River Angel

by A. Manette Ansay

  “I know what wet hay smells like,” Ruthie said, looking at his soft, city hands. She didn’t understand it, either. She still didn’t understand. Why had this happened, and why to her? What did it mean? Was she responsible? The same kind of thoughts she’d had after Tom’s death. Only then she’d carried those thoughts alone, for even old friends kept their distance—out of shame, perhaps, or else out of guilt. What had happened to Tom might have happened to one of their own loved ones, but it hadn’t, and every time they spoke with Ruthie Mader they were glad. And possibly one of them had done it, or known the person who had done it. Everyone was a bit uneasy when the topic snagged itself in the unsuspecting net of conversation. What would you do, if no one had seen? When done was done and there was no going back and changing things anyway? If it had been an accident, a terrible mistake that would cost you everything?

  A rooster crowed in the distance, four broken notes like a sob, and the sound drifted in through the open window on a breath of air as warm and moist as her own. Ruthie swung her legs over the edge of the bed and saw Cherish standing in the doorway. “We need to leave by seven,” she said.

  “It’s barely six o’clock.”

  “It’s five after,” Cherish said. “I’m going to start loading the truck.”

  At the potluck, countless people had taken Ruthie aside and told her how much they admired Cherish for getting her life together—some went so far as to say she had been blessed—but Ruthie knew she was more lost now than all those nights she’d sneaked out of the house. Adolescence, like any fever, would have run its course, and if Cherish had been wild, perhaps she couldn’t help it, taking after her grandmother the way she did. Gwendolyn had died of lung cancer long before Cherish’s birth, but whenever Ruthie looked into her daughter’s wide-set eyes, she saw her own mother looking back. That heart-shaped face. That hollowed cheek. That punishing mouth. Gwendolyn was seldom seen without a cigarette lilting from her lips. She spent nearly every weekend at the Hodag, drinking and dancing and flirting with men—there were nights she never came home. She wore low-cut shirts, jangly earrings, stiletto heels that Ruthie was forbidden to try on.

  “Don’t call me Mom,” Gwendolyn had said when Ruthie was eight or nine. “It makes me feel old.”

  But Cherish had been living a quiet life. She’d been working long hours at the library. She’d finished all the books on the Recommended Book List that UW-Eau Claire sent its incoming students. She’d stopped telling lies. If you asked, she would look you right in the face and admit she did not believe in God.

  “As a society, we have to move beyond that,” she told Ruthie. It was, no doubt, an idea she’d gotten from her reading. “There is no reason to believe that the soul is anything more than what we call memory.”

  “Then what happens to people when they die?”

  “Mom, I don’t want to fight about this,” Cherish said. “I know religion is a comfort to you, but I just don’t believe it anymore.”

  Ruthie didn’t know how to reach her. And now she was leaving, and she was happy to be leaving, and there was nothing to be done except to get up and shower, braid her hair, put on her good dress with the short, cuffed sleeves, even though Cherish had said not to dress up. Clip-on earrings shaped like daisies. Nice white sandals from Penney’s. Her Faith cross never left her throat—she would have felt uneasy without it, the way she would have felt had she removed her wedding ring. Suddenly she was hurrying. She wanted to help with the last of the boxes. She wanted to be there with Cherish when she stepped out of her room for the very last time. After today they’d see each other only once a month—perhaps less. And when the holidays arrived, Cherish might decide to go home with a friend. When summer came, she might just find a job in Eau Claire. Ruthie might never again have this opportunity to reach her daughter’s heart.

  But she found Cherish’s room already empty. Bare hangers rang like chimes. The bed was stripped, the desk cleaned out, the shelves robbed of books and clutter. Cracks in the plaster marked the walls in lightning-bolt patterns, and water stains dappled the ceilings. There was a dark spot on the wall where burning wires had nearly started a fire; the light switch beside it was duct-taped into a permanent off position. Now that Ruthie had paid her back taxes, set aside tuition for Cherish, bought a used Ford pickup, a furnace, and a hot-water heater, and exterminated the huge bat colony in the attic, there was little cash left over for all the other things that needed to be done. Somehow the plumbing would have to be replaced. The peeling clapboards needed stripping and painting. The roof leaked; the front porch had rotted through. The kitchen needed appliances—the dishwasher had died years earlier, and only two burners on the stove still worked. Though what would one person need with more than two burners? It was hard to imagine—the small, silent meals. Mornings broken only by the chatter of TV. Life alone.

