The Dream Peddler Read online

  “Yes,” she said, “yes, of course we know about him.” She pushed her palms along her skirt to the edge of her knees. “I told you he went with the men today.”

  Evie’s mother stared her down for a moment. “What I mean is, do you understand what he is trying to sell here?”

  Evie looked away again, as if her eyes had no strength left in them to hold still. Rose took a long breath, long enough to draw warmth out of the room, to leave less air for the rest of them.

  “Are you aware of why he has come here?”

  Evie’s shoulders shrugged.

  “He claims to be selling dreams, Evie. That’s what George tells me. Little bottles of liquid dreams, any dream you might desire.” Her breath flew out. “It’s ridiculous,” she said finally.

  Evie shook her head. “I don’t understand. Bottles of dreams? There is no such thing.”

  “That is apparently no matter. You take the potion he has mixed for you and dream of whatever you like. He’s a charlatan. I don’t want him anywhere near this family. He will find a way—he will prey on our situation.”

  Evie’s face, which had been tautened by her mother’s anger, settled back now into its folds of worry. “I don’t care,” she said. “He could not possibly make things worse.”

  “Toby Jenkins has vouched for him.” George had come down the stairs behind Rose so quietly that no one had noticed him. “He took a potion, and it worked. He had his dream. Robert gave it to him to try, for free.”

  “I’ll just bet he did.”

  “That’s what he said, Rose. How do you know it couldn’t work? How do you know?”

  They faced each other.

  “It’s not possible, George,” said Rose. “It’s piffle.”

  “I’m a little surprised by you, Rose, I must say.”

  He was of course thinking about Rose’s gardens and their hot blooms of bonfires, her strange ability to sometimes heal pain in patients her husband could not cure. No one ever called Rose a witch in front of George, but people would mention she was peculiar and then look at the ground.

  “And I’m surprised by you.”

  George held his tongue. He knew she would forbear from telling them what she’d seen in the bedroom. But it puzzled him, that his revealing the true contents of the vial had made her more angry with him, not less.

  * * *

  * * *

  That night George went into his dream languidly while Evie seemed to drift away from his side. The evenness of her sleeping breath took him down a road like careful footsteps. In his dream it is the high summer, a warm night with a large moon sifting its light over the landscape in a shimmering talc. He walks by fields where the tips of grass blades lean and quaver, and it seems he must continue walking here until something happens. In time a golden-gowned woman emerges from the dim horizon like a ghost, and he knows he must follow her. Pain distends his chest if he thinks of turning away, though he cannot even see who she is. He believes she is a stranger, but she’s also familiar, like someone who has passed him many times in the street although they’ve never met. She leads him down to the water, where he watches her push a canoe away from the shore. There’s a soft tearing noise as the boat slides off the bank, as if the land begrudges giving her to the water. George watches the lady dropping her paddle into the ripples on one side of her canoe, the cadence of paddling, then pulling it across herself to the other side. He looks around, but there are no other boats for him to take. If he can’t follow her, he knows his heart will cease to beat in his chest and a cave of ash will be hollowed out within him. She is the spirit animating his heart, he realizes; without her he cannot live. He steps into the water. The ice of it shocks him. It shouldn’t be this cold in summer, and instead of caressing his legs it bites them. As he wanders into the river up to his waist, he can feel the current straining against him, and he is not going fast enough to chase her. Petaled with moonlight, the black-white water needles the warmth of sensation away from his limbs. He feels himself dissolve like a doll of mud, the sand of him drifting down to the river bottom. His head remains above the surface, but his breath departs him anyway, seeking its home in her distant silver canoe.

  * * *

  * * *

  Charles Bachmeier sat up into the darkness before his wife had woken. It was a strange thing not to hear Laura moving about below, making the coffee and breakfast by lamplight in the kitchen. As his weight left the bed, she rolled slightly and coughed but never opened her eyes. Charles dressed quietly and took his lamp downstairs. He began to make up the fire in the kitchen stove, raking out the ash before adding new coal. He watched the dark lumps take the heat into themselves and begin to glow, like a group of girls reddening at whispered compliments. Then he filled a pot with water for his coffee. He did not know how to make pancakes, so instead he laid some slices of bacon in a pan and waited for them to melt. As he was making the coffee, he listened for the hiss of the bacon beginning to fry.

