The Healer

Greg Hollingshead

THE HEALER

For Dick

For there is a dim glimmering of light yet un-put-out in men; let them walk, let them walk, that the darkness overtake them not.

— St. Augustine, Confessions

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

SHEEP’S CLOTHING

COUNTRY PROPERTY

DAUGHTER OF GOD

RECLAIMED

Copyright

About the Publisher

Timothy Wakelin, age thirty-two, pale features handsome or weak, it was hard to tell, fine dark hair thinning, widower food stains down the front of his blue cotton turtleneck, sat, dismayed and receiving looks, along a rear wall in the single chair at a table for two in the Grant Gemboree, a bus-stop café in the mining town of Grant. It was lunchtime on a hot weekday in late June. Outside, through layers of smoke, blue and enfolded, pickup trucks slowly passed. Inside, the place was jammed. Everybody knew everybody else, and everybody except the stranger had a cigarette going. A din of talk, shouts, horseplay. Clattering cutlery and banging dishes. The name tag of the waitress—not Wakelin’s own waitress but the one who had taken away the other chair from his table—said Ardis, and he was watching her closely because he knew that this was the name of the healer’s mother, and it did not strike him as a common name, unless it was common around here. Ardis was a tall woman, five-eight (Wakelin guessed) in flat heels. In adolescence she must have enjoyed the attractiveness of a cherub or an animal cub. Wakelin saw cheeks once rosy with new powers, but those powers, with the booze and the cigarettes, in middle age were swollen with disappointment, the cheeks pouchy, the bleached hair pinned up like straw, eyes dark-ringed and guarded.

She did not look like the mother of a saint.

Two other things Wakelin noticed. One, makeup intended to cover an area of bruising down the left side of Ardis’s face. Two, the red-rimmed eyes of a dog—an old black Lab lying by the door, dewlaps outspread on the grime—that followed her everywhere as she wove and squeezed through the press of diners.

Wakelin’s lunch was just awful. Eggs of crumbling yolk and rubber-white albumen on a carbon laminate, dank toast, coffee a rusted knife-edge of heartburn, thin and without taste. A breakfast something like a story about a healer, something like a saint’s life. Of dubious provenance. The dog’s breakfast of narratives. Hearsay, exaggeration, wishful thinking, local legend. Followed now through a confusion of smoke and opinion, in a place for locals, a meetinghouse of initiates, with the blanket of the familiar draped soft all round. Cozy as heaven, old as hell.

The healer’s name was Caroline Troyer. All her twenty years lived in this uranium town of thirty-three hundred people, a five-hour drive northeast of the city. From the articles already done on her, most of them published over the past year, confections too credulous not to be cynical, Wakelin had learned enough to expect some kind of saint, fanatic and pathetic in equal proportions. Of course, he was up here as a journalist, for the story. A journalist impersonating someone looking for a piece of country property. Impersonating himself, actually, from last summer, a year after Jane died, when he was roaming the Canadian Shield doing just that, looking for property, until he asked himself why he wanted to live in the country— what he thought he’d find up here, what he thought he’d do, how he’d make it from breakfast to bedtime—and couldn’t think of an answer. Not a good one. Anyway, it was his own former intentions he was here in the name of. Former intentions now false pretences. These were his drawn line. All he proposed to bring to this and to take away was enough truth to make the thing fly. He would not purposely distort, he would do an honest, writerly job in the time allotted. Three to four thousand words for a major circulation woman’s magazine, whatever he wanted. Whatever he could come up with that would pass for new information, a fresh angle, a little insight, and failing all else a worldly, yet sensitive, last word.

Wakelin was watching a small old man ease in the front door. It was a difficult arrival, the movements halting and inexact. This was more than age. There was or had been illness. The palsy, the ravaged breathing, the trousers on heavy suspenders swaying clown-style, a gabardine barrel.

Across the room Wakelin’s own waitress, whose name was Gail, glanced toward the old man as he approached from the door and shouted, “Hey there, Frank!”

Gail was a beautiful young woman with the luminous skin of an angel, a bad permanent, and something of a stoop. Also a poor clothes sense. A blue polyester gypsy blouse with ruffles, grey flannel slacks, and on her feet running shoes of convolved rubber extrusion in purple and lime.

