Father Briar and The Angel (20 page)

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.”