River Angel

by A. Manette Ansay

  “So many things,” Lucy said, and she sat in a folding chair: There were several scattered along the walls, along with an old couch and parlor chair. Someone had left a wrist brace; someone else had left a cane. A woman’s pretty scarf was draped from a low beam. It was peaceful here, she had to admit, with the swallows preparing for nightfall, the bubbling coo of pigeons in the silo, the breath of the wind on the walls. And then, the sound of voices—

  —it was a family: two little girls, a father and mother. The mother led a small white dog on a leash. The dog started to bark at the shadows cast by the candles, a shrill, high-pitched barking that set Lucy’s teeth on edge.

  “Lookit the angel!” the older girl said.

  “Stand back from the candles, honey,” the man said.

  “Shh!” The woman scooped up the dog and rocked it like a child.

  “We’re from Dodgeville,” the man said in a loud, tourist voice. “Are you the lady who saw the angel?”

  Ruthie nodded.

  “Well, we believe you anyway,” the woman said. “I saw an angel myself when I was, I don’t know, eight or nine?” She sat down in one of the folding chairs, still holding the dog in her arms.

  “You said you were six, the last time you told it,” the man said, grinning. “She changes the story every time.”

  The woman ignored him. “Every morning, I had to lead our cows out to pasture, and then I’d fetch them back at the end of the day. The path wound through a stand of trees, and Lord, was I ever scared of that place! A woman was supposed to have hung herself there, but my mother said that was only a story.”

  “And you girls think you have it tough.” The man poked the younger one lightly in the belly. The girls giggled and leaned against their mother, who kept on talking. The little dog had closed its eyes.

  “One afternoon, it started to snow, and by four-thirty it was dark as night. I just started to cry at the thought of going out there alone. But my mother said that if I was that scared, I should ask God to send my guardian angel to walk with me. And wouldn’t you know, when I got to the stand of trees, a little girl was waiting for me. She was about my age, and she was wearing some kind of fur coat, and when she saw me, she smiled and started walking. She never spoke, just looked back now and then to make sure I was keeping up OK. She walked with me every evening after that, until spring came and the days were long again. I never saw her after that.”

  It was the sort of story Joe loved. Joe. That scarf caught Lucy’s eye again. It was red, with a pattern of elephants marching trunk to tail, just like one she had at home. She got up and tugged it down from the beam, and as she turned it over in her hands, she saw the oil crease where she’d accidentally slammed it into the car door. Still, it took her a moment before she understood.

  She wound the scarf around her neck and hurried out of the barn. The sun was setting over the river. Bats flashed through the air, dived at the yellow star above the barn door like hard-thrown stones.

  God will straighten your spine like a ribbon.

  She walked up to the porch, sat down on the step. From the time they’d started dating, Joe had insisted she was beautiful to him, that she was exactly what he wanted. On their wedding night, she’d been shy until he’d finally pulled the sheet away, revealed her naked and shivering and trying to cover herself with her hands. “You’re one of a kind, that’s all,” he’d said, and at last she’d unfolded her arms. During the thirty-three years they’d been married, he’d always claimed to love her exactly as she was. But now she knew the truth. He saw her as something broken, something that needed to be fixed. He saw her the way any stranger would, walking into the café. Everything they’d shared, everything she’d accomplished, hadn’t made any difference. And at that moment, Lucy knew that a particular tenderness between them had been lost for good. She might forgive him, over time, but she’d never be able to forget.

  When Ruthie came out of the barn, Lucy stayed motionless in the twilight, wishing she could just slip away. But Ruthie carried the trash bag across the courtyard, headed straight up the sidewalk toward the house. “Oh—there you are,” she said. “I’m sorry, I just got so completely caught up in that woman’s story. It’s amazing how often people are moved to share experiences like that.”

  “And you believe them.” Lucy found she didn’t have the energy to form a question.

  “I believe that even the most ordinary people regularly experience extraordinary things.” Ruthie tossed the bag up onto the porch and sat beside Lucy on the step. “It’s just that these experiences are no longer valued, or trusted. So we hide them. We keep them to ourselves.”

