had him lie face down. When she touched his back to rearrange the sheet, he twitched. As she began, his eyes were facing down and closed; still, he could see, in his mind, those energetic pale fingers. But there was no scalding water, no comment on his misshapen calves, his papery skin, his blue veins. No question about his uneven legs, the product of a quirk in his genetics that manifested itself at puberty, placing a kink in his adult body. She was telling him to relax, and how to do it, then asking him about pressure, tension, pain, and the way he imagined them: sharp, dull, throbbing, angry. As she spoke, she was leaning into her hands, pushing her entire weight into him with more force than he guessed possible. Kneading skin and muscle, her hands moved in arcs and circles, starting at the edges, but always inward: closer and closer toward his heart.
Through her fingertips Mary read the terrain beneath Arnold Mikesh’s skin, a frozen pile-up of muscle, tendon, and bone without capacity to properly shift or flow—a challenge for an hour-and-a-half of work. With so much seized up within him, she marveled that this man had smiled when he first spoke with her, red faced, with hat in hand, at her door. She needed this workout as much as Mikesh: reconnecting with her hands through an art that demanded she practice as regularly as a pianist or a dancer.
The anatomy that comprised the puzzle before her had gotten rearranged. Slowly but forcefully her hands learned the tangle of disorganized pieces, and located the places for which they were made, the ropes of muscle in their slots and the beadwork of bone in his spine—massaging the knots, testing the tension in cables of muscle, coaxing each piece into relaxed alignment. Mikesh was a man who used his back. Though he was neither trim nor defined, the calluses she saw on his hands, the firmness of his arms and shoulders, told her he was used to heavy lifting. She wondered where he came from, and what propelled him in the middle of a night when no one else was on the road to the lonely spot where Josh died.
Mary Towers was close enough to Josh that my mother chose her for consolation and several hours of shelter after we arrived from Des Moines to identify Josh’s body. Mary’s thoughts as she kneaded Mikesh’s muscle and skin were pulled to one of the last two times she had seen Josh. He had been in Decorah, holding a July gathering at the fairgrounds, healing people, laying hands on them, but it had gone on too long. When he tried to leave, there was a disturbance and he was hauled into jail. When she heard about it through a friend she felt troubled. She checked with the police and found Josh had gone to the home of a local minister. When she pulled up in front of the unfamiliar house in her compact Honda she was conscious of the heat and humidity: the kind of weather that made tomatoes swell and split. She heard voices in the back yard, and could smell barbeque. Slinging her workbag over her shoulder she walked around the garage to a deck where Josh was sitting in an aluminum chair. Peña, the minister and his wife, and three or four others, none familiar to Mary, were gathered around him. She could read Josh’s face, see that his mind was elsewhere. He needed time to himself. Josh may have been a healer, but who took time to heal him? Used to Peña’s aggression, she knew to ignore him, lest he order her away directly. She walked to Josh, crouched at his side and took his hand, explaining she’d heard about the day’s troubles. She knelt at his feet, and removed his sandals. Josh tensed, but said little. Pouring a sandalwood-scented oil over her hands, she ran them over the knobs of his ankles, cupped his heels, and then massaged the balls of his soles, squeezing, working back and then forward again to his toes. Conversation broke off. A woman joked, uncomfortably, that this might be something that would do the woman good too. More silence. Peña, agitated, his eyes narrowed, said that Mary had not been invited, that she was not “with” them. Mary had heard people describe the minister’s worshippers as “holy rollers.” She had heard the man’s voice on radio advertisements for Sunday worship. Now he was speaking about her.
“Joshua, you should be aware that this woman has a reputation around town.”
Mary felt her skin prickle and the blood rise to her head. The man did not deign to speak to her directly or to use her name. But she did not defend herself, did not speak angry words. She focused on moving the oil into Josh’s toes.
“Remember what being seen with her will make upright people think about you.”
Only then did Josh answer him: “She understood what I needed. You fed me. You welcomed me. But you didn’t do this.”
Josh having defended her, Mary looked to the minister and read the disgust on his face as he considered the image Josh suggested. She could not suppress a smile. She was burning at the words said about her reputation. She let her hair fall forward, dragging it back and forth across the upper arches of Josh’s feet wickedly, as if to confirm that she was the opposite of upright, to suggest that the minister also do this for Josh. Her unspoken taunt shoved the preacher out of his constrained comfort zone. The man rose in outrage, but Josh said, “let her be.”
She left soon after. Though she might have called Josh back into himself, she destroyed his welcome in that household. She had seen Josh only once since then, later in the summer. Then nothing. Josh carefully avoided her.
Mary refocused on her work with Mikesh. She sensed the healing inch forward. Spasmed muscles relaxed. The air Mikesh drew into his lungs pushed up more slowly and firmly against her fists. She methodically worked his back, his fingers, his face, his legs, his chest, the muscle of the shoulders that had pressed into the ground to get near to Josh before he died. This man exchanged last words with Josh. The man beneath her eased and quieted in his breathing. She had helped put him back into himself.
It seemed like barely twenty minutes had passed when Mikesh heard the woman saying he could sit up, get dressed when he liked. Mikesh felt like he had wakened from his first night of Christmas vacation sleep. His headache was gone. As Mikesh finished dressing, Mary Towers knocked, then sat on the massage bench, looking distracted.
Her work done, she felt the lethargy creeping back over her, dragging at her, and fought to keep it at bay.
“The one treatment may not do it for you, Arnie. Your back was twisted and balled up in a bad way. Any idea how that happened?”
“I don’t know. But it may have something to do with an accident. Did you hear about the car that left the road in the south part of the county on Friday night, the car driven by Joshua King?”
She woodenly bobbed her head. Helplessness broke over her like a gray ocean wave.
“I’m the one that found the car and called the ambulance. The man in the car, King, was still alive when I got there, but he died while we were waiting. It seems the experience messed me up.”
Still no response. Her eyes were closed. Mikesh grew uneasy.
She knew intimately the place where the shadowy waters would sink her and she would lose consciousness, and she knew she must fight, struggle to the surface where there was air she could draw into her lungs, air she could use to say something to this person seated before her, familiar with the source of her grief.
The words she found were, “Poor man.”
“I’m sorry. Are you talking about Joshua King?”
“Josh? No. No, I was thinking about you.” Her eyes opened.
“You called him Josh. Did you know him?”
She pulled back from the slope of her bereavement. “Josh was an old friend, someone I could talk to.”
She lowered her head, looking away. Mikesh was again struck by her hair’s intense blackness, its messy energy. His doubts, his earlier desire to flee, came rushing back.
“I’m sorry . . . about your loss.”
Mikesh
