My father smiled. He reached over a bit suddenly, almost awkwardly, and patted me on the upper arm. I was looking past him, out of the window, looking out at a wide, empty field across the road from Parker's, part of someone's farm that seemed to stretch back for miles. For a moment, for just a moment, I felt so sad and distant.
“How's your pie?” my father asked.
“The best,” I said, pulling my attention back inside.
“I think I'm going to need some help here,” he said, and nudged his plate toward me.
“Okay,” I said, and glanced past his shoulder out the window again, not consciously really, and saw, for just a fraction of a second, the figure of a large woman striding along the edge of that distant field.
“I . . .” I think I was about to say, “I have to see something,” but even that would have taken too long. I bolted from the booth and out the front door of Parker's, which brought me only twenty paces or so from the highway. A tractor trailer hurtled past in a roar of noise and swirling dust. I ran quickly to the left, trying to get the same angle I had had from the diner window. I looked out across the highway to the great, empty, rolling fields, one folded in behind another, for miles back to the base of a distant mountain range. Beautiful, vast, and empty.
The next morning was Saturday. I had made some excuse for my strange behavior the night before, and everything was fine between my father and me. He had to work that day, another twelve-hour shift, so I left the house early, right after breakfast, and headed straight out into the woods to the bottom of that same forsaken little hill, determined to stay there all day if I had to. I hadn't been there three minutes when I heard the sound of footfalls through the leaves, and Emma appeared from around the west edge of the hill.
“Good morning, Thomas,” she said.
“Ma'am,” I said with a nervous quake in my voice. She raised her eyebrows. “Emma,” I corrected myself.
She nodded. She was carrying on her back a small canvas pack. She swung it off her shoulders.
“I have here a couple of peanut butter sandwiches, two apples, a few cookies, and some cider. My memory is that boys your age like peanut butter sandwiches.”
She looked at me, questioning.
“Yes,” I said. “Sure.”
“Good,” she said.
“Can I have a cookie now?” I asked.
“You may not,” she said. “Would you like to go for a walk?”
This was not a question, I realized. I nodded and fell into step beside her.
“I came out here twice last week and you weren't here,” I said, after we had walked a bit.
“Did you?”
“How did you know I would be here today?” I asked.
“I didn't know,” Emma said, and for the first time I sensed a flicker of warmth from her. She almost looked shy, glancing over at me sideways.
“I hoped,” she said.
That day began my friendship with Emma. Almost every afternoon, after school, I ran out into the woods to Tallon's Creek, followed it a mile or so to where it swamps, went north toward the mountains for another mile, then east down the rocks to the ravine where, at the base of that low, bramble-covered hill, we always agreed to meet.
In bits and pieces, over a period of days, she told me about herself, about her history. It was hard getting information out of her. She seemed much more interested in me, what my parents were like, what I learned in school, what I thought about things. I told her what I could, and in return I learned about her.
She said her full name was Emma Carter Crawford. She told me, very strictly, to call her Emma. She never did tell me why she didn't like to be called “ma'am.” She had different quirks like that, I came to learn. Sometimes I would ask her a question, and wait for her answer, but none would ever come. She would just walk on as if I had never spoken. I couldn't tell if she didn't like the question, or was lost in thought, or simply hadn't heard me. Some of the time we were together we didn't talk at all. The two of us would walk along in the woods, mile after mile.
Other times she talked freely. She told me that for years she had worked in her family's hardware store, Carter's Hardware in Harrow Point, a little town about ten miles from where I lived. Her father had built the store and run it for twenty-three years. When he died, she took over the store.
She married, she said, forty-seven years ago.
“He was a sweet man. People said he married me for my money—I owned the store when Papa died, and that was money in Harrow Point—but he didn't. He loved me. He couldn't change a light bulb, poor man, had no common sense at all. But he was a kind man. He loved me.”
It seemed an important point to her, and I nodded solemnly.
After seven years of marriage she was widowed. Those years brought her three children: now all were grown and moved away.
I listened politely to her personal history. But what I really wanted to know about was what she had done with that deer. I pestered her with questions, which she more or less gracefully dodged, or else ignored altogether, the first few times we walked together. But one day, she admitted that yes, she had “helped” the deer. I wanted to know how; rather desperately, I wanted to know.
It was after we had been walking together for a couple of weeks or so that she finally told me about a visit she had had, at her store, many years before. One day, she said, a man had come to the shop a few minutes after closing. He was carrying an injured fawn. His name was Carlton Nash.
“I'd known him for years,” she said. “At least I knew who he was. Everyone did. He was a local character. He said he was a hundred and two years old—no one knew how old he really was; eighty or so, we all thought. He didn't look all that old. He said he could talk to animals.
“There was a place in town called the Johnson Home for Adults, a kind of nursing home and, really, sanitarium. Mr. Nash had lived there—well, stayed there, now and then—for as long as anyone could remember. He said he had come down from Tikkun Ridge, up near the state line, years and years before. No one knew any different. He was a strange man, strange habits. He would wander off for weeks at a time, then just show up one day and settle back into his room.
