Chapter Eight

eight

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.

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.