Thief of Dreams (25 page)

EDWARD TALLY

For some reason he couldn't justify, he woke up feeling rare and with the firm belief lodged in his head that someday he and Madeline would laugh about all this. Maybe he'd only had a nice dream he couldn't remember, but the more he thought of it, the more the notion seemed perfectly logical. Also he was ravenously hungry and didn't have even the slightest hangover. Good corn whiskey, he decided, was very hard to beat.

He wanted a bath and breakfast. Going slow and easy, he told himself, was the key. Madeline had never liked surprises, and yesterday morning was nothing if not a surprise. He rummaged through his belongings, looking for his shaving gear and toothbrush. She just needed time to consider things. To get used to him being around.

To his delight the bathroom at the end of the hall was unoccupied and very clean. If it was necessary, he could court her all over again. After he'd washed up and had himself some breakfast, he'd stop by the hospital and see how all the Bucks were faring. He'd pick up James so he could visit with Lester, and maybe leave Madeline a present. Flowers, say. Flowers were always terrific. With a very simple note. Nothing pushy. Maybe he wouldn't even use the word
love
, since she didn't seem ready to grant him the right.
Your husband
, that was absolutely all he'd put on the card. A wonderful touch, he thought. Perfect.

JAMES TALLY

A little more than a mile above his grandfather's house, he crossed a highway he hadn't even known existed, and half an hour later, when he'd thought himself in wilderness, he crossed a dirt road running through dense woods. It was only wide enough for a single car, had grass down the center of it, and he had no notion where it came from or where it went, but it was still a road. So he kept walking. It had gotten a little easier since he'd admitted to himself that he was afraid.

Some part of him wanted to keep his grandfather's house and barn near enough, so that, if he needed, a very short hike would bring them in sight again. Even that seemed plenty scary enough. Still, another side of him knew better. If he really meant to leave his childhood behind and become, once and for all, the sort of person he wanted to be, the sort Osceola was, there shouldn't be compromise. Yet it was Lester as much as anything—taking that terrible beating even though he didn't know the first thing about fighting and had a damaged heart too—who kept him going. If that plane of absolute, total justice he had always sensed operating constantly and invisibly around him could be appeased, he meant to appease it. For sure Lester had accepted all sorts of pain and humiliation that wasn't his, had substituted himself and bought James clear. It was time for James Tally, he told himself, to do whatever was necessary to buy Lester clear.

So what if he was afraid? It wouldn't be honest to try and deny it. He
should
be taking his fear with him, so that, when his test and trial were over and finished, and he had become a man in his heart, he could leave his fear behind and come home without it. He was certain it would happen, and Lester would be all right too and wouldn't die.

Nobody should suffer for the other fellow's cowardice, and maybe cowardice wasn't so hard to get over, just like he had already got over being cold. When he'd first started out, his feet and hands were very cold and the tips of his ears stung with it, but not any longer. There was even a little sweat down the center of his back where the blanket was strapped so tightly.

A hundred yards or so above the dirt road, he began to move through thickets of rhododendron and laurel, twice and three times higher than his head. Here and there, where the sun didn't reach, thin patches of snow occupied shallow depressions. They were stitched with the tracks of mice, but occasionally he saw where squirrels had passed over the snow, and once he saw what he took to be the tracks of a grouse. He was at the height of the land and might have stayed if the woods road hadn't been so near, but he feared any half measure that might put everything in jeopardy.

Through laurel, rhododendron, pine, and occasional stark and leafless hardwoods, he could see a higher mountain across a valley from him. He could not see the bottom of the valley, but he didn't see any roads or houses or cleared fields either. He didn't want to go downhill, but he made himself do it while a soft wind in the trees he hadn't noticed before seemed to breathe his name.
Jaaammes
, the wind said.
Jaaaaaammmmmesss
. To have the wind repeat his name so, turned his mouth dry and his knees weak.

