The Dream Peddler

by Martine Fournier Watson

  He had spent his night at the Thomson house, where their third, a little boy named James, had croup and scared them all witless. The night air was not cold and damp enough to ease his breathing, they said, though they’d been running out with him at intervals and propping him up with his face turned to the high moon. After examining him Dr. Whiting knew it was the true croup and explained to them the cold air would not have helped anyway. He showed them how to lay out a pan of hot coals and sprinkle it with sulfur. He tied flannel over his own face and held poor James above the dark smoke while he writhed and choked. Finally the boy began to cough up a messy grayish membrane and was laid down breathing much easier. Dr. Whiting stayed and smoked the little boy twice more in the night to make sure all the infection was gone, then left them all dazed over their pale bowls of porridge in the morning. James was resting soundly, and the other children waved bright metal spoons good-bye at the doctor from the breakfast table.

  There was always some kind of illness running through these large families, he thought. He was sitting now on the grass, although a faint dampness of dew was trying to find his skin through his clothing. They’d all had a case of the measles, too, shortly before Mary was due, and Sam had been concerned about her passing it on to the baby. The baby still seemed right as rain, but the little two-year-old, Lila, was worrying him now. He had noticed a change in her on his last two calls to the house but couldn’t put his finger on what was wrong. Lila had been growing strong and healthy and like most children her age was starting to string her words together into short sentences. She enjoyed games of patty-cake and pressing her cheek hard against whatever she hugged.

  He noted again how low to the ground Ben’s modest stone was, how it sloped perfectly down to meet the grass. He remembered something about the ancients having stone pillows, didn’t he? He had read that somewhere, he was sure, the Greeks or Romans using them. The grave seemed to be guiding him onto itself, as surely as if it had arms. He decided to try it out, and he took off his coat and spread it over the dew, then lay down with the tops of his shoulders slanting back onto Ben’s memorial. He watched the sun floating up in the sky, a bubble so bright it forced his already heavy eyelids down over his eyes. As he closed them, he saw a phantom sun scarred red across his interior darkness.

  Lila’s words had been going out like things with a tide. She was as laughing as ever, happy, always singing tunelessly some endless song known only to her. But her words washed back in less frequently, their edges softened down like sea glass. Something told him he should know what was wrong, but he struggled to hold that idea against the physical perfection of her childhood: her hearty appetite, straight back and limbs, untroubled sleep. Even as he closed his eyes, he thought he could stay awake to puzzle it through, but he fell asleep with his body stretched out over the length of Ben’s earth. The grass under him flattened, and the sun wormed across him, warming the dark wrinkles of his clothing.

  Evie came into his dream, not the gaunt daughter of today but the chubby toddler of many years ago, sitting on a blanket in the front yard in her dirty play dress, patting her surroundings with the tender palms of her hands. There are dimples in each of her fingers smiling up at him. He bends down to observe more closely what she is doing and finds she is picking up fallen tulip petals from the beds in the lawn and examining each one carefully. She puts every petal through the same series: smells it, tastes it, rolls it between her fingers. Then she pokes it into her ear, and he’s surprised to see it disappearing completely from view. He kneels to check her ears, but they are empty, unharmed by the petals. In his confusion over where they could have gone, she seems a tiny magician, fooling him with the simplest of tricks.

  Then he notices her putting a small pebble up to her mouth, and he snatches it away, afraid she will choke on it. She smiles at him and shakes her head silently, entertained by his inability to understand. She puts her now-empty fingers into her mouth and pulls out a pebble, glistening wet from her saliva, and places it carefully beside her on the blanket. Mystified, he watches as she pulls a whole row of pebbles from her mouth and lines them up across the pale fabric He studies them, certain this is a message she has made, in a code he cannot decipher. Running his fingertips along the surface of the stones, he is still troubled, trying to understand, and Evie, out of patience, begins to climb across the hump of his bent back and giggles down into his ear.

