The Healer

Through the display board at her left hand, from directly the other side of it, Caroline Troyer could feel the man’s unease and the pull of his curiosity as he stepped deeper in to study the stairs to the apartment. She waited to hear if he would climb them, and when he did not she slipped off her stool behind the counter and crossed to the front window, beyond the door. There she waited again, until she saw his face, the face of a child, crinkled and ambered by the cellophane, craning into the frame as he studied the pictures, not idly and not as a buyer but in the more abstracted manner of someone working to assemble an understanding. And she saw his eyes close as he seemed to listen. Or maybe it was the warmth of the sun against his face that was causing him to hesitate this way, one hand, she imagined, flat on a gravestone—but she could see the print of fatigue, the habit of obliquity in the set of the mouth. And she saw a man, though not old, already half turned to the past. His energy accordingly devoted, his suffering consequent.

She walked back to her place behind the counter, and there she watched herself try to believe that this was not another one here for a story.

Country bells jangled over Wakelin’s head. Sunlight widened across linoleum and partway up an oak desk, narrowed and was gone. Commotion in darkness. On the desk an electric fan revolved its swollen cage toward him, a robot head, the rock-weighted papers in its swath agitating so violently that surely they would fly up and blow around at any time. He moved forward, blinded by the sudden diminishment of light: fluorescent tubes flickering from a stipple ceiling, an arborite sheen off walls of nicotine pine, knots like black gouts. At the rear, above the desk, certificates of qualification. Photographs in black frames. Groups of men in shirtsleeves and jackets, shaking each other’s hands. The fan swung away, and multi-coloured plastic streamers across a back doorway took up the dance.

Wakelin moved right, to a cork wall tacked with more Polaroids of cabins among leafless birches in thin sunlight. Small cottages separated by gravel roads from steel-coloured water. Slope-porched red-brick farmhouses, narrow and spruce-darkened. Rural properties. He returned to the desk and smartly, with the flat of his palm, whacked a desk bell.

“Here,” she said.

“Aaah!” Wakelin cried, and as the surprise kept lifting him higher into the air and the embarrassment came flushing up into his face he knew again what a floater he was, and already as he settled back into his shoes he was turning, too fast, and he could feel his whole body clamouring for balance.

That it was Caroline Troyer he knew from a picture in her high school yearbook, reproduced in more than one of the articles. If there was a glow on her I couldn’t see it, and then she smiled. The story was already writing itself in his head, a shameful dodge, the corruption of a good journalist, and it wasn’t even partly true, she was a long way from smiling and yet he could see it right away, a quality of light about her, and if light was too much, then maybe calm focus would do. No one, anyway, who glimpsed this young woman would fail to look a second time. She was sitting on a stool behind a display counter along the street wall, next to the door he had just come through. Her hair was straight and dark, cropped at the livid jaw, and she wore a weed-coloured cardigan unbuttoned over a white T-shirt. Broad shoulders. For the sake of the story he wanted her to be beautiful, but he couldn’t tell at first if she was or wasn’t, and he thought she must be one of those who are either very beautiful or very plain, in some moods and attitudes one and some the other, except that when she is plain you are not sure, and when she is beautiful you have no doubt. A certain rawness or youth in the bones of the face. But not the eyes. No failure of clarity or maturity or definition there. At first he thought they were raging, but moving closer he saw they were simply in a state of full attention. Eyes beholding an accident. No emotion as yet. The accident continuing to unfold.

“I didn’t see you there,” Wakelin said. He was standing across the display case from her. He reached over. “Hi. Tim Wakelin.”

She did not take or, for that matter, look at the hand. He might have been holding out something vile or dangerous he had found lying in the street. He looked down and saw the hand now following through with a feigned casual gesture toward the contents of the case. Well, there was one problem right there.

He pretended to study the contents of the case. An assortment of jewellery and tackle, as the shingle had promised. Many lures and brooches. Many intricately beaded and feathered earrings and dry flies. “Nice work,” he said, knowing nothing about such things. The pieces were certainly beautiful enough. “Yours?”

