River Angel

by A. Manette Ansay

  This wouldn’t be the first time he’d battled Ruthie over an angel. The last one had sprung from the mind of Lily Schobruller. Lily had always believed there was an angel watching over her family; it seemed harmless enough on the surface, as such things usually did. But when Lily’s daughter, Emily, started high school, the angel reported that Emily was having sex with boys, sometimes more than one at a time. Father George spent an interminable afternoon with the whole troubled family in his rectory parlor, trying not to wince as Lily and her husband, Dan, accused their daughter of unspeakable things. Father George knew when he was in over his head; afterward, he spent an hour on the phone, investigating psychiatric care. But a neighbor was one of Ruthie’s followers, and she took Lily and Emily along to a meeting at the Fair Mile Crossroads. The next thing Father George knew, they were all back in his parlor, eager to let him know that the angel was, in fact, Lily and Dan’s first child, a stillborn little girl whom Lily and Dan had never told Emily about. Now this child was jealous of her living sister, making up vicious lies.

  How very interesting, Father George said. And how will you keep her from lying in the future?

  No problem. Faith members had simply joined hands and told the little girl they recognized and loved her. Emily reported that later that same night, her sister had come to her in a dream and apologized for what she’d done. In the morning, a ring that she’d lost weeks earlier was sitting on her nightstand.

  A peace offering, Lily said eagerly, happily, and what was Father George to say? He shook Dan’s hand and patted Emily’s shoulder and suggested it still might be a good idea for Lily to get a complete neurological and psychiatric workup at the hospital, just in case. But of course, Lily never did. Sometimes Father George had the strange sense that he was fighting Ruthie Mader for his parish, particularly when it came to his female parishioners. If a woman was dying, Ruthie beat him to her bedside with votive candles and soothing words. If a woman was unhappy, chances were she’d call Ruthie’s Women’s Crisis Hot Line before she’d even consider making an appointment at the rectory. At Our Lady of Mercy, Ruthie made weekly rounds just like a priest, and though she didn’t go so far as to administer blessed oils, he had seen her massage a dying patient’s hands and feet and temples with rose water.

  It was hard to believe that before Tom Mader’s death, Ruthie had been a parish cornerstone. When Father George first arrived at Saint Fridolin, she’d been secretary-treasurer of Christian Mothers, an elected member of the parish council. Now she apparently found no contradiction in practicing both Catholicism and what, as far as Father George was concerned, bordered on the occult. Faith meetings were shrouded in secrecy, yet he had heard accounts of healing-prayer circles, supernatural occurrences, spiritual “gifts” that ranged from visions and prophecies to communion with the dead—it was enough to make his thinning hair stand on end. No wonder newspapers throughout the Midwest were jumping on the story: the Sentinel, the Sun-Times, the Tribune. The media loved this kind of thing. What did they care if the citizens of Ambient came off looking like hysterics and eccentrics, likely as not to report the appearance of a UFO the following week? More than once, Father George had considered driving out to the J road to shine the light of reason on the crowd of curious onlookers—especially if they happened to be his own parishioners. But the mere presence of a priest could be interpreted as a kind of validation.

  The best way to handle a situation like this was not to pay it any attention. Thirty-five years ago, when he was still a seminarian in New York, there’d been an old priest named Father Gluck, blind and bent nearly double with arthritis, who had done parish work for over fifty years. All the acolytes confided in him, sought out his advice, took turns walking with him in the garden, where he’d pat the faces of the flowers he loved but could no longer smell or see. One warm spring day just before Father George’s ordination, Father Gluck gave him this piece of advice: “From time to time,” he said, “a woman from your parish will come to you—and it will be a woman—and she’ll say, ‘Oh, Father, I have seen our blessed Mother,’ or ‘Father, Our Lord has appeared to me.’ When that happens, son, do not dismiss her, and do not disbelieve her. Simply say, ‘My dear lady, the next time this apparition appears, please give it my warmest regards.’”

