“What’s that?” their mother asked. “You sleep bad last night, Barto?”
“I went right off,” Barto told her. “Weird sleep, though. Bad dreams. Like something was chasing me down all night long. I woke up feeling as tired as if I’d really been hours running.” He bent forward again and began to scoop the steaming oatmeal into his mouth. Ali sprinkled brown sugar over his bowl and shrugged as if he couldn’t understand, but he put his head down and smiled to himself. He poured in cream from the pitcher and watched the sugar crumble.
After breakfast they went outside to their chores and the long summer day of work. Still in the grass by the porch were the broken wood-chip pieces of the carving Ali had made the week before. With his pocketknife he’d been whittling sticks he picked up from the woods, saving the straightest ones from the kindling pile. He had cut his hands a few times, but he was learning not to. When he found a long, bowed, shallow piece of wood, he’d sat with his knife and begun to hollow it out, narrowing the tips and shaving off the bark, fashioning a perfect toy boat to float down the river. The boat had come out long and fine and light, and then he’d spent hours digging carvings into its hull, swirls and stars and moons, whatever he could manage. Barto had waited until all those hours had passed and then grabbed it out from Ali’s hands in an instant.
“What’s this?” He’d grinned, turning it over in his fat palms and examining all the lined surfaces, the work of it. All the time.
“It’s a canoe,” Ali had told him.
“Not anymore,” laughed Barto, and he’d dropped the wood on the grass and stomped it with his foot, hard, and it had crunched and broken like bone.
* * *
* * *
At this late afternoon hour, the Reverend Arnold liked to sit in the manse parlor, behind a small desk tucked into the corner, making notes for the week’s sermon and contemplating his message. Mrs. Arnold would be busy with supper preparations in the kitchen, and it was one of the few hours in the day when he did not have some female—his wife, or the leader of the Ladies’ Aid, or Violet Burnley pestering him about hymn selections—thrumming at his ear like a persistent mosquito.
He settled into the straight wooden chair, not too comfortably, and flipped through his Bible. He tapped his fingers along the blotter. Finally he readied his pen, changing the nib and testing its flow against a spare page. When he was poised to begin, a rapping against the front door from its impressive brass knocker interrupted him. Mrs. Arnold emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron, and moved past the open doorway of the parlor to answer it. He heard high, womanly voices, the dreaded words “Of course not, please come in,” and he steeled himself, laying his fountain pen down precisely parallel to the edge of his paper.
His wife, still nervously wiping her now-dry hands, ushered Mrs. Schumann into the room and closed the door behind them.
“Abigail, what a pleasant distraction.” He stood, edged his way around the desk corner, and motioned her to the sofa under the front window.
“I hope I’m not interrupting you at work,” she said.
“Not at all, not at all. You, and all my parishioners, you are my work,” he said. Then, thinking this didn’t sound quite right, he added, “I welcome the diversion. Researching and writing can be so dreary.” He smiled, easing himself into his favorite armchair across from her. “What’s on your mind?”
Mrs. Schumann folded her hands over her knees. Her hard-set face looked almost upset. “I hardly know where to begin. It’s all so . . . I don’t know if I can explain. . . .”
“Take your time, take your time.” Mr. Arnold lowered his voice to its most soothing tone.
“It’s all begun with the dream-selling character. This Robert Owens.”
Mr. Arnold’s back straightened. “Yes?”
“Do you know him?”
“Not precisely. I certainly haven’t patronized him.”
“Oh, no, of course not.”
“I had occasion to speak to him once. Only once.” As he didn’t know how to describe that encounter, when he had the distinct but crazy impression Robert Owens was laughing at him, he decided against saying anything more.
“A few months ago, maybe around the time of that dance, you remember? I became aware of a . . . a change. In my Johann.”
“Oh? What sort of change?”
“Well, for one thing, he moons around.”
“Moons a—”
“It’s just so hard for me to explain, without sounding . . . It’s not that I don’t want him to be happy, you understand? But this is not normal happiness. This isn’t the same as after the price of corn goes up or the boys shot their first bird, and he was so proud. This is like . . . well, it’s like he’s a different person. I don’t even recognize him. And he’s so forgetful. He was supposed to be mending the back-pasture fence the other afternoon, but he never even came in for dinner. . . . I had to send the boys out looking for him, and when they found him, he wasn’t mending anything at all!”
“What . . . what was he doing?”
“The boys said they found him wading in the creek. Just paddling around, trousers rolled up around his knees, and he’d built a campfire on the bank for no reason, in the blazing heat. And he said they should all sit around it and play cowboys. . . .”
“Cowboys. Well, my. I’m sure the boys would’ve liked—”
“The boys are too young to handle this! They have their own chores—they can’t be keeping track of him, too. They can’t run the darn farm.” She put a hand to her mouth. “I’m so sorry. But I’m just at my wits’ end. The work this time of year is all we can keep up with, and you know Papa hasn’t been the same since his stroke. . . . I have him to dress and feed on top of everything—it just isn’t fair! Johann can’t take time out in the middle of the day to play Indian tepee!”