  He had stayed close to the house this past week, worried over the increasing depth of Laura’s sunken cough. Today Charles could stay no longer at home, and he knew it was wasteful to worry over Laura anymore. If he did not go out on the bay to get ice for the icehouse, it might soon be impossible, and if Laura had no ice all summer, he would not hear the end of it. He jumped when he burned his thumb on the edge of the pan as he was lifting out his meat. He sat thoughtfully with his breakfast and a second cup of coffee. Once the animals were fed and their stalls sprinkled with clean hay, he should see the Banks boys coming into the yard to meet him, and he would harness Martha and take the sled down for their ice.

  He clumped up the stairs to check on his wife once more. Cutting ice would make a long day of it, and he would not be back until nightfall. As he peered into the room, he saw that her eyes were open, like the blue places where water wells up in spring. He stepped over the creak of the threshold, came by the bed, and laid a hand against her cheek, which was fuzzy and cool.

  “Good morning, sleeper,” he said.

  “I think I’m feeling better today.” She smiled at him. “That was bad,” she went on, trying to sit up. “It sure was.”

  Charles placed a hand on her shoulder.

  “Don’t get up. I’ve taken care of my breakfast, and I just wanted to see you before I go out for the ice.”

  “Oh, the ice, the ice, my goodness, I’d forgotten all about it. Yes, we must have that. But you be careful, Charles. Has it been warming this week?”

  “Don’t worry yourself. No, it hasn’t been warm at all. It’s bitter cold again today, so perfect weather for it.”

  Laura leaned back again, folded her hands over the blanket. She turned her head and gazed out the window, as if from there she could keep watch.

  He waited with Martha as the sunlight settled downward from the tips of the trees to their thickened trunks planted in snow, but the Banks boys never showed. Shiftless, that’s what Jackson Banks was, he thought. The boy would never make a farmer. It would be the city for him, no doubt, and a job in a factory. Just enough money left over at the end of a week to swing the girls across the scuffed floors of the dance hall. Never a penny saved. Charles would have to go without them.

  There was a path through the forest down to the bay, and Charles rode Martha and the sleigh out of the yard toward the opening in the trees. The rising sun drew ribbons of shadow across the smooth snow, and Martha’s hooves pocked into them, the sleigh runners whispering behind. He touched the horse’s back lightly with the reins, not to urge her faster but to remind her of him, behind her, watching her effort. Her head bobbed up and down in its usual way, and from time to time she tossed it to one side or the other, steam from her muzzle straying up over the swiveling alertness of her ears.

  The sun was brightening but the day refusing to warm as Charles came into that familiar thinning of the trees, and then the vastness of the ice spread out befor
e him. Far away it was uncertain, rippled in places from the water’s unseen movement, but here where he stood closer to shore it was still thick and faithful. Martha walked onto it without fear, nostrils quivering in the cold. Charles dismounted and unhitched the sleigh so he could fasten the long scraper to the ties instead. He would walk Martha up and down a few times to clear the snow from his work surface. Ice cutting was hard work, but Charles enjoyed it. He was always enthralled by the white precision of the blocks as he lifted them from their hold, like marble destined for the walls of some exotic palace in a land he would never see.

  Responding to his gentle shake of the reins, Martha willingly dragged the scraper over the ice. Charles walked along beside her while the snow furled slowly onto itself like bedclothes pushing back. As he breathed, the air pinched the hairs in his nose together, and his chest took in the ache of it. His scarf that Laura had knit for him last winter began to chafe; he could feel the moisture of his own breath caught in the weave and the unhappy wetted wool rasping his skin in turn.

