The Healer of Harrow Point (10 page)

“Aw, Allison said she'd cut my hair ...” Andy began, but Hally didn't let him finish.

“Was she drunk?” Hally asked, slow and loud, happy, relishing every word. “Did you all have a fight?”

Allison and Andy had only recently been married. Andy was blushing now, but he was still trying to keep his dignity.

“She said why pay Martin seven dollars for a haircut when she'd be happy to cut it for me,” he tried to explain.

Hally was shaking his head, trying to look serious. “Son,” he said, putting his hand on Andy's shoulder. “Pay the seven dollars. If it's a matter of money, I'm sure we can come up with a little for you.”

“Well,” Andy said, trying not to laugh, “you see ...”

“Now I don't like to say anything bad about anybody's wife,” Hally continued—there were a few people standing around us now, laughing—“and Allison is a fine lady; but, Andy, keep that woman away from your head!”

My father was laughing now as hard as anyone else, and I was too, and Andy was laughing, and he turned to me and pushed my shoulder and said, “What are you laughing at?” and that made me laugh the harder.

Hally walked off, probably to give someone else a hard time, and my dad pointed toward the spot where he wanted me to set out the brochures. I started putting the brochures in small stacks. The room was filled with loud and cheerful conversations, laughter. I looked up and Mike was there, the necks of two bottles of Coke pinched between the fingers of his broad right hand. He held out a bottle to me, and I took it with a shy nod. He winked and nodded, took a swig from his bottle of Coke, and walked away. I had a swallow, too, and looked over and saw my dad on the other side of the room talking to Richard Healy and Hally and Mitchell. Hally was laughing hard at one of his own jokes, and my father was grinning, his shoulders shaking with barely suppressed laughter, and I could hear Mitchell say, “You ain't right in the head.”

I loved these men. How far away from Emma was I at that moment? Certainly I didn't give her a thought. She was a source of joy and wonder for me, but there was a deep feeling of joy here, as well: the joy of home, the joy of being with a group of people who knew me, and, for good and for ill and through thick and thin, were an inextricable part of who I was. I had no such thoughts then, of course. But I was caught by a kind of joy and pride about being part of this group, of being at the meeting and, more to the point, of belonging there.

After a while the meeting got under way. My father talked at length about hunting safety. He emphasized the importance of wearing blaze orange. He talked about planning the hunt carefully beforehand, and sticking to the plan; about knowing where you were heading, and how long you intended to stay out. He stressed the importance of knowing exactly where your hunting partners were at all times, and of not wandering off yourself without letting your partners know. Then my father began telling about an incident from the year before.

One county over, maybe thirty miles away, a man had shot his brother because he mistook him for a turkey. The fellow had walked a little ways off to relieve himself, and the unexpected rustle, the snatch of red clothing that might or might not have looked like a turkey's neck, had caused his brother to fire. The single rifle shot had pierced the man's throat. The shooter ran over, thinking to find a turkey, and found his brother crumpled on the ground, his pants twisted around his knees, dead. Everyone knew the story already. It had enough elements of the macabre, the tragic, to be well known. But my father told it again to good effect.

“Hell of a way to die,” I heard Hally say from a few rows behind me. “Get popped while you're taking a crap.”

There were a couple of grumbles, some nervous laughter.

“It's not funny, Hally,” someone said.

“I know it's not funny,” Hally shot back. “It scares the hell out of me.”

“Good,” my father said brusquely. “It should scare you.”

I thought: “Even Emma couldn't have saved him.” It was the first time that evening that I had thought of her.

Just then I heard a woman's voice. It seemed that everyone's head turned as mine did.

“Officer,” she called to my father as she walked toward the front of the room.

“God help us,” I heard someone mutter. Everyone watched her as she walked. She was a young woman, very fair, with light, light blond hair. She was so thin she looked frail. Her jaw was set tight as she walked, her eyes set straight ahead, ignoring the men all around her.

“Go home, Carole Ann,” Corey Hughes called out. His voice was flat, not unkind but definite.

