The Dream Peddler Read online

  Finally Evie sat down in the chair that June had left warm and waited for her tea. Maybe she would even try a biscuit. She smoothed her palms over the arms of the chair. It was the one George would carry out to the porch for her in spring, where she could knit or mend outside. The forest breezes would find her while she rested her eyes in the undulant gold of the fields. It was still too soon to move the chair. This year the spring was suffering an unexpected shyness.

  Chapter 4

  The dream peddler unpacked his few belongings. His clothing did not fill half the dresser, but he found it useful for storing some of his wares. He lined the bottom drawer with straw from his cart (sneaking it in in a sack, for he had a hunch Vi might not want her dresser stuffed with musty straw of questionable cleanliness) and carefully set as many bottles as would fit upright pressed together. Like crowds in a circus tent, they kept each other from leaning or falling, their cork heads dull and uncomplaining.

  Dinnertime had come and gone, so without a meal Robert decided to go ahead and take care of his errands in town. He would casually announce his presence at the store, and this would begin to spread the word of him. In winter months people clung more tightly to their homes, so news of his arrival might travel haltingly at first. If he lacked patience, though, the manner of his coming might be spoiled, like a food that was cooked too hot and unwittingly burned.

  There was a way he had of introducing himself to a place. He did not set up a booth or holler out his wares, never went from door to door. He carved out the way people would think of him without their noticing. He was not to be associated with carnivals or drifting confidence men. The only way to do this was to sneak in, to leak the nature of his products, and let time and curiosity act on his behalf.

  The walk to the store was brief. Small white flakes of snow dawdled down all around him, but underneath was a faint earthy warmth, as if the snow might be losing heart. He hoped it would not turn to rain—there was nothing more miserable than winter rain.

  Through its big front window, the general store appeared to be empty. Robert’s entrance disturbed a small bell above him, and its jangling complaint brought a red-haired young woman out from a doorway behind the counter. When she was met with the sight of someone she did not already know, a look of surprise crossed her face, and she flushed and chased it quickly away with a winsome smile.

  “What a nice surprise.” She beamed as if the two of them were old friends. “It’s been so slow here all morning I haven’t had a soul to talk to, and now here you are. You’re just like a gift.”

  Robert removed his hat. “Please allow me to introduce myself,” he said. “My name is Robert Owens, my friends call me Robbie, and I’m new to your town.”

  “Oh, well, of course I know that.” She leaned forward a little over her counter, and he took a step nearer. Her skin was fair but not freckled, and her eyes were such a light brown they were almost amber. Her nose had a pinched end to it, and the teeth in her smile were white and even. Her two eyeteeth were large, which gave her a hungry look. “I’m Cora Jenkins. This is my family’s store. And what can I do for you today?”

  By this time Robert had reached the customer side of the counter. He placed his hands upon it not too far away from her own. Miss Cora seemed accustomed to charming the men around her, and it would not do to disappoint.

  “Just a few things I need to purchase. Shaving cream, one or two handkerchiefs, some bootblacking.” He turned to survey the neat shelves and all their stacks and cans of goods. He moved down the counter to the penny candy, and she followed him. “A half-pound bag of these sugar hearts, with the messages on them. And a can of those blueberries, please.”

  She raised her eyebrows at this list that had begun so typically for a bachelor and yet ended so strangely. “A half pound of sweets! My goodness, you men sure are fortunate you don’t have to watch your figures.” She turned toward the hearts, and it gave him a view of her own shape in her brown wool dress, narrow but full through the bosom. Coming around to his side of the counter, she brandished a metal scoop, opened the container he’d pointed to, and began to fill a paper bag with his purchase. The hearts fell together with a beady sound like a threatened rattlesnake. When she went to weigh the bag on the scale, it was exactly one half pound.

  “Well, miss, you sure do know your business.”

  “Just takes practice, that’s all! I’ve been measuring out candy since before I could spell, so I guess I’m a pretty good hand at it by now.”

  She walked around the store, plucking down the other things he had asked for and fitting them all carefully into a larger paper bag. Back behind the counter, she began to do her sums on a pad of paper. She looked so much like a schoolgirl, biting her lip in concentration, that he found himself smiling at her.

  “By the way, the candies are not all for me.” He winked as he took a heart from the packet and slid it across the wood toward her.

  “Thank you,” she said, looking down at it. “But you know it’s a bit silly to treat me. I can help myself whenever I want.”

  “Even so,” he said, “now you’ve one as a gift from me. Not the same as helping yourself. I like to think a gift is an important thing.”

  “Do you, now?” She left off from her pad of paper to look up at him. “Are you going to be expecting some kind of gift from me in return, then?”

  He held his hands apart. “Not a thing. Not a thing, to be sure. I just meant that . . . now we can be friends.”

  “Friends! I don’t know you at all, I’m sure.”

  “You can ask me anything you like, to remedy that.”

  She tilted her head to one side. “All right.” She put the candy heart into her pretty mouth and took a small bite. With the sugar still on her tongue, she asked, “Why are you here?”