“Sometime after my husband died, I guess I became a local character, too. I took in all sorts of strays: dogs, cats, and such. I had a mess of tame squirrels, a few rabbits. People began to bring me things: birds with broken wings and whatnot. Every so often Mr. Nash would limp along, his pockets full of milk bones and peanuts and little dry rolled pieces of oats and molasses. He had something for all the animals. He would sit on my porch or on the big stump in the yard, and in no time he would be surrounded by whatever animals were staying with me then. He would jabber away at them, and from where I watched, I believed the animals were jabbering right back. He never had much to say to me, though. Just the animals.
“And then one day he came into the shop, carrying the fawn.
“‘She's been hit by a car,’ he said. He sat down on the window ledge, cradling the fawn in his arms. ‘I'm getting too old for this. Think I might retire. So, you and me got to talk.’”
“Of course, I didn't understand what he meant.”
“We spoke for hours,” she said, “all night and through the morning. By noon, Mr. Nash was gone, and the fawn was healthy ...”
She let the words hang in the air. She tried to let the story trail off, but there was no way I was letting her stop.
I plagued her with questions. The secret was half told, I believed, and I wanted to learn the rest. Over the days to come, gradually but clearly, forcefully even, she told me things, taught me things. Interspersed with stories of her life, questions about my days at school, and observations on the weather and such, she began teaching me about a part of life that was utterly new to me.
She told me that healing animals was a question of spirit, of spiritual strengths and hierarchies. I listened closely, and maybe understood a third, a fifth of what she said. Animals, she said, have great strength and beauty; sp
iritually, they are simple, however, and somewhat coarse. A human's spirit, she said gravely, is the greatest, finest, most powerful force in nature.
“A tragic truth,” she said, and fixed me with a stare. Pay attention, her look said. This is important.
I learned early on that she had a way of looking at you, now and then, that simply commanded attention. It wasn't a look she used often, but there was no resisting it. To that point in my life the only person I knew that commanded such respect was my father.
Again and again she emphasized the extraordinary power of the human spirit. She talked of it as being both a gift and a responsibility. But she said that I was not to think that animals did not have a power all their own. Integrity, she called it. She told me about a fox she found caught in a metal leg trap, a trap which had been meant for bear.
“His leg was mangled, just mangled. He had been there a while, and I thought the fight was about out of him. He looked terrible. I spoke to him gently, and touched his leg, and his eyes met mine and the jolt! It almost knocked me over backwards.”
“Jolt from what?” I asked.
“From him. The simple, clean power of what he was. I hadn't met that in deer; they're such gentle creatures. There was power in that fox.”
She shook her head. “It was all I could do to get the trap open and off his leg, and him fighting me all the way. Oh, he was strong, and not just physically, Thomas. His will was strong, his being. I was determined to do something for his leg and he was determined to have no part of it. I still don't know which of us was right. Sometimes I push too hard.”
“Did you fix him?” I asked.
She shook her head again. “I helped him. That's all I can ever do, help. Here's what I got for my trouble.”
She showed me her left hand. At the base of her palm there was a wide, whitish scar, and an indented place, like part of her flesh was missing.
“Did he bite you?” I asked.
She nodded. “Hard,” she said.
“Couldn't you heal yourself?”
The question seemed to stop her. She shook her head.
“It's funny,” she said at last. “I live this life, the things I do—but when it came to my hand, it's almost like I couldn't quite talk myself into it, couldn't quite believe it. I couldn't trust my own spirit, the way I impose my spirit on the animals.”
We walked a while in silence.
“I was right to try to help that fox, Thomas,” Emma said. “I don't know that I was right to insist.”
“But you helped him,” I said.
“It was a battle of wills. I won. I'm not saying I was wrong. Anyway, I'm hard-headed enough that I know I would do it again, if the situation were the same. But don't for a moment think that because your will is strong, these creatures don't have a perfect integrity of their own. An animal can be perfectly itself the way only the rarest of people can.”
The point of her teaching was never the wonder, the magic of the healing, but the work of it, and the reasons behind it. She didn't want me to be in awe of her powers, or to be delighted in them as something magical. She was trying to get me to see, to really understand something of what she did.
Once she began to teach me, her silences grew deeper, and more frequent. Sometimes I could scarcely get her to talk to me at all. We would walk along quietly together. It seemed at times that she was looking for something, or listening for something. I learned just to let her be, not to bother her with questions. An hour might pass in silence, two hours, and then suddenly she would start to talk again.
To be honest, I had trouble following her. I would get used to the silence, enjoy it even, and then Emma would start teaching me, and I would struggle to understand her.
She was squatting at the top of a ridge one day, tossing little bits of bark onto the ground in front of her. She was squinting up at me, in this way she had, as if she was arguing with herself over something, something to do with me. I just stood there, shifting from one foot to the other, waiting.
