author’s note

River Angel is a work of fiction, the best way I’ve found to tell the truth. It is less the story of an individual than the history of a community; it is less about what did or did not happen in a town I have chosen to call Ambient than it is about the ways in which we try to make sense of a world that doesn’t.

In April 1991, in a little Wisconsin town about a hundred miles southwest of the town where I grew up, a misfit boy was kidnapped by a group of high school kids who, later, would testify they’d merely meant to frighten him, to drive him around for a while. Somehow they ended up at the river, whooping and hollering on a two-lane bridge. Somehow the boy was shoved, he jumped, he slipped—accounts vary—into the icy water. The kids told police that they never heard a splash; one reported seeing a brilliant flash of light. (Several people in the area witnessed a similar light, while others recalled hearing something “kind of like thunder.”) All night, volunteers walked the river’s edge, but it was dawn before the body was found in a barn a good mile from the bridge. Investigators constructed this unlikely scenario: The boy had drifted downstream, crawled out of the water, climbed up the slick embankment, and crossed a snow-dusted pea field. But if that was the case, then where were the footprints? The evidence of his shivering scramble up the embankment? And how could he have survived the cold long enough to make it that far?

The owner of the barn had been the one to discover the body, and she said the boy’s cheeks were rosy, his skin warm to the touch. A sweet smell hung in the air. “It was,” she said, “as if he were just sleeping.” And then she told police she believed an angel had carried him there.

For years, it had been said that an angel lived in the river. Residents flipped coins into the water for luck, and a few claimed they had seen the angel, or known someone who’d seen it. The historical society downtown had a farmwife’s journal, dated 1898, in which a woman described how an angel had rescued her family from a flood. Now, as the story of the boy’s death spread, more people came forward with accounts of strange things that had happened on that night. Dogs had barked without ceasing till dawn; livestock broke free of padlocked barns. Someone’s child crayoned a bridge and, above it, a wide-winged tapioca angel. Several people reported dream visitations by the dead. There were stories about the boy himself—that he frequently prayed in public places, that he never once raised his hand against another, that a childless woman conceived after showing him one small act of kindness.

Though both church and state investigators eventually deemed all evidence unsubstantiated, money was raised to build a shrine on the spot where the boy’s body was found. I have been to the River Angel shrine, and to others. I have traveled to places as unlikely as Cullman, Alabama, and as breathtaking as Chimayo, New Mexico. I leaf through the gift shop books about angels, books about miracles, books filled with personal testimonies. Books in which supernatural events rescue ordinary people from the effects of a world that is becoming increasingly violent, dangerous, complex. Though I myself am not a believer, I understand the desire to believe. I live every day with the weight of that desire.

Ultimately, I have found it is meaningless to hold the yardstick of fact against the complexities of the human heart. Reality simply isn’t large enough to hold us. And so the sky becomes a gateway to the heavens. Death is not an end but a beginning. A child crossing a pea field into the indifferent, inevitable darkness may be reborn, raised up by our longing into light.

Holly’s Field, Wisconsin