The Healer

“That’s his,” she replied, indicating the red tow truck rising behind Crooked Hand like an image on a billboard, the shining grille rippling in the heat. The same tow truck Wakelin had seen parked outside the exhibition hall at the fairgrounds. “Nights he drives the ambulance,” she added.

“Busy man,” Wakelin said. He had twisted in his seat to look out the rear window of the cab. The eyes were still on him. Quickly Wakelin turned back around in his seat. “I met him yesterday, with your father. Well, not met, exactly.”

She didn’t say anything.

In two minutes they were moving out of Grant, a rhythmic bump from the left rear wheel like a bulge in a bicycle tire, a pulse accelerating. The Birches Motel came up on the right, and from his present unforeseen vantage Wakelin watched with improbable nostalgia his home of last night pass like something from a parallel life. A glimpse too of the person as recently as this morning he had been when there, as alien and spectral as the friend of a friend in an anecdote told in a dream. As a matter of fact, in the confidence that sometimes in the pursuit of a story, good faith can drive out the bad, he had not yet checked out. A small white-brick plaza then, and on that same, east side, beyond a spreading oak and under a blue H, the district hospital, clapboard ranch-style, like a retirement home. Past that and to the north and east, on their elevation, the fairgrounds.

“Maybe your dad’s back up at the exhibition hall,” Wakelin suggested.

If Caroline Troyer agreed that this might be the case, she did not acknowledge as much to Wakelin.

“Of course, we’ve got the truck, so how would he—” and Wakelin thought, Stop talking right now. You don’t know a thing about it.

“What are they building up there?” he said next, for conversation.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t been up. He’s on council.”

Wakelin nodded.

Pale fields rolling; sun-bleached barns on distant hillsides, like mock-ups; blue sky. Ahead a grey-black swell of the Shield. Through the window at his back the sun shone hot on Wakelin’s shoulders under his shirt. The truck after his little car felt spacious and high up off the road. She drove with the seat all the way back to accommodate her long legs, and she moved in a way that seemed to take possession of the vehicle and the road.

“So tell me more about these properties,” Wakelin said.

“One’s a two-storey frame with a view, the other’s a sixteen-acre farm run to bush. A two-storey five-bedroom brick.”

Wakelin waited. “That’s a lot of bedrooms,” he said finally. “I could sleep around.”

Silence followed here. And then, though of course he knew what it was, Wakelin said, “Can I ask you your name?”

“Caroline.”

“Tim.” He reached over. At first all his hand got was a glance, but he left it there, stubborn in the air between them, and finally her own came off the wheel and briefly, firmly, he grasped it. A strong hand as big as it looked. If this was the hand of a healer, it was no shaking hysteric’s. Or so Wakelin decided. As it returned to the wheel, his own returned to his right knee in an image of his left hand, thumbs in parallel. He had always liked sitting this way. He also liked the heat of the sun at his back. He closed his eyes. Maybe they could ride like this forever. He looked at the side of her face. Would this be a good time to broach the subject of healing? Just kind of segue into it? But how?

“Will I love these properties?” he asked instead.

She gave him a scant wordless look, and Wakelin thought, One thing about these country salespeople, they do not stoop to charm or flattery. Nor do they lay down a pitch. It is almost as if they were reluctant to sell.

The truck was labouring ever more slowly toward a chiselled slot in the horizon, a blue tab.

“Anyway, it’s nice to meet you, Caroline,” Wakelin said.

Just past the summit of the long climb was a Troyer Realty For Sale sign, at the foot of a gravel drive that cut back steeply to the top of the rock wall. They had passed other such signs on the way, nailed to fences and trees. This one had a diagonal of tape across one corner saying Reduced, and this time Caroline swung in. They mounted a gravel slope to a tar-paper house with black window frames. She pulled the truck right up into the shadow of it and turned off the engine.

“Needs a few panes,” Wakelin mentioned, crushing a mosquito against his temple as they stepped forward. The place suggested a rural bomb-site. “What’d they—blow out?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Where’s the front door?” he asked next. Looking around for it in every direction including away from the house altogether, he saw riddled pop cans on a rail fence. “Somebody’s been doing some target practice,” he called to her as he stumbled after her down the side of the house among scattered appliances and automotive parts to a slope of rock and brown grass. At the foot of the brown grass, a dead spruce with a russet crown.

