The Dream Peddler

by Martine Fournier Watson

  “Miss Jenkins, Mrs. Dawson,” he greeted them.

  The conversation they’d had stretched out between them like a pull of taffy while they stared at him. The taffy thread hung in the air and swagged heavily. Robert looked at Cora sadly.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” she said.

  “I’m getting ready to leave town,” he told her. “And I need to buy some things for my journey.”

  The door to the back room opened, and Tom came in.

  “Stay away from my daughter!” He took four long, fast strides and landed his fist at the corner of Robert’s mouth. Robert fell back against the far shelves, and he looked at Cora.

  “What did you say to him?”

  “You don’t talk to her,” said Tom, putting his body between Robert and the counter. “You aren’t ever going to speak another word to her again. You are not going to look at her. You are going to turn around and leave this store.”

  As Robert began to obey, Tom muttered, “Jackson was right about you all along.”

  “So it’s that again.” Robert touched his face. “Poor Jackson,” he said under his breath.

  “I want you out of this town,” said Tom. “And don’t ever come back.”

  Evie followed Robert out of the store.

  They stood in the street. Tenderly she took his hand away from his face and saw the blood creeping down from his lip.

  “It wasn’t me,” he said. She reached into his chest pocket, pulled out his handkerchief, and pressed it to his mouth.

  “I know it wasn’t.” He pulled the handkerchief down, and she searched his face. “But how can we ever prove you aren’t responsible?”

  For a while he stood turning the bloodstained cloth over in his hands, as if he were trying to figure out what it was.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he told her. “Because I am.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Though he had known her for many months now, Robert had never been out to Evie’s farmhouse. He had some vague idea of where it was from Violet’s description and walked there for the first time to tell her good-bye.

  George had taken a load of hay out to sell, and Evie was in the kitchen canning. She had been canning all summer since the berries had started ripening, and her fingertips were always stained a claret color. Now the tomatoes were ready, and she was canning them and making ketchup and pickles. Steam hovered over her stove like a specter, but today she hardly noticed it in the gluey heat. Evie didn’t think you could call what you did in this kind of air breathing. It simply seeped into your weighted lungs and trickled back out again, like a tide.

  Through the back window, she saw him coming over the fields. There wasn’t time to wash or change, only for wiping her hands on her apron and drawing the back of one across her forehead without thinking, dragging the sweat. When she stepped outdoors, it was with the feeling that something painted inside her was weathering, flaking away. He was not supposed to come to her home, ever. She had never told George about him. Telling George would have meant hurting him, explaining about her own dreams.

  She didn’t know if George ever met Ben in his dreams. Maybe if he did and woke to find him gone again, he’d become used to it. She could imagine George that way, suffering the choked moment of waking for the sake of the dream that came before. But she never asked him; they never spoke of it. And for some reason she knew George hated Robert Owens, even though he never said a bad word about him until Cora. In fact, all he ever had to say of Robert was how he had tried to help, tried to help find Benny and how that was a kind thing, but even so she knew. And suddenly she realized it was not for George’s sake or the sake of the lie that she didn’t like seeing Robert coming across the fields. She was damp and limp from the sweaty canning work and the heat, wearing her dirty apron. She didn’t want him seeing her like this, and all at once she understood why George hated him. She almost laughed at how she hadn’t seen it.

  “Hello,” he said when he reached the bottom of her porch steps. “I’ve come to say good-bye.” And he stood sheepishly listening over what he had just said. She saw his cart with all his things waiting down by the road like a patient mule.

  “I’m sorry you have to go,” she told him.

  Self-consciously she wiped at the back of her neck. She knew that the curls around her temples would be wild and wiry with drying sweat. She wished she would stop thinking about her looks, when this moment would be over so quickly.

  “I always knew you would leave, we all understood that. But I’m sorry it’s like this. I’m sorry . . . for Cora, for all of it. No one here will ever know you were a good man. How good you were to me. They’ll only blame you.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I told you once, it’s always like this. This is the life I have chosen. If you remember me the way that you knew me, it’s more than I deserve.”

  She looked out across the farms, the striping greens of fields that grew over and over again in the endless distance, the darker speckle of hungry animals grazing away the forever.

  “Where will you go?”

  “It doesn’t matter. East. Maybe after this winter I’ll go south, where it doesn’t get so cold.”

  “Hard to imagine the cold coming again, isn’t it? In this heat?”

  He smiled at her, and she wondered how he could manage to crinkle the corners of his eyes like that and still look so unhappy.

  “Oh!” he said, remembering something. He pulled his canvas bag off his shoulder and pulled out a large flask.

  “I know you never wanted this much of it,” he said, “but maybe if you could find somewhere to stash it . . . I was worried about . . . how you would manage, now. Without my medicine. I brought you some that should last a long while, if you want it.”

  She bit her lip. “It’s very kind of you. But I’ll learn to get by without it. I haven’t dreamed in so long I think I’ve forgotten how. Maybe it would be better for me. To remember.”

  He nodded and put the flask back into the twilight of his bag.

