Then they were gliding out into a vaulted chamber canopied by live oaks, pillared by an occasional cypress. Here the water forked in every direction, diverging around islands from which the oaks arose; their branches bridging between the islands, laden with stalactites of Spanish moss, some longer than a man, trailing into the water. The sun’s beams withdrew, leaving them in a phantom world of grays and gray-greens so ill-defined that the branches appeared to be black veins of solidity wending through a mist of half-materialized forms. An egret flapped up, shrinking to a point of white space. Its flight was too swift to be a spirit’s, too slow for a shooting star’s, yet had the quality of both. Mr Brisbeau’s pole sloshed, but otherwise there was a thick silence. The place seemed to have been grown from the silence, and the silence seemed the central attribute of the gray.
Mr Brisbeau beached the pirogue upon the bank of an island where three small crosses had been erected; a muskrat skin was nailed to each one. He climbed out and knelt before them. Kneeling, he was a head taller than the crosses: a giant come to his private Calvary. The skins were mouldering, scabbed with larval deposits, but the sight of him praying to this diseased trinity did not strike Donnell as being in any way grotesque. The silence and the great arching limbs abolished the idea of imperfection, and the decomposing skins were in keeping with the grand decomposition of the swamp.
Now and then Mr Brisbeau’s voice carried to Donnell, and he realized it was more of a conversation than a prayer, a recounting of the day’s events salted with personal reaction.
‘… You remember the time Roger Hebert smack me wit the oar, sparks shootin’ through my head. Well, that’s the way it was ‘cept there wasn’t no pain…’
Sitting in the boat for so long had caused Donnell’s hip to ache, and to take his mind off the discomfort he played tricks with his vision. He discovered that if he brought the magnetic fields into view and shifted his field of focus forward until it was dominated by the white brilliance of a single arc, then the world around him darkened and the gros bon ange became visible. He looked out beyond the prow and glimpsed a glowing tendril of green among the silvery eddies. He turned his head, blinking the sight away, he did not want to verify or acknowledge it. It dismayed him to think Jocundra might be right, that he might be able to see anything he wished. Anything as ridiculous as Bayou Vert. Still, he was curious.
‘What’s off there?’ he asked, pointing out the direction of the green current to Jocundra.
‘Marshlands,’ she said. ‘A couple of towns, and then, past that, Bayou Rigaud.’
‘Rigaud.’ The word had a sleek feel, and important sound.
He steadied the boat for Jocundra as she moved forward to sit beside him. ‘Why do you want to know?’ she asked. But the old man’s voice lifted from the shore and distracted his attention.
‘If I was you, me,’ he said contentiously, talking to the centermost cross. ‘I’d end this boy’s confusion. You let him see wit the eyes of angels, so what harm it goin’ to do to let him know your plan?’
Chapter 12
May 30 - July 26, 1987
One night after patients had begun to arrive in numbers, Donnell and Jocundra were lying on their bed in the back room surrounded by open textbooks and pieces of paper. The bed, an antique with a mahogany headboard, and all the furniture - bureau, night table, chairs - had been the gifts of patients, as were the flowers which sprouted from vases on the windowsills. Sometimes, resting between sessions, Donnell would crack the door and listen to the patients talking in the front room, associating their voices with the different flowers. They never discussed their ailments, merely gossiped or exchanged recipes.
‘Now how much lemon juice you addin’ to the meal,’ Mrs Dubray (irises) would ask; and old Mrs Alidore (a bouquet of Queen Anne’s lace and roses) would hem and haw and finally answer, ‘Seem lak my forget-list gets longer ever’ week.’
Their conversations, their gifts and their acceptance of him gave Donnell a comforting sense of being part of a tradition, for there had always been healers in the bayou country and the people were accustomed to minor miracles.
‘I think I’m right,’ said Jocundra.
‘About what?’ Donnell added a flourish to the sketch he had been making. It was a rendering of one of the gold flashes of light he saw from time to time, similar to those Magnusson had drawn in the margins of his ledger; but this one was more complex, a resolution of several fragments he had seen previously into a single figure:
‘About you being a better focusing agent for the fields than any device.’ Jocundra smacked him on the arm with her legal pad. ‘You aren’t listening.’
