The Dream Peddler Read online

  He took his nectarine home and set it on the windowsill in his room. His brother had married the year before and moved away, so George had the space to himself, and with no one else there to grab it down and eat it slurping, the fruit sat, unmolested, until it began to wither. The nectarine took an odd way of rotting. First it softened down, and then the quiet bruises began to mottle its surface like gathering clouds, but despite the damp summer heat it grew no mold. Its skin wrinkled in until it was puckered all over, in a corner desert complete unto itself.

  * * *

  * * *

  The wedding of George and Evie was as grand as any the town had seen. After the marriage in the church, there was a feast for those who dared, up at the Whiting house, complete with roast pig and glistening stained-glass platters of jellied fruits. The light that day was white and hot, the bleaching kind of light. The fields rustled in tune with Evie’s stiff dress, and every so often the cicadas sent up their screech of celebration. Fiddlers stomped the back-porch boards so the people could dance in the grass. Children in their Sunday best went speeding through the crowds, with Evie’s mother running alongside them, laughing. George held Evie’s back under his hand, wondering at the skin beneath the taffeta, proud to be her husband, looking out over the whirling party as if he had created it.

  George took Evie home to live in his parents’ house while he and his father built another one on the other side of the farm. Between the two houses, the rows of wheat hush-hushed. Once they were moved into their home, Evie enjoyed running down sometimes to June Dawson’s kitchen when she had finished her housework. They would sit together mending or shelling peas while the men nursed the fields.

  * * *

  * * *

  Too many years for their liking, George and Evie remained childless. George harbored a silent suspicion that he could not make a boy of his own because he was unable to take Evie’s candent body for granted. The unexpected freckles on her shoulders. The damp, dense hair between her legs. There was too much to know of her; he would never have confidence in knowing, never enter there casually and thus find his way with ease. When men were among themselves, they talked of their bedroom boredom lightly, joked even, and George knew if he could not make a baby, this must be the reason. He laughed along, pretending to understand it all, how a man could grow tired of his woman, could trace her so often he dropped those seeds at the middle of the maze without even trying, but George’s laughter did nothing to tamp down his terror. There was no puzzling his way out when he was with Evie. He lay on her, pulling her soft hair over his open mouth like gauze over a wound, shocked every time.

  Despite his bewilderment Evie did eventually come to him with the news. It was three years since they had been married.

  “My mother says it’s the time,” she told him, carrying two plates of supper to the long oak table. George had built it so awfully long, picturing to himself as he sanded over its knots all the generations that would someday crowd there. So far it was only ever filled by the men who tucked in, eating with quiet purpose, when they came during the season for threshing.

  “Time for what?” he asked, reaching for the salt shaker, waiting for her to sit down. She remained standing behind her chair, so he could see.

  She placed her right hand over her abdomen. “You know. Time. Everything in good time.”

  An uncertain smile skirted the corners of his mouth. “Are you saying . . . ? How far along?”

  She shook her head. “I’m not pregnant, yet. But she can tell. This month it will happen.”

  George sighed out his disappointment, pushing his plate away and resting his forearms on the table in front of it. “For Christ’s sake, Evie, why’d you have to . . . ? You’ll forgive me if I don’t take your mother’s word for it.”

  “Don’t worry.” She was smiling still, felt she was smiling for him since he was not yet ready, and pulling her chair in across from his and raising her fork. “This is the kind of thing she always knows. I was there this afternoon for a visit, and she is so excited. She is just over the moon.”

  “Really? And how do you think she knows?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Evie took a big bite of chicken and hardly chewed it before she swallowed. “She just does.”

