The Dream Merchant

by Fred Waitzkin

  Meanwhile, the girl was angry with me for acting like the judgmental rabbi. She showed herself off shamelessly. I could have you, I could break you, she seemed to say. I tried to turn her my way by talking up the book. I told her that a book about Jim’s life would bring him fame and would be good for his business. She took this in.

  Jim had me begging to write the book. I was afraid he would die in her arms before I had the story.

  The first night I was able to get him talking, Jim skipped around, while she and I had to struggle to keep up, tried to imagine details and connections. They sat on the sofa and I pulled the La-Z-Boy closer. He jumped decades in a sentence. Jim wanted to move fast and hit the glamour spots for her, hunting jungle animals, the close calls, his considerable physical courage. Jim watched her face and when he thrilled her he smiled back with his love-goofy expression.

  She got into the swing of it. Jim, say the beginning, she prodded. Say when you were a little boy.

  Then Jim smiled at me to say, Look how smart she is.

  She was smart but also very literal and dogged. She kept nudging him to fill in the blanks. How did we get from there to here? Finally, she dragged him back to the beginning, his grandfather’s farm in western Canada where the story begins.

  Jim coughed for a time to gather himself.

  What first came to him was the smell. He hadn’t thought about it for a while, maybe since she’d come to live with him, but now he remembered the sweet sickly odor and fear spreading out from his neck and shoulders like the dark pool on the narrow concrete floor, some of it reaching the edges, where the floor came against a buckling wooden wall. Jim could see the puddle through a crack in the workshop door, viscous and blackening on the concrete slab. After sixty-five years he recalled it vividly. The afternoon was hot and he swatted flies and sweat from his face. Jim was afraid to push hard on the door, which was blocked by an unyielding weight. He was nauseated and shaking all over. In the kitchen sink there had been clumps of black hair. He didn’t want to open this door, not then and not now when they had no money, he and Mara and the kids eating chicken legs every night, not even enough to take her out to lunch. They drove to the Winn-Dixie in a twenty-year-old Volvo with bad brakes he’d picked up for six hundred dollars. A better car was out of the question. His stomach was in a knot at their poverty, or maybe it was the lingering stench of blood. He paused before starting to speak about the early years of hunger and heartbreak. He coughed, to steal another few seconds.

  * * *

  Jim’s dad, Nathan, in a fancy suit with wide lapels and a perfectly folded handkerchief in his pocket, striding off past the pigpen of his father’s farm, kicking at a few chickens while he crossed the dirt yard. Through the kitchen window Jim could see the old Chevy moving away from the farm on a narrow winding road. He ran outside to watch the taillights flicker and disappear. Where’s Dad going? Sally shrugged.

  A little boy on a farm in western Canada is wealthy with things to see and wonder about. Jim awoke to the dry rush of prairie wind through his half-open window. Outside, the trees were bending. Something wild was happening. Get up and race to the swing on the big maple tree. Feel the wind on his face. Smell the fresh-cut hay and the manure of horses, smell it way up his nose into his cheeks. Good. Smell the turned-over earth, even better than eggs, made him feel all opened up to living. Get up and search for worms and bugs. Dig some potatoes for Sally and smell your hands. Get up. Smell the fried eggs sizzling in the summer kitchen, a big cool pitcher of milk set on a great slab of ice below the floor. Dad sets his beer gently on the ice that doesn’t melt all summer. Dad’s face is filled with wanting something. Get up. Through his little window Jim looks at the rolling hills, and a picture of cows grazing down near the river. Lovely, peaceful cows that don’t move until Jim comes very close.

  From his window Jim could also see a little shack, a workshop where his dad sometimes did carpentry for his own father. Nathan held rough pieces of wood in his vice that smelled of oil, and after a few days he carried a finished chair or little table from the shed. Jim wanted to learn how to do this trick. He wanted to stand beside his dad, who always smelled good. Jim shuddered at the pleasure of Nathan.

