The Healer (8 page)

There was a keen wind blowing, whirling minute bits of frozen scum off the snow, and from time to time the owl would slide his transparent inner eyelids like windshield wipers over his great orbs to clean away the particles of snow that clung to them.

During the summer, Billy had hardly ever seen any other youngsters. Abe Zook kept to himself, and most of his neighbors avoided him. They were more than half afraid of the old braucher and Zook encouraged their trepidation. Occasionally someone would drop in who wanted a charm, herbs, or to have Zook cure by his mysterious power of laying on of hands, but these were nearly always elderly people who did not stay long. But when autumn came, Billy was entered at the local school, a small, red brick building of the sort that had once been common among rural schools, but was now found only in the Pennsylvania Dutch country. There was no plumbing, only twin outhouses marked "Girls" and "Boys." A Franklin stove provided the only heat, and the students sat on hard wooden benches. There was only one room and all the grades sat together, coming up before the teacher at different times to recite their lessons. The lessons were simple, and Billy would have found it easy to be the school's leading scholar had he thought it worth the effort. At first he had been eager to make friends, but the other kids were suspicious of "the boy who lives with the braucher" and regarded him with almost superstitious respect. Billy had fallen easily into the role of a sorcerer's apprentice and enjoyed dropping hints of strange secrets he had learned from Abe Zook and of uncanny doings around the lonely cabin, nearly all of them purely imaginary. Never a gregarious boy, he was more than willing to exchange friendship for awe.

In fact, Billy was often unsure, himself, whether or not he was playing a part. At the far edge of Abe Zook's farm was an apple orchard. One of the trees was a partially dead giant whose bark had taken on a light blue tint like the skin of a very old man. The outflung branches still cast enough shade so that nothing but moss grew in the magic circle around the roots. Whenever the boy could slip away in the warm days of Indian summer, he went to the tree and lay on his back, looking up into the deep blue sky as though gazing into the depth of a giant amethyst.

At first the sky would be holding nothing but big floating clouds that swept past like snow-white worlds. For a few minutes, Billy would play at seeing dragons and castles in their ivory shapes. But this was only to tantalize himself deliciously for the great thrill. After a time, he would will the sky to be clear, and then the clouds would seem to glide away. He would nerve himself for the Great Experience.

He had first undergone the Great Experience when he was a small boy and his father had still been alive. He had been a sickly child and caught cold easily. What would have been merely an inconvenience to most children, was torture to Billy. The colds usually started with a sore throat, but in Billy's case, his throat felt as though it had been skinned. Breathing was agony. He cried with the pain and longed for the cold to go into his head. When it did, things were little better. He always ran a high fever and was often semi-delirious. During these long hours of suffering, his mother sat by his bed and read to him endlessly; fairy tales were his favorites. He knew the Oz books almost by heart and could repeat nearly word by word any of the tales in Andrew Lang's variously colored collections. Lying in bed, constantly changing his pillow cool-side up, he would drift in his feverish state into a world in which he was a character in the tales. The story would form itself around him, the familiar people in the stories would talk to him, and he would be traveling down the Yellow Brick Road or scaling the Glass Mountain with his companions. There was always danger in his dreams as there was in the fairy tales—without that element they would have become insipid. Yet the danger was never too threatening or too frightening. Only in these dreams could he ease his suffering.

Later, he found himself able to slip into this dream world by an effort of will. In the dream world, the problems he had at school and with his stepfather ceased to exist. He suffered through the day in order to hide himself in some corner of the apartment when he returned home and joyfully slip away into a pleasanter world, where there was just enough danger to make it exciting, but a danger that he could control.

Lying under the dead tree, Billy would stare deeper and deeper into the limitless blue above him. Slowly the blue would begin to grow slightly darker. Then Billy knew that he was succeeding. The sky would begin to tremble, as though with invisible heat waves. The whole expanse would begin to move, wave after wave swaying across it, each lapping over the last wave and obliterating it. The movement grew faster and faster, and then Billy would feel himself straining upward. His whole soul was being sucked out of him. It pulled at his body as a plant's root pulls at the earth if the stem is jerked. Instinctively, he would open his mouth to give his mind an opening through which it could escape. He would begin to breathe deeply in regular, spasmodic gasps. The strain became almost unendurable. Then there would be a rending sensation and he would seem to faint.

