The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

by David Wroblewski

  Edgar and Almondine panted in unison, their breaths congealing on the window. Almondine had been growling low in her chest, but Edgar only heard it now and he reached over and smoothed her hackles. He wiped a watery path across the fogged glass. Claude clambered to his feet and stooped to pick up the truck keys. The feeble cab light glowed briefly over him as he opened the truck door and pulled himself inside and slammed the door shut. The starter grumbled. The taillights flared and flared as if he were stomping on the brake. The truck sat wreathed in clouds of exhaust. Finally it rolled toward the barn and backed around. The headlights swept the yard where Edgar’s father and Claude had fought, their struggle drawn in snow that glowed white, then red, then darkened again as the truck roared past the house and away down Town Line Road.

  A Thin Sigh

  HE KNELT BY THE WINDOW AND LET THE IMAGES REPLAY themselves. The snow lay jaundiced under the yard light and the shadow of the house lampblack across the snow, unbroken save for a single skewed rectangle glowing at its core. Light from the kitchen window. Flakes of snow were captured there, drifting earthward like ash. Up through the furnace register his father’s voice rang, tinny and fractured. Edgar walked to his bed and slapped the mattress for Almondine, but she lay in the doorway and would not come. At last he dragged his blanket over to her and arranged himself on the slatted floor. She rolled onto her side and braced her feet straight-legged against him.

  Then all the voices fell silent. The light at the bottom of the stairs dimmed. They lay together on the dusty-smelling floor, listening to the timbers of the house groan and pop. Formless light seethed when Edgar closed his eyes. Then he was awake. He put his hand under Almondine’s belly and she stood and stretched her feet out front and bowed her spine until a high whine escaped her, and they crept down the stairs, feeling their way in the dark. In the living room, the tiny candlestick lamp cast just enough light to outline the chairs.

  He thought the kitchen would be a shambles, but the table stood level, the chairs snugged evenly beneath. All shadow and silhouette. He walked around the table and touched the chairs in turn, points of the compass. The freezer compressor ticked and engaged and murmured a low electric throb; the blower sighed warm air across his stockinged foot as he passed the register. A silver bead of water blossomed at the threaded end of the tap and fell into the void. He twisted down the faucets.

  His mother whispered to him from the doorway of their bedroom.

  “Edgar, what are you looking for?”

  He turned and signed, but in the dark she couldn’t read it. He walked to the living room and stood near the candlestick lamp and she followed behind, cinching up the belt around her robe. She sat on the edge of her chair and looked at him. Almondine stood beside her until his mother ran her hand along the dog’s flanks, then she downed between them on the floor. Their shadows moved enormous across the walls and windows of the living room as they signed.

  Is he all right?

  His lip is cut. He lost his glasses. He feels ashamed.

  What happened?

  It’s…She thought for a moment, then started again. It’s hard to say.

  Is he coming back?

  She shook her head. Of course not. Not after this.

  What about the truck?

  I don’t know.

  Edgar stood and gestured at the door. I saw where his glasses fell. I was going to get them.

  Will you still know in the morning?

  I think so.

  Then wait until tomorrow. He’ll wake if he hears the door.

  Okay.

  Edgar stood and walked to the stairway.

  “Edgar?” his mother whispered.

  He looked back at her.

  “This thing between your father and Claude. It’s old, from since they were children. I don’t think they even understand it. I know I don’t. The thing to remember is that it is over. We tried to help Claude and it didn’t work out.”

  He nodded.

  “And, Edgar?”

  He turned to look back at her. What?

  “I don’t think your father is going to want to answer a lot of questions about what happened.”

  She smiled a little, and that made him smile. He felt some unnamable tenderness toward his father, talking about him in the dark like that. A laugh came up from inside him, like a hiccup. He nodded and clapped his leg and he and Almondine mounted the stairs, the top floor solely theirs once more. And that night, he dreamt of a jumbled world, color and sound without substance, and in the dreaming everything fitted together perfectly, mosaic pieces interlocked in a stately, exquisite dance.