When he'd gone only a little way down the steep slope, his feet slipped suddenly on pine needles, and he fell and slid over the lip of a granite outcropping and into space before he could stop himself. A dozen feet below he landed on the rolled blanket strapped to his back so hard there was no breath at all left in him. He gaped like a fish out of water but couldn't draw any air into his lungs or make a sound. His senses whirled in mad disorder at the sudden prospect of dying, and the hinges of his jaws popped. He struggled to breathe, but it was as if he no longer had lungs to fill, or as if his mouth were only a shallow pocket of stone with no entrance to them. Yet, at last, he began to make an inhuman squeaking like a windlass drawing up a heavy load. But it was a long time later before he could begin to fill his chest.

When he had his breath back, he propped himself on his elbows and found that he was dizzy but not hurt, and because he wasn't on the ridge anymore, the wind had quit calling his name. He looked behind and above him, sobered that he had fallen so far without breaking anything. Maybe some stern guiding spirit had merely taught him a lesson in order to make him pay attention. He felt chastened and lucky, and after he pondered it for a while, he decided he was grateful. Still a bit raw in the lungs and throat, he rested a little longer, got to his feet, and went on, but much more carefully than before.

EDWARD:

He held half a dozen red roses wrapped in fancy paper in one well-scrubbed hand and knocked on the trailer door with the other. He'd really wanted a dozen roses, but after he'd thumbed through the contents of his billfold, he'd had to reconsider. “Hey, squirt!” he'd called, “you in there?” When there was no answer, he tried the door.

The trailer was spotlessly clean and seemed inhabited solely by a piece of notepaper on the table. The message gave him a start until he realized it wasn't Madeline's hand. James had written it.

“Huh,” he said and began looking for something to hold the roses. He didn't want to take them out of the paper, which looked so festive and official. Finally he found his favorite iced-tea glass, half filled it with water, rolled back the paper enough to stick the stems in, and pressed the card open so she would see at a glance: “Your Husband.”

Back at the house he rapped gently on the kitchen door before he pushed it open to see Bertha working the dasher of a churn. “You wouldn't know where James got off to, would you?” he asked her.

“Well, he was right here just a little bit ago. He's not down to the trailer?”

He shook his head. “Huh,” he said. “His buddy's doing better today, and I thought James would be anxious to see him.” He scratched the back of his neck. “Looks like I'm a little out of step with everybody this morning. I guess I ought to get Roy home so he can milk, but I'll come back by.”

Mild and friendly and without missing a single beat at the churn, Bertha said, “All right, and if I see that young'n before you get back, I'll just sit on him till you get here.”

“Thank you,” Edward said.

“You might take a look out to the barn,” she said behind him as he was closing the door.

He didn't see him at the barn, but he called his name and, after a moment, cupped his hand around his mouth and twice made a bobwhite whistle.

A swift, tumbling river with a few mossy rocks sticking out of it occupied the floor of the valley. It smelled sweet and woodsy, but he needed to find a way across, and he walked a long way upstream before he found a place that looked broad and shallow. He'd wanted to get across it and stay dry, but he'd seen no blow-downs that came close to reaching across the river and no spot, either, where he could cross jumping from rock to rock. After pondering the riffles and eddies and smooth, slick spots for a while, he stripped to the waist, tied his shoes together, stuffed his socks in the toes, and used his father's belt to strap his britches, underwear, and shoes to his bedroll. Holding his belongings under his arm and already dithering with the cold, he stepped into the water.

It was frigid, and when it reached his knees, it was pushy and tried to climb him. His teeth rattled, and his legs felt stiff and numb by the time he got halfway across; still, the river didn't look as if it would get any deeper.

But somehow the very next step dunked his genitals, and while he gasped and grunted and struggled to keep from going any further, he took another step to his waist. He lost his footing and almost went down completely before he recovered. But even so, his shirt got soaked almost to the armpits, he dunked one end of his bedroll, and filled one dangling shoe with water. After that, all caution left him and he floundered toward the bank on feet and legs as senseless as if they were made of brass.

