It was impossible not to make comparisons. His father’s brother wore an ill-fitting serge suit, in which he looked uneasy and shabbily formal. From the way it hung on him, he was the thinner of the two. Claude’s hair was black where his father’s was peppered. He stood with a slightly stooped posture, perhaps from the long drive, which made it hard to tell who was taller. And Claude didn’t wear glasses. In all, Edgar’s first impression was of someone quite different from his father, but then Claude turned to look at the barn and in profile the similarities jumped out—the shapes of their noses and chins and foreheads. And when they walked into the side yard, their gaits were identical, as if their bodies were hinged in precisely the same way. Edgar had a sudden, strange thought: that’s what it’s like to have a brother.
“Looks about the same,” Claude was saying. His voice was deeper than Edgar’s father’s, and gravelly. “I guess I expected things to have changed some.”
“There’s more difference than you think,” his father said. Edgar could hear the irritation in his tone from across the yard. “We repainted a couple of years back, but we stayed with white. The sashes on the two front windows rotted out so we replaced them with that big picture window—you’ll see when we get inside. And a lot of the wiring and plumbing has been fixed, stuff you can’t see.”
“That’s new,” Claude said, nodding at the pale green LP gas cylinder beside the house.
“We got rid of the coal furnace almost ten years ago,” his father said. He put his hand lightly on Claude’s back and his voice sounded friendly again. “Come on, let’s go in. We can look around later.”
He steered Claude toward the porch. When they reached the steps, Claude went up first. Edgar’s mother held the door, and Claude stepped through and turned.
“Hello, Trudy,” he said.
“Hello, Claude,” she said. “Welcome home. It’s nice to have you here.” She hugged him briefly, squeezing up her shoulders in an embrace that was both friendly and slightly formal. Then she stepped back, and Edgar felt her hand on his shoulder.
“Claude, meet Edgar,” she said.
Claude shifted his gaze from Trudy and held out his hand. Edgar shook it, though awkwardly. He was surprised at how hard Claude squeezed, how it made him aware of the bones in his hands, and how callused Claude’s palms were. Edgar felt like he was gripping a hand made of wood. Claude looked him up and down.
“Pretty good sized, aren’t you?”
It wasn’t exactly what Edgar expected him to say. Before he could reply, Claude’s gaze shifted again, this time to Almondine, who stood swinging her tail in anticipation.
“And this is?”
“Almondine.”
Claude knelt, and it was clear at once that he had been around dogs a long time. Instead of petting Almondine or scratching her ruff, he held out his hand, knuckle first, for her to sniff. Then he puckered his lips and whistled a quietly hummed tweedle, high and low at the same time. Almondine sat up straight and cocked her head left and right. Then she stepped forward and scented Claude thoroughly. When Edgar looked up, his father had a look of shocked recollection on his face.
“Hey, girl,” Claude said. “What a beauty.” Only after Almondine had finished taking his scent did Claude touch her. He stroked her withers and scratched her on the chest behind her elbow and ran his hand along her belly. She closed up her mouth and arched her back in a gesture of tolerant satisfaction.
“Man, it’s been—” Claude seemed at a loss for words. He kept stroking Almondine’s coat. He swallowed and took a breath and stood up. “I’d forgotten what they’re like,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I could just run my hand over a dog like that.”
There was an awkward silence and then Edgar’s father led Claude up to the revitalized spare room. They’d waited dinner and Edgar set the table while his mother pulled ham out of the refrigerator and cut up leftover potatoes to fry. They worked in silence, listening to the talk. As though to make up for his earlier comment, Claude pointed out differences, large and small, between the way things looked and the way he remembered them. When they came downstairs, the two men stood in the wide passageway between the kitchen and the living room.
“How about dinner?” his mother asked.
“That’d be fine,” Claude said. He looked pale, suddenly, like someone troubled by something he’d seen, or some memory newly dredged up, and not a happy one. No one spoke for a time. Edgar’s mother glanced over at them.
