The Healer
“How are you folks t’day.”
“Orest Pereki,” she said.
Now he looked at her more closely.
“Caroline Troyer,” she said.
“So it is,” the voice said, the fingers up under the mesh. “How’s your dad?”
The service station had a restaurant with peach curtains punched out in that same plastic mesh. Wakelin said he needed to stop for lunch, he was ravenous. He knew that if he didn’t get her talking soon he had no story. It would be two wasted days. “On me,” he said. “Please.”
For a mile or so the highway had run parallel to a hydro power line, and now in three columns the giant pylons stalked the horizon like skeletons of Martian war machines. When Wakelin and Caroline were seated inside by the window, she parted the curtain of mesh and indicated the man dressed like rock. “Orest used to be cut sprayman for Hydro,” she said.
Wakelin considered this, and then he said, “Defoliant? Orest should sue.”
She was still looking out the window. “He’d need money to sue.”
“Not necessarily,” but that sounded fairly unlikely. Wakelin considered adding something like, Too late for a healing, I guess, a case like that. Or, Kind of raises the larger issue of why people get sick, doesn’t it?
But he didn’t. Instead he ordered the club on brown, toasted, with fries. Caroline Troyer, the egg salad on white. They both chose medium Cokes. A point of connection, Wakelin felt. Over lunch he got down to work. He started by asking her if she liked living in the country.
“I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“I live in town.”
“Right. How’s town?”
She shrugged her shoulders. They really were very broad. A fine head on them, too. “I never lived anyplace else.”
Wakelin shifted in his seat. “Tell me. What do you think to yourself when somebody shows up from the city looking for a piece of country property?”
“I don’t think anything. It’s always him takes them out.”
“Hey. I’m honoured.”
Gravely she studied his eyes, perhaps to discover there a finer intelligence than could be inferred from his words.
Wakelin persisted. “But why me?”
“He told you to come in when he wouldn’t be there.”
“Because he didn’t like my face.”
She did not deny this, instead said, “It would be him we saw Bachelor Crooked Hand talking to.”
“He set this up?”
“No. But Bachelor would tell him what he saw.”
“Why? Your father wants you or he doesn’t want you to take people out?”
“He doesn’t know if he wants me to or not.”
“But you don’t. Want to. Normally.”
“My parents, they think I should have a career.”
“And you don’t agree, particularly? But it doesn’t have to be this one, does it?”
She didn’t say anything.
“Doesn’t a person have to lie to sell houses?” Wakelin asked next.
“You don’t have to lie. You show them a bad one and then you show them a good one. That’s what he does.”
Wakelin sat back, disarmed. It was a long time since he had been with anyone like this. Childhood. This was innocence. Candour, no strings. A source of alarm. How could he not pity it? Not seek, despite himself, in juicy small increments, to wisen it up? Not sooner or later with one half-unwitting word or gesture finish it off? How could he trust himself?
He asked her, “So will you do this again?”
“No.”
“Your decision has nothing to do with me, right?” He grinned. “I mean, this isn’t personal?”
No expression marked the honest beauty of her face. No hostility, no amusement, no tightening of the skin around the eyes, nothing. Only watching.
“Tell me,” Wakelin said, leaning forward with great calm, scrambling to keep this going. “How do you know Orest?”
A flicker. Just that. A shadow. “My father, he used to bring me up here in the summers, when I was little. We’d camp. Down the cut a ways— Look, we have to go.”
“Just you and him?”
She nodded. Eyes downcast. Making no move to leave, and, like her, Wakelin sat watching her weigh and turn the truck keys in her fingers. And he was thinking, Jesus Christ, I can’t even tell if what I’m feeling right now is compassion or desire. Who’s supposed to be the emotional illiterate at this table, again?
Without raising her eyes, she said, “There’s Wakelins out around Avery Lake.”
“Bow legs and bad hearts?”
Quickly she glanced up.
“They’ll be the impostors. Awful thorns in our sides.”
She looked away.
And then it was more brutal of him still, but the waitress was standing right there, looking at him. He ordered pumpkin pie and coffee. “Two seconds, I promise,” he told Caroline Troyer. “I just can’t seem to stay awake today.” He let his lids droop and hated himself all over again from the beginning.