“Officer, can I say a few words?” she asked my father. She was standing only a few feet away from me. Her jeans hung loosely on her thin hips. She was wearing an oversize sweater that seemed to engulf her.

For a moment my father didn't speak.

“Aw, for gosh sakes, Singer, we didn't come to listen to her!” This was Lyle Abbott. I knew all these men; I didn't know her. Merwyn Powell was seated next to me, his hands folded lightly on his large belly, a look of quiet disapproval on his face.

“Who is she, Mr. Powell?” I whispered.

“She's a nut. But if I know your father, we're gonna listen to her.”

Several of the men were complaining now, but my father already had his hand up. The room settled down.

“Gentlemen, this is a public meeting in a public building. If Miss Proffitt wants to talk to us, briefly,” he paused and looked at her. She did not flinch. “. . . then let's give her our full attention.”

“Some of you might know ...” she said softly. Her voice was quavering.

“Speak up, darlin'!” someone from the back called.

“Some of you might know,” she said more slowly, loudly, looking down at the floor, then up at the ceiling, and then, suddenly, fixedly, at me. “I'm the president of the local animal rights group.”

“Oh for crying out loud!” Chester Lanz started.

My father banged the flat of his hand, once, on the table top, and Chester frowned, and was silent.

“I know you don't want to listen to me. I know you think there's nothing I could say to you that could change how you think about hunting,” her voice was shaking. I thought it was nervousness, then realized in an instant that it was anger, a true and deep anger. She took a breath. All at once the anger seemed gone, to be replaced by sadness, resignation. Her voice became too quiet. “You're probably right. There's probably nothing I can say.”

“Nothing that we can hear!” Hally shouted, which brought some laughs. Even my father looked down at the floor and smiled.

“Nothing that I can say,” she repeated more loudly. “But I want you to listen to Charlie Hatch for a minute.”

She gestured toward the back of the room. Charlie was back there, his hands jammed in his pockets.

“Charlie, come on,” the woman urged, motioning him toward the front.

Charlie stood quite still. There was a long silence; you could hear the Coke machine buzz.

“How ya doing, Charlie?” Hally called to him. No one laughed.

“Okay, so I was hunting last year, right?” Charlie spoke loudly, apparently to his shoes. “And I was with my friend Landon, ya'll know Landon, and we were up in tree stands, you know, fifteen feet up or something, only we just had the one ladder, and Landon was up in his stand last, about fifty yards away, okay, and so he had the ladder at his stand. And this buck walks underneath me, just, damn, right there,” he stopped abruptly. He had been speaking quickly. For the first time he looked up at us. “Right there beneath me, and I shot him.”

Charlie stared back at the floor and kept talking. “And I shot him once and I'd have shot him again but my gun jammed. He went down on his forelegs and he was trying to get back up; he was, like, spinning there in place, kneeling on his forelegs, trying to get up, and I hollered for Landon to come over, and, well, he did, he climbed down and come over but it was, I don't know, minutes, four or five or six minutes, and that buck just spun, and struggled, and fell, and tried to get
up and couldn't. It took him forever to die, before Landon got there. I just stood up there like I was some god in the sky, some big man that could kill an animal like that. I just watched him. And I knew right then that I shouldn't have ought to shot him, and I tell you, I won't do it again. And that's all that I'm going to say. I mean, if you shoot something ...” he stopped abruptly. The room was silent. Charlie blinked his eyes, like he was blinking away tears. We waited, and Charlie began again.

“I mean, if you're going to shoot something, well, I just figure ...” He took a deep breath. “God goes to all this trouble to make a deer, you know? So if you shoot one, just make sure you're prepared to watch it die.”

He kicked at the floor, looked up at us, and said, “Good night,” in an odd, almost formal tone, and hurried out of the back of the room, shouldering past three people who were lugging in some huge object in a sheet. The sheet was stained with blood. My head swum a moment, and then came crystal clear. Two men and a woman—I didn't know any of them—were lugging a dead deer wrapped in a sheet to the front table. They heaved it with a thud on the table in front of us all. The rank smell from it filled the room.