  “Maybe it’s better that way,” Lucy said. “Sometimes we’re mistaken about things, and when that happens, we wind up misleading others. Hurting others.”

  “All we can do is be true to what we believe,” Ruthie said. “At least, that’s what my daughter tells me.”

  “How is Cherish?” Lucy said, changing the subject. She thought of the frightened child she’d led from her father’s funeral so long ago.

  Ruthie sighed. “All those times she was sneaking out to cause mischief, I thought she was home studying. But now that she’s really studying all the time, I wish she’d go out with friends.”

  “I hear she’s working at the library.”

  “She’s going to Eau Claire this fall. She wants to major in English. English. I always thought it would be art.” Ruthie looked hard at Lucy. “You’ve been to school,” she said. “College, I mean. Did it change you? All the ideas you read in books?”

  “Sure,” Lucy said. “That’s why you read them. To open your mind.”

  Ruthie sighed. “Cherish won’t go to church anymore. She says she’s an atheist—can you imagine?”

  “I suppose I am too. Agnostic anyway. Not like Joe.” She fingered her scarf, tried to sound casual. “Does he come here a lot?”

  “I haven’t seen him recently.”

  “That’s because he has bronchitis. No doubt from sitting in a drafty old barn.” She’d meant it to come off as a joke, but her voice was so bitter that it was hard to recognize as her own. The family emerged from the barn. There was the clear, clean sound of coins against the bottom of the donation box.

  “Look. I have to be straight with you—I didn’t come to see the shrine. I’m here because there’s a rumor you’re selling out to Big Roly Schmitt.”

  “How did you find out about this?” Ruthie said, and then she put her head in her hands. “No, don’t tell me,” she said through her fingers. “At this point, it doesn’t matter, I guess.”

  “Have you signed anything?”

  Ruthie shook her head, and suddenly Lucy felt ashamed. It wasn’t Ruthie’s fault about Joe.

  “Tell me something,” Lucy said. “Do you really want him to have this property?”

  “I’ll tell you exactly what I want,” Ruthie said. “I want to pay off my debts and send my daughter to school. I want to live in this house and maintain the shrine for as long as people feel the need to see it. Tom and I worked hard for this farm, so hard—” Her voice broke. She reached inside the neck of her sweater, fingered the cross at her throat as if the answers to everything were contained inside it. “I’ve done all that I can do.”

  “Then let me tell you what I want,” Lucy said. “I want to keep this town alive. As a town—not a suburb or a strip mall. With a Main Street people can walk to. With the sort of character that makes our kids want to stay after they’re grown and our parents remain once they retire. A place where people feel safe because it has a center, a soul, and we’ve lost that somehow. We’ve lost each other. We need to find ourselves back again.” She thought of Joe, his vitamins and prayers. His fear. “I’ll be straight with you—I don’t believe in the shrine the way it seems my husband does. But I believe in what it means for the city. I want to protect it if I can.”

  “What can you do?” Ruthie said wearily.

  “Did you know the city is looking to purchase river
front land for a public park?”

  Ruthie stared at her. “No,” she said. “I don’t keep up with the papers much.”

  “It’s not in the papers—yet,” Lucy said. “Here’s what I was thinking. I’d like to have the city planner come out and take a look. If the parcel looks good, we can make a proposal to the general council. But I have to tell you, it’s a long shot. The council might not go for it—not everybody thinks as I do. Or they could kick it to a referendum, in which case the voters could kill it. And I should tell you the city probably won’t pay you what Schmitt can.”

  “I don’t care about profit,” Ruthie said. “This is the miracle I’ve prayed for.”

  “There’s no such thing as miracles,” Lucy said. “There’s good luck and bad luck, and we’re going to need plenty of the first kind to make this happen.”

  “No doubt Cherish would agree with your vision of things,” Ruthie said. “But you and I—we’ll have to agree to disagree if we’re going to work together.” She took Lucy’s hand like a sister. “Now tell me,” she said. “What do you need from me? What can I do to help?”