When his order came he paused with a forkful of pie and said, “So what do you want your career to be?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you ever think about joining the Church?”
He might have pricked her with a pin. “Why would I do that?”
“Only a suggestion. Exercise your faith—”
“What faith?”
“You don’t have to have faith—”
“Why would I want to have faith?”
“Beats despair?”
She was sliding along her bench to leave.
“Listen,” Wakelin said. “I was a really nosy kid. I tried hard to keep it clean, but—”
She was halfway to the door.
As he put down money to cover the bill, Wakelin thought, A faith healer hostile to faith. Hmm.
Or was that former faith healer?
Christ, I don’t have a thing here.
The rest of the afternoon they spent lost on gravel roads among hill farms. A quality in that region of confinement and reduction in scale. Limited horizons. The soil thin and stony. Sourest of podzol, a smear of humus. Frost-free days few in number. Land not intended, not in any millennium of this climate era, to be farmed. Goats and chickens and bug-bitten kids with bare feet standing at the bottoms of lanes, kids who didn’t see many trucks they didn’t know, who would pause amidst their play to watch, from first sighting to last, this latest unfamiliar vehicle pass, and as Wakelin waved and the kids just stared and continued staring even as the dust-roll enfolded them, two words kept coming to his mind: Isolation. Suffering. On many stretches, poplars dustily crowded the road like elephantine weeds. A land of escarps and gravelish moraine. Bulrush swamp. Fields of chicory the colour of blue sky. Signs bad or non-existent, they kept getting lost. They would find themselves on roads that turned out to be private lanes or that ended at checkerboards now signposts for dumped garbage or that petered out to tractor ruts across rocky till.
At a stream that passed under the road through an exposed and grader-battered culvert with bedspring grates, Caroline Troyer pulled over and took a crushed litre milk carton from under the seat and walked down to the water reshaping it. Wakelin got out to stretch his legs and watch her squat by the water to fill this container, her skirt bunched between her knees, her hair swung forward hiding the pale sombreness of her face, and his spirit travelled down the embankment to embrace her in her lowly task. The blackflies at this spot still thought it was May. He tried to have the hood popped all ready for her, but he couldn’t figure out how. She returned and did it herself amidst a furnace blast of heat off the engine. She balanced the hood on its slender rod, then used a rag to loosen the rad cap—“Um, please be really, really careful doing that,” said Wakelin, who had stepped back—and refilled the carton by means of two more trips to the stream.
It was almost six by the time they found the place, on a stretch where the ditch-grass and aspens were powdered white from the road, a stately red-brick farmhouse with a wraparound porch. The day had diminished to a silent white haze of late-day heat, but inside, where grain sheaves in white-plaster relief bordered the high creamy ceilings and the burnished linoleum shone in the slanting light, the air was cool and commotionous. The whole place smelled of baking bread, and Wakelin, as he stood alongside Caroline Troyer in the front hall before an osteoporosal old woman with upraised eyes, was aware of strange stirrings, ghostly and expansive rustlings, as of bread rising in remote corners. A man with a nine-inch lift on his right boot dragged it into the front hall and spoke passionately concerning the R20 insulation he had had installed the previous spring at great expense, and yet a seventh as much had been saved already on heating fuel this winter past. As the man spoke, behind him in a kind of sunroom Wakelin could see beings moving like outsized children or sleepwalkers, and overhead he could hear as well the footfalls of uncertain dreamers. The whole house in a movement of habitation. The man dragged away his elevator boot, and the old woman explained that though the farm had been their life, leaving it would be nothing compared to losing the children, who would be scattered and lost, even one to another.
“Why do you have to sell?” Caroline Troyer asked the woman, and Wakelin looked at her, though he had been wondering exactly the same thing.
The woman sighed and said because they had no money left, and with the latest round of cuts to foster care—
She led them to that sunroom, where the man had returned to reading a story to the six or seven hydrocephalics gathered around him, possibly listening, possibly not, a few others musing at a low table spread with puzzles and books. When the woman entered with visitors, the children crowded forward in shy excitement.