  He woke, with the feeling he’d sunburned his face and no idea how long he’d been sleeping. The dream was still with him; he could feel the tug of Evie at his shoulders and half expected to see the little rank of pebbles waiting for him there in the grass. With an unexpected ease, he realized he knew what was wrong with Lila Thomson. She’d lost her hearing, probably from an ear infection caused by her bout with the measles. And now all the words she had so carefully collected were leaving her. In her head they were still perfectly cut, as if from ice, but in the round hollow of her mouth they began to melt and lose their shapes, and when she tried to breathe them out, they were already gone. From now on she would make only barks, wails, and a hazy, heartfelt kind of panting.

  The sadness of his discovery made little impression on him as he raised his head, trying to twist the stiffness out of his neck, and rolled over onto one elbow and looked underneath him. He was overcome by a sense of gratitude, a certainty that his dream had been a visitation even though he had never before in his life experienced any magic. He palmed the surface of the gravestone with the hand he was not leaning on.

  “Thank you, Benny,” he told it. “Thank you for helping me.”

  * * *

  * * *

  The only trouble with Evie’s new way of sleeping was how she woke, with the itchy feeling of having slept not at all. There might be a darkness, a vague sense of George ruffling the air behind her or the moon tickling in at the window, but always a sense that no time had passed and whatever sleep she got had been only a few minutes. She decided it was a matter of will to get used to it, to keep her mouth clamped shut while yawns stretched hard at the back of her throat, to keep her eyes open wide so there would be no hint of sleepiness when George spoke to her.

  Evie didn’t like to go back to Violet Burnley’s after that first time. She realized now that if Violet saw her there, buying who knows what from Robert Owens, it would get back to her parents, and George. She was glad for the summer, because there were so many places to hide. You could disappear into the sheaves of corn, leaving no wake behind you. Every field and grove was a shifting cover for private meetings, and eventually she came to think of Robert as everlastingly dappled with shade, his face a wobbling patchwork of light and darkness. He came to her in the same orchard where they had met, beside the graveyard, and everything they said to each other was tinged with the verdure of leaf shade. He always held out a half-pound bag of sweets, sugar hearts from the store, as if she were a creature that had to be lured. One time he brought her an apple, and she turned the waxy skin in her hand as if considering all its surface before biting, hunting for the deepest red she could find on it.

  “It’s strange you came to town the time of year you did,” she said. “We don’t get too many salesmen coming through here in the winter.”

  He folded his arms. “Guess I wouldn’t normally have come that time of year either. It’s no fun walking through the blasted cold, that’s for sure.”

  “So why did you? Come here then?”

  He watched her rolling the apple in her hand.

  “Sometimes things just don’t go right. There was a young woman, in that last town. She drank one of my potions before she went to sleep, and then she never woke.”

  Evie didn’t look up at him, but the apple stopped.

  “I promise, there was nothing in that potion that could have hurt her. It must have been a coincidence, but people in that town, they blamed me.”

  “Why did they blame you?”

  He looked away. “No one c
ould tell what had happened to her. Maybe she had a bad heart? They didn’t accuse me directly, of course, but you understand there always comes a time when I have to leave. Everything starts off fine, people think up the dreams they want, and when they buy the potions and they get them . . . well, they like that. And they keep coming back for more, so they can go on having dreams.

  “But the problem, see, is they’ve all told me what they want. They’ve all told me what they want most to dream of, these secrets they have, that they haven’t told anyone else. They’re uncomfortable after a time, knowing everything that I know, and they maybe think they can’t trust me to keep quiet about what I know. So even if they’d rather keep coming back to me to have dreams, they resent me being around. The price gets too heavy.”

  Now they looked at each other.

  “When I come to town a stranger, people don’t think much about telling me secrets, I guess. They don’t know me, and I don’t know them. But after a long enough time, see, I do come to know them. I am in danger of becoming part of their town. And when I feel that, when I feel people starting to hold it all against me, that’s when I know it’s time to leave.”