From here on, the dream had always been different, but ever since the day of the hunt, one dream kept returning. He was running through the forest with the coyote, whom he always thought of as Wolf. The forest was thick with undergrowth, but the undergrowth melted away before them as they skimmed along. Together they heard the baying of the pack behind them, and he felt the glorious surge of delight that danger brings—a sensation that started in the feet and tingled up the legs, titillating the loins and finally flooding the chest with ecstasy. As the pack came closer, he and Wolf put on an extra burst of speed. Now they were no longer touching the ground but scudding just above it. He and Wolf laughed together at the futile efforts of the men and hounds to destroy them. At last they would shake off the pack by some cunning trick and float away together through the woods on some fresh adventure.

When winter came, it was no longer possible to lie under the apple tree, but by then, through constant practice, Billy had developed the habit of passing into his dream state so he could slip into it while sitting by the fire or lying in his bed. He could even go into it in the classroom by watching a patch of sunlight on the worn boards of the floor or a red gleam through the damper of the stove. He knew the teacher was conscious of what he was doing, but like the kids she stood somewhat in fear of him and of Abe Zook, so after reprimanding him once or twice for "falling asleep in class," she ignored the whole matter.

Abe Zook knew all about Billy's trances and to the old man it was clear evidence that the boy was a potential braucher—perhaps as great a one as the legendary John George Hohman. He tried to initiate the boy into the mystery of charms, spells, and herbs but Billy's interest centered on animals. Abe Zook had helped him tame Dracula, first by never going near the bird without a heavy leather glove on his left hand with which he could ward off the owl's attacks, and then feeding the owl bits of meat from his gloved fingers. Then came long hours of carrying Dracula on his gloved fist, feeding him occasionally, and then having the bird fly to him for food with a strong cord fastened to the leather straps around the owl's legs. Finally, Billy had been able to take the bird hunting. He had never entirely overcome his aversion to killing, but the thrill of watching Dracula float through the woods on wings as silent as a cloud, after a pheasant or squirrel, moved him as deeply as the cry of the hounds. To have animals hunt each other seemed different, somehow, than for a human to kill them. However, he never got used to trapping. The sight of an animal lashing desperately in the relentless steel jaws sickened him.

This morning he had gone out after the snowstorm with Dracula, hoping to pick up a rabbit. Usually rabbits got down a hole or into a brier patch before Dracula could overtake them, but snow slowed them down and gave the owl a better chance. No rats had been caught for several weeks and Dracula had been forced to live on sheep hearts. He had thrown no castings—the oblong pellets, composed of the skin and bones of their quarry, which birds of prey disgorge. Abe Zook had assured the boy that the castings cleaned out the owl's crop and without them a slime would form on it that would eventually kill the bird. Dracula was entitled to the heads of any rabbits he killed. Billy and Abe Zook would take the rest.

Wasser had accompanied them from the farm, as Billy hoped he would be useful in finding the rabbits. It was ringingly cold and nothing, not even a bird, moved. They had started out so early that it was still dark, but in the east the jet black sky was turning tourmaline and the silver stars were losing their platinum glow.

Wasser lay down on a patch of bare ground blown clear by the sharp wind and started biting out snowballs from between his toes. The old hound had quickly grown discouraged. It was too cold for scent to carry and, being shortsighted, Wasser depended almost entirely on his nose. Billy stood on the highest part of the rise, turned sideways to shelter Dracula from the full force of the wind. There was far too much wind to fly Dracula in the open but in the shelter of the apple orchard it might be different. Also, rabbits often came there, especially after a snow, to strip the bark from the younger trees.

Billy called to Wasser and started down the hill toward the orchard. The hound looked up, flinched a little at the prospect of wading through the snow again, and followed him.