  DOCTOR PAPINEAU DROVE THEIR truck back out to their house the next day. Edgar’s father packed Claude’s things in the truck—not much more than the suitcase he had arrived with: a box of magazines, his shirts and pants, a pair of work boots, and a well-worn navy pea coat. In time, they heard that Claude had picked up part-time work at the veneer mill and odd jobs on the side. He worked for Doctor Papineau, in fact. Later on they put the rollaway bed into the truck, along with the little table and the lamp, and drove them into town, too.

  THE SNOW HELD OFF until December that year, but once loosed, it seemed never to stop. Edgar and his father shoveled the driveway while flakes covered their caps. Edgar’s father knew the trick of skimming the snow without picking up gravel.

  “Leave some on the driveway, would you?” he’d say, reminding Edgar how the stones in the grass shot like bullets across the lawn on the first mowing.

  Edgar took his litter into the snow in pairs or trios, Tinder and Essay and Finch, then Pout and Baboo, then Umbra and Opal. They chased one another, sliding on their front paws, reversing, backpedaling, running with their noses against the ground, trenching pale lines in the powder, stopping only to sneeze it out. Those early snows didn’t pack. When Edgar managed to squeeze together a snowball, he tossed it at Tinder. It disintegrated in the dog’s mouth and he licked his chops and looked on the ground for it.

  The Saturday before Christmas they planned to go shopping in Ashland but it was snowing so hard his mother thought they wouldn’t be able to get back. They stayed home and watched the astronauts driving around on the moon in their buggy. His father said it looked like they were getting ready to plant corn. And every week there was a news story about Alexandra Honeywell and Starchild Colony. It was cold; people were leaving, she admitted, but the inspired would take their place. She stood in the snow reading poetry to the camera and talked about the voyageurs. Often, those segments played after the weather report. He never failed to be in the living room when the forecast was announced.

  ON NEW YEAR’S EVE his mother roasted a duck. Near midnight, they poured three glasses of champagne and clinked. The television counted down to midnight and when Auld Lang Syne began to play, his mother jumped up and held out her hand and asked him to dance.

  I don’t know how, he signed.

  “Then it’s time you learned,” she said, pulling him up off the couch. Though they were staying home, she wore a black-and-white dress and black shoes with straps across the back, and nylons. She showed him how to put his arm around her waist and hold out his other hand and she put her hand in his.

  “This is how the girls will look at you when you dance with them,” she said, and she looked into his eyes until he blushed. He didn’t know how to move his feet. He couldn’t even explain the problem since she was holding his hands, but she knew anyway.

  “Here, like a box,” she said. She stopped and made him put his hands out, palm down, and she moved them to demonstrate what his feet should do. Then she stepped up to him again. The room was dark, and the lights from the Christmas tree sparkled in the windows. When she put her head against his shoulder, the air grew warm. The sweet cider taste of the champagne was in his mouth, mingled with his mother’s perfume, and he knew even then that the sensation would be with him for the rest of his life.

  When the song stopped, his mother whispered, “Happy new year.” His father had bee
n leaning against the kitchen doorway. When the orchestra started in again, he walked up and said, “Pardon me, may I cut in?” His mother slipped away from Edgar and into his father’s arms. Edgar watched them dance, music ringing through the house, and then he opened the refrigerator and took a package of curds and pulled on his shoes and coat. He tried to tell them where he was going. Though the song had ended, they stood there, swaying, silhouetted against the lights of the Christmas tree.

  He and Almondine ran through a night black and sharp-edged with cold. In the barn, he switched on the lights and set Patti Page singing “The Tennessee Waltz” on the old record player. Then he used up the curds, handing them out to the dogs, even the puppies, and signing to each in turn a happy new year.

