The Healer

Ross Troyer leaned across the seat and opened the passenger door for his daughter Caroline, who climbed up and pulled hard at the door but not hard enough for the door to engage. It was an old truck.

He raked his fingers through his hair, observing in the rearview the effect of doing so upon the lie of it.

“Door’s not shut,” he said.

She tried it again.

“Who got in?” he murmured, his old joke. His eyes had left the rearview. She was clicking into her seat belt.

His hand went lightly to the handle of the knife in the sheath at his left side, as it often did. Then his hand went to the ignition. “Better wind down that window.”

She wound down the window.

He eased the truck along the narrow alley, and when he reached the street he nosed out cautiously beyond the parked cars. They left the main street by the north bridge. Passed the Birches Motel (where Wakelin lay in his hot shack out back, watching TV) and next to the Birches the new six-unit white-brick plaza. Two more minutes and they were beyond the built-up area, into farmland. In the distance to the north and east the fairgrounds in their elevation. This was just after six in the evening. The sun was pale and it would not set for nearly three hours. It was only just summer, but there had already been more heat than rain, and the trees and the crops though green were not lush. Caroline Troyer sat with her hands loose in her lap and her head tilted slightly, the way her father often held his, but her expression betrayed none of his facetiousness, only the affliction that was often there too in his, her eyes downcast upon the toes of her boots set evenly upon the floor of the cab.

This was farm country close to that part of the Shield where on three different occasions, over two billion years, alpine ranges had pushed up, all now eroded to fault escarpments and low domes of granite wrapped and separated by the forested sag and swell of the shreds of sedimentary gneisses. Where in this area the roots of those ranges lay exposed was a short distance to the north, beyond hills of clay and gravel and wooded outcrops and Precambrian erratics now ploughed around for oats and corn. Where the grade was steepest it was girdled by high faceted walls in olive and black and pink, for the roadway had been blasted out of the batholith for the pleasure men take in linearity achieved by the effective placement of dynamite. As the truck climbed toward this channel, Caroline Troyer’s eyes remained lowered.

“You’re okay?” he said.

She nodded. Not looking up, she added, “Why?”

“You seem depressed.”

“I was dry,” she said, and looked away out the window where a sign read, Rock Collecting Along this Highway Is Dangerous and Unlawful.

“Dry,” he said.

“Dry in my heart.”

“Would this be why you’ve been hiding your light under a bushel? Or because?”

She made no answer.

The truck was losing speed with the steepness of the grade.

“Why did you stop the healing, anyway?” he asked her. “Your mother could have sworn you had a good thing going there. I think she expected you’d take it on the road.”

She looked at him.

He smiled. “Tears of the world a constant quantity? Or its gratitude?”

She looked away again. “I don’t like crowds.”

“Me neither. But there’s money in them. As your mother has pointed out to you many times.” He put his face close to hers and said in a waggish voice, “But do you listen?”

She didn’t say anything.

“So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know. I don’t suppose you ever heard the expression, ‘When a woman has nothing to do she buys a pig’? Pig comes along looking for country property, she marries him. Gives her mother a nice city porker to sit on. Distributes the weight a little.”

She was still looking away. After a while she said quietly, “What do I need with somebody else’s body to look after?”

He laughed at this, pleased, a soft crowing, and pounded the heels of his hands lightly against the wheel. And then he said, “Healer sick of healing speaks.”

“We’re not talking about healing.”

“No.”

After a pause he said, “Still, you could. What if marriage is the next thing to do, as you will know in your bones? The next thing’s enough for most people. They sit around on their ass until all other options exhaust themselves, and then they do it. Circle closes. What’s so wrong with the next thing? Without it, what have you got? Doubts, littleness”—he hunched at the wheel, making himself small—“laziness, putting off, closing down, that’s the person, tiny and scared. The next thing, now, that’s the larger wisdom.”

“It’s no wisdom,” she said.

He didn’t say anything, and then he touched her knee, and when she looked at him he mouthed, “That’s my girl.” She scowled and turned away.