“People have become so utterly, fundamentally convinced that spirit and matter are separate things,” she said, “that certain essential human skills have been all but lost.”
I frowned at her, squinted back at her. I wanted to understand.
“There is greater and lesser force,” she said. “But there are no planes, no levels of existence, no spirit world, no lower realms. There is no spirit as opposed to matter, no matter separate from spirit. There is only life. I've thought about this for a long time, Thomas. It's not that I am so sure I'm right, but I want at least to tell you what I think. Okay?”
I shrugged. “Okay,” I said.
“You see, people see one side of things, one facet of life—what they can immediately touch and see and feel. They think the spirit isn't real just because they don't think they can see it. But Thomas, understand, spirit is all you ever see.”
She was looking at me hard. I don't know how much I understood. She shook her head.
“It's as if folks had decided that the right hand is stronger than the left, and so never used their left hand at all. And you know what would happen”—I did not—“the left hand, the human left hand, would just get weaker and weaker, until it seemed useless. And think, Thomas, what would become of people born naturally left-handed?”
I was eleven and I believed her, word for word, as well as I could follow her.
“Are you, you know, left-handed?” I asked.
“Hmm,” was all she said.
“People use so little of their real spiritual potential,” she told me. “They ease along on one percent, two percent in a crunch; for years they can drift along on nothing, nothing at all. Power can be given, infused. Mr. Nash was a great source of power. But you must be ready. Your spirit must be cultivated, strengthened, poked and prodded, stretched and battered about, educated, or an infusion of great power can burn you to a crisp.”
Of course, everything she said was entirely new to me. I just listened in awe.
Another time I asked her more about how she healed animals. She said that the more seriously injured an animal was, the more time she needed to heal it, and the more draining the healing was to her strength. Time was important. The deer I saw shot was relatively easy for her to heal.
“But he was dead!” I said.
“Oh, that. Well, there's dead and there's dead. His body was strong, full of warmth and life. If he had been there a few hours it would have been a different story. I think I could have brought him back, but it would have taken a good long time.
“But then,” she said, “you take a rabbit that's been run over by a car, crushed; well, then it doesn't matter. You have to have something to work with.”
I blinked. I didn't want to think about crushed rabbits.
“But mostly it's just deer, somehow,” she went on. “It's just deer that I find. Sometimes I think that certain things are simply given to you.”
“How about people?” I asked. “I mean, if someone died—”
“No. I can't. Maybe some can. Mr. Nash said he had seen it, seen it from the woman who taught him. But he couldn't, and I can't. People are beyond me.” She chuckled at that. “People are beyond me in a lot of ways.”
“But my face, when I was scratched that day!”
“Oh, well, cuts, scratches, that's one thing. They don't really trouble you. But anything that truly frightened you, any serious injury where your spirit was shaken, or broken ...” she just shook her head.
I looked down in despair. Once again I didn't understand.
“The world is more connected than you know,” she said, in the slow, firm voice she used when she was trying to drill something into me. “You are what you see,” she said.
“You are what you see,” I said to myself, as if repeating the words would help me to understand them. Then I asked another question.
“So there was another, a woman before Mr. Nash?”
She nodded. “Yes. We go back for ages and ages, Thomas. We've been
burned as witches, feared as sorcerers, revered as messengers from God . . . but usually completely ignored, unknown. And unknown is best, believe me.”
I was fascinated and troubled by the things she told me. It seemed to me her power to heal was goodness itself, and yet still I was troubled. I believed everything she told me. For me there was no question of not believing her. I had seen her power with my own eyes, and thought that such power must be wedded to truth. I spent my days in a state of pleased confusion, happy to be friends with Emma, and trying to understand her and the things she said. I suppose in a way I am still working on some of the things she told me.
She was a large woman. Her face was weathered, red, shiny and smooth along her forehead and cheeks. Her eyes were bright and small, set in wrinkled pockets; they glittered a deep, unsettling blue. Her hair was gray and blond, long and full, and frizzy at the ends, flying everywhere when it was loose, sticking out everywhere when she tied it back, wound tightly to her head. She was not inclined to smile, but occasionally she would grin at something, and chuckle, which was fine. When the weather was at all cold she limped when she walked. She was neither fat nor muscular, but solid, solid through and through. She said she was eighty-three. She said Mr. Nash really was a hundred and two.
“One of the compensations,” she said, and waved her hand vaguely, “of all this, is aging comes a bit more slowly.”
I nodded, as if I understood.
Our long, rambling walks covered the same forest land I had walked many times with my father. My legs were just sprouting that year, and I was always rushing on ahead of her, and being called back.
“Here,” she would say sharply. “Now look at this.”
She showed me the paths the deer took through the woods, where rabbits burrowed at the edge of woodland meadows, ponds where the deer came for water, and the tracks and the droppings of fox and bear. Her teaching reinforced my father's. Then it struck me: one reason I was troubled was because of how similar their knowledge was.
The Healer of Harrow Point Page 3