  Jim petted the cows and wiped away flies from their ears and noses. They had big dopey faces. He played with their ears, touched the drool on their soft mouths. In the corral they were bored, swishing and stomping in mud and cow dung. He liked them better in the field. Most afternoons he walked toward the river and learned how to track them in the grass and dirt. He called to them in his biggest voice and shook the chop bucket. The lumbering beasts followed him through the gate when it was time for milking. Jim was master of the cows.

  Nathan pursed his lips, looked very serious tying his tie in the mirror. He was the boss. Jim watched his father shine his shoes to a deep luster. Jim wanted to be the boss. Nathan said to Sally he wanted to ride in a Cadillac. She sighed. I’ll never be able to own one, but at least I could see how it feels on the road, he said, while Sally washed the dinner dishes and tried to push down her disquiet.

  Nathan walked out the door with a slam. His work was dressing up and going out. What’s a Cadillac? Jim asked. What a nice name, Cadillac. Sounded rich and bold like his dad. Jim wanted to go out and find Nathan. He wanted to smell perfume on his face and body. Mostly he wanted to dress like Nathan. He practiced with a ribbon tying his tie. Practiced pursing his lips like Nathan when he tied his tie. Sally shook her head. Jim practiced folding a napkin and putting it in the pocket of his filthy flannel shirt. He sat in bed folding it over and over, a hundred times.

  A Cadillac is a big fancy car, Mommy, must be good to ride in. I want a Cadillac. Where is he, Mommy? She wouldn’t say. She washed their clothes, worked even when she might have rested an hour. There was always work to be done on a poor farm like this one. Toil was respite from worry and questioning. Grandpa took care of the big family as best he could. Whenever he gave Sally a few cents, she saved it in a rag. Actually, there was a box of knotted rags. The secret stash had been growing for some time; maybe something important would come of it, though she couldn’t imagine what. Nathan had all the big plans.

  Sometimes Nathan didn’t come home for a couple of nights. Sally accepted his infidelities without a word. There was nothing to do. From the kitchen window she would watch her husband leaning against the old car, staring at the hills.

  Again and again Jim’s dad dressed up and threw himself into the night, rode hope into town, and took what he could, except he was turned away for not having a buck, couldn’t go to good restaurants or buy things that might have appeased him. Nathan resented the successes of other men, the tailored cut of their suits, their pretty, made-up ladies. Much of the time he was drugged and blackened by lusting and resenting and could not focus on his sturdy wife and pauper children. Doing the work of the farm, which he understood would someday pass on to the eldest of his twelve brothers, was futility and malaise. Nathan chased his urges and stole small favors, whenever he had the chance.

  One fall afternoon, before Jim turned seven, Nathan announced that they would have to leave the farm, Grandpa couldn’t afford to keep them around anymore; he couldn’t feed everyone in the big house and keep it warm. It was something called hard times. Jim wondered why his uncles could stay for hard times and they couldn’t. He worried about leaving the cows but then decided he’d be returning soon. He couldn’t imagine not coming back to where he’d lived his whole life.

  The family took a bus to a tiny village outside of Edmonton, about seven hundred miles to the west. Nathan had heard there was work there. They found a small house in the country and rented it for eight dollars a month. The front room had a dirt floor. In the kitchen there was a little wood stove. There were three other rooms, but only the kitchen was heated as long as they had wood to put in the stove. There was a toilet but no bath and not a stick of furniture in any room. They would have to sleep on the floor. It was a cold, forlorn place.

