Edgar thought about it for a moment.
I don’t remember, he signed.
His mother looked at him. You don’t remember?
No.
But you told me about it last night.
I mean, I know when I came downstairs I saw him lying there, but I don’t remember it. I just know he was lying there. It’s like I know it because someone else told me about it, not because I can see it.
She turned to the sheriff. “Glen, he doesn’t remember it much. Just that Gar was on the floor.”
“Well, that’s okay. Sometimes that happens. What’s the first thing you do remember?”
Running to the house.
“Is that when you called the operator?”
Yes.
“But that didn’t work.”
No.
“Then what?”
I ran back to the barn. No, wait. I ran up to the road. I thought I might see someone driving by who could talk on the phone. But there was nobody.
His mother repeated this. “That was after you went into the house?”
I think so. “You don’t remember for sure?”
No. But I think I went back into the house. “How did the phone get broken?”
He paused again. I don’t remember. “Pop says it was hanging in pieces when he got there.” Yes. I think I broke it, but I don’t know when.
“Okay, okay. You had them on the line and couldn’t say what was wrong. Trudy, did you ever discuss with Edgar a plan for how he might call for help if he needed to?”
“No, not really. The assumption was that Gar or I would always be there. The main thing we worried about was Edgar getting hurt when he was in the field or the woods. But he always had Almondine with him, and she’s been watching him since he was born. So…no.” Her eyes started to glisten, and she looked down. “We thought through so many possibilities. As soon as we could, we taught him how to write his name, address, and telephone number in case he got lost. We were always worried about…always thinking, ‘what if ’…”
She tipped her face down and closed her eyes. Glen produced a box of tissues and she crumpled one in her hand and drew in a breath.
“We worried about Edgar getting separated from us. Especially when he was little. But it never happened. And he was so smart. We’re talking about a kid that started reading at three years old. The last couple of years, it just wasn’t a concern. He knows how to handle himself with people who can’t sign—no, more than just handle himself: half his class knows how to read his sign. All his life he’s been teaching people. He’s good at it. Good at it. And besides, if there was ever any problem, he could just write out what he wanted to say. Nothing like this ever entered our minds.”
She stopped and wrapped her arms around her sides. Watching her do it—collect herself that way—made Edgar shudder. He could almost see her reaching inside herself to steady something, catch some falling piece of crockery. Almondine stood and poked her nose against Trudy’s hand, and she stroked the dog’s back.
“I’m sorry,” Glen said. He looked abashed. “I didn’t mean to imply you did something wrong. All I’m trying to do is get down what happened as Edgar saw it. We’re going to be done here in a couple of minutes, and then we’re done for good, I promise. Believe me, I wish we didn’t have to talk about this, but I don’t have a choice. Edgar, how you doing?”
Edgar nodded.
Glen sat back and clapped his palms on his broad knees.
“All right, let me ask you both a question: had Gar mentioned anything that might indicate he was sick? A headache? Feeling tired? Anything unusual?”
“No, nothing,” his mother said, and Edgar nodded in agreement. “I thought a lot about that last night. If he wasn’t feeling well, he didn’t say anything.”
“Would he have?”
“Maybe not. He hated going to the doctor. He says”—she paused a second and corrected herself—“said, I mean, they never fix things. They only make you feel worse.”
“Who’s your doctor?”
“Jim Frost. Same as everyone else around here, I suppose.”
“He can fill me in on Gar’s medical history?”
“He can. There’s nothing much. The only thing that even remotely resembled a medical problem was needing glasses.”
“Uh-huh. Okay.” This, too, Glen noted.
“All right. Edgar, I’m going to ask you to tell me what you remember about your father when you went back into that barn. I want to understand if he was conscious, whether you talked to him, or what.”
He was awake when I came back.
“Did you talk to him?”
No. But he was breathing.
“Could he talk?”
No.
“What did you think had happened?”
I didn’t know. He wanted to clear the scrap buckets from under the workshop stairs. When I came downstairs, he was lying in the middle of the workshop. I thought he’d hit his head, but he hadn’t. I opened up his coat. I couldn’t see anything wrong. “Then what happened?”
Then he stopped breathing.
There was silence in the office. Glen looked at Edgar and grunted sympathetically. “That’s all?”
Yes.
“And then Pop showed up.”
I guess.
“You don’t remember?”
No.
“What’s the next thing you do remember?”
Waking up in the house. Doctor Papineau talking on the telephone.
“You don’t remember walking back to the house?”
No.
“Do you remember doing anything after you went back to the barn besides being with your father?”
No.
“Your hands are beat up. Did that happen when the phone got smashed?”
No. I was banging on the pen doors to make the dogs bark.
“Why?”
To make noise.
“In case someone drove by?”
So if an ambulance came they would know to look in the kennel.
“Right.” He wrote for a minute in his notebook. “Smart. Just so you know, the operator was still on the line when you did that. She reported hearing what sounded like dogs barking.”
Just then there was a knock on the door, and Annie’s muffled voice. “Glen, boiler repair is here.”