They had reached the crown of the highest height of highway in that high country, where rocks amber and olive lined the channel the road had been laid in, great angular blocks so heavily demarcated one from the next it was as if they had been placed in that stepped array by giant masons. Just beyond the crest of the road, where the rock went into terraces, tilted terraces, a sign saying Ross Troyer Realty stood at the foot of a sandy drive that cut back hard to the right and climbed one such angled terrace to where a tall black tar-paper house with a patchwork tin roof stood untended in long grass, invisible from the road. Windows paneless. Troyer nosed the truck up to the north wall of the house and turned off the engine.

Crickets and cicadas. The hot engine ticking.

Caroline Troyer got out of the truck and walked to a window and looked in while her father removed a rifle from a chest in the box. The smell from the house was the smell of bats and mice and the defecations of larger creatures in a hot space. A nothing room slow to lighten after the brightness of the evening. Curling linoleum. Torn wallpaper and squatter litter. She stepped back and looked up. Nests of cliff swallows high up under the water-stained eaves.

She walked to the west corner and looked along there. The front door was halfway down, three feet from the tops of the weeds. There were no steps. She walked back to the east corner and down that wall past coal-cellar stairs under a sheet of melt-sagged plywood; a gas stove, controls gutted; and small corroded items of automobile and appliance it was necessary to step around until she came to the south wall and sloping away from there an open area of rock and stubbled grass where not so long ago children had played. A rusty swing set. In the dust by her foot a warped red plastic shovel bleached to pinkness. From here the land continued to fall away to the east and south where the dark river twisted and turned through the village in the anguish of human propinquity until the peace of fields permitted serenity once more. Along the south wall of the house was an old sofa slumped by the elements upon its frame and springs. It looked soaking, but it was hard and crumbly to the touch like something mummified, and upon it hung the miasma of manured dog. In the middle of that wall a door had swung open. It creaked in an imperceptible breeze. The steps to it were concrete blocks sunk at an angle. She glanced at that door and turned away. A clothesline, a bare wire, had been strung from a hook in the side of the house to a jack pine with a russet crown. Something hung from the wire. She went over. From its rear foot by a string a chipmunk, headless.

The string was knotted to the line. She worked at the knot to undo it, drawing back her face from the dessicant stink. Jumped when he said, “What are you doing?”

“Throwing this away.”

“Good. You’re learning. Your anxious homebuyer, they do love an omen.”

“Why?” she asked, meaning the desecration.

He shrugged. “Somebody needed a head?”

She ignored this. “Why couldn’t they just feed it or give it a name?”

“Probably they did. First.” He smiled.

He had his hunting knife out, to cut the knot, but she got it undone before he could do that and threw the small carcass down the slope, into the longer grass.

“How can you sell a place like this?” she said.

It was a moral question, or more accurately, an accusation, though that was not how he heard it.

“For the view.” Which he indicated. Then the house. “This’ll come down.”

“What do you tell them about water?”

“I tell them around here it’s three-quarters water. Rock and water. Two billion years of rock and ice and water. Cool it down, rock and ice. Warm it up, rock and water.”

She just looked at him.

He stepped closer. “Listen to me. People buying a house are buying their own dreams. Same as healing. They’ll be healed as much as they want to be healed, and they’ll buy what they want to buy. You don’t want people to believe you can heal, you don’t want to sell them back their dreams, that’s fine. Just don’t let me ever hear anybody say I stood in your way.”

He turned and she followed him, followed his shirt, the perspiration in a stain at the spine, around the house and through the old scrap and long grass to where the rock surfaced grey and smooth and level with the curve of the land and the eye rose from it to a sky like a luminous bowl of fine-sanded glass. Beyond the clearing of rock was a rail fence on which stood a pair of riddled cans, Coke and beer. Troyer walked over and picked up three others, also riddled, a Cott’s, a green one probably ginger ale, and a Diet Coke, and placed them at spaced intervals along the rail. He walked back to where she stood waiting and handed her the rifle.

