Greg Hollingshead

THE HEALER

For Dick

For there is a dim glimmering of light yet un-put-out in men; let them walk, let them walk, that the darkness overtake them not.

— St. Augustine, Confessions

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

SHEEP’S CLOTHING

COUNTRY PROPERTY

DAUGHTER OF GOD

RECLAIMED

Copyright

About the Publisher

SHEEP’S CLOTHING

Timothy Wakelin, age thirty-two, pale features handsome or weak, it was hard to tell, fine dark hair thinning, widower food stains down the front of his blue cotton turtleneck, sat, dismayed and receiving looks, along a rear wall in the single chair at a table for two in the Grant Gemboree, a bus-stop café in the mining town of Grant. It was lunchtime on a hot weekday in late June. Outside, through layers of smoke, blue and enfolded, pickup trucks slowly passed. Inside, the place was jammed. Everybody knew everybody else, and everybody except the stranger had a cigarette going. A din of talk, shouts, horseplay. Clattering cutlery and banging dishes. The name tag of the waitress—not Wakelin’s own waitress but the one who had taken away the other chair from his table—said Ardis, and he was watching her closely because he knew that this was the name of the healer’s mother, and it did not strike him as a common name, unless it was common around here. Ardis was a tall woman, five-eight (Wakelin guessed) in flat heels. In adolescence she must have enjoyed the attractiveness of a cherub or an animal cub. Wakelin saw cheeks once rosy with new powers, but those powers, with the booze and the cigarettes, in middle age were swollen with disappointment, the cheeks pouchy, the bleached hair pinned up like straw, eyes dark-ringed and guarded.

She did not look like the mother of a saint.

Two other things Wakelin noticed. One, makeup intended to cover an area of bruising down the left side of Ardis’s face. Two, the red-rimmed eyes of a dog—an old black Lab lying by the door, dewlaps outspread on the grime—that followed her everywhere as she wove and squeezed through the press of diners.

Wakelin’s lunch was just awful. Eggs of crumbling yolk and rubber-white albumen on a carbon laminate, dank toast, coffee a rusted knife-edge of heartburn, thin and without taste. A breakfast something like a story about a healer, something like a saint’s life. Of dubious provenance. The dog’s breakfast of narratives. Hearsay, exaggeration, wishful thinking, local legend. Followed now through a confusion of smoke and opinion, in a place for locals, a meetinghouse of initiates, with the blanket of the familiar draped soft all round. Cozy as heaven, old as hell.

The healer’s name was Caroline Troyer. All her twenty years lived in this uranium town of thirty-three hundred people, a five-hour drive northeast of the city. From the articles already done on her, most of them published over the past year, confections too credulous not to be cynical, Wakelin had learned enough to expect some kind of saint, fanatic and pathetic in equal proportions. Of course, he was up here as a journalist, for the story. A journalist impersonating someone looking for a piece of country property. Impersonating himself, actually, from last summer, a year after Jane died, when he was roaming the Canadian Shield doing just that, looking for property, until he asked himself why he wanted to live in the country— what he thought he’d find up here, what he thought he’d do, how he’d make it from breakfast to bedtime—and couldn’t think of an answer. Not a good one. Anyway, it was his own former intentions he was here in the name of. Former intentions now false pretences. These were his drawn line. All he proposed to bring to this and to take away was enough truth to make the thing fly. He would not purposely distort, he would do an honest, writerly job in the time allotted. Three to four thousand words for a major circulation woman’s magazine, whatever he wanted. Whatever he could come up with that would pass for new information, a fresh angle, a little insight, and failing all else a worldly, yet sensitive, last word.

Wakelin was watching a small old man ease in the front door. It was a difficult arrival, the movements halting and inexact. This was more than age. There was or had been illness. The palsy, the ravaged breathing, the trousers on heavy suspenders swaying clown-style, a gabardine barrel.

Across the room Wakelin’s own waitress, whose name was Gail, glanced toward the old man as he approached from the door and shouted, “Hey there, Frank!”

Gail was a beautiful young woman with the luminous skin of an angel, a bad permanent, and something of a stoop. Also a poor clothes sense. A blue polyester gypsy blouse with ruffles, grey flannel slacks, and on her feet running shoes of convolved rubber extrusion in purple and lime.

A minute later, skull shining through his yellowing hair, Old Frank was being helped by Gail into the chair at the small table adjacent to Wakelin’s.

“Everybody’s hungry today,” Old Frank said. His dentures, fingers, and nails were yellow too, and they seemed to be his biggest and strongest components.

“The usual, Frank?” Gail shouted, though she was right beside him.

The old fingers were groping the shirt pocket.

“The usual, Frank?”

Old Frank’s teeth clacked. “Everybody’s hungry today.”

“I know,” Gail said, turning her head as if to look around but not using her eyes. “It’s unreal. The usual?”

“That’ll be right.”

Gail went away.

Old Frank was fumbling open a pack of Export “A.” Three cigarettes spilled to the table. It was some time before he got one of them picked up, but when he did, Wakelin was right there with a match.

“Hi.” The match flared. “Tim Wakelin.”

Confusion in the old eyes until the flame had narrowed them to the task at hand, which when completed it was Wakelin who narrowed them next. “Reporter?”

“Not me,” Wakelin replied and went on shaking out the match. “Up to look for a piece of country property.”

Old Frank seemed to consider this. Then he said, “Sure as hell won’t find much around here,” and looked sharply at Wakelin to see how he would take the disappointment.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Wakelin said, and leaned forward, confiding. “The only thing I haven’t seen much of around here so far is a lack of For Sale signs.”

Old Frank turned swiftly away. Whether stung by such insolence or stumped for a comeback, Wakelin did not have a chance to discover, because Gail was already right there, setting before Old Frank a platter of fried eggs and toast with bacon in a charred and twisted stack.

“You’re looking for property,” she told Wakelin, “you talk to Ross Troyer.”

Ross Troyer, yes. Father of the healer.

“Ross Troyer Realty,” Wakelin agreed, nodding. “I’ve been seeing the signs.”

“You’ve been seeing the signs, have you,” Gail said. She was making sure Old Frank had everything he needed. This done, she toted Wakelin’s bill and slapped it down next to his plate. Then she stood and looked at him.

Wakelin looked back. He wanted to reach up and square those shoulders. In the shower, with both hands, he wanted to straighten that terrible permanent. Later, in front of a bonfire he would make of those slacks, blouse, runners, socks, underpants, and bra, he wanted to nuzzle and bite every part of her. He tried to think of something to tell her, besides this. He squirmed for his wallet. She seemed to shake her head. He froze. She did not move. He resolved to say something, anything.

“Pay at the cash,” Gail said from the corner of her mouth and walked away.

After that, Wakelin spent some time sideways in his chair, holding the bill and his wallet, facing Old Frank’s hair-dense right ear as the old man chewed in the tentative, reactive way of the dentured, for whom all food is now laced with tinfoil.

“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.”

“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.

The door was a full two steps above the level of the sidewalk. The steps were concrete, eroded to settings of polished stones. As Wakelin placed his foot on the lower step he was moved to reach over and lay his right hand flat against the ink-blank centre of the nearest marble headstone. A surface glassy and warm in the sun. Other stones were salmon and sand-colour. One was black. All with lapidary margins of maple leaves, lilies, Scotch thistles. Leaning across, Wakelin could also see, along the inside sill of the window, in a gap created by a shortfall of amber cellophane creased and bubbled against the pane, a row of bleached Polaroids, and he leaned farther to study those pale images, of frame cottages, aluminum-sided bungalows, waterfront lots and woodlots, all prices neatly inscribed in faded ballpoint across the bottom margins, and when he had finished this scrutiny he saw, higher up the glass, an octagonal silver sticker, lifting away around the edges: Monuments Sold Here. And he thought, Well, for your long-last home you’ve got your aluminum siding, and before it needs replacing you’ll be wanting the marble. For your long, last home.

He closed his eyes. From a public speaker down the street Roy Orbison was singing “Running Scared” in a voice undersea and pure as bel canto on an old seventy-eight. At Wakelin’s back, two pickups idled at a light. Overhead, a squirrel on a phone cable was turning one of last year’s acorns into a hail of shells, the fragments clicking and bouncing on the sidewalk. The sun was hot against the right side of Wakelin’s face and against the back of his hand on the headstone. He could smell the exhaust from the street, he could smell the scorched sugar fanblast from a doughnut shop somewhere. And he knew that he was right here, that he was nowhere but where he was.

Wakelin lifted his hand from the stone and straightened up. The door was dirty matte white, boot-scuffed along the bottom, an aura of grease around the knob.