“Okay,” he said, loudly. “Send them downstairs, would you? I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
He turned back to them. “Among my glorious duties, I supervise certain aspects of maintenance.” He grinned. “They haven’t asked me to wash dishes yet, though.”
He wrote something in his notes, then looked up. “Well, I know you two have a lot on your minds. There are some formalities to take care of, and then we’re done. Trudy, I’d like to talk to you alone before we finish up.”
She looked at Edgar. “Will you be okay waiting outside?”
He nodded. He and Almondine walked into the empty foyer. From the depths of the building came the banging of hammers on pipe and the long creeeeeee of rusted threads being turned. He looked at Annie’s neatly arranged desk—the microphone, the plant, the canister of pencils, the trays of forms—but when he tried to focus on anything his gaze kept skittering away.
Almondine ambled into the hallway and down to the entrance and he followed. On the street, a truck with the words “LaForge Heating and Repair, Ashland, WI” was parked behind their pickup. The day had warmed, and the street was filled with a soup of brown slush. Pale icicles dispensed a procession of water drops from the diner’s eaves. He opened the truck door and climbed in beside Almondine.
Doctor Frost rounded the corner. He entered the town hall through the door they’d just exited. Edgar tipped his head back and closed his eyes and pulled off his gloves so that his aching hands might go numb in the cold.
HIS MOTHER CLIMBED INTO the truck and keyed the ignition and they sat there while the truck idled. A semi passed on Main Street, slush flying in its wake. Further on, the little whit
e spire of the Presbyterian church rose against the blue sky. She put her hands on the steering wheel and straightened her elbows.
“Doctor Frost—” she began, then stopped and drew a shaky breath.
Tell me.
“It’s the law that when someone dies unexpectedly, they have to do an autopsy to find out what happened. You know what an autopsy is, right?”
Edgar nodded. One happened practically every night on the detective shows.
His mother sighed. He could see she had been afraid she would have to explain it.
“The main thing to know is that your father wasn’t in pain. Doctor Frost said that it didn’t hurt. What happened is, there’s a place in a person’s head called the Circle of Willis. It’s in their brain, way down inside. You father had an aneurysm near there. That means one of his blood vessels was weak and it just broke. And that place where it was weak was so important, that he…he couldn’t live after that.”
Edgar nodded again. He didn’t know what else to say; it was so definitive. There was even a name for the place where things had gone wrong: the Circle of Willis.
“Doctor Frost said everyone is born with little flaws in their arteries and veins. Weak spots. Most people go through their whole life and never know. The flaws aren’t in places that matter: their arms, their legs. For a few people, the flaws are in bad places, and even then, those people can go their whole lives and nothing happens. But in some people, people who have a weak spot in an important place, that weak spot breaks. Sometimes they die from it. Nobody knows why it happens to some people and not others.”
His mother sat there and looked out the windshield. She laid her hand on Almondine’s neck and smoothed her fur down, and then slid her hand over to Edgar’s shoulder.
Thank you for telling me, he signed.
She turned and looked at him, really focused on him, for the first time since they’d left the house.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. She didn’t look like she was going to cry, only slack and exhausted and determined. “I think it’s better to know what happened than not,” she said. “Don’t you?”
Yes.
“And it doesn’t mean anything like that is going to happen to you or me. We have those flaws, just like everyone, but they aren’t in important places.” This, with an air of finality.
Yes.
“I have to go to Brentson’s now. Are you sure you want to come along?”
He had told her yes, and he meant it. He wasn’t scared of the funeral preparations. What scared him was sitting at home, alone, knowing he wouldn’t have the energy or the concentration to do anything but look out the window and think. He didn’t want to see the thing bloom in front of him again. What scared him was letting his mother do things by herself; he thought they ought to do everything together, for a while at least, no matter how bad. He thought that sometime later they would probably try being apart. He didn’t say any of that, he only nodded, and Trudy put the truck in gear and drove them to Brentson’s Funeral Home, where he sat beside her and listened as she explained what she wanted.
IN THE HALF-LIGHT, his mother laid her hand on his shoulder.
“Breakfast,” she said.
He sat up from the sofa and rubbed his eyes.
How much did you sleep? he signed.
“A little. Come on.”
Almondine stood and stretched and followed Edgar’s mother into the kitchen. Edgar climbed the stairs to his room and dressed and looked out the window at Almondine, wandering the yard looking for a place to urinate. He walked down the stairs and stepped onto the frigid porch in his socks and pushed the door open. Overhead, a vault of watery blue, Venus and the north star captured within. Almondine backhanded a paw of powdery snow and stood three-legged, looking at him, jaw hanging gaily.
Come on, he signed. It’s too cold.
She looked around while he shivered, then mounted the wooden steps. He dropped his hand onto her back as she passed. In the kitchen, she shook the cold from her fur and devoted herself to drinking water in loud slurps. The thermostat clicked and the furnace began to blow.
Edgar took a cup from the cupboard and walked to the Mr. Coffee sitting by the stove. He poured until the cup was half full and lifted it to his mouth. He must have made a face.