  Sally
spread some blankets and then, sitting beside a flickering candle, she showed Nathan her money saved over the span of five years, a little more than two hundred dollars. She counted it out slowly, with a hesitation, wanting to please him, but also feeling the urge to pull it back and knot it away again—her secret life dissolving with this pile of dollars and loose change on the blanket. But maybe he would love her again now that he was away from the farm. That was her hope. Nathan was astonished at such a sum, and sobered to discover that his wife had kept this big secret. She saved her pennies milking cows, mopping, digging, planting, cooking, cleaning, sixteen hours a day without ever taking a holiday. She kept it from him and now they had it. He called her a good girl and hugged her on the cold floor. There was enough money for Nathan to go and buy furniture and a new stove for the kitchen, to put food in the pantry and to buy cotton for Sally to sew new shirts for the kids to wear on their first day in school, so they wouldn’t be embarrassed, and make curtains for the front room and the kitchen. She wanted to make it a cheerful place. Then when he had a job they would put in a wood floor in the front room. That would help. They would manage until he found work.

  Nathan brought home meager provisions for the kitchen—a few cans, some cereal, milk, enough for a few days—but next to nothing sitting on a shelf made a desolate picture. While she waited for the furniture to arrive, Sally did what she could around the house and ran after the kids.

  For weeks, Nathan looked in Edmonton for work, but he couldn’t find a thing, not one day’s labor. Thousands of men were looking.

  Nathan told Sally he was going to ride the trains and look for work farther west. During depression times many men were riding the freights. Sally was impatient. Where were the furniture and her new stove? They would be delivered to the house in a few more days, he said. She didn’t want to wait for Nathan to find employment and start sending her money—he wasn’t a good bet. Sally had already talked to a few neighbors who agreed to buy her fresh-baked bread, and occasionally she would sell them some cookies and a cake. Sally was a resourceful and energetic worker—she wanted to get started and needed the stove. In her mind her little business was already taking shape. But now they had next to nothing in the house. They needed to make some money fast. The kids had big holes in their shoes. She tied rags around their shoes and sent them off down the road to school with a couple of pieces of bread and jam.

  The night Nathan left on the train she confronted him about the furniture, stood in front of him, hands on her broad hips while he weaved around. Where’s the furniture, Nathan? Where’s my money? Or else he would have walked out the door without a word about it. And he wouldn’t have cared, on the wondrous first night of his odyssey, lying on his back, looking up at the stars from a speeding train. He told her he had taken the money and gambled it on pork options, lost every last penny. He explained this while he gathered his things, folded his suit, put on his new shoes, searched for a clean handkerchief without sense for the outrage of his vanity, let alone the import of his crime.

  We might have made a fortune, but it didn’t work out, Sally. I tried, he said with heaped-on repentance. She shook her head and didn’t say a word.

  What did it matter if he spent her money on pork options or poker or more likely on some women who thought he was a business owner having a sporting weekend on the town—what did it matter? Or maybe he was leaving them with a hundred in his pocket and a dream about where he would go and whom he would meet. She could feel his festive stirrings—she knew him. But what did it matter how he lost it? They were a desperate family. In a few more days they would owe eight dollars for the month’s rent. She didn’t have two dollars. What would she do when the lady came for her money? Nathan left them this way, rushing out the door for the whistle of a train.

  It was deep into the fall and the prairie wind was frigid even before dark. Wind seeped through the thin wood walls, rushed through loose window frames and beneath the front door. Even with the stove hot, the house was cold and the children wore most of their clothes to bed at night. They smelled from never bathing.

  Sally begged in the church and when she had nothing, she pleaded with strangers on the street. She heated a little soup before bed and gave the boys bread in the morning. One man took pity and gave her three dollars—it gave her just enough to pay the rent a week late. But what about next month? If they were put out, where would they go? How would Nathan find them?

  One morning Jim woke to go to the bathroom and the toilet was frozen solid. Go out back, said Sally. They were living in a frozen house. The four of them began sleeping in the kitchen huddled together around the fire. There was no tub to bathe in. In the morning, they went to the bathroom in the yard beside a broken shed. The earth was too hard to dig a hole. She sent them off to school, walking across snowy fields with holes in their shoes. At least it was warm in the school. Sally spent her day walking the streets looking for work, and then it was a five-mile hike back from town. She came into the freezing place bone tired and hungry, lit the fire before the kids arrived from school. But then, gripped with fear that her children would starve, she rushed back out to the church, two miles down the road, and mopped floors until night to earn a quarter or two. She was driven by terror, and often took the two little ones into a store and begged for an onion or a carrot. If she was lucky she would cook a few vegetables in her little pot with some butter. The four of them dipped bread into the pan.