“Just a second,” she said. “Hold it. You two stay there. Edgar, go stand by your father. Go. Go!”
He walked to the doorway. She stepped away from the frying pan and let the potatoes sizzle and put her hands on her hips and squinted as if eyeing a litter of pups to pick out the troublemaker.
“Good God, Sawtelle men look alike,” she said, shaking her head. “You three were stamped out of the same mold.”
Evidently, she saw three self-conscious smiles in return, for she burst out laughing, and for the first time since Claude arrived, things began to feel relaxed.
By the time the meal was finished, Claude’s haunted look had softened. Twice, he stepped onto the porch and lit a cigarette and blew smoke through the screen. Edgar sat at the table and listened to the talk until late in the night: about the kennel, the house, even stories about Edgar himself. He taught Claude a couple of signs, which Claude promptly forgot. Almondine began to lean against the newcomer when he scratched her, and Edgar was glad to see it. He knew how much the gesture relaxed people. He sat and listened for a long time until his mother pressed her hand on his forehead and told him that he was asleep.
Vague recollection of stumbling upstairs. In his dreams that night he’d stayed at the table. Claude spoke in a voice low and quiet, his face divided by a rippling line of cigarette smoke, his words a senseless jumble. But when Edgar looked down, he found himself standing in a whelping pen surrounded by a dozen pups, wrestling and chewing one another; and then, just as he lapsed into deep, blank sleep, they stood by the creek and one by one the pups waded into the shallow water and were swept away.
EDGAR OPENED HIS EYES in the dark. Almondine stood silhouetted near the window, drawing the deep breaths that meant she was fixated on something fascinating or alarming. He clambered out of bed and knelt beside her and crossed his forearms on the windowsill. Almondine swept her tail and nosed him and turned back to the view.
At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. The maple tree stood freshly leafed out just beyond the porch, its foliage black under the yellow glow of the yard light high in the orchard. No commotion had erupted in the kennel; the dogs weren’t barking in their runs. The shadow of the house blanketed the garden. He half expected to see a deer there, poaching seedlings—a common trespass in summer, and one Almondine regularly woke him for. Not until Claude moved did Edgar realize his uncle had been leaning against the trunk of the maple. He wore jeans and a flannel shirt that belonged to Edgar’s father and in his hand a bottle glittered. He lifted it to his mouth and swallowed. The way he held it in front of him afterward suggested contents both precious and rare.
Then Claude walked to the double doors fronting the barn. A heavy metal bar was tipped against them, their custom whenever a storm might come through. Claude stood considering this arrangement. Instead of opening the doors, he rounded the silo and disappeared. From the back runs a volley of barks rose then quieted. A few moments later Claude appeared at the south end of the barn, hunkered down beside the farthest run. His tweedling whistle floated through the night. One of the mothers pressed through a canvas flap and trotted forward. Claude scratched her neck through the wire. He moved down the line of runs until he had visited every dog and then he returned to the front and set the brace bar aside and opened the door. Had he walked in directly, a stranger, the dogs would have made a ruckus, but now when the kennel lights came on there were a few querulous woofs and then silence. The door swung shut, and Edgar and Almondine were left watching a yard devoid of all
but shadow.
The small workroom window began to glow. A moment later Patsy Cline’s voice echoed from inside. After a few bars, the melody warbled and stopped. Roger Miller launched into “King of the Road.” He had just begun to describe what two hours of pushing broom bought when he, too, was cut off. There followed a swell of orchestral music. Then some big band number. The progression continued, each song playing just long enough to get rolling before it was silenced. Then the music stopped.
Almondine huffed at the quiet.
Edgar pulled on his jeans and picked up his tennis shoes. The lamp in the spare room cast a dim glow into the hall and he swung the door back and looked inside. The line-dried sheets were firmly tucked under the mattress. The pillows lay plumped at the head of the rollaway bed. The only signs Claude had been there at all were his battered suitcase splayed open on the floor and his suit pooled beside it. The suitcase was nearly empty.