A minute later, skull shining through his yellowing hair, Old Frank was being helped by Gail into the chair at the small table adjacent to Wakelin’s.

“Everybody’s hungry today,” Old Frank said. His dentures, fingers, and nails were yellow too, and they seemed to be his biggest and strongest components.

“The usual, Frank?” Gail shouted, though she was right beside him.

The old fingers were groping the shirt pocket.

“The usual, Frank?”

Old Frank’s teeth clacked. “Everybody’s hungry today.”

“I know,” Gail said, turning her head as if to look around but not using her eyes. “It’s unreal. The usual?”

“That’ll be right.”

Gail went away.

Old Frank was fumbling open a pack of Export “A.” Three cigarettes spilled to the table. It was some time before he got one of them picked up, but when he did, Wakelin was right there with a match.

“Hi.” The match flared. “Tim Wakelin.”

Confusion in the old eyes until the flame had narrowed them to the task at hand, which when completed it was Wakelin who narrowed them next. “Reporter?”

“Not me,” Wakelin replied and went on shaking out the match. “Up to look for a piece of country property.”

Old Frank seemed to consider this. Then he said, “Sure as hell won’t find much around here,” and looked sharply at Wakelin to see how he would take the disappointment.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Wakelin said, and leaned forward, confiding. “The only thing I haven’t seen much of around here so far is a lack of For Sale signs.”

Old Frank turned swiftly away. Whether stung by such insolence or stumped for a comeback, Wakelin did not have a chance to discover, because Gail was already right there, setting before Old Frank a platter of fried eggs and toast with bacon in a charred and twisted stack.

“You’re looking for property,” she told Wakelin, “you talk to Ross Troyer.”

Ross Troyer, yes. Father of the healer.

“Ross Troyer Realty,” Wakelin agreed, nodding. “I’ve been seeing the signs.”

“You’ve been seeing the signs, have you,” Gail said. She was making sure Old Frank had everything he needed. This done, she toted Wakelin’s bill and slapped it down next to his plate. Then she stood and looked at him.

Wakelin looked back. He wanted to reach up and square those shoulders. In the shower, with both hands, he wanted to straighten that terrible permanent. Later, in front of a bonfire he would make of those slacks, blouse, runners, socks, underpants, and bra, he wanted to nuzzle and bite every part of her. He tried to think of something to tell her, besides this. He squirmed for his wallet. She seemed to shake her head. He froze. She did not move. He resolved to say something, anything.

“Pay at the cash,” Gail said from the corner of her mouth and walked away.

After that, Wakelin spent some time sideways in his chair, holding the bill and his wallet, facing Old Frank’s hair-dense right ear as the old man chewed in the tentative, reactive way of the dentured, for whom all food is now laced with tinfoil.

“So what’s the story?” Wakelin said.

“Eh?” The head swung round. A column of yolk down the chin was a yellow thermometer. Delicate skin had formed on the bulb, which creased as the jaws with their electric dentures, their numb mouthparts, continued to chew.

“A reporter,” Wakelin said, more loudly, “on what story?”

The Grant Gemboree noise level might have fallen slightly when he said these words.

Again Old Frank turned away. This time Wakelin did not know whether he had heard or not. Or, if he had, what.

Gail was back. “You got some egg on your chin there, Frank!” she shouted.

Old Frank’s fork clattered to his plate and both hands went scrabbling for a serviette. She helped him release one from the powerful dispenser and wiped his chin for him.

“Lying scum-suckers,” Old Frank commented as she did this.

“What was that, Frank?” she shouted.

But she had finished wiping, and Old Frank was chewing again. She looked at Wakelin. Whether querying or accusatory, he did not know. There was no expression on her alabaster face.

“I’m leaving, I’m leaving,” Wakelin said lightly.

She shrugged and glanced away as she removed a pack of Player’s Mild from the side pocket of her flannels. “Too late,” she said and fired one up. “Rush is over.”

Old Frank was looking at Wakelin. “Had a cancer on my lung. Size and shape of a small grapefruit. Son-of-a-bitch doctors threw up their hands and walked away.”

“I’m sorry,” Wakelin said.

“Crushing other organs. Throwing off clots like a pinwheel.”

“God.”