  It was dark by the time Lucy got back home. Joe opened the door as she pulled in the driveway, waited for her as she came up the walk. “I finally called the restaurant,” he said, “and they said you’d left hours ago. I was this close to calling Mel Rooney—” But before he could say anything more, she unwound the scarf from her neck, balled it up, and hurled it at him like a bomb. Then she stormed down the hall to their room, slammed the door so hard it bounced back open, slammed it again. The minute Joe appeared, she shouted, “What the hell did you think you were doing, Joe? I’m not good enough for you the way that I am?”

  Joe opened his mouth, closed it. “I don’t see what you’re mad about,” he finally said. “I thought that this might help. It can’t hurt anyway.”

  She threw her crutch across the room, balanced herself against the bedpost. “This is the package I come in. You don’t like it, you shouldn’t have married it. You don’t want it anymore, divorce it.”

  “Lucy.”

  “You said it didn’t matter to you!”

  “They say it helps people quit smoking. They say somebody’s cancer went away. What’s wrong with having a little faith?”

  She stared at him as if he were someone she’d never seen before.

  “You said it didn’t matter, Joe,” she said. “All these years.”

  “You’re blowing this out of proportion. You know how I feel about you.”

  “And how’s that, Joe?”

  She could see him choosing his words as if both their lives depended on it. The room seemed to hold its breath. The faces of their children and grandchildren watched them from the dresser, from the top of the TV, from the wall above the bed.

  To the Editor:

  I am writing on behalf of my husband and myself to ask again if anyone knows the whereabouts of Fred’s brother, Shawn James Carpenter, that you please call me or you could always leave a note at Jeep’s, you do not have to sign your name either. The detective we hired last April has found nothing except that maybe he was in Utah for a while, but we don’t know. This has been a difficult year for our family and we appreciate all the help and support from everyone who knew Gabriel or is touched by his story. There’s been some talk that we oppose the shrine and plan to bring legal action against Ruthie Mader, and I want to say for everyone to see, this is not true. We don’t pretend to understand everything that has happened, but as long as it’s helping people, so much the better. We are ready to put this behind us if we ever can to get on with our lives.

  Sincerely,

  Bethany Carpenter

  —From the Ambient Weekly

  July 1991

  eleven

  Ruthie Mader sat up in bed, watched the sun push itself free of the earth like a giant hothouse flower. The tax debt had weighed on her mind for so long that she felt for it now out of habit, the way the tongue reaches for a notch in the gum, a sour, cracked tooth—but no. In July, the city had voted to purchase ninety acres for the Thomas Mader Recreational Area. The sale had left her with money enough to secure the house and barn, plus the remaining ten acres of land. God was good. And Lucy Kimmeldorf was a genius.

  Two weeks after the sale, the Circle had sponsored a victory potluck in her honor. Ruthie placed an open invitation in the Ambient Weekly, expecting no more than a hundred people, but by five o’clock that afternoon, there were over four hundred—the line of parked cars stretched to the highway bridge—and most signed their names in the guest book Anna Grey Graf had thought to bring along. Her husband, Bill, had warmed up to the Circle; he even took shifts at the grills with Joe Kimmeldorf, Jeep Curry, and Fred Carpenter, flipping hamburgers and brats. Stan Pranke supervised from a lawn chair, Bill Graf, Sr., and old Pops Carpenter joined him with a six-pack, and every now and then all three of them disappeared in a blast of charcoal smoke. Women unfolded card tables, arranged platters of cold fried chicken and boiled ham and cold cuts, three-bean salads and carrot salads, coleslaw and sauerkraut and finger Jell-O, rolls and chips and sour cream dips, tray after tray of dessert bars. There was sweet lemonade in rented canisters, ice-filled tubs of soda and Pabst. Children raced through the orchard in packs, collecting apples for green-apple fights. Babies slept on blankets spread out in shady rows beside the house. Janey Fields and Danny Hope, just back from their honeymoon, sat beside the babies, and everybody teased them that they better watch it, those things might be contagious. Even Cherish came out of her shell, lifting her head to greet people, chatting with Lisa Marie Kirsch, running for extra serving spoons.

