“Hot in there, ain’t it?”
Robert nodded. “Sure. Good to get some air.”
“Perfect night.”
Again Robert nodded, silently.
“You’re the dream peddler.”
“That I am.”
“I’m Jackson.”
They breathed in the smoke side by side, the hearts burning in their chests.
“What’s that mean, exactly, dream peddler? What’s that like?”
Robert blew out before answering. “It’s just a gift I have. Anyone wants to dream a particular thing, something they don’t usually dream, they come to me. I make a mixture, the customer drinks it before going to sleep. They have the dream.”
“Sounds like a good racket.”
“I assure you it’s not. Money-back guarantee.”
“Oh, really? Well, I might have to try it sometime.”
“Whenever you like.” Robert watched the mist of their talk dissolve over the edge of the steps. “What’s your pleasure?”
The boy tried tapping his cigarette out into the bushes down below, but it was too soon, and there was no ash. Eventually they found the same rhythm, of hand to the face and rise of the chest, then the downward arc of the orange stars while their breath escaped with the light.
“I’d just want to get out of here, plain and simple. I’d go to the city in my dreams, do something great, become really rich. Something grand like that.”
“Why don’t you just go on and do that in real life?”
“Maybe I will. But a dream would be all right, too, for now.”
“Sure.”
The young man looked out at the tarnished darkness, gnawed through here and there by a distant lantern. Robert smoked and pictured Evie twirling in the light behind him. He could almost feel her shadow slant through the glass and graze his neck.
“Do you ever dream anything you don’t understand? About yourself, I mean? Ever dream that you’re someone you don’t even recognize?”
Robert smiled at that. “Constantly.”
Jackson smoked quietly for a while, passing the cigarette from one hand to the other as if he didn’t know which one to favor.
“So you’re not married?”
“Well, I bring no wife with me, so it’s what people assume.”
“Oh.” He looked away. “So you are married, then.”
Robert sighed. “I was, once.”
“What happened?”
“It’s not something I talk about. It didn’t work. I was a bad husband to her. So I left.”
Jackson looked at Robert intently. “Yeah. Me, I don’t know if marriage would be for me. I don’t think I ever will do it, get married.” He held up the cigarette and stared into its burning eye. “I guess my parents would be awfully disappointed.” He leaned his head back against the boards of the schoolhouse, and his wide-open eyes picked up the moving light inside and shone as if he were crying, although he wasn’t.
“It’s a funny thing, you know,” Robert spoke eventually. “I’ve been to many towns like this one before and known many people who thought of leaving but never did. And maybe if they did leave, sure, their lives would be better, but then again maybe not. Life is a matter of routine, in a sense, no matter where you are. Big city, small town, it doesn’t make much difference.” He pulled thoughtfully on the cigarette. “There’s no adventure in leaving, when you come down to it. I’ve built a life on leaving, and I can tell you now, even that becomes routine.”
“So what are you saying? That there isn’t any point to it all? There’s nothing out there to find?” Jackson tossed his unfinished cigarette into the dirt, and its glow embered down to a single spark.
“Not exactly. Sure there are things and people out there to discover. But your life is the adventure. Your life. Whether you choose to stay or leave.” Robert reached over and placed his hand on Jackson’s chest. “It’s in here, son. The adventure is in here.”
He moved to take his hand back again, but Jackson quickly covered it with his own. Robert’s head jerked up in surprise, and then both hands dropped at the sound of a scuffle approaching the doorway, and a few more boys jostled out onto the steps.
“Come for a drive, Jack?” one of them called out, recognizing him.
“Yeah,” he said, without looking up. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and scuttled down the stairs with them into the school yard.
“I’m sorry,” Robert said to his back, but he did not think the boy heard.
Chapter 14
That night the cool evening went cold and a strange spring snow came down, fat as cotton.
On Robert Owens’s elixir, Laura Bachmeier went away on an African safari. She watched a caravan of elephants move with glacial slowness across the savanna, like wrinkled hunks of stone. Alice Gertson’s son Mortimer had grown up to be an airplane flier and was gliding her skillfully through a sunset pink, while little Mary Watkins had spent her pennies on a longed-for trip to the circus, which she had never in real life taken. Tigers went through flaming hoops, and monkeys in red velvet jackets danced over the dust, and the face of the ringmaster was painted and greasy like a clown’s. Rupert Shaw had married someone else, just for one night, a woman who always smiled vacantly and never nagged. And Elmer McBryde had gone to the Yukon for a pan full of gold, and he rolled the glints of it, choking the wet sand like stars, under an undulating sky of northern lights.
In the morning a warmer air passed over the snow, drawing up a low stubborn fog. All day it would resist the burning sun and never lift. In the sitting room, Benny’s handprint could not be seen, but Evie went and put her hand over the place where she knew it to be, not touching the glass.
Why is it like this? she wondered. It would hurt less to come out slow in a long, straight climb, but it didn’t seem to work that way. She broke the surface for air and then went down again, coming out and falling back in, over and over and over and over.
