“I know that.”
“It lets people make choices they never could make before. Martha’s sinuses are clear for the first time in years. And Gary’s not smoking. He doesn’t know whether or not to be happy about it, he liked smoking, but when he lights a cigarette he takes one drag and puts it out.”
“I remember what that was like.”
“Sue Anne cured herself of cancer. Most people would probably call that a miracle.”
“When was that? I didn’t know she had it.”
“Neither did she. She didn’t know she had it and she doesn’t know it’s gone, and I’m not sure whether I ought to tell her or not. She knows on some level, she had to know or she couldn’t have made it happen, but she doesn’t have any conscious knowledge and maybe she doesn’t need any.”
“How do you know she had it?”
“I picked it up when I first held her hand. I could see it, a mass in her right breast, and it felt — I don’t know, hot, sort of.”
“To the touch?”
“No, I only touched her hand. I felt heat from the lump in my mind when I scanned her. And then I made a point of taking her hand later that day to see if I got the same reading, and I did. There were some similar hot spots in her uterus, and I believe breast cancer frequently metastasizes there.”
“Jesus. And you didn’t say anything?”
“I wasn’t sure what to do, Guthrie. I’m a blind headshrinker, not a board-certified radiologist. I’m willing to trust my diagnostic skills, but why should anybody else be? If I sent her to a doctor and I turned out to be right, then he would remove her breast and her uterus and that might be enough to save her, or the same factors that led her to create the cancer in the first place might bring about a recurrence. In any event, she’d be in a hospital somewhere.” She smiled. “I thought it might be more efficacious to keep my mouth shut and wait for a miracle. But I decided to scan her every day so that I could monitor the condition.”
“‘Trust everybody but cut the cards.’ And when you scanned her—”
“The cancerous mass was reduced in both sites. That was yesterday morning. By last night the uterus was clear and the lump in the breast was smaller and there was no heat coming from it. And this morning it was completely gone.”
“Jesus.”
“Well, I suppose he may have had something to do with it. Depending on your belief system.”
“What happened, Sara? I don’t mean metaphysically. Where did the cancer go?”
“To cancer heaven, I suppose. Who knows what happens in spontaneous remissions? The cancer cells died. Maybe they killed themselves, maybe the other cells ganged up on them and ate them. The body does this sort of thing all the time, there are all these little SWAT teams cruising around the bloodstream on search-and-destroy missions.”
“‘The Walk That Cures Cancer.’ It sounds like something from the Enquirer.”
“I know it does. You know what they say, just because it’s in the Enquirer doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a lie.”
“I know, some of that shit actually happens.”
“My gums are getting better. My dentist says I’ve had significant bone loss, he’s been after me to have periodontal surgery for the past year and a half. My gums bleed easily and some of the teeth are a little loose in their sockets. But make that past tense. My gums don’t bleed anymore, and my teeth are no longer loose, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m regenerating some of that bone. That’s supposed to be impossible, but so what? ‘The difficult we do at once; the impossible takes a little longer.’”
“Except when it doesn’t.”
“Except when it doesn’t. ‘The Walk That Cures Periodontal Disease’ wouldn’t sell as many tabloids, but if it means I get to keep my teeth, I’m not complaining.”
“No, I don’t blame you.”
They fell silent. The moon was a pale sliver, and every possible star glinted overhead. The sky tonight seemed to Guthrie to have depth. Usually it looked two-dimensional to him, like the painted interior ceiling of a great dome, but now the stars appeared strewn at random across an infinity of space.
An owl called in the distance. The sound died, leaving the silence more pronounced. Guthrie said, “Is that what we’re walking for, Sara? Healing?”
“That certainly seems to be a part of it.”
“Sometimes it feels like an encounter group and other times like a visit to a faith healer.”
“It has elements of both, but the intensity is greater here, I think. And so are the results. And when something really dramatic happens, like Mame’s walk, it gives everybody a sense of the possibilities. I don’t know what the limits are. Maybe there aren’t any.”
“Why are some of us getting healed while others aren’t? Douglas has a bum hip, he’s had it since he was in high school, and I haven’t noticed any improvement since he got here. Mame walked away from her arthritis just like that, and his limp’s no better than when he joined us.”
“Maybe he’s not ready to give it up. Or maybe it’s not the healing he came for. Yes, we’re here to be healed. But that’s not the only reason we’re here.”
“What else is there?”
“I don’t know yet. I get flashes of it but I can’t see enough to guess the shape of it.”
He had another question, but he had to force himself to ask it. “Sara? What about your eyes?”
“What about them?”
“Has there been any healing?”
“Of my vision?” She patted his hand. “I’m not going to be getting my eyesight back, love. It’s gone.”
“What does that mean? That it would take a miracle?”
She shook her head. “That’s not the point. I didn’t come here to heal my eyesight, Guthrie. I came here to sacrifice it.”
“I know that.”
“I thought you did.”
“It’s just that, oh, when we were on the bridge today, crossing the Snake River? I couldn’t help wishing you could have seen it.”
“Oh, Guthrie,” she cried. “Would you like me to tell you what I see when I look at a river?”
Route 52 along the banks of the Payette River to Horseshoe Bend. Then a gravel road running right to a ghost town just below Placerville, and a turn onto another gravel road cutting southeast through New Centerville to Idaho City. Then Route 21 northeast through national forest and into the Sawtooth Range, and cutting southeast again to Stanley, and Route 75 east through Sunbeam and Clayton and north past Bald Mountain and a petrified forest and into US 93, and north along the Salmon River all the way to the town of Salmon, and Idaho 28 switching southeast to Tendoy, and then a road, unnumbered on his map, first gravel and then dirt, heading east over the Bitterroots and crossing through Lemhi Pass into Montana.
That was the route Guthrie had traced out for them, and it would have been a hard trip in a car. On foot it was harder, the sort of trek where you’d expect a certain amount of attrition, with some people dropping out and deciding to head back.
Nobody dropped out. On the contrary, people kept dropping in. Not all that many, because there was not that large a population base to draw from, but enough so that the group kept growing.
Dingo was an outlaw biker. He had a full beard, a shaved head, one black front tooth, a single gold earring, and a lot of scar tissue on his face and body. He wore jeans and a denim jacket with the sleeves cut off. He had an Iron Cross around his neck and a studded leather wristband on each wrist and heavy ass-kicking boots on his feet. He looked like a middle-class nightmare.
He was one of seven bikers on five Harley-Davidsons who caught up with the group early one afternoon. Dingo would have looked menacing all by himself. With his companions, he looked like Attila on the march.