The snow had drifted in the open pasture and both boy and hound were soon exhausted struggling through the mounds. In addition to the owl, who weighed two pounds, Billy was carrying a basket on his back and a light hatchet, for Abe Zook had told him to collect some bark while he was in the woods. The inner bark of the birch tree, when allowed to ferment, made ale that Abe Zook mulled by stirring it with a red hot poker and by adding some spices such as mint and smart weed. The outer bark of black cherry, cut from young branches and put in a crockery jar with rain water, turned into a dark brown fluid that was more potent than even the hardest hard cider. Billy had also been told to bring back pine cones, which with a little silver paint could be sold for Christmas tree ornaments, and holly branches for wreaths. This would not take long. Billy knew well where to get the pine cones and holly. Collecting the bark would be more difficult; it meant climbing the trees to reach the best branches. The lower branches would be no good, the bark there was too thick and difficult to ross—separate the tough, outer bark from the soft inner lining. Still, he could count on a few hours to hunt with Dracula.

It was light enough now to see the whole sweep of the countryside and anything—even a rabbit—would show up clearly against the dead white snow. Billy looked until his eyes watered, wiped them, and looked again. Still, he kept on to the orchard. Here the snow was comparatively light, the brunt of the storm having been stopped by a windbreak of evergreens.

The light was growing steadily stronger. In the sky, only a single steel-blue star remained along with the fading remains of a bone-white moon. The black bones of the trees stood like skeletons against the pink clouds in the east. Overhead, a jet plane stitched a long white plume, also dyed pink, across the dark blue sky. To avoid the wind, Billy kept along the edge of the evergreen windbreak. Suddenly he stopped. Something else had paralleled the windbreak. In the snow were two sets of pad marks: the long, thin prints of the coyote and the almost round marks of a dog.

Billy bent over the tracks. Even though there was quite a bit of wind, the tracks were clearly etched, with no trace of drifted snow. They were probably not more than an hour old. Billy called Wasser over, hoping that he could tell from the hound's actions how fresh the tracks were, but the cold was so intense that Wasser could pick up no scent, and tracks without scent meant nothing to him. Ahead, Billy could see where the tracks had left the run and turned into the orchard. Wolf and his companion, the female dog, had also been looking for rabbits.

The snow was turning purple now where the shadows of the trees lay on it, and visibility was perfect—better than it would be after the sun had fully risen and there was a glare off the snow. Ahead, the dead white was broken by dunes of brown clump grass that lay in sweeping patterns, tracing the path of the wind gusts that had carried the seeds. The sun, blood-red and a perfect sphere, was just clear of the horizon, and in the west the mottled dish of the moon was fading. The clump grass was so exactly the same color as the coyote that once when the wind made a tuft move, Billy started, thinking that Wolf was there.

Judging from the tracks, the dog had stayed in the orchard, digging either for mice or windfalls, while Wolf had gone to a fence row where the frost had left filigree work around the mouths of the rabbit holes. He had tested each hole with his nose—the imprint of his muzzle could be seen—but had apparently decided that the frozen ground was too hard for digging. He had gone back to get the dog and the two of them had left the orchard and headed for the distant woods.

Billy knew he would also have to go to the woods, both for the bark and because only in the shelter of the trees could Dracula fly. The owl was growing restless and had jumped off his fist several times, only to swing back again with a flirt of his great, soft wings. There might be pheasants lying-up in the honeysuckle tangles and Dracula could take these fairly easily, as the startled birds rocketed up. Billy headed for the woods with Wasser struggling after him.

It was turning out to be a mother-of-pearl day. The sun gleamed on the glazed surface. At every step, Billy broke through the crust into the soft snow beneath, and the hard edges of the ice crust hit his boots until his ankles were sore. Wasser slid helplessly on the crust, now breaking through until he was bogged down and then skating over the slick surface. The boy could see where Wolf, in some surprising manner, had walked easily on the crust, but his companion, the dog, had clearly had as hard a time as Wasser; her trail was a series of skid marks alternating with holes where she had gone through the crust and wallowed in the snow. Billy began to wonder if he might overtake them, and if he did what would happen.