‘Yeah I am,’ he said, preoccupied by the sketch. ‘Go ahead.’
‘I’ll start over.’ She settled herself higher on the pillows. ‘Okay. If you transmit an electrical charge through a magnetic field, you’re going to get feedback. The charge will experience a force in some direction, and that would explain the changes in light intensity you see. But you’re not just affecting the fields. To cure someone as hopeless as Mr Robichaux, you have to be affecting the cells, probably on an ionic level. You aren’t listening! What are you doing?’
‘Doodling.’ Dissatisfied, Donnell closed his notebook. It did not feel complete. He could not attach the least importance to the gold flashes, yet they kept appearing and it bothered him not to understand them. ‘I’m listening,’ he said.
‘All right.’ Jocundra was miffed by his lack of enthusiasm for her explanation. ‘Now one basic difference between a cancer cell and a normal cell is that the cancer cell produces certain compounds in excess of normal. So, going by Magnusson’s notes, one likelihood is that you’re reducing the permeability of the nuclear membranes for certain ions, preventing the efflux of the compounds in question.’
Donnell rested his head on the pillow beside her. ‘How’s that relate to my being the focusing agent?’
‘NMR.’ She smoothed down his hair. ‘Magnusson’s stuff on it is pretty fragmentary, but he appears to be suggesting that your effect on the cameras was caused by your realigning the atomic magnetic nuclei of the camera’s field and transmitting a force which altered the electrical capacitance of the film. I think you’re doing more or less the same thing to the patients.’ She chewed on her pencil. ‘The fact that you can intuit the movements of the geomagnetic field, and that you’re able to do the right things to the patients without any knowledge of the body, it seems to me if you had enough metal to generate a sufficiently powerful field, two or three tons, then you’d be able to orchestrate the movements of the bacteria with finer discretion than any mechanical device.’
Donnell had an image of himself standing atop a mountain and hurling lightning bolts. ‘Just climb upon a chunk of iron and zap myself?’ ‘Copper,’ she said. ‘Better conductivity.’ ‘It sounds like magic,’ he said. ‘What about the wind?’ ‘There’s nothing magical about that,’ she said. ‘The air becomes ionized under the influence of your field, and the ions are induced to move in the direction imposed on the field. The air moves, more air moves in to replace it.’ She shrugged. ‘Wind. But understanding all this and being able to use it are two different things.’ ‘You’re saying I should go back to the project?’ ‘Unless you know how we can buy three tons of copper with a Visa card.’ She smiled, trying to make light of it.
Something was incomplete about her explanation, just as there had been about his sketch, and he did not believe either would come to completion at Shadows. ‘Maybe as a last resort,’ he said. ‘But not yet.’
The majority of the patients were local people, working men and housewives and widows, as faded and worn as the battered sofas they sat upon (Mr Brisbeau had tossed out the junk and scavenged them from somewhere); though as the weeks passed and word spread, more prosperous-looking people arrived from faraway places like Baton Rouge and Shreveport. Most of their complaints were minor, and there was little to be learned from treating them. But from the difficult cases, in particular that of H
erve Robichaux, a middle-aged carpenter afflicted with terminal lung cancer, Jocundra put together her explanation of the healing process.
When medical bills had cost him his home, with the last of his strength Robichaux had built two shacks on a weed-choked piece of land near the Gulf left him by his father, one for his wife and him, the other for his five children. The first time Donnell and Jocundra visited him, driven by Mr Brisbeau in his new pickup, the children - uniformly filthy and shoeless - ran away and hid among the weeds and whispered. Their whispers blended with the drone of flies and the shifting of wind through the surrounding scrub pine into a sound of peevish agitation. In the center of the weeds was a cleared circle of dirt, and here stood the shacks. The raw color of the unpainted boards, the listless collie mix curled by the steps, the scraps of cellophane blowing across the dirt, everything testified to an exacerbated hopelessness, and the interior of the main shack was the most desolate place of Donnell’s experience. A battery-operated TV sat on an orange crate at the foot of the sick man’s pallet, its pale picture of gray figures in ghostly rooms flickering soundlessly. Black veins of creosote beaded between the ceiling boards, their acrid odor amplifying rather than dominating the fecal stink of illness. Flies crusted a jelly glass half-full of a pink liquid, another fly buzzed loudly in a web spanning a corner of the window, and hexagrams of mouse turds captioned the floors. Stapled on the door was a poster showing the enormous, misty figure of Jesus gazing sadly down at the UN building.