Three to four thousand words. Anything he wanted to write on Caroline Troyer he could write. His editor, a buzz-cut beauty, was being kind to him because his wife had died only twenty-two months earlier. Try that again. His editor was being kind to him instead of sleeping with him. She was being kind, and she was being not dumb. She knew there would be three of them in the bed. The healing story he could take to a book if there was a book in it, though that did not seem likely. He was not here to do a hick superstition story. He was not here to put Caroline Troyer down. A little cultural anthropology for the instruction and delight of the readers of a national woman’s magazine. Allow them to make up their own minds. Of course he was here to do a hick superstition story. Of course he was here to put Caroline Troyer down. He didn’t intend to demonstrate she could heal, did he? Attention-seeking daughter of dysfunction. That was his understanding when the stories on her had first started to appear, that was his understanding after he had gone through the files, and that was his understanding driving up here. And if she had stopped healing, or pretending or thinking she was healing, then that was new, nobody to his knowledge had written about that yet, and maybe that could be his story. But it seemed that his predecessors, callous impatient hacks, had betrayed whatever small trust they’d once enjoyed in local hearts, and if he himself hoped to uncover a story in this picked-over patch of glacial outwash, then he would need to continue being a guy just looking for country property. Would need to keep his sheep’s clothing buttoned up a while longer yet.

Or so Wakelin assumed as he climbed the steps of the Troyer Building. Grasped the warm, cheap brass knob. Leaned into the door.

Through the display board at her left hand, from directly the other side of it, Caroline Troyer could feel the man’s unease and the pull of his curiosity as he stepped deeper in to study the stairs to the apartment. She waited to hear if he would climb them, and when he did not she slipped off her stool behind the counter and crossed to the front window, beyond the door. There she waited again, until she saw his face, the face of a child, crinkled and ambered by the cellophane, craning into the frame as he studied the pictures, not idly and not as a buyer but in the more abstracted manner of someone working to assemble an understanding. And she saw his eyes close as he seemed to listen. Or maybe it was the warmth of the sun against his face that was causing him to hesitate this way, one hand, she imagined, flat on a gravestone—but she could see the print of fatigue, the habit of obliquity in the set of the mouth. And she saw a man, though not old, already half turned to the past. His energy accordingly devoted, his suffering consequent.

She walked back to her place behind the counter, and there she watched herself try to believe that this was not another one here for a story.

Country bells jangled over Wakelin’s head. Sunlight widened across linoleum and partway up an oak desk, narrowed and was gone. Commotion in darkness. On the desk an electric fan revolved its swollen cage toward him, a robot head, the rock-weighted papers in its swath agitating so violently that surely they would fly up and blow around at any time. He moved forward, blinded by the sudden diminishment of light: fluorescent tubes flickering from a stipple ceiling, an arborite sheen off walls of nicotine pine, knots like black gouts. At the rear, above the desk, certificates of qualification. Photographs in black frames. Groups of men in shirtsleeves and jackets, shaking each other’s hands. The fan swung away, and multi-coloured plastic streamers across a back doorway took up the dance.

Wakelin moved right, to a cork wall tacked with more Polaroids of cabins among leafless birches in thin sunlight. Small cottages separated by gravel roads from steel-coloured water. Slope-porched red-brick farmhouses, narrow and spruce-darkened. Rural properties. He returned to the desk and smartly, with the flat of his palm, whacked a desk bell.

“Here,” she said.

“Aaah!” Wakelin cried, and as the surprise kept lifting him higher into the air and the embarrassment came flushing up into his face he knew again what a floater he was, and already as he settled back into his shoes he was turning, too fast, and he could feel his whole body clamouring for balance.

That it was Caroline Troyer he knew from a picture in her high school yearbook, reproduced in more than one of the articles. If there was a glow on her I couldn’t see it, and then she smiled. The story was already writing itself in his head, a shameful dodge, the corruption of a good journalist, and it wasn’t even partly true, she was a long way from smiling and yet he could see it right away, a quality of light about her, and if light was too much, then maybe calm focus would do. No one, anyway, who glimpsed this young woman would fail to look a second time. She was sitting on a stool behind a display counter along the street wall, next to the door he had just come through. Her hair was straight and dark, cropped at the livid jaw, and she wore a weed-coloured cardigan unbuttoned over a white T-shirt. Broad shoulders. For the sake of the story he wanted her to be beautiful, but he couldn’t tell at first if she was or wasn’t, and he thought she must be one of those who are either very beautiful or very plain, in some moods and attitudes one and some the other, except that when she is plain you are not sure, and when she is beautiful you have no doubt. A certain rawness or youth in the bones of the face. But not the eyes. No failure of clarity or maturity or definition there. At first he thought they were raging, but moving closer he saw they were simply in a state of full attention. Eyes beholding an accident. No emotion as yet. The accident continuing to unfold.

“I didn’t see you there,” Wakelin said. He was standing across the display case from her. He reached over. “Hi. Tim Wakelin.”

She did not take or, for that matter, look at the hand. He might have been holding out something vile or dangerous he had found lying in the street. He looked down and saw the hand now following through with a feigned casual gesture toward the contents of the case. Well, there was one problem right there.

He pretended to study the contents of the case. An assortment of jewellery and tackle, as the shingle had promised. Many lures and brooches. Many intricately beaded and feathered earrings and dry flies. “Nice work,” he said, knowing nothing about such things. The pieces were certainly beautiful enough. “Yours?”

She shook her head, scarcely. Still watching him.

“But you’re the … daughter?” he said.

“He’s not here.”

Wakelin nodded. A bad question. To his right, her left, a sheet of perforated white pressboard arrayed with rods and other fishing gear. Bolted over a window. He peered down into the case. “Local artist?”

“Bachelor Crooked Hand.”

Again Wakelin nodded. It was possible he had not stopped nodding. “He’s good,” he said. “Mr. Crooked Hand knows his stuff. He is local, then?”

She hooked the hair over her left ear. “Friend of my father’s.” This last word a hard one for her to say apparently. You could hear the wince in it.

“I thought they looked native,” Wakelin said.

She made no reply.

“Listen,” Wakelin said. “I’m looking for a place in the country. Could you—?”

“It’s him does the properties. He’s in in the mornings or I can tell you where he’s at.”

So. The father.

Not quite the order of things Wakelin had had in mind. But then, neither was she. None of that pleading presumption you get from the serious neurotics.

The Grant Fairgrounds were five minutes north and east of the town, on a tabletop cuesta that towered like Eden above the working fields. As the lane wound upward, the plume of red dust in the rearview swelled and rose and moved out through the planted pines. Wakelin slowed at a rusted gate, standing open. The peeling white fences of the grounds were swamped in their decay by milkweed and field grass. It was evident that this year’s Grant Fair would not be some weekend soon. Now on Wakelin’s right was a long, low sag-roofed building, like stables. At the chained doors of a larger, more barnlike structure, he turned left and drove down into the thistle-and-dirt bed of a racetrack and up out of it, crossed a patchy barren of dandelion and gravel, and descended into the track bed on the far side of the oval. A hundred metres down the stretch to his right, he saw weather-blackened white bleachers. Immediately ahead, a graffitied exhibition hall in cream-yellow slate, where a shining red tow truck stood majestic amidst a few battered pickups.

From inside the exhibition hall, the sound of hammering. Wakelin left his car alongside one of the lesser vehicles and passed through great standing wooden doors into the echoing space. The building had a mansard roof and gables, and the green light came tilting down in long shafts from the ancient mossy windows. At the far end, in a haze of dust, two kneeling carpenters were hammering away at what looked like the raw skeleton of a low platform. Two other men stood nearby, their figures large in the particulate blur. As Wakelin came up to them, the shorter, stockier man glanced at him past the other’s shoulder. He was First Nations, wearing workboots and soiled coveralls unzipped to the navel. To Wakelin’s eye there was no hair on his head or body whatsoever. Not eyebrows, not belly hair. His head and face and chest had a pinguid smoothness, the skin like a latex bodysuit from which the trapped and lashless eyes gazed sadly forth.

Bachelor Crooked Hand, Wakelin thought. It’s got to be.

When one of the carpenters looked over at Wakelin, the other, taller man, the one speaking, turned to see who or what had caught the carpenter’s attention. But only briefly, too briefly for Wakelin to see his eyes, which required the merest glance to discover the utter lack of significance of this arrival. And so Wakelin found himself standing waiting for the man to finish telling a story, a rural incident, in which a child’s head had been sawed off in front of its mother, except that the sawer had got either the wrong child or the wrong mother, and this would be the lawyer’s plea: diminished guilt by reason of mistaken identity. Not so much grief caused as otherwise, your Honour.

Lawyers, fuck ‘em, Wakelin thought. And then he wondered what the teller was pretending to think: that a stranger would show up in an empty exhibition hall in out-of-season fairgrounds where nameless construction was under way and just stand around being pointedly ignored while eavesdropping on a leisurely recounting of some grisly local horror? And then he saw a look pass between the two carpenters and one of them glanced over, and that did it. He stepped forward.

“Excuse me,” he said.

The man stopped talking. The native considered Wakelin once more.

“I’m looking for Ross Troyer,” Wakelin said.

Now the other turned to face him. He was taller and older and better dressed than either his companion or Wakelin. He wore a collarless stitch-striped blue shirt with dress jeans and loafers. His face was handsome like a child’s, large and mild, and he wore his hair long and combed back in waves, like a movie star’s, except that there was something terrible about his eyes. It was as if they had been lobbed in on a dare from a distance of several feet, or as if it just happened to be human sockets they had landed in, it could as easily have been a wolf’s. The irises were milk-green, paler than the circle of the sun-beat face and paler still at their inside than their outside rims, a circumstance causing an impression of concavity, which in turn caused the pupils to appear to protrude, like rods. Rods that swelled and contracted, swelled and contracted, until they had got Wakelin just right. Then they stopped moving.