  “Sounds like a lonely life.”

  He shrugged. “I s’pose it can be lonely, yes. But in a way I also feel like I’m good for them. Like a doctor, maybe, like your father. I take money for a while, and it’s good business for me and all, but then when I leave, I don’t know . . . they are able to let those parts of themselves go with me. They’ve shucked off a burden, somehow. Sometimes it’s a good thing, to let go of some part of yourself.”

  Evie was shaking her head. “But the part of themselves that leaves with you, then, is the dreaming part. What do we have if we let go of the dreaming part of ourselves?”

  “And what about you?” he asked her. “I’ve helped you to silence your own dreaming mind. Probably I shouldn’t do that. But I find it hard to say no to you.”

  “Because of Ben.”

  “Well, yes.” He looked as if he might say something more, but all he did was go into his pocket for cigarettes.

  “It’s different with me,” she said. She swallowed the bulb of yawn blooming under her palate. “Right now I don’t have any other choice.”

  “As you wish it.” He held out her medicine, and she walked away from him into the wind. When she had gone out of his sight, he looked down and noticed she’d dropped his apple into the grass, and it was smooth and unbitten.

  * * *

  * * *

  It was George’s birthday, and Evie had decided to bake him a cake.

  He was out haying in the fields and would not come in for supper until the evening milking was done. She had collected the eggs from the hens that morning, but she stepped out again for a last look as she sometimes did in the afternoon. As soon as the days stretched out a little, the quiet winter hens began laying again, as if the process needed light. Evie enjoyed the hens, the broken silkiness of their feathers under her hand, the comical rolling of their yellow-ringed, beady eyes.

  In the half-light of the henhouse, she felt at home, as if the dust motes in her sleepy mind suddenly showed themselves to her here. She yawned in the twilight and shook her head. She was still having trouble, moved through the day in a stubborn stupor she could not shake off. Putting her hand into the warmth under each hen, she stopped for the first time to wonder at how easy it was to take their eggs from them, as long as none of them were broody. Since she had already collected earlier, most of the soft, hot hollows were empty. Charlotte, she noted, had another broken shell, and her straw was sticky with egg slime. Evie had cleaned up yesterday’s mess as soon as she discovered it, but she’d probably been too late. Now that Charlotte had a taste for the eggs, she’d be no good. Evie would have to break her neck and dress her for the table.

  With two new eggs she found, Evie climbed back up to the house and began the cake. Her apron turned white and floury as she measured and mixed. By the time supper was ready, the cake sat, petaled with frosting, in the center of the dining table. Evie had spelled HAPPY BIRTHDAY across it, using a knife to carve careful letters. In its serene roundness, it even seemed hopeful, like a cake for a little boy. Evie left it and went upstairs to change into her good yellow summer dress. She took out her hair, brushed the curls, and pinned them back again. She realized she had grown used to the shape of herself. She could anticipate her reflection now, so the image she ferried in her mind could meet up with what she really was.

  When George came in from the field and saw Evie and his cake, he smiled, and it creased the grime across his cheeks.

  “It’s a celebration,” he said dubiously.

  “Happy birthday, George.”

  “Well, look at all this. Look at you.”

  Evie had set a roast chicken to rest on the sideboard, and the smell went down into him. She’d made rolls and butter beans and roasted carrots. He rubbed his hands down the front thighs of his overalls and pulled them back up, curling and releasing his fingers.

  “I’m not fit for all this,” he said. “I’d better go clean myself up.”

  In a clean shirt and forearms, George ate hungrily while Evie nodded over her plate. He looked up at her now and again but saw only the same thing each time: Evie drawing a fork agonizingly slowly through her food and once in a while lifting a bite and holding it in her mouth. He could see her taking a drink of water to make the food go down, as if she could not swallow without it.

