“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.

A low, uneasy moaning begins at sight of the bullwhip, and the bared teeth alternate with that in a singsong incantation as he totters up onto his knees and rests his folded knuckles flat on the floor. The hair is long on his back and arms and legs. His face is transfixed with an ignorance as old as time, yet a small light burns in his eyes, and he has a little tail six inches in length extending from the coccyx bone with a tufted tip of bristles. He slides forward a few inches closer to the healer. Old bones lie piled in corners for safekeeping with their scraps of blackened flesh.

“You might as well go on and heal him,” the farmer says. “We ain’t letting you out of here till you do.”

“He’s been like this a long time,” the mother says.

“You don’t understand,” the healer says. “I’ve never dealt with anything like this.”

“You cured cancer,” the farmer says.

“Raised the dead, I’ve heard,” the mother says.

“No ma’am. Ain’t nobody ever raised the dead but Jesus Himself,” the healer says, as the thing begins to look as if it would like to grab his leg. He tries to retreat, but the gun is in his back like a hard finger.

“What you think, mama?” the farmer says.