The man said nothing at all, just drilled Wakelin, just skewered him.

“Are you Ross Troyer?” Wakelin said.

In reply, heavy lids lowered slowly over the terrible eyes. Lifted once more.

“I’m Ross Troyer,” the other, hairless man said.

“Oh, really?” Wakelin cried and turned, so surprised he behaved like someone startled. “I thought you were—” Holding out his hand.

The hairless man’s hands remained in the pockets of his coveralls. He just looked at Wakelin. Face of iron, acid-pocked iron.

“What do you want?” the first man said, any impatience he might have felt at his companion’s little trick directed clean at Wakelin.

Turning back to him, Wakelin said stupidly, “You’re Ross Troyer?” and then, “I’m looking for some country property. Something—”

“You talked to her?” Troyer said quickly, a glance at his friend.

“Yes, I—”

“What’d she say?”

“She told me to talk to you.”

Troyer nodded. He seemed to wait.

And so Wakelin talked to him. He said what he had planned to say, the same thing he had said with fanatic earnestness to every realtor he had spoken to when he was up in this area last summer, in his hot hand the money Jane had left him, when he truly was looking for a place in the country. Or thought he was. Three months off and on, spring to fall, he had searched. Nothing. Until one airless September night in a cricketing motel room, not so far from here actually, he had leaned into the half-unsilvered mirror above the cigarette-burn scalloped dresser top and asked himself what exactly he thought he was going to do in the country. Get in touch with his grief? Commune with the chipmunks? Hang himself from a tall oak tree? When no answer came from the glass, he drove back to the city where he would rid his mind of all thought of sylvan redemption. Or try to.

The word Wakelin had used most often in his statement to realtors last summer when describing what he was looking for in a piece of property was silence. He used this word again now in his statement to Ross Troyer. Silence. Country silence. No neighbours, no traffic. No highway over the next hill. He told Ross Troyer that he had been searching for silence since early spring. He asked him if he realized how hard it is to find silence in the city. He told him how in his search for silence he had crossed and recrossed half the southern Shield, that he was serious, that he could pay cash. He told him exactly how much he could afford to pay (though he could afford a little more than what he said, because he still had the money from Jane). He did not tell Ross Troyer (and did not know himself) if he was talking about silence because silence was still, or ever had been, of genuine value to him, or because last summer he had talked about it so often that he was starting to believe in it himself, or because in the pressure of the moment he was mouthing bits of last summer’s speeches, and really this was nothing but words. Repeats, at that. Old words. He didn’t believe in silence and never had. And he did not tell Ross Troyer that the sole reason he was here—conscious reason—was to find a way to talk to his daughter in order to get enough new material on her healing activities, or on her having given them up, so that he could go back to the city and write the story and so move on to the next and after that the next, and all this talk about silence was really just a symptom of a private fantasy of respite from the mechanical round of the life of a man who had lost its compass when he lost his wife.

After Wakelin finished talking there was a pause while Troyer fixed him with his pupils before he said, “You’re not going to find much for that kind of money.”

“Yeah,” Wakelin replied wearily. He had heard this many times.

“Of course, if you could see your way to coming in a little higher—” But Troyer was already shrugging, and in the tired casual voice of one advising a fool he added, “Drop by the office tomorrow. I can show you what I’ve got.” And he turned upon Wakelin a look that might have been intended to say he was sorry not to be able to be more encouraging, but what the look actually said was, Now you get the hell out of my sight.

Wakelin glanced across at the hairless man to see if he might offer some sort of foil for this sentiment, but everything about the look he received from that quarter made it clear that it was not for one such as Wakelin to know how it was inside that balaclava of flesh.

Wakelin walked down the echoing hall and out into the bright heat of the afternoon. He knew he could climb into his car and be back in the city by dinnertime. He knew he could just write off this whole gig. Flop down in front of the tube in time for the ten o’clock news. Wake up tomorrow and start on something quick and clean and over with by the end of the week. Something without all this northern history. This cast of the repressed.

Except that as he drove south, approaching Grant, with every conscious intention of passing through and keeping going, he turned in suddenly at a motel called the Birches. There the grass had been trimmed to the bases of the slender white trunks of those trees and made a green carpet to the river. There, owing to the fine summer weather, all the tired woman on the desk had available was a cabin out back. “Sounds good to me,” Wakelin said, and a few minutes later he was unlocking the door of a mock-log shack hardly big enough for a double bed, a small hot space smelling of mould spores, Pine-Sol, and cigarettes. Tens of thousands of cigarettes, from the decades when every holiday traveller smoked and the scenery when viewed at all was viewed asquint.

Wakelin was in the trance that goes with doing the opposite of what you’d intended, when everything has to be thought about because nothing now is going to be easier than to start making mistakes. You are off-track, which is to say you are divided against yourself, and who better qualified to fuck you up? For ventilation’s sake Wakelin left both the door and the one small window of his hot shack wide open, took off his shoes and socks, and shuffled down the carpet of grass to the river in its narrow channel.

Divided or not, he was not, it seemed, ready to give up on this story, and not because things were going so well. All he had for tomorrow was a pretext for reentering the Troyer Building. To learn what her father had to sell him. Mind you, given the general tenor of his welcome around here, this could be considered a significant achievement for one day. Tomorrow morning he’d be waiting out front when she opened for business, her father would still be upstairs shaving, and this time she would talk to him.

Not likely.

So why was he still here?

For a chance, like a believer, to touch the hem of her garment?

Wakelin looked to the water, sliding with a constant force. So swift, so black. Universal magnet for despair. He sat down. Not one for rash acts or anything like that, but a single move could undo that favourite little idea about himself forever.

Something not kosher between the father and the daughter. Not to this day, maybe, but once. He could feel it. Something.

Was this what was keeping him here? The story behind the story?

The shore opposite was talus at the foot of a height of black rock with the disshevelled appearance of igneous toothpaste squeezed a hundred feet out of the earth and fallen back on itself with a great weight. The cliff was barely in shadow, but the shadow was headed this way, across that spill of rock. Wakelin lay down on the grass where he sat, an arm over his eyes. He was hardly sleeping these days. Compensated by being half asleep most of the day and dozing at any time. There on the grass he fell asleep and dreamed that he was back in the city, in the summer night. At that small hour when the commotion stumbles to rest, when the roar of human commerce subsides to a broken peace, when at any moment you are liable to be jolted upright by a muffler-less acceleration, by a window slammed shut against a drunk bellowing in the street, by cats yowling and hissing in the grey backyards of the morning.

In the city Wakelin slept with a pillow over his ear, a feather buffer, but for some reason the pillow made the fear worse, and most nights he woke afraid, sometimes with a cry or a shout, sometimes crouched by the bed, toes gripping the fibre mat, no idea why, no particular memory of a particular dream, just the fear. This had been going on so long and was so familiar and at the same time so fresh a condition that Wakelin had all but forgotten it had been no different when Jane was alive, that it had not started with losing her. With Jane, when he bolted up in terror, he had trained himself to pass straight into the follow-through, pillow in hand, a comforter pulled from the hall closet as he passed, and he was on the futon in the living room, already working at getting back to sleep, rocking his hips in a steady rhythm, something he could not do in the same bed with Jane, who felt every shift, heard every sound. If so much as the pattern of Wakelin’s breathing changed, she was wide awake. What’s wrong? she would whisper, and she would be talking to him.

Nothing, Love. Nothing’s wrong. Nothing at all.

What was wrong? He blamed the city, he still blamed the city, but he knew the city was not it. Not really. Sometimes when Wakelin slept it was as if the sweet flow of his dreaming were a supersaturated solution the faintest ping could crystallize to terror. As he slept, his mind would pass out through the pillow pressed against his ear, and it would range across the ambient field until when the moment was ripe it would pluck one sound and swell it to a chime. Ping! Time for your fear, Tim! This was how it happened on the riverbank behind the Birches. In the distance somewhere, all but beyond auditory range, probably, the slam of a screen door exploded like a gunshot inside his head, and it was a detonation of sorrow, a bullet of fear and longing. He sat up on the grass in the shadow of the black cliff, and the blue sky above him was perhaps not cold but it looked cold. He got to his feet shivering, the arm lately over his eyes now numb and useless, brushing himself off with the other, and walked stiffly back to his mock shack, which had retained the heat of the day with the same shabby tenacity it had retained the cigarette smoke of its occupants and the spores of the mould in the carpet and the cheap curtains, and he curled up on the warm bed with a gentle rocking of his hips, and he was grateful for that warmth now.

Caroline Troyer was sitting behind Crooked Hand’s counter. She was reading. Something was bothering her, and as she went on reading she half-thought it must be the man who had just been in looking for property (so he said), how his half-turn to the past and the habits of blindness and deception cultivated by that in him had muddied and compromised his nature, but then she realized that it was not him, at least not only him, but her own immediate state of intending to do something she wasn’t doing. Of knowing there was something but not knowing what it was. Like knowing something is there before you turn your head. Before you recognize it, it’s there as a husk, as the ghost of itself, waiting to be known. And then the sun had reached the cellophaned window, and the office did not get hotter, not yet, but the patch of bright amber light on the linoleum at the corner of her eye caused her, even as she continued to read, to think of heat, and that was how she remembered that she’d been meaning to plug in the fan, which she had unplugged when she went upstairs for lunch, right after the man had come in, and that’s what it was she wasn’t doing.

