River Angel (17 page)

“Not yet,” Stan said. “But we need to have a chat.”

“Uh-oh,” Pops said, and he led them to the living room, seated himself in an orange beanbag chair that made Stan's back ache just to look at it. Three cats were curled up in a cozy tangle on the floor; Gabriel came in and flopped down beside them. Stan claimed the couch.

“When's the last time you were in town?” he asked.

Pops thought about it. “Oh, I'd say about a week ago.”

“How'd you get there?”

Pops showed all of his this-way-thataway teeth. “Now, Chief, you know the state ate my license. How else am I going to get around?”

Clumps of fur drifted through the air. Stan glanced up and wished he hadn't when he saw all the cobwebs hanging from the ceiling. The whole house was a disaster. Still, Pops was doing better than anyone might have expected. After his young wife died, he went into a kind of depression that had lasted for years; Fred and Shawn had pretty much raised themselves. Over time, he'd come back to himself, and now he even worked a bit—serving drinks at Jeep's when things got busy, picking up trash along the highway for the city, doing bush-hogging and snow removal for Big Roly Schmitt. And Stan could see Pops loved the boy. He could hear it in his thoughts, which were thick with devotion, like a golden retriever's. He also knew that Bethany Carpenter, brusque though she could be, wasn't the type to neglect a child. This was something Stan could handle himself. So he told Pops, in his best cop voice, that some changes were re
quired. From now on, if he needed something in town, he should let Fred give him a lift or, better still, fetch it for him. He could use the time at home to drag some of the stuff along the highway closer to the house, or maybe even behind it, so it couldn't be seen from the road. And above all, he and Bethany and Fred all had to keep a closer eye on Gabriel.

“From now on, we're gonna charge a fifty-dollar vagrancy fine each time the department picks him up,” Stan said.

He was lying, of course; there was no such fine. Well, at least not yet. But it was something both Pops and Fred could understand—unlike the threat of child protection, which was too abstract to be effective.

“Fifty bucks!” Pops said. “Christ, for that I should just let you keep him.”

“You wouldn't really do that,” Gabriel said. He'd draped one of the sleeping cats over the back of his neck like a scarf.

“That's because there won't be a next time—right, Gabriel?” Stan took a shiny toy badge out of his pocket. Cost him two bucks at the Wal-Mart, but what the hell. “Tell you what. If you promise me you'll stay close to home, I'll make you a special deputy.”

“Can I arrest people?” Gabriel said. He wasn't so bad-looking when he smiled. Give him a few more years, Stan thought, shave about fifty pounds off of him, and he might turn out OK. Come to think of it, Shawn had been kind of a butterball himself.

“Sure, why not?” Stan said, and he beckoned the boy over so he could pin the badge on his T-shirt. After Gabriel had run off, still wearing the cat, to look in the bathroom mirror, Stan asked Pops, “Don't he have friends at school he can play with?”

“Naw. They all give him hell—his cousins included. He says his only friend is Jesus.”

Stan had to laugh at that. “My wife would sure approve.”

That had been—what?—two weeks ago? The tractor had been
seen on the road only once since. Two refrigerators, a bathtub, and most of the bashed-in TVs had disappeared from the roadside. And Gabriel stopped wandering off—or so it had seemed. Until now.

Someone was driving too fast up the J road, swerving past Mel's orange warning cones and onto the bridge. Stan clambered out of his car just as Bethany and Pops emerged from theirs. The old man seemed confused. He stared out over the river, which was black and cold as the universe itself. “Gabriel?” he called.

“What happened?” Bethany hurried toward Stan.

“We're not sure yet,” Stan said. “Some high school kids saw him fall off the bridge, but we don't know the exact circumstances.”

“Off the bridge!” Bethany said.

“Gabriel?” the old man shouted, and Bethany whirled on him and said, “What on earth was he doing at the bridge? If you'd kept an eye on him like you promised—”

“He told me he was going back to your place,” Pops said, pulling at the zipper of his coat. “He said he had homework.”