  “I have your book,” she said. “I can run in and get it for you.”

  He shifted the strap of the bag back onto his shoulder. “Did you like it?”

  She nodded shyly.

  “Why don’t you keep it, then. Or you can give it back to Violet. I borrowed it off her shelf.”

  He looked away, and she knew he’d been the one who dog-eared the page.

  She came down to the bottom step so they were eye to eye. Telling herself it was silly to hesitate—it was not as if she had never touched him before—she reached down and picked up one of his hands with her pink-stained ones and held it.

  “I need you to know . . . that I never believed them. I know you couldn’t have hurt him. And if anyone asked me how I can know that, how I can be sure, I guess I wouldn’t have an answer. It’s just . . .” She shrugged. “I may as well not believe in God, if I don’t believe in you.”

  He watched her eyes mirror over with tears. He would have liked to ask her to come with him, could hear himself asking it in his mind. She could leave behind this place where her only child had died. Leave behind this life and forget, the way people lost the last echoes of their dreams when they woke and let them slip, ebbing back toward night. He did not ask her out loud because he knew what the answer would be, but he thought it out clearly until she let go of his hand.

  “It’s all right,” he told her. “I’ll start again. I always start again.”

  She breathed in. “Tell me how you do that.”

  He put his arms around her and held on to her. While they stood there together, he hoped his breath might go all the way through her and come back into him, changed.

  “No.” He spoke quietly into her ear, so low it became her own voice keening inside her head. “Never, Evie. I don’t want you to be like me.”

  Chapter 27

  Soft
ly Benjamin pulled the door closed behind him. Outside, the world was deepest blue, as he always imagined the bottom of the sea. The snow had grown a glass skin of ice in the night, and it cracked under his boots and sometimes gave way. Going through the woods to the bay was slow, and the little boy held his eyes on the moon as if his gaze would keep it from setting. The listless moon knew nothing of hurry; it lingered low, an impassive face, indifferent to Benjamin’s progress. Small barbed branches held out by trees caught at the brown coat here and there but failed to hold him back. He emerged from the woods, and the moon was still, jeweling before him. He needed to go even closer. The snowcap dipped down and became the ice of the bay, but he didn’t hesitate to walk out upon it as the moon drew him on. Farther out over the frozen tide he went, until even his own house had been swept away by the trees behind him. He stood in triumph, raising his hands into the cold.

  The ice tore.

  The moon looked on silently as the boy slipped down into a different blue and was gone. And lazily the moon became the sun, blazing the ice across the bay with a heatless light.

  Chapter 28

  For a few nights after she stopped taking Robert’s medicine, Evie waited nervously for a dream. She expected Ben to visit her, and she wondered what age he would be. Sleep came back to her only slowly, like a friend she had wronged. At first she wasn’t sure she could dream anymore, as she was waking in the mornings and not remembering anything from the night. Then, on the fourth night, she did have a dream, but it wasn’t Ben who came.

  Robert is once again standing in front of her, just outside her door as he had been to say good-bye, but also in the orchard where she remembers him. As soon as she takes his hand and walks out with him into the orchard trees, the house behind collapses soundlessly, and she knows without needing to turn and look that it has disappeared into a fold of time, like a castle of sand washed away. Hand in hand with Robert, she walks through the trees, and the apples gleam like polished stone, and some of them fall to the ground with a here-and-there thump. It is later in the season than when she last saw him, and the appled ground sends up a sweet rotting smell, and the chill of coming winter trots under the fitful breeze like a dog.

  They emerge from the orchard at the edge of the water, where autumn has been advancing. Robert helps her silently into a canoe and paddles her out on the bay, dipping his oar on both sides of the boat in turn while she sits, queenlike and idle. They float upon the still water for a long time, and Evie wants to ask him where they are going, but then she spies a long, shallow island coming into view, one she had not known was there. The island is glimmering yellow, covered in molting maple trees all standing in the reflecting pools of their own fallen leaves.

  Robert beaches the canoe at an angle on the shore, and Evie wobbles, arms out at her sides, climbing over the seat until he takes her hand and helps her up onto the sand. The beach is stunted, chiseled from the grassy bank, and they climb up over the stones into the gold. It is colder here, and Evie has not dressed warmly enough, but Robert seems to feel nothing. His skin is smooth where hers is goosefleshed. Wondering what they are here to do, she sees her family, June and Harold, George, and her mother and father, pulling long fallen branches out of the woods and leaning them into a shelter, piling them quickly against the chill.

  When George catches sight of her, he stops to wave, then puts his hand back to his work. She wonders, how did they know that her house disappeared? She wonders if all the other houses in town have collapsed, if anyone else is out here or only her loved ones. She turns to ask Robert her questions, but he is no longer beside her, and she spins around to where they left the boat. It’s still there, wedged in the wet sand like the curved handle of the knife that carved out this beach. She looks back at the shelter builders, but no, he is not with them. On the surface of the bay, the sun scrapes up the little rippling waves, and in its distant tract of silver she discerns now a dark, round shape, floating along like a lost ball. And she recognizes Robert, that he’s left them the boat and is swimming away. The bay is wide, and she doesn’t know if he can swim to the other shore or if he intends to drown. His head is swarmed by the fuzz of light, and then the light engulfs the air around it and it flickers out, disappears. She can’t tell if it was only a trick of the blinding sun, or if he went under.

