The Dream Peddler Read online

  Praise for The Dream Peddler

  “Fournier Watson’s tale is gorgeous and carefully paced, with subtle tensions among the townspeople and lush descriptions of the natural world. Themes of coming and going, holding on and letting go, permeate this highly engaging, captivating, and, yes, dream-infused story.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “What an astonishing novel. The Dream Peddler unfolds like a gorgeous poem, leading us deep into the lives of its characters and exploring the vast underground legacy of our own desires. This is the must-read book of the year.”

  —Rene Denfeld, bestselling author of The Child Finder

  “The Dream Peddler is a lovely, lyrical novel. Watson’s poignant and gentle storytelling and the near-poetry of her beautiful prose captivated me from the beginning. I loved every page.”

  —Louisa Morgan, author of A Secret History of Witches

  “Martine Fournier Watson’s vivid writing will leave you feeling as if you are a satisfied customer of the dream peddler.”

  —Mark Tompkins, author of The Last Days of Magic

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Martine Fournier Watson is originally from Montreal, Canada, where she earned her master’s degree in art history after a year in Chicago as a Fulbright scholar. She currently lives in Michigan with her husband and two children. The Dream Peddler is her first novel.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Martine Fournier Watson

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Watson, Martine Fournier, author.

  Title: The dream peddler / Martine Fournier Watson.

  Description: New York, New York : Penguin Books, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018028423 (print) | LCCN 2018029133 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525504955 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143133179

  Classification: LCC PS3623.A8728 (ebook) | LCC PS3623.A8728 D74 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018028423

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Colin Webber

  Cover images: (man and bottle) CSA Images / Getty Images; (clouds, top) (detail) John Lavery, Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images; (farm, bottom) Edward Hopper, c. 1930. James Goodman Gallery, New York, USA / Bridgeman Images

  Version_2

  To my mother and father, who gave me everything

  Contents

  Praise for The Dream Peddler

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Acknowledgments

  Reader’s Guide

  I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas: they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.

  —Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

  What d’ye lack? What d’ye lack? A dream of success—a dream of adventure—a dream of the sea—a dream of the woodland—any kind of a dream you want at reasonable prices, including one or two unique little nightmares. What will you give me for a dream?

  —L. M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs

  Prologue

  The light of the gold harvest moon woke Benjamin Dawson from his dream. He sat up in bed, and through the window he saw that moon, larger than any he had ever known before. How did it grow so close out of the black night loam? He could tell by the thickness of the quiet that he was the only one awake in his house, maybe in the whole town. The blanket his body had warmed in the night was still gathered around his legs like a dozing animal. Every moment the sky was lightening toward its dawn, and he wanted to go outside and see that moon before it set. It seemed to be hovering just beyond the winter trees, as though anyone who made it through to the other side of the woods and the edge of the bay would stumble upon some monstrous glory, like the discoverer of a continent. At nine years old, Benjamin knew he could never reach the moon, yet still he had an urge to confront this one, with nothing between the two of them but the stinging, star-speckled air.

  He slipped out of bed and pulled off his nightshirt, lifting the clothes he had dropped onto his little wooden chair the night before. The clothes were cold, and he shivered into them. He crept down the stairs and tugged on the black clots of his boots, pulled his thick brown wool coat over himself, and grabbed his cap from the high shelf. The front door was stiff but silent.

  Chapter 1

  The dream peddler came to town at the white end of winter, before the thaw. He had no horse or motorcar, but a low wagon harnessed to himself that he pulled along. He whistled as it bumped over the road behind him, while ahead the wind sifted off the surface of snow and hissed away. His covered jars and bottles tinkled occasionally in their nests. He winced up into the brightness of the sky, where the split, frayed ends of treetops swept at the clouds, his gloved hands tucked into the harness ropes crossed over his chest. His fast breath wraithed the air before his face and vanished.

  The steps of his long walk shook the past from his mind and fragmented all the faces of the place he had left. He let them be blurred by the blowing snow. As the brittle day began to soften, he stopped at the side of the road, lifted a small bottle from his coat, and imagined the kindling warmth of the drink inside. He gave it a squeeze but slipped it back into his pocket untasted. The blank spread of farmland surrounded him now, but those houses were all set too far back from the road. He was looking for the homes of the merchants, where town lives bunched together like linen gathering along a pulled seam. As the road turned away from the sun, he came to a yellow-painted house that seemed a good prospect. Two children in winter coats were eating snow off their mittens in the little front yard.