She shook her head, scarcely. Still watching him.

“But you’re the … daughter?” he said.

“He’s not here.”

Wakelin nodded. A bad question. To his right, her left, a sheet of perforated white pressboard arrayed with rods and other fishing gear. Bolted over a window. He peered down into the case. “Local artist?”

“Bachelor Crooked Hand.”

Again Wakelin nodded. It was possible he had not stopped nodding. “He’s good,” he said. “Mr. Crooked Hand knows his stuff. He is local, then?”

She hooked the hair over her left ear. “Friend of my father’s.” This last word a hard one for her to say apparently. You could hear the wince in it.

“I thought they looked native,” Wakelin said.

She made no reply.

“Listen,” Wakelin said. “I’m looking for a place in the country. Could you—?”

“It’s him does the properties. He’s in in the mornings or I can tell you where he’s at.”

So. The father.

Not quite the order of things Wakelin had had in mind. But then, neither was she. None of that pleading presumption you get from the serious neurotics.

The Grant Fairgrounds were five minutes north and east of the town, on a tabletop cuesta that towered like Eden above the working fields. As the lane wound upward, the plume of red dust in the rearview swelled and rose and moved out through the planted pines. Wakelin slowed at a rusted gate, standing open. The peeling white fences of the grounds were swamped in their decay by milkweed and field grass. It was evident that this year’s Grant Fair would not be some weekend soon. Now on Wakelin’s right was a long, low sag-roofed building, like stables. At the chained doors of a larger, more barnlike structure, he turned left and drove down into the thistle-and-dirt bed of a racetrack and up out of it, crossed a patchy barren of dandelion and gravel, and descended into the track bed on the far side of the oval. A hundred metres down the stretch to his right, he saw weather-blackened white bleachers. Immediately ahead, a graffitied exhibition hall in cream-yellow slate, where a shining red tow truck stood majestic amidst a few battered pickups.

From inside the exhibition hall, the sound of hammering. Wakelin left his car alongside one of the lesser vehicles and passed through great standing wooden doors into the echoing space. The building had a mansard roof and gables, and the green light came tilting down in long shafts from the ancient mossy windows. At the far end, in a haze of dust, two kneeling carpenters were hammering away at what looked like the raw skeleton of a low platform. Two other men stood nearby, their figures large in the particulate blur. As Wakelin came up to them, the shorter, stockier man glanced at him past the other’s shoulder. He was First Nations, wearing workboots and soiled coveralls unzipped to the navel. To Wakelin’s eye there was no hair on his head or body whatsoever. Not eyebrows, not belly hair. His head and face and chest had a pinguid smoothness, the skin like a latex bodysuit from which the trapped and lashless eyes gazed sadly forth.

Bachelor Crooked Hand, Wakelin thought. It’s got to be.

When one of the carpenters looked over at Wakelin, the other, taller man, the one speaking, turned to see who or what had caught the carpenter’s attention. But only briefly, too briefly for Wakelin to see his eyes, which required the merest glance to discover the utter lack of significance of this arrival. And so Wakelin found himself standing waiting for the man to finish telling a story, a rural incident, in which a child’s head had been sawed off in front of its mother, except that the sawer had got either the wrong child or the wrong mother, and this would be the lawyer’s plea: diminished guilt by reason of mistaken identity. Not so much grief caused as otherwise, your Honour.

Lawyers, fuck ‘em, Wakelin thought. And then he wondered what the teller was pretending to think: that a stranger would show up in an empty exhibition hall in out-of-season fairgrounds where nameless construction was under way and just stand around being pointedly ignored while eavesdropping on a leisurely recounting of some grisly local horror? And then he saw a look pass between the two carpenters and one of them glanced over, and that did it. He stepped forward.

“Excuse me,” he said.

The man stopped talking. The native considered Wakelin once more.

“I’m looking for Ross Troyer,” Wakelin said.