  They could have gone to her parents’, he thought. Or even his parents’ next door. They would have been pleased to put on a little supper if she’d asked them. And then the two of them would not be here alone together. With others around maybe he wouldn’t be feeling this anger churning upward from his gut, this sudden need to make her eat. Evie stared dreamily out the window, unaware of the flush working up the back of her husband’s neck. As soon as his plate was clean, Evie jumped up as if a bell had sounded. She cut George a big wedge of the cake and a smaller piece for herself.

  “It’s delicious,” he told her.

  “I’m so glad. I remembered at the last minute you’d rather chocolate, and I just didn’t have any.”

  “No, no, this is good like this.” He ate some more. “You going to try some?”

  Obediently Evie raised her fork again. George had an impulse to reach across the table and grasp her hand, shove the fork into her mouth and down to the plate again, again, and again until the cake had gone into her. Hold her mouth shut over the gagging. He imagined himself pressing his hands behind her head, pressing her whole face down into the cake. She yawned, and he saw himself bending her yawn into the soft frosting before she could close her mouth.

  George shifted his weight in the chair, and his hands brushed across the tabletop, crumbs snowing down to the floor. He cleared his plate and Evie’s as well, with the cake unfinished. She sat at her empty place, leaning her head on her hand, paying no attention to him. George went over and forced himself to kiss her on the cheek.

  “Thank you for that wonderful supper. I’m very tired. I’m going on up to bed.”

  Evie looked up at him. “Oh. All right.”

  As he lay in bed watching the tide of daylight go out, he listened to the movements of Evie washing their supper dishes below. The work seemed to go on for a long time. Most nights Evie and George went to bed together, and when she slid in beside him, he waited for her to turn onto her side and then he drew her body in next to his. He liked to fall asleep holding her, but tonight the sounds of her work carried him off before she came up. As if he were rocked by a ship and all her movements sounded like the clinking of wind in the chains.

  Chapter 17

  Toby was having a wonderful dream. He had them frequently now, thanks to the extra money from summer work he took on the busy farms. Under the sun he strained his muscles and the blue veins surfaced into his sweat, and under the moon he slept. Most o
f the time he didn’t recognize the girls in these dreams, and it was a different girl every night. He hoped Robert Owens would stay in town a very long time.

  In this dream, though, he knows at once the woman waiting for him at the edge of the field. The wheat is high, and as she backs away from him, he fears he could lose her in its sighing folds if he doesn’t follow fast enough. But she is not running, only leading him into the center. Her gray eyes check over her shoulder every so often, making sure he’s still behind her. The growing wheat gasps and parts around them, then closes in on itself to erase their path.

  Her hair when she unpins it is thick as an attic darkness and lined the same way with the daylight. He will put his face into it, then lie down, catch the tips of it along his skin like rain. Her body is the one from before, the round, muscled thighs closing around his hips when he enters her, the large breasts shifting their brown nipples slightly away from him as she arches her back. His eyelids half close over his vision, his chest moves down to cover the glance of her breasts, and she is slippery around him. He’d never realized that he wanted her when he was waking; it only comes to him now, in the dream field. The sun crosses over his back and bends down between his shoulder blades. It lifts the sweat beads one by one, harvesting them from his skin.

  Even in his dream, he is surprised to feel her bucking hips against him. As she starts to call out in her pleasure, he hears himself shushing her like the swaying shafts of wheat, because he can’t help thinking that even this far from the town someone might hear them. . . . No time passes in the dream. He rolls away and feels the crackling stalks tickle, while the sunlight never moves from its midday stiffening in the sky. Eventually it becomes clear to him that they are frozen now, and only if they separate will time resume. So he rises and looks for his clothes, tossed into the wheat and clinging there, and the chaff peels away with them as he pulls them out. She makes no move to dress herself, only leans on an elbow and watches, one leg pulled over the other and hiding the place where he has just been. The faint staggered stretch marks of her abdomen glimmer like lightning.