  JANUARY THAW. THE ASH they spread along the driveway melted the snow into gray puddles, candied with ice in the morning. He sat in their living room wearing a coat and boots, watching for the yellow caterpillar of the school bus through the bare trees. In the afternoons, the sun was up barely long enough to take his litter into the yard before suppertime to proof them on come-fors and stays in the snow. They learned quickly now. He led three of them at a time to the birches in the south field, then ran to the yard and released them with a sweeping gesture they could see against the sky, and they sliced across the field like a trio of wolves, bodies stretched over the white snowdrifts.

  He was getting better, too. With a single dog, he could make leash corrections as well as his mother, catching them in the middle of their first step out of a stay, when they had barely made up their mind to break; when he did it right, they settled back before lifting their hindquarters all the way off the ground. But he didn’t make it look easy like she did. It took every bit of his concentration. He learned to toss a collar chain at their hindquarters if they didn’t come on the long-line recalls, though his accuracy was a problem. Plus, he moved his arm so much they saw it coming. He practiced against a bale of straw. His mother could flick her wrist and catch a dog loafing halfway across the mow. When he wasn’t expecting it, she threw one against his own backside. The shock of it, the jingle and the impact, made him jump.

  “Like that,” she said, smiling. “Works pretty well, doesn’t it?”

  And all the while his dogs grew smarter—caught on to the corrections and found ways to beat them. They would be seven months old soon, and their coats were sleek and winter-thickened. They’d grown as tall as they were going to get, but his father said their chests wouldn’t fill out until the summer.

  Doctor Papineau, when he visited, could never keep them straight, but to Edgar they were so different it was hard to believe they came from the same litter. He could tell them apart by their movements alone, the sound of their footfalls. Essay always pushed to see what she could get away with, waiting until he looked away to bolt. Tinder, the most rambunctious, would break a stay just because one of his littermates looked at him with a certain glint in his eye. Baboo was the opposite: once in a stay, he would sit forever. He made up for his delay coming off the long line with his love of retrieves. He trotted back to Edgar again and again with the target in his mouth, an aw-shucks swagger rocking his hindquarters.

  They were, each of them, brilliant, frustrating, stubborn, petulant. And Edgar could watch them move—just move—all day.

  ICY GRAINS, DRY AND WHITE, were falling from low, flannelled clouds. The wind gathered and swept the grains across the yard like a surf. When Edgar opened the barn door, a tendril of snow scorpioned along the cement floor and dispersed at Almondine’s feet. His father was kneeling in the farthest whelping pen, where a pup squirmed and mewled on the silver pan of the scale, its ears folded and otterlike. As Edgar watched, his father cradled the pup in his hands and set it back with its mother.

  “Giants,” he said, writing a note on the log sheet. “And ornery. They haven’t opened their eyes yet and they’re already pushing each other around. You should be grateful you didn’t end up with this batch.”

  I’m taking mine upstairs, Edgar signed.

  His father nodded and turned back to the pup. “I want to clean out those buckets in the workshop before your mother gets back from town. When you finish, find me, okay?”

  Okay, he signed. He knew which buckets his father meant—a whole row of them under the workshop stairs, all different sizes, some not buckets at all but battered old lidless ten-gallon milk cans filled to the brim with scrap metal, old nails, hinges, screws, bolts. His father had been threatening to either sort through them or pitch them into the silo for as long as he could remember.

  Edgar pulled Finch and Essay out of their runs to practice long-distance downs. The dogs bounded to the workshop and up the stairs, tussling and growling in the straw as he and Almondine followed. In the mow, he could see his breath in the air. He closed the vestibule door. Almondine, without immediate training duties, found a comfortable corner to watch from. Edgar stayed one dog and let it rest while he snapped a long line to the other’s collar and put it in a standing stay. On each trial, he lifted his hand overhead to signal a down, rewarding them with a scrub of their ruff, or correcting with a sharp tug on the long line, which he’d threaded through an eye bolt in the floor to direct the force down and not forward. As soon as they’d mastered one distance, he retreated a pace farther.

