The Healer. Greg Hollingshead
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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.
Now he looked at her more closely.
“Caroline Troyer,” she said.
“So it is,” the voice said, the fingers up under the mesh. “How’s your dad?”
The service station had a restaurant with peach curtains punched out in that same plastic mesh. Wakelin said he needed to stop for lunch, he was ravenous. He knew that if he didn’t get her talking soon he had no story. It would be two wasted days. “On me,” he said. “Please.”
For a mile or so the highway had run parallel to a hydro power line, and now in three columns the giant pylons stalked the horizon like skeletons of Martian war machines. When Wakelin and Caroline were seated inside by the window, she parted the curtain of mesh and indicated the man dressed like rock. “Orest used to be cut sprayman for Hydro,” she said.
Wakelin considered this, and then he said, “Defoliant? Orest should sue.”
She was still looking out the window. “He’d need money to sue.”
“Not necessarily,” but that sounded fairly unlikely. Wakelin considered adding something like, Too late for a healing, I guess, a case like that. Or, Kind of raises the larger issue of why people get sick, doesn’t it?
But he didn’t. Instead he ordered the club on brown, toasted, with fries. Caroline Troyer, the egg salad on white. They both chose medium Cokes. A point of connection, Wakelin felt. Over lunch he got down to work. He started by asking her if she liked living in the country.
“I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“I live in town.”
“Right. How’s town?”
She shrugged her shoulders. They really were very broad. A fine head on them, too. “I never lived anyplace else.”
Wakelin shifted in his seat. “Tell me. What do you think to yourself when somebody shows up from the city looking for a piece of country property?”
“I don’t think anything. It’s always him takes them out.”
“Hey. I’m honoured.”
Gravely she studied his eyes, perhaps to discover there a finer intelligence than could be inferred from his words.
Wakelin persisted. “But why me?”
“He told you to come in when he wouldn’t be there.”
“Because he didn’t like my face.”
She did not deny this, instead said, “It would be him we saw Bachelor Crooked Hand talking to.”
“He set this up?”
“No. But Bachelor would tell him what he saw.”
“Why? Your father wants you or he doesn’t want you to take people out?”
“He doesn’t know if he wants me to or not.”
“But you don’t. Want to. Normally.”
“My parents, they think I should have a career.”
“And you don’t agree, particularly? But it doesn’t have to be this one, does it?”
She didn’t say anything.
“Doesn’t a person have to lie to sell houses?” Wakelin asked next.
“You don’t have to lie. You show them a bad one and then you show them a good one. That’s what he does.”
Wakelin sat back, disarmed. It was a long time since he had been with anyone like this. Childhood. This was innocence. Candour, no strings. A source of alarm. How could he not pity it? Not seek, despite himself, in juicy small increments, to wisen it up? Not sooner or later with one half-unwitting word or gesture finish it off? How could he trust himself?
He asked her, “So will you do this again?”
“No.”
“Your decision has nothing to do with me, right?” He grinned. “I mean, this isn’t personal?”
No expression marked the honest beauty of her face. No hostility, no amusement, no tightening of the skin around the eyes, nothing. Only watching.
“Tell me,” Wakelin said, leaning forward with great calm, scrambling to keep this going. “How do you know Orest?”
A flicker. Just that. A shadow. “My father, he used to bring me up here in the summers, when I was little. We’d camp. Down the cut a ways— Look, we have to go.”
“Just you and him?”
She nodded. Eyes downcast. Making no move to leave, and, like her, Wakelin sat watching her weigh and turn the truck keys in her fingers. And he was thinking, Jesus Christ, I can’t even tell if what I’m feeling right now is compassion or desire. Who’s supposed to be the emotional illiterate at this table, again?
Without raising her eyes, she said, “There’s Wakelins out around Avery Lake.”
“Bow legs and bad hearts?”
Quickly she glanced up.
“They’ll be the impostors. Awful thorns in our sides.”
She looked away.
And then it was more brutal of him still, but the waitress was standing right there, looking at him. He ordered pumpkin pie and coffee. “Two seconds, I promise,” he told Caroline Troyer. “I just can’t seem to stay awake today.” He let his lids droop and hated himself all over again from the beginning.
When his order came he paused with a forkful of pie and said, “So what do you want your career to be?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you ever think about joining the Church?”
He might have pricked her with a pin. “Why would I do that?”
“Only a suggestion. Exercise your faith—”
“What faith?”
“You don’t have to have faith—”
“Why would I want to have faith?”
“Beats despair?”
She was sliding along her bench to leave.
“Listen,” Wakelin said. “I was a really nosy kid. I tried hard to keep it clean, but—”
She was halfway to the door.
As he put down money to cover the bill, Wakelin thought, A faith healer hostile to faith. Hmm.
Or was that former faith healer?
Christ, I don’t have a thing here.
The rest of the afternoon they spent lost on gravel roads among hill farms. A quality in that region of confinement and reduction in scale. Limited horizons. The soil thin and stony. Sourest of podzol, a smear of humus. Frost-free days few in number. Land not intended, not in any millennium of this climate era, to be farmed. Goats and chickens and bug-bitten kids with bare feet standing at the bottoms of lanes, kids who didn’t see many trucks they didn’t know, who would pause amidst their play to watch, from first sighting to last, this latest unfamiliar vehicle pass, and as Wakelin waved and the kids just stared and continued staring even as the dust-roll enfolded them, two words kept coming to his mind: Isolation. Suffering. On many stretches, poplars dustily crowded the road like elephantine weeds. A land of escarps and gravelish moraine. Bulrush swamp. Fields of chicory the colour of