The Healer

Now in memory, she is standing in her windbreaker and cap and rubber boots before her father in the yard, where blank gravestones lean among winter weeds along the chain link. It is a hard bright morning. The air is cool, the sun hot. He kneels on a foam pallet before a glassy stone, a drill in his hand. He is wearing sound mufflers, a dust mask, goggles. He switches off the drill. He pulls the mask and goggles down around his neck but not the mufflers, and the fine salmon dusting of marble leaves naked white goggles around his eyes.

I’m going up the hill, she says.

You should.

I’ll be back to make lunch.

I’d appreciate it.

And in memory she is climbing through the sumacs and among the pines above the war memorial and following the rising path along the ridge. Where the rock is exposed it is warm from the sun and the snow is granular and has been quick to recede. The air is cool in the shade where the snow lies deep yet in places, and the path is muddy but not where the shade now falls or has fallen upon it today.

Her destination is not the highest part of the ridge but almost. It is a sloped clearing several yards in diameter below, but not visible from, the path, south-facing, where no immediate green is visible as yet except the mosses and conifers. Neither is rock visible, but scratch for ten seconds and there it is. The clearing is surrounded by young hemlock and balsam. Higher up, above the path, a white pine. The clearing is sheltered and warm on days when few are. It is a place where animals bring their kill or perhaps are themselves killed here, for it is scattered with the intricate bones of small birds and mice and voles, and the skeletons of squirrels, and even a few of the vertebrae and what remains of the forelegs of a fawn, all bleached to the chalk whiteness of bone.

This is her sanctuary. No people come here. In this place it is possible to believe that no one knows where she is. Here she kicks off her rubber boots and spreads her white legs. At her feet is a screen of chokecherry and dogwood thick enough, even unleafed, to cancel the town. A brown creeper darts pecking through the winter stalks. Eastward the white meridial pain of the spring sun. South, the undulant bluish grey and lime-green horizon of forested hills. She can hear a killdeer, she can hear a Canada jay. A squirrel gone squirrelly at her trespass. She can hear the ravens, from the bluff on the other side of the summit, up in arms as ever, and she can hear the wind that moves through the white pine above her, a tunnel of soft roaring. And she feels smaller breezes on her face and arms, smells the insolate fragrance of the mosses, and as her fingers sift the pulpy till, her thoughts do not recede but slow and quiet to a sequence of resistances in her skull, small catches, palpable in their succession.

To go to that place is to wake from thoughts inspired by the dream of freedom that are not freedom.

She is not free now, only remembering her secret place on the ridge as she drives her father’s truck through the dusk listening to a man so reactive to himself, so blind, that a properly intuitive choice such as where he will spend his solitude is perplexed, impulsive, in the end will be the result practically of chance; that the nature of his relationship with a woman he lost nearly two years ago is no less complicated a mystery for him tonight than it was on the day he lost her, his suffering hardly diminished, his life snagged, twisting on that loss. And five minutes after she has delivered this lost soul to his car, she will stand before another baffled devious sufferer, her father, whose pain instead of a maundering aggrieved soliloquy will issue in old rage, because he is the one who long ago laid claim to the unpredictable, and how dare she by similar behaviour presume?

She should phone. Where on this stretch has she seen a phone?

Her passenger rambles on. First they sell you their version, done out in the way they imagine resembles your own, and then they sell you what they have come to sell you. This is why to hear him you would almost think his disappointment was a small huddled sadness and not a wail of self-pity and flailing rage at the one lost.

One of her headaches is starting. She attends to the pain as to distant thunder, and then she attends to herself thinking about her father’s rage, and that is when she notices a cast to this thinking, a cast familiar yet difficult to discern because obscured by its subject, or rather by his nature, by his own cast. And that is when she understands that these thoughts, although hers, although old catches in old succession, are kinetic with other energy that is not simply her own old emotion. And she understands that this other energy is not her own anticipation arising out of past experience. And she knows that it is another’s, that it derives from some other site that is finding repercussion here.

And that site is the rage of her father.

And that site is active and it is active now.

“Did you get them?” Wakelin asked when Caroline Troyer returned to the truck. He knew she hadn’t because the whole time she was in the phone booth he had watched her lips.

“There’s no answer.”

“So they’re out. Aren’t we almost there?” Why was she shaking?

“Forty minutes.”

“And there you’ll be. Large as life. Obviously they’re not worried.”

Half an hour before she pulled over to call he had started telling her about Jane. The feeling he had as he did this, indulged himself shamelessly, was similar to the one on those occasions, always with women, he would lay himself wide open. Sometimes in arousal, sometimes in sorrow. Like a dog on its back, lolling, thighs splayed. A guttural freedom. Here I am, grovelling in my display. Rub or scratch as you will, only be careful. I bite. He had got talking about silence, and the next thing he knew he was talking about Jane.

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