wanted to kiss her, but not on the mouth. No, he wanted to go down, down deeper, wetter, hotter...

"Look into my eyes, lover, lets watch each other and see each other's pleasure. Do you see how excited you make me?" she said, using her index finger to spread her folds and show him her glistening pearl. "See how goddamned turned on I am by your body?" she grinned.

The blasphemy made the sex even better!

"Goddammit, goddammit, goddammit!" she cried.

He couldn't help it; Father Briar wondered if God could hear her. They were in the tool shed in the snowed-over baseball field behind the church. Cedric had brought in a kerosene space heater and blankets, and there amongst the balls and bats and rakes and hoes and such, they made love in their little nest.

Her cursing sounded sweet to him, funny and sexy, not angry or aggressive. Cedric was getting aggressive, though, and he pressed a kiss below her belly button, on the tender bundle of nerves just above her pubic bone.

Now it was her turn to be aggressive. She grabbed him by the hair and pulled him up; putting his head to each breast and making him suck yet again, then pushing him down between her thighs, which she willingly parted this time.

He glanced up at her, brown eyes wild and crazy with lust. His hot, hungry mouth paused over her pussy, making her wait one last time.

Then he showed his tongue in as deep as it would go.

That she didn't pass out astonished her. "How have I waited this long to experience this?" she marveled. In and out he went. She lost track of time, all she knew was that her hands were still tied up in the hair on his head and his tongue was in the hair down below.

For an inexperience cunnilinguist, he was great at it. He used his lips to part hers and his tongue as a hard, sentient little cock that could explore every last hidden curve of her.

She tasted so so so sweet. And she was now so wet, her juices flowing from her and making the blanket warm and damp and slick. He rubbed some of the precious juices on his cock. Damn, he wanted to put it in her. But not yet. Not yet.

He wanted to keep sucking at her, keep pressing his lips against her, keep feeling her wiggle and twist and squirm beneath his talented tongue. He wanted to make her lose her mind, to come undone, to go a little crazier than she ever had before.

So he did.

Father Briar took his time, causing Julianna to lose track of it. He was succeeding in is intent to passionately explore and reveal every delicate bit of her, every last sweet warm bit of pinkness, every fold, curve, and twist.

Julianna knew she was on the verge of an orgasm. She couldn't let that happen. She wanted the pleasure to keep going and going and going. Now he was using his thumbs as well as his tongue.

Her whole body quivered and pulsed. Sounds grew in her throat before escaping fully formed, loud and happy and horny. She pressed her hips forward, harder, into him, onto that remarkable tongue. Now it was his turn to moan. His sounded strangled and suffocated. This was a great thrill to her, having momentary control over him like that. Julianna liked it when he was vulnerable. She squeezed her thighs tighter and rode him harder

They both loved this part of sex, the physicality and the intensity of it all. They loved the way they could nearly lose their minds in each other's bodies. He loved the change in the taste of her, from her first sweetness to her later muskiness. He loved how he could play her body as though it was a hi-fi, making her louder and then quiet, hot then cool, happy then agitated and horny.

Finally, she untangled her fingers from his hair, freeing him from his lover's duties. But he stayed with them; he stayed down there, still eager and excited. Julianna started babbling, so great was the pleasure. She couldn't put sentences together, she couldn't put words together, and even syllables were escaping her. Finally she regained control enough to start shouting "yes, yes, yes..."

Then her swollen clit went stiff and she went silent but for the panting.

Worried that he might move away and stop pleasuring her, she told him to stay right there.

"I just need a moment" she begged. "I just need a moment. I want to come again."

Like a good man who was used to obeying the rules, he stayed right there, his soft breathing complimenting his sucking mouth, his attention and his intensity not waning, slowly stroking himself to her grinding movements. He kissed her soft and sweaty thighs again and again, showing great patience and control, under she was ready again.

She didn't say anything; she just turned over, presenting herself for him that way. She still had her stockings on and he found that unbearably sexy. He didn't want to enter her just yet; he wanted to still prolong this further.

They were still new lovers!

And they were still new to love. "I've wanted to put my hands all over you since Sunday at mass. You looked so beautiful in your new dress. I wanted to stop mass and start with you.

He touched her ass, grabbing at it greedily.

"I was feeling the same way. It almost felt sinful to be in church, feeling such feelings. But, oh! The sin felt so good."

She rolled over, wanting to look him in the eyes.

"My stars, you are fantastic. Sex is fantastic. We are fantastic. One minute we're arguing about theology and the next moment we are...we are...we are fucking!"

She didn't think she'd ever heard him use that word before. It thrilled her as much as it thrilled him.

And he was right, that was how this sexual session had started; they'd been arguing about the morality of the vows of priestly celibacy and lifelong bachelorhood. This had turned into stripping, and yes, fucking.

"I love your animal lust, I love your body, I love how you love me," she told him.

"I love that you don't treat me like a priest. You treat me like a man. Not a man of God, but a real flesh and blood man.

"I love that you didn't treat me like a doll or a child. You treat me like a woman. Not like a plaything. Although you use me like your plaything, and I love that, too! Hurry up and do it again."

He obliged.

"You want me, you got me. Is that cool?"

"Very cool," she agreed.

He lifted her legs up over her shoulders. Her eyes widened and her mouth pursed into a cute little pouty smile.

"Your intensity is so powerful. God, Cedric, who thought sex could be so great?"

"I never knew," he said, panting and still pounding. "Especially when it's all so very new to me."

Her cheeks flushed and her breasts rose and fell with her rapid breath.

"I haven't been with a lot of men, either. The sex was pretty boring, too." She leaned up and kissed him, keeping his lips in her mouth for a long time while she ground herself against the base of his cock.

"But from the first time you kissed me, all the way back there in Spokane; I knew you were different, that you were wonderful, and that sex would be amazing with you.

Cedric groaned and paused, trying to delay his climax. "Even though I'd never done it before?" he asked.

"You didn't need to be Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity to impress me, but that you ended up being even sexier is a surprise!"

Julianna could compare almost all the great moments in her life to great movies, in this case, last year's Academy Award winning romantic masterpiece.

"I don't want you to hold back, Cedric. Do it harder, harder, please!" She focused her rhythm, on keeping them together. Finally he pulled down her stockings, doing so without removing himself from her, a little bit of skill she found amazing.

"You are sexier than Deborah Kerr ever could be," he said, upping her movie reference.

"Hey!" she cried, in mock and funny horror, "she was an adulteress. You aren't married."

"No," he said, "and thank God for that. Literally!"

The laughed, they made love, they laughed again, they made more love.

Julianna ran her hands over his broad, fine, pale chest. By Golly Gosha had done her nails in a gaudy, cherry red that she loved in spite of its flashiness. She used the newly painted and filed ends of them to sharply trace the outline of his pecs, his abs, his ass, as he went in and out of her. She nibbled at his ears, enjoying the taste of sweat, salty and full of passion. She followed the thin line of hair that started at the center of his ribcage and left a trail down to his belly button, down to his cock, that magnificent thing.

Then she locked her gaze to his as she wrapped her hand around it, taking it from her, putting it back in. She did this with great care and deliberation, enjoying every move. After all the hot roughness, she wanted a little cool delicacy.

Cedric tore open the package of a condom. Where he'd bought it, she had no idea; birth control was hard to come by in northern Minnesota in the 1950's, and probably impossible to buy if you were a known priest. Truth was, he hadn't bought it; like his well-used Playboys, the condoms had been confiscated by concerned parents and given to him for proper disposal. What did parish parents think he did with these things, these sexual things they didn't want in their houses? Perform exorcisms upon them before burning them with Holy Kerosene?

This was a weird little ritual they had to do. He liked to climax inside of her, which was obviously impossible without birth control. Were Julianna to get pregnant as a single woman... he couldn't even bear to think of it, lest he lose his erection. So they did it without for a while, to better enjoy the feeling and because both of them, in their deepest hearts, thought of birth control as a sin.

So she always knew he was ready to climax when he ripped open the package and rolled the bulky thing over his bulky thing. Task accomplished, he crawled across the mattress, chasing her.

Julianna was crawling away to tease him; she knew he loved the sight of her breasts swinging and her ass bouncing as she scurried away on all fours. The further waiting, the further anticipation, made her squeal. Finally he caught her and wrestled her about at bit and then parted her thighs. Father Briar pinned her arms to the bed, holding them down above her head, kissing the soft insides of her porcelain arms as he entered her. She arched her back, making her body an S shape, a series of curves and hidden spots that he wanted to map and explore and treasure.

With great care, he slowly lowered himself over and then into her. Plunging himself all the way into the bottom, he cried out on pleasure and she dug those newly manicured nails into the muscular flesh of his butt. He pressed his hips to hers, still inside, still exploring. He wanted to coil their bodies together, but he didn't want to use that word; it had serpentine and therefore devilish connotations.

She wanted to look into his eyes, to drink him in with her mouth, to devour him with her vagina. By bucking her hips, she could control his strokes, making them longer and shorter, sensuous or pounding, sweet or nasty. They stayed in that magical, chemical connection of bodies touching all the way from their heads to their toes, all the tips, for long, hot minutes.

"You're so sexy, so perfect, so mine, so Julianna." He kissed her. She kissed him back. They both knew they had to quit soon, that doing it back here in the tool shed, next to the blessed shovels and the holy hoes, was dangerous and silly.

Now he was close enough to be frantic. There were no passionate pauses, no loving lingering, only strong, solid thrusting. He felt like he'd grown to twice or three times his normal size inside her! There was athleticism in his sexuality; he had, after all, been a star quarterback in high school and a lot of that youthful vigor remained in this still-young man. All they could do was gasp for breath, hoping there was still enough oxygen left in the little shed to fuel them.

Julianna's buttocks were taut and firm from all of the arching and thrusting. That was where her sexual power came from; those lean and elegant muscles in her backside. She squeezed, then released, squeezed, the released, matching his rhythm. She did that same clenching and unclenching movement with the inner walls of her pussy, driving him wild with the sensation of her around his cock.

Cedric kissed a path from the delicious spot at the nape of her neck, then down around her breasts. He kissed and stroked faster and faster and she arched her back and came for the first time that night and only the fifth time in her life, then for the sixth, and finally the seventh.

He was sure the whole town could hear her passionate screaming. It sounded like she was changing into a werewolf. Cedric wasn't sure he'd mind. Her pussy was on him like a vice grip. Her strong pulses and contractions and tiny circular hip movements astounded him as she rode out her orgasms. He was thrilled to have the power to make her feel so good.

It was this rush of power that made him come, hard and loud and long. He didn't quite pass out, didn't quite fall asleep, but drifted into a spot near those two things, in an inexplicable state of love and release.

Julianna's delicate and considerate kisses brought him back around.

"Sweetheart, we've got to get up and get dressed. As much as I'd love to lie here all day..."

He bolted upright, suddenly clearheaded, as though he was a hockey player who'd been checked into the boards and needed revival by smelling salts.

"Oh my God! We've got to get out of here," he shouted, suddenly panicked. "Bishop Mueller will be here shortly."

The Bishop of the Diocese, Dale Mueller was indeed to arrive within a few moments; and he was already inclined to be displeased with Cedric. He had received word from Gosha that he was not fulfilling his religious duties.

"This man is not a priest, he is a fornicator. I am convinced of it. We cannot have such a man as one of Christ's disciples," were the words he had heard from the old Pole. Armed with such a scandalous, serious and sexy piece of information, Bishop Mueller had made plans to visit him and inquire after the spiritual health of the congregation.

His suspicions were almost confirmed, had he arrived thirty seconds earlier, Cedric's world would have come crashing down. He would have been defrocked, for he was engaged in a prolonged, post-coital, goodbye kiss with Julianna in a confessional booth.

Yes, they had chosen it for the exciting, kinky thrill of making out in the confessional. Some may call it sacrilegious, and that is fine. It was also wicked hot.

Julianna heard the huge engine of Mueller's Lincoln Coupe pull up outside, so she made for the back entrance. Cedric tidied up his appearance, for his hair was ruffled and he had lipstick on his face. He'd had a member of his flock, a sweet and gentle farmer named Ernest who lived a couple of miles north of town, who liked to lounge about his house in lipstick and a slip; he hoped the Bishop thought nothing like that was going on with him! So he wiped his already chapped and winter-dry lips repeatedly until he was sure all traces of Julianna's love were gone.

"What on God's Earth could he be doing here? I can deal with Gosha's incessant whining about matters of liturgy but this, oh my, this is a most unexpected visit."

Cedric opened the door not knowing quite what to expect.

The Bishop looked more stern than usual. This was something serious.

"Bishop Mueller!" Cedric forced a smile. "This is a most unexpected and welcome visit. Please inform me. What brings you to these parts?"

"Matters of faith, our church and," Bishop Dale paused, "...personal inquiries," he looked at Cedric, who pretended that he didn't know what he was talking about.

"By all means, Bishop."

The men convened at a table at Bjorn's cafe, Cedric had driven the Bishop there in haste after he'd professed hunger for the Norwegian cook's blueberry flapjacks.

Cedric poured tea into his superior's mug as they ordered. Father Briar thought the older man's fondness for whipped cream (he always ordered extra on his pancakes) comical but said nothing, of course.

"Why are you here? Other than the delicious griddle cakes, of course."

"Father Briar, as you are no doubt aware there has been much scandal in the church of late. I however am not here to discuss about such things, no, the purpose of my visit is much more personal."

"Please continue," said Cedric. The Bishop sighed in between sipping his brew before he continued.

"This little town seems consumed with sex and who is and isn't having it."

"People are prurient by nature," Father Briar said, non-committal, blowing on his coffee and fogging up his glasses.

"That I well know. Decades in this job have taught me that it is often less about theology and more about keeping discipline within the congregation."

"The parish here in Brannaska isn't lacking in discipline, spiritual or otherwise," Cedric said, frost creeping in around the edges of his voice.

"Some of the members doesn't seem to think so."

"Some of the members, or just one?" Father Briar pressed.

"Well, there has been a single critic who is most vocal."

"Surely you don't put too much stock in one woman's complaints?"

"What makes you so sure it's a woman?" The bishop was surprised that Father Briar had figured him out so quickly.

"Most of my flock is quite fond of me," Cedric said, although he was careful not to let on just how fond.

"I know that to be true, as well. You have been an excellent servant of the Lord and..."

He was cut off by Bjorn sliding steaming plates of pancakes in front of them. The frothy whipped cream dripped over the edge and onto the counter.

The stacks were so tall and smelled so good that all conversation was tabled and by the time he was finished eating, Bishop Mueller had long forgotten the reason for his visit.

Love was saved, yet again, by pancakes.
**Chapter Eighteen: Francisco Makes a New Friend.**

Francisco had come down to Bjorn's after he'd finished his chores around the farm. Now, on route to polishing off his second plate of fried pork chops, boiled potatoes, and honey carrots, he wanted someone to chat with.