Back at the truck Wakelin exclaimed, “I’ll take it! And the nice old couple and the kids, too!”
“It’s too cheap,” Caroline said. “It should have sold.”
“After two years of looking!” cried Wakelin, overlooking the year he had put the whole thing aside as a bad idea. He was ready to buy. Was this or was this not textbook serendipity? “I can’t believe my luck! I’ll be the new landed gentry!”
“It’s too cheap,” Caroline said again.
“Maybe the kids spook people,” Wakelin suggested hopefully.
And then she turned the other way out the drive and it was right there, a gravel pit so vast the trucks at the bottom looked like Dinky Toys.
“The listing should have said something,” Caroline said.
“Listen,” Wakelin told her. “People can adapt to anything. They’ll walk around with an open sore for years. Before you know it, you’re dressing it in your sleep. Besides, a pit is more an absence than an actual—”
Here a gravel truck roared by and the whole world turned white.
“You never said what he looked like,” Ardis Troyer observed as she sat with her husband at the table in the dining area, their evening meal of grilled pork chops and boiled potatoes and carrots in front of them, their daughter’s drying in the oven. Ardis’s dog Keeper lay under the table, against her foot.
He glanced up. “What?”
“What he looked like.”
He turned away.
Ardis put down her fork like something fragile. “The only reason I ask, Ross, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to you that at least your daughter’s showing a little initiative for once. Venturing out into the world like a functioning adult female of the species.”
“There’s nothing functioning about seven hours to show a few properties.”
“No?” Ardis smiled. She picked up her fork. “How old was he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Approximately.”
“No idea. Thirty.”
“Handsome?”
“What? How should I know?”
“You saw him! You talked to him, Ross! Ross, listen to me. Something about this mystery stranger has inspired your holier-than-the-Christ hermit daughter to get up off her skinny arse and drive him out to show him seven hours’ worth of properties. That’s the miracle unfolding as we speak, and it’s beyond me why you aren’t showing a little more interest or enthusiasm, something.”
When her husband did not respond, Ardis sat for a moment watching him, perhaps waiting to see if he was only taking his time. Waiting, she sipped her vermouth. As she set down her glass she murmured, “Of course with our luck he’ll be a serial killer.” Again she waited, and then she said, “Not that after seven straight hours of her anybody wouldn’t be.” She looked at him. “What properties?”
He shook his head.
In a musing tone she said, “It’s a long ways if she took it on herself to show him them two A-frames up by Biddesfirth.” “It’s not seven hours.”
“Not any more.” She was looking at her watch. “It’s eight.” She was thinking again. “Of course there’s meals. If she didn’t eat lunch, she’d need dinner. You know how hypo she gets. Candlelight at the Coach House maybe?”
His eyes came up to consider her.
“Ross, relax. Eat something, for God’s sake. Stop looking like somebody just rammed a hot poker up your arse. It’s not even dark yet. I’m sure she’ll phone when she comes to one. She’s fine. Exploring life, we should hope.”
His eyes had gone to the kitchen, to the clock over the stove. Now they came away from there.
Ardis resumed eating. After a minute she asked, “How tall was he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, when you talked to him,” she said in a lilt of exasperation, “were you looking up, or down, or what?”
He gazed at her with incredulous loathing.
She had thought of something. “He didn’t have dark hair, did he? Fine and straight—?”
“I don’t remember.” He looked away. “Maybe.”
“A blue turtleneck? Stained?”
“A dark turtleneck. I don’t know about stained.”
She clapped her hands. “I talked to him yesterday! At the restaurant! He’s looking for property!”
“He’s not looking for property. He’s another reporter.”
Ardis was musing. “Maybe. That’s what I thought. But eight hours, Ross. Eight hours. You know yourself she won’t give reporters the time of day any more. You practically have to—Well well well. It does seem like she got lost, all right. Lost in a truck ceiling. Just like the rest of them around here after all. A little slow to sort her ass from the heavenly bodies, but—” Ardis sat back in an attitude of relief. A moment later she leaned forward with her eyes googled and waggling her hands at the sides of her face. “Feelings! Funny feelings! Whooo! Must be from on high!”