She checked the breech, placed the rifle firmly against her shoulder, aiming. Fired. The Diet Coke popped into the air as the echo of the report came off the house behind them. When she fired a second time the beer can behaved in exactly the same way. A third time and the Cott’s can too was gone. The Coke can was not hit dead centre, and it flew off obliquely. The ginger ale was as the others. She lowered the rifle. A breeze thrashed delicately the leaves of a cluster of yellow birches just beyond the fence. The sound was the sound of running water.

“You’re getting there,” he said and sadly smiled.

Rubbing her shoulder, she turned to look at him.

“You know,” he said, “we should go camping again some time. Just the two of us. How long has it been? Twelve years?”

The pain in her eyes must have been what he was after.

“No, eh?” he said mildly and again he stepped closer. “Anyway, you’ll remember what I’ve always told you.” He laid the tip of his right index finger against the centre of his chest. “Bang, right? Anybody tries anything with you?”

Her eyes stayed with his. “That’s about you,” she said. “What you’d do. Now what about everything else?”

But he had already turned away and was walking back toward the fence and failed to see the movement of her hand to indicate not only the grove beyond but also everything around them, the house and the seventy and more years of isolation and suffering and blundering clutches at freedom it had known, and the entry into its history that selling it would constitute, and the squeamishness of such a consideration, and this primeval rock the house stood on, and the land to the south, all the contention and folly and sorrow of the town down there, the contention and folly and sorrow of her own heart, of everything physical, everything human.

“What else?” he said. He was stooping for cans. When she didn’t answer he looked around and made a grin using an economy of face muscles in a ritual they had not had between them since she was a girl of nine or ten. “What do I care about everything else? Is it going to snap you out of this phase? Is it going to give me back my precious angel?”

“I’m not talking about everything else for me. I’m not talking about any phase. I’m not talking about precious angels.”

He set the cans along the rail and walked back to where she stood. “I’d say we’re both dry,” he said. “I’d say we’ve both been dry for too long.” He took back the rifle. From his pocket he drew a .32 handgun, which he passed over to her and stepped back facing the cans.

She was not so accurate with the handgun, missing two cans altogether on the first try and hitting directly only one.

As he moved forward once more to restore the cans to the railing, she sank to her haunches in a single effortless movement, her elbows on her knees and her arms locked straight, the gun lax in her hand.

“I was taking the clothes out of the dryer yesterday,” she said. “Folding them and dropping them in the basket. When they landed they made a funny sound.”

He looked around at her. He was holding a can. “Funny sound,” he said.

“A crackly popping. Somewhere between a crackle and a pop.”

“Don’t forget the snap. I always carry a good big pocketful. It’s bulky, but it’s light. I admit it tends to clog the machine.”

“I thought it might be static, from the heat,” she said, “but it wasn’t crackly enough. It didn’t sound enough like static.”

“Huh.”

“What was it?”

“Don’t ask me,” he said. “I know it looks like I’m busy setting up cans here, but really I’m just putting in time until you tell me what it was.”

“It was suds that came back out the drain where the washer empties, right next to the clothesbasket. I didn’t notice them against the light-coloured lino, there. I had my eyes on the clothes dropping. Well, the air pushed out by the clothes as they landed was passing through the mesh of the basket and popping the suds. It was the suds popping I was hearing, and it sounded almost electric but not really.”

“Well, well,” he said.

She looked up at him. “It didn’t sound like suds when they pop. I know what suds popping sounds like. Or I thought I did. This was more crackly. I was thinking I was hearing something electric, so it wasn’t the same sound.”

“Not the same sound, no,” he said.

She was looking up at him in an attitude of imploring, but that was not what she was doing. The look was to say that this was for him. For his benefit. That she knew what she knew, fugitive and inconsequential and perhaps dreary or trivial to another as it might be, but it didn’t matter, because she also knew that it would operate to the degree of its significance, and if it were not significant, then it would not last, it would make no difference, it would not operate at all.