Usually, Bjorn was behind the counter and a reliable source of unreliable gossip. Such was true today. "Have you heard about Trigger Olsen?" he asked.

Mr. Montana had, in fact, heard about Trigger. He'd heard so many things that he didn't know which rumor the coffee pouring proprietor was referring to.

"No," he lied, "I haven't."

"He might skip college altogether, go to the pros. Maybe junior hockey up in Winnipeg, first, before trying to make it in the National Hockey League." He pronounced 'hockey' without the 'h' so it sounded like 'ah-key.'

"They say he has a shot at being the next Rocket Richard." Despite his accent, Bjorn pronounced the legendary player's last name properly, Ree-shard, like a real French Canadian. These were people who took their puck seriously.

"Why might he be skipping college?" Mr. Montana asked, always looking for a bit of juicy insider information.

"Something to do with a girl, I've heard."

"He is quite serious with young Ramona Herbertson."

"You wanna shake for coffee?"

"You betcha," Bjorn said, using a bit of local slang that was particularly on the nose for this occasion. Minnesotans, however, said "you bet you" as only two words and as an affirmative to something they wanted to do.

As in "would you like to go ice fishing tomorrow if I bring a bottle of brandy?"

"You betcha!"

The cook stopped in her tracks, convinced she'd heard him wrong.

Bjorn rarely "shook" for coffee. Why was he humoring Francisco today?

He was humoring Francisco because he wanted the man around. Julianna was coming in for her shift soon, and, ever the meddler, he was going to try to "set them up." If he didn't shake he feared the man might get bored and set off.

That was unlikely. Mr. Montana knew she was set to work that night as well and had put on his finest blue jeans and even ironed his flannel. His usual hip flask was gone, replaced with Tic Tacs. He loved those little buggers. They were so cute! He cherished every one he sucked until it disappeared.

He was not a man without his charms, Francisco Montana. In his outgoing and gregarious way, he'd tried to get everybody in town to call him "Frank" but it hadn't stuck. He was always Francisco or worse, Mr. Montana. Frank had never even been anywhere near that vast, lonely, and empty state. He'd never been further west than Fargo. And he'd hated that.

Mr. Montana's hair was thick and black and wavy; strong and a little too much, like Bjorn's coffee. It was only now being streaked with flashes of gray in his fifty third year. Although he possessed a big belly now, it matched the rest of him; a thick fellow with legs like telephone poles and forearms like Armor brand canned hams, he carried his weight well.

Unlike some of the fellows, he was careful with his hygiene and usually showered before coming to the café from the barn or the pigsty. He rarely cleaned his fingernails at the table with his pocketknife, which was always kept in the top front pocket of his denim overalls. The amount of stuff that he kept up there always amused Bjorn, who'd once seen a picture of a kangaroo in National Geographic Magazine and couldn't help but compare the marsupial with Mr. Montana.

"Their pouches sag in the same way," he'd laugh and tell his wife, the cook.

Mr. Montana considered himself lucky. His unusual name had given him an exotic air even though he hadn't earned it. So ladies were interested in him, even if he was just another bachelor farmer, if a slightly wealthier than average one. The local single ladies speculated about his sexual prowess and the advanced and foreign techniques he might use.

"Quite frankly, I find such speculation filthy," the cook had remarked, "people everywhere do it the same way."

Bjorn found that unlikely but didn't dare contradict her.

Frankly, he didn't know why he felt the compulsive need to fix Julianna up. She was a nice girl and all, but it was more than altruistic kindness at work, it was something deeper within him. He didn't like loose ends, he didn't like odd numbers, he didn't like issues unresolved. Single women were a problem to be solved, an opportunity to demonstrate his knowledge of the community and its residents, and to show off a little.

It is interesting, then, that he didn't feel the same obsessive desire to fix up the single men in town, and there were many of those. He'd never really considering firing her after last Sunday's smorgasbord disaster; heck, he blamed Mr. Olsen and Mr. Montana for that. And a little trouble and controversy never hurt business. The more people talking about Bjorn's, Bjorn figured, the better.

The doorframe rattled and an assault of cold air stormed through, followed by Julianna. Barely recognizable under multiple layers of sweaters, coats and hats, she was ten minutes early, which pleased both Bjorn and the cook to no end. She'd had to catch a ride into town with Gosha, whose truck was warm and always easy to start. The number of work-hours the café lost due to engines not firing up in the cold weather was enormous. Gosha's truck and the skill with which she trove it seemed almost magical to Julianna and she'd gotten into town and to work much faster than she'd anticipated. This made her happy.

Seeing Mr. Olsen there made her sad. Was he going to torment her the same way tonight that he had last week? Would Francisco Montana flirt with her again?

She wondered if she'd mind. She was still irritated with Cedric. He'd been both lusty and indifferent lately, a combination she found almost impossible to deal with. Julianna felt he was being overly paranoid about the locals finding out, and if they did, what was the big deal? He'd have to stop being a priest, sure, but then they could get married and live together in public, out at her cute little house. Was that so horrible, was that so immoral, was that too much to ask? No, it certainly wasn't.

"Heck," she thought, "maybe I'll even do a little flirting myself. Would do a girl good, to have people in town know I'm sexy and desirable and that men want me."

But that was a bridge too far. And this was back in an era where that phrase had literal and not just metaphorical meaning. The Allied defeat in Holland in 1944, where Major General Robert Urquhart had literally gone a bridge too far and the good guys had suffered a terrible defeat and humiliating withdrawal. She couldn't flirt with Mr. Montana, that would be like cheating on and being unfaithful to Cedric.

So she put her head down and went to work. This smorgasbord, unlike last week's, was much easier on her; there was no relentless teasing from Ty Olsen, no overt sexuality from Francisco. There was just food, piles and piles of hot and steaming meats and vegetables, served in the coldest depths of winter.

The frightening temperature had done nothing to lower turnout to the weekly buffet ("although, remember, never call it that," Cedric had reminded Julianna before her shift, "as she will lose her mind.") and there was still a wait at the door. When that became too crowded, families would wait in their pickup trucks, heaters running but windows cracked to avoid carbon monoxide poisoning, for up to an hour, listening to the radio, gossiping about By Golly Gosha and their neighbors, and enjoying each other's company.

"I'm sorry I told Bjorn to fire you after your first shift," the cook told her. Julianna shrugged her sweaty shoulders, not defeated yet. The smorgasbord tonight had been especially busy and she'd been running around like the proverbial chicken with her head cut off.

That had been just a phrase until she moved here to Brannaska. But she'd been taken around to some farms since her arrival and in the natural course of the day; she'd seen some barnyard beheadings.

"I had a good shift tonight, right?"

"Better than good. Great." From a nearly silent old Norwegian woman, this was enormous praise. Once in a decade praise.

Julianna slid onto the stool opposite the cash register. It was red and the cushion was worn out from so many heavy farmers' butts. The thing spun around dangerously and children had been known to use it like a top, with themselves balanced upon it.

From the cook's expression, however, Julianna judged that both giving praise and admitting she had been mistaken about something were her two least favorite things to do. Julianna figured she wasn't particularly fond of loud children using her stools as toys, either.

"Thank you for giving me a compliment."

"It has only been two Sundays, two smorgasbords, and already you've proved to be a hard worker. You're always on time. You are good girl. You never flirt. Even with Mr. Montana. Many of my past waitresses flirted with Francisco. You do not like him?"

She liked him well enough. But her heart was set on another man. How could she tell the cook, her boss, this, without risking Cedric's entire life?

"He is nice," she said, trying to sound neutral.

"Successful farmer, too; he's got massive acreage west of town."

That the cook thought Julianna was motivated by money and not love slightly annoyed her, but she was still too happy about being praised to feel bad for long.

"I like how you charm the customers. We don't have a lot of charmers here in Brannaska. You don't mix up orders anymore. And you are good with figures. You are just as good with the figures as Bjorn is."

"Thank you. During the war I did a lot of work with numbers. Mechanics have to know all sorts of gauges and fractions and such." Julianna was having a hard time resisting bragging.

"My jaws are getting tired from all of this talking," the cook said, and that ended the conversation. She walked to the back to pour brown sugar, salt and orange juice for one recipe or other; this concoction was in nearly everything they made, from the ribs to the desserts.

Julianna sat at the counter and tried not to spin around on the stool. She thought nobody was looking, so she indulged herself. Once.

She immediately regretted it. There was a huge laugh from across the room; Mr. Montana had just returned from the bathroom, where he'd been for a substantial amount of time.

"Don't go in there for a while, kid; I'm pretty sure I just did something that violated the Geneva Conventions."

She tried not to laugh; that was gross and body humor wasn't funny. But it built up within her.

"Bjorn, your smorgasbord was so good I just committed a war crime in the john!"

Now Julianna burst out laughing. How could this man make such things sound harmless, funny, and, yes, charming?

"I'm going to tell Senator McCarthy on you," she said.

"Can I bribe you not to rat on me?"

"What is your offer?" she said, one eyebrow raised.

He patted the flask in the pouch of his overalls.

"Cocktail?"

She wasn't as scandalized as most of the locals would've been. This was a "dry" country; no alcohol could legally be bought or sold within its enormous boundaries. Booze was very much a moral issue here.

But Julianna had come from a Pacific Northwestern family with a comfortable and friendly relationship with red wine and brandy. So the offer of a tidy little cocktail appealed to her; it had, after all, been a long, successful work day.

"You did an excellent job tonight," he told her.

Wow! Two compliments in fifteen minutes? This must've been a record, for Brannaska anyway.

She met Francisco's eyes. "Thank you. I appreciate it, and I appreciate you not giving me the dickens tonight. My father taught me that I should never shirk and sort of job or duty or responsibility. He hated shirkers, my dad."

"How did he feel about cocktails?"

"He was strictly a shot and a beer guy. My mom loved a Brandy Alexander, though."

"I can offer vodka and orange juice, if Bjorn has orange juice."  
"The cook, I promise you, has orange juice."

Excited, she excused herself and went to the back. Two glasses poured, she went back and sat down.

The cook definitely not would've approved of her juice in this manner.

Bjorn was a little more tolerant, but still, out of respect, they waited to pour the vodka until he'd gone outside to start the engine of his truck, lest it freeze up and not be able to drive them the quarter mile home.

As Mr. Montana mixed the drink with soda straws, Julianna took a good look at him for the first time. When he wasn't annoying her with his teasing and his weird theories about how the world worked, he was rugged and attractive and manly.

When he was dressed up, he dressed in Western gear to match his Western name. And he didn't stick strictly to cowboy denim, he'd come to barn dances and church potluck dinners in a Nudie Suit, the elaborately embroidered and rhinestone bejeweled creations made popular by Hank Williams and Porter Wagoner.

But he was no dandy, no foppish dude; you might mistake him for a wrangler right off a ranch, but not a Nashville slickster or a Hollywood cowboy with a plastic gun. Were she a "shaker," she'd bet that there wasn't a day in his life that he hadn't done some sort of challenging manual labor.

Instead of wearing him out, like it had some other residents of Brannaska who were the same age, it had invigorated him. He had a thick chest that he had a hard time finding overalls to cover it, but he did, and baggy ones, too.

They took sips.

"Delicious," she complimented. It had been a long time since she'd had vodka and it had an electric burn as it went down. She took a deep breath and the world spun and then looked new.

The free drink was the first time a man had bought her one since the war had ended. It wasn't because she wasn't beautiful or fun, quite to the contrary. But she'd been so in love with Cedric, for so long, that she'd never had much of an opportunity to step out.

Julianna was delighted. "What a night this has been," she thought. "I've gotten free drinks from a Norwegian cowboy, a real apology from a woman who never speaks, and praised for a job I've only done twice in my life."

If they were going to continue their evening, they'd have to adjourn to somewhere else. Bjorn hadn't started his truck to let it run forever; him and the cook wanted to get home. But this was a big step.

A big big step, just out the door. Could she do it?

Julianna had witnessed him joking and laughing with the customers. She knew he worked like a machine when he was on the farm. Would he be fun somewhere else? Was it safe? More importantly, was it appropriate?

After three more big sips of vodka, it was appropriate.

There was a chain hotel on Highway Ten, about twenty miles away, with a lounge and restaurant for truckers that stayed open all night. Most of the respectable people in Brannaska avoided it because they'd heard all sorts of sordid stories about what truckers did with various women of low character in the parking lot.

They drove there separately, her following him at a respectable distance. Julianna was nervous. Once settled into the grimy lounge, they began talking, once two more drinks had been ordered.

"Nice that this place is just across the county line," he said, "so we can get a nightcap."

"That they serve liquor seems to be the only attraction to this place," she said, lifting up a wet, ketchup-stained napkin that had been carelessly left by the waitress. Julianna wouldn't have been so shoddy.

"Well, they make an excellent Brandy Alexander."

"Thank you, Mr. Montana. Tonight's crowd at the smorgasbord wore me out." Cassidy sipped her drink.

"Consider yourself lucky. There were no tourists in there tonight," Mr. Montana said. A tourist was anybody they didn't immediately recognize. Immediately. "Those demanding out-of-towners expect things they shouldn't, expect things that nobody could cook, and expect them free," he noted.

"Worse are the seniors," she joked, emboldened by the alcohol, "especially the geezers they bring in from the old folks home. I have to hand feed some of those poor people."'

"It is a good thing that most of smorgasbord consists of soft and mushy foods. It's easy for them to chew," Mr. Montana agreed.

"I didn't confuse the glorified rice with the mashed potatoes tonight, which is a step in the right direction."

"I could've made you loose your cool, but I didn't want to do it again. It felt...rude."

This made her blush, and blushing made her feel terrible! She was ashamed of herself for having such a good time without Cedric. Was she being disloyal? Instinctively, she looked around to see if there was anybody there to recognize her. This was a habit she'd picked up after a few years with Cedric.

Francisco popped the cap of the top of a bottle of beer and took a measured gulp. Since he was driving home he'd wanted to switch to something a little less strong than the vodka he'd been nipping from most of the evening.

"I think that all people, not just seniors, are getting more and more impatient; they want their order, the want everything, and the want it now. I blame television."

"Oh, yes, I do think it is making our children more stupid. Some of those new programs are just trash."

"No, I wasn't talking about programming; I was talking about the waves they beam through the air to send the pictures to our sets. Those are what are making us stupid. They could set those rays, those beams, to make people smarter, but what good would that do them? Government depends on people being stupid to stay in power."

As Julianna's father would've said, "that chaps my ass." She'd served the country and its government, so had Cedric. They weren't duty bound to make people stupid. They and everybody else like them, all the way up the chain of command to FDR and Truman themselves, had worked to keep America safe and free, not ignorant and enslaved to television waves being beamed from the sky.

She didn't want to directly contradict him, though, that would be impolite. And since he'd made such a show earlier of not being rude and teasing her, she wasn't going to say anything about the silliness of his theories.

