The Healer of Harrow Point Read Online Free PDF Page A

years old—no one knew how old he really was; eighty or so, we all thought. He didn't look all that old. He said he could talk to animals.
    “There was a place in town called the Johnson Home for Adults, a kind of nursing home and, really, sanitarium. Mr. Nash had lived there—well, stayed there, now and then—for as long as anyone could remember. He said he had come down from Tikkun Ridge, up near the state line, years and years before. No one knew any different. He was a strange man, strange habits. He would wander off for weeks at a time, then just show up one day and settle back into his room.
    “Sometime after my husband died, I guess I became a local character, too. I took in all sorts of strays: dogs, cats, and such. I had a mess of tame squirrels, a few rabbits. People began to bring me things: birds with broken wings and whatnot. Every so often Mr. Nash would limp along, his pockets full of milk bones and peanuts and little dry rolled pieces of oats and molasses. He had something for all the animals. He would sit on my porch or on the big stump in the yard, and in no time he would be surrounded by whatever animals were staying with me then. He would jabber away at them, and from where I watched, I believed the animals were jabbering right back. He never had much to say to me, though. Just the animals.
    “And then one day he came into the shop, carrying the fawn.
    “‘She's been hit by a car,’ he said. He sat down on the window ledge, cradling the fawn in his arms. ‘I'm getting too old for this. Think I might retire. So, you and me got to talk.’”
    “Of course, I didn't understand what he meant.”
    “We spoke for hours,” she said, “all night and through the morning. By noon, Mr. Nash was gone, and the fawn was healthy ...”
    She let the words hang in the air. She tried to let the story trail off, but there was no way I was letting her stop.
    I plagued her with questions. The secret was half told, I believed, and I wanted to learn the rest. Over the days to come, gradually but clearly, forcefully even, she told me things, taught me things. Interspersed with stories of her life, questions about my days at school, and observations on the weather and such, she began teaching me about a part of life that was utterly new to me.
    She told me that healing animals was a question of spirit, of spiritual strengths and hierarchies. I listened closely, and maybe understood a third, a fifth of what she said. Animals, she said, have great strength and beauty; spiritually, they are simple, however, and somewhat coarse. A human's spirit, she said gravely, is the greatest, finest, most powerful force in nature.
    “A tragic truth,” she said, and fixed me with a stare. Pay attention, her look said. This is important.
    I learned early on that she had a way of looking atyou, now and then, that simply commanded attention. It wasn't a look she used often, but there was no resisting it. To that point in my life the only person I knew that commanded such respect was my father.
    Again and again she emphasized the extraordinary power of the human spirit. She talked of it as being both a gift and a responsibility. But she said that I was not to think that animals did not have a power all their own. Integrity, she called it. She told me about a fox she found caught in a metal leg trap, a trap which had been meant for bear.
    “His leg was mangled, just mangled. He had been there a while, and I thought the fight was about out of him. He looked terrible. I spoke to him gently, and touched his leg, and his eyes met mine and the jolt! It almost knocked me over backwards.”
    “Jolt from what?” I asked.
    “From him. The simple, clean power of what he was. I hadn't met that in deer; they're such gentle creatures. There was power in that fox.”
    She shook her head. “It was all I could do to get the trap open and off his leg, and him fighting me all the way. Oh, he was strong, and not just physically, Thomas. His will was