“Cows have been done,” George said to her from the kitchen, and she returned to him.
“Good,” she said. “I’ll have breakfast on in just a minute.”
He had left her the day’s eggs on the counter, so she cracked a few into a bowl while the water was heating for their coffee.
“That was a fun time last night,” she said while she cradled her bowl and looked at him, whisking.
George nodded. “Awful lot going on, it seems.”
Evie smiled. “I told you. There’s always plenty to see at a dance. Did you see John Shaw’s father taking him out at the end by the collar?”
“What was that all about?”
“He showed up drunk. He and some friends got their hands on something. So drunk he didn’t have the good sense to go home and sleep it off. They might never have known it then.”
She turned and poured her eggs into the hot buttered pan. They shriveled in and right away began to bubble.
“You’re still a beautiful dancer. I’d forgotten.”
She scraped at the eggs. “You’re not too bad yourself.”
When they were ready, she brought them to the table, and a few thick slices of bread and the dish of butter. She had served herself a small plate and took no bread.
“You should eat more.”
“I know. I’m just not very hungry.”
The curdle of eggs slipped down her throat, and she gagged. She reached for her coffee, chasing the food down with it. The hot coffee helped, scalded her insides clean.
George pulled his eggs around the rim of his plate with a fork. “And what did you think of Robert Owens carrying on with the Jenkins girl like that?”
Evie swallowed and grimaced. “I think it might have been more her carrying on with him, actually.”
“Either way. That’s trouble, there. He’s too old for her and not the proper sort of man at all. He’s practic
ally a vagrant.”
Evie smiled. “All they did was have a dance, George. I didn’t see him get down on one knee and propose.”
“You know what I mean.” He lifted the forkful of eggs in the air, and some fell back to his plate.
“I do. And I think Cora Jenkins might be the silliest girl ever born to this town. But there you have it. If she will run after the likes of Mr. Owens, people will talk, and her reputation for flirting will be even worse for it. But he’s not the type to stay around forever, is he? I think all that could possibly come of it is that Cora will be very disappointed when he does leave.”
“She’ll end up with a broken heart.”
“Maybe. But it will probably be her own fault.”
While George shoveled his food, tearing at bread and mopping his plate, Evie drained her coffee cup and put it down. “And what happened to him after that dance, do you think?” she asked. “He seems to have a strange habit of ducking out early from everything.”
George looked up. “I’m surprised you would have noticed.”
Evie rose, fussing with stacking their plates and clearing the table. “He took some punch for Cora and never brought the cups back to me. And when I saw the cups sitting empty where he’d set them down, I looked around for him. He was gone.”
George folded his arms across the table where his plate had been.
“Are you picking on the poor fellow for not carrying the cups back? You don’t mind about Cora, but this . . . this bothers you?”
“Never mind.”
George looked at her carefully. “You’re not thinking of . . . giving him any business, Evie?”
“No, I am not.”
“Because if you are, I don’t recommend it. Waste of money. I’ve heard all the tales, of course, but I don’t think he could really be manufacturing dreams. Luck, I expect, is all it is.”
“For goodness’ sake, you sound like my mother. She warned me off him, too. Why does anyone think I’m even interested in it at all?”
“Because,” he said. He stood and carried his empty cup to the sink. “Because for some reason you’ve got your eye on him.”
* * *
* * *
“Don’t forget, Evie and George are coming up for dinner tonight,” Rose called when she saw Sam taking his hat off the rack by the door.
“I’ll be back in plenty of time to see them. Zeke Olson broke his leg a while back, and I’m going over to take the cast off for him, that’s all.”
She nodded and went into the kitchen to mix up a meat loaf and peel some potatoes. She would coax out Evie’s appetite with one of her old favorite dinners and an angel food cake for dessert. While she worked her hands into the mixture of ground pork and beef, massaging in spices, she gazed out at the orchard. Neither she nor Sam had taken the trouble to prune the trees these last few years, and they tangled and twisted together, every year giving less fruit. Different varieties of insect and disease were flourishing in the abundant shade and creeping over them.
She molded the meat loaf into her pan and pumped fresh water to wash her hands. Her wedding ring sat on the windowsill where she’d left it, spiraling the afternoon sunlight. As she slipped it back over her finger, the skin puckered around her knuckle. When she rubbed herself, it slid across the back of her hand, as if the skin were slowly separating from her, detaching as though it thought she shouldn’t need it anymore. How easy it was to grow old, she thought, easy as a raft along a river.
The meat loaf in to bake, she went outside to sit on the porch and wait for her company. At the sight of the tulip masses, she felt a phantom ache in her back from all the hours she’d bent over the soil. Last fall when Benny was visiting, she’d shown him how to plant his own little patch of flowers and shown him, too, how to sprinkle them with cayenne pepper to keep the squirrels away. He’d wanted to taste a pinch to see how it worked, and how she’d laughed at him as he ran back into the house for water. She let him choose whatever colors he wanted, and he’d surprised her by planting only pink. “Not for me,” he said. “I don’t like pink, you know. They’re for Mum.”