"It is turning people into lousy neighbors and lousy tippers. I'm sure you've noticed that," he said, winking.

"Not really," she thought, sipping her drink to cover her silence, "but I have noticed you throwing money around like its nothing, especially when pretty women are involved. Me, lately. Heck, I've got twenty extra dollars in my pocket right now because of you."

Twenty dollars was a huge amount of money. Huge. The equivalent of one hundred and seventy five dollars today. A loaf of bread cost twenty cents, a gallon of milk was eighty five cents, and two dozen eggs were a dollar and a half, not that anybody in Brannaska was wanting for chickens or eggs.

"They aren't that bad," she said, trying to dismiss the situation. He took another measure, although large, gulp of beer, and then called for another. "Wow, that one went down fast," she noticed. And he'd started repeating himself.

"Those old folks come down from the senior home like a group of squabbling old pigeons. Those old people love that glorified rice and love it when someone gives them good service. You give good service."

Now Julianna felt like she was in a bit of a bind. If she drank her vodka orange juice too fast, she'd be drunk and not able to drive home. There was no way she was spending any time in the parking lot here! Goodness knew what the truckers might do. But equally painful would be sitting here listening to him try to, as the kids said, "put the make on her."

"I just try to listen to them, to give them a little bit of affection if they need it, and to get their food to them as quick as I can," she said, trying to keep the conversation light and personable. "They are all cooped up like chickens in that home and they either don't have any children or the kids they have don't care to come round and visit. So smorgasbord is the only time they get to go out all week, to get out and do something."

"Yah," he agreed, "smorg is good for the community."

Even when drinking, Mr. Montana was well-spoken and never slurred his words. She'd overhead him discussing a variety of events and news items with fellow farmers at Bjorn's, and despite his loony theories, he was well informed. As he drank more, those claims only became sillier and more outlandish, but still entertained people enough so that now their little two person outing had turned into a late-night drinking session with some of northern Minnesota's roughest characters.

Julianna had been in the WAC, and Seattle was a port city, so she was no stranger to rough gentlemen who began and ended many a conversation with their fists. That seemed to be code among sailors, especially, although her Cedric was nothing like that.

Cedric! How mad he would be if he saw her now!

Was she being naughty? At the moment, she didn't care. "Montana Frank," as she was now reluctantly calling him, was a hoot and a half, in the local slang. Meaning, the fellow was good for a laugh. A lot of laughs. Why couldn't she go out? She certainly couldn't go out with Cedric, "the paranoid old stick in the mud," as the vodka had made her take to calling him.

Speaking of vodka, Julianna had finished her drink. The glass sat, the ice melting into the pulpy remains of the orange juice.

"Thank you, Montana Frank, that was delicious." She had anticipated adding "but now I have to go" to the end of that sentence, but at the very last millisecond, decided it wasn't necessary.

"You are having another, right?" he commanded more than asked, already signaling the barman for two more before she had a chance to respond.

"Maybe this waitress won't be as fast as me. Maybe she'll be as helpless at bringing drinks as she is at cleaning tables," Julianna thought, noting the ketchup-stained napkin still sitting there, "and maybe I'll be able to sneak away unnoticed."

Nope.

The drinks were there in moments. Montana Frank had just gotten to the punch line of his first joke when they were delivered.

"Eh, let yourself go a little bit, Jewels," she thought, using Cedric's nickname for her. Cedric again, thoughts of him were never far from her mind, were they? Despite that nagging little devil on her shoulder, Julianna smiled, a mixture of excited, content, and tired. And a little ashamed for betraying Cedric in this manner, then a little ashamed at being involved with a priest in the first place. But such were the conundrums of life and love, eh?

She'd told Cedric that her new job felt like a bore after working those long years of war and meaning. There were similarities between waitressing and being a mechanic, she realized, the booze liberating her thoughts. Both involved endless hours on the feet, ten to twelve hour days, verbal abuse (and the occasional slap on the ass) from men, and not a lot of money.

Waitressing even had some fun aspects to it that working in the war effort did not. After that disastrous first Sunday smorgasbord, she had enjoyed chatting with the staff and serving the customers. The free meals were the best of the perks, the cook was a master and Julianna had gained a half dozen pounds in the short time she'd been working there.

She got to bring whatever food that was leftover from smorgasbord home, and whenever she was in town and dropped by for coffee and breakfast or a light lunch, Bjorn or the cook would invariably wave off the grubby bills she held out for the tab.

"Wouldn't Father Briar be ashamed of his choice of lovers if he saw me here now," she thought, taking a pull of her new, ice cold drink through the plastic straw. "All of our high-minded theological discussions about fidelity to one's vows, ones morals, tossed out the window of a pickup truck into the frigid north woods night, for some jokes and some laughs and some cocktails.

"Oh, the heck with it," she told herself. "We won the war. Then we won another war in Korea. Why can't we have a little fun? But what about dad? Would he think I'm shirking right now?" All the time she'd spent in church and in service, yet here she was, contentedly swilling drinks in a cold northern dive bar.

Julianna decided she needed a glass of water. She went up to the bar and plopped herself down on one of the stools, noting that they were the same make and model as the ones in Bjorn's, but were a lot more decrepit. While the barman was getting her water, she looked across the smoky room. There were all sorts of unshaven men and a big band tune from fifteen years ago on the radio. Like the music, this looked like a crowd lost to time. It was late enough and empty enough that the sluggish waitress, who doubled as an indifferent cleaning woman, had pushed a few of the chairs up against the walls and was sweeping with all of the enthusiasm of the condemned.

At one end of the room there had once been a dance floor but it had long gone to rot, the hardwood floor now mottled and stained with spilled drunks and shed blood. Julianna shuddered at how down on their luck a band must've been to have played their music here. The water tasted good, though, these farm towns had wells deep into the aquifer and it came out fresh, frigid, and sweet smelling. It brought a much needed clarity to her thoughts.

This place was miles from the sorts of places she'd recently been with Cedric. He was not fussy; heck, he'd been a sailor, but so many years under the rigor of a Jesuit education had given him a certain refinement that was otherwise rather lacking in Brannaska. Combine that with their justified fears of being seen together or caught in a compromising position and the number of places they could safely venture was minimal. This filled her with a feeling as bitter as the Angostura bottle behind the bar.

And then she had the most fantastic idea came into her head, alcohol-fuelled, to be sure, but still, what was the saying? In vodka veritas? "Something like that," she thought, a plan forming. What if she let Father Briar find her in such a low class locale, slumming with truckers and jazzbos and whores?

"That would make him jealous, so jealous! Maybe he'd see how silly it is, to not be able to go out together. Maybe things will change. Anyway, it is what he deserves. Isn't that what the Church teaches us, that we all get what we deserve, in the end?"

She returned to her seat in the booth across from Montana Frank. Thankfully, in her absence, he'd finished her vodka orange.

"Sorry, sweetie, about your screwdriver," he slurred, slumped back in the seat.

This was going to be easier than she thought. She already had an accomplice who was very pliable. It would be easy, stepping out around town with him a few times. Naturally, nothing meaningful could ever occur between them, this was just for show.

"I mean," she thought, gulping her water and the little square ice cubes that she crunched between her teeth like a horse crunches sugar cubes, "I can barely tolerate him on an hour cocktail date or through an eight hour shift waitressing at Bjorn's, much less a life together!"

But she wasn't going to tell Cedric that!

"Let the locals talk. Let them talk about me," she thought, "for once, the gossip will work in my favor, instead of against me, like it usually does. I won't even tell him myself. Word that I'm stepping out with another man will get back to him soon enough."

Now all she had to do was convince Frank Montana, now mostly finished with his sixth beer, to be her accomplice.

As he slipped further down in his booth, wherein he was so comfortable it looked like his home away from home, and fiddled with the beer bottles in front of them, peeling the labels down halfway and exactly halfway, never off, and arranging them in a straight line, she decided to make her move. Julianna leaned forward in the booth, making sure to press her breasts together to enhance the size of her cleavage, even though she was clad in three layers of sweaters, and said, "Montana Frank, as you know, I'm new in town, and I'm so terribly lonely..."
**Chapter Nineteen: Francisco and** **Julianna** **'s First... Date?**

When she'd first asked him out, Montana Frank had thought he'd gotten drunk enough to fall asleep in the booth and have a delicious dream. "This young woman can't be serious," he'd assumed. But she'd persisted, inviting him to dinner date at Hurley's Hanging Gardens, the nicest restaurant in the trendy tourist destination of Mille Lacs.

"Mille Lacs means "thousand lakes" in French." Mr. Montana man-splained.

"Oh, just like Des Moines is French for 'the Moines,' she joked.

People from both of the Twin Cities make the drive up to eat here," he enthused. "And even better, it's your treat!"

He was teasing. She'd offered to pay, which was mind-blowing enough, but there was no way any woman was paying for his dinner.

"Call me a chauvinist, but my mama raised me right. I'm a member of the Church in good standing. I always pay for "shakes" at Bjorn's, even when I lose. And hell will freeze over before I allow a woman to pay for a meal. Even an alluring woman with a hidden agenda, a woman like Julianna Warwidge."

Of course, he knew that she must have had ulterior motives. She was young and beautiful; he was aging and a bit of an overweight scoundrel, when he honestly appraised himself. This he didn't do often, where was the fun in that? But when he did, he was honest. There were many more desirable bachelor farmers around town than he; why hadn't Julianna showed the slightest bit of attention in any of them?

And he'd inquired. Bjorn always knew the good gossip and he hadn't heard any scuttlebutt about her being seen stepping out with any other fellows. This was the 1950's, so lesbianism never entered his nor any other of the townsfolk's minds. Nobody, that is, but Bjorn and the cook, strangely, as they remembered Sweden's free and open nudist culture from their youth, where attitudes towards the body and sex were free and uninhibited during the summer months They'd discussed the possibility that Julianna might have been a "daughter of Eros," but dismissed the possibility out of hand. This was Brannaska, after all.

"I am honored that you, such a high-falluting girl, would be seen out with me in public," he said, his flattery oozing across the table like the butter melting over the bread. Julianna enjoyed it, too; Mr. Montana was an exceptionally manly physical presence despite his silly theories and awkward sense of humor. And any man would've been an improvement over being seen out with no man, which was her usual predicament.

"I'll be on my best behavior," he promised, after accepting her invitation to dinner. That she hoped would be true. She still had no romantic interest in the man; she was just looking to make Cedric jealous. She wasn't nervous being our or even alone with him; she was a tough girl who'd fended of plenty a horny and drunken sailor during her time in the WAC. Her father had taught her "to never take any guff from any man," and he'd even showed her a few dirty tricks with which to defend herself. "Ain't dirty tricks," he'd explained, "if you are a lady and some brute is trying to assault your honor."

Mr. Montana shook his head. He could believe the menu at this place. "What a grand variety of options!" Unlike most Minnesota farmers, this one wasn't a man of few words. He liked fourteen words when four would do, and if he could get away with forty, all the better! Something just didn't feel right about not explaining yourself fully.

Still, though, he was worried about talking too much. It had been a while since he'd been out with a woman. Been longer since he'd been out with an attractive woman. Been even long still since he'd been out with a young, attractive woman. Most of his dates had hair the color of which did not exist in nature but had been chemically engineered in a bottle.

"Will you please order for me, Mr. Montana?" she batted her eyelashes at him. "You are so much more worldly than I am."

"Oh, I doubt that's true," he said, blushing for the first time in thirty years. There was joy in being out with a women half his age, and even if he suspected the whole thing was a sham, he wasn't going to let that affect his good time.

When the waitress came, he straightened up in his chair and spoke very formally.

"We will have two Chiffonade salads with Roquefort dressing. Our appetizer will be Canapé Anchovies. I will have a New York Sirloin Steak and the lady will have Lamb Chops in Mint Sauce. We will both have sweet potatoes, butter, bread and red wine, I do not care what vineyard or vintage, my palate is not that sophisticated."

Both the waiter and Julianna were impressed. "As you wish, sir," she said, bustling back to the kitchen.

"It isn't Bjorn's," he said with a wry smile, "but it'll do quite nicely for tonight."

She didn't comment on the fact that they were at Mille Lacs Lake's fanciest fish restaurant and he'd ordered an imported steak and lamb chops.

"Cedric would've known to order the house specialties and not the showiest items on the menu," she thought, missing him for a moment.

The wine put such thoughts aside. It was sour and sweet simultaneously, heady and fragrant with a dozen tastes. "Delicious," she said.

"I think so, too."

They made small talk until a big problem happened.

Father Briar and Bishop Dale walked into the restaurant

It was all Julianna could do to keep the wine from squirting through her nose. She wanted to curse, and curse out loud. Cursing in her head wasn't nearly as much of a stress relief. They took seats behind Mr. Montana, in a darker corner of the place, ensconced in a big round red booth.

"Thanks for coming out with me tonight," the Bishop said. "I saw that the lights in the parish house were on and I thought I might drop in."

"That is very thoughtful of you. I could always use some company."

Cedric had been hoping for Julianna's company that night but repeated calls through Ma Roggenbucker's party line had gone unanswered. But he'd left the light on for her, just in case. That was the way folks did things around here. "Minnesota nice," they called it. And Cedric lived by an "open door" policy.

But an "open door" policy sometimes led to dinner with your boss instead of time with your illicit love. Such is life.

Bishop Muller had no such policy; both his door and his heart were locked, and therefore fewer joys and disappointments from the world than did Father Briar.   
For example, tonight the man had been lonely and out for a drive. Driving and listening to the radio were a form of mediation for him, and he often drove in weather and other circumstances he shouldn't have. Having, perhaps subconsciously, drifted over towards his favorite parish in the diocese, he made the effort to ask Cedric out for dinner and more driving with him.

Since Northern Minnesota is sparsely populated and as lonely, as well, as lonely an old Bishop, dining options were minimal. So it wasn't much of a coincidence that they ended up at Hurley's Hanging Gardens, especially after they'd been out "cruising" for an hour or better. Father Briar had been frightened as they'd driven; the bishop was a terrible driver and seemed to be in constant battle with the car.

When they finally pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant, he was so relieved and stressed he didn't even notice Montana Frank's vehicle parked five cars down.

Nor did he notice Julianna in the booth with the very same Montana Frank as they walked in. He was still thinking about the dozen or so times the Bishop Muller had narrowly missed hitting other cars or careening headlong into the ditch.

"I've heard the lamp chops are good here," Bishop Muller commented.

"I'll be having fish," Cedric said.

Julianna fussed and fumed and plotted and schemed and worried.

"What am I going to do if he sees us?" she wondered, heart pounding.

Their meals came.

"This looks delicious," Mr. Montana commented.

"It sure does," Julianna agreed.