Now it seemed to her there must be a way to act that would not, like this, like him, be confused, half hidden to yourself, half backward-turned, your timing always that little bit late. And she decided to see if it would be possible to know the right time to get up and go over and plug in the fan. She knew she could just do it. Decide to do it, then get down off her stool and walk over and do it. But it seemed to her that that would only be acting according to an idea of what she should do. Acting to fit an idea of acting. And she wondered if there could be some other way to do it. So she sat up straight and she waited, and before she knew it she was springing up to go and do it. But instead she sat down again, because it seemed to her that doing it that way, without thinking, was even more mechanical than doing it according to some idea. So she waited. Again she sprang up to do it, and again she sat down and waited.

And then it happened. She saw when to get up and go and plug in the fan, and in the exact same action of seeing it she got down off the stool and walked over and she plugged in the fan. And this was another kind of action altogether, a third kind, completely different from the other two. It was a harmony, a grace of movement, and she wondered if a person’s whole life could be this way. And how this would be different from the other ways. How it might change how she was able to know. Whether she could live in order to act out of seeing and not according to an old reflex or the last idea. And she knew that it would be easy to think you were doing it when you were not, believing in it as an idea but not doing it. Or doing it in love with the person you wanted to be. But the thing was, she knew that she knew this, and she knew that she didn’t have to stop there, because she understood that knowing this was also part of what she could see, and all she had to do was to try to find out how far this thing was possible to be done.

In this way, moment by moment, not gradually but all at once, at each moment, she would empty herself, if she could, she would empty herself of the slave.

Ross Troyer leaned across the seat and opened the passenger door for his daughter Caroline, who climbed up and pulled hard at the door but not hard enough for the door to engage. It was an old truck.

He raked his fingers through his hair, observing in the rearview the effect of doing so upon the lie of it.

“Door’s not shut,” he said.

She tried it again.

“Who got in?” he murmured, his old joke. His eyes had left the rearview. She was clicking into her seat belt.

His hand went lightly to the handle of the knife in the sheath at his left side, as it often did. Then his hand went to the ignition. “Better wind down that window.”

She wound down the window.

He eased the truck along the narrow alley, and when he reached the street he nosed out cautiously beyond the parked cars. They left the main street by the north bridge. Passed the Birches Motel (where Wakelin lay in his hot shack out back, watching TV) and next to the Birches the new six-unit white-brick plaza. Two more minutes and they were beyond the built-up area, into farmland. In the distance to the north and east the fairgrounds in their elevation. This was just after six in the evening. The sun was pale and it would not set for nearly three hours. It was only just summer, but there had already been more heat than rain, and the trees and the crops though green were not lush. Caroline Troyer sat with her hands loose in her lap and her head tilted slightly, the way her father often held his, but her expression betrayed none of his facetiousness, only the affliction that was often there too in his, her eyes downcast upon the toes of her boots set evenly upon the floor of the cab.

This was farm country close to that part of the Shield where on three different occasions, over two billion years, alpine ranges had pushed up, all now eroded to fault escarpments and low domes of granite wrapped and separated by the forested sag and swell of the shreds of sedimentary gneisses. Where in this area the roots of those ranges lay exposed was a short distance to the north, beyond hills of clay and gravel and wooded outcrops and Precambrian erratics now ploughed around for oats and corn. Where the grade was steepest it was girdled by high faceted walls in olive and black and pink, for the roadway had been blasted out of the batholith for the pleasure men take in linearity achieved by the effective placement of dynamite. As the truck climbed toward this channel, Caroline Troyer’s eyes remained lowered.

“You’re okay?” he said.

She nodded. Not looking up, she added, “Why?”

“You seem depressed.”

“I was dry,” she said, and looked away out the window where a sign read, Rock Collecting Along this Highway Is Dangerous and Unlawful.

“Dry,” he said.

“Dry in my heart.”

“Would this be why you’ve been hiding your light under a bushel? Or because?”

She made no answer.

The truck was losing speed with the steepness of the grade.

“Why did you stop the healing, anyway?” he asked her. “Your mother could have sworn you had a good thing going there. I think she expected you’d take it on the road.”

She looked at him.

He smiled. “Tears of the world a constant quantity? Or its gratitude?”

She looked away again. “I don’t like crowds.”

“Me neither. But there’s money in them. As your mother has pointed out to you many times.” He put his face close to hers and said in a waggish voice, “But do you listen?”

She didn’t say anything.

“So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know. I don’t suppose you ever heard the expression, ‘When a woman has nothing to do she buys a pig’? Pig comes along looking for country property, she marries him. Gives her mother a nice city porker to sit on. Distributes the weight a little.”

She was still looking away. After a while she said quietly, “What do I need with somebody else’s body to look after?”

He laughed at this, pleased, a soft crowing, and pounded the heels of his hands lightly against the wheel. And then he said, “Healer sick of healing speaks.”

“We’re not talking about healing.”

“No.”

After a pause he said, “Still, you could. What if marriage is the next thing to do, as you will know in your bones? The next thing’s enough for most people. They sit around on their ass until all other options exhaust themselves, and then they do it. Circle closes. What’s so wrong with the next thing? Without it, what have you got? Doubts, littleness”—he hunched at the wheel, making himself small—“laziness, putting off, closing down, that’s the person, tiny and scared. The next thing, now, that’s the larger wisdom.”

“It’s no wisdom,” she said.

He didn’t say anything, and then he touched her knee, and when she looked at him he mouthed, “That’s my girl.” She scowled and turned away.

They had reached the crown of the highest height of highway in that high country, where rocks amber and olive lined the channel the road had been laid in, great angular blocks so heavily demarcated one from the next it was as if they had been placed in that stepped array by giant masons. Just beyond the crest of the road, where the rock went into terraces, tilted terraces, a sign saying Ross Troyer Realty stood at the foot of a sandy drive that cut back hard to the right and climbed one such angled terrace to where a tall black tar-paper house with a patchwork tin roof stood untended in long grass, invisible from the road. Windows paneless. Troyer nosed the truck up to the north wall of the house and turned off the engine.

Crickets and cicadas. The hot engine ticking.

Caroline Troyer got out of the truck and walked to a window and looked in while her father removed a rifle from a chest in the box. The smell from the house was the smell of bats and mice and the defecations of larger creatures in a hot space. A nothing room slow to lighten after the brightness of the evening. Curling linoleum. Torn wallpaper and squatter litter. She stepped back and looked up. Nests of cliff swallows high up under the water-stained eaves.

She walked to the west corner and looked along there. The front door was halfway down, three feet from the tops of the weeds. There were no steps. She walked back to the east corner and down that wall past coal-cellar stairs under a sheet of melt-sagged plywood; a gas stove, controls gutted; and small corroded items of automobile and appliance it was necessary to step around until she came to the south wall and sloping away from there an open area of rock and stubbled grass where not so long ago children had played. A rusty swing set. In the dust by her foot a warped red plastic shovel bleached to pinkness. From here the land continued to fall away to the east and south where the dark river twisted and turned through the village in the anguish of human propinquity until the peace of fields permitted serenity once more. Along the south wall of the house was an old sofa slumped by the elements upon its frame and springs. It looked soaking, but it was hard and crumbly to the touch like something mummified, and upon it hung the miasma of manured dog. In the middle of that wall a door had swung open. It creaked in an imperceptible breeze. The steps to it were concrete blocks sunk at an angle. She glanced at that door and turned away. A clothesline, a bare wire, had been strung from a hook in the side of the house to a jack pine with a russet crown. Something hung from the wire. She went over. From its rear foot by a string a chipmunk, headless.

The string was knotted to the line. She worked at the knot to undo it, drawing back her face from the dessicant stink. Jumped when he said, “What are you doing?”

“Throwing this away.”

“Good. You’re learning. Your anxious homebuyer, they do love an omen.”

“Why?” she asked, meaning the desecration.

He shrugged. “Somebody needed a head?”

She ignored this. “Why couldn’t they just feed it or give it a name?”

“Probably they did. First.” He smiled.

He had his hunting knife out, to cut the knot, but she got it undone before he could do that and threw the small carcass down the slope, into the longer grass.

“How can you sell a place like this?” she said.

It was a moral question, or more accurately, an accusation, though that was not how he heard it.

“For the view.” Which he indicated. Then the house. “This’ll come down.”

“What do you tell them about water?”

“I tell them around here it’s three-quarters water. Rock and water. Two billion years of rock and ice and water. Cool it down, rock and ice. Warm it up, rock and water.”

She just looked at him.

He stepped closer. “Listen to me. People buying a house are buying their own dreams. Same as healing. They’ll be healed as much as they want to be healed, and they’ll buy what they want to buy. You don’t want people to believe you can heal, you don’t want to sell them back their dreams, that’s fine. Just don’t let me ever hear anybody say I stood in your way.”