  For the first time since that cold night in April—in some ways, it seemed to Ruthie, for the first time since Tom’s death—there was a sense of community again. A collective feeling of optimism. When night fell, everyone worked together building a giant bonfire. There were marshmallows and plenty of sticks, and in the restless, searching shadows of the flames, the talk turned quiet, reflective. Alone or in groups, people slipped away to the barn, where they stood before the white stone angel to marvel at what had happened. Some returned to the fire and told of a feeling, a presence, a peacefulness there. Some spoke of other experiences they’d had that ruffled the smooth grain of reason. As soon as the talk turned in this direction, Ruthie saw Cherish rise, make her way back to the house. Soon the light in her bedroom winked on. No doubt she was opening a book, losing herself in the ideas of a stranger. How eager she was to move away from Ambient, to live in a place where no one knew her story, to meet people who would look into her scarred face and accept it as it was, without recalling its former landscape.

  And now that day had finally arrived; Ruthie couldn’t quite believe it. By noon, Cherish would be settling into a dormitory in Eau Claire, having conversations with people Ruthie would never meet, talking about things that Ruthie, with her outdated high school diploma, would never understand.

  Ruthie pulled her knees to her chest, leaned back against the headboard, and closed her eyes to pray. She did not say any particular prayer; she no longer memorized Bible verses. Over the years, she had moved away from the sharp-cornered lines of her schoolgirl catechism, searching for warmer cadences, something more graceful, closer to love. Raising a child had taught her the purest sounds of devotion, how words are merely the residue meaning leaves in our mouths. Monks chanting Latin in brownrobed lines, parents singing nursery rhymes to drowsing children, even the comfort of a standard greeting—Hi. Hello. How are you? Fine—the message behind each was constant, unchanging, insistent as a heartbeat. I’m here. I’m here. The oldest prayer. Ruthie prayed until she felt herself growing visible, and at that moment she was raised up, becoming—for a brief, brilliant eye blink—larger than she knew herself to be. And that was Faith—the mind’s surrender to the stunned and terrified wonder of the heart. Like the moment after Cherish’s birth, when she’d reached out to touch that wet, furred skull. Like the moment of Tom’s death, when she was in t
he root cellar, innocently weeding soft apples from the bin, and suddenly felt him standing behind her, one hand in his pocket, and knew. Like the moment in the barn, when she’d first seen the boy bathed in light, smelled the sweetness of his skin. Each time the same whisper: I’m here, I’m here. Knowing God would be like such a moment, only stretched into all eternity.

  She opened her eyes. Cherish was up; Ruthie could hear her moving around her room, thumping the last of her books into boxes. Since that night on the bridge, she’d suffered from terrible insomnia, which left her glassy-eyed and distracted. She prowled the house with her face tucked low, as if to hide the fading scribble of scars. Anything Ruthie said or did only made things worse. When she tried to explain that when God shuts a door, He opens a window, that even the worst of experiences had the potential for goodness if one only turned them over to the Lord, Cherish merely marked her place in her book with a finger and waited for Ruthie to finish.

  “That’s one way to look at the world,” she’d say, or else, “That’s very interesting.”

  That calm, rational tone. The same tone used by the priest whom the archdiocese sent to investigate the shrine, a plump, kindly man who had already made up his mind. They went over the details again and again. What had the angel looked like? How had Ruthie known what it was? And how much sleep had she had that night? (He apologized, shifted the focus of his inquiries.) The temperature of the boy’s skin—would she say it had been room temperature? A little cooler? Warm like a fresh cup of tea? And his coloration—flushed? As in bruised or feverish? As in raw chilled skin? When Ruthie described the odor that had surrounded the body, the priest shook his head in a good-natured way. “Wet hay might have such a smell,” he suggested, and then he checked his notes. “You mentioned the boy’s damp clothing.”