They descended the stairs. Edgar had to guess at the position of the owl eye in the dark, but they reached the bottom in perfect silence and slipped out the back porch door and trotted to the barn. He pressed an eye to the crack between the double doors. When he saw no movement, he turned the latch and slipped through the doors and into the barn, with Almondine close behind.
A few dogs stood in their pens. Most lay curled in the straw. All of them watching. Nearby, the workshop door stood open. At the distant end of the kennel, the lights in the medicine room blazed. It was as if Claude had inspected everything and left. Edgar walked to the whelping rooms and cracked open the door and looked inside. Then he and Almondine climbed, again silently, the stairs along the back wall of the workshop. At the top was an unlit plywood vestibule with a door that prevented winter drafts from rushing down. They stood in the shadows and looked into the mow. Four bare bulbs glowed in their sockets among the rafters. The massive stack of straw bales at the rear of the mow—directly beneath the hole in the roof—was covered with tarps in case it rained. Loose straw and a scattering of yellow bales covered the mow floor. Fly-lines ran from cleats in the front wall through pulleys in the rafters and ended in snaps that dangled a few feet above the floor.
Claude lay in the middle of it all on a hastily improvised bed of bales, one hand hanging slackly to the floor, palm up, fingers half curled beside a liquor bottle. Between each of his breaths, a long pause.
Edgar almost turned and led Almondine down the stairs again, but at that moment Claude let out a quiet snore and Edgar decided, as long as Claude was asleep anyway, they could work their way along the front wall to get a better look at him. They edged out. Edgar sat on a bale of straw. Claude’s chest rose and fell. He snorted and scratched his nose and mumbled. They moved one bale closer. Another snore, loud enough to echo in the cavernous space. Then Edgar and Almondine stood over Claude.
The black hair. The face so deeply lined.
Edgar was pondering again the differences between his father and his uncle when, without opening his eyes, Claude spoke.
“You people know you got a hole in your roof here?” he said.
Edgar wasn’t sure what startled him more—the fact that Claude was awake, or that he’d begun to smile before he opened his eyes. Almondine bolted with a quiet woof. Edgar sprawled backward, encountered a bale of straw, and plopped down.
Claude yawned and sat up. He set his feet on the mow floor and noticed the liquor bottle. An expression of pleasant surprise crossed his features. He picked it up and looked at the two of them and shrugged.
“Going-away present from some friends,” he said. “Don’t ask me how they got it. Supposed to be impossible.”
He lifted the bottle to his mouth for a long, languorous drink. He seemed to be in no rush to say more, and Edgar sat and tried not to stare. After a while, Claude looked back at him.
“It’s pretty late. Your parents know you’re out here?”
Edgar shook his head.
“I didn’t think so. But on the other hand, I can understand it. I mean, some joker shows up and wanders out to your kennel in the middle of the night, you want to know what’s what, right? I’d’ve done the same thing. In fact, your father and I used to be pretty good at sneaking out of the house. Regular Houdinis.”
Claude mused on this for a second.
“Getting back in used to be a whole lot harder. Did you use the window or go through the—oh, never mind,” he said, breaking off when his gaze shifted to Almondine. “I guess you snuck out the back. The old tried and true. You figured out the way off the porch roof yet?”
No.
“Your dad didn’t show you?”
No.
“Well, he wouldn’t. You’ll figure it out on your own anyway. And when you do, remember that your old dad and I blazed that particular trail.”
Claude looked around at the mow. “Maybe a lot else is different, but this barn is just how I remembered it. Your dad and I knew every nook and cranny in this place. We hid cigarettes up here, liquor even—we used to sneak up for a belt in the middle of summer days. The old man knew it was here somewhere, but he was too proud to look. I bet if I tried I could find half a dozen loose boards right now.”
