The Healer

“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.

Or so Wakelin assumed as he climbed the steps of the Troyer Building. Grasped the warm, cheap brass knob. Leaned into the door.

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.