“You’re right,” Wakelin said, fanning at blackflies. “It’s a wonderful view. Is that really Grant down there?”

The river was a flung sash. Above the town, corrugations of rapids. He walked over to a clothesline. In the spirit of a prospective car buyer kicking a tire, he tested the spring of it. Looked back around at the house.

Last summer one of the realtors Wakelin consulted had spoken to him of the paramount importance of a straight ridgepole. He was a squat guy with frizzy no-colour hair and the breath of a cat. Your first line of defence, he kept saying with fierce, tooth-sucking emotion.

“Roof seems okay,” Wakelin now observed. “What are they asking?”

She told him.

Wakelin was astounded but too cunning to let on. “How much land?” he asked calmly.

“Two acres.”

Now he could hardly contain himself. “Not bad,” he murmured, practically stroking his jaw. “Not bad at all.” He ventured a glance at her then, and she was looking at him as if he were insane. “Of course it needs a little work,” he added quickly. “A new door, for one thing. From this angle that one looks kind of warped. And windows. Can you see a single intact pane? I can’t.”

She had started for the house.

“Could we look inside?” Wakelin called.

It was a dreary warren of scat-littered open-lathed cubicles remarkably unventilated considering the amount of window glass scattered across the floors. Wakelin kept crunching over to the light and gazing off into the distance. Anyhow, it was a great view. He was a menace to his own livelihood, wasn’t he, to be so impressionable? When even a place like this could have him forgetting he was not here to buy property.

“Those are hydro lines, right?” he said, pointing out a window at wires with insulation frayed and rotting. “Or would that be phone?”

“There’s no phone.”

“And heat?”

“Oil.”

She was looking at him, waiting, he imagined, for more questions. “They deliver up here, do they?” he said.

“It needs a proper well.” “For oil?” She waited.

“Oh, right, of course,” he said, nodding. “That might be fun. Could I dowse?”

She turned away.

When they were out in the fresh air again, same blackflies—must have waited—he asked, “So is there in fact a front door?” but he was already sighing. “Look,” he said. “I’m afraid upstairs I heard a car go by. Two cars. I appreciate the highway’s at the bottom of that channel so you don’t actually see it, and I guess windowpanes would make the place more soundproof, but, I mean”—vaguely he looked to where he imagined the highway—“it’s right there.” When he turned back, she was walking away.

“Hey, where are you going?”

The second property was fifty miles north and east. Wakelin looked again to the side of her face. Where was she taking him? To the land where all foolishness is exploded? He tried to get her to talk, not about healing necessarily, about anything, small talk, but the driver’s prerogative being silence he soon gave up, though grateful. He was not enjoying the sound of himself with her. A tenor of wheedling. Persona of a ditz. A pale little voice from a box-inside-a-box of ignorance feigned and ignorance real. Where was the affable lettered fellow with the easy laugh and the endearing stammer who should have had the story by now? A story. Some story. Was it her country authenticity throwing him or only something that passed for it, a dark reflector of his own devious passing, and here at the wheel of this truck was a natural power demon, an old-world witch, the sort of woman that people can’t stop themselves submitting their bodies to?

After forty minutes down a rolling corridor of black spruce, the asphalt acceded to washboard. A government sign said Highway Improvement Project and Caution: Unsurfaced Road. Ten minutes later a propped sign with a red-rag flag above it said Slow for Highway Workers, but there was no equipment and no road crew, just the hanging dust of vanished speedsters. Asphalt again and soon after, Coppice, a truck-stop hamlet on a black river in a valley more a shallow dip in the rock than a valley. Caroline Troyer pulled in for gas at a Shell station where the man on the pumps was a study in black faded to the landscape. Mafic attire. Black shirt, black jeans, black boots, all like the rock here weathered to grey. Receding black hair greying, combed straight back. A lean hollow-chested man with the complexion of late Auden and the non-rotational spine of an old farmer. The faded black shirt he wore open at the neck, a square of peach-coloured plastic mesh at his throat, and when he leaned down to Caroline’s window his fingers fiddled up under the mesh and his voice came out electronic and raw.

“How are you folks t’day.”

“Orest Pereki,” she said.