River Angel (22 page)

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 Car
penter 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 the 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.”

“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 stu
dents. 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.