Thief of Dreams (3 page)

It seemed all too painfully appropriate that such a vivid memory should reach her just when she was dropping off to sleep and yank her wide awake. Here she was again, a little over fourteen years later, right back home where she had first seen him, and he was just as impertinent, rude, and incapable of being ignored in her memory as he had been on that morning in 1934.

Not that she hadn't had boyfriends before he showed up; she'd been twenty-two, after all. One or two of them she'd even thought she might like, but her father had been so strict that merely the notion of his disapproval had kept her distant and cool around them, and finally, he scared most of them so badly she couldn't help finding them dull and uninteresting. She and Lily had been the last two at home, all three brothers having gone off on their own, and already she and Lily were hearing jokes about being old maids. And so Lily was. But that hadn't been it at all. There had simply been something about Edward Tally. He just wouldn't be denied. And by the end of the next day, when he and his partner had finished putting in the service and the meter, he somehow thought he had a right to come and court her. He'd even charmed and buffaloed her mother and father, so that they smiled to themselves when he came in his old open flivver and took her off on picnics, drives, and dates, even as far away as Bristol, Tennessee, and didn't get her back until midnight, when she'd always had to be in by ten. Ha, she thought bitterly, if they'd only known. If her father had only seen that he was just exactly the sort of man he'd meant to protect her from.

She couldn't help being furious and stared up at the ceiling of the trailer, fuming that she was thirty-six and not twenty-two; that she had a thirteen-year-old son to look after; that she was living in a cow pasture with not only no electricity, but no water either; that she had very little money and no prospects; that she was, in every conceivable way, worse off for having met Edward Tally.

And how disinherited and sad it made her feel that her family was keeping something back that she'd counted on. There was a strange reserve in them that went beyond anything they might say or do. She was sure they didn't mean to show it—Clara and Virginia aside, who were young and in a snotty stage—but it told her they really did have their own lives to lead, lives they had been leading in her absence for a long, long time. It was just that she hadn't known you could lose your place with family. No one, she thought, meant for it to happen. But if you went away, they had to get on with their lives without you and maybe couldn't quite admit you again because you'd lost your place with them. How were they supposed to know how unhappy you'd been, or that you'd counted on them and dreamed of them constantly?

Oh stop it, she thought. It was insane to think such thoughts when she was so tired and needed to sleep.

She turned and fluffed her pillow. If absence had cost her her place at the center of their hearts, then who was to say that being among them again couldn't earn it back, even if it had to come a little at a time? And who was to say she had no prospects? Her life wasn't over. In a few days, when she got herself together, she'd begin to look for a job, and she had enough money to buy some sort of a car; anything that would get her to work and back would do. And was she living in some dreary trailer park? No she wasn't. And was she going to be yanked about from one dirty, indifferent city to another? Or be abandoned in one strange place while Edward Tally moved on to the next without her? Absolutely not.

Don't think, she told herself. Think tomorrow. Her legs ached with tension and fatigue as if she were coming down with flu, and she stretched them and pointed her toes in order to force the ache out. In the faint, silver moonlight entering the small window of the trailer, she turned on her side, acknowledged the sound of crickets, and closed her eyes. They felt full of sand.

Oh but it was a wonder to her that she hadn't seen through Edward Tally at once. It astonished her that she'd thought him the boldest and most exciting man she'd ever met, when, in fact, he was only unsympathetic, headstrong, and selfish. Jesus, she thought, but she'd been dumb. Love. Ha. Maybe someday they'd prove that being in love was a form of insanity, but she didn't need to wait; God knows, in her own case, she'd proved it out already. “Hey, sugar,” he might say when they were courting, a big, delighted smile on his face, “I've come to take you to the movies.” And she'd be happy to go. “Put on your prettiest dress, sweetness, we're going to a dance over to Blowing Rock.”