  Father George had had reason to remember Father Gluck’s advice more than once during his tenure as pastor of Saint Fridolin’s. During his first year, he’d counseled old Mauva Schikedantz, who thought she saw Christ in her fireplace, pacing the flames in a long white robe. Father George suggested that the next time it happened she say an Our Father and add another log, but on Good Friday, she’d reached out her hand, wanting to touch His side as the apostle Thomas had done. These days, she seemed happy enough at the nursing home in Solomon; when he brought Communion, she ferried the Host to her mouth unassisted, clamped between her thumb and a melted nub of finger. The home, like Our Lady of Mercy, attracted a fair number of visions—Jesus, Mary, dead spouses, all the usual culprits—but Father George was less inclined toward professional skepticism when the ill or infirm were involved. After all, some things simply could not be explained. That was the beauty and power of God. He himself had nearly died of a childhood bout with pneumonia; one night, he’d drifted away to a place of warmth and light, returning free of fever and with the first inklings of a vocation.

  But anything could be taken to extremes. Far too many of his parishioners came home from Mass and, without a second thought, checked their horoscopes in the Sunday paper. Some spent good money on star charts, or tarot cards, or crystals to wear around their necks. Some latched onto health food and New Age thinking, talked about synchronicity and reincarnation, invented their own mongrel system of beliefs, in which Jesus was a kindly big brother, God was the Wizard of Oz, and there was certainly no such thing as sin, as long as you didn’t hurt anybody. Smorgasbord Catholics, Father George called them, people who picked what they wanted instead of eating the whole, nutritious meal.

  “Maybe you didn’t like brussels sprouts as a child,” he’d told his congregation only one month earlier. “But as a parent, you know they’re chock-full of vitamins. Maybe you don’t like abstinence,” he said, and here he paused significantly, looking at the young people. “Or fidelity.” He stared at the middle-aged couples. “Or the idea that there’s a very real hell in which sinners shall abide for all eternity.” He raised his head to address them all. “Or any of the other things about being a good Catholic which, at times, you may find hard to swallow. But the Church is like a parent. And if you place your trust in her teachings, you’ll have no desire to supplement her wholesome diet with cheap fast food: charms, crystals”—he paused again—“angels, and the like.”

  He’d been proud of that particular sermon—he could tell by certain flushed faces that he’d driven the point home. Yet Ruthie Mader and the Catholic members of her following lined up for Communion, identical gold crosses shining at their throats as if to ward off the evil eye. Father George’s hand shook as he slipped the Host into Ruthie’s waiting mouth. He had tried his best to be understanding—after all, Tom’s death had been a terrible shock. But nearly eight years had passed. Enough was enough. He couldn’t treat Ruthie like Mauva Schikedantz, who hadn’t known what she was doing when she put her hand to the flame. After the Lily Schobruller incident, he’d called on Ruthie personally to suggest, as gently as he could, that her energy and time would be better spent on the parish instead of an independent prayer group. He praised her for the work she had done in the past. He warned her that praying with people of other faiths could lead to an erosion of her own faith.

  “You know I’ve been a Catholic all my life,” Ruthie told him. “Nothing can weaken my devotion to the Church. But after Tom died, I realized that sometimes it takes other women to understand what a woman is going through—not only in times of grief but in everyday life.”

  “But why all the secrecy?”

  “We have open meetings the first Saturday of every
month.”

  “But they’re never open to men. What are we supposed to think?”

  Her brow furrowed; she took a long time to reply. “I guess,” she said quietly, “the same thing many of us wonder about the priesthood.”

  Father George turned off the TV and read for a while. Then he climbed the stairs to his private quarters, where he put on his long johns and knelt beside his bed. Guide me in this matter, he prayed. Make me a good shepherd as I follow in the steps of our Lord Jesus Christ. He’d speak with the archbishop again tomorrow after the funeral; it might be that an investigation was in order after all, if only to put the whole thing to rest. Then he crawled beneath the covers and shook until the warmth of his body took the chill from the sheets. He imagined how the boy had felt, plunging into the icy waters of the Onion River, and for the first time since he’d heard the news, he was moved to genuine sorrow. Truly, he understood the desire to believe that the boy’s last moments on earth were filled with grace, that he had not suffered, that an angel had embraced him like a good mother and carried him across the frozen fields. But old Father Gluck had taught him to observe how the mind completes that which is left unfinished, in the same way the eye reconstructs its blind spot, filling in the gaps to create an acceptable whole. The greatest act of faith was learning to live with the incomplete picture, to endure the injustice, ugliness, evil that welled from the void like blood from a wound.