They both, however, privately thought it didn't look any different than the plates they'd have gotten and Bjorn's. Oh, sure, they might've arranged the victuals on the plates here a little fancier here; the potatoes were a good five centimeters away from the fish and not a morsel was anywhere the edge of the plate. At Bjorn's, overlap was common and edges of your fried chicken breast hanging over the plate was a sure sign of gourmet eats.

Julianna picked at her salad and tried not to look at the booth behind her. She felt ashamed and frightened, like she wanted to disappear into a crack in the floorboard and go down into the depths of the earth. But even the thought of that triggered her claustrophobia, her fear of being trapped under the earth, to be buried alive, to be closer to hell.

The first part of dinner with the bishop was a minor hell, just the first ring, which Dante describes as merely a deficient form of Heaven, a place where beings are controlled by nothing but rationality and therefore can dream of and aspire to nothing greater and more holy than logical minds can conceive of.

Bishop Muller chewed with his mouth open, talked in a low mumble about nothing, and looked between his plate and his guest with big, red, wet eyes.

"Sometimes he looks like a sad clown, and sometimes he just looks like a clown," Cedric thought between mouthfuls of (admittedly delicious) broiled Walleyed Pike. "The former is better than the latter; at least sad clowns have dignity."

"I'm so ashamed of myself," the bishop thought. "I've got to rely on those under me, priests who are too scared to say no, for company."

His lamb chops tasted like ash in his mouth.

"I'm so ashamed of myself," Julianna thought. This surprised her. She felt as though she was cheating on Cedric. "But how can you be unfaithful to a priest? Isn't going out with other men just part of the charade? And a part of the charade that should, at least, be part of the fun? I can't have a normal love life, why can't I at least have the appearance of one?"

"I heard on the radio that there might be a storm brewing up north," Montana Frank said, trying to lighten Julianna's darkened mood. He was a sensitive soul, prone to great worry about having offended others.

"You farmers, do you talk about anything but the weather?" Julianna wasn't trying to be rude, and she forced a plastic smile after saying it, but when his face fell, she knew she'd done wrong.

"Another sin," she sighed inwardly, "as if I can afford any more."

Father Briar, just physically a few feet away from Julianna and Mr. Montana, had, spiritually speaking, descended into the second circle of hell, where the punishments of "Hell proper" begin. Dante described it as a place "where no thing gleams."

Looking around, Father Briar concluded that indeed, this RESTAURANT was a perfect representation of this section of Dante's vision. The red tablecloths were muted, the silverware unpolished, the plates an eggshell white, the lighting dim, and the conversation without with or charm.

Even more appropriately, in the second circle of Hell reside people whose earthly lives were consumed by lust. These souls are buffeted back and forth by the terrible winds of a violent storm, without rest.

Always the classicist, Father Briar pulled a pen from his shirt pocket and began to doodle on the paper napkin that he'd asked for instead of the linens.

Seeing him, Bishop Muller asked, "are you distracted, or dissatisfied with our meal?"

"No, not at all. I am one of those Christians who firmly believes that "the devil makes work for idle hands."

For the first time all week, Bishop Muller smiled.

While Father Briar's Medieval Latin wasn't as well-practiced and daily-used as his classical Latin (the language of the church), it was still fluent and lovely, especially in his elegant handwriting.

"Love, which in gentlest hearts will soonest bloom

seized my lover with passion for that sweet body

from which I was torn unshriven to my doom.

Love, which permits no loved one not to love,

took me so strongly with delight in him

that we are one in Hell, as we were above.

Love led us to one death. In the depths of Hell

Julianna waits for him who took our lives."

This was the piteous tale they stopped to tell."

Conversation had stopped at Julianna and Mr. Montana's table as well. He'd started telling a story but lost the narrative thread somewhere after she'd offered him one of her lamb chops.

Julianna felt awful. She was mad at everybody in the room and wished it would snow so much that they'd be just swept away into the white nothing. She would've said a little prayer, but thought that it might be blasphemous, given the circumstances. If not blasphemous, at least asking too much of the Lord, going a bridge too far.

She had forgotten, in her time of stress and sorrow, that no span is too long for a caring God. Bishop Muller, noticing Cedric doodling Dante's _Inferno_ on the cocktail napkin, got the hint and suggested they repair home early, before dessert, even.

So worried was Father Briar about the dangers of the drive home that he didn't even notice his girlfriend with the town's most eligible bachelor. He was just praying they got home safe.

Which, of course, they did.

**Chapter Twenty:** **Weren't the Disciples Out on a Lake in a Storm and Christ Calmed it for Them? Few Such Miracles, These Days.**

The Irish fisherman, Stevie Coughlin, was in a weatherman's glory. This meant he could lie his ass off and not be called on it. In this way, it was handy he was an Irishman, a people, because of Houlihan, the town's scurrilous innkeeper, had a reputation around Brannaska as being slippery with the truth.

"She's a whopper, she's a maelstrom, she's a monster!" he screamed into the National Weather Service phones, which were ringing consistently, with people requesting and offering information.

"Does that guy know any science or does he just know adjectives?" One of the college-trained forecasters asked.

"Knowing all the best adjectives is most of meteorology," Reginald (never Reggie) Roggenbucker, who was their most recently hired weatherman, said. Reginald was the lone son of the Roggenbucker Phone Monopoly, and he wanted out of the family business. So he'd studied economics at the U of M, which was the only science more fraudulent than meteorology, and had been hired, fresh out of school, by the new Weather Service.

True, but there was, even then, some established science. It was well-known, in fact, that an Alberta Clipper originated when warm, moist winds from the Pacific Ocean come into contact with the mountains in the provinces of British Columbia and then Alberta and into Manitoba's wild northern kingdom

"To form, the air travels through the mountains, forming what are known as Chinook winds in Alberta, then develops into a storm over the Canadian prairies when it becomes entangled, like an abusive lover, with the cold air hanging there.

The storm then slides southward and gets caught up in the jet stream, sending the storm barreling into the North and Central areas of the United States.'

"In a weird little fact, the term isn't used in Alberta, because the winds up there that cause the storms down here are warm. They start as warmth in Alberta and when they get to Minnesota, they are dangerous and full of ice and snow." This seemed, to Reginald Roggenbucker, as a perfect metaphor for life in the state.

"Aye, laddies, just like the nasty rippers coming off the North Atlantic, these Canadian storms sweep in at high speed over whatever land they encounter, usually bringing with them terrible conditions."

"What did this old blowhard know?" all the college boys asked themselves. But he was, for once in his sorry and sodden life, he was right. It was not uncommon for an Alberta Clipper to cause temperatures to drop by thirty degrees in ten hours. These crazed storms bring with them shark-like winds, compounding the ferocity of the temperatures.

Making things even worse for Brannaskans, the northern, southern and eastern shores of the Great Lakes, of which Superior graces Minnesota's borders, often receive enhanced snowfall from Alberta Clippers during the winter, due to lake enhancement. The lake-effect snow can add substantially to the overall snowfall total.

"Don't care about "lake enhancement," boyos?" Coughlin asked the assembled staff. "Ya should. It could be the difference between five and fifty inches of snow, the difference between life and death.

Reginald (never Reggie) Roggenbucker kept a laminated prayer card in the top left drawer of his desk. As a scientist, Reginald never wanted to be teased about his faith, hence the secrecy. It read:

"O My God, I adore Thee and I love Thee with all my heart. I thank Thee for having created me, for having made me a Catholic and for having watched over me this day. Pardon me for the evil I have done this day; and if I have done any good, deign to accept it. Watch over me while I take my rest and deliver me from danger. May Thy grace be always with me.

Amen."

On the backside was a picture of Jesus in a storm, wandering the wilderness, being stalked somewhere off in the deep woods by a red-eyed wolf with hornlike ears and spittle drooling from his jaws.

The most common type of wolf is the gray wolf, or timber wolf. There was nothing common about this particular wolf, however. Adult grey wolves are 4 to 6 feet long and weigh about 40 to 175 pounds. This wolf was at least 8 feet long and five feet high at the shoulders. Just like its name, the gray wolf typically has thick gray fur. This one had fur like steel wool that was thicker than shag carpeting.

Wolf packs have a leader, known as the alpha male. This wolf was the Alpha of the alpha males. Each pack guards its territory against intruders and may even kill other wolves that are not part of their pack and this one often killed just for the sake of it, the sheer bloodlust. Wolves are nocturnal and will hunt for food at night and sleep during the day. This wolf needed neither food nor sleep, for days upon days. It was machine-like and without emotion or pain.

Packs of wolves don't like to stay in one place. They are known to travel as far as 12 miles (20 kilometers) per day. The march this wolf was undertaking required triple that pace and he ran the distance with a vicious ease.

Wolves have friends. This wolf did not. Wolves howl to communicate with other members of the pack. When this wolf howled, the rest of his pack knew to stay away for violence was afoot.

Violence was always afoot, and when Reginald held his picture and recited its prayer, he always worried for Jesus and prayed he'd escape that wolf.
Chapter Twenty One: There is a Commandment About Respecting Your Mother, Right?

Underneath her dozen layers of winter clothing, Gosha was not a big woman. She ate like a bird and not just metaphorically, she actually pecked at her food and swallowed the tiny morsels whole.

Bjorn was always fascinated. They weren't from very far away from one another, originally; Stockholm and Warsaw are only five hundred miles apart. But Bjorn felt like he was a very American man, deeply assimilated and accustomed to the ways of the country. He, like most of the others in town, viewed Gosha as an outsider, a foreigner, an alien.

Another outsider had swept into town! This was news worthy of an exclamation point. Julianna's mother was there for a visit.

"She flew into Minneapolis. Flew! The money these people must have," he speculated to the cook.

"None of your business, Bjorn," she reminded him.

"Flew on Northwest Orient Airlines," he said, not quite ready to let it go yet. Bjorn was a big fan of the Minneapolis-based airline company because of their effort to help United States Armed Forces during the recently ended Korean War. At the beginning of the decade, they'd airlifted troops and equipment over to Korea, in the process expanding their base of commercial operations in the region, hence the newly added (and not yet offensive) term "Oriental" to their name.

"Flew in on a Stratocruiser. They have an organist on there. Music while you dine in the sky." The old café proprietor shook his head with awe and wonder. There was a twinkle in his brown eyes that the cook found delightful, in spite of herself.

"He can be a charming old rascal," she admitted, deep in her heart of hearts. "But his obsession with airplanes is a bit childish."

Bjorn didn't think it was childish, he thought it manly. In his life, he had two big aspirations, beyond his family and restaurant: he wanted to fly on a Northwest Orient Airlines Stratocruiser, and he wanted to ride a camel.

One of those goals seemed much more attainable than the other, and now here was Julianna's mom, fresh off the airplane. Bjorn would have to investigate, interrogate if necessary, when she came in for breakfast.

To his endless surprise, she came in on the arm of Gosha. And that is not a colloquial expression; she walked in arm-in-arm with the Polish woman.

This had been a habit of woman in Warsaw and all across the Old World. They walked holding one another like that to show solidarity, and often because the ancient cobblestone streets were slick and dangerous for un-aided pedestrians.

The sidewalks of Brannaska were similar, especially in the depths of this winter. So the matronly women had stepped lightly and together and had made it into the cafe for breakfast still vertical and unharmed by falls.

Julianna was in the back, helping with dishes and frying eggs. Bjorn's booming voice filled the kitchen.

"Your mother is here Julianna!"

She wiped her soapy hands on her apron and went out to say hello. When she was Gosha sitting in the booth next to her mom, she almost fainted.

"Next to her in the booth! Not across from her, right next to her!" Julianna marveled.

"We left space in the booth for you," her mother said, imperiously waving her into the seat across from her and her new friend.

"I see you've met my neighbor," Julianna said with a wry, real smile.

Her mother was staying Houlihan's Inn, the only commercial accommodation in town. She'd insisted on staying there because she "didn't want to impose or put you out, Julianna." The place was run by an Irishman so foul that even Father Briar, in all his Catholic, Celtic pride, refused to acknowledge his existence.

"Yes, I met her this morning when I was out for my constitutional."

"Ah," Julianna said. Her mother was in the habit of taking a long, pre-dawn walk to help her move her bowels. Along the way, she'd sneak a few drags on a cigarette, which she found to help the condition. These were secrets (her irritable intestines and nicotine fixes, not her walks) that she'd managed to hide from her husband across four successful decades of marriage. Hide from her husband, but not her daughter.

"Yes. I was out for an early stroll and met Gosha, who was out for the same."

This wasn't exactly true. Gosha had been on "humping patrol," her self-styled mission to either aid or bust the town's fornicating couples. She'd been cruising the streets all night, but her voyeuristic and moralistic crusade had gone unsuccessful. She'd seen Mrs. Warwidge walking like an Olympian's determination and decided to investigate this person who was, just possibly, the newest stranger in town.

As the town's resident "newest stranger in town," Gosha didn't want any fresh arrivals usurping her position.

"Your mother has been talking about the priest in her parish back in Seattle," Gosha explained, pecking at a yolky forkful of fried egg.

Julianna got a little queasy, both from looking at the gooey, jiggling egg and from what other priests they might have been talking about.

As if guided by the merciless Hand of God, Father Briar came through the door.

Unable to control her sudden terror, Julianna cried out "oh God!"

"That isn't God, it's just the priest. Sophisticated girl like you ought to know the difference by now," Gosha said and her mother giggled. They were already sharing private jokes.

Julianna felt as though she would keel over right then and there. "Just bury me in this booth," she thought, "it's nice and plush and comfortable."

Little did she know that somebody else in town had the same peculiar funeral arrangements, and that Bjorn would have to honor that request before the winter was out.

"I think those pancakes look delicious," Mrs. Warwidge said.

Julianna took this as her opportunity to extract herself from the dizzying situation, if only momentarily to do her job.

"Please don't sit down next to Gosha and mom," she silently begged her boyfriend.

So of course he did.

"Maybe if I tell her we are out of pancakes, she'll leave," Julianna schemed.

"I think we're out of pancakes," she told the table of various and sundry Catholics that she was related to, hiding from, and having an affair with, in order of seating.

"Plenty of batter," Bjorn boomed, a smart smile on his face. He didn't know what Julianna was up to, but whatever her plan was, he was going to enjoy throwing a monkey wrench into it.

"Pancakes sound delicious, thanks, Julianna. I'll have a slice of blueberry pie with that, too," Cedric said.

"So, Father Briar," Gosha said, "how are you dealing with the winter weather? Keeping warm somehow, I hope?" she asked, an eyebrow raised.

Pouring the pancakes in the kitchen, Julianna strained to hear every word of the conversation.

"Julianna has spoken well of the Father here and says that he's an excellent servant of the Lord," Angeline Warwidge said.

"I'm sure she has," Gosha said, her voice full of malice and portent.

"Your daughter flatters me; I'm just a humble parish priest."

"That she does, and that you are," Gosha said, with enough sarcasm that both Julianna and her mom were stung.