Now the other turned to face him. He was taller and older and better dressed than either his companion or Wakelin. He wore a collarless stitch-striped blue shirt with dress jeans and loafers. His face was handsome like a child’s, large and mild, and he wore his hair long and combed back in waves, like a movie star’s, except that there was something terrible about his eyes. It was as if they had been lobbed in on a dare from a distance of several feet, or as if it just happened to be human sockets they had landed in, it could as easily have been a wolf’s. The irises were milk-green, paler than the circle of the sun-beat face and paler still at their inside than their outside rims, a circumstance causing an impression of concavity, which in turn caused the pupils to appear to protrude, like rods. Rods that swelled and contracted, swelled and contracted, until they had got Wakelin just right. Then they stopped moving.

The man said nothing at all, just drilled Wakelin, just skewered him.

“Are you Ross Troyer?” Wakelin said.

In reply, heavy lids lowered slowly over the terrible eyes. Lifted once more.

“I’m Ross Troyer,” the other, hairless man said.

“Oh, really?” Wakelin cried and turned, so surprised he behaved like someone startled. “I thought you were—” Holding out his hand.

The hairless man’s hands remained in the pockets of his coveralls. He just looked at Wakelin. Face of iron, acid-pocked iron.

“What do you want?” the first man said, any impatience he might have felt at his companion’s little trick directed clean at Wakelin.

Turning back to him, Wakelin said stupidly, “You’re Ross Troyer?” and then, “I’m looking for some country property. Something—”

“You talked to her?” Troyer said quickly, a glance at his friend.

“Yes, I—”

“What’d she say?”

“She told me to talk to you.”

Troyer nodded. He seemed to wait.

And so Wakelin talked to him. He said what he had planned to say, the same thing he had said with fanatic earnestness to every realtor he had spoken to when he was up in this area last summer, in his hot hand the money Jane had left him, when he truly was looking for a place in the country. Or thought he was. Three months off and on, spring to fall, he had searched. Nothing. Until one airless September night in a cricketing motel room, not so far from here actually, he had leaned into the half-unsilvered mirror above the cigarette-burn scalloped dresser top and asked himself what exactly he thought he was going to do in the country. Get in touch with his grief? Commune with the chipmunks? Hang himself from a tall oak tree? When no answer came from the glass, he drove back to the city where he would rid his mind of all thought of sylvan redemption. Or try to.

The word Wakelin had used most often in his statement to realtors last summer when describing what he was looking for in a piece of property was silence. He used this word again now in his statement to Ross Troyer. Silence. Country silence. No neighbours, no traffic. No highway over the next hill. He told Ross Troyer that he had been searching for silence since early spring. He asked him if he realized how hard it is to find silence in the city. He told him how in his search for silence he had crossed and recrossed half the southern Shield, that he was serious, that he could pay cash. He told him exactly how much he could afford to pay (though he could afford a little more than what he said, because he still had the money from Jane). He did not tell Ross Troyer (and did not know himself) if he was talking about silence because silence was still, or ever had been, of genuine value to him, or because last summer he had talked about it so often that he was starting to believe in it himself, or because in the pressure of the moment he was mouthing bits of last summer’s speeches, and really this was nothing but words. Repeats, at that. Old words. He didn’t believe in silence and never had. And he did not tell Ross Troyer that the sole reason he was here—conscious reason—was to find a way to talk to his daughter in order to get enough new material on her healing activities, or on her having given them up, so that he could go back to the city and write the story and so move on to the next and after that the next, and all this talk about silence was really just a symptom of a private fantasy of respite from the mechanical round of the life of a man who had lost its compass when he lost his wife.

After Wakelin finished talking there was a pause while Troyer fixed him with his pupils before he said, “You’re not going to find much for that kind of money.”

“Yeah,” Wakelin replied wearily. He had heard this many times.

