River Angel
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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 rive, whooping and hollering on a two-lane bridge. Somehow the boy was shoved, he jumped, he slipped—acounts vary—into the icy water. The kids told police 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 . . .
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.
A miracle? A hoax? Or something in between? With acute insight and great compassion, A. Manette Ansay captures the inner life of a town and its residents struggling to forge a new identity in the face of a rapidly changing world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the small town of Ambient, Wis., expressions of Christian faith range from intense to transitory, from the rituals of a traditional Catholic church to a women's prayer and support group called "Circle of Faith," Christmas-and-Easter churchgoers and on down to the non-believers. In clear, emotionally intense prose, Ansay (Sisters) delivers the story of the mysterious death of a 10-year-old boy named Gabriel Carpenter through the eyes of townspeople of varying beliefs, motivations and behaviors. Recently abandoned by his wayward father to the reluctant care of an aunt and uncle in Ambient, Gabriel doesn't adjust well: his weak social skills, overt piety and constant search for the river angel (which, according to town legend, protects people who have fallen into the river) quickly make him a target for playground humiliation. One night, while Gabriel is walking over the bridge near where the angel supposedly resides, a carload of drunken teenagers chase and corner him, and somehow he disappears. It is unclear if he falls or is pushed off the bridge; but his body appears later, dry, still warm, but dead, in a barn a mile downstream. The consensus of townspeople is that he was carried there by the river angel, and a shrine springs up at the barn, drawing visitors from all over the state. The industry activated by these pilgrims who buy loads of souvenir angel T-shirts and "I Believe" bumper stickers revitalizes Ambient's failing economy; it's a miracle of sorts. As in her previous novels, Ansay displays a gift for rendering the dynamics of small-town life and the minute calibrations of human relationships. Here, out of the individual residents of Ambient and a broad chorus of voices, each one grappling with the human craving for the divine, she fashions a striking story about the ironies faith.