  Chapter 29

  Harvest time was past now, and the field was shorn of its beauty. When the air shimmered above it, this was like the haunting of the long, gold blanket of movement that had once been there. The leaves had not yet begun to turn, but they shook in the breeze, they quaked on the branches because the colder winds were coming, and they knew the time was approaching when they would lose their hold and fall.

  Evie sat knitting a new sweater for George and thought about Robert as he drifted away from town, down the road and more roads, going farther away from them until he was no more than a speck, a mote of a memory tumbling out there in the rest of the world. She thought afterward that must have been the reason she saw it, that shadow, flickering in the distance at the farthest edge of the field. At first it was just a blankness wavering across the bottom of the trees, blotting out the trunks one at a time, skittering back and forth. Then she began to see more, arms lifting from the shadow’s sides. She was watching it through her window handprint, flitting there in the spaces between the smudge fingers.

  She set the soft, curly knitting aside and stood up to look. Many times before this, she had crouched and held her own hand up before the ghost one and come very close without touching it. She would marvel at its persistence, as if it lay no longer on the surface but had traveled inward like crazing, now part of the glass. She learned how grease on glass could stay, the lines of a palm could be perfectly marked there now and preserved, if he had not let his hand slip down the way he had.

  This time she didn’t think of these things, because she was looking beyond the handprint, watching the figure blink and dance along the edge of the trees. She stepped outside and walked down off the porch, crossing the field. The closer she came to the shadow, the faster it danced, and it was Peter Pan just on the other side of the veil, the other side of having a family. Then he turned his face toward her so he was looking over his skinny boy shoulder, as slight and twisting as a paper doll. And of course it was not Peter Pan, or a shadow, but her son. His smile was a beckoning for her to play with him, and so she did, picking up her skirts and running, too, running across the ground. She could see that Ben had no weight, and the light went almost through him as it would through a leaf held up to the sun, translucence glowing between the thicker veins. When their bodies had raced until there was no more, they tumbled onto the grass and let their chests heave up to the sky and fall, pumping the smell of the earth into themselves and out again, hard like laughter. It seemed such a short time until Ben stood up, brushed himself off while the chaff snowed down around her, and smiled at Evie his gap-toothed smile, then wandered off toward the woods.

  She sat up quickly on one elbow, knowing she was not supposed to follow.

  “Good-bye, Benny,” she called. “Take care! Good-bye!”

  He half turned over his shoulder and waved one hand carelessly, as he’d done so many times before. “Bye, Mummy.”

  And off he went to meet his boyish adventures in the forest.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to L. M. Montgomery, the author whose books accompanied me through adolescence and beyond. If I hadn’t been so fascinated by her heroine, Emily Starr, and the mysterious manuscript she burned, this book would not exist.

  Thank you to my wonderful agent, Bridget Smith, for pulling me out of your slush pile and changing everything. It took a long time to find you, but it was well worth the wait. Also, heartfelt thanks to my editor at Penguin, Shannon Kelly, whose insights and support helped me make this book better than I ever thought possible. And to all those at Penguin whose hard work brought The Dream Peddler to light, thank you.


  I would also like to acknowledge Carrie A. Meyer, whose Days on the Family Farm became my primary source for information on early twentieth-century farm life in America, and Robert L. Van de Castle, whose Our Dreaming Mind taught me everything I needed to know about dreams throughout history.

  In addition to the professionals, I’ve been lucky to have the support of many friends and family members. I’m so thankful to Patty Kline-Capaldo, Rae Theodore, and all the members of the Just Write group out in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. It was just after I joined up with you that I started working in earnest to finish The Dream Peddler, and your companionship as readers and writers was invaluable to me. To everyone who generously read through early drafts for me, please know how much I appreciate you taking the time, and all your thoughtful comments.

  To my mother, who has read this book more times than I can count, thank you for loving it in every incarnation. You have been my sounding board and cheering section every step of the way, and that has meant the world to me.

  Thank you, Nate and Rachel, for being my young dreamers, now and forever the best things I have ever made. And Keith, I once joked with you that your support had provided me with “a room of my own.” Thank you. This book is what came out of that room.

  A PENGUIN READERS GUIDE TO

  THE DREAM PEDDLER

  Martine Fournier Watson

  AN INTRODUCTION TO THE DREAM PEDDLER

  Traveling salesmen like Robert Owens have passed through Evie Dawson’s town before, but none of them offered anything like what he has to sell: dreams, made to order, with satisfaction guaranteed. Soon after he arrives, the community is rocked by the disappearance of Evie’s young son. The townspeople, shaken by tragedy and captivated by Robert’s subversive magic, begin to experiment with his dreams. And Evie, devastated by her pain, turns to Robert for a comfort only he can sell her.