“Of course, if you could see your way to coming in a little higher—” But Troyer was already shrugging, and in the tired casual voice of one advising a fool he added, “Drop by the office tomorrow. I can show you what I’ve got.” And he turned upon Wakelin a look that might have been intended to say he was sorry not to be able to be more encouraging, but what the look actually said was, Now you get the hell out of my sight.

Wakelin glanced across at the hairless man to see if he might offer some sort of foil for this sentiment, but everything about the look he received from that quarter made it clear that it was not for one such as Wakelin to know how it was inside that balaclava of flesh.

Wakelin walked down the echoing hall and out into the bright heat of the afternoon. He knew he could climb into his car and be back in the city by dinnertime. He knew he could just write off this whole gig. Flop down in front of the tube in time for the ten o’clock news. Wake up tomorrow and start on something quick and clean and over with by the end of the week. Something without all this northern history. This cast of the repressed.

Except that as he drove south, approaching Grant, with every conscious intention of passing through and keeping going, he turned in suddenly at a motel called the Birches. There the grass had been trimmed to the bases of the slender white trunks of those trees and made a green carpet to the river. There, owing to the fine summer weather, all the tired woman on the desk had available was a cabin out back. “Sounds good to me,” Wakelin said, and a few minutes later he was unlocking the door of a mock-log shack hardly big enough for a double bed, a small hot space smelling of mould spores, Pine-Sol, and cigarettes. Tens of thousands of cigarettes, from the decades when every holiday traveller smoked and the scenery when viewed at all was viewed asquint.

Wakelin was in the trance that goes with doing the opposite of what you’d intended, when everything has to be thought about because nothing now is going to be easier than to start making mistakes. You are off-track, which is to say you are divided against yourself, and who better qualified to fuck you up? For ventilation’s sake Wakelin left both the door and the one small window of his hot shack wide open, took off his shoes and socks, and shuffled down the carpet of grass to the river in its narrow channel.

Divided or not, he was not, it seemed, ready to give up on this story, and not because things were going so well. All he had for tomorrow was a pretext for reentering the Troyer Building. To learn what her father had to sell him. Mind you, given the general tenor of his welcome around here, this could be considered a significant achievement for one day. Tomorrow morning he’d be waiting out front when she opened for business, her father would still be upstairs shaving, and this time she would talk to him.

Not likely.

So why was he still here?

For a chance, like a believer, to touch the hem of her garment?

Wakelin looked to the water, sliding with a constant force. So swift, so black. Universal magnet for despair. He sat down. Not one for rash acts or anything like that, but a single move could undo that favourite little idea about himself forever.

Something not kosher between the father and the daughter. Not to this day, maybe, but once. He could feel it. Something.

Was this what was keeping him here? The story behind the story?

The shore opposite was talus at the foot of a height of black rock with the disshevelled appearance of igneous toothpaste squeezed a hundred feet out of the earth and fallen back on itself with a great weight. The cliff was barely in shadow, but the shadow was headed this way, across that spill of rock. Wakelin lay down on the grass where he sat, an arm over his eyes. He was hardly sleeping these days. Compensated by being half asleep most of the day and dozing at any time. There on the grass he fell asleep and dreamed that he was back in the city, in the summer night. At that small hour when the commotion stumbles to rest, when the roar of human commerce subsides to a broken peace, when at any moment you are liable to be jolted upright by a muffler-less acceleration, by a window slammed shut against a drunk bellowing in the street, by cats yowling and hissing in the grey backyards of the morning.

In the city Wakelin slept with a pillow over his ear, a feather buffer, but for some reason the pillow made the fear worse, and most nights he woke afraid, sometimes with a cry or a shout, sometimes crouched by the bed, toes gripping the fibre mat, no idea why, no particular memory of a particular dream, just the fear. This had been going on so long and was so familiar and at the same time so fresh a condition that Wakelin had all but forgotten it had been no different when Jane was alive, that it had not started with losing her. With Jane, when he bolted up in terror, he had trained himself to pass straight into the follow-through, pillow in hand, a comforter pulled from the hall closet as he passed, and he was on the futon in the living room, already working at getting back to sleep, rocking his hips in a steady rhythm, something he could not do in the same bed with Jane, who felt every shift, heard every sound. If so much as the pattern of Wakelin’s breathing changed, she was wide awake. What’s wrong? she would whisper, and she would be talking to him.