“Didn't I tell you to keep him with you?”

“Why was that?” Stan said, placing a steadying hand on her shoulder.

“He and my Robert John don't get along. I figured it was better to split them up until I got back home.”

“And where were you?”

“Working!” Bethany said, and she shrugged off his hand. “Where else would I be? A lady at the millpond calls up, says her in-laws are coming in the morning and she'll pay me one hundred dollars to get her house in shape—” She broke off, stared out at the distant hazy lights of the search party. “Those high school kids, they didn't hurt him?”

“We just don't know right now,” Stan said, as gently as he
could. “They were the ones who called the police. It appears they tried their best to find him.”

“Maybe it ain't even him,” she said. “Maybe they made a mistake.” But when Stan took the Snoopy flashlight out of his pocket, she covered her face with her hands. Pops closed his eyes and began to swear, a long string of cusses that made no sense whatsoever, and Stan swore right along with him. He could not charge either of these people with neglect. They were doing the best they could. Let Mel file his goddamn charges if he wanted. Stan would tender his resignation as soon as he got home. He and Lorna would sell the house and buy that RV and drive it all the way to Alaska. Somewhere with lots of trees and fresh, clean air. Somewhere with a little town like Ambient used to be: friendly people, safe streets, nobody bothering to lock their doors. What was the world coming to that a thing like this could happen? And as if he was thinking the same thing, Pops said, “He was just looking for the angel. He wasn't bothering nobody. All he was doing was looking for that angel.”

And Stan said what he'd said to Ruthie Mader, and Roy Tauscheck, and family members of the one who'd died that foggy night at the strip. “He's out of our hands and into the Lord's. Go home, get some rest. We'll search all night if we have to, and we'll call the minute we know something more.”

After they'd gone, Stan radioed Mel to let him know he'd sent the Carpenters home. Then he told him he could kiss his wrinkled ass and drove to his own house, where Lorna was waiting for him, a cup of warm milk in her hand. The police had come to the meetinghouse. Anna Grey Graf had driven Ruthie to the hospital, where Cherish was in stable condition. “What in God's name happened out there, Stan?” Lorna said.

“I don't know,” Stan said. He took the warm milk she gave him, sat down at the kitchen desk. “Pull up a chair and write something for me?” he said, and then he handed her a pen, a
yellow tablet of lined paper. He rested his chin on his hands and wept as she took down his resignation.

He learned what had happened on the morning news, just like everyone else. It had been dawn before Ruthie Mader finally came home from Our Lady of Mercy to feed and water her sheep. Her old dog was oddly anxious; he led the way to the barn. Inside, despite the dim light, she could see everything with remarkable clarity—the hens in the rafters, the golden-eyed goats, the sheep huddled in a close circle as if guarding one of their lambs. A snow-white pigeon rose from the straw, and it was then that she realized it was not a bird at all, but the source of the light that filled the air, a light so beautiful it took her breath. She watched it rise up to the apex of the barn, disappear into a tiny slice of sunlight. The boy was lying in the sheep pen, hands folded on his chest. She placed her finger to his neck. She could not say how much time passed before she walked over to the house and dialed 911.

“His body was warm when I touched it,” she said. “There was a smell like flowers. When I saw him there, I thought he was just sleeping.”

Prayer of the Blessed Virgin (never known to fail): O most beautiful flower of Mt. Carmel, fruitful vine, splendor of Heaven. Blessed Mother of the Son of God, Immaculate Virgin, assist me in my necessity. O Star of the Sea, help me and show me here you are my Mother. O Holy Mary, Mother of God, Queen of Heaven and Earth, I humbly beseech you from the bottom of my heart to succor me in my necessity (make request). There are none that can withstand your power. O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee (three times). Holy Mary, I place this prayer for your hands (three times). All you have to do is say this prayer for three consecutive days and then you must publish and it will be granted to you if you believe. Grateful thanks
.