Old Frank held Wakelin’s eye. “Seventeenth of last month she shows up at my place. I’m at the kitchen table, there. No knock. She just walks in—”

“Who’s this?” Wakelin asked, and before he could stop himself, “Caroline Troyer?” Quickly he glanced to Gail, but she had already turned to look significantly at Ardis, who stood directly behind her holding a coffeepot in her right hand and in her left hand the chair she had taken earlier from Wakelin’s table. Ardis lowered the chair until its front legs rested on the floor. Gazing at Wakelin from around the chair was the black Lab, which had got to its feet. Gail’s eyes came back to Wakelin. Ardis’s had never left him.

Old Frank had butted out his cigarette. Now he was rattling his knife and fork onto his plate. He pushed it across to Wakelin’s table and drew his coffee mug in tighter to his chest. This was how he had been sitting at his kitchen table. “Not dark yet. No lights on. Never heard her come in.”

“Caroline would knock,” Gail mouthed above Old Frank’s head to Wakelin, nodding, mock-assuring, pointing to her ear. “He wouldn’t hear.”

“First I seen the light,” Frank said. “Then I seen her.”

“What kind of light was it, Frank?” Gail said, and Wakelin thought of a child asking to hear a favourite part.

“Soft firefly glow,” Old Frank stated. He must have said this many times. It came out like one word. Softfireflyglow. “She was lit up in herself. That’s the only way to say it. Call me crazy, I know what I saw.”

“You’re crazy, Frank,” somebody said from across the room, not unkindly, and it struck Wakelin that the entire Grant Gemboree was listening. Even the old cook, a wizened dissolute man with shiny skin and a ponytail in a hairnet, had come out of the kitchen to lean against the cash and smoke. The story must have been spinning off apocrypha for a month, and now here was Wakelin himself the occasion of a new authoritative telling. He couldn’t believe his luck.

“She sits down at the table there. She takes me by the hands and she looks me straight in the face.” The old man stopped speaking. He sat and blinked.

“Did she say anything, Frank?” Gail asked, prompting, leaning past him to crush her cigarette in his ashtray.

“Not with words, she didn’t.”

Again Old Frank did not continue. He took a small dry lump of tissue from his pocket and with shaking hands opened it and blew his nose.

“Is that when you cried, Frank?” Gail asked at his ear.

“Didn’t cry,” the old man said with surprising force. “Nobody cried.” He half-turned to Gail. “Stand behind me! Put your hands on my shoulders!”

Gail positioned herself behind Frank and did as she was told. He had leaned slightly forward in his chair.

“Now move them down my back—No, hell! not that way! Not thumbs together! The other—That’s right—Stop right there—Left on top of right. Not so much pressure. And hold it.” From his leaning position Old Frank surveyed the room. “Whole lung went hot-cold right through. Like Vicks VapoRub. Then she done the left one. Same thing. A couple minutes each lung, no more. I never felt anything like it in my life. The girl has power in the palms of her hands. She beamed that power inside there the way you’d go in with a storm light.”

Again Old Frank did not continue.

“And then what?” From the healer’s mother.

Old Frank looked at Ardis. “That’s all she needed. Next ultrasound, cancer’s the size of one of them mandarins you see at Christmas. This last one”—he snapped his fingers—“clean as a whistle.”

There was quiet in the Grant Gemboree. The coffeemaker hissing and spluttering.

Gail lifted her hands away from the old back.

“So what do you think happened, Frank?” someone asked.

“I’ll tell you what happened. Caroline Troyer give this body the knowledge to do what it had to do. She showed it how things were with it, and that’s all it needed to know.”

No one said anything. The dog yawned. Gail was back at Frank’s ear. “Tell the rest, Frank,” she said. “Now that you got everybody’s undivided attention.”

“You do it,” Old Frank said. “I wasn’t there. I stayed inside the house.”

It was Ardis Troyer who told the rest, and she told it directly to Wakelin. “What happened,” she said, “this wasn’t the first time Caroline went out to heal, and when she come out of Frank’s a crowd was waiting at the side door. It was dark, and either it was the light from the kitchen—”

“Kitchen light weren’t on,” Old Frank said.