He turned and she followed him, followed his shirt, the perspiration in a stain at the spine, around the house and through the old scrap and long grass to where the rock surfaced grey and smooth and level with the curve of the land and the eye rose from it to a sky like a luminous bowl of fine-sanded glass. Beyond the clearing of rock was a rail fence on which stood a pair of riddled cans, Coke and beer. Troyer walked over and picked up three others, also riddled, a Cott’s, a green one probably ginger ale, and a Diet Coke, and placed them at spaced intervals along the rail. He walked back to where she stood waiting and handed her the rifle.

She checked the breech, placed the rifle firmly against her shoulder, aiming. Fired. The Diet Coke popped into the air as the echo of the report came off the house behind them. When she fired a second time the beer can behaved in exactly the same way. A third time and the Cott’s can too was gone. The Coke can was not hit dead centre, and it flew off obliquely. The ginger ale was as the others. She lowered the rifle. A breeze thrashed delicately the leaves of a cluster of yellow birches just beyond the fence. The sound was the sound of running water.

“You’re getting there,” he said and sadly smiled.

Rubbing her shoulder, she turned to look at him.

“You know,” he said, “we should go camping again some time. Just the two of us. How long has it been? Twelve years?”

The pain in her eyes must have been what he was after.

“No, eh?” he said mildly and again he stepped closer. “Anyway, you’ll remember what I’ve always told you.” He laid the tip of his right index finger against the centre of his chest. “Bang, right? Anybody tries anything with you?”

Her eyes stayed with his. “That’s about you,” she said. “What you’d do. Now what about everything else?”

But he had already turned away and was walking back toward the fence and failed to see the movement of her hand to indicate not only the grove beyond but also everything around them, the house and the seventy and more years of isolation and suffering and blundering clutches at freedom it had known, and the entry into its history that selling it would constitute, and the squeamishness of such a consideration, and this primeval rock the house stood on, and the land to the south, all the contention and folly and sorrow of the town down there, the contention and folly and sorrow of her own heart, of everything physical, everything human.

“What else?” he said. He was stooping for cans. When she didn’t answer he looked around and made a grin using an economy of face muscles in a ritual they had not had between them since she was a girl of nine or ten. “What do I care about everything else? Is it going to snap you out of this phase? Is it going to give me back my precious angel?”

“I’m not talking about everything else for me. I’m not talking about any phase. I’m not talking about precious angels.”

He set the cans along the rail and walked back to where she stood. “I’d say we’re both dry,” he said. “I’d say we’ve both been dry for too long.” He took back the rifle. From his pocket he drew a .32 handgun, which he passed over to her and stepped back facing the cans.

She was not so accurate with the handgun, missing two cans altogether on the first try and hitting directly only one.

As he moved forward once more to restore the cans to the railing, she sank to her haunches in a single effortless movement, her elbows on her knees and her arms locked straight, the gun lax in her hand.

“I was taking the clothes out of the dryer yesterday,” she said. “Folding them and dropping them in the basket. When they landed they made a funny sound.”

He looked around at her. He was holding a can. “Funny sound,” he said.

“A crackly popping. Somewhere between a crackle and a pop.”

“Don’t forget the snap. I always carry a good big pocketful. It’s bulky, but it’s light. I admit it tends to clog the machine.”

“I thought it might be static, from the heat,” she said, “but it wasn’t crackly enough. It didn’t sound enough like static.”

“Huh.”

“What was it?”

“Don’t ask me,” he said. “I know it looks like I’m busy setting up cans here, but really I’m just putting in time until you tell me what it was.”

“It was suds that came back out the drain where the washer empties, right next to the clothesbasket. I didn’t notice them against the light-coloured lino, there. I had my eyes on the clothes dropping. Well, the air pushed out by the clothes as they landed was passing through the mesh of the basket and popping the suds. It was the suds popping I was hearing, and it sounded almost electric but not really.”

“Well, well,” he said.

She looked up at him. “It didn’t sound like suds when they pop. I know what suds popping sounds like. Or I thought I did. This was more crackly. I was thinking I was hearing something electric, so it wasn’t the same sound.”

“Not the same sound, no,” he said.

She was looking up at him in an attitude of imploring, but that was not what she was doing. The look was to say that this was for him. For his benefit. That she knew what she knew, fugitive and inconsequential and perhaps dreary or trivial to another as it might be, but it didn’t matter, because she also knew that it would operate to the degree of its significance, and if it were not significant, then it would not last, it would make no difference, it would not operate at all.

“It was like eating a cherry,” she said, “when you think you’re eating a grape. It’s not the same as eating a cherry when you’re expecting a cherry. It’s a strange cherry.”

“You’re a strange cherry,” he said. “A strange cherry with too little on her mind.”

And then she seemed to have to will herself to continue. For a long time now it had been difficult for her to talk to him at all, let alone about anything that mattered to her. This was hard work, and the only thing that made it possible at all was how much it did matter to her. “I’m not saying everything’s in a person’s mind or that nothing’s ever the same the next time, I’m saying a person can be wide open to how much it is and it isn’t the same the next time. You don’t have to hold on to believing things are a certain way any more than you have to act according to some idea of what you should do. It’s only going to wear you down. Well, today I stopped. All that’s gone, I let it go, and it doesn’t matter, or maybe it’s the only thing to do. The energy’s back, it’s gathering. It turns out it never stopped. And I’m still here. I’m saying it’s not the end of the world.”

She had lowered her head and was scraping at the dirt with the barrel of the gun. Now she looked up. “Or maybe it is the end. But if it is, it’s the beginning too. Every moment.”

His face was averted. “I thought you said you were dry,” he murmured.

“Not any more.”

Now he came down beside her, squatting too. Her head was bowed again. He looked to the west, where the sun was making a blaze out of a new tin roof on the other side of the sunken highway. If there was more to say about the bubbles, she didn’t say it, only went on scraping with the gun. He looked back at her, at the top of her head.

“Whew,” he said. “For a moment there I thought you were going to tell me you saw God in the suds. Fell to your knees and licked out the drain.”

She rose up off her haunches and started for the truck. He came after her and placed a hand on her arm, and she turned with the gun in both hands and raised it until the end of the barrel came up to the point directly in the centre of his chest.

“Don’t ever, ever do this,” he said.

“I know what happened,” she said. “But I don’t understand what it’s done to me. It’s obvious it’s done something, and then there’s all this energy, and it’s not ordinary, it’s not like any other kind. I don’t know what’s happening, I have no idea, and I don’t want to pretend to myself that I do. I need to find out so I can know what to do next. Not just the next thing, but what needs to be done. It’s like there’s been a disaster to the land. The question is, What’s growing here now?”

“Lower the gun.”

She did not lower the gun.

He took a breath. Exhaled. At that moment he too must have recognized the extraordinariness of her talking to him, for he seemed to resolve to go along. He rocked back on his heels. “So what is? Growing here now?”

“I’m telling you I don’t know. I have to find out for myself.”

“Nothing new about that. ‘Caro’ine do it by se’f.’ That’s your problem.”

“Then I’ll find that out too. Why aren’t I allowed to know what I can know? Why can’t a person know a thing unless everybody else is right there to say, ‘Okay, fine, we’re all ready, you can go ahead and know that now.’ What if other people haven’t had the same kinds of things happen to them? Good or bad, I’m not talking about only bad—”

“People keep each other on track. That’s how they move ahead. This is the problem since you quit school.”

“I quit school because I wasn’t learning anything in school.”

“You’re learning now? What? How special you are? The powers available to the true believer?”

“What do I believe?” she cried. “Tell me what I believe! Tell me right now!”

He ignored this. “And you quit healing because you couldn’t—what? Deserve it? Or heal?”

“It’s the energy heals,” she said. “The energy’s got nothing to do with deserving or not deserving.”

“Of course it does. Whatever you happen to think about it. You just don’t want to see your own part in this. In anything. Nothing new about that either. Look, Caroline. Anybody can be a saint if they never leave their own room. At least when you were laying hands on people you were getting out of the house. You’re too old for this. You’re too smart. It’s time to come back to reality. It’s time to remember who you are.”

She lowered the gun. “Who I am is fog,” she said. “Who I am is poison gas.”

He looked at her, and then he performed one of his unexpected acts. Brought his hands up to press the heels against his eyes. For a full minute he stood like that, still facing her, heels pressing, and then he took them away and his eyes were red and hollow and wet. He blinked. “Just don’t leave me, Precious Angel,” he said in a soft voice, almost a lisp. “I’m begging you. Don’t do it.”

She watched him as he said this. And then she said, “This isn’t begging, it’s warning.”

She turned and walked back to the truck.

