The Healer. Greg Hollingshead

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      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.”

      “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.

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