  They stared him down as he turned into the gate. He looked at them and raised his eyebrows as if to ask, May I? But they only gazed mutely, t
he melting snow dripping down their reddened chins. They watched him enter their yard, openly wary while curiosity held them still.

  He climbed the few steps up to the porch and gave three sharp raps on the door. Loud enough, confident, not too insistent. Then he waited.

  The door swung open on a woman of medium height, whose small brown eyes shrank smaller against the light. Her clothing was old but clean, and a faded apron over her housedress told him he had interrupted the flurry of morning chores.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, ma’am—”

  “Who are you?”

  “Robert Owens.” He touched his hat. “Do please call me Robbie.”

  Her lips pursed at him, as if to indicate that the word “Robbie” would never cross them. She scanned his person, and then her glance went behind him to the two frozen children staring openmouthed at their own door. Then it went beyond, to the cart he had left outside the gate.

  “I’m Abigail Schumann,” she told him, not in a friendly way but as though she felt obliged to trade this information.

  “Very nice to meet you, Mrs. Schumann. I can see you’re in the middle of some work here, so I won’t take up your time. I’m new to town, today, and I wondered if I might inquire about a place to stay? An inn, perhaps a boardinghouse?”

  In the gloom behind her, he discerned the outline of an elderly man sitting by a window as if he’d been placed there to catch the light, the round of his shoulders dusted white with it. The left side of the man’s face hung slack from its bones, and when his eyes met Robert’s, he opened only the right side of his mouth. A faint guttural sound tried to reach them at the doorway.

  Mrs. Schumann waved the children back to their play, but the children stuck.

  “Well, Mr. Owens, I’m not sure what to tell you. We don’t get many visitors who don’t already have a family to stay with. You looking for work?”

  “Oh, no, ma’am, not in need of any work. I make my own living and carry it with me. It’s all there in the wagon, you see.”

  As the wagon was covered over with a thick tarp, she folded her arms across her chest. “No, I don’t see.”

  Robert smiled at her but said nothing. Behind her the old man’s mouth was still straining, right side hauling on the deadweight of the left as if trying to save it from quicksand.

  “You a salesman of some kind?”

  “Of some kind, yes.”

  “And what would you be selling?”

  “Well, ma’am”—he scratched his chin, as though there had been a beard there not long ago—“I’d rather not say just yet, if it’s all the same to you. My product is very special, you see, and it needs to be presented in the right way. It’s not as simple as soaps or silks or things of that nature, you see.”

  She huffed. If she was curious, she was not going to let him see that. Instead she pointed a cracked fingertip down the road.

  “Keep going until you come to a big brown house with yellow shutters. That’ll be Violet Burnley’s place. She’s alone there since her brother died, and sometimes she’ll take in a boarder. Had as many as three last summer when the extra farm help came through. If she says no, you’ll probably have to move along.”

  He touched the peak of his cap again. “Thank you. I greatly appreciate it.”

  He retreated carefully down the porch steps, as if bowing from the presence of a monarch. Only at the bottom did he turn before walking back toward the children. He knelt on the snow in front of them and wiggled a hand into one of his pockets. Like animals hoping for food, they inched closer.

  “For you,” he told them, and he held out two small polished stones in the leather cup of his glove. They were blackish blue as night water, flecked with mottles of gold like some people’s eyes. “Put these under your pillows tonight,” he whispered to the children, “and you will have marvelous dreams.”

  One at a time, they reached into the stiff palm and picked out their treasure. “Mine is bigger than yours,” the small one said. “Stop talking big,” his older brother told him, “or the old witch Whiting will come and get you.” Smiling, Robert eased himself up, patted their shoulders one at a time, and continued on toward the road. They stared after him a moment before turning back to their mother. “Can’t we come in now?” he heard one of them whining behind him. “I’m so hungry for dinner my tummy is rumbling. . . .”

  The dream peddler passed back through the gate and bent to pick up the wagon harness. As he was fitting it over his shoulders, Mrs. Schumann clucked her tongue, handed a cookie to each of her children, and sent them away with a smack.

  “Odder than a three-legged duck,” she muttered to herself as she went back inside.