She couldn't deny him anything, anything at all. It was as though she had no will of her own. Only she did. It might have been down too deep to recognize, but it was there, making her moody and distracted, making her snap at her pupils in school and at Lily, and oddly, making her miss him outrageously when they weren't together, although she could see now what she truly missed and would always miss was the ability to make some mark on him, the ability to make him acknowledge her in a way he was incapable of doing. She'd known she wanted something more from him, but she hadn't herself known precisely what, and when he'd asked her to marry him, she'd thought she'd gotten what she was after at last.

How bitter it was to be so wrong. Why, he hadn't even asked her to marry him at all; he'd merely said he thought it was time they did. She remembered precisely the way he'd spoken, laying it out like some expensive dress he'd bought without bothering to find out if she liked the style or color or fabric or anything. And she'd said yes. Yes. But she'd mistaken one thing for another, mistaken his motives and her own.

And even after they'd gotten married and she was able, however feebly at first, to say she wanted this rather than that, wished to do this rather than that, he couldn't learn to take her into consideration. He could only be surprised. He could only figure he'd made a mistake in a few specific cases, or that she was in one of her moods. But the specifics never added up to a general understanding, except that he began to figure he couldn't please her no matter what he did. But he could never learn to take her into account.

One Saturday he'd driven her out to see a house in Cedar Hill, and when she'd said she liked it, he'd flashed her his big, boyish, disarming grin and told her he'd signed papers on it and made a down payment, no matter that she'd thought they couldn't begin to pay for it. And they wouldn't have been able to if she hadn't gotten busy and found herself a job and got a colored woman to come in and do a bit of cleaning and look after James. Still, those had been their best years, even though she was always tired, and they had begun to fight—or she had, since he would never fight—and there was a basic unhappiness underneath everything they did. She could make some sort of impression on the house, choose paint and wallpaper, plant flowers, arrange and rearrange the little furniture they owned, and when their meager finances allowed, even add something here and there. And of course she had James, who was so small and sweet and pliable. But then Edward Tally walked in one fine day and announced that he'd quit his job with Watauga Light and Power Company and taken a job on construction in Morganton seventy-five miles away, so he saw them only on weekends, and not all of those by far, since he started working six days a week. And sure, the overtime meant she could give up her own job if she wanted, but she didn't want. But it also meant that if he wished to see his family, he'd have to spend nearly three hours Sunday morning driving up the twisting mountain roads to Cedar Hill and the same amount of time going back Sunday night, and so, start work on Monday exhausted. When he left that job for another in Tullahoma, Tennessee, they did not see each other for months at a time.

Of course she hadn't felt she was very important to him. Who could blame her? And of course she'd complained. Who wouldn't? People married because they wanted and needed to live together. If you loved someone, you wanted to be with them; it was as plain as day to her, and she told him so. But who would have expected him to show up with an ugly purple house trailer, as though that would solve everything? As though that didn't involve leaving her home, her friends, and everyone she'd ever known. As though it didn't involve taking James out of school and away from everything he loved. Edward Tally was an inconsiderate man to the marrow of his bones, and you could teach a cat to sing quicker than you could show him that and make him see it.

She hated living in a trailer. Hated having to put on a house-coat and slippers and sometimes a raincoat to walk to the bath-house in the middle of the night to use the toilet, or to go all that way to take a shower or wash her hair or do the laundry. The trailer wasn't the least bit snug, as he often claimed with a twinkle in his eye and a grin on his face when the rain was lashing it with a sound like gravel being thrown against its side and the wind was fairly making it rock. And who could make love with any joy and peace when James was only a few feet away and nothing but a thin plywood partition like the bellows of a concertina between them? Oh, but she'd been unhappy. And unhappier still when he'd finally had his way and sold their home in Cedar Hill, which they'd been renting out and which he'd allowed them to believe they'd return to. And he hadn't put the money back toward the better house they'd buy someday, as he'd promised, but had bought himself a fancy 1941 Packard—and would have bought a new one, no doubt, if there had been any new cars to buy. And he'd taken to coming home one or two nights a week definitely tipsy, with no regard for her and the dinner she'd made. And he could see no harm in it, as though it were only a boyish prank or a working man's innocent due. What did he care that she'd been worried out of her mind that he was dead on the highway or that the supper she'd cooked him had been kept warm until it wasn't anything more than a drab mess in her pots and pans? Earlier in their marriage he'd only rarely done that sort of thing, but toward the end she never knew when to count on him. And likely as not he'd try to tell her he'd only just had a couple of beers and the time had just slipped past him. As if she hadn't lived with him long enough to know how much alcohol it took to put that glazed look in his eye.

