Читать книгу The Healer - Greg Hollingshead - Страница 17

Next morning, in the sudden sunless dark of the Troyer Realty office, Wakelin practically collided with Caroline Troyer, who was standing, for no visible reason, in a state of apparent complete idleness, in the centre of the floor. As he fell back he saw how tall she was, as tall as her mother, though not her father, and at least as tall as himself. A tall young woman wearing the same weed-coloured cardigan she had worn yesterday, this time with a cotton blouse buttoned to the neck. A plain skirt. She was not old, just dressed old. Old or schoolgirl. Unadorned even by the jewellery she sold. Big hands, hanging at her sides. Sober of mien.

“Sorry,” Wakelin said and added quickly, “Is he here?” He glanced around anxiously. He could see now but was not taking anything in.

She shook her head.

“You’re expecting him though,” Wakelin said in a tone caught uneasily between apprehensive and coaxing.

She seemed to notice. Then she said, “Truck’s out back, but I haven’t seen him.”

“Listen, he told me to come in today! I stayed over, at the Birches!”

She was still standing directly in front of him. Watching him. This ongoing accident his presence.

“What time did he tell you?” she said.

“He didn’t. But you said he was in in the mornings.”

“Well, he never mentioned anything to me.”

“So what am I supposed to do?”

“You could see what they got over to Mahan and try back here around eleven. If he comes in, I’ll try and catch him.”

“How far’s Mahan?”

“Twenty-five minutes. Pringle Realty 2000. Ask for Merle.”

“Hell,” Wakelin said and did a petulant knee-flex. He lowered his face a moment. When he brought it up he said, “Listen. You don’t want to go for coffee, do you? Or I could—What do you take? It’s just”—he put his hands to his face—“I really need to stay awake.” But these last words, being specious, echoed inwardly as noise and misgiving. “No?” he said, before she could respond. “That’s okay, I’ll just wait.” He plunked down on the nearest chair and looked up at her. Made a smile.

She turned to face him head-on once more. “What kind of property?” she said.

Swiftly Wakelin rose to make a short version of the speech he had made for her father and Bachelor Crooked Hand.

“Silence,” she said dubiously when he had finished. “You get far enough back in the bush you’ll have silence. In winter, anyways. Middle of the night. But daytime and evenings there’ll be the snow machines. And the chainsaws. Sound travels in the cold. On the lakes as soon as the ice is out there’ll be outboards, and jet skis.”

“Okay,” he said. “Fine. It doesn’t have to be on water. No 250 Evinrudes. No neighbour kids drunk on the next dock doing loon calls at two a.m. But also nothing next to an airfield. Or on a highway. Or a snowmobile run. Or an ATV route. Or railroad tracks. I don’t want to wake up to the five-fifteen. Or a lumber mill. Or a log sorting area. Or a firing range. No artillery. Nothing like that. Silence. A basic ground of silence. The wind in the firs. The snowflakes crashing down.”

“Why?” she said.

Wakelin opened his mouth. Shut it. Would, if it killed him, for once here, answer honestly, sort of. Leaven the guile. “I need to hear myself think. I’ve got a few … personal matters to sort out. I need peace. A little peace and quiet in my life.”

She nodded.

Wakelin followed Caroline Troyer through the plastic streamers and down a corridor of leaning headstones and realty signs and other clutter, umbral and glaring, toward the white glow of a screen door that opened directly into a chain-link bare-earth compound in eye-stabbing sunshine. There he climbed into the baking cab of a primer-grey Ford pickup, a smell of road dust, French fries, engine oil, the dashboard vinyl gaping dirty foam padding, an extensive crack system networking down the windshield like fork lightning. It was the kind of truck in which you would not be too surprised to see a rod come melting up through the hood.

“So how far to the first property?” he asked as she steered the rattling vehicle down a narrow alleyway, a grey board wall to the left, concrete block to the right. An inch to spare.

“Twenty minutes.”

“Practically to Mahan.”

“Mahan’s east.”

