The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

by David Wroblewski

  I don’t mean like the Bible. I mean, do you think anything at all happens to a person after they die?

  She spooned up a section of grapefruit. “I guess I don’t think about those things as much as I should. It’s hard to believe it matters when there’s the same work to do either way. Lots of people think it’s an important question, though, and if they think so, then it is for them. But they have to answer it for themselves.”

  If someone came in here and gave you positive proof, would you do anything different?

  She shook her head. “I think it’s just as likely that someone could say that this place, right here, is heaven, hell, and earth all at the same time. And we still wouldn’t know what to do differently. Everyone just muddles through, trying not to make too many mistakes.”

  I like that. This is heaven and hell and earth.

  After they cleared the table and washed dishes, they walked to the barn and checked the night rotation schedule and pulled two yearlings to bring up to the house. The dogs roughhoused the length of the barn. When they came up to Almondine they stopped abruptly and presented themselves.

  “You know, you need to get that litter named,” his mother said. “It’s been two weeks.”

  Her tone was mild, but all of a sudden his head was throbbing and he felt dizzy with some mixture of anger and embarrassment and uncertainty—above all, with the overwhelming effort required to pretend that nothing had changed.

  What’s the difference? Name them anything you want. Don’t name them at all.

  She looked at him. “You’ve been dragging all day. Are you sick?”

  Maybe I am, he signed. Maybe I’m getting tired of the smell of perfume.

  “Don’t take an attitude,” she said. Her face flushed. “What’s bothering you?”

  We train and train and then one day we just hand them over to strangers and it starts all over again. There’s never any end to it. There’s never any point. We don’t have any more choice in it than they do.

  “Oh, I see. And did you have an alternative in mind?”

  I don’t know. Something that doesn’t involve shoveling out dog pens every morning. Something that doesn’t mean we have to spend all day in a barn. Something just the two of us could do.

  This last he hadn’t known he was going to say and he felt himself blushing.

  She searched his face for a long time and ran her hands through her hair, letting it spill over her fingers like strands of dark glass. “This is going to be hard to understand, Edgar. I’ve put off talking about it with you and now I think that was a mistake. I’m sorry.”

  You’re sorry. For what, exactly?

  Then it was her turn to blush. She sat up straight and a kind of leonine recurve came into her posture.

  “I know you saw your father and Claude fighting, but what you didn’t see is that those were old fights. Fights that had been going on all their lives. I don’t understand it, probably no one does, not Claude, not even your father if he were here. But I know this: it’s possible for two good people to be all wrong when they’re around each other. Give Claude a chance. I have, and I’ve discovered a different person than I expected.”

  He closed his eyes.

  A different person.

  “Yes.”

  After four months.

  “Edgar, do you actually think that how long a person grieves is a measure of how much they loved someone? There’s no rule book that says how to do this.” She laughed, bitterly. “Wouldn’t that be great? No decisions to make. Everything laid right out for us. But there’s no such thing. You want facts, don’t you? Rules. Proof. You’re like your father that way. Just because a thing can’t be logged, charted, and summarized doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Half the time we walk around in love with the idea of a thing instead of the reality of it. But sometimes things don’t turn out that way. You have to pay attention to what’s real, what’s in the world. Not some imaginary alternative, as if it’s a choice we could make.”

  But he’s not gone.

  His heart pounding as he signed it.

  “I know. And all the same, you and I buried him. But he’s here, too, isn’t he? In this kennel, in the house, everywhere. But unless we walk away from this place and never come back we’re going to live with that every day. Do you understand?”

  No, he signed. Then: Yes.

  “And is that the same as saying he’s alive? Do we treat that feeling as if he were really here?”

  He found he couldn’t answer her. What if he did think that the length of a person’s grief was a measure of their love? He was as troubled by the simple fact of her asking that question as by his own inability to answer. And something else bothered him, something that had happened during the morning training sessions. One of the pups had been in that contrary mood that came over them sometimes, when they cared more about drama than praise. The pup had been provoking his mother, taunting, goading any way it could, purposefully misunderstanding what she’d asked of it, tackling its littermates—anything to make her angry. But it hadn’t worked. The carefully modulated tone of her voice and her equally modulated posture had conveyed only nonchalant indifference. It wasn’t until Edgar kenneled the pup that she said, “Next time he pulls that nonsense, I’m going to wring his neck,” and he’d realized that in fact she had been angry. Furious, in fact. That was part of her skill, wasn’t it, not to show any feelings that worked against the training? But if she could fool him about a pup, what might she be concealing when they talked about Claude?

  Then his mother said Claude would be coming back in a day or two, and he would be bringing some things to stay. Edgar asked did she love him, and she said, not the way she’d loved his father. He asked if they were going to be married. She said, honey I’m still married, as far as I’m concerned. She said she didn’t expect it to make sense to anyone, maybe especially not to him, and that she could see how the two things might not add up and she didn’t know how else to explain it except just to say that it did, for her. He knew she was a direct person, with little patience for explanations. Claude was coming back for a while, and though she didn’t say it, the implication was it could turn into a long while. Maybe forever.

