The Healer

“So what’s the story?” Wakelin said.

“Eh?” The head swung round. A column of yolk down the chin was a yellow thermometer. Delicate skin had formed on the bulb, which creased as the jaws with their electric dentures, their numb mouthparts, continued to chew.

“A reporter,” Wakelin said, more loudly, “on what story?”

The Grant Gemboree noise level might have fallen slightly when he said these words.

Again Old Frank turned away. This time Wakelin did not know whether he had heard or not. Or, if he had, what.

Gail was back. “You got some egg on your chin there, Frank!” she shouted.

Old Frank’s fork clattered to his plate and both hands went scrabbling for a serviette. She helped him release one from the powerful dispenser and wiped his chin for him.

“Lying scum-suckers,” Old Frank commented as she did this.

“What was that, Frank?” she shouted.

But she had finished wiping, and Old Frank was chewing again. She looked at Wakelin. Whether querying or accusatory, he did not know. There was no expression on her alabaster face.

“I’m leaving, I’m leaving,” Wakelin said lightly.

She shrugged and glanced away as she removed a pack of Player’s Mild from the side pocket of her flannels. “Too late,” she said and fired one up. “Rush is over.”

Old Frank was looking at Wakelin. “Had a cancer on my lung. Size and shape of a small grapefruit. Son-of-a-bitch doctors threw up their hands and walked away.”

“I’m sorry,” Wakelin said.

“Crushing other organs. Throwing off clots like a pinwheel.”

“God.”

Old Frank held Wakelin’s eye. “Seventeenth of last month she shows up at my place. I’m at the kitchen table, there. No knock. She just walks in—”

“Who’s this?” Wakelin asked, and before he could stop himself, “Caroline Troyer?” Quickly he glanced to Gail, but she had already turned to look significantly at Ardis, who stood directly behind her holding a coffeepot in her right hand and in her left hand the chair she had taken earlier from Wakelin’s table. Ardis lowered the chair until its front legs rested on the floor. Gazing at Wakelin from around the chair was the black Lab, which had got to its feet. Gail’s eyes came back to Wakelin. Ardis’s had never left him.

Old Frank had butted out his cigarette. Now he was rattling his knife and fork onto his plate. He pushed it across to Wakelin’s table and drew his coffee mug in tighter to his chest. This was how he had been sitting at his kitchen table. “Not dark yet. No lights on. Never heard her come in.”

“Caroline would knock,” Gail mouthed above Old Frank’s head to Wakelin, nodding, mock-assuring, pointing to her ear. “He wouldn’t hear.”

“First I seen the light,” Frank said. “Then I seen her.”

“What kind of light was it, Frank?” Gail said, and Wakelin thought of a child asking to hear a favourite part.

“Soft firefly glow,” Old Frank stated. He must have said this many times. It came out like one word. Softfireflyglow. “She was lit up in herself. That’s the only way to say it. Call me crazy, I know what I saw.”

“You’re crazy, Frank,” somebody said from across the room, not unkindly, and it struck Wakelin that the entire Grant Gemboree was listening. Even the old cook, a wizened dissolute man with shiny skin and a ponytail in a hairnet, had come out of the kitchen to lean against the cash and smoke. The story must have been spinning off apocrypha for a month, and now here was Wakelin himself the occasion of a new authoritative telling. He couldn’t believe his luck.

“She sits down at the table there. She takes me by the hands and she looks me straight in the face.” The old man stopped speaking. He sat and blinked.

“Did she say anything, Frank?” Gail asked, prompting, leaning past him to crush her cigarette in his ashtray.

“Not with words, she didn’t.”

Again Old Frank did not continue. He took a small dry lump of tissue from his pocket and with shaking hands opened it and blew his nose.

“Is that when you cried, Frank?” Gail asked at his ear.

“Didn’t cry,” the old man said with surprising force. “Nobody cried.” He half-turned to Gail. “Stand behind me! Put your hands on my shoulders!”

Gail positioned herself behind Frank and did as she was told. He had leaned slightly forward in his chair.

“Now move them down my back—No, hell! not that way! Not thumbs together! The other—That’s right—Stop right there—Left on top of right. Not so much pressure. And hold it.” From his leaning position Old Frank surveyed the room. “Whole lung went hot-cold right through. Like Vicks VapoRub. Then she done the left one. Same thing. A couple minutes each lung, no more. I never felt anything like it in my life. The girl has power in the palms of her hands. She beamed that power inside there the way you’d go in with a storm light.”

Again Old Frank did not continue.

“And then what?” From the healer’s mother.

Old Frank looked at Ardis. “That’s all she needed. Next ultrasound, cancer’s the size of one of them mandarins you see at Christmas. This last one”—he snapped his fingers—“clean as a whistle.”

There was quiet in the Grant Gemboree. The coffeemaker hissing and spluttering.

Gail lifted her hands away from the old back.

“So what do you think happened, Frank?” someone asked.

“I’ll tell you what happened. Caroline Troyer give this body the knowledge to do what it had to do. She showed it how things were with it, and that’s all it needed to know.”

No one said anything. The dog yawned. Gail was back at Frank’s ear. “Tell the rest, Frank,” she said. “Now that you got everybody’s undivided attention.”

“You do it,” Old Frank said. “I wasn’t there. I stayed inside the house.”

It was Ardis Troyer who told the rest, and she told it directly to Wakelin. “What happened,” she said, “this wasn’t the first time Caroline went out to heal, and when she come out of Frank’s a crowd was waiting at the side door. It was dark, and either it was the light from the kitchen—”

“Kitchen light weren’t on,” Old Frank said.

“—or she still had the glow on her. The ones waiting didn’t know whether to run up and touch the hem of her garment or cry out to God where they stood. Well, she didn’t give them the chance. She told them to get the hell on home, and when nobody budged she pushed through them and started back to town herself. By that time half of them were on their knees. The ones that weren’t, they clutched at her, but she struck their hands off and kept moving, with everybody trailing behind.

“By the time she gets to the main street she’s got over sixty people in tow, and this is the last straw. She turns on the stairs out front of our place and she tells them she’s finished with healing. You lay the hands of life on people left and right, and what do they do? Treat it like no more than their due, and heaven forbid anybody try to tell them they owe a goddamn thing to a living soul.”

“You weren’t there, Ardis,” someone put in from a table by the door, a man with blow-dried hair and Culligan stitched on his shirt. “The wife wasn’t out to Frank’s, she only heard what Caroline said on your steps. All Caroline said was, ‘It’s not me and it’s not you. Go home. There won’t be any more of this.’ It was about a dozen people, by the way, fifteen at the most, half of them kids, and half of them there to horse around. If there was a glow on her out at Frank’s, Doreen never saw it. When people ask her she doesn’t say there was or wasn’t, she just says she never saw it herself. People don’t glow, Ardis. They only seem to sometimes.”

Old Frank might have contributed something on the glow question, but he was engaged in retrieving his plate from Wakelin’s table and had stopped listening, or couldn’t hear. Ardis chose neither to accept nor to refuse the correction. While Culligan was speaking, her eyes remained on Wakelin, and when Culligan finished saying what he had to say, it was Wakelin she pointed her chin at. “Think you got enough yet?”

“Enough—?”

“You’re a reporter, aren’t you?”

“No—” He cleared his throat. “I’m not, actually. I’m looking for a country place.”