Thief of Dreams (2 page)

Deeply embarrassed, James twisted the handle, bumped the door open with his shoulder, and got out. He was still trying to think of something to say, when, without a backward glance, the driver turned into the highway and gunned the truck off toward Tennessee.

James watched the truck out of sight while all sorts of complicated things went on inside him, some of them crossing the threshold of thought, some not. A few miles away was the town where he'd been born and had lived the first eight years of his life, and for five years, while his family had moved from city to city and state to state, he'd grieved the loss of it and of these high, cool, North Carolina mountains, thinking there was nothing so wrong that it couldn't be put right if only he could get back again. But he was a dreamer and had not yet learned that dreamers seldom considered the fine print of their desires. The truck driver was heading back toward Knoxville, where James had last seen his father, although his father had since gone to Pittsburgh, a place he'd never been and therefore could not fix in his imagination. Pittsburgh, New York, Boston, or Bogotá—one place name was about as good as another to James; his father had vanished, and he himself was here. But he'd never liked cities or the frequent moves to take up temporary residence in one trailer park or another. And if he and his mother were still living in a trailer like gypsies, the trailer was at least parked in his grandfather's cow pasture. The house where his mother had been born was right there, looking just the way it had throughout his memory and probably his mother's memory too. And even if he had not quite got back to the town where he was born, he was close enough so that the air had the same sweet smell, the sunlight came down, somehow, as it should, and the earth felt nearly the same underfoot. And if he could not weigh what had been withdrawn from him, something important had been restored. In some odd way he even felt grateful for Virginia and Clara, who seemed to think of him as a threat, as an enemy even—they were family, after all, and not strangers.

The sun was dipping behind a mountain, and the light it shed, oblique and diffused, began to settle toward evening; and everything the boy could see looked old, settled, and permanent—the few farmhouses, the fields and pastures, and the ancient mountains themselves. His grandfather's house, the little white post office, and behind it, the barn, might have grown from the earth. And although the trailer didn't belong, it was after all only a small blemish.

All at once his itching neck and arms and the sticky grease on his hands became oppressive, and he came out of his thoughts enough to start up the driveway. There was an overflow pipe from the cistern just above the house, and his grandfather kept a cake of Lava soap there to wash up from barn chores. But he hadn't taken more than a few steps when he noticed that his mother, aunt, and grandmother had gone out to look at the trailer, his aunt and grandmother, no doubt, never having seen the inside of a house trailer in all their lives. They went inside; yet, in perfect miniature, Grandmother Marshall's voice reached him: “The Lord have mercy, child, it's no bigger than a henhouse.” And then, perhaps in apology: “But it's right clever, isn't it? It's as clever as it can be.” He heard his aunt's voice too, but he had gotten further up the driveway, the house had come between, and he couldn't distinguish her remarks.

At the cistern he scrubbed his hands again and again with the soap, rinsing them each time in the icy water from the overflow pipe before he plucked the two dollars from his T-shirt pocket and tucked them in the pocket of his jeans. When he got the cowshit washed off the right leg of his jeans, he took off his T-shirt and scrubbed his face, neck, arms, and chest. He was covered in goosebumps when he was done, and one leg and the waist of his jeans were wet, but he felt much better. He could see his grandfather, having closed the post office, working in the vegetable garden above the house, and he thought of going up there and asking if he needed any help, but as always the uncompromising, stooped silence of the man seemed best left undisturbed.

A few nights before, when he and his mother had got down off the milk-run Trailways bus, his grandmother and aunt had hugged them and made over them; and later, even Clara and Virginia had acknowledged them by being sulky over the sleeping arrangements—Clara and Virginia would have to sleep together in Virginia's small bedroom over the living room while he and his mother took the back bedroom on the second floor, which doubled as Clara's room and Aunt Lily's sewing room. But Grandfather Marshall had treated James and his mother as if they had always been there, which was to say he gave them no more notice than he gave the rest of his family. He clumped in from doing the milking and the chores, took his supper at the head of the table in the kitchen, and then retired to his chair by the fireplace, where, after a while, his mouth—a round, nearly toothless hole between his fierce beak of a nose and his broad, stubbled chin—fell open in sleep.

