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River Angel

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Overview

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 ' 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.

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Author Information

Bio of A. Manette Ansay

A. Manette Ansay is the author of five novels, including Vinegar Hill, an Oprah Book Club Selection, and Midnight Champagne, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as a short story collection, Read This and Tell Me What It Says, and a memoir, Limbo. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, a Pushcart Prize, the Nelson Algren Prize, and two Great Lakes Book Awards. She lives with her husband and daughter in Florida, where she teaches in the MFA program at the University of Miami.

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Additional Info

Imprint

HarperCollins

Filesize

1.17 MB

Number of Pages

256

eBook ISBN

9780380729746

Awards

  • New York Times Notable Books of the Year

Excerpt from: River Angel by A. Manette Ansay

Chapter One
The boy, Gabriel, and his father stopped for the night somewhere north of Canton, Ohio. Around them, the land lay in one vast slab, the snow crust bright as water beneath the waxing moon. The nearest town was ten miles away, unincorporated, and there was nothing in between except a handful of farmhouses, Christmas lights burning in each front window; a few roads; fewer stop signs; a small white crossroads church. High above and out of harm's way were the cold, gleaming eyes of stars, and each one was so strangely iridescent that if a man in one of the farmhouses had risen for an aspirin or a glass of warm milkýhe could have been forgiven for waking his wife to tell her he'd seen-well, something. A glowing disk that swelled and shrank. A pattern of flashing lights. And she could have been forgiven, later, for telling people she'd seen something too as she'd stood by the bedroom window, sock-footed and shivering, her husband still pointing to that place in the sky.

But a wind came up in the early morning hours, scattering the stars and moon like winter seeds, so that by dawn the sky was empty, the color of a tin cup. It was the day before Christmas. The air had turned cold enough to make Gabriel's nostrils pinch together as he stood in the motel parking lot, listening to his father quote figures about the length of time human skin could be exposed to various temperatures.

"It's not like this is Alaska, kiddo," Shawn Carpenter said, clattering bright-yellow plastic plates and cups from the motel's kitchenette onto the floor of the station wagon. The old dog, Grumble, who was investigating the crushed snow around the dumpster, shuddered as if the sound had been gunshot. The previous day, she'd ridden on the floor between Gabriel's legs, her face at eye level with Gabriel's face, panting with motion sickness. There'd been nowhere else to put her. Behind the front seats, the space was packed with all the things that hadn't been sold or lost or left behind: clothing, cookbooks, a color TV, a neon-orange beanbag chair, snowshoes, a half-built dulcimer, two miniature lemon trees in large lemon-shaped pots, and Shawn's extensive butterfly collection, which was mounted on pieces of wood and enclosed behind glass plates. whenever she'd started barking crazily, they'd been forced to stop and let her outside. The last time, it had taken over an hour of whistling to coax her back.

Shawn peeled off one of his gloves and held his bare hand out toward Gabriel. "One one thousand," he said, counting out the seconds. "Two one thousand. Three one thousand."