“—or she still had the glow on her. The ones waiting didn’t know whether to run up and touch the hem of her garment or cry out to God where they stood. Well, she didn’t give them the chance. She told them to get the hell on home, and when nobody budged she pushed through them and started back to town herself. By that time half of them were on their knees. The ones that weren’t, they clutched at her, but she struck their hands off and kept moving, with everybody trailing behind.

“By the time she gets to the main street she’s got over sixty people in tow, and this is the last straw. She turns on the stairs out front of our place and she tells them she’s finished with healing. You lay the hands of life on people left and right, and what do they do? Treat it like no more than their due, and heaven forbid anybody try to tell them they owe a goddamn thing to a living soul.”

“You weren’t there, Ardis,” someone put in from a table by the door, a man with blow-dried hair and Culligan stitched on his shirt. “The wife wasn’t out to Frank’s, she only heard what Caroline said on your steps. All Caroline said was, ‘It’s not me and it’s not you. Go home. There won’t be any more of this.’ It was about a dozen people, by the way, fifteen at the most, half of them kids, and half of them there to horse around. If there was a glow on her out at Frank’s, Doreen never saw it. When people ask her she doesn’t say there was or wasn’t, she just says she never saw it herself. People don’t glow, Ardis. They only seem to sometimes.”

Old Frank might have contributed something on the glow question, but he was engaged in retrieving his plate from Wakelin’s table and had stopped listening, or couldn’t hear. Ardis chose neither to accept nor to refuse the correction. While Culligan was speaking, her eyes remained on Wakelin, and when Culligan finished saying what he had to say, it was Wakelin she pointed her chin at. “Think you got enough yet?”

“Enough—?”

“You’re a reporter, aren’t you?”

“No—” He cleared his throat. “I’m not, actually. I’m looking for a country place.”

“Well, isn’t that a convenient coincidence.” “What do you mean?”

“Country place, my ass. Ignorant hick superstition is what you’re looking for.”

Wakelin did a helpless shrug. “Not at all—”

“Well, she’s had it up to here. She’s quit healing, and she’s quit talking to reporters for free. Interview’s going to cost you five hundred an hour.”

“What?” Wakelin could only say.

There was a pause then, and Wakelin, though he was genuinely amazed, was also conscious of the amazed expression staying longer on his face than it would have were he being candid about his motives. And then the black Lab was swinging its head to see how to back up. Gail too was stepping away. Ardis lifted the chair. As she replaced it at Wakelin’s table she said, “This is for whoever it is you’re working for.” She did not wink as she said this. There was no twinkle from those hooded eyes.

Wakelin smiled, nervously, a little confused, and Old Frank’s head came around. “Only trouble is,” Old Frank said, “he don’t know if it’s Jesus or the Devil.”

“That’s right, Frank,” Ardis said, and she passed on, refilling cups.

Wakelin stared at his bill. As he did so the Grant Gemboree noise level made a rapid return to its former level. Finally Wakelin was able to take in what he owed: $2.99.

Why, it was nothing at all.

Gail was back. “So anyways,” she shouted, “Frank’s Caroline Troyer’s biggest fan, and no wonder, eh? Aren’t you, Frank?”

Old Frank had pushed away his plate. “I guess I would be that,” he acknowledged.

Gail stepped closer, gazing down upon the old skull. “Too bad she stopped, eh? She could still help a few more poor souls around here if she wanted to, I guess.”

“She never stopped,” Old Frank declared. “Nobody could stop that. I won’t be the last one that gets their health set to rights by that one.”

“Hey, maybe not, eh?” Gail said hopefully.

Old Frank’s head had come around once more to Wakelin. “It’s not every young lass can heal a man,” he said.

“No, it’s not,” Wakelin agreed.

But Old Frank had already turned back to Gail, indicating his plate. “Could you throw this in the microwave, darlin’? In all the excitement the cocksucker went cold on me.”