“She's a pregnant doe,” Carole Ann Proffitt said sharply. “One of you shot her two days ago off the back of Mavis Gentry's property. Anybody want to claim it?”

She said this last around my father, who had moved in front of her. The room was in commotion, men moving to see, a chair fell over, someone was cursing.

“Let's go,” my father said sharply, to Carole Ann and the people with her. “Outside. Thomas, come with us. Richard,” he nodded to Richard Healy, and gestured toward the deer. “Burn that thing.”

My father led us down the center of the room. Sherman Kyle, another particular friend of my father's, fell in silently behind us. He was a quiet, lanky man. I was glad to have him there. I don't believe anyone could possibly have come to any harm there; indeed I'm sure Carole Ann and her friends could have left in safety, with no more than some jeering. But as it was, we moved swiftly out of a nearly silent room.

My father took the steps rapidly, the first one down the stairs. I could tell he was angry, a rare state for him. I ended up next to Carole Ann. As we descended the stairs she gripped me by the wrist, hard.

“Don't become like them,” she whispered sharply. “You don't have to be like them.”

“That's my father,” I said, because it was the only thing I could think of to say. He was holding the front door to the firehouse open ahead of us.

We spilled down the steps into the parking lot. The night had grown much colder. After all the activity upstairs, it was strangely quiet outside. It was a muted group that climbed into a couple of pickup trucks and drove out of the firehouse parking lot. My father stood silently watching them go, Sherman Kyle at his side. I didn't realize how angry he was until he spoke.

“Now what the hell did they think they were going to accomplish by that?” he asked sharply, and turned to
look to Sherman, and saw me. His face, tight with anger, softened. “Son,” he said quietly.

“I don't know,” Sherman said, in his slow, easy drawl. “I expect they thought they'd make an impression.”

“And what's Charlie Hatch want to get caught up with them for?” my father asked.

Sherman shook his head. “Charlie's a good boy. I can't see that he meant any harm.”

“No,” my father agreed. He seemed to force a smile. I could see that his anger was fading.

“I'm cold,” I said.

Sherman laughed. “I'm a-cold, too,” he said, and the three of us went back inside.

Upstairs the evidence of the deer carcass having been there was all but gone. A couple of the men were slowly, methodically cleaning the table up front with wet, soapy sponges. Mitchell was rolling the mop and bucket away, having cleaned a wide path up through the center of the room. The deer itself was gone. Several of the men were still very agitated. Some even questioned if charges couldn't be filed against Carole Ann and her group for disturbing the peace.

“You can swear out a complaint,” my father said, his even temper returned. “But I wouldn't bother with it.”

They burned the carcass in the little field behind the firehouse. Some of the men went out back to watch, but it wasn't much of a fire, and the night was very cold. I could see the flames from the windows of the meeting room, while my father and I packed up the leftover brochures.

“Need a hand with that box?” It was Sherman Kyle. “No sir,” I said, “thanks, but it's not heavy.”

“I hear we'll be going out together next week,” Sherman said.

He meant hunting.

“Yes sir,” I said quietly, moving the brochures around in the box, not looking up.

“Well that's good,” Sherman said. “That's real good.”

In the days that followed, I was alternately certain that I would not go hunting with Sherman Kyle, my father, and their friends, and then so unsure of what I would do that I felt ill with doubt and anxiety. I missed Emma. I walked out into the woods one day after school, but Emma was not there to meet me. The woods themselves felt strange, or I was a stranger to them. I was so preoccupied with my one great dilemma that I was not seeing the landscape around me, feeling the air, sensing the ground beneath my feet. The quiet, the sense of harmony and order that was so basic to my time walking in the woods, especially with Emma, was lost to me now. It could scarcely be literally true, but it seemed to me that there were more brambles, more impenetrable thickets, steeper and rockier hills, than there had been just the week before.