  Still, as he drifted off to sleep, Father George remembered the light he’d seen as a child, how the warmth sliced through the agony of fever, opening the channels of his burning lungs. He remembered Father Gluck’s own face transformed with genuine pleasure at what he could neither smell nor see. The scent of the flower. The color of its petals. The tender way he cupped each blossom, briefly, between his trembling palms.

  To the Editor:

  I am writing to express my outrage that the teenagers involved in the kidnapping of Joy Walvoord and Sammy Carlsen and finally, on April 3, the murder of Gabriel Carpenter are still walking the streets, free as you and me. I did not know the Carpenter child, but I understand he was devout in his faith and truly a fine young person. I extend my deepest sympathy to the Carpenter family and I want to say that those who are making a circus of his death with talk of angels and other hysteria should be as ashamed as the parents of the teens who did this to him. I do know Sammy Carlsen, who is my neighbor’s son, and also Joy Walvoord, who is the daughter of a co-worker. I can assure you that these are two wonderful kids who deserve to walk from one end of the block to the other without being terrorized. What Chief Mel Rooney calls a “prank gone awry” (see last week’s Weekly) I—and every sensible citizen—call a heinous crime. What is the world coming to that we can let such atrocities pass with only a slap on the wrist for the offenders? How can we imagine our city is a safer place for our children as a result of this leniency? I am DISGUSTED, and I’m not the only one.

  Name Withheld

  —From the Ambient Weekly

  May 1991

  nine

  Paul Zuggenhagen lay with his head beneath his pillow and the damp, dark covers locked over him. He could hear his younger brothers running up and down the hall, getting ready for school. He squished his fingers into his ears, but sound leaked in through his fingertips, and then his dad was pounding on the door. “You’re going to get your butt to school if I have to kick it there, you understand?” Regular attendance was one of the terms of Paul’s suspended sentence. Passing grades were another. And within three months of graduation, he’d be expected to show evidence of full-time employment or enrollment at an accredited university. Dad felt employment was the route to go; he’d been talking with an old college buddy who owned three auto dealerships in Indianapolis. “Best to give yourself a fresh start,” Dad said, and Paul nodded, pretending he hadn’t figured out that Dad was sending him away. Dad was senior vice-president of the Ambient branch of First Wisconsin, and even now he worried about how all this would affect his job. “Community relations is the number-one priority in banking,” Dad liked to say. “You boys reflect on me, don’t you forget that.”

  “Paul?” It was his mother now, her voice soft and pleading, and he got out of bed and said, “I’m up.” It was too late to take a shower—not that it mattered. Everybody stared at him regardless of what he looked like, remembering how he’d stood before the DA and told his story, just the way Mr. Powell had made him rehearse, only leaving out the part about the flash of light. “We were running after him, but we didn’t touch him physically,” he said. Then his mind went blank and he forgot what he was supposed to say next. “It was a joke—it was just supposed to be a joke,” he said, and then, right there, in front of the court and the community cable cameras and everyone, he’d broken down and started to cry. Mr. Powell said it had worked in his favor. Later, his brothers giggled when they showed it on TV. Mom hushed them and laid her hand on Paul’s arm and told him they were just too young to understand what was going on. She was the only one who touched him anymore. Today she’d fixed his oatmeal with brown sugar sprinkled into a heart. On his way out the door, she hugged him, just the way she always had, just as if it had been someone else on the bridge the night Gabriel Carpenter died.

