Father Briar and The Angel by Rita Saladano Read Free Book Online Page A

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,