The Stray
MORNINGS, CLAUDE STOOD ON THE PORCH SIPPING COFFEE, breakfast plate balanced on his palm. After dinner, he sat on the steps and smoked. Sometimes he unwrapped a bar of soap and turned it over and after a while began to shave away curls with a pocketknife. One morning, not long after Claude moved in, Edgar picked up the bathroom soap and discovered the head of a turtle emerging from the end.
For a long time, Edgar and his father had had a ritual of walking the fence line after first chores, before the sun had cooked the water out of the grass and the air had thickened with dust and pollen. Almondine came along sometimes, but she was getting older, and just as often when Edgar told her they were going, she rolled on her back and held her feet prayerfully above her breastbone. His father never invited Claude, not even those first weeks of summer, before the arguments between them overshadowed everything else.
Their route started behind the garden, where the fence stood just inside the woods’ edge. Then they followed the fencepost-riddled creek to the far corner of their property, where an ancient, dying oak stood, so thick-branched and massive its bare black limbs threw full shade on the root-crossed ground. A small clearing surrounded the tree, as if the forest had stepped back to make room for it to perish. From there they bore east, the land sweeping upward and passing through sumac and wild blackberry and sheets of lime-colored hay. The last quarter mile they walked the road. It wasn’t unusual for Edgar’s father to go the whole way in silence, and when he was quiet, each step became the step of some earlier walk (spray of water from laurel branches; the musty scent of rotting leaves rising from their footfalls; crows and flickers scolding one another across the field), until Edgar could draw up a memory—maybe an invention—of being carried along the creek as an infant while Almondine bounded ahead, man and boy and dog pressing through the woods like voyageurs.
It was on a dark morning that summer, on one of these walks, when they first saw the stray. During the night a white tide had swallowed the earth. At sunrise the near corner of the milk house shouldered through the fog, but the barn and the silo had disappeared, and the woods were a country of the only-near, where the things Edgar saw at all he saw in extraordinary detail and the rest had ceased to exist. The creek ran from nowhere to nowhere. The limbs of the dying oak hung like shadows overhead. In the sky, the sun was reduced to a minuscule gray disk.
They were almost home, walking the road, the world cottoned out ahead, when something caught Edgar’s eye. He stopped near the narrow grove of trees that projected into the south field atop the hill. A granite ledge swelled from the ground there, gray and narrow and barnacled with moss, cresting among the trees and submerging near the road like the hump of a whale breaking the surface of the earth. As his father walked along, Edgar stepped into the wild mustard and Johnson grass and waited to see if the ground might ripple and seal over as the thing passed. Instead, a shadow floated into view at the ledge’s far end. Then the shadow became a dog, nose lowered to the mossy back of the leviathan as though scenting an old trail. When the dog reached the crest of the rock, it looked up, forepaw aloft, and froze.
They stood looking at each other. The animal stepped forward to get a better look, as if it hoped to recognize him. At first Edgar thought it was a kennel dog enjoying a stolen hunt. It was the right size, with a familiar topline, and its blond chest, dark muzzle, and saddle of black weren’t unusual for a Sawtelle dog. But its ears were too large and its tail too sabered, and there was something else—its proportions were wrong somehow, more angular than Edgar was used to seeing. And if it had been one of theirs, all but the most contrary would have bounded forward.
His father had nearly vanished down the road but by chance he looked back and Edgar lifted his arm to point. Seeing Edgar hadn’t spooked the animal, but the motion of his arm did. The dog wheeled and retreated into the field, growing grayer and more spectral with each step, until at last the fog closed around it and it was gone.
Edgar trotted down the road to his father.
There was a dog back there, he signed.
In the kennel, every dog was accounted for. They cut back through the field to the finger of woods, hoping to sight it again. They were standing on the road where Edgar had first seen it when his father noticed its stool.