"Oh, Cedric, what were you thinking sitting down with them? How stupid could you be?" Julianna moaned under her breath. The cakes sizzled on the griddle.

"You have flown in?" Cedric asked, trying to change the conversation.

"On a Northwest Orient Stratocruiser, no less!" Bjorn enthused from across the restaurant.

"Really? I heard they have an organist on the plane."

"Yes, I was able to listen to music while we dined."

"Dined forty thousand feet in the air," Bjorn said, still amazed.

"Julianna has never been on an airplane," her mother said. "Not even in the war. Not even to come here. She took the train out here, because of her nerves," her mother said, trying not to sneer.

"Come on, Cedric, say something nice about me," Julianna thought, pouring the next three round batches of batter.

But the priest was silent.

"She hasn't gotten out and about much here, either. She goes to church, not much else," Gosha informed her mother, patting her on the arm with sympathy.

"Come on Cedric, defend me," Julianna muttered. The cook didn't hear over the frying of the eggs.

"Some people have a hard time with the adjustment to moving somewhere new," he said, his voice as meek as a lamb.

She wanted to spit in his pancakes, but didn't. She plated the stacks silently and, heart in her gut, went out to serve them. The table fell silent as they ate and the rest of breakfast passed without incident.

Yet again, pancakes had saved love. But for how long?

Chapter Twenty Two: Fish Fry Brings Heat to the Relationship

Cedric and Julianna mingled amongst the parishioners in the all-purpose church basement, together, but apart. It was Mrs. Warwidge's last night in town and her and her daughter had toured the sites of Brannaska, which consisted mainly of the two houses of worship.

"Very nice facilities," her mother commented, and then said very little more throughout the course of the day as they pitched in to help Father Briar.

The Catholic community had gathered together to help raise funds to pay the heating bills for the poorest church members. While firewood was plentiful, if one was elderly and without family to chop it, it could get expensive. Furthermore, some houses, especially those in town, heated themselves on natural gas, which also could be difficult to pay for on a fixed income.

"Give generously and graciously, please," Cedric ended the prayer by gesturing to the donation box in front of his flock. "And eat generously and graciously of our food."

All morning, using knowledge picked up from the cook at Bjorn's, Julianna cooked. Her mother, impressed as always by her daughter's efforts (if not always the outcome), helped with whatever she could.

"This morning's work reminds me of Jesus in the cave," Father Briar said,

There was coleslaw, white and runny with mayonnaise, the cabbage limp and soft. There was potato salad; this was a largely German Catholic parish, so there was **always** potato salad. Made with French's mustard, it glowed neon yellow and was always full of chopped onions and dried dill weed. There were dinner rolls, white bread with even whiter margarine.

But there was also fish; glorious fish, walleye pike in flour batter, peppered and salted and so crunchy and golden and flavorfully perfect that it was a little miracle all by itself.

"This fish fry is delicious, Father Briar."

"Yes, what a delightful occasion. A hale and hearty way to break up winter's monotony."

The compliments, unlike the dollar bills in the collection plate, were in no short supply.

"Donate generously, this goes towards a very worthy cause. We are heating the community so they can stay warm and safe in their own homes a noble cause to say the least." Cedric again gestured and repeated the same holy rituals; he enjoyed making a show of it all, the mystery of his office. He also hadn't had a meal outside of the parish house or Bjorn's in more than a week.

Julianna was on the edge of the room. She sighed in ill-concealed boredom.

"Whatever is the matter?" asked her mother. "Are you tired of me?"

"Nothing," replied Julianna. She was tired of such events, because it was getting harder and harder to conceal her affection for Cedric. It was also getting harder and harder to conceal her irritation with him. It was also getting harder to see him giving attention to other women, even if their spiritual needs were pressing and genuine.

"I leave in the morning, if that makes you feel any better."

"It makes me feel worse. I love you, mom."

"Alas Father Briar, it is like the feeding of the five thousand." An inebriated parishioner, carried away from drinking too much communion wine, was drawing silly religious comparisons. Cedric blushed in embarrassment.

"We will have no such silly comparisons here this is a place of worship. Father Briar, put an end to this blasphemy at once." Gosha said in anger to the man.

"She's quite the piece of work, your neighbor," Mrs. Warwidge said. "Did you know she's a welder and something of an automotive engineer?"

Julianna nodded but she wasn't listening. She was paying attention to her estranged love.

"He was only making a well-meaning joke." Cedric pleaded to the angry Pole. "Gosha, I think that you are misinterpreting. Maybe this is just a matter of language."

"My English language speaking is flawless. It is not my understanding of the words. It is the words themselves. Not only were his words incorrect, it is a sin for you to allow such behavior in such a holy place."

"Well, no man is without sin. I have never claimed to be 'holier-than-thou, and even the Lord Jesus Christ said, "let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

The taxidermist tossed a dinner roll across the room. It landed on top of another table with a 'thunk.'

"It was as hard as a stone," he joked. A few of the parishioners laughed, trying to break up the tension.

She wouldn't let it drop. Cedric placed his hands on her shoulders. Gosha erupted in a fit, looking for all the world like an adorable three year old having a short-lived temper tantrum in Polish.

"Cedric, can you silence this mad woman?" Julianna piped up as she scowled at Gosha. Mrs. Warwidge was embarrassed for both of them. Cedric choose to ignore Julianna's request

"I can't just tell her to do that, she has every right to be here as anyone else," said Cedric, trying to avoid making eye contact with her.

"Why don't you take the priest away," her mother counseled, "you seem to have a calming effect on him."

Now what did that mean? Julianna was about to lose her mind.

The drunken parishioner (who is being left nameless to protect his reputation) sidled up to Gosha and began flirting. To his great surprise, she calmed down and flirted back; at least he thought she did, his mind was clouded with liquor and his Polish was non-existent.

Julianna took this opportunity to walk Cedric out to the parking lot as she went to her car.

"Why are you so upset with me today?" he asked. "You've barely said word one."

"Words, words, it always starts with words."

"Don't corrupt scripture, Jewels."

"Don't call me Jewels, Father Briar," she said, managing to pronounce "Father" like it was a curse word.

"What is wrong?"

"Why didn't you defend me at breakfast the other day?"

"I was trying to play it "cool." Isn't that the new slang for things today? Playing it cool?"

"I needed you to stand up for me!"

"What if Gosha or your mother found out about the affair? I can't have any of this. It would be a scandal. I would be ruined!"

"I felt ruined."

Cedric thought for a while with his eye still on Julianna, who frowned back at him.

"I need to talk with the Lord," Cedric said, in a somewhat sheepish tone as he retired to the parish house.

Minutes later, amidst the bickering, Julianna snuck back to see him.

"Cedric," Julianna looked at Cedric who appeared to be deep in meditation. He opened his eyes and looked at Julianna.

"I can't continue to live like this," she told him, trying to sound calm and matter of fact, although she was anything but.

"Like what?" Cedric pretended not to understand what Julianna, who by now was rapidly losing her patience, was talking about.

"I can't continue living in a lie, Cedric, wandering and sneaking around, skulking in the shadows like some silly school girl. I won't be Ramona Herbertson." Julianna paused as Cedric looked on in silence.

"What matters to you more Cedric? Me, or the church?"

"Julianna, you present this to me as if it is an either or. Do you not realize that I, no, we can have both?

Cedric left a frustrated Julianna in the confines of his little home.

"I need time and space from you, Cedric."

Cedric looked ashamed, sheepish, and sad.

Julianna laid down the law and then left, winning the fight and squashing any potential for a rematch. 
Chapter Twenty Three: Ralphie Roggenbucker Goes Repairing.

** "**The wind tore at the fabric of reality."

Ralphie had a lot of time to himself, time to think. He was on the road a lot and he was off the road a lot; the quickest and most efficient route for telephone wires didn't ever follow the roads. So he spent a lot of time trudging through fields and forests, without even a dog for companionship, thinking up sentences like that one and testing out their roadworthiness.

That Irish blowhard down at the Weather Service had phoned Ma Earnestine and told her that "a whopper of a storm was a' brewing and she ought to let Brannaska know; he'd just gotten off the phone with WCCO for the fourteenth time that day.

So he was out shoring up poles and wires he worried might be a little less stable and sturdy. His work was solid, to be sure, but he liked to make sure his customers had service at all times, so he was out looking for "leaners," poles that might have drifted this way or that due to the previous high winds and blowing snow.

If this blizzard truly was a "once in a generation event, to be sure, laddy," he wanted every line and pole secure and stronger than the coffee at Bjorn's, where the farmers had to drink it out of steel mugs, lest it eat a hole through the inferior ceramic ones preferred at other restaurants.

He also knew that this storm was strong enough to bring his death. Ralphie certainly wasn't planning on that, no, he had a family to survive for. But if it came to that, he was prepared.

Ralphie had arranged to be buried in one of the booths at Bjorn's. Not in the restaurant, no, he was considerate and practical enough to let them remove the booth. Those booths were where he'd felt the most safe, the most at home, and he wanted to spend eternity in one.

So he'd secretly conspired with Bjorn (he knew the cook would never go for such foolishness) to have on of the booths removed (to be replaced at Ralphie's own expense, of course) and have his perfectly powdered and preserved corpse to be laid in it, as though he'd fallen asleep after a big smorgasbord. The whole mise en scene would then be sealed in a large pine box of Ralphie's own construction and then put into the ground, the grave being dug by the biggest backhoe in seven counties.

Bjorn thought it was the most succinct and perfect expression of religious faith he'd ever heard.

There was a pig hauler attached to the back of his re-purposed Coca Cola pickup truck and he had his poles all stacked up. If a pole had rotted or broken or needed to be newly installed, first he would unhitch the chain that bound them together. The top pole would roll down and settle into the snow with a soft and misty thud. Then he would role it into place, right over the post-hole and attach another chain. Then he would use the pickup to pull them vertical, driving slow and with a firm hand.

If the poles needed straightening, he used a similar procedure, often digging out the foundation of the post and re-packing it with new dirt, all the while using his eyes and experience as a level, gauging whether or not the pole was straight. When he was satisfied, he'd pack up his tools and drive to the next site. It was grueling, exacting, and exhausting.

It was also peaceful and meditative. He was probably the most spiritual fellow in town; Cedric's clerical collar and Jesuit rigor were easily matched by Ralphie's deep reading and time for reflection.

Since he spent so much time outside, he was also well attuned to the region's natural rhythms.

"That's odd," he noted, something in those tunes seeming out of pitch, "that Timber Wolf is moving fast. Rare to see them so clearly, and in such daylight."

And then the wolf was upon him. For the sensitive souls out there; I'm sure Ralphie's death was swift and as merciful as the capricious hand of Nature could make it. 
Chapter Twenty Four: Ralphie is Laid to Rest.

There was a knock on Julianna's door. She still had her pine and poinsettia Christmas wreath on the door and she was momentarily embarrassed and worried whoever this was wouldn't judge her for still having it up.

Julianna pulled the curtains in a discrete and conspiratorial manner to see who was knocking. Cedric was already looking at her, for he knew that she always peeped out of the window next to the door. Irritated, Julianna scowled at Cedric and pulled the curtains back. She wasn't ready to see him just yet; she'd needed her space and time to think and reflect.

"I'm human, Jewels."

"Unlike many in the congregation, I never thought you were divine," she said, acid on her tongue.

Wounded, he ignored her and plowed on. "I make mistakes, I know. I just want the best for us."

"Us?"

She still hadn't let him in, so Cedric stood in silence in the snowy road. The only noise was the gentle hum of the nearby generator substation.

The door opened, but just a crack. She peered through, somehow managing to look hostile with just one eye. Her hair was in curlers and she was wearing nothing but a slip.

"What do you want?" disgruntled and grouchy, Julianna looked like she was in no mood to play games.

"My dearest, I want you, and I want us to be open to the world about our love. Is it really that much to ask? But you know that can't be the case. You know we can't share our hearts with the world," pleaded Cedric, standing in the featureless snow.

"You are a conflicted man Cedric." the harshness of her words hit Cedric hard.

"Are you Cedric or are you Father Briar?" Julianna continued

"I'm tired of playing these games Cedric?"

"Games? Julianna, I would go to the ends of the Earth for you. You must realize that this is a deep spiritual conflict in my soul. It is about the very foundation of who I am as a person. This is my church, my livelihood, my life."

"Well go and take your conflict and your soul elsewhere I am not your play thing." Julianna attempted to shut the door but Cedric had his hand placed on it with all his body weight.

"This is no way for a man of god to behave you would be wise to get your hands off this door before I alert the authorities."

"Julianna" Cedric's piercing gaze stopped Julianna right in her tracks.

"We need to get to the icehouse." Cedric and Julianna remained locked in a stare.

"You had better let me get changed then," she said as she ran upstairs. Cedric closed the door to prevent any further heat from escaping. Minutes later Julianna appeared, dressed in a Parka and looking beautiful they drove off along the snowy road.

A hundred miles north the Alberta Clipper was growing in intensity. News on the local radio fills the airways. A warning goes throughout Brannaska - several villages have lost contact with the town but only those cooped up within the comfort of their homes receive any warning.

Gosha entered the parish house. She had hoped to inform Cedric of the dire weather. She looked at the notes that were sprawled out on his desk and the ashes on his hearth that had long since cooled.

"He has driven out, driven out into the path of this oncoming storm. Has no one told him? This is madness. May God provide him with safe passage." Gosha said her rosaries and left the empty church.

The timber wolf made its way across the iced over lake in a speedy yet elegant fashion. It moved with a hypnotic rhythm. Its cadence was measured; every step looked like it had been planned out well in advance for its paws landed on the icy ground in an exquisite, balanced manner.

Although elegant, it knew that it was being chased. Was it another beast? No, this was no mere Grizzly with a sizeable attitude and an even more sizeable appetite this was a quite literal force of nature. The clipper was drifting south. Alberta was notorious for whipping up such ferocious weather systems, this year had reached a whole new level of carnage. It seemed that the hand of God was working against the people of Brannaska.

The hand of God lay gently upon the shoulder of Ernestine Roggenbucker. There had been little talk of her husband's death; all of the farmers, Protestant and Catholic, dealt with grief in the same way: silence.

The telephone family were Lutherans, so Cedric had no clerical responsibility in the funeral. The Church would've never sanctioned such strange and quite frankly sacrilegious burial arrangements, anyway, no matter how happy they'd made Bjorn. Father Briar had fought with Julianna about attending. He thought it necessary, she did not.

In the end, he'd ceded control. This was new enough to be refreshing and reaffirming. She thanked God for small miracles.

The smallest miracles are sometimes the most necessary. This was true for the funeral, too; of all the days that winter, the afternoon of the burial was the nicest. The sun shone and the wind stilled, if only for a moment, and Ralphie slept the sleep of the just.

