The Dream Merchant by Fred Waitzkin Read Free Book Online Page B

a bad smell on her breath. Her speech was rambling and her message unusually candid.
    We need to start making money or we won’t survive, Jim. We’ll all be dead, she continued, grabbing her son’s hand. This is your father’s fault. The way he left us with nothing at all. How can we pay the rent? What are we to do?
    Sally careened into Nathan’s history of idleness and lavish spending and told the boy how his father had stolen her money. She spoke to Jim with candor and detail, as though he were her confidant and last chance rather than a kid. She wept. She beseeched him, What are we to do?
    *   *   *
    Jim narrated this early history in a dilapidated cottage with filthy sheetrock walls, soiled rugs, and broken furniture, a house wreck presided over by a flagrantly sexual and opportunistic girl. Who says you can’t go home again? I couldn’t help thinking that Jim’s father would have died for a Mara. He left his family in a freezing house without a few dollars to pay the rent or buy a morsel of food. The family would have starved to death except that Jim was clever and charming even then.
    There was a dairy farm a few miles down the road. Jim decided he would go there and speak to Mr. Hayes. Jim wasn’t really sure how much he knew or didn’t know about cows. More than a half year had passed since they had left Grandpa’s farm, a long time for a boy. But he had moxie and seemed to understand he’d have to introduce himself in a way to catch the farmer’s attention. Jim planned to tell Farmer Hayes that he knew how to talk to cows.
    Jim knocked on the door and waited until a big man in overalls opened it up. The hulking farmer did not exactly embrace young Jim. These days Hayes was bothered too often by poor people looking for a nickel or something to eat. When he said, I can’t use you, go on home, kid, Jim didn’t budge. This familiar place warmed him inside, the barn and the machines, the smell of the tilled earth. But Jim felt something besides nostalgia. The farmer’s vast green meadow spread out before Jim like a calling. Jim wanted to make this first big step into the world. He camped on the porch and the farmer shook his head and went back inside. He didn’t need a boy who talked to cows, but he couldn’t help chuckling.
    A little later, Hayes came back out with a piece of apple pie and an offer: You go out and find my herd and bring them back to the barn for milking. If you can do it, I’ll give you work to do around here. It’s like a test, he said, while Jim savored his last bite of pie. Mr. Hayes was only getting rid of a little beggar in a tattered coat. He was a good man, but he didn’t want the boy’s misery around his farm. He was sure Jim would get tired or bored in short order and head back from where he came.
    The cows are out there. The farmer gestured with his hand and shut the door firmly. Out there, beyond the meadow and distant tree line—somewhere, it might have been the end of the earth he was pointing to.
    Jim set off to find the cows. If he had been a few years older he might have experienced this as an agony—a test to save his starving family—but for an eight-year-old it was just a game. Starvation was a mother’s concern and Jim was still licking apple pie off his lips. He felt at home in the big meadow, picked a few daisies and smelled the spring. He headed off for the trees, about a mile and a half away, swinging an empty bucket he picked up in the yard. It was a game he’d played before. Find the cows. In the meadow there was no dirt for tracks, so he searched for bent underbrush. He was an Indian crisscrossing the meadow until he found a route of trampled grass pointing toward the trees.
    In the shade of a narrow stretch of tall pines Jim found some hoofprints in the dirt. This would help. He walked along the trees for a half hour and wondered how the cows would look