Ignatius Wick was twelve years old when he first met the angel Samael. It was at his mother’s funeral, during the graveside service at Hillside Cemetery. He was standing in front of the casket, between his father on his right, and his sister Margaret on his left, when he felt a hand rest lightly on his shoulder. He turned his head to look up, and saw an old man smiling down at him. The man’s eyes were sky blue, his face ruddy and cheerful, his chiseled features surrounded by a soft mane of snowy hair. The ebony black of his flannel suit and his silk tie seemed more pitchy than the blackest mourning clothes of anyone else at the funeral; the white of his shirt and his hair crisper and more perfect than the white of the fluffy clouds drifting overhead. Looking up into the man’s face, Ignatius felt a special warmth, as though he were looking up into the sun. He stared up into the man’s eyes until his father tapped him roughly on the shoulder and signaled to him to pay attention. Ignatius faced forward to watch the casket again, and when he briefly stole a glance behind him a few minutes later, the old man was gone, as if vanished into thin air.

After the service, Ignatius asked his sisters if they had seen the man with the white hair and the black suit, and none of them had. He asked his aunties too: they said they hadn’t. The more Ignatius thought about it, the more he knew. He knew it deep in his bones, more surely than one can know something by merely witnessing it, that the man was more than a man. He was an angel.

Ignatius returned to the cemetery every day after school. It did not matter whether there was spring mist in the air or whether it rained. He would walk down the long winding roads beside the lush, manicured lawns, and under the lazy willow trees. He would look at the clean marble monuments and markers. He would sit down, cross-legged next to his mother’s grave and weep, remembering that this is how he once used to sit on the kitchen floor when he was younger, drawing pictures for her on old pieces of butcher paper while she hummed a tune and prepared supper or washed dishes and patiently answered all of his child questions. And while Ignatius sat next to her grave, he kept his head up, looking all around him, hoping to catch another glimpse of Him, of the angel.

Ignatius returned many times, and never saw the angel. He began to suspect that maybe it had not been an angel after all, that maybe it had been just a friendly old man that nobody else remembered but Ignatius. Perhaps he was not a messenger from the other world who knew what Heaven looked like on the other side of the clouds. Perhaps he just lived with a silver-haired little wife in some old house in South Minneapolis, who paid neighborhood kids to mow his lawn, and shopped for groceries and went to the bathroom just like everyone else. And perhaps Ignatius should just forget about him. But if he did forget about him, then Ignatius had nothing left to think about except the big hole left by his mother. And if the man weren’t an angel, it meant that that thing he knew to be true on the day he saw Him was false, and there was no more hope that something special might happen. So he kept coming back, and kept his eyes up, looking.

And one day as he sat in the cemetery, he saw one car followed by another and then another, and finally a long black hearse wending down the curving road into the heart of the cemetery. From a distance he saw the cars park, people getting out, old women assisted by young men, a priest, and pall bearers lifting a casket from the hearse. They assembled around a grave. He forgot his own sorrow for a moment and found himself wandering through the plots, under the willow trees, toward the gathering. He stopped a stone’s throw away, watching. Shortly after the funeral began he noticed a tall, white-haired man dressed in black, standing in the middle of the crowd of people but standing out somehow, the blackness of his suit just a little too black, the whiteness of his hair just a little too white. Ignatius’ heart beat faster, his eyes locked on him. He waited for the right moment to do something, wondering what he would do when that moment came. Then he blinked, maybe, or looked another way for just a split second, and the man was suddenly gone. A terrible disappointment and frustration welled up in Ignatius. He glanced around, up and down the grounds surrounding the funeral party, looking for a man moving rapidly away, but he saw nothing. Then, as suddenly as he had lost sight of the man, he felt a gentle hand on his shoulder and looked up into the same kind, smiling face he had seen at his mother’s funeral.

“Hello,” said the man.

Ignatius’ heart was beating so fast he felt like he would burst inside. He looked up his face full of wonder and hope and fear. “Are you an angel?” he asked.

“Yes,” said the man, “I am. My name is Samael.”