When Ross Troyer spoke in the kitchen his voice caused the heat duct that fed his daughter’s room overhead to resonate. Caroline would know her parents were arguing by the quality of the sound from the duct. Her father did not have to raise his voice, all he had to do was speak long enough each time for the duct to resonate. She would know he was not talking on the phone because the phone was directly below her bed, in the front sitting room, next to her mother’s hand. She would know her parents were arguing because it was only when they argued that her father addressed more than one or two words to her mother at one time. If Caroline were to crouch by the register, as she used to do when she was a child, she could hear what he was saying, and if she were to lie flat on the floor and press her ear to the register, as she used to do until the burden of knowing came to outweigh the secret strength of it, she could hear as well what her mother was saying, all the way from the front sitting room, which was separated from the kitchen by the dining area, less a room than a space between the kitchen and the front room. There her mother, the dog at her feet, would be watching TV or reading a magazine or doing a crossword puzzle, a tumbler of vermouth on the coffee table in front of her, while in the kitchen her father, who did not drink, would be cleaning his rifle or going through real estate listings, and Caroline would know that he was listening to her mother as he had always listened to her, now listening and now not listening, in a way that to judge from his intermittent responses had done nothing over three decades to diminish the irritating effect of her words. Sooner or later the duct would start to resonate.

It was resonating tonight, but Caroline did not get off her bed, where she had been writing (the small black notebook now slack in her hand, the ballpoint pen capped and fallen to the bedspread alongside her knee), but listened only to the pure sign of her parents’ arguing as she had listened to it not as a child crouched at the register who understood the words or most of them but earlier, as an infant on her back, her limbs waving in air to its inflections, her muscles drinking its rhythms, that she might be informed by, and so survive, and in surviving one day react against and in reacting echo and so recreate the world of her parents’ emotions. Now, twenty years later, loath, she was sitting upright on her bed, where she could hear echoing inside her the legacy of that infant thirst: the tone and rhythm and tenor of the old wrangle, of the voices that moved without ceasing. And all of it—not only her parents’ passion but the turmoil it caused at the depths of her own muscles, her own being—was no less physical and familiar than the traffic noise and the rest of the low constant din from the street or than the full moon visible through the window like a halogen floodlamp behind speeding clouds. And she continued to listen to the rasp of the curtains in the night breezes and to the sound of her own breathing deeper and slower. And the other, the interior and past, was contained within the ground of these immediate sights and sounds, soothed by them, slowed and quieted though not silenced, held by them in an embrace of perception that calmed and so enabled the discovery of grace even in that.

In the front room Ardis Troyer had been drinking Bright’s President vermouth with ice while snapping through the pages of Chatelaine. She had been doing this for some time, every once in a while leaning forward to take a sip of her drink, but then she closed the magazine on her lap and sat like that, with her hands folded upon it. Reached for her drink. Drained it. Set down the tumbler with alcoholic care, though she was not drunk. Cleared her throat. Keeper, the black Lab, who lay with his chin on his foreleg, opened his eyes to look at her but was not roused to lift his head. She began to speak, at first almost wistfully but with increasing force and in a tone of amazed grievance concerning matters financial as they pertained to old plans of household acquisition and renovation too long in abeyance. Expectations cancelled, prolongations of waiting endured, not without bitterness.

These were old beads, slick with handling, and it would be remarkable if her husband listened at all.

When she spoke next, the connection at first obscure, the subject was her fellow waitress Gail Poot’s sister-in-law Bertie, who recently with the help of her husband Wilf had set herself up in the electrolysis business.

“Hair removal,” Ross Troyer said from the kitchen.

“That’s right. Unsightly body hair. Also spider veins. Spider veins is same equipment, different course.”

She reached for her glass. “Gail says people still think it hurts. Bertie told her it takes a little practice to get the depth right, that’s all. You get the depth right and they don’t feel a thing. A mild discomfort. Bertie’s better at it than most of them. She can already do thirty an hour.”

“Not customers she can’t.”

“Customers? Hairs.”

“Christ.”

“Bertie says the people act just like patients. They respect you and they’re grateful. They never dreamed this would be possible in their lifetime. What more could you ask? I think it would be a wonderful opportunity. In hard times people look to their appearance.”

He was studying a real estate listing.

“When it’s all they’ve got,” Ardis said.

“Who’s Bertie?”

“Gail Poot’s sister-in-law.”

“Gail Poot isn’t married.”

“No, but June is, and Dave’s brother Wilf married Bertie.”

“Dave’s an asshole.”

“I have no doubt that Dave is. Unfortunately we’re not talking about Dave. Any more than we’re talking about Gail or June or how in hell they’re related.”

“They’re half-sisters.”

“Ross, she could take the course.”

“What course?”

As he said this his chair scraped. Keeper looked around. She could see from where she sat that her husband was rising to his feet, and she was about to ask him, as long as he was up—but he passed from view, and she heard the back door open. She closed her mouth.

Night air blew cooler from the kitchen. Keeper got up, though with difficulty, and went to see. His toenails clicked across the linoleum of the dining area toward the kitchen.

Ardis felt for the remote. The screen flashed and came on. A jet-lagged-looking man in a foreign suit and brass-coloured hairpiece was standing in a studio audience pulling a silk rope of scarlet and blue from the cleavage of an obese woman looking up at him with a fight-or-flight expression, possibly an admixture of gratitude. Ardis watched this feat at once absently and in an attitude of calculation, as one who though with weightier matters on her mind would solve the illusion. When she heard a scuff on the fire escape she switched off the TV.

She looked to the kitchen. “You could at least shut the door after you when you wander out without a word.”

He was leaning a rifle against the wall by the table.

“Keep leaving those in the truck and the next we know some ten-year-old’ll be lying dead in the street.”

He was clearing the table.

Keeper returned from the kitchen to circle next to the coffee table, preparing to lie down once more.

“But anyways,” she said.

He was laying the rifle upon the empty table.

“Handsome? As long as you’re up—?”

A few minutes later he came into the front room carrying a bottle of vermouth by the neck. Keeper looked around. Her husband stopped at the coffee table, extending his free fist, palm-downward, over the tumbler. As he did this, she gazed at the back of that hand, a fervent scrutiny. Reached out to stroke the hairs along the clench-smooth skin of it. A tentative caress. At the first touch of her finger the fist released. Two ice cubes clattered into the tumbler. The other fist came forward to pour.

“Thank you, lover,” she said and then quickly, “Why can’t you clean that thing in here? Shouting back and forth like a couple of fishwives.”

He was returning to the kitchen and made no answer.

She took a deep breath and told him everything she had learned from Gail Poot. Where the course was offered, how many weeks, how many hours a day of classes, the cost. She told him what Gail had reported the necessary equipment had set back Wilf and Bertie, and she told him the dimensions of the space in the Belmount Mall they had rented and how Wilf had done all the necessary carpentry and wiring and even a certain amount of the plumbing to get her started. What the space had cost per square foot. How long the lease.

This was information with a real estate component, and he seemed to listen. When she had finished telling him everything she knew, he cleared his throat and said, “No.”

“Don’t tell me Alex Connor wouldn’t give you a good rate,” she cried immediately, prepared for this. “She can pay us back. If she stays on here, she contributes for once in her life like anybody else. It’s not like we don’t need the money.”

“No.”

A silence fell.

“I honestly don’t know any more,” Ardis said quietly, “why I bother.” This admission drew no reply.

“I guess a person lives around here long enough,” she continued, snapping the pages of her magazine, “she just gives up. Who wants to go on slamming their head against the same wall?”

And this question drew no answer.

After a few minutes Ardis said, “I’ll tell you one thing. No woman not a complete monster who’s ever been through the living hell of a child is not going to look out for her, it doesn’t matter how useless she’s turned out, and when men grow tits maybe they can start to understand that.”

Neither did this assertion elicit any sort of response.

“You know what I’d like to know?” Ardis said. “Why in God’s name she’d stop the healing.”

In the kitchen the fridge started up, and shortly after, in the manner of a man who, even as he begins to speak, is extricating, with the greatest reluctance, his attention from something incomparably more interesting, he said, “This assumes she started.”

“Get off it, Ross!” Ardis cried. “These weren’t no-name strangers! And even if it was only the ones ignorant enough to have the faith, the point is it was her they were ready to put it in. She’s the one that’s got what it takes to bring people so far on side all she has to do is touch them with her baby finger and they tip over into perfect health. And don’t tell me that’s not a rarer gift than anything these pill-pushers are up to these days, with their tainted blood and their antigoddamnbiotics. Doctors are nothing any more but a bunch of little Chinese and Jews fresh out of the cradle who think they know everything, when in fact they’re stumbling around in the dark like everybody else.”

She stopped and looked to the kitchen. He was rubbing his face.

“Why’d she stop?” Ardis said.

The hands continued rubbing and then they fell away. “Just as well,” he said.

Another short silence, and Ardis said, “I honestly don’t understand how even you could say something that ignorant. Your daughter has the halt and lame picking up their beds and walking out to meet the new dawn, and you sit there and say it’s just as well if she doesn’t.”

He did not deny that this was what he had said.

“You know what I think?” she asked him.

“I do. You keep me constantly informed.”

“I think she’s up there having the same nervous breakdown she’s been having for the past month, and the reason is, you don’t turn power like that off and on like a kitchen tap. I say she hasn’t got the first clue in hell what she’s sitting on.”

“Not if it’s not her ass.”

“I can’t talk to you.”

There was a pause.

“Look,” he said. “If she’s up there thinking twice about getting herself canonized, it’ll be the first healthy sign out of her in twelve years.”