His choice of caskets would prove to be remarkably full of foresight. The Naughahyde that made up the faux leather of the booth and the hardwoods and solid steels beneath it persevered his wolf-mauled remains for two thousand years, until his wounds had healed (time heals all things) and he looked like the strongest mummy ever discovered.

It is hard to argue with two thousand years of peace.
**Chapter Twenty Five: Forgiveness Often Comes at the Price of Travel** **.**

Cedric and Julianna looked at one another across her living room.

He'd come over, driven his own car, even, as a small show of acquiescence. Julianna, although irritated with him, still managed to give him a little smile.

Pausing to assess the gravity of his words Cedric looked out of the side of his car window as they traversed the frozen Minnesotan landscape.

"I'd be the disgrace of the Catholic Church this side of the states, no this side of the Atlantic." He'd been thinking about the consequences of their relationship for miles. Both of them were worried he wasn't concentrating on the road.

"Cedric, you are a decent man" Julianna put her hand on Cedric's lap and squeezed lightly. Fighting the urge to go further, Cedric moved Julianna's hand from off his lap.

"Jewels. Has nothing I said sunk in?" Cedric said in annoyance.

"I'm trying to comfort you." Julianna, defensive and a little rejected. He was usually so amorous, and this was an exciting weekend away, a weekend of makeup sex and sweet talk.

Silence filled the car. The atmosphere was bearable, as the long drives in the light and frothy snow had a way of tempering all but the most fraught of situations.

The forest spread out around them like a woolen blanket for a king sized bed. They walked in the happy silence unique to lovers. On the morning's drive up here, they'd spent a long time talking about the ethics of their affair and the remnants of the conversation lingered.

"I think it is immoral that they make you remain celibate. I think it's damaging to not let you have normal human relationships. And, when I say you, I don't necessarily mean you Father Briar, I mean you as in priests as a group."

"I love it when you speak so forthrightly. My calling is so filled with jargon and obfuscation that it is refreshing when people speak their mind with intelligence and honesty."

She knew she was being flattered, but she did not mind. Few people do...

"I knew well the restrictions and responsibilities placed upon me when I joined the Order."

"Did they deter you?"

"No, far from it. They attracted me. The rules drew me to it. They gave me a sense of clarity and they seemed not only logical, but natural and just."

"Wow, cool."

"Cool?" he asked, an eyebrow raised.

"Yes, I heard it from some of the boys on the hockey team. It means something is interesting or entertaining. I think."

"Rules are cool?"

"No. I don't think so. I'm not very clear on the concept yet," she said with a laugh.

Her laugh was full of rich tones and complex chords. He wished he were funnier, like W.C Fields or Bing Crosby. Heck, even Ed Sullivan got off a good zinger now and then. He wanted to be funny so he could hear that melodious laugh of hers more often.

It wasn't as though Father Briar was humorless, far from it. He very much enjoyed others people's jokes and when he made them himself, they were dry and clever and with an erudition and wit rare in the cornball era.

But while lightness came easy to him, and he was acquainted with joy and even religious ecstasy, he was unable to muster the acerbic insight and momentary meanness required for most humor. Cedric was simply too empathetic and kind to tease someone, if only for a passing moment.

Julianna, on the other hand, was a constant tease. She took great delight in poking at people's foibles. It was her way of making them feel included and part of the gang. She was never ever looking to hurt anybody's feelings, but if it happened for a second in search of a big laugh, so be it. It was only jokes!

In this and so many other ways they complimented each other.

"It is just too bad that the restrictions of your church don't allow us to show how good we are together in public," she mused.

"We could try to spend more time together at church functions," he offered.

"No," she countered, "I think we both would be too worried about being too obvious in our affections. I think we would end up acting, and putting on a show, a contrivance, a performance. And that would be a lie. And lies are sinful."

"That is an excellent rationale," he agreed, and they drove in silence for a few miles, the birch trees whirring alongside the road like a slide show in fast-forward. Life was a blur and she wanted it to slow down. She and Cedric had so few moments together that she wanted to pause every one of them and savor it, like a photograph or a painting.

"Do you think priests will ever be allowed to marry?"

"I sure hope so. I hope Pope Pius overturns the millennia-old rule next week. If he does, I'll marry you and officiate the ceremony myself, if they let me."

She was tickled, but still, it was a non-answer. So she grinned and let him drive in silence again for a while.

He was so mature, so grown, so manly, that she wanted to climb into the back seat and curl up and fall asleep. Julianna had done this as a kid while her father drove and the same sense of patrimonial safety and warmth washed over her. The car rocked with an easy, hypnotic beauty and her thoughts drifted, drifted to the comfort and safety of that sturdy wooden shack, of the solitude they'd enjoy together there, and the sex.

Oh, yes, she was anticipating the sex as she fell asleep. She may have even dreamt of it, but what man can tell of a woman's dreams?

******Chapter Twenty Six: The Calm Before the Storm** **.**

All was quiet on the western front.

It was the northern front that the trouble was coming from. Gosha peeped out of her window. The sky was a steely blue everywhere she looked, everywhere, that is, except the north. An imposing dark cloud was amassing in the distance. It looked like an anvil; black and heavy and immobile and indestructible, but the storm was moving at a great and terrible speed. The Alberta Clipper was tearing its way southward, towards Brannaska, towards her."

"Good heavens. In all my days, even in the Old Country, I have never seen anything as big as that!" she gasped as she continued to look at the approaching storm. "The radio said it wouldn't be here this quickly. Those fools never know a damn thing."

Gosha looked down at her window side table. It was a cluttered mash of newspaper clippings and religious paraphernalia.

"May God help this small town. This will be one to remember for the ages."

Gosha fortified her windows and doors, she'd already storm-proofed her windows but she wasn't willing to take any chances. She sealed them with plastic weather stripping, just to be safe.

She went outside to get wood from her shed. In the short time that she spent filling the wheelbarrow with logs, the temperature dropped a few degrees and the wind had picked up a few miles an hour.

It was still a ground blizzard; the winds were picking up snow from the ground, of which there was plenty, and whirling it into the air. The snow hadn't started falling from the sky yet. When it did, their troubles would be compounded exponentially.

"Come on, Gosha," she said to herself as she heaved and strained under the weight of the wheelbarrow. She'd shoveled a path and kept it clear every day but some of the blowing and drifting had already taken its toll.

She hadn't been out and about for a week, other than to attend Mass and do the most necessary of chores. The icicles hanging off the gutters of the house had grown several inches and dangled in a menacing manner over the door frame. Gosha had managed to carve out a path along the garden but the freshly blown snow concealed the compressed icy layer beneath it; the entire path had become a slippery gauntlet. Little avalanches feel down the conifers that lined the periphery of the garden, winter's icy grip had tightened its hold, viselike, mean, frustrated, and violent.

Gosha hunkered down for the weekend, as did the rest of Brannaska. They were quite obviously experienced people when it came to dealing with bad weather, but this Alberta Clipper was a monstrous weather system; it had the feel of a once in a generation storm.

The first snows hit Brannaska in a gently, but that changed at an alarming pace. With the winds came more and more snow so dense it was that when Gosha took the opportunity to take a peak outside she could not see the mailbox at the end of her front yard, and it wasn't far away– the whiteout had begun.

Before the days of radio, the townsfolk of Brannaska would often get caught out in blizzards. Storms such as these would rise on sunny and temperate days. The fear of such death had yet to disappear from the collective psyche of Brannaska.

Therefore, the citizens depended on reliable old WCCO for weather updates and the storm hits with terrifying swiftness and brute force. "It is like a combination of Ezzard Charles and Sugar Ray Robinson," the NWS meteorologist told them about this particular storm referencing two champion boxers of the year.

"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.

"So I'm going to go and shovel us out a little bit."

"Dear heart, don't go. It's so dangerous and cold!"

"It will be okay. I'm going to tie this rope around my waist and tie the other end to the support beam in here. That way, I can't wander off and lose my way, in case we get into a whiteout situation. I'm also going to shovel a path to the car, and tie the rope to the door handle. That way we can't lose the car, either."

How he managed to sound so cheerful was beyond her. But she wasn't a shirker, so she was tough and resolute, if only for him.

Gosha fiddled with the radio dial while she drove, but she never wobbled or wavered, the truck stayed straight and true. Soon, the reliable voice of WCCO came through, smooth, cultured, cosmopolitan (well, out of Minneapolis, anyway, which might as well have been Paris as far as the Brannaskans were concerned) came from the tinny little speakers.

"An Alberta Clipper of this magnitude and malignancy has never been seen before," the WCCO weatherman said. "If you are in Northern Minnesota, seek solid, warm shelter immediately. Stay in your homes, I repeat: stay in your homes. And don't think you are safe in your house. Precautions must be taken there, too. Shore up your windows with weather stripping. Stock extra wood for the fireplace. And for goodness sakes, keep your children and your loved ones near to you, its going to be a dangerous few days. Stay tuned to WCCO for 'Weather Updates on the Eights.' Young Sid Hartmann is up next with sports news."

"I was watching _Lucy_ with you and dad the other night and something came to me. Came to me in a little and unused part of my brain," Trig said, sounding almost eloquent. What he lacked up for in depth of vocabulary and elocution, he made up for in preacher's heartfelt innocence and truth.

His mother was wary but encouraged. Unlike most of his monosyllabic peers, Trig would often strike up conversations with his mother, conversations that lasted full sentences, full paragraphs, even. But they always concerned hockey or dinner, or, when he was feeling particularly loquacious and inspired, eating dinner while playing hockey.

Not tonight. Not with Ramona, still sweaty from sexual exertion, standing by his side, ashamed, embarrassed by Gosha's easy busting of them and yet somehow still a little defiant.

Even boys of lesser moral fiber can rise to inspired heights, especially when standing on the shoulders of a benevolent God, the sort of benevolent dude-like bro-deity who puts his girl up on his shoulders at the rock and roll concert on a drunken summer's evening, if only to better see a verse of her favorite song and flash her breasts at the bassist.

"We were watching _Lucy_ and I saw how Lucy and Ethel let their contest winnings slip through their fingers by carelessness and accident."

This was true. Lucy and Ethel had won a newspaper giveaway contest on that week's episode but their carelessness had cost them both the winning entry receipt and their chance at a ten dollar windfall.

"And I always hear about Father Briar talking about Jesus in the cave, and the patience it had given him, and how he'd recognized what was important in life."  
Again, the hockey star had misunderstood a fundamental proverb and the lesson to be learned from it, but the old saw "Jesus Loves a Trier" had never been truer. Trig was a Trier.

Ramona perked up next to him. A little color returned to her cheeks and he swelled from breast to thighs in anticipation.

"And I have decided that I won't let the prize of my life slip away through carelessness."

Ramona thought she might faint with joy right then and there. To her impressionable teenage years, that sounded like the beginnings of a marriage proposal.

Trig's mother was equally weak in the knees, but for different reasons. To her, this sounded like a prayer in which Trygve Thorbjorn Olsen was accepting Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior.

Ty Olsen was just happy his son was accepting manliness and the responsibility God asks those who chose to be men to bear. They all knew Trig would be wrong and they would all be wrong in his explanation, but they did not care.

"Jesus in the cave learned of the patience necessary to endure years of trial, I too will learn patience at college. And, just as Lucy and Ethel learned that being shortsighted and unable to see the wider world could contribute to the loss of money, sweet sweet money, and they learned that without one another, they were nothing, I'm going to have Ramona join me at school. I saved money doing taxidermy for dad all school year, with that money, I'll support Ramona until she gets a job or gets some classes. She'll cheer me at hockey, I'll cheer her in class."

They, eventually, they would divorce after twenty years of marriage, sixteen happy, two average, and only two difficult. For most people it would be hard to argue with that percentage of success, but athletes and small town girls with ambition and proto-feminist ideals should not be judged like the rest of us.

And so, through great mistakes and minor miracles, this family was united.

Julianna kissed him as he went outside. He had to work to push the door open against the force of the wind. The rope slid along through behind him.

It was nearly a whiteout.

The sun was high, which was the only indication of time. Its brightness was awful, turning the flying snow and shards of ice into blinding particles of pain which sting his eyes and face without care or mercy.

The wind whipped, blowing him first left, then right, then back against the icehouse with a fearful thump. He didn't think he'd be able to take steps forward until the force whirled again and propelled him towards the indistinct black mass that was the car.

"There is a flare gun in the trunk, along with some extra blankets," he remembered. They'd brought in most of their winter survival kit when they'd first come, but not quite all of it. He didn't know what they'd do with the flare gun, anybody else on the lake wasn't coming to rescue, and they were as trapped as Cedric and Julianna. And anyway, Cedric didn't think even the flare could be seen through this wicked weather.

Teenagers had been using the icehouse (as evidenced by the empty beer bottles) and had cut a number of holes, too close to the house and snow had insulated them; instead of freezing over, they'd stayed open, with only a loose, slushy crust on top. They littered the route between the icehouse and the car like landmines, but Cedric had no way of knowing.

He managed to make it all the way to the car and tied his end of the rope around the door handle, which he found only by fumbling and fussing and running his mitten covered hands over the whole of the vehicle.

While he was doing so, he brushed as much of the snow from the car as he could. It was full of ice crystals and was therefore gritty and abrasive, not as heavy as wet snow but a grave threat nevertheless.

Then, with great fastidiousness, he slid his mitten off and into his coat pocket, grabbing the car keys with the same motion. He knew it was so cold he had one try to get them into the trunk's lock. Within seconds his hand was trembling but the ice gave way, metal scraped against metal and went in.

With an effort that took almost the last of his remaining strength, he wrested the trunk open, the ice crunching and cracking from the hinges as he did. He put the flare gun in his pocket and retrieved his mitten. Father Briar trudged back to the icehouse. He was halfway there when the rope gave way. He hadn't tied it tightly enough to the door handle and it slid off when a gust of wind blew across the frozen lake.

He might've made it back, he wasn't that far away, and even half snow blind, he could see the shelter.

But then his foot found one of the holes cut a few days prior by the teens and he went in almost to the knee.

His first thoughts were, "its odd my shin didn't snap. Odd, to be so calm in the face of such danger."

Then he wanted to panic. The gravity of the situation was overwhelming and it was all he could due not to pull hard on the rope. But he knew that if he hadn't tied it tight to the car door, he probably hadn't tied it tight enough inside, either, and didn't want to lose his tether to the earth and be sucked under. He didn't know how big the hole was. Time seemed to have stopped. He thought only of Julianna and the pain in his leg.

Taking a deep breath, he decided what to do. He couldn't move for fear of falling through further, his eyes were full of tears, his lungs aching from effort.

Cedric gave three long but gentle tugs on the rope. He followed those with three short, sharp tugs, and three more slow, long ones. He waited, then repeated his message.

Three long, three short, three long.

It took Julianna only moments to figure out the Morse code Cedric was sending her. She and all the other WAC girls had memorized it in their first days of training.

As she put her coat and boots on, the tugging got more urgent and she knew whatever trouble he was in was getting worse.