‘Herve,’ said Mrs Robichaux in a voice like ashes. ‘That Mr Harrison’s here from Bayou Teche.’ She stepped aside to let them pass, a gaunt woman enveloped in a gaily flowered housecoat.
Mr Robichaux was naked beneath the sheet, bald from chemotherapy. A plastic curtain overhung the window, and the wan light penetrating it pointed up his bleached and shrunken appearance. His mouth and nose were so fleshless they seemed stylized approximations of features, and his face communicated nothing of his personality to Donnell. He looked ageless, a proto-creature of grayish-white material around which the human form was meant to wrap.
‘Believe,’ he whispered. He fingers crawled over Donnell’s wrist, delicate as insects’ legs. ‘I believe.’
Donnell drew back his hand, both revolted and pitying. A chair scraped behind him: Jocundra settling herself to take notes.
The area of the magnetic field around Robichaux’s chest was a chaos of white flashes; the remainder of the field had arranged itself into four thick, bright arcs bowing from his head to his feet. Donnell had never seen anything like it. To experiment he placed his hands over the chest. The attraction was so powerful it locked onto his hands, and the skin of his fingers - as well as the skin of Robichaux’s chest - dimpled and bulged, pulled in every direction. He had to wrench his hands loose. They disengaged with a loud static pop, and a tremor passed through the sick man’s body.
Donnell described the event to Jocundra, and she suggested he try it again, this time for a longer period. After several minutes he detected a change in the field. The pulls were turning into pushes; it was as if he had thrust his hands into a school of tiny electric fish and they were swimming between his fingers, nudging them. After several minutes more, he found that he could wiggle the top joints of his fingers, and he felt elements of the field cohere and flow in the direction of his wiggle. A half hour went by. The four bright arcs encaging Robichaux began to unravel, sending wispy white streamers inward, and the pyrotechnic display above his chest diminished to a barely perceptible vapor.
Sweat poured off Robichaux, his neck arched and his hands clawed the sheet. Whimpers escaped between his clenched teeth. A spray of broken capillaries appeared on his chest, a webbing of fine purplish lines melting up into view. He rocked his head back and forth, and the whimpers swelled to outright cries. At this, Donnell withdrew his hands and noticed the wind had kicked up outside; the room had grown chilly. Jocundra was shivering, and Mrs Robichaux knelt by the door. ‘Holy Jesus please, Holy Jesus please,’ she babbled.
‘What happened?’ Jocundra’s eyes were fixed upon the sick man, who lay gasping.
Donnell turned back to Robichaux; the field was reverting to its previous state. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Let me try again.’
The cure took three days and two nights. Donnell had to work the field an hour at a time to prevent its reversion; then he would break for an hour, trembling and spent. Her husband’s torment frightened Mrs Robichaux, and she fled to the second cabin and would not return. Occasionally the eldest boy - a hollow-cheeked eleven-year-old - poked his head in the window to check on his father, running off the instant Donnell paid him the slightest attention. Mr Brisbeau brought them food and water, and waited in the pickup, drinking. Donnell could hear him singing along with the radio far into the night.
The first night was eerie.