  * * *

  * * *

  Satisfied, the dream peddler carried his paper sack of purchases back to Violet’s house. From the front hall, he saw her sitting on the davenport with her hands clasped together in her lap. He paused there in the doorway, uncertain what it was that made him sure she was upset. She was simply staring out the window at the occasional drifting snowflake, parted from the storm like a stray bird left behind by a migrating flock. Then he realized that the caps of her knuckles had all gone white.

  As he shifted his weight, the paper bag crinkled inquiringly, and Violet turned to see him. He crossed the room and set his parcel on the low table in front of her like an offering. “Vi? Is something the matter?”

  She shook her head, and Molly the bird puffed herself up and squawked. Violet stood up and tossed the tea towel over the top of her cage to silence her. “Nighttime will be here soon, Molly,” she lied, and pulled her arms across her chest.

  “I’m afraid you’ve come here on an unfortunate day,” she said at last. “I’ve had a visitor while you were out. My . . . my friend Esther Coldbrook. Her husband has gone to join the search party. . . .”

  Robert remembered the stone of men thrown into the snow of the field, the men who had been both stone and its ensuing ripple.

  “There’s a little boy gone missing since this morning. The Dawsons’ boy, Benny. Can’t think what might have come to him. They’ve been assuming he’d just turn up, but it seems George decided not to wait anymore and get some help looking for him. All the available men are scouring the woods, and the shore. . . . If he went down shore, that could be an awful thing. The ice is like to break under you this time of year.”

  “Well, surely . . .”

  She turned from the window.

  “I don’t suppose you saw anything this morning, as you were coming to us? They say he hasn’t been seen since before breakfast. I’m sure you’d have taken note of a small boy wandering off by himself so early in the morning, on a winter’s morning, wouldn’t you?”

  Her eyes had gone wide around her questions, and Robert rubbed his hands agains
t his coat. He patted his pockets as if feeling for cigarettes he had stowed there, then let them drop.

  “Well, I’m sure I would have, Vi. But I think I was still a good distance away from here, if it wasn’t even breakfast yet. It would have been quite dark, and I guess I wouldn’t have seen him, even if he went by me on the other side of the road. When I woke up this morning, I was in a barn a number of miles west of town. I’m sorry I can’t say as I saw anything.”

  “You came from the west?”

  “That’s right.”

  Violet nodded to herself. “No, I don’t suppose you could be of any help to us, then. The Dawsons live out on the eastern side—the sun rises over their place. Theirs and the parents, George’s parents. They must all be beside themselves with worry. I am going to get busy after supper and make a corn bread I can take over tomorrow, with maybe some cold ham.”

  Robert and Violet shared a thoughtful supper. Vi had a pretty dining room off her kitchen with pink patterned wallpaper and lace curtains. Under the oil lamp, the room was rosy, but it did not have its own fireplace. Instead it relied on the warmth from the kitchen, and the food went cold quickly.

  After a roast pork and potatoes, there came the peach pie and a cup of tea. Robert leaned back in his chair and patted his stomach. “That was delicious, Vi. I must say I feel I’ve had some very good luck today.”

  She smiled absently. “The peaches were wonderful last year. I’ve got jars and jars of them. Every time I open one and eat them, I feel like I’m standing outside in the yard again, picking them from the trees.” Robert had a sudden image of Violet in a pale summer dress, the tree light shifting across her floury skin, surrounded by peaches hanging heavy and blushed like her own dreams.

  “I used to know his mother well,” she said. “The boy. Since she was a little girl. I used to go up to the big house and give her piano lessons.” She looked at Robert. “That was her mother’s piano, sent out with her from the city—a wedding gift, I think. But you couldn’t expect her to teach her own daughter. No. She’d be too busy wandering the fields or talking to the flowers in her garden. I used to hear her sometimes, mumbling under the lesson.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, she’s a bit touched, to tell you the truth. Just not quite right. No harm to anyone, but a bit hard on poor Evie, I expect. She was always on the outside, with a mother like that. A bit left out of things. Sweet girl, though, from what I could tell of trying to teach her.” She could hear her own voice struggling to get at the cold corners of the room, scrabbling like a trapped moth, but she couldn’t seem to stop talking. “Though not very musical, mind you. Plunking fingers, she had, no sense of the light touch. Everyone thought George Dawson must be off himself, marrying into that lot. But it all seemed to work out just fine, and now he’s their only child. It’s just not right. He must be found.”

  She stood up, brushed her skirt, and began to clear the plates. Robert stood up quickly, too, saying, “Let me help you,” but she waved him away.

  “Certainly not. You pay good room and board. You’ll not help me with any of this.” She stacked his plate with her own and nested his empty teacup in hers. “I must get in there now and start on my bread. Evie will have enough to deal with without spending all day in her kitchen making food.” Little did she imagine that a few miles away Evie was spending all her time cleaning house and punching down her own bread. She could have made enough bread to feed the whole town.

  “I wish I could do something,” Robert told her, leaning in the doorway of the kitchen he was not supposed to enter. But he was no longer talking about the housework. “D’you think they’d object to me? Maybe I could search with the men.”