  Months passed and the family starved. Not a word from Nathan. But Jim was certain his father was doing something splendid. Starting a business was what usually came into Jim’s mind, although he wasn’t altogether sure what that meant. He had many fantasies about Nathan. Some days he worked in a wood-paneled office dressed in his fine suit with a folded handkerchief and shining shoes. Other days Nathan was out west searching for gold in the mountains. That was the story Jim liked most. His dad was striking it rich in the mountains, maybe in Alaska. On some days Jim allowed himself to join Nathan and they found gold together.

  One evening Sally came home with her face flushed and a bad smell on her breath. Her speech was rambling and her message unusually candid.

  We need to start making money or we won’t survive, Jim. We’ll all be dead, she continued, grabbing her son’s hand. This is your father’s fault. The way he left us with nothing at all. How can we pay the rent? What are we to do?

  Sally careened into Nathan’s history of idleness and lavish spending and told the boy how his father had stolen her money. She spoke to Jim with candor and detail, as though he were her confidant and last chance rather than a kid. She wept. She beseeched him, What are we to do?

  * * *

  Jim narrated this early history in a dilapidated cottage with filthy sheetrock walls, soiled rugs, and broken furniture, a house wreck presided over by a flagrantly sexual and opportunistic girl. Who says you can’t go home again? I couldn’t help thinking that Jim’s father would have died for a Mara. He left his family in a freezing house without a few dollars to pay the rent or buy a morsel of food. The family would have starved to death except that Jim was clever and charming even then.

  There was a dairy farm a few miles down the road. Jim decided he would go there and speak to Mr. Hayes. Jim wasn’t really sure how much he knew or didn’t know about cows. More than a half year had passed since they had left Grandpa’s farm, a long time for a boy. But he had moxie and seemed to understand he’d have to introduce himself in a way to catch the farmer’s attention. Jim planned to tell Farmer Hayes that he knew how to talk to cows.

  Jim knocked on the door and waited until a big man in overalls opened it up. The hulking farmer did not exactly embrace young Jim. These days Hayes was bothered too often by poor people looking for a nickel or something to eat. When he said, I can’t use you, go on home, kid, Jim didn’t budge. This familiar place warmed him inside, the barn and the machines, the smell of the tilled earth. But Jim felt something besides nostalgia. The farmer’s vast green meadow spread out befo
re Jim like a calling. Jim wanted to make this first big step into the world. He camped on the porch and the farmer shook his head and went back inside. He didn’t need a boy who talked to cows, but he couldn’t help chuckling.

  A little later, Hayes came back out with a piece of apple pie and an offer: You go out and find my herd and bring them back to the barn for milking. If you can do it, I’ll give you work to do around here. It’s like a test, he said, while Jim savored his last bite of pie. Mr. Hayes was only getting rid of a little beggar in a tattered coat. He was a good man, but he didn’t want the boy’s misery around his farm. He was sure Jim would get tired or bored in short order and head back from where he came.

  The cows are out there. The farmer gestured with his hand and shut the door firmly. Out there, beyond the meadow and distant tree line—somewhere, it might have been the end of the earth he was pointing to.

  Jim set off to find the cows. If he had been a few years older he might have experienced this as an agony—a test to save his starving family—but for an eight-year-old it was just a game. Starvation was a mother’s concern and Jim was still licking apple pie off his lips. He felt at home in the big meadow, picked a few daisies and smelled the spring. He headed off for the trees, about a mile and a half away, swinging an empty bucket he picked up in the yard. It was a game he’d played before. Find the cows. In the meadow there was no dirt for tracks, so he searched for bent underbrush. He was an Indian crisscrossing the meadow until he found a route of trampled grass pointing toward the trees.