As if in answer to her thoughts, there were Evie and George jostling along behind Chester down the road. She wanted Sam to buy them an automobile but Evie kept saying no. She didn’t want to ride that fast.
“Half the fun for me is watching everything go by,” she said. “I like things to go slowly so I can take it all in.”
“You’d be so much more comfortable in a Ford,” Rose told her.
“My rear end would be,” she agreed. “But my soul would not.”
Rose didn’t argue.
Evie climbed out of the buggy down by the road and walked up through her mother’s tulips. In the bright evening sun, their cups glowed gumdrop colors, and the colors seemed to hum. Evie didn’t look at her, but Rose waved to George as he drove the horse over to the shed, and then she walked down to meet her daughter. She cordoned Evie with her arms, hands meeting easily now in the middle of her back. Evie wore no corset, and Rose could make out the ridges of her spine. She held her daughter tighter in case there might be something to read in them, some unseen future pushing up like a pattern of runes. Keeping one arm around her, Rose walked Evie up to the house, and the scent of the meat loaf met up with them.
“That smells good,” Evie said, just as if she had every intention of eating it.
George crossed the porch toward them and took a chair.
“Let me go inside and get us some lemonade,” said Rose. “Sam’s out on a call, as always, but we can sit out here and wait for him.”
They watched the sun reddening the west. The lemon tartness spread across their tongues. They all turned the other way when they heard the motor of the Whiting automobile in the distance, and it came around the bend as if they had willed it, were all dreaming the same dream of Dr. Whiting blowing cigar smoke into the windshield glass, the road wincing under his wheels. He drove past them, and his smile, formed around the big teeth clamped on the cigar, came off like a grimace.
When the meal was tucked away (Evie’s pushed to the rim of her plate), Sam stood up and patted his son-in-law’s shoulder.
“Going to take some of our canned nectarines over to Mrs. Coldbrook. You come with me, all right.” It was phrased like a question but not spoken like one.
The men went outside while Evie and Rose cleared the plates. Rose washed, Evie dried, just as they’d always done. While they worked, Rose started talking. She preferred to have weighty conversations side by side, not face-to-face. She was like a man that way.
“I’ve been having a feeling about you and that dream peddler,” she said.
“You have a feeling? What kind of feeling?”
“Just a bad sense that he is somehow going to cause trouble for you.”
“Trouble for me?” Evie emphasized the “me.” She turned her plate over and rubbed its back in circles, as she would have done to a colicky baby. “I don’t see how he could. I’ve never even said hello to him. Except once, at the dance. He was there, and he did come over to me for some punch. For himself and Cora Jenkins.”
“Cora Jenkins? He bringing punch to her?”
“I think he was only being friendly.”
“He shouldn’t be so friendly with such a young girl. It’s all right for him to dance with the ladies who are married—or unmarried but still . . . sensible. And that Cora Jenkins is not.”
“Cora can be very persuasive.”
“Don’t I know.”
Rose was up to her elbows in soapy water, and the dishes lifted and moved around the bottom of the sink, scuttling away crablike from her reaching hands. Evie looked out the window while she waited for a clean dish to surface.
“I’m tired of hearing about him, to be honest,” she said. “I’m tired of being warned away from him. I don’t even know him. It’s not like I’ve b
een seen walking around town with him. I haven’t bought anything from him.” Evie heard her voice growing petulant. “And what would it matter, really, if I did? Everyone else is trying the dreams.”
“I’m not concerned with everyone else. And I’m not trying to give you orders at your age. I can only tell you it gives me a bad feeling. I don’t know why. And my feelings about things are usually right.”
“Not always, though.”
“No, not always.”
Rose hefted the dishpan, and Evie went to open the back door for her so she could pour the used water out into the garden.
“Let’s go sit out front again. We can watch for the men to come back,” Rose said crossly.
They sat next to each other on the porch swing, and it pitched one side forward and then the other as they settled into it. Eventually they straightened out, though Evie found for the first time that the tipping sway of it made her feel ill.
“Did you see the tulips Ben planted? They came up beautifully.”
Evie nodded.
“Before you go, don’t let me forget I have something of Ben’s, if you want it.”
“You do?”
“Just an old ball glove. One of the Schumann boys came over with it. Some story of how Ben had loaned it to him or you’d got him a new one and he didn’t need it anymore. His mother wouldn’t let him walk all the way out to your place with it, so he brought it here.”
“Oh. He should have just kept it.”
“Well. He didn’t know if you might want it back.”
“I understand. But I don’t.” Evie folded her arms across her chest.
“I think you will have another child sometime,” Rose told her.
“I don’t think I could bear that.”
“Nonsense. It would be the best thing for you.”
Evie did not want to argue, so she said nothing.
* * *
The Dream Peddler Page 13