"He's stuck out there and I have to go out and get him," she told herself to build her courage, "or else he'll die."

So out she went.

Just yards away, on the other side of the icehouse, the wolf had curled up against the shelter to soak up the heat from Julianna and Cedric's fire. They didn't know he was out there. Not yet. They would, though, once he was rested from his incredible run to escape the storm. He knew he couldn't run forever and when he'd seen the shelter, even the smell of humans wasn't enough to deter him from hunkering down.

He smelled food, too. His belly growled and despite the dark of the night blizzard, his teeth glistened.

Gosha's driving was masterful.

The beast drove beautifully. It was like there was no snow or wind or anything but a breezy summer afternoon. Bishop Dale Mueller, who'd not been able to drive his Lincoln Coupe more than ten miles and hour (and even then had ended up in the ditch) was flummoxed. She plowed through snowdrifts half the height of the car with an assassin's confidence. On the rare occasions that the tires of her Ford Truck lost grip on the road, she adjusted the wheel a fraction of a millimeter, into the skid, not away from it, like he would've, and they were back on course, straight and true.

All the while, she listened to WCCO radio and gave running commentary on the weather reports, the state of the Catholic Church, jokes about Germans, rumors about the parish, and graphic descriptions of the deviant sexual acts she was convinced Julianna and Father Briar were up to.

Dale could see why this woman was such a force within the congregation. She was a non-stop machine of intimidation and innuendo, laced with a heaping scoopful of charm.

"The old girl is entertaining," he thought as she told yet another joke.

"Poland is invaded by Russia from the east and Germany from the west. Which way shoot first?"

"I don't know." He really didn't.

"West. Because always: business before pleasure!" Then she laughed her gurgling and cackling laugh.

Despite that those are the best two words with which to describe it (everybody in Brannaska did) it was an appealing sound, one that grew on you. "Sorta like a fungus," the Ty Olsen had once said. There wouldn't be much to say anymore. now that she'd saved his precious child and his not-quite virginal girlfriend.

She kept up this patter through a snowstorm that had left snowplows stranded in their garages and the bravest of men mewling like kittens. Never once did her strong left hand waver, she kept it strong and true on the wheel and their course was always correct.

"Don't come any closer, Julianna, I'm afraid you'll crack through the ice."

"Now you are telling me not to be scared of the ice? Heckuva reversal, that. I didn't believe you then, but I learned. I believe you now. This is four feet thick. I've been chipping away at the hole inside all day."

"I broke through."

"Don't think you did. You mentioned teenagers. I saw the empties. They just cut come fishing holes too close to the icehouse. That is what you fell through, I'm sure of it."

"No, Julianna, I feel through a huge hole in the ice and I'm barely hanging on."

Despite the blizzard, the world looked crystal clear and as gorgeous as the Garden of Eden to Julianna. It was then she knew as fact, not faith, that God was with her today, by her side and allowing her to move in mysterious ways.

"I brought the broom handle out," she said, her voice like a bell, "and I'll just poke my way along with that. I can see that you are only in up to your knee, you will be fine until I get there."  
"Julianna, I command you-"

"Who do you think you are, Moses?" Even the blizzard winds couldn't blow away the high and beautiful comedy in her teasing. "That makes sense. You are old enough to be Moses, bossy enough to be Moses, spent some time in parting the seas, and only have ten damned things to talk about."

At the end of their fight, there was'' laughter, and the laughter was awesome, and the laughter was with God.

Father Briar did what Julianna told him to do. He waited there for her to walk out to him, reach out with both hands, and pull. She brought him up with superhuman ease and they walked on three feet back to the icehouse, guided by her eyes.

The wolf was warm and strong, but hungry

Inside the shack, things were soft and tender (just as the wolf enjoyed them...) as Jewels and Cedric began making up. Kisses first, then necking. Oh! What a thing 'necking' was in those halcyon early fifties.

In between their kisses, she wrapped and warmed his leg, and made sure the rest of his body was warmed by something she'd learned in her emergency medical training during her WAC days as "core to core contact."

She tingled. The taste of her sexy skin was like nothing his palate had ever experienced. "Who knew medicine could be so sexy?" she joked, causing him to laugh again. Even though they were on a lake, she could feel a sea change beneath them.

They kissed and kissed because they were already undressed. That was part of "core to core contact." His kisses were soft and sweet but not yet spectacular. Until he got to her breasts. There were only a few boards, strong and sturdy to be sure, between her and the world, the deadly, empty world. The outside world. That her breasts were exposed in such a dire situation made her thrilled. Was there any lady in Minnesota naughtier than she? Surely not.

He stoked the fire again, although there was no need. The heat of their bodies was enough to steam up the inside of the icehouse and leave puddles on the plywood floor.

"How could we ever have fought?" he wondered aloud.

"Sometimes it is necessary," she counseled, "it just has to be done with respect."

This made him kiss her deeper and with more passion than any dirty talk could have.

The wolf watched Cedric and Julianna and he licked his lips, imaging what they might taste like.

Father Briar didn't have to imagine. She'd sprayed "her signature fragrance," her simple Woolworth's perfume, on her neck and he was kissing what remained of it away. It was as arousing as the finest French imports (which, of course, he'd never smelled, but a man can certainly imagine) and he wished she'd wear it more often.

"What funny things we think of, when trapped with the ones we love," he marveled. There were so many dangerous and amazing things going on outside, and here he was, thinking of his lover's perfume. Tasting it, too.

He longed to taste the rest of her. She'd loosed her clothes, causing his pants to tighten. Julianna's full breasts swung free and he stripped her over her shirt, taking in her trim waist, her porcelain skin made even whiter by not seeing the sun for months of winter, and the beginning curves of her delightful hips.

There wasn't much visual stimulation in the icehouse, but she was all he needed. His visual imagination had been stimulated, memories long dormant had been reawakened, and he thought of that same body, that body which she so lovingly offered to him, during the other times he'd been fortunate to be with her. That dress she wore to the barn dance, those cute stockings she'd worn to the hockey game in Thief River Falls, that particularly fancy church dress she wore on high holidays and for festivals of saints.

Then his cock stiffened again as he had flashes, memories, little mini-orgasms, after remembering her body fully nude, and indulging his imagination. She grabbed him and pulled him close. She could feel his hardness pressing against her, throbbing really, and he delighted in the anticipation of what was to come.

"There is no place for this lust, this desire, this insatiable hunger," he chided himself, but then gave in again. No man, he thought, could withstand the rapid onslaught of fire and passion that had come from kissing her.

"But I could no more stop kissing her than I could stop breathing," he thought, rationalizing his desire. Just to prove it, he held his breath, feeling the creeping cold from outside extinguish itself in his lungs.

He ran his fingers through her hair, listening to her moan as he tugged and pulled at the soft and downy tufts. Julianna's sounds were pushing him closer and closer to losing control of himself, and oh, how he loved control.

Julianna and her body had taken control of his brain. Sure, this was foolish, making love in a little icehouse in the middle of a blizzard. Heck, everything was foolish. Kissing her for the first time had been foolish, and everything since then had been foolish, almost to the point of dangerousness.

Pausing for a moment, he reached over to the cooler, hoping to find a cold soda pop inside. A small part of him was hoping for something stronger, maybe they had a little brandy left?

Nope, just soda. He shared it with Julianna, who was as hot as he was, despite the deadly blizzard outside. It was going to be one hell of a night.

He glanced over at the clock above the stove and saw it was just about seven pm. It had been dark outside so long due to the heavy snowfall that time had lost all sense of meaning. Father Briar was pretty sure it was Saturday night but it could have been Friday, next Wednesday, or next month, for all he knew.

Now, savoring the icy bottle of cola to his lips, Cedric took a long, audible gulp, his Adam's Apple bobbing as he swallowed, and licked his lips. He smiled down at Julianna, who was lying on a thick pile of blankets, placed on top of a wooden pallet. He liked his makeshift bed, liked their little love-nest.

He licked the last of the pop off his lips, happy he could still taste her over its caramel and sugary sweetness.

"Will I ever find safety with this woman? Will she ever find peace with me?" he wondered, but then dealt with such philosophical problems in physical ways. They had to, they would be trapped under the same small roof (and the wind was now rattling the walls) for another day, at least. How long could it possibly last? How long could they possibly last? He could make love for a week, at least, but after that, he wasn't so sure.

A dozen emotions pulsed through him. This was a woman who'd given up a normal romance and a normal life to be with him. That they'd ever fought shocked him and filled him with shame. This was a woman who he'd found so desirable that he'd betrayed the vows and promises of the Society of Jesus for her. That he'd ever not been in love with Julianna shocked and amazed him. This was a woman who'd moved halfway across the country, to a frigid but fertile land, to further explore the possibilities of their love. That he ever thought he could live without her shocked and amazed him.

He knew that he would protect with his life and he worried that this storm might make that possibility real.

"No man has ever loved a woman like I love Julianna," Cedric thought, knowing that was vanity, pure vanity, and that vanity was a sin. But this was a pretty small sin and a pretty big compliment to his lady, to boot, so he pushed guilt aside and went to kissing her body with a renewed vigor.

She was as white, sweet and delicious as a sugar cookie, lying on the makeshift bed. Propping herself up on her elbows and stretching her curvy legs and supple calves, she stared at him. Even this he found impossibly erotic.

Cedric took all of her in as the storm increased around them. There certainly was a storm in his heart. He kissed her belly and her bush and her thighs and her kneecaps and then moved up to her neck and began anew.

Growling with primitive savagery and a feverish hunger (remarkably similar to the wolf outside, although neither of them could know that at the time), he eased his underpants down over his thighs and off his ankles, but his eyes remained locked on hers. There were nearly one.

Over the past wintery weeks, he'd memorized every measure of her body. Cedric had put his lips on it, had tasted it, and had savored the emotions it brought out of him. It had changed his life. A huge smile came to the lips of the horny, committed, monogamous priest. At that moment, it didn't matter what she believed or he believed or the Church believed or anybody in town or any where believed. It didn't matter. Only they, their desire, and their faith in their love, still existed.

He scooted over to the edge of the makeshift bed and pressed his body against hers, pulled her into his arms and lay her down on the goose down pillows. He tasted her yet again and loved it. And then he began his smorgasbord, pressing her hips down using only the control of his mouth. When she wiggled in ecstasy from the delight in his mouth, he switched his dish and went to her breasts, supping on the juicy nipples while they perked up beneath the care of his tongue. She called out his name but the wind carried it away, out there across the frozen lake and into the snowy, starry night.

Julianna shuddered and sighed and wished the sensations he was giving her would never end. He explored her body with a cartographer's care, tracing every change in elevation, tracing her curves and her lines and her pathways. He kissed her from neck to navel and wild sounds caught in her throat for a moment before escaping.

It was all so incredible intense. Their lovemaking was heightened by the passion of the rescue. That they had to clutch each other for warmth, to make sure he didn't get hypothermia, to keep his leg from getting frostbitten, was even more arousing to her; they couldn't stop, even if they wanted to.

But, oh! They did not want to.

She tangled her fingers in his hair and guided him around her body before settling him between her legs. He kissed her for a while, then she felt his finger replace his tongue and she cried out in delight.

"Cedric!" her eyes flew open after being pressed shut from the intensity of the passion. "Cedric!" she cried again.

Father Briar gave no indication that he'd heard his lover (and his rescuer) scream his name. He continued with the same gentle insistence that he'd started with, making her passion rise and rise.

He tickled her with his tongue in the places only he knew, that she'd allowed only him. As she liked, he lifted her from the bed drawing her even closer to him, sliding his tongue deeper into her.

She wanted to scream, so she did.   
"Why not? Nobody can hear me," she though.

So Julianna screamed and let her body lose control, blessed and God-given control, and let her orgasms ripple through her body, one after another. She shuddered and didn't try to control it.

"What bullshit shame is!" she thought as more orgasms shook her body, shook her like the walls of the icehouse, shook her to her soul, as she screamed for him not to quit and keep that unbelievable pleasure going.

She let her body follow its own instincts, its own rhythms, and its own private dances. Julianna felt like a marionette finally shaking off its strings.

Julianna bucked and rode, reversed positions and let him take the top, rolled him back, kissed his mouth, his neck, and his nipples. As he rammed into her, she responded with a ferocious rocking of her own, like he'd never seen her do before.

Because he remembered how much he liked it, he took her butt in his hands and lifted her up, making her scream from the length and strength of him.

All the pain in his leg was gone (although soon to return) and she could see the color returning to his skin. He was a deep and lush red and he was absolutely gorgeous.

Their passion couldn't continue much longer, both were peaking on adrenaline and ready to release. He, too, had lost the inhibitions of his voice, and intensity of his shouting raised hers as well, shaking the walls. The noises carried on the wind for miles and miles.

Julianna wrapped her legs around him and locked down as hard as she could. She could feel the beginning of his twitching; his testicles tucked up into his body and she could feel them spraying into her.

Her legs vice gripped him even more aggressively and she gave herself an explosive orgasm around his semen as it flooded her. Finally she unlocked her legs and he exhaled, breathed deeply, and exhaled again, utterly spent.

Julianna did the only thing she could think of in such a miraculous occasion; she said a prayer of thanks to God.

"I know that when they have...intercourse...he does it with his collar on," Gosha told Dale. "And nothing else. Can you imagine that?"

"I sure can," the Bishop Dale said, with probably a spoonful too much enthusiasm. "What do you think Julianna wears while they are doing it?"

"Her big, corn-fed American breasts, with their pink bubblegum nipples, swing free as she rides him, I am sure."

"She could be on top of him?" Dale was astonished. Like a proper Christian, he only knew the missionary position.

"Not only could she be on top of him, he could be behind her."

Dale liked the sound of that. This scary Polish mystic was giving him feelings he'd not had since he was a teenager. But golly, Gosha, he was still a priest, so there was a pressing issue to be addressed.

"Do you think they use birth control?"

That unique cackle came again, filling the cab of the truck with its mischief and melody. "Would a deer in the woods? Would a salmon in the stream? Would a dog in the streets?"

"So...no?

"They fornicate without care or control. Like beasts. No. Not like beasts. He does not fuck her like a beast or a priest. He fucks her like a real man."

To emphasize her point, she grabbed his dick. Astonished to find it as hard as the stick shift controlling the truck's transmission, she gave it a couple of tugs, and then he moaned and passed out.

The wolf decided it was time. He needed to eat.

The growling began in earnest at 11pm on the second night of the storm. Cedric and Julianna were nude under a hand-stitched quilt, a double stuffed thing so thick it had gravity. Their bodies had been intertwined for hours and she had no intention of letting him go.

They were in the endorphin-enhanced state of post-coital bliss when wolf began his threatening. Just low, gnarly noises from the back of his famished but formidable throat. The wind was so loud and the snow had such a muffling effect that they didn't hear him at first, and when they did, they weren't sure what it was they were hearing.