G.Z
.

—
From the
Ambient Weekly

April 1991

His body was
warm when I touched it. There was a smell like flowers
.

It had been very early Sunday morning when Ruthie Mader dialed 911. By the middle of the week, nearly everyone within a hundred-mile radius of Ambient could have chanted those words by heart. The news shows played her breathless call; her words were quoted and requoted in the papers, repeated again on radio talk shows, around supper tables, at country bars over icy pitchers of beer. Old Bill Graf, flanked by his son, made a statement to WTMJ from the county morgue. The Carpenter child's body, he said, was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen, and he was proud to handle the funeral and subsequent cremation at no charge whatsoever to the family. Bill junior and his wife made a statement as well; the wife had been the child's fifth-grade teacher. “He'd bow his head down in the classroom to pray,” she said. “He was truly a special child.” Another woman had seen the boy walking along the highway bridge only a few weeks earlier; when she'd pulled over to offer him a ride, she'd seen a strange pale light around his face and hands. The child's father
could not be located for comment, but the grandfather confirmed that the boy had been
deeply religious
. “I believe Mrs. Mader's story,” Pops Carpenter said, scrubbing tears from his eyes. “I take comfort from the thought of it.” An address flashed up on the screen: Donations were being accepted on behalf of family and friends, who were hoping to place a monument on the spot where the boy had been found. Half a dozen papers had already called the Saint Fridolin's rectory for a comment on the rumor of a shrine.

“Each year in the United States alone, hundreds of supernatural occurrences are reported to the Church,” Father George Oberling said. “I don't mean to suggest people deliberately
misrepresent
what they see so much as
misunderstand
.” He'd tried to be as diplomatic as possible.

Now he turned off his TV and wearily rubbed his temples. It was Saturday night, exactly one week since the poor boy's death. The rectory phone had been ringing around the clock with calls from people whose lights had flickered (Wisconsin Electric blamed a power surge) and others who had heard a sound “like thunder” (Father George himself had heard nothing) and others still who had seen a flash of light, and all of them wanted to know if Father had heard of the old river angel stories, and did he believe in things like that, and how did he think the boy got across the field without leaving tracks, and was it true there wasn't a bump or bruise anywhere on his body? In fact, Our Lady of Mercy had confirmed that the boy had died of exposure. In fact, Mel Rooney had assured him that the lack of external physical evidence could be blamed on human error rather than celestial favors: Stan Pranke had assembled his search party at Jeep's. Within an hour, Mel was fighting off dozens of spontaneous volunteers, many of whom parked on the County C and then cut through the fields toward the river, trampling the fresh snow into slush. One good thing,
however small, had come out of the whole fiasco. Stan Pranke, God bless him, had finally resigned.

The funeral, delayed by the autopsy, was set for Monday at eleven, and at the request of a Catholic aunt, Father George had agreed to officiate. He could only hope that afterward, all the talk about
how
the boy arrived at the barn undetected would fade enough to allow the community to focus on
what
had actually happened. The
true
implications of this tragedy. Clearly the Carpenter boy had fallen through the cracks of the system, abandoned to the care of people who hadn't the skills to look after him. But worse was the thought of a child's death at the hands of other children. It wasn't happening only in big cities like Milwaukee or Chicago anymore. The real question was, what did parents plan to do about it? Hide their heads in the sand? Or else get their houses in order before this kind of violence took root? He'd heard that the Mader girl wouldn't face charges; she was badly disfigured, still recovering from her injuries, and had no memory of what had happened on the bridge. The boys themselves—well-known high school athletes, one a banker's son—already had good lawyers. No doubt they'd walk away with slaps on their wrists, maybe some community service. They still insisted they'd never touched the child, that he'd jumped from the bridge of his own volition; recently, one had started to claim that
he
had seen a flash of light. And why had he neglected to mention this initially? “I thought nobody would believe me,” Paul Zuggenhagen told the
Ambient Weekly
.