Ardis had moved on. “You know what she needs? An agent. All right. She was a, shall we say, unusual child with less than zero social skills and an overactive imagination. She flames out in high school, she’s got no aptitude for real estate, she hasn’t had a date in five years, and who am I kidding, she’s not going to be happy doing moustaches and bikini lines. But for Christ sake, Ross, look what she’s capable of! These reporters sniffing around here all winter. The world’s interested, if you aren’t. All she needs is some outside direction.”

“She’s got it. He lives in the sky and his take is one hundred per cent.”

Ardis was holding up the Chatelaine, rattling its pages to get his attention. “Why isn’t there anything on her in here, for instance? We’re just scraping the surface. Play our cards right and our little Two-shoes could be bigger than Jesus and the Beatles put together. These TV evangelists make fortunes, and they’re charlatans, every last horny bugger. I know. I watch those shows. The real thing does not come along every week, and when it does, believe me, the hunger’s there. It’s a market that never dies.”

“You know what?” he said. “I don’t want to hear any more about this.”

“No, I’m sure you goddamn don’t,” Ardis said quickly. “And for the life of me, I can’t imagine why that should come as no surprise.”

And pages of Chatelaine began to snap again, like little whips.

But of course nothing had been concluded, for it was not necessary for Ardis Troyer to know the reason she bothered in order for her to continue to do so, and slowly, with the persistence of fire, or life, the argument resumed, its participants ever more voluble and repetitive, luxuriant each in their refusal to yield, appearing never to progress but always progressing, like a dance or a sport or other human activity constantly on its way to repose, if never conclusion. And though patterns were retraced they were not on that account the same, informed as they were by histories of their own recurrence. Meanwhile overhead the high winds of the lower atmosphere had stripped all clouds from the face of the moon, allowing the light from the sun that reflected off that spheroid mass of dust and rock to brighten the air and the floor and the foot of the bed in the attic room where Caroline Troyer could see it by the translucence of her eyelids as she listened to the commotion from the street now generally waning but more raucous when it did erupt and the now gentler scrape of the curtains. And always the insistent resonance of the duct as her father made his stands on behalf of his version of her and of her few conceivable futures and of his own need, in response to her mother’s stands on behalf of her version and her need. And none of this was the same. None of it, ever. Because none of it was as it had been the last time, for there had been no last time, not really, and even were it all as old as that four-and-a-half-billion-year-old satellite lit by a star only slightly older, it would still be in the perceiving of it constantly new, because the perceiving was informed by the energy that all of it had come from and was still coming from and still falling back into, and that energy did not dance to time’s music but time to its.

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.

“You never said what he looked like,” Ardis Troyer observed as she sat with her husband at the table in the dining area, their evening meal of grilled pork chops and boiled potatoes and carrots in front of them, their daughter’s drying in the oven. Ardis’s dog Keeper lay under the table, against her foot.

He glanced up. “What?”

“What he looked like.”

He turned away.

Ardis put down her fork like something fragile. “The only reason I ask, Ross, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to you that at least your daughter’s showing a little initiative for once. Venturing out into the world like a functioning adult female of the species.”

“There’s nothing functioning about seven hours to show a few properties.”

“No?” Ardis smiled. She picked up her fork. “How old was he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Approximately.”

“No idea. Thirty.”

“Handsome?”

“What? How should I know?”

“You saw him! You talked to him, Ross! Ross, listen to me. Something about this mystery stranger has inspired your holier-than-the-Christ hermit daughter to get up off her skinny arse and drive him out to show him seven hours’ worth of properties. That’s the miracle unfolding as we speak, and it’s beyond me why you aren’t showing a little more interest or enthusiasm, something.”

When her husband did not respond, Ardis sat for a moment watching him, perhaps waiting to see if he was only taking his time. Waiting, she sipped her vermouth. As she set down her glass she murmured, “Of course with our luck he’ll be a serial killer.” Again she waited, and then she said, “Not that after seven straight hours of her anybody wouldn’t be.” She looked at him. “What properties?”

He shook his head.

In a musing tone she said, “It’s a long ways if she took it on herself to show him them two A-frames up by Biddesfirth.” “It’s not seven hours.”

“Not any more.” She was looking at her watch. “It’s eight.” She was thinking again. “Of course there’s meals. If she didn’t eat lunch, she’d need dinner. You know how hypo she gets. Candlelight at the Coach House maybe?”

His eyes came up to consider her.

“Ross, relax. Eat something, for God’s sake. Stop looking like somebody just rammed a hot poker up your arse. It’s not even dark yet. I’m sure she’ll phone when she comes to one. She’s fine. Exploring life, we should hope.”

His eyes had gone to the kitchen, to the clock over the stove. Now they came away from there.

Ardis resumed eating. After a minute she asked, “How tall was he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, when you talked to him,” she said in a lilt of exasperation, “were you looking up, or down, or what?”

He gazed at her with incredulous loathing.

She had thought of something. “He didn’t have dark hair, did he? Fine and straight—?”

“I don’t remember.” He looked away. “Maybe.”

“A blue turtleneck? Stained?”

“A dark turtleneck. I don’t know about stained.”

She clapped her hands. “I talked to him yesterday! At the restaurant! He’s looking for property!”

“He’s not looking for property. He’s another reporter.”

Ardis was musing. “Maybe. That’s what I thought. But eight hours, Ross. Eight hours. You know yourself she won’t give reporters the time of day any more. You practically have to—Well well well. It does seem like she got lost, all right. Lost in a truck ceiling. Just like the rest of them around here after all. A little slow to sort her ass from the heavenly bodies, but—” Ardis sat back in an attitude of relief. A moment later she leaned forward with her eyes googled and waggling her hands at the sides of her face. “Feelings! Funny feelings! Whooo! Must be from on high!”

“The reason she took him out,” he said carefully, his attention upon his plate, the food untouched, “I wasn’t there.”

“So you claim. But there’s nothing very new about that, is there, Ross? It’s never got her to take them out before.”

“I know what she’s thinking,” he said in an ordinary voice, although it no longer seemed to be his wife he was addressing. “I’m not fooled.”

“Look on the bright side,” Ardis said. “Even as we speak she’s out there solving our problem. Either she’s got off her rear end to sell property or she’s on her back arranging things another way—What are you doing?”

He was holding his dinner plate in his right hand, touching the rim of it to his left arm just below the shoulder. He was doing this casually, with his head tilted downward and to the side as if to regard the plate, and yet his attention seemed upon some object more remote.

Ardis’s hand went to her heart. She was silent now, and watched in a freeze of dismay as the plate moved swiftly rightward across his chest, his right arm extending, fingers releasing so that the plate sailed like a Frisbee through the doorway and across the space of the kitchen to explode against the oven door. There a gob of mashed potato adhered a moment to the Pyrex of the oven window before it fell away to leave a white pucker, and Ardis understood that the pucker appeared at that moment as white as it did only because the Pyrex was carbon-fouled inside a double pane, owing to an engineering flaw in that so-called quality stove, they get a reputation and the next thing you know immigrants working for chicken feed are asleep on their feet throwing together any old crap, and who pays—? She was on her feet. “Ross, honey, don’t!”

He now held his bread-and-butter plate in that same hand, the rim of it just brushing his left arm midway between the elbow and shoulder as if to indicate something there, and she looked to it hopeful, but his arm moved swiftly back, extending as before, and the wrist flicked, the fingers releasing, and that plate too travelled through the air, to smash against the hall-entrance door frame and scatter down the length of the hall to the front door.

“She doesn’t fool me,” he said again, quietly. “I know her.” And then he put his hands over his face and sat in silence.

Ardis lowered herself into her chair. It was as if she had been struck a blow to the stomach. She had no breath.

When he brought his hands away he was calm. “I’ll clean that up,” he said. “And clear the table.” He pushed his chair back and with his hands on his knees, elbows spread, peered beneath the table at her stockinged feet, which were drawn together under her chair. The dog was still under there, and it looked out at him with frightened eyes. “Don’t walk.” He stood up. “I’ll get your shoes. You put the dog out and go straight to the room and wait for me there. Have the gear ready. You know I don’t like that kind of talk.”

“Oh, Ross,” Ardis said, and sighed. Sighed so profoundly she could hardly speak. “I can talk a lot more like this than this, than, than, than—”

“No more. That’s enough. Where’s your fucking shoes?”

“My fucking shoes,” Ardis sighed and seemed about to faint in her chair at the table where she sat.

Wakelin and Caroline Troyer were back on the unpaved stretch, fifteen minutes into the washboard dance, when that rhythmic bump from the rear became enfolded by a sound more flubby and catastrophic. A flat tire.

Wakelin felt this was a job for himself, but he was too slow. Crouching beside her on the shoulder amidst blasts of dust and flying stones from the big trucks, he watched her forearms cord and soften as she loosened wheelnuts, one after the other. The nuts had seized, but she possessed the necessary strength, or more accurately the confidence of the strength and therefore she had the strength. What was this if not faith? Wakelin, extending the hubcap as a tray for wheelnuts, was tempted to make this point out loud, but when she took his tray and set it on the ground at her feet he remained silent, just continued to watch her hands and forearms, fighting an impulse now to reach out and touch them, to trace the perfection of blue veins in the backs of her hands as they worked, a desire that struck him as being exactly as creepy and inappropriate as it would strike her. But he knew that, he understood that, and was grateful to his genes, to his upbringing, to something, to be able to squat here in a state of as-good-as perfect control, blameless as your perfect gentleman, and just watch, while reflecting in a removed and dispassionate way upon the stubbornness of the physical world. And at that moment it came to Wakelin that paramount in a life in the country would be the physical problems, the small humiliations by intractable materiality, the cold-sweat stand-offs, and maybe he should think some more about this country-property thing.

