Thief of Dreams

Thief of Dreams

A Novel

John Yount

This one for Deborah,

in celebration of her spirit

and the long, lyrical parabola

of line she casts.

PROLOGUE

It was 1948 and everyone watching the truck pull the house trailer across the front walk, breaking flagstones and crushing plantings, was unhappy. Worse, the trailer had to go around in front of the farmhouse where there was only twelve feet or so of reasonably level ground before the lawn sloped steeply down to the highway, and not all that ground was usable because there was a thick growth of flowering quince planted just in front of the porch.

But it wasn't just the damage the trailer was doing or the peril it was in that made the family, gathered around to watch, so worried and sad. Madeline Tally had left her husband and come home to stay with her parents, and to them as well as to James, her son, marriages were supposed to keep going like the roll of seasons or the sun coming up in the morning. Even though Madeline's husband was a rough construction man, known to take a drink, and Madeline's mother and father were quiet, steady, churchgoing, country people; still vows were vows, and anyway, they'd grown fond of him. But Harley and Bertha Marshall had taken their daughter and grandson in because they wouldn't have known how to do otherwise.

As for James, he was thirteen and understood almost everything that was in the air, even if some of what he knew, he kept in that sad, sure, nonverbal chamber of the heart where everyone keeps a great deal of what they know. He was worried about his own culpability in all this trouble, and he had other worries too, not necessarily separate, about whether he had, or would ever be able to acquire, enough sense, strength, and bravery to get along in the world. So, burdened and subdued, he stood a little apart from the others, watching the trailer inching along and listening to the shrubs beginning to crack and break against its side. He could see the grim face of the driver in the rearview mirror of his truck with his jaw set like iron against the damage he was doing and against the beginning tilt of the trailer. And he could see his grandmother and two first cousins in the side yard, watching the truck and trailer creep toward them, his grandmother wringing her hands in her apron and his cousins not bothering to hide their general disapproval.

“Mercy,” Grandmother Marshall said when the trailer began to lean dangerously toward the highway.

His cousins, Clara and Virginia, were fifteen and seventeen, and James wasn't completely sure just what their bad attitude was made of. A little jealousy, maybe, that his mother and he amounted to two more orphans his grandparents were taking in, as Clara and Virginia had been taken in when their parents died the year James was born. Maybe it was the damage the trailer was doing. Deep tire tracks across the lawn, crushed plantings along the walk, broken flagstones, and now the shrubs in front of the porch scraping and breaking against the side of the trailer. James figured the ugly, purple house trailer had to be a part of it, not only for the damage it was doing but because the cousins might think it would make them look like a trashy family to have it in their cow pasture. James could understand that.

When the trailer let out a deep groan and began to tip even more heavily toward the road, James decided to move over beside his mother and his aunt Lily, who were standing together on the ruined walk. He'd been down the bank from it as it inched along, and he realized suddenly that, if it did turn over, he'd have to be lucky and pretty quick to get out of its way. Poor Aunt Lily, James thought, had the most right to be unhappy, but James couldn't see anything in her face except worry over whether or not the trailer was going to make it to the cow pasture. She had never been married and never left home, and when she wasn't teaching or sewing clothes for Clara and Virginia, she was working among her flowers and plants. The yard was her pride and her hobby.

As the trailer crept past the far corner of the porch, the wheels on the uphill side of it began to leave the ground, and the hitch, or some other part of the trailer, began a terrible popping and grinding.

“Mercy,” his grandmother gasped and twisted her hands into the apron she wore over her housedress.

“Goodness gracious, there it goes!” Aunt Lily said, great alarm and perfect resignation in her voice at the same time. She grabbed James's shoulders and squeezed, but the truck lurched forward, and the trailer was yanked past the corner of the porch and into the relatively flat side yard.

James's grandfather, who was the postmaster of the little one-room country post office on the other side of the driveway, had come out to watch the whole operation too, but he hadn't said a word, and when the trailer got past the corner of the porch, he turned toward the post office again. He was a tall, gaunt man with a widow's hump, which somehow didn't seem a sign of frailty or weakness, but the emblem of a private and stubborn strength. He didn't say much to anyone, and James was never sure what his grandfather might be thinking.

The trailer went through the side yard without doing any damage except for leaving tire tracks and knocking down part of a row of hollyhocks at the far edge. James's grandfather had already taken out a fence post and cut the barbed wire so the trailer could be pulled into the cow pasture. Staked out at the southern edge, the jersey watched the truck and trailer come lumbering into her lush, green province, and when the truck growled to a stop, she stretched out her neck and bawled.

“Don't you just know how she feels?” Virginia told Clara in a voice that wasn't as soft as it could have been.

“I want the two of you to help me in the kitchen,” Grandmother Marshall said. “You go on. I've got things for you to do.”

With great dignity the girls turned and marched up on the front porch and into the house while James looked at his mother to see what Virginia's remark had done to her. But if she had heard it, she showed no sign. She and her sister were standing with their arms loosely about each other's waists, gazing after the trailer, identical expressions of sad resignation on their faces.

