The Healer of Harrow Point Read Online Free PDF Page B

as I could follow her.
    “Are you, you know, left-handed?” I asked.
    “Hmm,” was all she said.
    “People use so little of their real spiritual potential,” she told me. “They ease along on one percent, two percent in a crunch; for years they can drift along on nothing, nothing at all. Power can be given, infused. Mr. Nash was a great source of power. But you must be ready. Your spirit must be cultivated, strengthened, poked and prodded, stretched and battered about, educated, or an infusion of great power can burn you to a crisp.”
    Of course, everything she said was entirely new to me. I just listened in awe.
    Another time I asked her more about how she healed animals. She said that the more seriously injured an animal was, the more time she needed to heal it, and the more draining the healing was to her strength. Time was important. The deer I saw shot was relatively easy for her to heal.
    “But he was dead!” I said.
    “Oh, that. Well, there's dead and there's dead. His body was strong, full of warmth and life. If he had been there a few hours it would have been a different story. I think I could have brought him back, but it would have taken a good long time.
    “But then,” she said, “you take a rabbit that's been run over by a car, crushed; well, then it doesn't matter. You have to have something to work with.”
    I blinked. I didn't want to think about crushed rabbits.
    “But mostly it's just deer, somehow,” she went on. “It's just deer that I find. Sometimes I think that certain things are simply given to you.”
    “How about people?” I asked. “I mean, if someone died—”
    “No. I can't. Maybe some can. Mr. Nash said he had seen it, seen it from the woman who taught him. But he couldn't, and I can't. People are beyond me.” She chuckled at that. “People are beyond me in a lot of ways.”
    “But my face, when I was scratched that day!”
    “Oh, well, cuts, scratches, that's one thing. They don't really trouble you. But anything that truly frightenedyou, any serious injury where your spirit was shaken, or broken ...” she just shook her head.
    I looked down in despair. Once again I didn't understand.
    “The world is more connected than you know,” she said, in the slow, firm voice she used when she was trying to drill something into me. “You are what you see,” she said.
    “You are what you see,” I said to myself, as if repeating the words would help me to understand them. Then I asked another question.
    “So there was another, a woman before Mr. Nash?”
    She nodded. “Yes. We go back for ages and ages, Thomas. We've been burned as witches, feared as sorcerers, revered as messengers from God . . . but usually completely ignored, unknown. And unknown is best, believe me.”
    I was fascinated and troubled by the things she told me. It seemed to me her power to heal was goodness itself, and yet still I was troubled. I believed everything she told me. For me there was no question of not believing her. I had seen her power with my own eyes, and thought that such power must be wedded to truth. I spent my days in a state of pleased confusion, happy to be friends with Emma, and trying to understand her and the things she said. I suppose in a way I am still working on some of the things she told me.
    She was a large woman. Her face was weathered, red, shiny and smooth along her forehead and cheeks. Her eyes were bright and small, set in wrinkled pockets;they glittered a deep, unsettling blue. Her hair was gray and blond, long and full, and frizzy at the ends, flying everywhere when it was loose, sticking out everywhere when she tied it back, wound tightly to her head. She was not inclined to smile, but occasionally she would grin at something, and chuckle, which was fine. When the weather was at all cold she limped when she walked. She was neither fat nor muscular, but solid, solid through and through. She said she was eighty-three. She said Mr. Nash really was a hundred and