“Fill it with milk,” Trudy said. “Use lots of sugar at first.”
Okay.
He sat and they waited for the sun to rise further. After a while Trudy scrambled eggs and made toast.
“Will you cut the fence this morning?” she asked over her shoulder. “Where we talked about? We need a path to the birches so they know where to plow. Do it first thing. I don’t know when they’ll be here.”
In the workshop he tested the fencing pliers on a nail, squeezing the handles until the halves clinked to the floor. He hooked a training collar over his gloved fingers and pulled Tinder out of his pen. He slipped the loop over the dog’s head and heeled him onto a dusting of new snow so weightless it flew from beneath their feet.
The road had been plowed in the night. There were no cars coming. They would have seen them or heard them in the distance anyway, but there never were. At the top of the hill he stopped and gave Tinder a chance to finish in a sit. When the dog walked past, intent on something in the distance, he reversed. They did this twice before Tinder sat by Edgar’s knee. Then he released the dog and they waded to the fence. He pulled the pliers from his pocket and cut the barbed wire and spiraled the ends back along the fence and they broke a path through the calf-deep snow. The sun-glaze on the drifts cracked into plates underfoot. On the way back to the road Tinder threw himself down and pedaled with his legs and dug his snout beneath the snow, turning a daft eye on Edgar.
What is it about this weather? Edgar signed. It’s making all of you crazy.
In the end he had to kneel and set his mouth by the dog’s ear and make words with his lips before Tinder would let himself be guided to his feet. Once up, the dog reared back and did a little canter in place and bit the lead and tossed his head. Edgar sighed and waited. Ten steps farther, Tinder began all over again. This time Edgar gave up and unsnapped the lead and halfheartedly pitched chunks of snow for Tinder to leap at while the dog dashed through figure eights in the field with ears laid back on his skull and tail straight behind, turning so madly his hindquarters slung to the ground. When he’d run out his lunacy, he trotted back. By the time they’d returned to the barn, Tinder was heeling without flaw, and when Edgar stopped before the Dutch doors, the dog dropped into a perfect sit at his knee.
A SNOW-BLADED TRUCK passed their driveway, paused, backed up, and turned in. In the cab sat two men, knit caps on their heads and collars turned up. The driver stepped half out of the cab and leaned over the top of the door while Trudy explained what she wanted.
“Shut the door, for crying out loud,” the man in the passenger seat said. He was much older than the driver, who waved his hand as if to shoo something away and kept talking. The older man leaned over and pushed the driver out and slammed the door.
The men backed their truck up the driveway, gearbox whining. The older man was giving directions, much to the other’s annoyance. Up on the road, Edgar and Trudy climbed into the truck’s bed. When they reached the spot where Edgar had cut the fence, Trudy tapped on the cab’s back window. The driver put the truck sideways in the road and the two men produced a pair of snow shovels to clear the plow mound, and then they drove through the cut fence, exposing a swath of honey-colored hay.
The truck rounded the birches and turned back up the hill. Halfway to the road its chained tires lost purchase and they backed down and tried again. They made a second pass and then stopped the truck and stood stamping their feet and clapping their hands while Edgar’s mother explained what was to be done next.
The two men worked that morning with picks and shovels. Their argument carried over the field like the squawking of geese. In the afternoon the truck trundled down the driveway again and the men came onto the po
rch, bickering in hoarse whispers. Trudy opened the door. The men walked into the kitchen.
“Ma’am, there’s a problem,” the older man said.
“What is it?”
“That ground is harder than concrete. We can’t dig in it with the tools we’ve got.”
“Of course it’s hard,” his mother said. “It’s the middle of winter. It’s frozen. When we talked, you said you’d done this before.”
“Not in the winter. Not in ground frozen that solid.”
“You’ve never done this in the winter?”
“Fact is, we mostly do plowing. The occasional odd job, but mainly plowing. We’ve only serviced a few, uh, home burials, and those were in the summer.”
“Then why on earth did you say you could do this?”
The older man nodded as if this question were exactly his.
“I didn’t. My idiot son did.” He glared at the younger man, who raised his hands speechlessly. “I’m real sorry. I wanted him to call you when I found out, but I let him talk me into trying. Said we could break through the frost. I was stupid enough to go along. But it’s like digging into an iron plate.”
“So what do we do?”
The two men stood and looked at her.
“We have a burial tomorrow,” she said. Edgar could see she was getting angry. “We are going to bury my husband. This isn’t a problem I want to have to solve. Do you understand that? Did either of you spend a second thinking about what would happen if you couldn’t do this?”
The older man shook his head and said, “Ma’am, I can’t apologize enough. Whatever kind of equipment it takes to break ground like that, we don’t have it.”
They stood there for some time. Edgar stood behind the men and he could see his mother’s face as she appeared to them, frightening and regal at the same time.
We could build a fire, he signed.
She frowned, then looked back at the men.
“You can’t do it.”
“No ma’am. The folks at the cemetery must have something. Maybe they could help out.”
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle Page 16
