River Angel

by A. Manette Ansay

  The boy was clinging to the fabric of her coat. He had wrapped his arms tightly around her hips. Robert John said, “Is he going to live with us now?” and for the first time, Bethany thought of Mary in a whole new way. Not my will but Thine be done, she’d said to God, but what else could she have said? The Almighty staring down upon her. The favor on His mind already taking shape.

  “I suppose he is, for a while,” Bethany said.

  Robert John groaned. Gabriel said nothing at first, but as she led him into her house, he asked her, “My dad’s coming back, isn’t he?”

  “Of course,” she said automatically, shooting Robert John a look in case he planned to contradict. “He loves you very much. Now let’s get you to bed. Things are bound to look brighter in the morning.”

  But she was startled by a memory she’d all but forgotten: her own father digging through the freezer for a Popsicle. It was July, and there was only one left—grape, the best kind—and he split it with her carefully. As their tongues tasted that simple sweetness, he winked at her and smiled. She was twelve or thirteen, and she thought to herself, So he loves me. He probably did.

  But the next day, he was gone.

  YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE: If you are the thief who took a wooden bird feeder from the front yard of 462 River Road PLEASE do the right thing and return it, no questions asked. It has no monetary value but is greatly sentimental as my Dad made it, before he died. Surely you must know how it feels to lose something you love. The bird feeder is painted to look like a gingerbread house, if anybody sees it hung out someplace, call John Grosshuesch at 555-1424.

  —From the Ambient Weekly

  January 1991

  three

  Anna Grey Graf—Mrs. G. to her fifth-grade students—was driving to work at Solomon Public, smoking a cigarette from the pack she kept hidden in her glove compartment and wondering what to do about Gabriel Carpenter. She’d been fighting her gut dislike of the boy from the moment Principal Johns first led him into her classroom. The poor child’s face was shaped like a pie, and he had skin the color of raw pie dough. His eyes looked bleary behind his glasses, as if he had a cold, which, in fact, he did most of the time. At recess, he walked by himself along the chain-link fence that bordered the highway, and if other kids shouted Hey! to him, he wouldn’t look up, no matter how many times they tried. Instead he’d bow his head and pray, the way he did in the cafeteria before lunch, the way he did in the middle of class, lips moving silently as if he were reading.

  For a while, the other kids were nice to him, partly because his aunt was the afternoon crossing guard, but mostly because of rumors that his father had left behind an envelope of money with Gabriel’s name written across the seal. Nobody knew exactly how much money the envelope had contained. Kids speculated that it was at least a million dollars and that Gabriel was so rich he could buy a house with a swimming pool. But Bethany Carpenter had told Anna Grey that it hadn’t been very much money at all and that old Pops Carpenter had gotten to it first and used it to pay his electric bill. She said that, at home, the boy was silent, distant. Her own boys teased him, and he often slipped away to the river, where he walked along the banks for hours. Or he went next door to his grandfather’s house to rummage through Shawn’s old boyhood things. Sometimes he’d explore the derelict barn, where Pops kept the tractor he drove to town as if it were a car. Sometimes he simply disappeared, and did not return until well after dark. Bethany said, “There’s something about him, I don’t know. Something not quite right—” She didn’t finish her thought, but Anna Grey knew exactly what she meant.

  There were children one simply disliked on sight. It didn’t happen often, thank goodness. The only other time it had happened to Anna Grey had been twenty-odd years earlier, in a suburb of Indianapolis where she’d lived before she married Bill and moved to Ambient, Wisconsin. How she’d loved that little school! The teachers had done everything from serving lunches to cleaning lavatories to minding the infirmary, but the workload hadn’t bothered her. She’d been young, and she’d liked the people she’d worked with, and there was something about walking down the tiled hallways and hearing the warble of the children’s voices as they lined up outside, eager for the bell—even now she couldn’t explain it, but it made her happy in a way she’d never felt since. Euphoric, even. She was so excited to be living up north, over five hundred miles from her hometown of Skylark, Georgia. She believed she was doing something important. She believed these children would take the knowledge she gave them and carry it with them to the sixth grade and the seventh, on to high school and maybe college, to places in the world she’d never see, and this somehow made her bigger than she was, better than she was, a good person. And then, in the fall of 1968, she walked into her classroom and saw Sandy Shore—her parents had really named her that—poking her cheek with the eraser end of a pencil, not hard or anything, just an absentminded gesture, and all of Anna Grey’s warm feeling was snuffed out as if a cloud had passed between her body and the sun.