  * * *

  * * *

  The dream peddler plodded on down the road. Though he had seen the sun rise, now the clouds thickened and began to slough off their silencing snow, and before long the promised brown house bobbed into view. Two bare trees had tangled their branches above the gate, rasping back and forth like a fervent pair of hands. Though the garden was smothered now, he imagined it neatly tended below, its flowers unfurling into spring, imprisoned in their gardener’s careful plan of borders and stripes. He could feel the winter weakening and the ground beginning to buckle.

  Only a few hours ago had Benjamin Dawson left home.

  Chapter 2

  Benjamin Dawson was the son of George and Evelyn. Evelyn had been a Whiting, raised in the big, broad house with the wide, deep porch on the crest of the longest road. Looking down on the other houses, it seemed to have opened its mouth and let them tumble down from it long ago like baby teeth. The Whiting house also boasted one of the few pianos in town, and in summer when Evelyn was a girl, her slow practice notes plinked out from its open windows one by one, uncertain where to land.

  When the time came for beaux to call, young Evelyn had few. Like other girls her age, she had achieved a certain look—the hair curling unbridled away from her temples, a brightening in her cheeks and searching eyes—all the physical signs she would soon fall from her family tree. But her mother was weird. Her mother was given to talking aloud to their garden in a high, wheedling voice. She could be heard by passersby, but they could never make out her words; they were not sure if she was talking to her flowers or herself. They were not sure which would be worse. She lit bonfires in the evenings simply to stare at them, not even using them to burn trash or leaves. She’d never actually been caught dancing around one of them, but it was suspected she must. She refused to attend church services, although her husband dutifully took their daughter every Sunday. Sometimes, when she came down the hill into town for shopping, she did not even appear to be clean.

  Any potential suitor of Evelyn had to take this mother into account. Though Evie was plump and lovely, with her glossy dark hair and her wide, dreaming smile, she was not aware of it. Evie lacked the sort of showmanship of self that might have distracted callers from a disheveled mother wandering painfully in the background. When young men came to visit, it was impossible to do anything about this. Rose Whiting was sure to say something unsettling or to take no notice of them at all, trailing through the garden beyond the swollen gloss of windows without her shoes.

  None of this could be said to trouble Evie. She felt uncomfortable around any young man who came on a summer evening, expecting lemonade and a suggestive swing within the blue-ceilinged porch. The boys she saw every day at school or church activities became strangers then, somehow fumbling and awkward, their feet always crossing and uncrossing, the sweating glasses of cold drink in danger of slipping down through their hands.

  * * *

  * * *

  George Dawson was not especially brave. That summer before he asked Evie to marry him, he was helping out for cash on the Coldbrook farm a little way out of town, and every evening if Evie was outdoors, she would see him cycling back along the side of the road. Boys and men who worked hard al
ways had a similar slope to them at the end of the day, Evie thought, their shoulders hanging too far forward. You couldn’t see the soles of their boots, but you knew they felt thinner. Evie decided she liked the look of George Dawson coasting down the road. Sometimes she watched for him from behind the curtains in her bedroom window so he wouldn’t be aware of her when he pedaled by. She didn’t realize, as the stifling weeks passed, that George began to know her presence, like the pollen teasing his nose.

  The prospect of Evie’s mother took no hold in George Dawson’s mind. He did not go for Evie because he was forward-thinking or had somehow missed the hints at borning babies who would be the descendants of crazy grandmothers. George went for Evie because she came down her front walkway to the edge of the road one day. Her right hand swung by her hip, and it was rounded out from a piece of fruit she held. As he neared, she offered it to him, hanging over the fence. The skin of it was bloodred and flecked with gold. It had come straight from the orchard on the hill behind their house.

  George stopped the bicycle by touching one foot to the ground. She smiled at him. “You’ve an awful long way to the other side of town,” she said. “Have this.”

  He couldn’t take it from her without touching her hand. When he leaned in, the bicycle had to lean with him, like a dog that wanted to scent her. Palming the fruit, he did not know what to say next.

  “It’s just like the Garden of Eden,” he came out with at last. “You’ve even got the name!”

  She laughed at that. He liked a girl with a ready laugh, he thought.

  “I guess you’d better not eat it, then. Best to be safe on that point,” and she winked at him over her shoulder as she swayed back up the drive in her blue summer dress.

  George took a sniff of the fruit before he placed it in his basket and pushed on. He wondered if any trace of her could be left now on its skin. It did smell a little like he imagined a girl would, if you held her, syrupy and dark.