  Maybe George’s anger was enough to work the miracle. Making love to Evie that night was different. He had never come to her with that kind of feeling before. After marrying Evie, he had soon discovered that her mother was just about as harebrained as everyone said. George never complained about her. He knew the family he was joining, so why complain? But Evie, Evie was a sensible girl. She never took up with Rose Whiting’s ideas. She seemed to tolerate Rose the way one did a small child, humored her moods, steered her away from people who were unkind. It was all one could do with the woman. And now here was Evie, saddened maybe, even desperate, coming to him with the news that her batty old mother had decreed it was time for their family to begin. He pushed deeper into her, starting to sweat. Evie was lying pink beneath him the way she always did, hips rocking. Except this time she could not keep up with him; he wouldn’t let her. In the end he collapsed on her softness, his exhaustion pinning both of them to the sheet.

  At the end of the month, she was able to tell him, and he was happy, and he forgot all about her mother and the way the baby was conceived.

  Chapter 3

  Violet Burnley was just like her house: well kept, serene, and trimmed with lace. She sat Robert Owens down in her parlor and left him there, staring at a green parrot in a cage, while she went to organize tea and cakes on a tray in the kitchen. Violet lived alone but was always ready to entertain, her pantry stocked with baked goods and her furniture polished and doilied. As she carried her tray back into the room, Robert murmured, “What a beautiful bird.”

  “Oh, she’s a terror,” said Violet, setting the tray down on a side table and lifting the plate of sweets. She held it out to Robert so he could choose a cake and, of course, a doily to hold it on. “My brother doted on her, so now I can’t get rid of her. Called her Molly.”

  “Does she say anything interesting?”

  “Not a word, actually. She chirps and squawks and beats her feathers like a storm, but I have never to this day heard that bird utter a single intelligible word. Maybe the pirates sold her off their ship because she was no good.”

  Robert looked into the dark, round, droplet eyes. The bird cocked her head knowingly at him. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “There’s something to be said for a woman who can keep her own counsel, isn’t there?”

  Violet grunted. “She’d be the first one around here who can, that’s for sure.”

  Robert laughed. The cake was good.

  “Miss Burnley, I’m awfully grateful to you for opening your home to me like this. I know I’ll be paying you fair room and board, and some might view such a thing as just a business transaction, but I must say I don’t, no, I don’t at all. It’s an entirely different matter when someone invites you into their home.”

  Violet sipped her tea. “I’ve never really thought of it that way, Mr. Owens. I enjoy having people in my house, I enjoy the company. Especially since I’ve lost my own Robert. Too much quiet, well . . . it gives me the blues, to be honest.”

  The dream peddler nodded. “I’ve never been that way toward the quiet myself, but I gather other people don’t quite like it. Maybe that’s why I’m so well suited to this kind of life. I spend a lot of time on the road this way, just walking, and I never even notice how much time I pass alone.”

  “What do you think about when you are walking from place to place?”

  Robert shrugged. “You know, no one has ever asked me that before. I’m not sure I know what I think about. Sometimes I just listen to the birds, and the squirrels chasing each other around the trees. I whistle a fair bit, to entertain myself. I’m not really much of a deep thinker, I expect.” He smiled at Violet in a most
disarming way.

  She set her cup carefully back in its saucer, and he did the same.

  The room she gave him was upstairs, clean and simply furnished. There was a small bed with a patchwork quilt, a chipped white dresser with three drawers, a washstand with a basin and mirror. The window had been clothed in striped curtains. Robert walked over to it and set his valise down before parting the stripes to take in the view of frosted fields. In the distance he noticed a dark, lumpy form against the snow, bending and bubbling. As he stood pondering what it might be, it suddenly splintered into a dozen slanted black slivers, all moving away from one another. A crowd of men, he thought. A crowd of men talking together and now going their separate ways. Yet they moved out in a perfect ring of even and deliberate growth, as if the snow were really the smooth surface of a gray lake accepting a stone.

  “This sure will do nicely, Miss Burnley,” he said without turning around.

  “I serve breakfast at seven, Mr. Owens, and dinner at noon. Supper at six. If you aren’t here around that time, I’ll assume you’ve chosen to eat elsewhere—does that seem reasonable to you?”