Grandfather Marshall seldom acknowledged children or spoke to them except in deep, booming commands:
“You young'ns get quiet in there!”
Worst of all he had terrible nightmares and would call out in that same booming bass in his sleep, sometimes in the middle of the night as James was making the long journey to the bathroom in the downstairs rear of the house. When James was far younger and on visits, more than once his grandfather's voice would suddenly fill the dark rooms, and James would bolt from the bathroom, down the hall, through the parlor, up the stairs, and back to his bedroom, waking everyone in his panic except his grandfather, who had to be shaken out of those nightmares or he would go on groaning and calling out forever.

Grandfather Marshall had never punished him or, to his knowledge, Clara or Virginia, but James knew the girls feared him too. James's mother had told him about the terrible hidings Grandfather Marshall had given his own children even when, for all practical purposes, they were grown. Once she'd told him about a puppy her brother, James's uncle Henry, had been given when Henry was only a boy, a puppy that yelped in the dooryard at night until Grandfather Marshall had risen one night, snatched the puppy up by its hind legs, and clubbed it dead with a stick of stovewood. James's mother had offered such stories when, for one reason or another, James had thought his own father had been cruel. She had offered them with a little deprecating snort to put James and his notion of cruelty in perspective.

He watched the old man stooping among the squash and beans and tried to weigh the purpose of all that silence and privacy, but he didn't understand it, and there seemed no way to respond to it except with a distance and silence of his own. Still, he would have liked to do something, to help, to make a difference somehow.

In the next moment he spotted the stile his grandfather had built so the fence could go back up around the cow pasture and he and his mother could still get to the trailer. It was sitting in the lee of the barn and was very like a stepladder, only twice as wide and very heavily built, and he wondered if he could carry it out where it belonged, but he couldn't budge it. He couldn't even figure out a good way to take hold of it until he got a bright idea and climbed inside. Then, if he used every bit of his strength so that specks of bright light burst behind his eyes and went whizzing about, he found he could lift all four legs an inch or so off the ground and even carry the stile a few steps before he had to put it down. After he'd moved it forty feet or so and was exhausted, a quail began to call somewhere above the barn. “Bob, Bob White,” the quail said in a voice that was wonderfully clear and splendid.

Living where he'd been living, he hadn't heard that pure, sweet sound in a long time. He knew enough to know it wasn't the usual birdsong—which, however beautiful, is in the business of laying claim to this bush, this tree, this volume of air and space of earth—but a beckoning by which the quail gathered themselves together. It was also the call James and his father imitated when they were out together in the woods or off fishing somewhere and had lost track of each other.

He listened until, at last, it came again; and, without any words whatever, he somehow understood that he couldn't untangle what had happened and lay out anyone's proper share of blame. He didn't know why such an understanding should have come just then, and if someone had been there and asked him, he could not have told them what he was thinking, since it wasn't truly a thought but a feeling.

Still, no one is able to hold on to grace for long, and in the very next moment his acceptance and humility seemed merely a kind of desolation in which, without help from anyone, he would have to invent himself.

MADELINE TALLY

The pasture, wet with dew, was silver under the moon, and a little of the moonlight even strained through the small windows of the trailer where she lay. She needed sleep and yearned for it, but it wouldn't come. A little while before, she'd almost dropped off, but in that very last moment she'd seen Edward Tally against a bright blue sky, his spurs dug into the telephone pole across from her momma and poppa's house, leaning back against his safety belt. How startlingly trim and hard he'd looked in his work clothes, and his hair and eyes were black as an Indian's. She had been working as a substitute teacher, yes, and had come out to stand beside the highway in order to catch a ride with Stanley Green, who taught math and used some sort of hair oil that smelled so close and sweet, she feared someday it would make her throw up in his automobile. Yes, and Lily was late, as usual, no doubt still fussing with her hair and clothes, and if they weren't out by the road waiting to step into his car the moment he stopped, Stanley Green, prissy little man that he was, would go right on by without even so much as slowing down. So she had been stuck there with this strange man looking boldly down at her.