  Sandy Shore was a twitchy-looking girl, with pale-yellow hair so fine that it had clumped to her sweater with static. One sock drooped around her ankle; the other was stretched as high as it could go. Already she had her hand in the air, and when Anna Grey got to her desk, it took every ounce of self-control she had to keep her voice level as she said, “Yes?”

  What the girl wanted to know was, could she write in pen? Her teacher last year had insisted on pencil. “I’m sure I don’t care what you write with,” Anna Grey said with such venom that the child blushed and the restless rustlings of the other children dried right up. Silence, at least ten beats, before Anna Grey found the presence of mind to begin taking role. At the end of the day, she went home to her efficiency apartment above the hardware store. She’d fixed it up to look bright and cheery—red and white checkered curtains she sewed herself, a matching oilcloth for the table, a framed Sears print on the wall. Suddenly she saw it for what it was: the linoleum faded around the kitchen sink, the couch with its shameful cigarette burns—she’d lied to the landlady, told her she’d quit smoking—the odor of mildew seeping out past the rose-scented air freshener Anna Grey favored back then. Outside her small window, the Indianapolis sky was getting dark. Three weeks from now, there’d be frost on the ground, and then the long winter would slap everything flat beneath its palm. People were starting to hurry along the sidewalks, heads down, hands jammed in pockets, hard faces set against the growing chill. It was all Anna Grey could do to heat a can of soup, open her lesson planner, prepare for the next day. She knew Sandy Shore would be waiting, that dirty eraser pressed to her cheek. Anna Grey tried to reason with herself. Sandy Shore was no different than a hundred other little girls, anxious, eager to do things right—a student who needed the sort of reassurance Anna Grey’s supervisor claimed she had a knack for. But it had been no use. An irrational feeling can’t be remedied with reason. If it were that easy, the world would be a different place.

  She crushed out her cigarette, checked her watch. It was only ten minutes till the first bell. At the Fair Mile Crossroads, she rolled through the four-way stop, and as she turned onto County O, she saw a hitchhiker waiting on the shoulder. A Styrofoam cup of coffee from the McDonald’s steamed in his gloved hand. At first, she thought he was smiling at her, a wide, ragged smile. Then she realized he had a harelip. His stare was blank, unyielding. She wanted to stop, to offer assistance or, at least, a dollar and a friendly word. But she was late already, and besides, who in this day and age would stop to help a stranger? Anna Grey accelerated onto County O, her mouth flat with regret.

  She thought about the story she’d heard a few weeks earlier from Maya Paluski, the art teacher, who’d heard it from Ruthie Mader at a meeting of the Circle of Faith. It went like this: An older couple west of the Killsnake Dam were moved to pick up a hitchhiker, something they’d never done before. The hitchhiker was a young man, long-haired, unshaven; it was downpouring rain, and he was soaked to the bone. The couple offer
ed him what they had: a blanket, lukewarm coffee in a Styrofoam cup, a fruitcake they’d planned to give to a friend—no, take it, they said, take the whole thing. They were goodhearted people and they told the hitchhiker how they could see he was goodhearted too, and they hoped he would get wherever he was going and find the happiness he was due. They wrote their names down for him on a scrap of paper, and their address, and they gave him twenty dollars, which was everything the woman had in her purse.

  Two weeks later, they got a letter postmarked California. The hitchhiker thanked them for their kindness. He told them he’d had a semiautomatic and planned to kill the first person who stopped to offer him a ride. “I pushed it under the seat,” he wrote. “I had a change of heart. I know Jesus has forgiven me and I hope you’ll forgive me too.” They found the gun where he’d said it would be, and for those who don’t believe, there is the cold steel fact that the couple wrested from underneath their seat. A person can see it, reach out his or her hand, slip a doubtful finger into its small round mouth.

