He squatted by the fire, studying the new map, and when it burned lower he went off a ways and went on studying it by flashlight. The map was a puzzle, and when he made the mistake of trying to puzzle it out he wound up feeling like a lab rat in an unsolvable maze. The state was all mountains. Except for the Interstate, which did not lend itself to their sort of travel, all of the roads moved in a devious fashion, tracing circuitous paths through the Rockies. He found one promising route, more direct than most, that proceeded east along the Salmon River. But the line on the map suggested that it might be only a rudimentary road, perhaps no more than a foot trail, and when he checked the table of symbols he found out it wasn’t a path at all, it was part of the line of demarcation between the Mountain and Pacific time zones.
Talk about walking a thin line, he thought. Every false step would cost you an hour.
He gave up analyzing, and then the route seemed to jump out at him from the map. He found Sara sitting up beside the dying fire and led her off to one side.
“I think I’ve got our route,” he said. “I don’t know, though. There’s a stretch of 21 through the Sawtooth Range that’s marked ‘Closed in Winter.’”
“It’s still June, Guthrie.”
“I know that. Still, the roads they close in the winter may not open all that wide in the summer. It looks as though we’re in for a lot of steep climbing and bad roads and places with more bears than people. Does our celestial protection plan have a clause about bears?”
“I didn’t read the fine print.”
“What I’m getting at is we’ve got a woman with a kid strapped on her back and another who’s only thirty-odd hours out of an aluminum walker. Are they going to be able to make it?”
“Guthrie, I think Mame can cover any stretch of ground you or I can.”
“I think the same thing, only I feel like an idiot for thinking it. I’ve been wanting to talk to you about this all day. What the hell happened?”
“With Mame? She had a healing.”
“That sounds as though she scratched her knee on a thornbush and it mended without leaving a scar. That’s not what Mame had. She had a complete recovery from crippling arthritis.”
“Isn’t it more or less the same thing?”
“The way an ice cube’s the same thing as the chunk that sank the Titanic. What happened to Mame was a miracle.”
“I agree.”
“So—”
“Every healing’s a miracle, Guthrie. Say you scratch yourself on a Thom. The skin is broken, the flesh is torn, and although you don’t even give it a moment’s thought the blood coagulates and the cells reach out to one another and they grow back together. You don’t think that’s miraculous?”
“It may be hard to understand, and it may make you want to congratulate God on designing a good system, but it’s ordinary, isn’t it? It’s the way things work.”
“Just an everyday miracle,” she said. “You know, you can cut a piece of paper with a scissors, then patch it with Scotch tape, and you can leave it like that for a year and not have the paper grow back together again.”
“Sara—”
“I remember when my brother broke the leg off one of the dining room chairs by rocking on it, and my father glued that chair and put a couple of screws into it. But when Eddie broke his own leg skiing they didn’t use glue or screws, they just put it in a cast and it grew back together. Why do you suppose skin and bone mend themselves and wood and paper don’t?”
“I get the point. Life is a fucking miracle. But what happened to Mame wasn’t an everyday miracle. It was unusual, it was impossible, it was harder than your average run-of-the-mill miracle.”
She was shaking her head. “There’s no order of difficulty in miracles. They’re all impossible. You can’t divide them into major and minor miracles. This wasn’t the first miracle we’ve witnessed on this pilgrimage. Look how many of us have had healings of the spirit. Look what’s happened to Jody, to John, to Martha. Even for those of us who haven’t had a lot of tears and high drama, look how our spirits have been healed. We’re all becoming the people we really were all along. The deposits in the joints of our spirits are melting and washing away like Mame’s arthritis, and we can move and laugh and sing again.”
“You’re saying it’s the same thing?”
“Of course it’s the same thing. But Mame’s not the first person with a healing on the physical level. Look at you, for God’s sake.”
“Me?”
“You spent twenty years addicted to nicotine. You think that’s not a physical condition? Nicotine’s more addictive than heroin. If you run animal experiments, habituating them to a drug and then giving them free choice between the drug and water, you can determine what percentage get addicted. You get different percentages with different drugs, and there’s some variance with species. With nicotine the addiction rate is at or near 100 percent irrespective of species. And you quit. Don’t you think that’s a miracle?”
“Lots of people quit smoking.”
“Without trying? Without even intending to? And with no withdrawal symptoms and no craving?”
“Okay, it’s a miracle.”
“You had an even more obviously physical healing, didn’t you? Didn’t Jody take away your headache?”
“Oh, right. With his hands. He’s been doing that for a lot of people.”
“He takes away pain with his hands.” She smiled softly. “Jody grew up thinking he caused people pain. What better gift could he get than the ability to take their pain away?”
His head whirled, and he thought he’d probably need Jody’s services again soon. He said, “To get back to Mame—”
“She cured herself of arthritis, Guthrie. That’s all. All cures are the same. They happen when you decide on a cure and manifest it on a physical level. Sometimes you go to a doctor and he gives you something that triggers it. Sometimes you go to a church. Sometimes you go to someone like Jody, who gives you a transfer of energy that starts the process in motion. Then your body remembers what it’s supposed to do, and the bone knits or new skin forms or calcium deposits dissolve. That’s what a healing is, that’s what a miracle is. The wonder isn’t that they happen. The wonder is that they only happen some of the time.”
“Her healing was so fast, Sara.”
“I know. We usually don’t let ourselves mend that quickly because we know it’s not possible. But Mame was in a hurry. If she spent a month healing herself we’d be in Idaho before she was ready to walk.”
“I hope we’ll be out of Idaho by then. We’ll be in Montana.”
“The point is we’d be out of reach. Mame needed to heal fast, so she didn’t listen to the part of her mind that knew you couldn’t walk out from under that bad a case of arthritis in a couple of miles. She healed her spirit by undoing all the knots that she’d tied in it over the years, she let go of everything she’d been holding onto too tightly, and every step she took helped make her whole again.” She considered for a moment. “The first step set it all in motion. But she had to stay with it, she had to walk through the parts that hurt more than the arthritis.”
“Could she have done it without us?”
She spread her hands. “I don’t know how to answer that. People cure themselves all the time without walking across the country to do it. Sometimes it’s a cold, sometimes it’s a shaving nick, sometimes it’s a terminal illness. People choose their diseases and sometimes they choose to heal them. So Mame could have healed herself. She didn’t even have to walk to do it, with us or without us. But she probably wouldn’t have been able to make the choice to do it. There’s something magical about this walk of ours, Guthrie.”