  Essay understood the exercise at once, and how to confound it. She waited until Edgar was walking toward her—when it was hardest to give a correction—then stood up before she was released, panting merrily. Or she would lie down but immediately roll over. Twice, while she was supposed to be waiting her turn, he discovered her poking at the bales of straw, contemplating a climb. Finch, on the other hand, never took his eyes off Edgar. The problem was he just kept standing there, watching, when Edgar signed the down. After Edgar had repeated the command three times, Finch began to look concerned. Edgar scolded himself for repeating commands and walked over, but the sight of Edgar approaching struck Finch like a bolt of inspiration, and the dog slid to the floor.

  For a break, Edgar flung tennis balls and whirled coffee can lids into the farthest corners of the mow for the dogs to chase. The pounding of their feet on the mow floor provoked the kennel dogs below into a chorus of muffled barks. He’d started the two of them holding retrieval targets—just taking them in their mouths for a second or two—when he noticed that the kennel dogs were still barking. Odd, since both his dogs were now sitting quietly. Edgar opened the vestibule door and listened, then started down the stairs. Finch and Essay, nails clicking on the wooden treads, crowded past him.

  Got to work on that, he thought.

  He was almost to the bottom tread before he saw his father, sprawled and motionless on the floor near the workshop entrance. He was wearing his winter coat, as if heading outside. And he lay face down.

  For a moment, Edgar stood paralyzed. Then he bolted down the steps and was on his knees beside his father while Essay and Finch stomped and plunged around them. He shook his father and dug his fingers into the heavy fabric of his coat and rolled him onto his back and peered into his face.

  What happened? What happened?

  Behind the lenses of his glasses, his father blinked. How slowly his eyes tracked Edgar’s hands. He strained to lift his head, raising it no more than an inch off the floor. He stopped and took a breath. Edgar slipped his hand beneath his father’s head before it could fall back against the cement.

  And then he was frantic. He withdrew his hand as gently as he could and checked his fingers for blood, but there was none. He tore his sweater off and bunched it up beneath his father’s head.

  His father’s mouth had fallen open.

  Can you see me? he signed. He yanked down the zipper of his father’s coat and looked at the checkered work shirt beneath. He patted him from throat to belt. No blood, no injury.

  What happened? Did you fall? Can you see me?

  His father didn’t answer. Nor was he looking back.

  Then Edgar was running through the cold, the house j
erking in his vision. Wisps of snow coiled around the porch steps. He burst into the kitchen and yanked the phone off its hook. He stood for a moment, unsure of what to do. He pulled the zero around on the dial and waited. Almondine was in the kitchen with him; he couldn’t remember her running alongside to the house or even following him down from the mow.

  After the second ring a woman’s voice came on the line.

  “Operator.”

  He was already trying to make the words. He moved his lips. A sigh came out of him, thin and dry.

  “This is the operator. How may I help you?”

  His heart surged in his chest. He tried to force sound from his mouth, but there was only the gasp of exhaled breath. He swung his hand wide, then struck his chest with all the force he could muster, mouthing the words.

  “Is this an emergency?” the operator said.

  He struck his chest again. Again. Each blow drove a single note from his body.

  “A-n-a-a-a.”

  “Can you tell me where you are?” the operator said.

  Almondine retreated a step and began a deep, throaty barking, smashing her tail from side to side and dashing toward the door and back.

  “I can’t understand you. Can you tell me where you are?”

  He stood panting. He beat the receiver against the countertop until it was in fragments and left it hanging and ran out the door and up the driveway and onto the road, hoping to see his mother arriving in their truck, or a car passing, any car. Almondine was beside him now. The woods were lost in the falling snow, the apple trees blanched. Beyond a hundred yards everything faded into a featureless blank so white it hurt to stare into it. A car would not be passing in such a storm. When he looked back at the barn, Essay and Finch were crossing the yard toward them. The four of them stood while he looked up and back along the road. Then he ran to the house again. A voice was coming out of the shattered handset.