“The reason she took him out,” he said carefully, his attention upon his plate, the food untouched, “I wasn’t there.”
“So you claim. But there’s nothing very new about that, is there, Ross? It’s never got her to take them out before.”
“I know what she’s thinking,” he said in an ordinary voice, although it no longer seemed to be his wife he was addressing. “I’m not fooled.”
“Look on the bright side,” Ardis said. “Even as we speak she’s out there solving our problem. Either she’s got off her rear end to sell property or she’s on her back arranging things another way—What are you doing?”
He was holding his dinner plate in his right hand, touching the rim of it to his left arm just below the shoulder. He was doing this casually, with his head tilted downward and to the side as if to regard the plate, and yet his attention seemed upon some object more remote.
Ardis’s hand went to her heart. She was silent now, and watched in a freeze of dismay as the plate moved swiftly rightward across his chest, his right arm extending, fingers releasing so that the plate sailed like a Frisbee through the doorway and across the space of the kitchen to explode against the oven door. There a gob of mashed potato adhered a moment to the Pyrex of the oven window before it fell away to leave a white pucker, and Ardis understood that the pucker appeared at that moment as white as it did only because the Pyrex was carbon-fouled inside a double pane, owing to an engineering flaw in that so-called quality stove, they get a reputation and the next thing you know immigrants working for chicken feed are asleep on their feet throwing together any old crap, and who pays—? She was on her feet. “Ross, honey, don’t!”
He now held his bread-and-butter plate in that same hand, the rim of it just brushing his left arm midway between the elbow and shoulder as if to indicate something there, and she looked to it hopeful, but his arm moved swiftly back, extending as before, and the wrist flicked, the fingers releasing, and that plate too travelled through the air, to smash against the hall-entrance door frame and scatter down the length of the hall to the front door.
“She doesn’t fool me,” he said again, quietly. “I know her.” And then he put his hands over his face and sat in silence.
Ardis lowered herself into her chair. It was as if she had been struck a blow to the stomach. She had no breath.
When he brought his hands away he was calm. “I’ll clean that up,” he said. “And clear the table.” He pushed his chair back and with his hands on his knees, elbows spread, peered beneath the table at her stockinged feet, which were drawn together under her chair. The dog was still under there, and it looked out at him with frightened eyes. “Don’t walk.” He stood up. “I’ll get your shoes. You put the dog out and go straight to the room and wait for me there. Have the gear ready. You know I don’t like that kind of talk.”
“Oh, Ross,” Ardis said, and sighed. Sighed so profoundly she could hardly speak. “I can talk a lot more like this than this, than, than, than—”
“No more. That’s enough. Where’s your fucking shoes?”
“My fucking shoes,” Ardis sighed and seemed about to faint in her chair at the table where she sat.
Wakelin and Caroline Troyer were back on the unpaved stretch, fifteen minutes into the washboard dance, when that rhythmic bump from the rear became enfolded by a sound more flubby and catastrophic. A flat tire.
Wakelin felt this was a job for himself, but he was too slow. Crouching beside her on the shoulder amidst blasts of dust and flying stones from the big trucks, he watched her forearms cord and soften as she loosened wheelnuts, one after the other. The nuts had seized, but she possessed the necessary strength, or more accurately the confidence of the strength and therefore she had the strength. What was this if not faith? Wakelin, extending the hubcap as a tray for wheelnuts, was tempted to make this point out loud, but when she took his tray and set it on the ground at her feet he remained silent, just continued to watch her hands and forearms, fighting an impulse now to reach out and touch them, to trace the perfection of blue veins in the backs of her hands as they worked, a desire that struck him as being exactly as creepy and inappropriate as it would strike her. But he knew that, he understood that, and was grateful to his genes, to his upbringing, to something, to be able to squat here in a state of as-good-as perfect control, blameless as your perfect gentleman, and just watch, while reflecting in a removed and dispassionate way upon the stubbornness of the physical world. And at that moment it came to Wakelin that paramount in a life in the country would be the physical problems, the small humiliations by intractable materiality, the cold-sweat stand-offs, and maybe he should think some more about this country-property thing.