  Perhaps his shrug surprised her. He saw he had no vote in the matter, and didn’t bother to ask for one. When his mother chose to be imperial, arguing with her was hopeless. You could disagree with her words all you wanted, but her bearing was irrefutable. He said he’d stay out in the kennel a while, and she led the two dogs away. At the doorway she looked back at him as though she were about to add one last thing, then she seemed to think better of it and turned and walked to the house.

  AFTER SHE WAS GONE HE hooked the top of the kennel doors back and let the night breeze blow in and opened the pens for his litter to run the aisle. Edgar knelt beside Almondine and set a hand in her ruff and for the first time that day he felt some measure of calm.

  I wish you had been out here with me last night. Then at least I could be sure it really happened.

  His recollection was vivid enough to make his insides tremble, but there were gaps, too. He’d woken up in the barn, in the pen with Essay and Tinder. He didn’t remember going inside or anything that happened after standing in the rain. And in the morning the syringe lay broken in the grass, as if he’d stepped on it, but he didn’t remember that happening, either.

  He tried to sort out his feelings. There was the desire to run; there was the desire to stay and put himself in front of Claude the moment he returned; there was the desire to take his mother’s explanations at face value; above all, there was the desire to forget everything that had happened, an aching desire for everything normal and familiar, for the routine of the kennel and reading at night and making dinners, just the two of them, when he could almost believe that his father had stepped out momentarily to check a new litter and would be right back.

  He half expected to be spooked in the barn, but he wasn’t, maybe because the night sky was clear. If rain had been falling
he wouldn’t have had the courage to stay out. He watched Essay put her feet on the front doors and try to peer over the ledge into the yard. When she tired of that she began parading in front of the dogs, whipping a piece of twine back and forth in her mouth and mock-pouncing.

  Quit teasing them, he signed. Come here.

  He put them in stays and got out the grooming tackle and nail clippers. They were done blowing coat for the spring, and he used the undercoat rake to draw out the last vestiges of downy gray beneath their guard coats. They lay in a circle around him, panting and watching. He brushed out Almondine first, then Opal and Umbra together, then Finch and Baboo. Tinder and Essay he saved for last because they needed to learn patience. Essay disliked being brushed and Edgar didn’t understand that. He talked to her about it and listened to her complaints but he didn’t stop. They always came to like grooming. He was proud of that. Even if he had a lot to learn as a trainer, he was as good a groom as a person could be.

  The stroke of the brush from croup to withers helped him think. What was confusing was his mother’s mercurial attitude. One moment she asked him to decide the future of the kennel, the next she dictated their lives. He couldn’t tell what she truly felt about anything. An expression he’d read in a book came to him: she was taking up with a man. A dumb, old-fashioned expression. In the book it had been something simple and clear. Taking up with someone. As direct an act as turning on a light or shooting a gun, an indivisible act.

  Yet this was complicated beyond any ability he had to express it. He felt he could do nothing until he had the right words, but the ones that came to mind only captured what he had been thinking, trailing his real thoughts like the tail of a meteor. To say his mother was taking up with a man: that was an idea that had occurred to him days before, maybe weeks. But only just then had the words bubbled up inside him. As soon as he heard them in his mind he discarded them as fussy and stupid, a remnant of past thought. What he was thinking that moment was something entirely else and he didn’t know if anyone had ever come up with words for those ideas. He stopped grooming Essay and tried to explain, and for a long time the dogs lay watching as his hands traced his thoughts in the air.

  Anyway, he told them, all of that was beside the point after seeing his father. He’d found a syringe in the workshop last night. That was his own memory, he was sure of that much. Then his father had touched him and Edgar had been filled with his father’s memories but like some half-made vessel he’d been unable to capture them and they’d vanished, all but a few tattered vestiges. One vestige was the sight of Claude backing out of the barn doors and into a cold, white world.

  His father had died from an aneurysm.

  A weakness in some place called the Circle of Willis.

  Except he didn’t believe that now. Claude had been there that day. He would have left tracks in the snow. Had Edgar seen tracks? Yes—his own, his mother’s, his father’s. The tracks of half a dozen other people might have been there too but he wouldn’t have known the difference, because it wasn’t anything he’d been looking for. The wind had been blowing steadily, filling every footstep and tire track with a dune of white on its lee side. Would Claude’s tracks have led up the driveway? Through the field? Into the woods? He must have gotten there somehow. Edgar remembered running out to the road, but beyond fifty or sixty yards everything had blanked out into a white wall of snow. Claude’s Impala could have been parked at the crest of the hill or two miles off; either way it would have been equally concealed. He thought, for the first of many times, about the expression on Claude’s face that morning as he’d peered in through the kitchen window. Had he seen surprise? Or guilt?

  And if it had been guilt, what was Edgar supposed to think about the kiss that followed, so purposeful and defiant? Why go out of your way to bait a person who might know your terrible secret? Unless, he thought, it was better if that person were blinded by anger. Could Claude have concluded so quickly that if Edgar sounded mad with jealousy, anything else he said would be discredited?

