Flenco feels guilty for feeling her faith sag a little when she thinks of all the miles of roads the healer could be on and how easy it will be to miss him. She wonders if it was smart to abandon her big billboard sign by the side of the road and take off like this, but she was feeling the grip of a helpless sudden hopeless inertia and there was nothing to do but put some road under her wheels.

Flenco glances at Mr. Redding who is still oblivious to everything with the wind sailing up his nostrils. She takes a hefty slug of the beer between her legs. She nudges him.

“You want some of this beer, baby? You still asleep? Well you just go on and take you a nap, get rested. Maybe you’ll feel better when you wake up.”

Flenco hopes that’s so. She hopes for a clue, a sign somehow, maybe that gathering of the crippled in a field like she’s heard happens sometimes. If she can find him, she’ll deliver Mr. Redding into the healer’s healing hands herself. But if she can’t, she doesn’t know what she’s going to do. She feels like the eleventh hour is fast approaching, and her beloved sits on the seat beside her in stony silence, his mouth open, his head canted back, the wind gently riffling his thin gray hair now that his reversible cap has blown off.

“I think maybe they need a little time to get to know one another, mama, what do you think?” the farmer says.

“That might be a good idear,” the mother says. “Leave ’em alone together awhile and maybe they can play.”

The healer looks for a place to run but there are no windows in the airless chamber of what his good work has brought him to and no door but the one the farmer guards with the point of a gun.

“You can’t leave me down here with him,” the healer says, and he searches for some shred of sanity in the seamed faces of the farmer and his wife. His playmate edges closer.

“You could even eat supper with us if you wanted to after you heal him,” the mother says. “Be right nice if we could all set down at the table together.”

“He makes too big a mess for him to eat with us very much,” the farmer says, a little apologetically, gesturing with the gun. “Throws his food everywhere and what not.”

The farmer turns with the key in his pocket and fumbles down deep in there for it. He takes the key out and has to almost turn his back on the healer to get it in the lock, but he said, “I wouldn’t try nothing funny if I was you.”

“If you’re scared of him biting you we’ll hold him and not let him bite you,” the mother says.