“Look at that,” he said, poking the meager pile with a stick. It was the same rusty orange as the road. Only then did Edgar understand why its lines had looked wrong as it walked the spine of the whale-rock. He’d never seen a starving dog before.
THEY TOLD HIS MOTHER they’d spotted a stray and that it was eating gravel. She just shook her head. It wasn’t much of a surprise. People were always pulling into their driveway, hoping the Sawtelles would adopt the pups that scrambled across their back seats, maybe even train them along with their own dogs. Edgar’s father would explain that they didn’t work that way, but at least once every year a car would crunch to a halt by the orchard and a cardboard box would drop to the gravel. More often, pups were abandoned out of sight, on the far side of the hill, and these they would discover in the mornings huddled against the barn doors, exhausted and frightened and wagging their stumpy tails. His father never let them near the other dogs. He’d pen them in the yard and after chores drive them to the shelter in Park Falls, returning grim and silent, and Edgar had long since learned to leave him alone then.
And so they expected to see the stray appear in the yard soon, maybe even that morning. In fact it didn’t appear for days and then only a glimpse. Almondine and Edgar and his father were walking the fence line. As they approached the old oak, something dark bolted through the sumac and leapt the creek and crashed through the underbrush. Edgar threw his arms around Almondine to stop her from chasing. It was like holding back a tornado—her breath roared in her chest and she surged in his arms and that night she barked and twitched in her sleep.
His father placed several telephone calls. No one was looking for a lost dog, not that Doctor Papineau knew about. Likewise with the animal shelter and with George Geary at the post office and with the telephone operators. For the next few days, they left Almondine behind on their walks, hoping to coax the stray along. When they came to the old oak, Edgar’s father produced a plastic bag and shook out dinner scraps near the twisted roots of the tree.
On the fourth day, the animal stood waiting near the oak. Edgar’s father saw it first. His hand dropped on Edgar’s shoulder and Edgar looked up. He recognized at once its blond chest and dark face, its black saddle and tail. Most of all its bony physique. Its hind legs quaked out of fear or weakness or both. After a time it turned sideways to them, flattened its ears against its skull, lowered its head, and slunk back toward the bole of the oak tree.
Edgar’s father retrieved a scrap of meat from his pocket. His hand swung past and a chunk of meat came to rest on the ground between them. The dog bolted back, then stood looking at the offering.
“Step back,” Edgar’s father said quietly. “Three steps.”
They backed slowly away. The dog lifted its nose and shivered, whether from the scent of food or of people, Edgar couldn’t tell. His own knees began to jitter. The dog trotted forward as if to grab the meat, but at the last minute it whirled and retreated, watching over its shoulder. They stood regarding one another from across the greater distance.
“Yawn,” Edgar’s father whispered.
Edgar raised his hands to sign as slowly as he could.
What?
“Yawn. Real big,” his father said. “Like you’re bored. Don’t look at the food.”
So they gaped their mouths and gazed at the sparrows flicking from branch to branch in the crown of the dying oak. After a while the stray sat and scratched its shoulder and yawned as well. Whenever it looked at the meat, Edgar and his father became entranced all over again by the movement of the sparrows. Finally the stray stood and walked up the path, quickening at the last instant to snatch the meat and plunge into the underbrush.
They let out their
breaths.
“That’s a purebred German Shepherd,” his father said.
Edgar nodded.
“How old, would you guess?”
A yearling.
“I was thinking less.”
No, it’s a yearling, he signed. Look at its chest.
His father nodded and walked to the base of the tree and dumped out the rest of the dinner scraps. He looked into the underbrush on the far side of the creek.
“Nice structure,” he mused. “Not so dumb, either.”
And beautiful, Edgar signed, sweeping his hands wide.
“Yeah,” his father said. “Give him a little food and he’d be that, too.”
CLAUDE HAD BEGUN WORKING on the storm damage on the back pitch of the barn roof—hammer strikes echoing against the woods, the scream of nails pulled from old wood, a grunt when he gouged himself.