Father George shook his head. Eventually, people were going to have to recognize the angel for what it was: an embodiment of guilt and sorrow and shame. A whole lot of wishful thinking. But when he showed up for eight o'clock Mass the next morning, he discovered Saint Fridolin's packed to the rafters, as if it were Christmas Day. After recovering from his astonishment, he proceeded with the service, but when he returned for the ten o'clock
Mass and found not only the pews but the aisles clogged with worshipers, he stepped down from the podium and addressed the congregation directly. Didn't they see what was happening—that the very
real
tragedy of a child's death was already starting to pale beside rumors of the so-called supernatural? Didn't they understand that God was not a magician producing rabbits from a hat, that faith was so much more than smoke and lights and special effects? The Eucharist—the transubstantiation of bread to body, wine to blood—was a
true
miracle, sanctioned by the Church, yet every day, Catholics around the world ate the Host as nonchalantly as a potato chip. But let someone revive an old folktale—he paused to strain the grim note of frustration from his voice—and they'd come to a service they hadn't attended since Christmastime.

“Don't be distracted by the fabulous,” Father George said. “Go home and pray for the soul of Gabriel Carpenter. Pray that those young people responsible will make their peace with God and change their ways. And pray that, as a community, we will learn to instill our children with strong moral values through our own adult examples of sobriety, respect, and devotion to our faith.”

Still, the rectory phone continued to ring, parishioners bearing new bits of information like gifts. Did Father know a church bus had arrived from the Dells? Had Father been past the highway bridge, where people were leaving bouquets of flowers and taking photographs?

“It's nothing to worry about,” Father George told the archbishop at the end of the day. “I know the woman involved, and I doubt many people are taking her too seriously.” But when he turned on the nightly news at ten, he was greeted by a shot of Ruthie's courtyard. That afternoon, over one hundred people had made an impromptu pilgrimage from the bridge to the barn, where the police were concluding their investigation. The animals
had all been transported to a neighbor's barn; trouble began when two local officers stated there was still an impression in the straw where the boy's body had lain. Lots of people desired to see that impression for themselves, and when they started ducking under the tape police had wound around the barn walls and prying off the boards that had been nailed over the windows, Mel Rooney took his bullhorn and announced that everyone would have to step back. But no one obeyed, and there were more people showing up all the time, avoiding the barricade at the end of Ruthie's long driveway by parking on the highway and walking through the fields, or else driving in through the old apple orchard, and all of them wanted answers. “This is
our
community,” one man shouted at the camera. “We
live
here! We have the right to know what's going on!” Abruptly everyone pressed forward, sweeping Mel's line of officers with them into the barn, and the clip ended with the whole crowd singing “Amazing Grace.”

Why me
? Father George groaned.
Why my parish
? He tried to look on the bright side—there were worse adversaries than the river angel. At least he wasn't stuck at Saint John's up in Antigo, where the Virgin kept appearing to a local housewife and delivering messages regarding “the purity of the white race.” Or at Immaculate Conception in Dickeyville, where numerous parishioners had reported seeing the ghost of a one-armed man in the church confessional. (A new confessional finally had to be built.) But the sad fact was that although his situation could have been worse, it also could have been better, and he wondered if God would ever see fit to allow him to return to New England. He'd arrived at Saint Fridolin's in 1980, and within a year he'd requested reassignment so many times that the diocese still joked about it. Over the past eleven years, he had learned to call Ambient home, and he'd even developed a certain affection for his flock of pale, slow-moving Midwesterners. But he would never learn to accept the mind-numbing flatness of the land, the long,
indifferent winters, the aching boredom of small-town ways: the old hurts, the petty grievances, the strange lack of worldly curiosity, born of isolation, which made the mind fertile ground for wild imaginings and poisonous seeds of the sort sown by Ruthie Mader. He hadn't seen her anywhere in the crowd, but he had no doubt she'd been there, fanning the flames along with the other members of the Circle of Faith.

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.