The Healer

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.