“They just peel right off,” he said at dinner, pinching two fingers and daintily lifting an imaginary shingle from his plate. His face was sunburnt, and his hand was bandaged where he’d driven a toothpick-sized splinter into it. “Some of the roofing boards are in okay shape, considering the shingles have been letting so much water through. But there’s plenty of rot.”
Claude led them to the mow and pointed out the blackened boards, then climbed the ladder in the dusk and tossed shingles down. If they didn’t reshingle the whole thing, he said, they would be reroofing it, timber and all, a couple of years down the line. And any way you sliced things, it would take him a good part of the summer. They closed up the kennel and walked to the house. After Edgar went inside, his parents stayed in the yard with Claude. Their voices, pitched low, came through the porch screen as they talked, and Edgar stood in the kitchen and listened, carefully out of sight.
“That’s no good,” Claude was saying. “It’ll end up in the yard some night, and get into the barn and pick a fight with one of the dogs.”
“It’ll come in on its own soon enough.”
“Out this long and still running? Whoever dumped it probably beat it. Probably it’s crazy as hell. If that dog was going to come in, it would have run up to you peeing on itself by now.”
“Just give it time.”
“They starve out there, you know that. They don’t know how to hunt, and it’d be worse if they did. Better to shoot it.”
Silence. Then his mother said quietly, “He’s right, Gar. We have three mothers coming into heat in the next month.”
“You know I won’t do it.”
“We all know,” said Claude. “No one has ever been as stubborn as Gar Sawtelle. Strychnine, then.” Claude glanced up toward the porch. His expression almost but not quite hid a grin, and what he said next had the sound of a taunt, though Edgar did not understand what it meant.
“You’ve done it before, Gar. You’ve done it before with a stray.”
There was a pause, long enough that Edgar ventured a look out the window. Though his father stood in profile, half turned toward the field, Edgar could see the anger in his face. But his voice, when he replied, was even.
“So I’m told,” he said. Then, with finality, “We take them into Park Falls now.” He walked up the porch steps and into the kitchen, face flushed. He took a stack of breeding records from the top of the freezer and set them on the table, and he worked there for the rest of the evening. Claude sauntered into the living room and paged through a magazine, then climbed the stairs, and all the while a silence occupied the house so profound that when the lead snapped in his father’s pencil, Edgar heard him swear under his breath and throw it across the room.
THEN, FOR DAYS, NO SIGN of the stray. Almondine would stop and stare across the creek, but neither Edgar nor his father saw anything, and after a few moments he’d clap her along. He liked to think she’d caught the stray’s scent, but Almondine often stared into the bushes like that, drawn by exotic scents unknown to people.
Edgar woke one night to the sound of a howl echoing across the field, a long, lonely oooooooooohr-ohr-ooooh that finished in a high-pitched chatter. He sat in the dark and listened, wondering if it had only been in his dreams. There was a long silence, then another howl, this time farther away.
What happens if he comes in? he asked his father the next morning.
“He’s gone, Edgar. If he was going to come in, he would have already.”
But I heard him last night. He was howling.
“If he comes in, we’ll take him to Park Falls,” his father said. Then he glanced up and saw Edgar’s expression, and added, “Probably.”
That evening Edgar pulled two yearlings into the kennel aisle and got the grooming tackle. By the time he’d finished, the setting sun bathed the back of the house in crimson. Claude stood on the porch smoking. As Edgar mounted the porch steps, Claude lifted his cigarette to his mouth and drew on it and pointed its incandescent tip toward the field.
“Look there,” he said.
Edgar turned. Down near the edge of the forest, three deer sprang across the field in parabolic leaps. Behind them, in grim pursuit, the small, earthbound figure of the stray. When the deer vanished into the aspen the stray stopped and circulated as if winded, or confused. Then it too passed into the trees. Claude stubbed out his cigarette in the bowl of an ashtray as the sun dropped below the horizon.