“It was like eating a cherry,” she said, “when you think you’re eating a grape. It’s not the same as eating a cherry when you’re expecting a cherry. It’s a strange cherry.”

“You’re a strange cherry,” he said. “A strange cherry with too little on her mind.”

And then she seemed to have to will herself to continue. For a long time now it had been difficult for her to talk to him at all, let alone about anything that mattered to her. This was hard work, and the only thing that made it possible at all was how much it did matter to her. “I’m not saying everything’s in a person’s mind or that nothing’s ever the same the next time, I’m saying a person can be wide open to how much it is and it isn’t the same the next time. You don’t have to hold on to believing things are a certain way any more than you have to act according to some idea of what you should do. It’s only going to wear you down. Well, today I stopped. All that’s gone, I let it go, and it doesn’t matter, or maybe it’s the only thing to do. The energy’s back, it’s gathering. It turns out it never stopped. And I’m still here. I’m saying it’s not the end of the world.”

She had lowered her head and was scraping at the dirt with the barrel of the gun. Now she looked up. “Or maybe it is the end. But if it is, it’s the beginning too. Every moment.”

His face was averted. “I thought you said you were dry,” he murmured.

“Not any more.”

Now he came down beside her, squatting too. Her head was bowed again. He looked to the west, where the sun was making a blaze out of a new tin roof on the other side of the sunken highway. If there was more to say about the bubbles, she didn’t say it, only went on scraping with the gun. He looked back at her, at the top of her head.

“Whew,” he said. “For a moment there I thought you were going to tell me you saw God in the suds. Fell to your knees and licked out the drain.”

She rose up off her haunches and started for the truck. He came after her and placed a hand on her arm, and she turned with the gun in both hands and raised it until the end of the barrel came up to the point directly in the centre of his chest.

“Don’t ever, ever do this,” he said.

“I know what happened,” she said. “But I don’t understand what it’s done to me. It’s obvious it’s done something, and then there’s all this energy, and it’s not ordinary, it’s not like any other kind. I don’t know what’s happening, I have no idea, and I don’t want to pretend to myself that I do. I need to find out so I can know what to do next. Not just the next thing, but what needs to be done. It’s like there’s been a disaster to the land. The question is, What’s growing here now?”

“Lower the gun.”

She did not lower the gun.

He took a breath. Exhaled. At that moment he too must have recognized the extraordinariness of her talking to him, for he seemed to resolve to go along. He rocked back on his heels. “So what is? Growing here now?”

“I’m telling you I don’t know. I have to find out for myself.”

“Nothing new about that. ‘Caro’ine do it by se’f.’ That’s your problem.”

“Then I’ll find that out too. Why aren’t I allowed to know what I can know? Why can’t a person know a thing unless everybody else is right there to say, ‘Okay, fine, we’re all ready, you can go ahead and know that now.’ What if other people haven’t had the same kinds of things happen to them? Good or bad, I’m not talking about only bad—”

“People keep each other on track. That’s how they move ahead. This is the problem since you quit school.”

“I quit school because I wasn’t learning anything in school.”

“You’re learning now? What? How special you are? The powers available to the true believer?”

“What do I believe?” she cried. “Tell me what I believe! Tell me right now!”

He ignored this. “And you quit healing because you couldn’t—what? Deserve it? Or heal?”

“It’s the energy heals,” she said. “The energy’s got nothing to do with deserving or not deserving.”

“Of course it does. Whatever you happen to think about it. You just don’t want to see your own part in this. In anything. Nothing new about that either. Look, Caroline. Anybody can be a saint if they never leave their own room. At least when you were laying hands on people you were getting out of the house. You’re too old for this. You’re too smart. It’s time to come back to reality. It’s time to remember who you are.”

She lowered the gun. “Who I am is fog,” she said. “Who I am is poison gas.”

He looked at her, and then he performed one of his unexpected acts. Brought his hands up to press the heels against his eyes. For a full minute he stood like that, still facing her, heels pressing, and then he took them away and his eyes were red and hollow and wet. He blinked. “Just don’t leave me, Precious Angel,” he said in a soft voice, almost a lisp. “I’m begging you. Don’t do it.”