Nothing, Love. Nothing’s wrong. Nothing at all.

What was wrong? He blamed the city, he still blamed the city, but he knew the city was not it. Not really. Sometimes when Wakelin slept it was as if the sweet flow of his dreaming were a supersaturated solution the faintest ping could crystallize to terror. As he slept, his mind would pass out through the pillow pressed against his ear, and it would range across the ambient field until when the moment was ripe it would pluck one sound and swell it to a chime. Ping! Time for your fear, Tim! This was how it happened on the riverbank behind the Birches. In the distance somewhere, all but beyond auditory range, probably, the slam of a screen door exploded like a gunshot inside his head, and it was a detonation of sorrow, a bullet of fear and longing. He sat up on the grass in the shadow of the black cliff, and the blue sky above him was perhaps not cold but it looked cold. He got to his feet shivering, the arm lately over his eyes now numb and useless, brushing himself off with the other, and walked stiffly back to his mock shack, which had retained the heat of the day with the same shabby tenacity it had retained the cigarette smoke of its occupants and the spores of the mould in the carpet and the cheap curtains, and he curled up on the warm bed with a gentle rocking of his hips, and he was grateful for that warmth now.

Caroline Troyer was sitting behind Crooked Hand’s counter. She was reading. Something was bothering her, and as she went on reading she half-thought it must be the man who had just been in looking for property (so he said), how his half-turn to the past and the habits of blindness and deception cultivated by that in him had muddied and compromised his nature, but then she realized that it was not him, at least not only him, but her own immediate state of intending to do something she wasn’t doing. Of knowing there was something but not knowing what it was. Like knowing something is there before you turn your head. Before you recognize it, it’s there as a husk, as the ghost of itself, waiting to be known. And then the sun had reached the cellophaned window, and the office did not get hotter, not yet, but the patch of bright amber light on the linoleum at the corner of her eye caused her, even as she continued to read, to think of heat, and that was how she remembered that she’d been meaning to plug in the fan, which she had unplugged when she went upstairs for lunch, right after the man had come in, and that’s what it was she wasn’t doing.

Now it seemed to her there must be a way to act that would not, like this, like him, be confused, half hidden to yourself, half backward-turned, your timing always that little bit late. And she decided to see if it would be possible to know the right time to get up and go over and plug in the fan. She knew she could just do it. Decide to do it, then get down off her stool and walk over and do it. But it seemed to her that that would only be acting according to an idea of what she should do. Acting to fit an idea of acting. And she wondered if there could be some other way to do it. So she sat up straight and she waited, and before she knew it she was springing up to go and do it. But instead she sat down again, because it seemed to her that doing it that way, without thinking, was even more mechanical than doing it according to some idea. So she waited. Again she sprang up to do it, and again she sat down and waited.

And then it happened. She saw when to get up and go and plug in the fan, and in the exact same action of seeing it she got down off the stool and walked over and she plugged in the fan. And this was another kind of action altogether, a third kind, completely different from the other two. It was a harmony, a grace of movement, and she wondered if a person’s whole life could be this way. And how this would be different from the other ways. How it might change how she was able to know. Whether she could live in order to act out of seeing and not according to an old reflex or the last idea. And she knew that it would be easy to think you were doing it when you were not, believing in it as an idea but not doing it. Or doing it in love with the person you wanted to be. But the thing was, she knew that she knew this, and she knew that she didn’t have to stop there, because she understood that knowing this was also part of what she could see, and all she had to do was to try to find out how far this thing was possible to be done.

In this way, moment by moment, not gradually but all at once, at each moment, she would empty herself, if she could, she would empty herself of the slave.