  He looked at the dogs lying sprawled in various postures of sleep, all except for Almondine, who sat leaning heavily into his thigh.

  We’re going to have to sit tight, he signed. We’re just going to have to wait.

  He led the dogs to their pens. He spent a minute squatting in the straw with each, drawing a hand across their muzzles and down the curve of their shoulders, making sure they were settled. Then he turned out the aisle lights, and together he and Almondine walked into the dark.

  On the gravel-shot lawn, where the syringe had lain crushed in the rainwater, an oblong of grass and weeds caught his eye. He sat on his heels to look. The spot was maybe the size of his palm and at first glance he thought the grass was dead but it was not. It was lush and thick and there in the watery moonlight it was also as white as a bone.

  Hangman

  HE LAY IN BED THAT NIGHT WITH ALMONDINE BESIDE HIM, both of them waiting for sleep that would not come. Outside, a night wind was blowing and through the high window of his room the rustle of the apple tree and the maple made a continuous surf. Almondine lay with her forelegs outstretched and her head reared up, looking with suspicion at the movement of the curtains. In time, she gave a long, gaped yawn and he reached over and set a hand on her foreleg. Wind she distrusted. Wind could come into the house and slam doors. He smoothed the fine filamentary whiskers that arched over her eyes. In the morning she would be sleeping on the floor, he thought. If she started the night on the bed she always ended on the floor. If she started on the floor there was a chance he might wake in the morning to find her on the bed but more likely she would be standing at the window or lying in the doorway. There was some notion of propriety in her about this but he had never been able to fully make sense of it.

  He was looking at Almondine and trying to think of nothing when the image of his father, fingerspelling, came back to him. He sat up in his bed. What was it his father had said in those final moments? How could he have forgotten it?

  Find H-A-A-something-I.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to see again what had happened the previous night. The rain had turned to drizzle. His father’s gestures had been vanishingly faint. Edgar sat in a reverie, watching his father’s hands, shaped by mist, tracing out the letters, and when he opened his eyes again he thought he’d misread the third letter that night. It seemed to him now to have been a C, not an A.

  Find H-A-C-something-I.

  The knowledge came at some cost. He’d seen his father reaching toward him again and remembered how he’d begged not to be touched, instead of saying what he wished he’d said. He believed, though he couldn’t have said why, that his father had been spelling out a name, a dog’s name. He turned on the light. On his bedside table he found a scrap of paper and a pencil and he wrote down the letters, leaving a blank for the unknown. Even incomplete, it looked familiar to him. He had no idea what it meant.

  Almondine trailed him down the stairs. His mother had turned out the lights in the living room and kitchen and lay in bed reading. It was ten by the kitchen clock.

  “Edgar?” she called.

  He walked to the door of her bedroom.

  “I wish I hadn’t been short with you tonight.”

  He shrugged.

  “Do you want to talk more?”

  No. I can’t sleep. I’m going out to the barn to look for names.

  “Don’t stay out long. You’ve got circles under your eyes.”

  He held the door for Almondine, but she decided it would be better to sleep on the porch. He walked to the workshop and pulled down the master litter book and paged through it. If he could find a name that fit, he would be able to get the dog’s number and, from there, its file.

  And then?

  He didn’t know what would happen then.

  It took almost an hour to look through the entries, at first scanning the pages, then going more slowly, considering each name for a diminutive. He wound up with nothing—no possibilities, n
othing even close. He made a list, filling in the blank with every possible letter and crossing out whatever looked like nonsense: “Hacdi” and “Hacqi” and “Hacwi.” It was like playing hangman, where you guessed a word one letter at a time while your opponent filled in the head, body, arms, and legs of a man on a gallows.

  But in this case it was surprisingly difficult to eliminate prospects. The possibility that it was a foreign name had occurred to him, and names were more idiosyncratic than regular words. In the end, he simply had to guess. He crossed out all but six possibilities:

  Hacai.

  Hacci.

  Hachi.

  Hacki.

  Hacli.

  Hacti.

  He looked up each word in The New Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language, though, as he suspected, none had entries. He paged through the master litter book one last time, looking for names that could be abbreviated or distorted, but even as he ran his finger down the pages he knew it was hopeless.

  Again and again, his eye returned to “Hachi.” The missing letter was an H, he was sure of it—index and middle finger extended horizontally from a closed hand. He visualized his father’s hands, translucent and wind-smeared. The problem was, the wind had gusted and he had barely seen the sign in the first place. In despair, he replaced the master litter book atop the cabinets. He could go through the files one by one, he supposed, though that would take days, weeks even. He leaned his head against a cabinet. He kicked the bottom drawer.

  The drawer containing the letters.

  Then he got it. Hachi was right, but it was only part of the name. Hachi-something. Hachigo? Hachiru? He’d seen the name in a letter perused and discarded while searching for letters from Brooks. He dropped to his knees and yanked open the drawer. Now that he knew what to look for, it didn’t take long. He recognized the handwriting even before he’d spotted the name.

  Hachiko.