And there were nights when he didn't come home at all. At midnight or maybe one or two in the morning she'd get a call from one of his construction buddies she'd hardly met or never met, and this strange voice would tell her he'd had a little too much to drive, but they'd see to it that he got to work the next day, and he'd be just fine. Sure, she'd see him the next afternoon shuffling up with his hat in his hand, they would say, as though they, too, were telling her about a schoolboy prank, as though it were funny and innocent or even, somehow, endearing.

She'd got so sick of it that sometimes she really didn't mind so much when he'd quit one job for another and leave her and James for months in one strange city while he went off to the next. They'd fought until, at last, they didn't fight anymore, or make love anymore, or even talk, so that when he said he was going to Pittsburgh, she'd said that was fine, because she and James were going home to North Carolina. With an icy calm she could feel reaching for her heart, they had discussed mechanical things like money and the trailer and the car and had left the other ninety-nine percent of what was between them go unspoken.

Oh God, she thought, let me start all over again with a clean slate, clean and blank with nothing written on it, I pray you, Jesus God Lord Almighty Christ. Please just let me sleep. But her stomach didn't feel so good, and she slid her legs to the edge of the bed and sat up very slowly, hoping she wasn't going to be sick all over everything with no water to clean it up. She'd left him, she told herself sternly. It was done. Why on earth did she have to leave him again every single night? Why did she have to list her grievances over and over, try him again and again like a judge in court?

She got up and quietly slid back the thin plywood partition that separated the bedroom from the rest of the trailer. Dimly she could make out the boy sleeping on the couch, wrapped in a sheet and a blanket. She'd given up trying to get him to let the couch down and make it up properly as a bed. When it was time to sleep, he'd snatch his pillow, sheet, and blanket from the storage compartment under the couch, fold the sheet and blanket together lengthwise, and climb inside. In the morning he'd grab them up and stow them under the couch again. It was an uncomfortable couch, even for sitting, since it was covered in stiff, green Naugahyde, with huge buttons to hold the batting in place, but when he didn't let down the back, there was scarcely room for him to lie there. She hated having him sleep on it like that, absolutely hated it, as though what they had left of dignity and self-respect might somehow be put at risk by permitting such small compromises. Other folks, it seemed to her, had a much larger margin of safety in such matters.

Quietly she opened the small gas refrigerator and poured herself a glass of milk, and, as if watching him had disturbed his sleep, he began to turn over, making small, careful adjustments even as he slept in order to keep from falling to the floor. She drank her milk, her hand shaking, the rim of the glass rattling against her teeth. “Damn you, Edward Tally,” she said, not loud, but loud enough to rouse her son, who sat up on the couch and blinked at her through the dim moonlight.

“Momma?”

“Hush and go to sleep,” she said. “I'm just having a little milk to settle my stomach.”

JAMES TALLY

He followed Piney Creek, sometimes wading the deep meadow grass along its cut banks watching for grasshoppers to use for bait, sometimes wading the stream. It was a pretty creek, but not a big one, usually no more than twenty feet across and nowhere over his head, but it was clear and clean and full of fish. Hog suckers lay motionless in the shallows until they were spooked. Then they'd dart away, swift as bullets, to lie absolutely motionless somewhere else. And there were hornyheads and perch and schools of minnows and, in some of the deeper pools, even a few smallmouth bass. Sometimes he'd see the bass gliding like shadows to disappear under a rock or under an overhanging bank.