  “Of course, perfectly reasonable.” He turned to face her again. “I thought this afternoon I might settle in by going to the store and getting myself some supplies. Would you point me in the right direction?”

  “That would be the Jenkins General Store. Just keep on going the way you found me and take a right on Main Street. You can’t miss it.”

  “And, Miss Burnley?”

  She turned back from the door. Downstairs her seed catalog was waiting for her. “Yes?”

  “Will you please call me Robbie?”

  She smiled. “Yes I will, Robbie, if you will call me Vi.”

  * * *

  * * *

  As always, George woke before dawn to feed the animals and milk the heavy cows. When he stepped outside, he observed a golden moon, biggest he’d ever seen, buoyed up on the tops of the trees. He thought she was beautiful, but she was not the first he had seen, and he turned away from her, trying to duck his head under the chill. Inside the house Evelyn, too, was rising to dress and cook their breakfast in the lamplit kitchen, while her shadow swooped behind her like a bat.

  Usually the smell of potatoes boiling and ham frying would bring Benny down from his room, but this morning he was quiet. At the last possible moment, when she had the plates ready, she went to the foot of the stairs and called him. Back in the kitchen, she began carrying loaded plates to the dining table, brought a pitcher of milk in, and set it down heavily. Still there were no sounds from upstairs. She wondered if he could have caught another cold and shook her head against the idea. Ben, he had asked her once more yesterday to please start calling him Ben instead, but she kept forgetting. On her way to the stairs again, she glanced at the coatrack and saw that his things were gone, rolled her eyes, and went back to the kitchen. As usual he was up earlier than his parents, most likely gone out to the woodpile and forgotten to bring the wood in, climbing instead on the unsteady pile and jumping off into the snow.

  When George came in moments later, he was alone, and Evie frowned.

  “Didn’t you drag Benny back for breakfast? You know it’s going to go cold on him.”

  “What do you mean? I never saw him out there.”

  Evie went to the door and threw it open. A glance at the woodpile showed it was undisturbed. The yard was a silence beaded here and there with the sounds of animals in the barn, the few brave birds tapping at the shell of the quiet with their beaks. There was the fort Benny had made a few days ago, half collapsed where he’d stomped it down in the avalanche of enemy attack. His footprints pushed everywhere in circles and crisscrossed the snow, and George’s wide-spaced tread cut through that jumble in a steady straight line. But there was no jubilant boy leaping about; there was no one there.

  George came to stand behind her. “He’s gone off to play in the woods awhile, I expect. I guess his breakfast will keep.”

  Evie felt the warmth of her husband just inches behind her back, and the fresh-air smell coming at her from both before and behind. She listened a moment while the forest gave up nothing. Reluctantly she stepped back to close the door, and George gave her a quick embrace as she pressed against him.

  “Come and eat,” he told her. “And what are your plans for the day?”

  * * *

  * * *

  Evie had no particular plans that day. While George went out to mend fences, she began the week’s baking. She kneaded and punched down her bread dough at the kitchen counter and looked out the window into the woods. Birches veined the darker trees with white. A fine, powdery snow began to fall.

  As the morning shortened toward noon, she was wondering how much she should worry. It was Saturday, so Benny knew he need not be off to school, but his chores had all gone undone. He should know they would be wondering. Was it time yet to force on boots and trudge through the snow to the neighbors’ homes? She imagined herself knocking on each door until it surrendered, opening inward. Unknowingly they would allow the snow and the little wind of her nerves to whisper into the house, touching the untroubled hollows of their own warm spaces.

  “George.”

  “Mm.”

  “Something isn’t right. Even if he lost track of time, Benny should be back by now, because he’d be hungry.” An unbidden thought ran across her mind like a stray cat. “You don’t think . . . you don’t think he’d have gone all the way down to the bay, do you? The ice . . .”