  A book was lying facedown on the nightstand. Ruthie was certain that too much reading was causing Cherish’s sleeplessness, but Dr. Kemp said insomnia was a symptom of depression. He said it was important for Ruthie to give Cherish some distance. He said it was important for teens to understand it was OK to hold beliefs that were different from their parents’. Ruthie had nodded when he’d said that. But it wasn’t OK; in fact, it was intolerable. It was like being killed. What had ever happened to Honor thy father and mother? How else were beliefs to live on, if not through the lives of one’s children?

  She picked up the book—Nietzsche? Night-zee? The biography on the back said that he’d died in an asylum. She tried to read a passage that Cherish had underlined: The content of our conscience is everything that was during the years of our childhoods regularly demanded of us without reason by people we honored or feared…. The belief in authorities is the source of the conscience; it is therefore not the voice of God in the heart of man, but the voice of some men in man.

  She flipped to another page.

  …there is no longer for you any rewarder and recompenser, no final corrector—there is no longer any reason in what happens, no longer any love in what happens to you—there is no longer any resting place open to your heart where it has only to find and only to seek…. And then, at the bottom of the paragraph: Perhaps it is precisely that renunciation which will also lend us the strength by which the renunciation itself can be endured; perhaps man will rise higher and higher from that time when he no longer flows out into God.

  She read it several times to be sure she’d understood. How could anybody live in the world, believing something like that?

  Footsteps pounded up the stairs; Ruthie kicked the book under the bed just seconds before Cherish came into the room.

  “I’m ready whenever you are,” Cherish said, looking around the nightstand. “I thought I left a book up here.”

  Ruthie shook her head. For the first time in months, Cherish’s face was flushed with excitement, beautiful still in spite of the scars—perhaps even more beautiful. Ruthie wanted to hold her the way she had when Cherish was still small, feel those sturdy arms around her waist, see the upturned face, its absolute confidence. Nights, they’d said their bedtime prayers together, holding hands across the kitchen table between cooling cups of hot cocoa. There wasn’t a question Ruthie couldn’t answer. There wasn’t a problem Ruthie couldn’t solve. And God, like a grand, benevolent giant, was watching out for them both. Or so it had seemed, until now. Until Cherish turned her face away.

  “I miss you already,” Ruthie said, knowing it was the wrong thing to say.

  “I’m not even leaving the state.”

  “But I worry—”

  “I’ll be fine.” Cherish bounded down the stairs.

  They ate a light breakfast before they left. Cherish had already unlocked the door to the shrine, put out the basket of angel pendants and a box of “What to Do in Ambient” brochures, which Lucy replenished from time to time. A raft of swallows glided out into the sunlight, bellies flashing rust. How Ruthie missed the smells and sounds of the sheep, the waxy feel of their
fleece, their patient, placid eyes. But she’d sold them to the Farbs, along with the goats, to meet her co-payments on Cherish’s medical bills. The chickens had died, one by one, or wandered off. Old Mule had disappeared abruptly—she hated to think he’d been stolen, but clearly there was no sense in keeping animals with so many people coming through. Last weekend alone, there had been sixty-five pilgrims.

  “Mom?” Cherish called. She was already sitting in the truck. “If my roommate gets there first, I’ll be stuck with the top bunk.”

  And so that was it. As Ruthie drove down the driveway, toward the J road, she waited for Cherish to look back or, at least, sneak a glance in the rearview mirror. But she didn’t, and when they got on the highway, she turned on the radio as if this were any other day, as if they were just going into town to pick up groceries at the Piggly Wiggly. Ruthie sneaked a sideways glance at her daughter. How could a child you had carried inside your own body grow up to become a mystery? They passed the new billboard that marked the edge of the Carpenters’ land: I BELIEVE! REMEMBER GABRIEL AT THE RIVER ANGEL SHRINE. They passed what had once been the Faith house. It hadn’t taken Roland more than a week to rent it out to an auto parts dealer, and of course they’d whitewashed Cherish and Maya’s mural from the walls. It was a shame they’d never finished it. It was a shame that Cherish didn’t paint or draw anymore. What would she do with an English degree if, as she claimed, she didn’t want to teach? How Ruthie envied Margaret Kirsch, whose daughter was already an assistant manager at the Wal-Mart. Lisa Marie was learning real skills, a life trade. Lisa Marie was staying close to home. Close to her mother.