The problem was, with a physical problem you really did have a problem. A physical problem was another order altogether from those issuing from the usual obstacles and defeats of money, work, and other people. When you had done all you could do and still something physical did not work, then it did not work. It was not like a magazine story, infinitely malleable given thought enough and time. Unless your name was Uri Geller and your physical problem was a shortage of bent spoons, you were not going to solve it by mind alone. When you had a problem writing a magazine piece you could always sleep on it, a fresh start. With a physical problem you could sleep on it as much as you wanted, it wouldn’t make any difference. For Wakelin, a fresh start in the physical world consisted of driving to Canadian Tire and throwing himself on the mercy of the first clerk who bothered to toss him a glance. It was buying a new one and paying extra to have somebody come around and set it up.
Caroline Troyer was speaking to him, telling him to fetch rocks for under the wheels on the passenger’s side, she’d be jacking on a grade.
Wakelin jumped up and jogged around the front of the truck and skidded down off the shoulder for two big rocks and clambered back up with one in each hand. They were bigger than they needed to be, the weight of ten-pin bowling balls, and twice he fell, embedding an elbow in the soft gravel, but he made it and jammed them in. “Done,” he said, squatting once more at her side, game as a puppet.
Now she unbolted the spare from under the bed and located the axle and positioned the jack and jacked the truck and removed the blown tire and lifted on the spare and tightened the nuts partway and unjacked the truck until the ground held the tire, and tightened the nuts the rest of the way and unjacked the truck until it came down fully onto its springs and the jack was loose enough to free it from under the axle and threw the blown tire into the bed. And this entire procedure Wakelin followed helplessly ever one step behind, not quite keeping out of her way, his thoughts lapsed to overexposure, his mind bleached, the small interior voice stuck meaningless back there with What was this if not faith? stuck and repeating. And the world as manifest on that dirt shoulder in that corridor of spruce and fir under the deepening blue of evening, a cooler breeze from the forest margin fragrant with fungus and conifer in mitigation of the vaporous gritty pall of dust and diesel upon that stripped road surface, the world rose up on its old elbows aggrieved, and seeing it that way Wakelin felt a need for redemption, or something like it, a need undiminished by his utter ignorance concerning what redemption could be or how to get it. Why it should be necessary at all.
And then she was taking the jack out of his hands (dismantling it as she did so) and the socket wrench, and this hardware she replaced behind the seat while he struggled to fit the hubcap back on, but after one glance she repositioned it and kicked it on herself. And so much further unnerved was he by the short sharp efficiency of this action in the midst of all that personal chagrin, all that despair of old helplessness, that he had climbed into the cab and buckled himself in before he realized that she herself was not getting in but walking around the back of the truck to kick away the rocks he had placed under the tires, except then when he glanced around, she was just standing there looking at them.
He struggled out of his seat belt and threw open his door. “I can do that!” he called. “I’m sorry, I completely forgot—” He jumped down.
“You put them at the backs of the tires,” she said.
Wakelin was not sure if this statement was descriptive or prescriptive. He checked the rocks. “Right,” he said.
She was walking back to the driver’s door.
Wakelin continued to stare at the rocks. Something was wrong, but what? And then he saw that he had wedged them under the upslope side of the tires, and a hot wavefront travelled his neck and cheeks and climbed his temples, and though there was no need at all he kicked away the rocks and did so with some energy.
They were on the road again. A few minutes later back on asphalt, moving once more down a corridor of spruce and fir, and that rear bump had not gone away.
Roused from his mortified flush, Wakelin looked over.
Her eyes were fixed down the road. “It’s the good tire blew,” she said.
It’s always this, Caroline Troyer reflected. The main thing about thought: move away. From anything it lights on. It doesn’t matter what it is. Like a fire or a Slinky, move away and start up again some place else. Move away and do it different. Do it as it should be. As things like this used to be. When they were better. Or if it seems to be a good thing it’s lit on, then do it as precious. Out of reach. Or better: do it sacred. That’s right, sacred, needing defending. Or do it lost forever, at any time now. That’s always a good one.