  George looked up. “I don’t think so. He knows you can’t trust the ice this time of year—I’ve told him time and again.” At the look on her face, he stood. “Let me just go out for a little walk and see if I can’t hunt him down for you. I’ll give him a talking-to for making his mother worry like this, you can be sure.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Evie was careful not to burn her bread. She sat by the fire in the parlor with her basket of darning and worked her needle while the fitful breath of the baking bread tried to comfort her. When George returned, she was just lifting her first two loaves from the oven with a quilted pair of oven mitts. Benny used to pull them over his arms when he was three, with her tea cozy for a hat. He’d march across the kitchen clapping the mitts together like an organ-grinder’s monkey with his cymbals.

  She set the pans on the counter, and her shoulders rolled forward while she listened. There were no boisterous boy sounds behind her, only George’s heavy shuffling as he removed his coat and boots. So when she turned, she knew the face she would be looking at—George, smiling to convince her he was still carefree, while his eyes began to glint their little fear.

  “Looked all around,” he said. “Thought maybe I saw some tracks going into the woods, but it was hard to tell. The snow’s beginning to cover it all, so there wasn’t much to go by. I tell you what.” He bent over the bread to take a smell of it, drawing its warmth up over his chin with his hand. “I think I’d better get some men together and maybe start to have a look. I don’t want to wait too long, seeing as it’s a cold day. He may have got himself stuck up a tree or some such caper and be needing our help.”

  “Let me get some dinner on the table first,” said Evie, sliding the bread out from under him and turning it out of the pans to cool. “You’ll need a good meal in your stomach if you’re going to be traipsing through the woods all afternoon.” Mindlessly she took a knife to her bread, even though it was too soft and hot to slice yet. “When you bring that boy home to me,” she said, “I am going to give him a piece of my mind.”

  So Evie brought George the thick slices of mangled bread still steaming and a bowl of her vegetable stew. Then she bustled around him while he ate, and he knew better than to insist she eat with him. After filling himself George went out to collect his father and some of their neighbors. Evie stood by the parlor window and watched the innocent snow drift down.
It knew nothing of her.

  Eventually June Dawson came over from her farm to keep Evie company. Her main intent in doing this seemed the hasty erection of a protective border of thoughtless chatter, meant to distract Evie from her missing son. June was a large woman, broad-shouldered just like George, and she seemed to be bursting out of her chair as she told Evie about the udder infection of one of their cows, the new organdy ribbon she’d admired at the general store, the muffins she’d made that came out hard as hockey pucks (it was the unreliable baking powder again; she didn’t know why Jenkins only stocked that one brand), and finally fell back on the weather. Evie did not try to be polite or pretend to listen, though she nodded from time to time along with the rhythm of June’s deep voice. June was satisfied strewing words about the house, just as she had sprinkled the lucky salt in every corner after it was first built. She couldn’t help it, and Evie didn’t expect her to. The words flopped like hooked fish on the furniture and the floor, piling invisibly there until Evie thought she’d smother from them.

  June was talking on about the lateness of the spring.

  “I can’t say as I even remember a March so cold it gets into your bones. The ice on the bay doesn’t seem like to budge, and here it is almost April already.”

  Evie shivered, and her movement transferred something to June, who fell briefly silent.

  “I know what you need, my dear. A nice hot cup of tea. I wouldn’t take a bite either if I were you, but let’s just have us a spot of tea and maybe a small biscuit. You could eat a small biscuit, now, couldn’t you, love?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she raised herself out of the rocking chair and went to the kitchen, where Evie could hear her rattling teacups and banging the kettle clumsily against the faucet over the sink. June was a noisy person, seemed to believe in noise, in its power to rumble like an oxcart over anything unpleasant and squash it flat. Evie found herself grateful for the commotion; it did seem to banish the worst possibilities. Nightmare could not intrude upon June’s blithe, bumping sounds. Nightmare required stillness.