  They turned onto County O, passing the spot where Tom’s body had been found, the white cross weathered to the color of sorrow itself, gray as bone. The fields were scorched the color of honey; the horizon shivered with heat. There is no longer any reason in what happens, no longer any love in what happens to you. The sentence had stuck in Ruthie’s mind like a terrible song, going round and round. “No wonder that poor man went insane,” she said, more to herself than to Cherish.

  “Which man?”

  “The one who wrote that book.”

  “Nietzsche.” Cherish looked annoyed. “What did you do with it, Mom?” Then she shrugged. “I’ll get another copy at the library.”

  “How can anyone think there’s no reason for all that we see?” Ruthie gestured at the brittle fields, at the dust boiling over the highway and the shocked blue heart of the sky. “Somebody did this, somebody made this, just like somebody made us all. If you found a watch lying on the sidewalk, would you think all those intricate pieces had assembled themselves on their own?”

  “The world isn’t a watch, Mom.”

  “The things you believe,” Ruthie said. “It simply breaks my heart. I wish we could talk about this, sweetheart.” They were coming up on I-90/94; she exited onto the cloverleaf and headed west. A highway sign urged people to give themselves a hug-buckle up, and stuck beneath the seat-belt graphic was a river angel bumper sticker: HONK IF YOU BELIEVE! Ruthie truly hated those things, but there wasn’t anything she could do about them. People sold them in town along with T-shirts and mugs and pins. Maya Paluski was in Seattle visiting friends for the summer, and she’d sent Ruthie a photo she’d taken of a Jaguar with California tags and THIS CAR PROTECTED BY THE RIVER ANGEL plastered across the bumper.

  “Fine,” Cherish said. “Let’s talk.”

  “Good,” Ruthie said, surprised.

  “I’ll start,” Cherish said. “You say what I believe breaks your heart. But if you believe in what you say you believe in, then isn’t what I believe in simply part of God’s will?”

  “Oh, honey,” Ruthie said. The first sign for Eau Claire appeared: 185 miles. Two crosses stood tall in the mown grass of the easement, fresh pink carnations braided around their necks. “There must have been an accident,” she said, trying to change the subject. Talking now would be a mistake; she could see that. They’d only spend the morning fighting. But Cherish wouldn’t let it go. She said, “I thought you didn’t believe in accidents.”

  Ruthie looked at her. “What are you talking about?”

  “I mean,” Cherish said, “you believe that everything is God’s will, right? So nothing can be an accident. People die, people live—but either way, it really doesn’t matter. So what if two people lost their lives back there. So what if some poor family is grieving. Give thanks in all circumstances. How many times in my life have you told me that?” The hot wind rippled through her hair.

  “You’re twisting my words, and you know it.”

  “Am I? All right. Let’s talk about the carnations, then. What a waste of money!” Ruthie winced; Cherish was mimicking her. “Dead people live with God; they have everything they need. If you’re going to give flowers, give them to the living.” She dropped back into her regular voice. “You told me that too, remember? Come on, Mom, you wanted to talk. We visited Dad’s grave every single Sunday for years, and we never once left flowers or pictures or anything. Anything. Didn’t you care about him? Didn’t you love him? Don’t you ever miss him?”

  Ruthie was stunned. “How can you ask me that?”

  “You’ve never acted like it. You never talk about him. You never even cried, not even at the funeral. And whenever I cried, you’d tell me that he’d only been on loan to us anyway and that he really belonged to God, and it was selfish to be unhappy when he was so very, very happy in heaven. Fine, OK, that’s what you believe. I guess I can deal with that. But then you get after me for reading Nietzsche. Mom, your ideas are more depressing than anything Nietzsche ever wrote. More fucked up too, if you want to know the truth.”

