“Yes, darling,” the mother coos. “The nice man has come to help us. You like the nice man, don’t you, dear?”

“He likes to play,” the farmer says. “He plays down here all the time, don’t you, son?” the farmer says. “We just keep him down here so he won’t scare people,” he explains.

The parents see no need to recite the list of stray dogs and hapless cats caught and torn limb from limb, dripping joints of furred meat thrust mouthward without mayonnaise. The six-year-old girl still missing from last year is best not spoken of. The farmer now makes use of a pneumatic tranquilizer gun before laying on the chains and padlocks at night. Deliver at home beside his stillborn twin like Elvis, the hairy one has a headstone over his undug grave.

The warped and wavy line of his dented skull is thick with a rancid growth where small insect life traverses the stalks of his matted hair. He sways and utters his guttural verbs and fixes the healer’s face with his bated malevolence and grunts his soft equations into the dusty air.

“He wants to play,” the mother says. “Ain’t that cute.”

“Cute as a bug,” the farmer says, without loosening his grip on the pistol.

“I can’t heal him,” the healer says.

“What did you say?” the farmer says.

“Did he say what I think he said?” the mother says.

“I think you better say that again,” the farmer says.

“I can’t heal him. I can’t heal anything like this.”

“What are you saying?” the mother says.

“You heard what he said,” the farmer says. “Says he can’t heal him.”

“Can’t?” the mother says.

“I can’t,” the healer says, as the man on the floor drools a rope of drool and moans a secret rhyme and moves his shoulders to and fro and never takes his eyes off the healer’s face.

“I bet you’d like to know what happened to him,” the mother says.

“Horse kicked him,” the farmer says.

“Right in the head,” the mother says.

“Turned him ass over teakettle,” the farmer says. “Kicked him clean over a fence.”

“Like to kicked half his head off,” the mother says. “But you’ve cured worse than this. That little girl over in Alabama last year with that arm growed out of her stomach and that old man in the Delta who had two and a half eyes. You can heal him. Now heal him.”

“We done read all about you,” the farmer says. “We been trying to find you for months.”

“And then he just come driving right by the place,” the mother says. “Will wonders never cease.”

The man on the floor is trying to form the rude impulses necessary to gather his legs beneath himself and put his feet flat on the floor. He wants to stand and will stand in a moment, and the farmer reaches quickly behind him for a coiled whip on a nail.

“Easy now, son,” he says.