Father Briar and The Angel Read Online Free PDF Page A

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