Once on shore he shucked quickly out of his shirt and undershirt and dried himself on the driest part of the blanket. Luckily his britches and underwear hadn't gotten wet; and, stiff with cold, he stumbled and hopped about, pulling them on over the diminished knob of his penis and a scrotum small and hard as a walnut. He checked for his slingshot, knife, and matches and found them all safe; but when he took up his shoes, he discovered that his dry shoe still had a sock snuggled in the toe, but the wet shoe was empty. Had he glimpsed something pale and limp floating away when he'd almost fallen? Just out of the tail of his eye? But he'd been fighting to keep from going under, and whatever it was had had no power to distract him.

He wrapped the blanket about him like a robe and went off down the bank looking for it, thinking maybe a long limb could fetch it in. But when at last he saw the sock, much further downstream than he thought it would be, it was barely afloat and in the very middle of the river. But even that disappointment didn't matter long, since when he got close enough to be certain of what he saw, the sock was riding a little sluice of water dropping down between two rocks, and at the bottom it got sucked under. The pool where the sock disappeared looked deep, and it was crazy to consider shucking out of his clothes to swim out and search for it.

He went up the river again to find his shoes and shirt. The blanket was wool, and even though it was a little wet here and there, it was warm, so he took it off only long enough to fold it once, slice its center with his pocketknife just enough to get his head through, and put it back on like a poncho. He wrung out the shirt and undershirt, wrapped them around the wet shoe, and cinched them and the blanket around his middle with his father's belt. His left shoe was dry, so he put it on. He put the dry sock on his right foot. And he felt almost okay, even a little plucky.

Lester didn't swim and wouldn't have wanted to wade such a river. He would have been impressed. And he wondered if whatever he had come here to appease, that imponderable, absolutely just spirit that constantly judged and brooded over him, wouldn't be a little impressed too. It was a notion that sneaked into his mind sideways, but he knew how inappropriate it was, and he shut it out at once.

He began to climb, feeling all right for a while; and pretty soon the hardwoods, plentiful around the river, began to give way, once again, to pine and balsam, laurel and rhododendron. At first he was warm enough just by being no longer in the river or wet, as though that had stoked the fire in him so high, mere cold air no longer had the power to chill him. But then, because he was wearing the heavy blanket and climbing steadily, he got too warm. He slowed his pace, stopped often to rest, and soon he was cold again, perhaps because he'd broken a sweat and perhaps because he'd gotten higher. When his teeth began to rattle, he stopped altogether and worked at the way the blanket was gathered at his waist, overlapping its edges as much as possible until he got the open spaces under his arms and along his ribs much smaller. He rubbed his hands together to warm them and took off his left shoe to rub his foot, which was much colder than the one with the sock.

Still he felt all right until he realized he couldn't hear the river anymore. The sound of it had followed him a long way and given him comfort, and he held his breath and listened, thinking that somewhere among the underpinnings of all this silence, he'd be able to pick up at least a murmur of it far below, but he couldn't, and it unsettled him. Oddly the river seemed a kind of milepost, the last link with anything he knew, as though without it he couldn't possibly calculate how far he'd come and how far it was home. He listened as hard as he could, but he didn't hear anything at all except the long sigh of vast and empty space.

He put his shoe back on and stood up, but his courage seemed to have slipped away. All this emptiness, these mountains and woods, did not care for him; he knew that with sudden and absolute clarity. The sun, not so far above the ridge he'd crossed earlier in the day, made him see that, even if he walked very fast, darkness would catch him long before he got home. All at once he felt very foolish, as if this ordeal—no matter how deeply he had felt about it—was to no purpose. A delusion of the silly child he was and always had been. Hadn't he deceived himself many times that he could be strong and brave and therefore earn a better life for himself, or at least not betray those he cared for? But he'd never once come up to the mark. Not once.

Even the stern guiding spirit, who always haunted and judged him, seemed to grow thin, as though it too might only be imagined, invented, dreamed up. And if that were true, then he was absolutely alone in all this empty space, and there was no remedy for anything, not for his parents, or Lester, or himself. All at once he wanted to run and had to sit down and wrap his arms about his knees and rock himself. If he started to run, he wouldn't be able to stop. He'd come too far, crossed a river, and come too far for running. But he wouldn't be able to stop.