The problem was, with a physical problem you really did have a problem. A physical problem was another order altogether from those issuing from the usual obstacles and defeats of money, work, and other people. When you had done all you could do and still something physical did not work, then it did not work. It was not like a magazine story, infinitely malleable given thought enough and time. Unless your name was Uri Geller and your physical problem was a shortage of bent spoons, you were not going to solve it by mind alone. When you had a problem writing a magazine piece you could always sleep on it, a fresh start. With a physical problem you could sleep on it as much as you wanted, it wouldn’t make any difference. For Wakelin, a fresh start in the physical world consisted of driving to Canadian Tire and throwing himself on the mercy of the first clerk who bothered to toss him a glance. It was buying a new one and paying extra to have somebody come around and set it up.

Caroline Troyer was speaking to him, telling him to fetch rocks for under the wheels on the passenger’s side, she’d be jacking on a grade.

Wakelin jumped up and jogged around the front of the truck and skidded down off the shoulder for two big rocks and clambered back up with one in each hand. They were bigger than they needed to be, the weight of ten-pin bowling balls, and twice he fell, embedding an elbow in the soft gravel, but he made it and jammed them in. “Done,” he said, squatting once more at her side, game as a puppet.

Now she unbolted the spare from under the bed and located the axle and positioned the jack and jacked the truck and removed the blown tire and lifted on the spare and tightened the nuts partway and unjacked the truck until the ground held the tire, and tightened the nuts the rest of the way and unjacked the truck until it came down fully onto its springs and the jack was loose enough to free it from under the axle and threw the blown tire into the bed. And this entire procedure Wakelin followed helplessly ever one step behind, not quite keeping out of her way, his thoughts lapsed to overexposure, his mind bleached, the small interior voice stuck meaningless back there with What was this if not faith? stuck and repeating. And the world as manifest on that dirt shoulder in that corridor of spruce and fir under the deepening blue of evening, a cooler breeze from the forest margin fragrant with fungus and conifer in mitigation of the vaporous gritty pall of dust and diesel upon that stripped road surface, the world rose up on its old elbows aggrieved, and seeing it that way Wakelin felt a need for redemption, or something like it, a need undiminished by his utter ignorance concerning what redemption could be or how to get it. Why it should be necessary at all.

And then she was taking the jack out of his hands (dismantling it as she did so) and the socket wrench, and this hardware she replaced behind the seat while he struggled to fit the hubcap back on, but after one glance she repositioned it and kicked it on herself. And so much further unnerved was he by the short sharp efficiency of this action in the midst of all that personal chagrin, all that despair of old helplessness, that he had climbed into the cab and buckled himself in before he realized that she herself was not getting in but walking around the back of the truck to kick away the rocks he had placed under the tires, except then when he glanced around, she was just standing there looking at them.

He struggled out of his seat belt and threw open his door. “I can do that!” he called. “I’m sorry, I completely forgot—” He jumped down.

“You put them at the backs of the tires,” she said.

Wakelin was not sure if this statement was descriptive or prescriptive. He checked the rocks. “Right,” he said.

She was walking back to the driver’s door.

Wakelin continued to stare at the rocks. Something was wrong, but what? And then he saw that he had wedged them under the upslope side of the tires, and a hot wavefront travelled his neck and cheeks and climbed his temples, and though there was no need at all he kicked away the rocks and did so with some energy.

They were on the road again. A few minutes later back on asphalt, moving once more down a corridor of spruce and fir, and that rear bump had not gone away.

Roused from his mortified flush, Wakelin looked over.

Her eyes were fixed down the road. “It’s the good tire blew,” she said.

It’s always this, Caroline Troyer reflected. The main thing about thought: move away. From anything it lights on. It doesn’t matter what it is. Like a fire or a Slinky, move away and start up again some place else. Move away and do it different. Do it as it should be. As things like this used to be. When they were better. Or if it seems to be a good thing it’s lit on, then do it as precious. Out of reach. Or better: do it sacred. That’s right, sacred, needing defending. Or do it lost forever, at any time now. That’s always a good one.

Now in memory, she is standing in her windbreaker and cap and rubber boots before her father in the yard, where blank gravestones lean among winter weeds along the chain link. It is a hard bright morning. The air is cool, the sun hot. He kneels on a foam pallet before a glassy stone, a drill in his hand. He is wearing sound mufflers, a dust mask, goggles. He switches off the drill. He pulls the mask and goggles down around his neck but not the mufflers, and the fine salmon dusting of marble leaves naked white goggles around his eyes.

I’m going up the hill, she says.

You should.

I’ll be back to make lunch.

I’d appreciate it.

And in memory she is climbing through the sumacs and among the pines above the war memorial and following the rising path along the ridge. Where the rock is exposed it is warm from the sun and the snow is granular and has been quick to recede. The air is cool in the shade where the snow lies deep yet in places, and the path is muddy but not where the shade now falls or has fallen upon it today.

Her destination is not the highest part of the ridge but almost. It is a sloped clearing several yards in diameter below, but not visible from, the path, south-facing, where no immediate green is visible as yet except the mosses and conifers. Neither is rock visible, but scratch for ten seconds and there it is. The clearing is surrounded by young hemlock and balsam. Higher up, above the path, a white pine. The clearing is sheltered and warm on days when few are. It is a place where animals bring their kill or perhaps are themselves killed here, for it is scattered with the intricate bones of small birds and mice and voles, and the skeletons of squirrels, and even a few of the vertebrae and what remains of the forelegs of a fawn, all bleached to the chalk whiteness of bone.

This is her sanctuary. No people come here. In this place it is possible to believe that no one knows where she is. Here she kicks off her rubber boots and spreads her white legs. At her feet is a screen of chokecherry and dogwood thick enough, even unleafed, to cancel the town. A brown creeper darts pecking through the winter stalks. Eastward the white meridial pain of the spring sun. South, the undulant bluish grey and lime-green horizon of forested hills. She can hear a killdeer, she can hear a Canada jay. A squirrel gone squirrelly at her trespass. She can hear the ravens, from the bluff on the other side of the summit, up in arms as ever, and she can hear the wind that moves through the white pine above her, a tunnel of soft roaring. And she feels smaller breezes on her face and arms, smells the insolate fragrance of the mosses, and as her fingers sift the pulpy till, her thoughts do not recede but slow and quiet to a sequence of resistances in her skull, small catches, palpable in their succession.

To go to that place is to wake from thoughts inspired by the dream of freedom that are not freedom.

She is not free now, only remembering her secret place on the ridge as she drives her father’s truck through the dusk listening to a man so reactive to himself, so blind, that a properly intuitive choice such as where he will spend his solitude is perplexed, impulsive, in the end will be the result practically of chance; that the nature of his relationship with a woman he lost nearly two years ago is no less complicated a mystery for him tonight than it was on the day he lost her, his suffering hardly diminished, his life snagged, twisting on that loss. And five minutes after she has delivered this lost soul to his car, she will stand before another baffled devious sufferer, her father, whose pain instead of a maundering aggrieved soliloquy will issue in old rage, because he is the one who long ago laid claim to the unpredictable, and how dare she by similar behaviour presume?

She should phone. Where on this stretch has she seen a phone?

Her passenger rambles on. First they sell you their version, done out in the way they imagine resembles your own, and then they sell you what they have come to sell you. This is why to hear him you would almost think his disappointment was a small huddled sadness and not a wail of self-pity and flailing rage at the one lost.

One of her headaches is starting. She attends to the pain as to distant thunder, and then she attends to herself thinking about her father’s rage, and that is when she notices a cast to this thinking, a cast familiar yet difficult to discern because obscured by its subject, or rather by his nature, by his own cast. And that is when she understands that these thoughts, although hers, although old catches in old succession, are kinetic with other energy that is not simply her own old emotion. And she understands that this other energy is not her own anticipation arising out of past experience. And she knows that it is another’s, that it derives from some other site that is finding repercussion here.

And that site is the rage of her father.

And that site is active and it is active now.

“Did you get them?” Wakelin asked when Caroline Troyer returned to the truck. He knew she hadn’t because the whole time she was in the phone booth he had watched her lips.

“There’s no answer.”

“So they’re out. Aren’t we almost there?” Why was she shaking?

“Forty minutes.”

“And there you’ll be. Large as life. Obviously they’re not worried.”

Half an hour before she pulled over to call he had started telling her about Jane. The feeling he had as he did this, indulged himself shamelessly, was similar to the one on those occasions, always with women, he would lay himself wide open. Sometimes in arousal, sometimes in sorrow. Like a dog on its back, lolling, thighs splayed. A guttural freedom. Here I am, grovelling in my display. Rub or scratch as you will, only be careful. I bite. He had got talking about silence, and the next thing he knew he was talking about Jane.

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