They left the oil lamp unlit so Donnell could better see the field, and the darkness isolated them in a ritual circumstance: the healer performing his magical passes; the sick man netted in white fire, feverish and groaning; Jocundra cowled with a blanket against the cold, the sacred witness, the scribe. Crickets sustained a frenzied sawing, the dog whined. Debris rustled along the outside walls, driven by the wind; it kicked up whenever Donnell was working, swirling slowly about the shack as if a large animal were patrolling in tight circles, its coarse hide rubbing the boards. Moonlight transformed the plastic curtain into a smeared, glowing barrier behind which the shadows of the pines held steady; the wind was localized about the cabin, growing stronger with each treatment. Though he was too weak to voice his complaints, Robichaux glared at them, and to avoid his poisonous looks they took breaks on the steps of the shack. The dog slunk away every time they came out, and as if it were Robichaux’s proxy, stared at them from the weeds, chips of moonlight reflected in its eyes.
During their last break before dawn, Jocundra sheltered under Donnell’s arm and said happily, ‘It’s going to work.’
‘You mean the cure?’
‘Not just that,’ she said. ‘Everything. I’ve got a feeling.’ And then, worriedly, she asked, ‘Don’t you think so?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, wanting to keep her spirits high. But as he said it, he had a burst of conviction, and wondered if like Robichaux’s belief, his own belief could make it so.
The second day. Muggy heat in the morning, the slow wind lifting garbage from the weeds. Weary and aching, Donnell was on the verge of collapse. Like the rectangle of yellow light lengthening across the floor, a film was sliding across his own rough-grained, foul-smelling surface. But to his amazement he felt stronger as the day wore on, and he realized he had been moving around without his cane. During the treatments the sick man’s body arched until only his heels and the back of his head were touching the pallet. Two of the man’s teeth shattered in the midst of one convulsion, and they spent most of a rest period picking fragments out of his mouth. The fly in the web had died and was a motionless black speck suspended in midair, a bullet-hole shot through the sundrenched backdrop of pines. The spider, too, had died and was shriveled on the windowsill. In fact, all the insects in the cabin - palmetto bugs, flying ants, gnats, beetles - had gone belly up and were not even twitching. Around now the eldest boy knocked and asked could he borrow the TV ‘so’s the babies won’t cry.’ He would not enter the cabin, said that his mama wouldn’t let him, and stood mute and sullen watching the heaving of his father’s chest.
On the second night, having asked Mr Brisbeau to keep watch, they walked down to the Gulf, found a spit of solid ground extending from the salt grass, and spread a blanket. Now and again as they made love, Jocundra’s eyes blinked open and fastened on Donnell, capturing an image of him to steer by; when she closed them, slits of white remained visible beneath the lids. Passion seemed to have carved her face more finely, planed it down to its ideal form. Lying there afterward, Donnell wondered how his face looked to her, how it displayed passion. Everything about the bond between them intrigued him, but he had
long since given up trying to understand it. Love was a shadow that vanished whenever you turned to catch a glimpse of it. The only thing certain was that without it life would be as bereft of flesh as Robichaux’s face had been of life: an empty power.
Jocundra rolled onto her stomach and gazed out to sea. An oil fire gleamed red off along the coast; the faint chugging of machinery carried across the water. Wavelets slapped the shore. Sea and sky were the same unshining black, and the moonlit crests of the waves looked as distant as the burning well and the stars, sharing with them a perspective of great depth, as if the spit of land were extending into interstellar space. Donnell ran his hand down her back and gently pushed a finger between her legs, sheathing it in the moist fold. She kissed the knuckles of his other hand, pressed her cheek to it, and snuggled closer. The movement caused his finger to slip partway inside her, and she drew in a sharp breath. She lifted her face to be kissed, and kissing her, he pulled her atop him. Her hair swung witchily in silhouette against the sky, a glint of the oil fire bloomed on her throat, and it seemed to him that the stars winking behind her were chattering with cricket’s tongues.
On the afternoon of the third day, Donnell decided he had done all he should to Mr Robichaux. Though his field was not yet normal, it appeared to be repairing itself. His entire chest was laced with broken capillaries, but his color had improved and his breathing was deep and regular. Over the next two weeks they visited daily, and he continued to mend. The general aspect of the shacks and their environ improved equally, as if they had suffered the same illness and received the same cure. The dog wagged its tail and snuffled Donnell’s hand. The children played happily in the yard; the litter had been cleared away and the weeds cut back. Even Mrs Robichaux gave a friendly wave as she hung out the wash.
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