Absolutely everything about that day came back to her, the fresh green smell of the morning, the warm sun on her shoulders, the dress she was wearing, and even the faint odor of creosote from the telephone pole, which, no doubt, his spurs had released.

“So,” he'd said, “y'all decided to get modern with the rest of us then?”

His voice had been so easy, jovial, teasing; but she didn't know him from Moody's goat, and the question, if that's what it was, seemed at best, familiar, and at worst, insulting. She knew she was blushing, but she meant to give him a look that would put him in his place, only he wasn't looking at her any longer, but at his labors, fierce wires of muscle straining in his arms and knotted in his jaw. She dropped her eyes and said nothing. She fidgeted, looked up the road to see if Stanley Green was coming and over her shoulder to see if Lily was.

“Well,” he said, his voice grunting with the strain of whatever he was doing, “I expect everybody will be hooking up one of these days. Hey, there's one or two folks on the other side of Cedar Hill that's even put electricity in their barns. Got yourself a radio yet?”

She didn't know why, exactly, she couldn't bring herself to speak. Perhaps because he'd taken her by surprise, or because his hair was so black the sun made it blue, but in the next moment there was a ripping sound, almost like paper being torn, and down he came, first landing on his feet and then his rear. “Damn,” he said, and while she stood mute and shocked, Lily appeared, rushing past her and across the highway to him. “My goodness! Are you hurt?” she asked, immediately trying to help him up as if there were no such thing as sex, or proper behavior, or being introduced, or flirting men, or shyness in all the world.

“I'm okay,” he said with an embarrassed laugh, “I just wasn't paying attention.” But if he was talking to Lily, he was grinning right over Lily's shoulder at her.

“Well you're certainly not okay,” Lily told him. “Look at your arms! You've hurt yourself terribly!” And then turning around: “Maidy, what on earth is the matter with you? Help me get him into the house.”

Of course Stanley Green's Chevrolet would trundle into view at just that moment. “But here's our ride,” she blurted to Lily like an idiot.

“I'll make him wait,” Lily said. “Now you just show this poor man up to the house so Momma can take a look at him.”

Embarrassed, although not nearly as much as he should have been and not as much as she was, he unsnapped the safety belt, which seemed to have done him no good at all, and allowed himself to be escorted into their kitchen where Bertha Marshall would later remove splinters and paint him from the inside of his wrists to the inside of his elbows with iodine. Still, on the way up the driveway, he kept up his easy conversation, the bold grin never leaving his face. A few of the light poles in the valley were hard as iron, he told her, and a man had to watch himself if his climbers weren't going to strip out and make him fall. She sensed his implication and resented both the flattery and the blame. He asked her where she worked—one question she managed to answer—and he told her that some members of her family were maybe just a teeny bit more friendly than others.

All day at school she couldn't get him out of her mind. She and Lily had both been thrilled about their poppa's decision to lumber off the ridge behind the barn and use the money to wire the house. There was a light fixture in the ceiling and two receptacles in the walls of every room in their home, and she and Lily had each bought a pretty lamp for their bedrooms; and, without their parents' knowledge, they had, indeed, put a radio on layaway. Theirs was just about the last house in the valley to be without electricity, and it was all very exciting to be getting it, but somehow she couldn't even savor it any longer without Edward Tally—he had introduced himself in the kitchen, but as with Lily, he had looked at her rather than at her mother—stealing center stage. Also, when she got to school, she noticed he'd left a single spot of blood on her dress just above her knee, and off and on all day she caught herself staring at it as though it were a ruby.