Some people got uncomfortable talking with Edgar, imagining they would have to turn everything into a question—something he could answer by shrugging, nodding, or shaking his head. The same people tended to be unnerved by the way Edgar watched them. Claude didn’t seem to mind in the least.
“Did you have something you wanted to ask,” he said, “or was this purely a spy mission?”
Edgar walked to the work bench at the front of the mow and returned with a scrap of paper and a pencil.
What are you doing up here? he wrote.
Claude glanced at the paper and let it drop to the floor.
“Not sure I can explain it. That is, I can explain it, but I’m not sure I can explain it to you. If you know what I mean.”
Edgar must have given Claude a blank look.
“Okay, your father asked me not to get into too much detail here, but, uh, let’s just say I’ve been inside a lot. I got really tired of being inside all the time. Little room, not much sun, that sort of thing. So when I got in that room tonight, even trimmed out and fancy like your mom made it, it occurred to me that it wasn’t much bigger than the room I’d been in. And that didn’t seem like the right way to spend my first…” A bemused look crossed his face. “My first night home. I started thinking maybe I’d sleep on the lawn, or even the back of the truck. Watch the sun rise. Thing is, the outside is awfully big. That make any sense? Spend a long time cooped up, you go outside and it feels almost bad at first?”
Edgar nodded. He set two fingers on the palm of one hand and swept them over his head.
“Exactly right. Whoosh.” Claude swept his hand over his head too. “Know what Scotch is?” he asked.
Edgar pointed at his bottle.
“Good man. Seems like most people get interested in liquor eventually, and they’re either going to try it on their own…”
The bottle of Scotch tipped itself toward him invitingly. Edgar shook his head.
“Not interested, eh? Good man again. Not that I’d have let you have much. Just wanted to see if you were curious.”
Claude unscrewed the bottle cap, took a sip, and looked squarely back at Edgar.
“Still, it would be a big favor to me if you’d keep this between us. I’m not doing any harm up here, right? Just relaxing and thinking, enjoying this place. Your folks would probably end up all worried for no reason. This way, they don’t know you’re sneaking out at night, and they don’t know I went for a stroll, either.”
Claude’s smile, Edgar decided, looked only a little like his father’s.
“You’d better get back to the house now. If I know your dad, he wakes everybody up at the crack of dawn to start work.”
Edgar nodded and stood. He was about to clap Almondine over when he realized she was already standing in the vestibule, looking down the stairs. He walked over to
join her.
“Here’s a trick that might come in handy,” Claude said to his back. “You know that stair that squeaks? About halfway up? Try it over by the left. There’s a quiet spot, not easy to find, but it’s there. If you get in the door without slamming it, you’re home free.”
Edgar turned and looked back into the mow.
I know that spot, he signed. We found it this morning.
But Claude didn’t see him. He’d sprawled backward across the bale, fingers meshed behind his head, looking through the gap in the roofing boards and into the night sky. He didn’t look drowsy, more like a man lost in thought. It came to Edgar that Claude hadn’t really been asleep at all as they’d worked their way along to get a better look at him. He’d been teasing them, or maybe testing them, though for what reason Edgar could not imagine.
The next morning, Edgar came downstairs to find his uncle seated at the kitchen table, eyes bloodshot, voice croaking. He didn’t mention their late-night encounter; instead, he asked Edgar to teach him the sign for coffee. Edgar rowed one fist atop the other as if turning the crank of a grinder. Then his father walked out to the porch and Claude joined him and they talked about the barn roof.
“I can start on it,” Claude said.
“You ever reroofed a barn?”
“No. Or a house. How hard can it be?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
That afternoon, Edgar’s father and Claude returned from the building supply in Park Falls with a new ladder tied to the truck topper and the truck bed filled with pine planks, tar paper, and long, flat boxes of asphalt shingles. They stacked the supplies in the grass behind the back runs and over it all they spread a new brown tarpaulin.
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle Page 7