“Is this the only . . . I mean, have there been any other—”
“Oh, there’ve been countless of these incidents. That’s just the most recent. Leaving the milk pails out to spoil in the sun. And he plain forgot to order the thresher for the wheat. . . . Thank goodness he goes in with Coldbrook and the others, and they reminded him in time.” She paused and put a hand to the back of her neck. “I can feel him slipping away from us, day by day. He’s just not the same man I married. He was always so . . . responsible.”
“Abby, I’m still not sure what all this has to do with—”
“I’m getting to that. I’ve been asking Johann for weeks and weeks what’s the matter. Where is his head? He won’t say, he won’t say. Then, a few days ago, he finally told me the truth. But only part of the truth.” She paused here, making certain the minister’s eyes had not wandered from the new worry lines in her face. “He admitted to me he has been taking the dreams.”
Mr. Arnold leaned forward in his chair. “I see. What kind of dreams are those?”
“That’s just it. He won’t tell me.” Here Mrs. Schumann’s rigid posture collapsed, as if her whole body were a sculpture of ice that had finally caved in in the late-summer heat. “How can that be? In all our years together, he’s never kept a secret from me before.”
That you know of, thought Mr. Arnold, then quickly dismissed it as unfair.
“Well, I’m not sure how to proceed,” he said. “Perhaps if I paid Owens a visit. I’m in charge of your husband’s soul, after all.” He smiled a tight smile, curtailed by the responsibility. “There’s a chance Mr. Owens might be persuaded—speaking in confidence, of course—to tell me what this is all about.” He sat back, wondering if he was about to make promises he couldn’t keep.
“Do you really think so?”
“At any rate, he can’t stay here forever. The man is practically a vagrant. And when he leaves, his dreams will go with him.” He tapped his fingers together hopefully.
“That could take many months!”
“In
the meantime why don’t you send Johann over to see me. I’ll talk with him about all this, the . . . mooning, his responsibilities to you and the children, and of course the waste of good money.” He noticed with some discomfort that Abigail was still wringing her hands.
“That’s not all,” she said. “I think he’s been around my children.”
“Pardon me?”
“Do you know what I found under their pillows when I stripped them to wash the sheets? Stones.” She could not have laced the word with more horror than if she’d said “guns,” or “poison.” “Dark little stones, smooth as satin, gold veins in them. Looking up at me like two eyes.”
“And they. . . . you believe they have something to do with Mr. Owens?”
“I know they do. I scolded the boys and asked where they’d got such strange things, and they just as bold-faced as could be told me the dream peddler gave them to them. He stopped at our place, first thing on his way into town, asking for somewhere to put up. And I sent him on to Violet’s.” She wrapped her arms now across her chest. “He told them something about the rocks, some dreaming nonsense. They’ve been sleeping on them ever since.”
“Have they . . . have they been acting differently as well? Acting strange?”
“No.” She sounded almost disappointed. “They’re just as rambunctious as ever. But I tell you, it makes me very uncomfortable. He never asked my permission to give them anything. And the boys just don’t know what they should think of their father. He’s so . . . so pleased all the time, whistling, grabbing at me to dance around the kitchen. The boys have been terrible, trying to get his attention. Pulled a pile of hay down out of the mow and made a big mess, jumping into it. And the worst was when I caught them trying to light cigarettes in the barn. Cigarettes! In the barn! They could’ve burned it all down. They expect him to whip them, Reverend. They’re looking for signs of the father they knew. They need to be punished, but he pays them no mind at all. Laughs at them. I’m at my wits’ end,” she repeated.
“Do you . . . do you have the stones?”
She blinked. “No. I threw them into the river.” They looked at each other. “I couldn’t keep them in the house.”
“I see. No, of course. I was only curious.”
“And all this . . . this is not all.”
“Surely . . .”
“I overheard the boys talking in their room. This was after I took those rocks away.” She closed her eyes. “I’m not sure how to say this.”
“That’s all right. Take your time.” He rubbed his temple.
“It seems . . . at least, from what I understood of what they were saying . . . it seems the dream peddler has quite a following among the young men. Toby Jenkins, and all them. That they have been giving him . . . an awful lot of business.”
“I’m not sure—”
“It sounds as though he has been selling dreams of an inappropriate nature,” she said darkly.
“Oh, dear,” said Mr. Arnold. “Oh, dear.”
“I could not think what to do, but I felt I must bring this to your attention. It’s all in fun, everyone says. What could be the harm? Well, I’ll tell you what. I think this is scandalous. And to think my young boys, who are very young, should even hear about something like this . . . But you see, they have friends with older brothers, and I have no reason to doubt . . . And then, once I heard this, I had to ask myself . . . what if this has something to do with my own husband? And his dreams, and why he won’t tell me about them? How can I not wonder? If Owens is selling all kinds of . . . magic, would he have any compunction about selling that to a married man? Johann could be . . . for all I know, in his dreams, where no one could ever catch him! Where he believes it does not matter.”
“I see. But it does matter.”
She nodded tearfully. “Yes, it does. It matters to me. I feel like a fool.”