  Anna Grey liked to think of herself as a caring person, a compassionate person. She admired the couple from Killsnake, but she also thought they’d taken a terrible risk. The world wasn’t what it used to be. Even people in small towns like Ambient had started to lock their doors at night, post Neighborhood Watch signs in their windows, keep handguns in the clutter of nightstand drawers—and still one heard reports of vandalism, break-ins, even sexual assault. Lawn mowers and snowblowers and power tools disappeared from garages. Windows and streetlights got shot out in the fancy neighborhoods around the millpond, and every now and then somebody’s tires were slashed. Recently, there’d been two drug-related arrests at the high school, and last year’s senior prom, which was held at the Knights of Columbus hall, had resulted in so much property damage the Catholics voted not to rent out the facility again—it was said that this year’s prom would have to take place outside, beneath a canvas tent. And how many times had Anna Grey walked to the foot of her driveway to get the morning paper and discovered her mailbox lying in the ditch, the post snapped like a spine? Then, for days, she’d wonder if it was the work of some former student, now grown and avenging a long-ago slight. Or if it was a lunatic, or worse. Or if it was just a random thing, like what had happened to Ruthie Mader’s husband. Tom Mader had worked for the post office, farmed sheep on the side. Even then, Cherish Mader had been a lovely girl, obedient and hardworking, with a talent for art—a pencil sketch she’d done of Saint Fridolin’s still hung above Maya Paluski’s desk. Cherish had been in Anna Grey’s fifth grade the year somebody broadsided Tom’s little green Bobcat in front of the Neumillers’ mailbox. The impact knocked him into the ditch; he died right there on County O as letters fluttered like doves across the wet spring fields. Even now no one knew who had done it. It could have been anybody, perhaps someone everybody knew. You simply couldn’t be sure of anyone anymore.

  Still, at night, as Anna Grey lay beside Bill’s silent, sweating body, she sometimes imagined slowing, stopping, opening her heart to a man like the one she’d just seen, except that this man was good-looking, educated, someone who was just a little down on his luck. He’d climb into her Taurus, balance his backpack across his knees, and the slow burn of his smell—cigarettes, dampness, wind—would fill her throat. “If you hadn’t stopped,” he’d tell Anna Grey, “I guess I don’t know what I would have done,” and his voice would be gentle, apologetic, warm with the same Georgia lilt that still softened her own words. Such a man would agree that even well-meaning Northerners had a way of talking that made them sound impatient, superior. His teeth would be as white and square as buttermints. His eyes would hold a complicated mix of brown and gold and yearning.

  But where were these thoughts coming from? What was all this nonsense about a stranger’s eyes and yearnings? She slowed behind the line of cars piling up at the entrance to the school. Enrollment had swollen to an average of thirty-five kids per class, and class sizes continued to increase, despite periodic additions of “mobile classrooms”—trailers that circled the original structure like settlers’ wagons under Indian attack. The trailers were painted in lively colors—lime green, cobalt blue, pink—and as Anna Grey turned into the parking lot, the ugliness of the whole place struck her afresh. The asphalt playground. The bare wallows beneath the swings, where the snow and ice had been worn away. The faint, sour tang of the fertilizer plant that was always present, regardless of which way the wind blew. The children, bundled like cumbersome dolls into snow pants and heavy coats. Half of them were catching the same coughs and colds the other half still hadn’t quite gotten over. And there, pacing the fence, was Gabriel Carpenter. His arms were wrapped around his books, mashing them to his chest. His hands were bare—Bethany said he kept losing his mittens—and as Anna Grey walked from the parking lot to the Main Building, she tried not to think about the way he picked and picked at his chapped knuckles. For weeks, he’d had a sore at the corner of his mouth; every now and then, he’d moisten it with his tongue. Yesterday, during social studies, Anna Grey couldn’t help but excuse herself to the teachers’ lavatory, where she checked her own lip in the mirror. Of course, there was nothing there. Of course, it was only her imagination making her taste a swelling against her gum. She’d stared into the mirror, her face jaundiced by the overhead lights. Her eyes were wide apart, her eyebrows plucked in high, surprised arcs, each one as thin as a torn fingernail. Deep lines creased either side of her mouth, but it was a kind mouth, an easygoing mouth, a mouth that wanted to smile. Surely all the crow’s-feet narrowing her eyes were evidence of that. It was just that the child brought out the worst in her, the same as Sandy Shore. He made her realize all her limitations. He made her realize she should be doing more.

