Father Briar and The Angel (11 page)

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!”