“Now, now,” said Mr. Arnold. He leaned forward and patted her hand, hoping the tears would not spill. “Let’s not lose our heads. I know this is distressing. But let us not forget, despite what you overheard . . . you don’t know for certain what your husband has been dreaming about. You don’t yet know.” She shook her head. “Now, then. I don’t want you to worry. Send Johann over to see me, and we’ll get to the bottom of it. I’ll sort him out.”
Chapter 20
The dream peddler was walking through the graveyard stillness when he began to have the feeling he was not alone. It was a fleeting thing, like the flash of a bird’s shadow as it darts from one tree to another, gone in the moment of recognition.
He had never come across anyone else here except on the days when he and Evie had planned to meet. Robert walked here because he enjoyed the orderly rows of stones and the little haphazard flowers growing up wherever the wind had dropped their seeds. The long green fronds of weeping willows hung down, protecting the silence within their dreamy, hairy branches.
He walked to the end of a row, then spun fast and tried to catch whoever was there. Only a startled bird flew at him out of the bush, while the quiet, dappling green that floated the headstones went on undisturbed. It was not until he had wandered all the way to the southwest corner that he saw her, hunkered down like she was reprimanding a child. She seemed unaware of him, and he realized she was not following him at all but here for her own purpose, and everything turned on him then, and he was spying on her across the patchwork of graves.
She lifted her head, and stood. Her hair was just like her daughter’s, forever loosening itself from its knot, frizzled with gray but otherwise just the same. As if he were meeting with Evie again, he walked to her, and it dawned on him he’d never seen the new grave in the back. She had kept him away from her son, had always led Robert down into the orchard where their footsteps would not disturb him.
“We were able to bury him, when the warm weather came,” Rose said.
“I see.”
He looked down at the stone, surprised by its modesty. In this attitude he could see the sparse new grass coming in over the fresh black earth like feelers, and he could see Rose’s feet. They were naked except for dirt, toughened and callused. She had walked all the way here, he realized, with no shoes. She walked everywhere in the summer months with no shoes, and her feet had grown a hard crust like a shell. One small toenail was torn half away. The feet made her seem crazy, he understood suddenly; it was the feet more than anything else, more than thoughtless words or absentmindedness. Because they were so uncared for, because she cared not for them, their cleanliness or pain, as if they were somehow disconnected from herself. If she could walk what it took to make this of her own feet, she could not be normal; that was what people must think.
“I know my daughter goes to see you.”
Startled by the flint sound of her voice, he looked up at her.
“It’s not what you think,” he said quickly.
“You don’t know what I think.”
“Tell me, then. Do you think I sell dreams to her, take advantage of her for my own pocket?”
“Don’t you?”
“No. It’s not like that with us.”
She dented her hips with her hands. “Are you . . . involved with her?”
He leaned back slightly from the question. “No.”
She surveyed him a moment, then looked past him to the deep green orchard.
“It might not be the worst thing. She needs to feel something again. She needs to wake up.”
“But she . . . her husband . . .”
“George is a good man,” she said. “But he’s a simple man, and a quiet one. He’s not going to pull Evie out of this. He’s only going to watch her disappear.”
“Maybe the trouble is . . . it’s not for George, or even you . . . or me. Is it?”
“I’ve seen the two of you meet here. More than once. And she never notices me. She never notices because she doesn’t come back
here. Doesn’t look over here, her son’s resting place.”
“You think she avoids her pain? Ignoring the grave?”
“I imagine it probably helps.”
Robert hesitated. “She has a handprint, you know. There’s a handprint of Ben’s, left on a window in the house, which she never wipes away. I think she feels him there when she looks at it. Maybe she doesn’t need to visit his grave.”
Rose looked at him directly then, and her eyes were much like Evie’s, except they were brown. “You know my daughter quite well.”
“In some ways, yes.”
“Do you take money from her?”
He smiled slowly. “Only because she insists on it.”
“If you can do her any good . . . at all . . . I told her to stay away from you, you know.”
“That was probably sound advice.”
They stood looking at the dates of Ben’s life. The wind went through the trees around them, and the branches woke, wondering.
“This has been very hard on her.”
“I can only imagine.”
“Can you?”
He shrugged. “I could try.”
“When someone has been this badly broken . . .” Rose shook her head. “There’s no fixing it, you know. One just learns to live with the brokenness. How to walk and talk in spite of the cracks. How to feel without tearing the seams.”
“I suppose so.”
“Do you know why I’m telling you this?”
Robert looked up at Rose then. “I guess you want me to be careful of her.”
“I want you to understand you can’t heal her.”
He wasn’t sure what to say to that.
“Maybe you—” he said. He started over. “People don’t exactly come out and say this . . . but somehow I’ve heard things. . . . They think you’re some kind of a witch.”
Rose smiled and lifted her shoulders. “I’m just a person who does not care what people think.” She gestured down to the filthy feet as if she’d been reading his earlier thoughts. “Maybe that’s as strange as being a witch, I don’t know. I’ve always talked to myself, ever since I was a girl. I can’t seem to help it. And I light fires because they are warm and beautiful, and I go without shoes because the grass feels good on my feet.”
The Dream Peddler Page 19