As they came out between parked cars and pulled onto the street, Wakelin saw Bachelor Crooked Hand. He was leaning into a sidewalk phone next to the Stedman’s, in a corner of the parking lot across the street. He was speaking into the mouthpiece, toy-sized in the meat of his grasp, and as he did this he was looking straight in through the windshield of the truck at Wakelin.

“What does that guy do?” Wakelin asked, the gaze following him as Caroline made the turn. “Besides make lures and brooches?”

“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.

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 blue sky. Signs bad or non-existent, they kept getting lost. They would find themselves on roads that turned out to be private lanes or that ended at checkerboards now signposts for dumped garbage or that petered out to tractor ruts across rocky till.

At a stream that passed under the road through an exposed and grader-battered culvert with bedspring grates, Caroline Troyer pulled over and took a crushed litre milk carton from under the seat and walked down to the water reshaping it. Wakelin got out to stretch his legs and watch her squat by the water to fill this container, her skirt bunched between her knees, her hair swung forward hiding the pale sombreness of her face, and his spirit travelled down the embankment to embrace her in her lowly task. The blackflies at this spot still thought it was May. He tried to have the hood popped all ready for her, but he couldn’t figure out how. She returned and did it herself amidst a furnace blast of heat off the engine. She balanced the hood on its slender rod, then used a rag to loosen the rad cap—“Um, please be really, really careful doing that,” said Wakelin, who had stepped back—and refilled the carton by means of two more trips to the stream.

It was almost six by the time they found the place, on a stretch where the ditch-grass and aspens were powdered white from the road, a stately red-brick farmhouse with a wraparound porch. The day had diminished to a silent white haze of late-day heat, but inside, where grain sheaves in white-plaster relief bordered the high creamy ceilings and the burnished linoleum shone in the slanting light, the air was cool and commotionous. The whole place smelled of baking bread, and Wakelin, as he stood alongside Caroline Troyer in the front hall before an osteoporosal old woman with upraised eyes, was aware of strange stirrings, ghostly and expansive rustlings, as of bread rising in remote corners. A man with a nine-inch lift on his right boot dragged it into the front hall and spoke passionately concerning the R20 insulation he had had installed the previous spring at great expense, and yet a seventh as much had been saved already on heating fuel this winter past. As the man spoke, behind him in a kind of sunroom Wakelin could see beings moving like outsized children or sleepwalkers, and overhead he could hear as well the footfalls of uncertain dreamers. The whole house in a movement of habitation. The man dragged away his elevator boot, and the old woman explained that though the farm had been their life, leaving it would be nothing compared to losing the children, who would be scattered and lost, even one to another.

“Why do you have to sell?” Caroline Troyer asked the woman, and Wakelin looked at her, though he had been wondering exactly the same thing.

The woman sighed and said because they had no money left, and with the latest round of cuts to foster care—

She led them to that sunroom, where the man had returned to reading a story to the six or seven hydrocephalics gathered around him, possibly listening, possibly not, a few others musing at a low table spread with puzzles and books. When the woman entered with visitors, the children crowded forward in shy excitement.

Back at the truck Wakelin exclaimed, “I’ll take it! And the nice old couple and the kids, too!”

“It’s too cheap,” Caroline said. “It should have sold.”

“After two years of looking!” cried Wakelin, overlooking the year he had put the whole thing aside as a bad idea. He was ready to buy. Was this or was this not textbook serendipity? “I can’t believe my luck! I’ll be the new landed gentry!”

“It’s too cheap,” Caroline said again.

“Maybe the kids spook people,” Wakelin suggested hopefully.

And then she turned the other way out the drive and it was right there, a gravel pit so vast the trucks at the bottom looked like Dinky Toys.

“The listing should have said something,” Caroline said.

“Listen,” Wakelin told her. “People can adapt to anything. They’ll walk around with an open sore for years. Before you know it, you’re dressing it in your sleep. Besides, a pit is more an absence than an actual—”

Here a gravel truck roared by and the whole world turned white.