"I think it is just the wind, whipping and whistling through the cracks," he reassured her. His foot was wrapped in blankets and he kept it near the stove at all times. Otherwise their bodies were still locked together, as if they intended to stay that way forever.

And they might've, if not forever, at least for the foreseeable future, except for the wolf had decided it was now or never: his belly needed filling.

He circled the icehouse once, then again. The door was obviously the weakest of spots and the obviously entry way. He pawed at it, his icy claws leaving deep, visible marks in the frozen wood.

"That was clawing," Julianna said, panic rising in her voice.

"Clawing?" Cedric asked, confused.

"Yes, clawing."  
Then he heard the sound again.

"Yes," he agreed, astonished, "that is clawing."

Cedric tried to stand up but fell. There were pins and needles stabbing at his legs as the blood returned to them. The tumble would've been comical under any other circumstances. and even Julianna had to suppress a laugh.

But she was still in control. She'd been in control throughout the rescue and the subsequent amazing sex, and she wasn't yet ready to let him have it back.

"Cedric," she said, calm and cool (literally cool, shit, it was cold), "seeing as you can't walk, I need you to roll over to the door."

She stood, still naked, and loaded the flare gun.

"When you open the door, I'm going to blast whatever is out there. So stay low."

Cedric was surprised, but did what he was told. With the last of his remaining strength, he pulled the door open by the bottom plank.

Nothing had surprised the wolf in his weeks of running. Not the fury of the storm, not the length of his journey, not coming upon poor Robbie Roggenbucker in his truck. He didn't have much experience with human beings, but they didn't usually appear in front of him, white in the darkness, breasts swinging free, with a gun in their hands.

Hunger is a powerful motivator, but self-preservation is even stronger. The wolf was turning to flee even before the shot sizzled over his back, singing his fur before briefly illuminating the night before disappearing into the awful, gloaming snow.

God takes care of all creatures great and small, so concerned souls, I'm sure the wolf way okay. 
**Chapter** **Twenty Eight:** Dum Spero, Spiro **is Latin for "As I breathe, I Hope."**

Beauty and the Beast (although Gosha had already herself shortened its name to just the more appropriate "Beast," pushed the snow aside with ease, clearing a path across the lake.

"That cow catcher works wonders," Bishop Mueller said, watching the steel wedge welded to the front of the truck do its plowing work.

"I never understand when is on a train they call it "cow catcher." Looks more like "cow vaporizer" to me." The old Pole loved black humor, useful stuff for her massive truck, and trains. Cows she was indifferent to. But the sold steel grill, bought at auction for a bargain price, had fit quite nicely, after some blowtorching, on the front of her ride. Now, instead of clearing debris (most of it, despite the name, not of a bovine nature) off the train tracks, it was serving as a snowplow.

"I know where icehouse is," she declared. "teenagers like to have sex there. I must clear it out of "humpers" regularly."

Besides the winch, the cow catcher and goodness knows what else, Gosha had mounted a 10,000 candlepower spotlight (bought at a military auction for, get this: a bargain price!) and she hit the switch to turn it on.

The Army light cut through the wildly flying snow and ice and inky black night like a not-quite-invented-yet laser beam. After a few seconds of fiddling with her in-cab controls, which consisted of chains and pulleys and spinning plates on well greased ball bearings.

The light spilled in through every crack in the little fishing shack.

I haven't seen a light like that since the war," Cedric said.

Julianna peaked through the cracks in the walls of the shack, then shocked and needing further information, she opened the door just enough to get a clear view.

"It is Gosha and Bishop Muller in a tank," she said, in surely the strangest sentence she'd ever uttered.

"I know what to do," Julianna said. "Don't worry. Go out, stall them for a moment, and then let them in."

"Where are your clothes?" he panicked, pulling his flannel long johns on and his snow suit over them.

"Don't worry," she said. "Where I'm going, I won't need them."

He was befuddled, but didn't press further. As dressed as possible, he slipped out the doorway and back into the blizzard.

Julianna slipped down the fishing hole she'd kept chipping the ice from all storm. It felt as warm and soothing as bathwater.

"Oh, Father Briar, thank God you are safe and okay," Bishop Muller gushed. He'd never really taken Gosha's complaints about Father Briar seriously, especially after his breakfast and fancy dinner with the man. and after his unexpected (and decades in the waiting) sexual release, he wasn't much in the mood for anything but a joyful reunion with his best priest.

"And your girlfriend?" Gosha asked. Even she was surprised by the fury of the storm and wanted to get back into the Beast and away from the cold. She also wanted another shot at the manliness of the bishop. Gosha assumed he'd be looking for more, too; and maybe to be able to enjoy it this time for longer than fifteen seconds.

"What girlfriend?" Father Briar asked, the hostility frozen in his voice. "I'm here alone."

He couldn't believe he was saying this. Julianna most certainly was inside the icehouse, with nowhere to go. The only things in there were their love nest of blankets and a stove.

But he knew to follow his instructions. He'd heard her still, small voice, heard it from somewhere inside his soul, and he knew that now was the time to follow her.

"Would you and Bishop Muller like to come in and see for yourselves?" he said with a straight face.

"Of course we would, especially if you have a cup of coffee in there," the Bishop said.

"I might have a nip of something a bit stronger," Cedric offered, and opened the door to an empty icehouse.

Julianna knew she should be dead by now but she wasn't; quite to the contrary, she was clear-headed and analytical and most surprising, warm. Kicking her legs with power and grace, she flipped herself upside down.

Julianna felt elemental, essential, and utterly real. She felt close to God and His power enveloped her.

"Air," she remembered, "don't humans need air?" It sure didn't feel like it. She put her hands to her breast to check her heart: its beat was still strong and steady.

There were currents flowing around her, but she did not move. These warmer and cooler parts of the lake rose and fell and traveled around, moved by unseen forces.

There was no pain. "Remarkable," she thought, "it's like a bath." She smiled and then wondered how that was possible. "Shouldn't my cheeks be numb? Shouldn't my muscles be stiff and useless? But they were not. Julianna felt like an otter or a beaver. "A polar bear, even!" she said to herself, in a clear and strong voice.

Another voice spoke, spoke so close to her she'd know hearing it was real and not a tricky hallucination caused by anoxia. The voice was still and small and as real as the water around her.

"This storm is not God's work," the voice said, "for I have seen no wrath except on man's side, and He forgives that in us, for wrath is nothing else but a perversity and an opposition to peace and to love. Do not worry about what you perceive as sin, your sin of love for the Father. Human souls mature so that evil and sin will no longer hinder us."

"Well, this place is most certainly empty," Bishop Muller said.

Gosha was dumbfounded. She'd been so certain that she'd caught them, she been so certain that she was right and so certain of the rightness of her cause, that proven wrong, she wanted to explode like an atom bomb. She'd wanted to leave immediately but Bishop Muller had insisted they stay for a coffee and a nip of brandy.

Cedric couldn't imagine where Julianna had gone, but he assumed it was outside somewhere. "Could she have turned herself invisible?" he thought, hoping the bishop would sip his drink swiftly. "Could she be like the Shadow?" he thought, remembering the popular radio serial from his youth.

He stated to worry. There was no other practical explanation but her being outside, but there was no way out, so how? In the absence of logic, the rigorous Jesuit started to panic.

"This is delightful brandy," Bishop Muller commented, his breathing relaxed, his pupils dilated, and his blood-pressure mellow after his recent love encounter.

"Yes, and this little icehouse is lovely," Gosha added, already thinking of the romantic encounters she could pull off in a secluded place like this.

Julianna imagined it would be dark and terrifying down under the ice, black and murky and full of grime and grossness. That there would be no light. That there would be dead, fallen trees covered and mossy mud, with fish with beady red eyes and teeth engineered by Satan. That she would need to breathe and open her mouth and take the foul and poisonous water into her lungs and be pulled to the bottom and death.

None of that were true, at least not from Julianna's unusual vantage point. She couldn't see the bottom of the lake, nor anything to the sides. The varied hues of blue were out of a Van Gogh masterpiece, whirling gentle and soft in the distance, hypnotizing and peaceful. Every pint of water seemed to be a different color of blue; aquamarines competed with turquoises and navies competed with periwinkles, denims with oxfords, and iris with teals. A whole universe, multiple universes, even, were contained in a single color.

She wanted to stay down there forever, and would've, until she remembered her lover, dealing with their tormentors above. And then again, that lilting voice spoke to her, the accent ancient but the words so very modern.

"Jesus said to me, he said, "You shall not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be diseased'; but he Jesus said, 'Thou shalt not be overcome."

Now clued in to the incredible importance of listening (something she and so many woman make the calling of their lives) she listened, the sound coming through the water like waves. When Gosha's truck rolled away, she swam towards the fishing hole in the ice, which now looked like a Heavenly beam, leading her home.

Cedric was astonished that the ice could hold the Beast as it rumbled off into the night. The machine was so bizarre and so terrifying and so, well, so Gosha, that he wanted to watch it go, but he was terrified about the fate of his Julianna.

After seeing them off, he barreled his way back into the icehouse to find her standing there next to the fire, as healthy and as pink and as naked as a newborn babe.

She had emerged from the lake seconds ago without effort, with the last mystical words that had been spoken to her still ringing in her ears like a bell, like a pure and silver bell.

"And I saw that truly nothing happens by accident or luck, but everything by God's wise providence. If it seems to be accident or luck from our point of view, our blindness and lack of foreknowledge is the cause; for matters that have been in God's foreseeing wisdom since before time began befall us suddenly, all unawares; and so in our blindness and ignorance we say that this is accident or luck, but to our Lord God it is not so."

"Baptize me," she commanded, "I've already been fully immersed."

And so he did.

"Let us ask our Lord Jesus Christ to look lovingly on this child who is to be baptized, on her parents and godparents, and on all the baptized."

Nude but warm, she shivered, not from cold, but the Holy Spirit.

Father Briar continued.

"By the mystery of your death and resurrection, bathe this child in light, give her the new life of baptism and welcome her into your holy Church."

They said in unison, "Lord, hear our prayer."

He recited every word in precise, beautiful Latin, and at the end, after he'd traced the outline of the cross on her forehead in ice water, adding a phrase of his own:

"God forgive us for our small sins,

and thank you for great miracles."
**Epilogue** **:**

Julianna and Cedric's relationship lasted many decades longer than Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe's. After New York/Hollywood power and glamour couple returned to the United States after their ill-fated and aborted honeymoon, tension between the combustible personalities continued to build, particularly around DiMaggio's discomfort with his wife's sexy image, the very same image that had to attracted him to her in the first place.

They had the first of their many famous public falling outs in September 1954, as Julianna and Cedric's beautiful summer turned to a golden autumn. It was in New York City, on set of _The Seven Year Itch_. As Monroe filmed wildly erotic (especially for the time) scene in which she stands over a subway grate with the air blowing up her skirt, a photo memorialized in a many a Navy man's mind for the next fifty years, an image sexy enough to bring a Kennedy to his knees.

Naturally, a crowd of onlookers and press gathered (one wonders how the asphalt didn't melt beneath them, such was Norma Jean's hotness); As her skirt blew up again and again, the crowd cheered uproariously, and the Yankee Clipper, who was on set monitoring his wife's behavior, he lost his infamous temper.

Julianna thought _the Seven Year Itch_ was amazing, a view shared by Father Briar _._

DiMaggio and Monroe were divorced in October 1954, just 274 days after they were married. In her filing, Monroe accused her husband of "mental cruelty." She married the playwright Arthur Miller in 1956, who had extensively written about the aforementioned Sen. Joe McCarthy.

When the 36-year-old Monroe died of a drug overdose on August 5, 1962, DiMaggio arranged the funeral. For the next two decades, until his own death in 1999, he sent roses several times a week to her grave in Los Angeles.

The morning of November 29, 1964, ten years after the events of this story, was a remarkable one in the religious life of American Catholics, and Catholics worldwide.

Brannaska parishioners sitting in their places that morning knew something was different, very very different than they had been before, from the start of Mass.

The week before, and the week before, and every week any of them could remember, the priest and altar boys had entered in reflection and silence.

Now there was singing. Singing! Two verses of a processional hymn. Father Briar, standing behind a brand new altar set up in the middle (the middle!) of the sanctuary, still said some prayers in Latin, but for the most part, the ancient and traditional language of the Church was gone.

The Brannaskans, who'd had warning this change was coming but never really believed it, were encouraged to recite others along with him, again in their own language. Some of them prayed in German, one in Polish, and most in English.

The distribution of Communion was now different. Since the dawn of the faith, the priest had repeated a prayer in Latin as he worked his way along the line of parishioners kneeling at the altar.

Now paused in front of each parishioner, in many places standing rather than kneeling (standing!), held up the Communion host so they could see it, and said, " _Corpus Christi_ " ("the Body of Christ"), to which the communicant responded, "Amen".

That historic morning, as he blessed Julianna, who looked radiant and full of love and joy, he also thanked God for the simple power of sex and love and asked his forgiveness for indulging in it.

The Church discontinued Latin entirely by 1969. Julianna and Cedric's love lasted decades longer, well into the 1980's, although Latin did have a pretty good run: it is tough to argue with two thousand years of success. 
Notes and Historical Sources:

Interviews with kind folks who participated in both the Catholic life and the farming life of this era in Minnesota irreplaceably valuable.

Thanks to my sister.

Most of all, the author would like to thank her mother. That is no disrespect (and much love!) to fathers, but, as Julian of Norwich once said, "Our Savior is our true Mother in whom we are endlessly born and out of whom we shall never come."

The Facebook group, a true collaborative, "Old Minneapolis" as a joy and a source of support and inspiration, if not material directly relevant to the book. But as any author knows, material not being related to the book is often full of truth, portent and unexpected investigative joys.

Various blogs, forum posts, and personal, self-published reminiscences, have all been helpful in providing background and detail to a book that would otherwise gone a little unseasoned and bland without them.

If you think, wherever and whoever you are, that the personal and cherished details of your lives, that you've self-published to audiences of your friends and family have gone unnoticed, I assure you with devout faith: they have not.

While we all, if we are moral creatures, be wary of the Catholic Church's history of despicable criminality when it comes to issues of land and art-theft, not to mention its unconscionable treatment of young boys by pedophile priests. But equally spurious is the idea that all men and women of religious service somehow become perverts without a moral compass is equally untrue. There were good people throughout the clerical bureaucracy, hundreds of thousands of them, and to ignore them is to do a disservice to many just and noble human lives.

"All we are

is all we are,"

Like Kurt Cobain, like Bill Haley and His Comets, like the Hoosier Sodbusters, once sang in what sounds both like a Buddhist Koan and the belief of a Catholic mystic like Julian of Norwidge.

What we are is love. May Cedric Briar and Julianna Warwidge live and love for a good long run, as long as grey wolves, as long as Latin, as long as love itself. 