  Once more around for Martha. She turned, and as her horse’s eye stared at him, he felt that her obedience, bought with oats and apples, was also somehow the product of this shared discomfort. As he stopped her near the edge of their snow clearing and unhitched the scraper, it dawned on him that he hadn’t brought any sandwiches for lunch. He’d forgotten that Laura was not up to do it for him. Now he would not eat until he had packed at least one load of ice into the icehouse, with the sawdust to keep it from melting.

  From the sleigh he pulled down his pick and worked on chopping a large wedge out of the bay’s deep crust. Every year when he did this, he would imagine the lives of the miners out east, the heft of the pick arcing through the air and catching in the niveous rock surface of the ice, lift again, arc again, the burning dazzle of the winter sun on sifting snow as blinding as the darkness of underground.

  With his ax, too, he scraped and whacked in the ice until he had chipped away a good-size triangle through to the black water wiggling below. The ice was quick to reappear, like a cataract clouding an eye. It was at least a foot thick still, and he wedged his long saw against one point of the triangle and forced the blade up and down. He looked away to the hidden shore where the young trees spindled up from the water’s edge, then back down to his work. Patient Martha pawed the ice and snorted, watching him.

  Down one long line of the ice he worked, then back to the hole and sawed another parallel line beside the first, until he had one long, squared-off log of ice to saw into blocks. When this was done, he brought the two great picks from the sleigh and dug them into a block, hefting it first out of the water and then onto his abdomen, and staggering under its weight to the sleigh. He did this with block after block, Martha observing disinterestedly while her load back grew heavier and heavier. As he was nearing the end of this first pile of ice blocks, he looked up to see a figure coming through the trees at the edge of the bay.

  He thought, at first, something about the gait and shape of the coat, that it might be Laura. Lifting his hand to his temple, unsure what to do, he finally stopped work and started toward the trees. From the hazy, distant figure he could eventually carve his wife’s outline, sharpening her edges out of the cold as he had with the ice. He quickened his pace; something must be terribly wrong if she had dressed to come down and get him when she was not yet well.

  The end of the braid she slept with still hung twisting down below her hood, but she smiled at him, a squinted smile defending her blue eyes from the glare, and she held up a bundle in her hand.

  “What on earth are you doing, my dear?” Charles gasped out, stomping across the ice. It was goose-bumpy under his boots, here, like a skin.

  “I brought you some lunch, silly!” she said, shaking her parcel of sandwiches. “I just knew you’d forget. I was feeling so much better, and then I thought of you maybe out here hungry and working away, and I knew you wouldn’t come back in the middle just to eat.”

  “You foolish girl,” he said, pleased, taking the sandwiches and folding her into his free arm. “You should never have strained yourself, feeling better or not. You’ll end up back in your bed from getting up too soon.”

  “Nonsense.” She patted his back—thumping, really—so he’d feel her hand through all his layers of winter clothing. “I haven’t strained myself. I took Charlie with me.” And a few yards away he could see the pony, whom Laura had named after him as a joke, standing perfectly still with his legs planted as though he had somehow grown there, not needing to be tethered.

  Though he scolded her, Charles was grateful for the bundle. The hard work had emptied his stomach just as if he’d been digging inside himself all morning.

  “Thank you,” he told her, and as he turned to take the lunch back with him, he slipped in the powdery snow and went down. Scrambling to pull himself up again, his gloved hands swam against the snow until he found a wobbly purchase and lurched to a standing position. Laura sucked her breath in with a suddenness that alarmed him, and he turned to her, searching her face for signs of resurfaced pain. He frowned. She needed to get back to the house now, and he needed to return to his work.

  “Oh, my God, Charles, oh, my God,” she said, one mittened hand going up to her face and the other out to him as she stared down, down into the ice.

  He looked back again to where he had just been lying, where his floundering had swiped away the snow the way children do, making angels. At first all he saw was a splotch of red welling up through the waxy layers, but, like a murmur he couldn’t quite hear, it compelled him to move closer in. And there inside the ice was the missing boy, who must somehow have broken into the water and drifted down toward the shore, caught here by the tree roots two miles from his home.