It did look pretty shabby in the cow pasture. The man had parked it maybe twenty-five feet from the yard where the pasture appeared to be nearly level, but the trailer still leaned noticeably toward the scrub growth of birch and redbud separating the pasture from the steep bank down to the highway.

“Well, Harley said if he could get a team and wagon around in front of the porch, that trailer would go too, but I surely didn't think it t'would,” Grandmother Marshall said. “Mercy,” she added, and shaking her head over it, she turned and, in her listing walk, followed the girls inside.

Mopping his face and neck with his handkerchief, the driver came into the yard while Aunt Lily studied the trailer with round sad eyes. “Oh Maidy,” she said, “you can't live in that thing. It's tilted thirty degrees!”

“I can straighten it up all right,” the driver said, giving the trailer a brief glance over his shoulder, “but lady,” he said to James's mother, “if you ever take a notion to go somewhere else, don't call me. Some other fool's gonna have to pull it outta here.”

“I'm sorry,” Madeline Tally said. “I just didn't realize. … Can I do anything to help?”

“Yes,” the driver said, “you could get me a tall glass of ice water.” He mopped his face and gazed at the broken shrubbery in front of the porch and the great depth of the tire track where the lawn sloped down to the highway. “There was no weight on that uphill wheel at all,” he said. “I've got to be a damned idiot.”

“I'm sorry,” Madeline Tally said, “there just wasn't anywhere else to put it.”

But he was already looking at James. “Boy, you want to jump in and help?”

“Sure,” James said.

“Then start gettin them jacks and blocks and a few of them short planks out of the bed of the truck. I'd like to get back to Knoxville before three in the morning.”

While James unloaded the truck, the driver squatted alongside the trailer and peered beneath it. “You get cowshit on you and you can take a bath and change your clothes,” he said. “You ain't got to drive all the way to Knoxville smelling like a manure spreader.” He came over to the truck and scrutinized the boy as though he were trying to guess his weight or birthday. He was a smallish but rawboned man whose mouth was stained with chewing tobacco. James wouldn't have thought the driver would have had such worries since an odor of ancient sweat and tobacco already hung over him as rich as frying bacon and as rank as a skunk. “You reckon you could crawl under there and do exactly like I say?” he asked.

“Sure,” James said.

But the driver was very particular and hard to please, and by the time James had jacks set under the four corners of the trailer, he was wet with sweat from crawling and wiggling about on his stomach or on his back, and the grass had begun to make his skin itch wildly. Still, most of the cowpiles were dry as sawdust and light as cardboard, and when the driver got James out from under and clear so he could begin to jack the trailer up, James only had the wild, green stench of fresh cowshit on one knee, although his hands were black from the greasy jacks and he was otherwise thoroughly filthy.

The man went from corner to corner, raising the trailer with his long jack handle, all the while setting his big carpenter's level along the rear bumper, here and there on the floor inside, and across the tongue where the gas bottles for the stove, refrigerator, and furnace were bolted. Finally the boy crawled beneath the trailer again to set blocks under the cross members, but this time the driver seemed nearly impossible to please and had James rearrange the blocks again and again, only to have him take them down altogether and dig away at the earth with a handleless garden hoe he pawed out of the bed of his truck and threw under the trailer for James to use. At the left rear corner of the trailer, no matter what James did he couldn't satisfy the man, who finally inched and wiggled underneath and did it himself. But at last, a little at a time, he lowered each jack, explaining how important it was to keep the weight distributed evenly as it came down on the blocks. When the jacks were free and he'd gone over the trailer again with his level, he winked at the boy and said, “Now that's the way to do her, son. Once, by God, up—and once, by God, down. None of this farting around all day, treating the thing like a yo-yo.”

When the boy had dragged the jacks and timbers out and the man had thrown them back into the jumbled bed of his truck, he gave James his empty water glass, smudged with black fingerprints. “I'd be obliged if you'd tell your momma I'm done and ask her kindly if I could have just one more glass of ice water.” He took out his red bandanna, mopped his face and neck with it, blew his nose into it, and shoved it back in his hip pocket. He considered the sun in the bright blue August sky and winked at James again. “I'll be back in Knoxville this side of midnight. Get on to the house now and fetch your momma,” he said. “You may live here, but I don't.”

When the driver had drunk his ice water and Madeline had counted out sixty-five dollars into his wide, dirty palm, he told James to get in the truck with him. Guessing that there was some other mysterious chore to finish, James did, but once they had scraped past the ruined shrubbery, crossed the broken flagstones of the walk, and bumped back down into the driveway, the driver stopped and withdrew the big leather wallet chained to a belt loop of his trousers. “This ain't no refund,” he said; “you earned it fair and square,” and he tucked two one-dollar bills into the breast pocket of the boy's T-shirt.

James looked down at it. He would have been happy to work all day for such a sum.

“Well get the hell out of my truck, boy,” the driver said. “I didn't take you to raise.”