The Healer of Harrow Point Read Online Free PDF

strong, his being. I was determined to do something for his leg and he was determined to have no part of it. I still don't know which of us was right. Sometimes I push too hard.”
    “Did you fix him?” I asked.
    She shook her head again. “I helped him. That's all I can ever do, help. Here's what I got for my trouble.”
    She showed me her left hand. At the base of her palm there was a wide, whitish scar, and an indented place, like part of her flesh was missing.
    “Did he bite you?” I asked.
    She nodded. “Hard,” she said.
    “Couldn't you heal yourself?”
    The question seemed to stop her. She shook her head.
    “It's funny,” she said at last. “I live this life, the things I do—but when it came to my hand, it's almost like I couldn't quite talk myself into it, couldn't quite believe it. I couldn't trust my own spirit, the way I impose my spirit on the animals.”
    We walked a while in silence.
    “I was right to try to help that fox, Thomas,” Emma said. “I don't know that I was right to insist.”
    “But you helped him,” I said.
    “It was a battle of wills. I won. I'm not saying I was wrong. Anyway, I'm hard-headed enough that I know I would do it again, if the situation were the same. But don't for a moment think that because your will is strong, these creatures don't have a perfect integrity of their own. An animal can be perfectly itself the way only the rarest of people can.”
    The point of her teaching was never the wonder, the magic of the healing, but the work of it, and the reasons behind it. She didn't want me to be in awe of her powers, or to be delighted in them as something magical. She was trying to get me to see, to really understand something of what she did.
    Once she began to teach me, her silences grew deeper, and more frequent. Sometimes I could scarcely get her to talk to me at all. We would walk along quietly together. It seemed at times that she was looking for something, or listening for something. I learned just to let her be, not to bother her with questions. An hour might pass in silence, two hours, and then suddenly she would start to talk again.
    To be honest, I had trouble following her. I would get used to the silence, enjoy it even, and then Emma would start teaching me, and I would struggle to understand her.
    She was squatting at the top of a ridge one day, tossing little bits of bark onto the ground in front of her. She was squinting up at me, in this way she had, as if she was arguing with herself over something, something to do with me. I just stood there, shifting from one foot to the other, waiting.
    “People have become so utterly, fundamentally convinced that spirit and matter are separate things,” she said, “that certain essential human skills have been all but lost.”
    I frowned at her, squinted back at her. I wanted to understand.
    “There is greater and lesser force,” she said. “But there are no planes, no levels of existence, no spirit world, no lower realms. There is no spirit as opposed to matter, no matter separate from spirit. There is only life. I've thought about this for a long time, Thomas. It's not that I am so sure I'm right, but I want at least to tell you what I think. Okay?”
    I shrugged. “Okay,” I said.
    “You see, people see one side of things, one facet of life—what they can immediately touch and see and feel. They think the spirit isn't real just because they don't think they can see it. But Thomas, understand, spirit is all you ever see.”
    She was looking at me hard. I don't know how much I understood. She shook her head.
    “It's as if folks had decided that the right hand is stronger than the left, and so never used their left hand at all. And you know what would happen”—I did not—“the left hand, the human left hand, would just get weaker and weaker, until it seemed useless. And think, Thomas, what would become of people born naturally left-handed?”
    I was eleven and I believed her, word for word, as well