  Charles could remember coming across young Ben in the summer, playing with a birchbark boat he’d made, following it along the swirling current and leaping through the trees. He could hear Laura’s breath shuddering behind him, but he stood in silence, looking down at the little gray face so perfectly preserved. It was like something out of a fairy tale, a sleeping spell that might be sundered with the right words, the right kindness, if the best tools could be brought to the task. He wasn’t so far, really, from his house and his own little piece of the shore. His winter hat was gone, but a red knitted scarf still hooped his neck, the work of his mother’s hands. Charles bent to the ice that lay over the boy in a brittle veil, touched it with his gloved hand.

  “I must go and get the sled. I must bring the ice pick,” he said.

  “Don’t forget the blanket,” Laura whispered over his shoulder. “To wrap him in.”

  * * *

  * * *

  All that morning Evie and her mother moved through the household chores without talking. George and her father had left early again that morning, and Evie decided to bake some cookies for the men from the search. Every day she imagined there would be a man or two fewer, as each was drawn back eventually into his own orbit of family and work, but she wanted to make something to thank them with, and she needed something more to do. If her hands weren’t always busy with some task, she would come unmoored, just waiting for news.

  There was a low tap at the front of the house as she was bending over to slide her first sheets into the oven. Her stomach clenched inward, her only warning against standing up again. Outwardly calm, she was pulling off her oven mitts and placing them neatly on the counter while her mother went to the door. She stepped into the hallway, brushing invisible flour from her palms. The door opened, and a man’s silhouette came into the entry, the outline of Charles Bachmeier from the neighboring farm. In Charles’s bulky arms there was a bundle, a heavy gray blanket. As her eyes adjusted to the light coming in around him, she was able to make it out better, the thing he was cradling. She was warding off the answer in his face as she held her gaze down and studied the form. . . . There were two icy boots falling out at one end . . . and near
the center a mottled hand dangled from the folds. A flood of saliva rushed into her mouth, and she heaved, throwing up onto the floor.

  Chapter 7

  It was a pitiless cold day to be crunching outside in the brittle-topped snow. The men were gathering again at Jenkins’s store after the day’s search, and they were a little earlier than the day before without meaning to be. It was bitter enough to kill the hope of finding Benjamin Dawson safe. So they drained back into town, the skin on their cheeks burned pink, limbs stiffening. Icicles along the eaves of the store flashed in the setting sun, like bared fangs.

  In twos and threes they came in, clapping their gloves together trying to bring the thaw into their hands, pulling their scarves down to let the warmer air tingle their lips. They stood around looking at one another, expecting news to break between them, then silently turning out to consider the shelves in case there was something their wives had wanted, something they’d forgotten.

  George arrived with Sam, both of them stamping their boots against the floorboards, George blowing on his palms even though they could no longer feel his breath. He looked at the faces circling him and saw his friends, and even the men he did not like so well. They all stood like dogs at attention, gazes shifting up at him and then away, as if they’d failed to learn some new trick but were hoping for kindness anyway. He was thinking he wouldn’t ask them to continue on, not much longer, even though he couldn’t stop looking himself. Maybe when spring arrived, when it was time to plow the fields and drop the little seeds into their secret places and he had work to do again, real work, or if Evie asked him to. Until then he didn’t know how to return to her again empty-handed, without their boy. He stood there dumbly with his frozen brain dawdling, trying to thaw, trying to figure out how he had lost him.

  When Cora Jenkins entered from the storage room, he saw. She kept her head down while she walked through the room of men, and he was thinking how Cora never did that. She always looked up and around so she could show off her pretty neck and eyes. She liked to take in the admiration of all who saw her, the way water would take the sunlight and glint it giddily back at the sky. Now she scuttled, pulling the end of her long copper braid forward over her shoulder. The men all turned instinctively toward her. They all knew that braid so well and had followed the woven trail of it many times with their eyes, down to where it ended at her waist. Now she was stroking it like a stray animal she’d picked up and must protect from them.