  The hallways of Main were empty, quiet, though she could hear laughter coming from the teachers’ lounge. Cigarette smoke listed from the open door. Inside, multicolored couches were arranged around a low, square coffee table. There were some magazine racks, a wobbly coat stand nobody used, a sink that had been dry ever since the pipes froze up last year. A few valentines were already posted on the bulletin board, covering the New Year’s decorations no one had bothered to take down. A small group of teachers had gathered around Marty Klepner, the guidance counselor, who was telling jokes so bad he must have learned them from the kids. Anna Grey filled her coffee cup with bitter decaf and tucked her sack lunch (fat-free-cheese sandwich, celery sticks, an overripe pear) into the fridge. She longed for another cigarette, but everybody thought she’d quit.

  “What’s Wisconsin’s state flower?” Marty asked.

  “The satellite dish,” Anna Grey said, half under her breath but still loud enough for him to hear. It was an old joke, a stupid joke. Her daughter, Milly, had told it to her last year.

  Marty smiled at Anna Grey across the heads of the others, a friendly, apologetic smile that made her long to haul off and slap him as hard as she could. She turned away without a word, imagining the reddening imprint of her hand against his chalk-pale skin, and then how she’d kiss each fingertip. His forehead was freckled and beautiful; the shape of his skull showed beneath his thinning hair. She noticed he seemed bulkier through the chest, less hunched—had he been lifting weights? It wouldn’t have surprised her. She’d heard he’d found a steady girlfriend, younger, a single mother with a six-month-old baby girl. Why should it matter to Anna Grey? It didn’t. She’d married Bill for better or worse, and of course there was Milly to think of. A couple of long kisses one day before Christmas, a loose-limbed walk down the hall to his office, half an hour on the counseling couch beneath the field of construction-paper sunflowers kids had stapled to the ceiling—these things meant nothing when you held them up against the light of a husband and child. A home. A stable, sensible life. When she and Bill went to sleep without so much as a peck on the cheek, she told herself they were both just tired, that they’d been married too long for foolishness. When Bill sat silent at the table, night after night, she kep
t up the conversation for them both.

  The first bell sounded. She picked up her coffee cup, walked down the hall to her classroom. Seniority had earned her a permanent room in Main. Of course, she felt sorry for the younger teachers, who had to pick their way out to the trailers, hopping frozen puddles, high heels sinking into brown patches of snow, but she herself had spent several years assigned to North Trailer, the worst of them all, known unofficially as the North Pole. Her permanent room was a palace by comparison: well heated and spacious, with two chalkboards, windows she could open when the weather turned warm. Yet it was all she could do to hang her coat behind the door, to set her coffee cup on the corner of her desk already stained by dozens of overlapping rings. Maya Paluski said that she used to feel that way before she’d joined the Circle of Faith. She said that the Faith meetings had given her a new lease on life.

  “We hold open meetings on the first of each month,” she often reminded Anna Grey. “You ought to come, Anna. It would do you a world of good.” When she spoke, she played with the plain gold cross all Faith members wore around their necks. “We’re a family. We don’t always agree, but we look out for each other.”

  The Circle of Faith put Anna Grey in mind of the Skylark Bible Circle, a Baptist organization her mother had belonged to and enjoyed. Faith members did charity work, scheduled afternoon picnics and winter cider parties. They sponsored guest speakers and visited each other’s churches, went on nondenominational retreats, explored faith healing and women’s spirituality, and helped each other with everything from child care to tax preparation. But Anna Grey didn’t want to air her troubles in front of Ruthie Mader, who lived on an idyllic hundred-acre farm overlooking the river, whose husband had been, by all accounts, a truly wonderful man, whose daughter had gone on to become so popular and pretty she’d been crowned Festival Queen last Fourth of July at Cradle Park. Cherish Mader wasn’t sitting home every weekend like Anna Grey’s Milly, rereading her collection of science fiction novels. Besides, Anna Grey had her own church home, Christ the King Lutheran—she’d converted when she married Bill. She could always make an appointment with Pastor Floyd if she wanted someone to talk to. Pastor Floyd spoke against the Circle of Faith, which he said was a feel-good kind of thing with no spiritual basis. People taking God into their own hands, he’d said. Well, God isn’t like Play-Doh you can shape into anything you want. Man is the Play-Doh. God is God. And tradition teaches what he expects from us.