  She turned now from the sink to look back at him over her shoulder.

  “Well, now, I don’t know,” she said. “I’m sure they would think it’s very kind of you. But it’s a bit strange, is all. Because nobody knows you. And you don’t know the boy you’d be looking for.”

  He tucked his taskless hands into his pockets. “I just can’t help feeling I should be helping in some way, even so.” He stared at her.

  Vi considered. “You’re a kind man, I think, Robert Owens. Since I’ll be going down tomorrow with this food for them, why don’t you let me ask. Hopefully by then there will be nothing for you to do.”

  Robert nodded and shuffled back out to the hall, found his way to the stairs and up to his tidy room. He sat on the bed, looking at the window whose curtains he’d left open. There was nothing beyond them now but the pitch.

  * * *

  * * *

  Evie, too, was looking out the window of her house, in the direction of the trees she could no longer see. If someone opened the door, then a rectangle of light passed over the ground, and the boot prints all jumped out like dark rabbits from holes.

  George had returned alone. The other men he’d gathered together had gone back to their homes for supper with their own wives and children, promising to assemble again the next day at Jenkins’s store. Evie could picture all the families around their tables, everyone enjoying their meal and feeling sorry for the Dawsons. Food would still have flavor for them, and fire would still have heat.

  “I’m going to keep it up myself, Evie, don’t worry. I’ll take a lantern with me. Maybe he’s gotten into a barn and fallen asleep.”

  The night would be very cold, Evie thought. Benny needed to have been brought in before now, or he could freeze. In a neighbor’s barn, the animal heat might keep him warm enough, but what would he be doing there? She had some idea that she was supposed to know. She was his mother, she should have some feeling about whether he was alive or dead. But she found there was nothing of sense inside her, only the fear whose tentacles had seized every vein in her body, so there was no more warm blood but only thick blindness sludging through her. She found herself still able to move, but she was slower, winding down like a neglected clock toward some dreaded stillness. She hoped she would never run out of methodical household tasks.

  “You mustn’t stay out there all night, George,” she said without looking at him. “You must be able to go on still tomorrow.”

  “I won’t stay out all night. But I’m not ready to quit yet, I still need a little more time.”

  There was a scuffling just outside the door. Evie’s head snapped to the sound. “Benny?” At once her sluggish veins quickened, as every drop of her went rushing toward that little noise. She ran and pulled the door open and looked out into the snow. Her lantern light glanced off the beady eyes of a startled raccoon. She heard herself screaming at it.

  * * *

  * * *

  It was morning again. Mornings were still going to keep coming, she thought. Not just for everyone else but for her as well.

  Evie had not changed her clothes, as she had not gone to bed. She had sat in her rocking chair moving slightly back and forth, watching the fire and rising to stoke it from time to time. Her eyelids dried like corn sheaves, as if they had somehow been separated from her. George had come in, gone wordlessly upstairs, and lay on their bed. She knew he was awake, and she could hear the movement overhead as he rolled one way and then the other. He was like the dream in the sleeping mind of the house.

  Evie realized when her eyes opened to the sound of George plodding downstairs again that she had slept in flickers after all. Her fire was low and tired. She did not rise to offer George breakfast as she normally would have. She heard him moving around in the kitchen, probably taking bread and cheese from the cupboard and cutting off slices to eat. The pump squeaked as he worked the water from it. He would stand by the sink with crumbs falling down all around him, a thing that would have made her crazy at him before. After a moment of silence, she turned her head to see him looking in from the hall.

  “I’ll be going in to the store today,” he said. “I thought you might want me to call down to your folks.”

 
Evie nodded. She’d forgotten all about them. She heard George’s bulk move to the front doorway and the clumping sound of boots being donned, a swish of moving coat and another of door.

  It was early. The world was just beginning to blue. Evie stood and mechanically went to the door and put on her own things. She needed more wood from the pile, so she went out and hefted as many logs as she could into her arms. Inside she brought them over to the black log cradle, then looked behind at the snow she had tracked mindlessly over the floor. She went back then to the front entry to remove her coat and boots and walked to the kitchen for a rag to wipe the dirty water. It took a bit of time to build her fire back up again—paper, then kindling, then wood. How many times she had knelt at her hearth, feeding in paper, then kindling, then wood. All she could think was that they must not let the house go cold.

  * * *

  * * *

  Later in the morning, while the rising sun was fanning the shadows of bare trees across the snow in full blue feathers, a knock came at the door. Evie’s heart quickened. It might be George, she thought, then knew it could not be George; he wouldn’t knock at his own door. It might be some other searcher who had found Benny, some neighbor bringing him home. She might open the door to see him flopping slack in someone’s arms. She went to it anyway.

  It was only Violet Burnley in her winter coat and hat, holding two wrapped parcels in her scrawny woolen arms.

  “Oh, Violet, hello,” she said dully.

  “I hope I’m not bothering you, but I just wanted to do something for you and thought I might bring down this dinner for you and George . . . or supper, whatever you need.”