The majority of the patients were local people, working men and housewives and widows, as faded and worn as the battered sofas they sat upon (Mr Brisbeau had tossed out the junk and scavenged them from somewhere); though as the weeks passed and word spread, more prosperous-looking people arrived from faraway places like Baton Rouge and Shreveport. Most of their complaints were minor, and there was little to be learned from treating them. But from the difficult cases, in particular that of Herve Robichaux, a middle-aged carpenter afflicted with terminal lung cancer, Jocundra put together her explanation of the healing process.
When medical bills had cost him his home, with the last of his strength Robichaux had built two shacks on a weed-choked piece of land near the Gulf left him by his father, one for his wife and him, the other for his five children. The first time Donnell and Jocundra visited him, driven by Mr Brisbeau in his new pickup, the children - uniformly filthy and shoeless - ran away and hid among the weeds and whispered. Their whispers blended with the drone of flies and the shifting of wind through the surrounding scrub pine into a sound of peevish agitation. In the center of the weeds was a cleared circle of dirt, and here stood the shacks. The raw color of the unpainted boards, the listless collie mix curled by the steps, the scraps of cellophane blowing across the dirt, everything testified to an exacerbated hopelessness, and the interior of the main shack was the most desolate place of Donnell’s experience. A battery-operated TV sat on an orange crate at the foot of the sick man’s pallet, its pale picture of gray figures in ghostly rooms flickering soundlessly. Black veins of creosote beaded between the ceiling boards, their acrid odor amplifying rather than dominating the fecal stink of illness. Flies crusted a jelly glass half-full of a pink liquid, another fly buzzed loudly in a web spanning a corner of the window, and hexagrams of mouse turds captioned the floors. Stapled on the door was a poster showing the enormous, misty figure of Jesus gazing sadly down at the UN building.
‘Herve,’ said Mrs Robichaux in a voice like ashes. ‘That Mr Harrison’s here from Bayou Teche.’ She stepped aside to let them pass, a gaunt woman enveloped in a gaily flowered housecoat.
Mr Robichaux was naked beneath the sheet, bald from chemotherapy. A plastic curtain overhung the window, and the wan light penetrating it pointed up his bleached and shrunken appearance. His mouth and nose were so fleshless they seemed stylized approximations of features, and his face communicated nothing of his personality to Donnell. He looked ageless, a proto-creature of grayish-white material around which the human form was meant to wrap.
‘Believe,’ he whispered. He fingers crawled over Donnell’s wrist, delicate as insects’ legs. ‘I believe.’
Donnell drew back his hand, both revolted and pitying. A chair scraped behind him: Jocundra settling herself to take notes.
The area of the magnetic field around Robichaux’s chest was a chaos of white flashes; the remainder of the field had arranged itself into four thick, bright arcs bowing from his head to his feet. Donnell had never seen anything like it. To experiment he placed his hands over the chest. The attraction was so powerful it locked onto his hands, and the skin of his fingers - as well as the skin of Robichaux’s chest - dimpled and bulged, pulled in every direction. He had to wrench his hands loose. They disengaged with a loud static pop, and a tremor passed through the sick man’s body.
Donnell described the event to Jocundra, and she suggested he try it again, this time for a longer period. After several minutes he detected a change in the field. The pulls were turning into pushes; it was as if he had thrust his hands into a school of tiny electric fish and they were swimming between his fingers, nudging them. After several minutes more, he found that he could wiggle the top joints of his fingers, and he felt elements of the field cohere and flow in the direction of his wiggle. A half hour went by. The four bright arcs encaging Robichaux began to unravel, sending wispy white streamers inward, and the pyrotechnic display above his chest diminished to a barely perceptible vapor.
Sweat poured off Robichaux, his neck arched and his hands clawed the sheet. Whimpers escaped between his clenched teeth. A spray of broken capillaries appeared on his chest, a webbing of fine purplish lines melting up into view. He rocked his head back and forth, and the whimpers swelled to outright cries. At this, Donnell withdrew his hands and noticed the wind had kicked up outside; the room had grown chilly. Jocundra was shivering, and Mrs Robichaux knelt by the door. ‘Holy Jesus please, Holy Jesus please,’ she babbled.
‘What happened?’ Jocundra’s eyes were fixed upon the sick man, who lay gasping.