  The snow had melted, except for a few thin gray patches along the roads. The trees were budding; daffodils and tulips poked up from the soft spring soil. At school, the other kids avoided him, and most of the teachers didn’t call on him. There’d been a petition—some of the parents had started it—saying that he should be permanently expelled along with Randy, but Mom and Dad went to the superintendent and Paul was allowed to finish his last term. He felt as if he’d materialized in another country, somewhere he’d never been before and yet knew intimately. Everything was the same and not the same. His court-appointed psychologist said that was pretty normal, and then he asked Paul what he had dreamed about during the past week. Paul always made something up about snakes and tunnels and trains. The truth was that he had never been able to remember his dreams.

  At lunchtime, he sat by himself in the far corner of the cafeteria, eating his fried chicken and Tater Tots and chocolate pudding without really tasting anything. A group of girls walked by, Lisa Marie Kirsch among them. None of them said hi. Each wore the little gold angel pendant you could get for free if you visited the shrine. All over town, you could see those same little angels hanging from rearview mirrors; businesses posted angels in their windows and, beside them, the words I believe. Paul hadn’t seen the shrine yet, though he very much wanted to. Kids said you could make any wish you wanted. They left things underneath the white stone angel that Cherish’s mom had bought with money from hundreds of donations: rings and candles and barrettes from girls’ hair, flowers and photographs. Paul wanted to leave something too. He didn’t know what; he hadn’t decided yet. But Dad said that if Paul showed up at Ruthie Mader’s barn, it would be like pouring gasoline on a fire, and why in God’s name would Paul want to do that? He said maybe Paul would have been better off at a military school, where people could do his thinking for him.

  Randy had been sent to a military school to finish his senior year. It was in West Virginia. He’d mailed Paul a picture of himself, posing in a crisp uniform in front of the American flag, and Paul could tell his face was set so he wouldn’t flinch when the flash went off. He said he liked the academy OK and that he’d enlisted in the navy for next year. He hoped to wrestle for the navy team. Maybe we can hang out next time I come home, he wrote, but Paul didn’t think he meant it. A few days after the sentencing, Paul had sneaked over to Randy’s house, waited by the back door till the coast was clear, then followed him down the stairs to his paneled bedroom in the basement.

  “If that little fucker only hadn’t jumped,” Randy said, and he punched the sandbag that hung from the ceiling. “It’s his own damn fault. He’d be fine if he hadn’t jumped.” Paul sat at the desk, wishing he hadn’t come. The room was too warm, and it smelled of sweat and pot and Randy’s rag
e. “But Cherry’s the one who takes the cake,” Randy said, and he threw himself on the bed. “Ol’ Cherry pretending she was too drunk to remember anything. All she had to say was that we didn’t touch the kid.”

  “You really think she remembers?” Paul said.

  “Where have you been for the past two years? She can drink like a soldier. She just didn’t want to get herself involved.”

  “Well, it worked out anyway,” Paul said.

  “Worked out, yeah,” Randy said. “Three hundred hours picking trash by the highway and whatever other shit they decide we have to do this summer. The rest of my senior year at a fucking military—”

  He broke off then and started to laugh. “But I got to hand it to you,” he said. “That story you told the papers. A flash of light! I nearly wet my pants when I read about that.”

  “You didn’t see anything?” Paul said faintly.

  “You mean like an angel?” Randy said, and he wasn’t laughing anymore. “Get a grip on yourself. You know what happened. The kid freaked. We never laid a hand on him. We didn’t do anything wrong.”

  They hadn’t seen each other after that, but Paul still saw Cherish nearly every day, passing by him like a ghost in the halls. He tried to catch her eye, but she never lifted her gaze from the floor, and the few times he’d approached her, she’d scuttled off in the opposite direction. She didn’t seem to hang around with Lisa Marie anymore. She hadn’t found another boyfriend. Like him, she kept to herself. Girls whispered about her—after all, she’d nearly died. The doctors said she was lucky. He’d heard she was working at the public library after school, saving for tuition. He wondered if what Randy had said was true—that she really hadn’t been all that drunk. That she remembered everything. He wondered if she’d seen the flash of light. He wondered if, each time she crossed the highway bridge, she searched the water, the sky, the fields, the way he did, looking for clues, trying to understand what had really happened.