She watched him as he said this. And then she said, “This isn’t begging, it’s warning.”

She turned and walked back to the truck.

When Ross Troyer spoke in the kitchen his voice caused the heat duct that fed his daughter’s room overhead to resonate. Caroline would know her parents were arguing by the quality of the sound from the duct. Her father did not have to raise his voice, all he had to do was speak long enough each time for the duct to resonate. She would know he was not talking on the phone because the phone was directly below her bed, in the front sitting room, next to her mother’s hand. She would know her parents were arguing because it was only when they argued that her father addressed more than one or two words to her mother at one time. If Caroline were to crouch by the register, as she used to do when she was a child, she could hear what he was saying, and if she were to lie flat on the floor and press her ear to the register, as she used to do until the burden of knowing came to outweigh the secret strength of it, she could hear as well what her mother was saying, all the way from the front sitting room, which was separated from the kitchen by the dining area, less a room than a space between the kitchen and the front room. There her mother, the dog at her feet, would be watching TV or reading a magazine or doing a crossword puzzle, a tumbler of vermouth on the coffee table in front of her, while in the kitchen her father, who did not drink, would be cleaning his rifle or going through real estate listings, and Caroline would know that he was listening to her mother as he had always listened to her, now listening and now not listening, in a way that to judge from his intermittent responses had done nothing over three decades to diminish the irritating effect of her words. Sooner or later the duct would start to resonate.

It was resonating tonight, but Caroline did not get off her bed, where she had been writing (the small black notebook now slack in her hand, the ballpoint pen capped and fallen to the bedspread alongside her knee), but listened only to the pure sign of her parents’ arguing as she had listened to it not as a child crouched at the register who understood the words or most of them but earlier, as an infant on her back, her limbs waving in air to its inflections, her muscles drinking its rhythms, that she might be informed by, and so survive, and in surviving one day react against and in reacting echo and so recreate the world of her parents’ emotions. Now, twenty years later, loath, she was sitting upright on her bed, where she could hear echoing inside her the legacy of that infant thirst: the tone and rhythm and tenor of the old wrangle, of the voices that moved without ceasing. And all of it—not only her parents’ passion but the turmoil it caused at the depths of her own muscles, her own being—was no less physical and familiar than the traffic noise and the rest of the low constant din from the street or than the full moon visible through the window like a halogen floodlamp behind speeding clouds. And she continued to listen to the rasp of the curtains in the night breezes and to the sound of her own breathing deeper and slower. And the other, the interior and past, was contained within the ground of these immediate sights and sounds, soothed by them, slowed and quieted though not silenced, held by them in an embrace of perception that calmed and so enabled the discovery of grace even in that.

In the front room Ardis Troyer had been drinking Bright’s President vermouth with ice while snapping through the pages of Chatelaine. She had been doing this for some time, every once in a while leaning forward to take a sip of her drink, but then she closed the magazine on her lap and sat like that, with her hands folded upon it. Reached for her drink. Drained it. Set down the tumbler with alcoholic care, though she was not drunk. Cleared her throat. Keeper, the black Lab, who lay with his chin on his foreleg, opened his eyes to look at her but was not roused to lift his head. She began to speak, at first almost wistfully but with increasing force and in a tone of amazed grievance concerning matters financial as they pertained to old plans of household acquisition and renovation too long in abeyance. Expectations cancelled, prolongations of waiting endured, not without bitterness.

These were old beads, slick with handling, and it would be remarkable if her husband listened at all.

When she spoke next, the connection at first obscure, the subject was her fellow waitress Gail Poot’s sister-in-law Bertie, who recently with the help of her husband Wilf had set herself up in the electrolysis business.

“Hair removal,” Ross Troyer said from the kitchen.

“That’s right. Unsightly body hair. Also spider veins. Spider veins is same equipment, different course.”