  Ruthie gripped the steering wheel. She said very softly, “Don’t you ever, ever say that word to me.”

  “Fucked up,” Cherish said, and she turned up the radio.

  One hundred miles to Eau Claire. Gradually, the flat fields rolled themselves into wooded hills, rock formations rising between them, unexpected, ungainly as dinosaurs. The highway cut between granite walls; pink flecks ran through the veins. Seventy-five miles. Another white cross by the roadside: wildflowers dead in a clouded jelly jar, snapshots wrapped in plastic, a pale blue ribbon the color of ice. Someone’s life flashed past and was gone, was resurrected as Ruthie imagined the hands which had tied that ribbon, a woman’s hands, rough and shaking like her own. And the long weekly drive with the children to place the flowers at the site, and then the longer ride back, tempered with the promise of McDonald’s or Dairy Queen, salt and fat and sweetness that fooled nobody’s hunger. Where is Daddy and why has he gone? The woman’s tears brighter than her wedding diamond. The stares of the people in the restaurant. The children hushing themselves after spills. The same scene, week after week.

  Ruthie hadn’t wanted Cherish to grow up in a house defined by grief. Death was a natural part of God’s plan; she didn’t want Cherish to fear. If Ruthie needed to cry, she went to her room and shut the door, sobbed into Tom’s bathrobe, which still hung from its wobbling hook, feeding the worn flannel into her mouth until she choked on its dust, gagged, spat it out. Ten minutes, fifteen minutes at most, and then it was over, her hair freshly combed, her throat and tongue raw with Listerine. Sundays after Mass, they walked from the church to the cemetery unburdened. No flowers. No photographs. Nothing but a small American flag, which blew away between their visits. Cherish always hunted it down in the ditch that ran alongside the gravestones, returning with the mementos and memorials of others: cards and letters, plastic flowers, angels, saints, and pinwheels. None of that was necessary, Ruthie explained, for Daddy had absolutely everything he needed. “Doesn’t he miss us?” Cherish said once, and before the tears could spill over, priming the wetness behind Ruthie’s eyes, she replied, “Of course not—he knows we’ll join him soon.” And yes, she had said it: “It’s selfish for us to cry.”

  Selfish—also human, she realized now. Yet if one weren’t careful, grief could take over completely. The way Ruthie
had nearly allowed it to do during those terrible months just after Tom’s death, a time she’d always hoped Cherish wouldn’t remember, would never discover on her own. Dear Lord, Ruthie prayed, tell me what to do. Forty-six miles. “Cherish,” she began, and she turned off the radio. And at last she felt the grace of God assembling the words she needed, placing them one by one, like mints, upon her tongue.

  “A week or so after your father’s funeral,” she said, “I was driving down County O when I saw a car pull up by your father’s marker. A little red sporty thing. Something about it made me look twice. When it pulled away, I chased it in that old Ford we had—you remember it? But I couldn’t keep up. I turned around and came back home.” It had been a long time since Ruthie had talked about that red sports car. Lorna and Jolena and Shelley knew the story. And Maya. The founding members of the Circle of Faith. “But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. During the day, while you were in school, I’d bike out to the Neumillers’. I made myself a blind beneath a stand of hickory trees—the cows would gather round, and I’d flap my arms to scare them off—and I waited. The more I thought about it, the more I was absolutely certain that the driver of that sports car was responsible for your father’s death. I’d only caught a glimpse of him, but as time passed I began to see him clearly. He was handsome, in his late thirties, with blond hair turning silver and a gold ring on his hand. He had blue eyes and creases starting around his mouth. A thick neck. A leather watchband. And he was thinking he’d gotten away with something. Maybe even laughing about it—I knew there were people in the world who didn’t care what they did. Your grandmother was that way. Once, when I was a kid, she clipped a dog that was crossing the road. It had a silver collar, and I saw it spinning with its jaw smashed open—alive and everything, just badly hurt. But Gwendolyn told me, ‘Hang on, baby,’ and she shot right out of there, and when we got out to where the Badger State Mall is now, which is where we lived back then, she turned to me and said, ‘Looks like we got away with that one.’”