The establishment known in Grant as the Troyer Building was of ancient frame construction in brown shingle-brick pressed up against the heaved narrow sidewalk of the main street. Unlike most of the other buildings on the main street of Grant, it was not false-fronted but an actual two-storey, with a gable, separated from the shoebox IDA Drugs by a broad wooden staircase roofed and set back from the street and rising into darkness. Wakelin stepped into the shadows there. Immediately at his right hand was a dusty window covered on the inside with some kind of perforated board, the regimented holes shining sickly. Stepping deeper, he sighted up the staircase. At the top was a landing and to the right of that a door, which from his research he knew opened into the Troyer home, an apartment on the second floor. Was it from these stairs that Caroline Troyer had addressed a crowd of between twelve and sixty, speaking words of disputable import? It smelled like a urinal in here.

Wakelin walked back out into the sun and stood on the curb and looked up at the building. From the articles he had read he knew that the attic gable window was hers. Above it, in the apex, an oval plaque: Erected 1919. Lower down, at the second-storey level, two windows, larger. Sun-damaged brown drapes, their falls crushed by furniture against the sills. On the ground floor, the family enterprises. To the right of the single entrance from the street, one window only, no sign on the glass. Beneath that, in a row along the sidewalk and leaning at different angles against the front of the building, seven marble headstones. To the left of the door, where the window had been, a rectangle of shingle-brick a deeper shade of brown. Above the door a shingle, brown lettering on beige, divided left and right by a double slash. To the left of the slash, Crooked Hand’s Fine Jewellery and Tackle. To the right, Ross Troyer Realty.

The door was a full two steps above the level of the sidewalk. The steps were concrete, eroded to settings of polished stones. As Wakelin placed his foot on the lower step he was moved to reach over and lay his right hand flat against the ink-blank centre of the nearest marble headstone. A surface glassy and warm in the sun. Other stones were salmon and sand-colour. One was black. All with lapidary margins of maple leaves, lilies, Scotch thistles. Leaning across, Wakelin could also see, along the inside sill of the window, in a gap created by a shortfall of amber cellophane creased and bubbled against the pane, a row of bleached Polaroids, and he leaned farther to study those pale images, of frame cottages, aluminum-sided bungalows, waterfront lots and woodlots, all prices neatly inscribed in faded ballpoint across the bottom margins, and when he had finished this scrutiny he saw, higher up the glass, an octagonal silver sticker, lifting away around the edges: Monuments Sold Here. And he thought, Well, for your long-last home you’ve got your aluminum siding, and before it needs replacing you’ll be wanting the marble. For your long, last home.

He closed his eyes. From a public speaker down the street Roy Orbison was singing “Running Scared” in a voice undersea and pure as bel canto on an old seventy-eight. At Wakelin’s back, two pickups idled at a light. Overhead, a squirrel on a phone cable was turning one of last year’s acorns into a hail of shells, the fragments clicking and bouncing on the sidewalk. The sun was hot against the right side of Wakelin’s face and against the back of his hand on the headstone. He could smell the exhaust from the street, he could smell the scorched sugar fanblast from a doughnut shop somewhere. And he knew that he was right here, that he was nowhere but where he was.

Wakelin lifted his hand from the stone and straightened up. The door was dirty matte white, boot-scuffed along the bottom, an aura of grease around the knob.

Three to four thousand words. Anything he wanted to write on Caroline Troyer he could write. His editor, a buzz-cut beauty, was being kind to him because his wife had died only twenty-two months earlier. Try that again. His editor was being kind to him instead of sleeping with him. She was being kind, and she was being not dumb. She knew there would be three of them in the bed. The healing story he could take to a book if there was a book in it, though that did not seem likely. He was not here to do a hick superstition story. He was not here to put Caroline Troyer down. A little cultural anthropology for the instruction and delight of the readers of a national woman’s magazine. Allow them to make up their own minds. Of course he was here to do a hick superstition story. Of course he was here to put Caroline Troyer down. He didn’t intend to demonstrate she could heal, did he? Attention-seeking daughter of dysfunction. That was his understanding when the stories on her had first started to appear, that was his understanding after he had gone through the files, and that was his understanding driving up here. And if she had stopped healing, or pretending or thinking she was healing, then that was new, nobody to his knowledge had written about that yet, and maybe that could be his story. But it seemed that his predecessors, callous impatient hacks, had betrayed whatever small trust they’d once enjoyed in local hearts, and if he himself hoped to uncover a story in this picked-over patch of glacial outwash, then he would need to continue being a guy just looking for country property. Would need to keep his sheep’s clothing buttoned up a while longer yet.