“There’s how it’s staying alive,” he said. The light had gone gray around them and Claude turned and walked into the kitchen.
Late that night, an argument. Edgar made out only some of it from his bedroom. Claude said now there was no choice—it would never come in on its own once it started chasing deer. His father said that he wasn’t about to shoot it if there was any other way. They’d seen no downed deer. Then something else Edgar couldn’t make out.
“What happens if it goes onto someone else’s property?” his mother said. “We’ll be blamed for it, even if it isn’t one of ours. You know we will.”
Around it went among them, their voices faint and sibilant through the floorboards. Then silence without agreement. The spring on the porch door creaked. Footsteps along the driveway. The barn doors rattled on their old hinges.
The next morning, his father handed Edgar a steel food bowl with a hole drilled in the rim and a section of light chain. He dumped two handfuls of kibble into the bowl. They looped the chain around the trunk of the old oak and snapped it. The next day the bowl was empty. They moved it twenty yards up the trail, refilled it, and chained it to a birch.
FIXING THE BARN ROOF, it turned out, was a perfect job for Claude. It hadn’t taken long to see how ferociously solitary the man was. A day spent alone climbing the ladder and ripping tarpapered shingles from old planking left him whistling and jaunty. Sometimes he balanced himself on the long axis of the barn’s peak and watched them working the dogs. He might have been earning his keep, but the barn roof was also a convenient surveyor’s point, a perch from which their entire, insular little kingdom was revealed. Time and again when Edgar looked up, he found Claude in the process of turning back to work.
As soon as the situation required him to work with Edgar’s father, however, arguments arose, puzzling and disconcerting. Though the details differed each time, Edgar got the idea that Claude and his father had slipped without their knowing it into some irresistible rhythm of taunt and reply whose references were too subtle or too private to decipher. Whatever the dynamic, it wasn’t Claude’s only aversion. Group conversations left him looking bored or trapped. He found reasons to dodge the dinner table, and when he did join them, he seemed to lean away as if ready to walk off if things took an unpleasant turn. Yet he never actually left. He just sat, responding to questions with a word or a nod and watching and listening.
It wasn’t that he disliked talk. He just preferred conversations one on one, and then he liked to tell stories about odd things he’d seen happen, though he himself was seldom the story’s subject. One evening, after Edgar had coaxed a new mother out of her whelping pen for grooming, Claude slipped through the barn do
ors and ambled over. He knelt and stroked the dog’s ear between his thumb and forefinger.
“Your dad had a dog once,” he said. “Named him Forte. He ever tell you about that?”
Edgar shook his head.
“We were just out of high school, before I went into the navy. Your grandpa came up with the name, because of his size. That one was a stray, too, and only ever half tame because of the time he spent in the woods. But he was a dog, you know? Smart as any we’d seen. Good build, good bones, ran a hundred-twenty, hundred-thirty pounds once he was fed right. Your grandfather had no qualms about using him for breeding stock when he saw what he had.” Claude talked about how strong Forte was, how quick, how the only bad thing about him was how he liked to fight, and how his grandfather made Forte his father’s responsibility, because, Claude said, “that dog was so much like Gar.”
This last comment made Edgar look up in surprise.
“Oh, yes. Once upon a time your father was a hell-raiser. Come home drunk, or sometimes not at all. Those two were made for each other. Your dad taught him a trick where he’d whistle and the dog would jump into his arms, all hundred-twenty pounds of him. They’d go into Park Falls and your father would let Forte fight somebody else’s dog and of course Forte would win, and as often as not the other guy’d pick an argument, and there they’d be, man and dog fighting side by side. They’d come home bloody and sleep so late the next morning your grandpa would get mad and kick them out of bed.”
Edgar had never seen his father lift his hand in anger, not against a dog and not against a person. He couldn’t imagine him letting a dogfight happen. But Claude just grinned and shook his head as if reading Edgar’s thoughts.
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle Page 8
