The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

by David Wroblewski

  He had, of course, always been hard to read, even as a little boy, so inward and stoic, beyond anything she’d expected. He had virtually never cried as an infant. Almondine had done his demanding for him, half nursemaid, half courier. His teachers attributed his stoicism to his lost voice, but Trudy knew that wasn’t it. In fact, Edgar had started communicating with a desperate urgency when he was only a year old. By the time he was two he had absorbed the clumsily demonstrated basics of sign language and begun, to her amazement, to construct a vocabulary of his own. There’d been a period—memorable but exhausting—when he’d demanded she name things from the moment he woke until his eyes fluttered closed in exhausted sleep. The ferocity with which he applied himself was almost frightening, and though she supposed it could have been a perverse form of motherly pride, she could not believe such obsession was typical. Almost in self defense, they’d handed him the dictionary and started him naming the pups.

  He had also been demonstrative and intelligent from the very beginning, his questions startlingly insightful. She would watch him absorb a new idea and wonder what effect it would have on him, because, with Edgar, everything came out, eventually, somehow. But the process—how he put together a story about the world’s workings—that was mysterious beyond all ken. In a way, she thought, it was the only disappointing thing about having a child. She’d imagined he would stay transparent to her, more part of her, for so much longer. But despite the proximity of the daily work, Edgar had ceased long before to be an open book. A friend, yes. A son she loved, yes. But when it came to knowing his thoughts, Edgar could be as opaque as a rock.

  A perfect example had been the Christmas when he was five. He’d started kindergarten that year. Every morning they stood together at the end of the driveway and she’d watched him board the school bus, and every noon he’d returned, hands upraised to greet Almondine, who almost flattened the boy as soon as he stepped clear of the bus, making such a spectacle that other children called Almondine’s name from the bus window. Edgar had been excited to be around other children that fall, but he wouldn’t tell her much about school unless she probed him. What had they done that day? Was his teacher nice? Did she read stories? Then she would coax him into telling her the story. Sometimes there was a sign he didn’t have yet, and together they would look it up in the sign dictionary, and if that failed, invent one on the spot. When December came, he’d sat at the kitchen table and written out a wish list for Santa and sealed it in an envelope before she could read it. She’d had to wait until he was asleep to steam the envelope open.

  At the top of his list he’d written, Pocket watch WITH A CHAIN.

  It had taken her completely by surprise. He had never once expressed a desire for a watch, and he already knew how to tell time—he’d learned when he was four. For a few long weeks he had included the time in everything he said—At six fifteen we are going to eat dinner. When I get done with my bath it will be eight thirty. That had quickly lost its thrill, but perhaps his obsession with telling time had just been internalized, gone opaque. In any case, it was the number one thing on his list and she was determined he would find it under the tree. She and Gar located a watch shop in Ashland whose proprietor rummaged around in back and produced an old pocket watch that a boy might use (and almost certainly break). And it came with a long chain. The winding knob was intricately knurled and engraved on the brass cover was a flowery letter C. Trudy liked the C. They could say it stood for Christmas. The man told them it would run for almost a whole day when fully wound; perhaps it lost five or ten minutes, but that would okay for a boy—better, in fact, since he would have to wind and set it frequently. They’d wrapped the watch and put it under the tree and made sure that the smallish box in green foil was the last one Edgar opened. He’d looked at the watch in his hand and smiled exactly the smile she’d been hoping for, and then he slipped it neatly into the pocket of his pajamas.

  “Aren’t you even going to open it?” Trudy cried. “Press the little lever! Look at the hands!”

  He took it out of his pocket and let them demonstrate how to wind the works and set the time. He watched intently, but when they’d finished, he closed it up and slipped it back into his pocket. That was the last they saw of it for almost a week, until Trudy walked into the living room and found Almondine in a sit and Edgar swinging the watch back and forth before her eyes. Almondine panted and looked past the swinging timepiece at Edgar. When Edgar understood that someone else was in the room he turned around.

  It doesn’t work on dogs, he signed.

  “You’re trying to hypnotize her?” Trudy had said. “That’s why you wanted a watch?”

  He nodded. Come on, he signed to Almondine. It’ll work better on puppies. And he pulled on his coat and marched out to the kennel while Trudy stood there, mouth hanging open.

  That had been the moment she’d realized how he carried things around inside, things entirely separate from her. Five years old, barely in kindergarten. She had no idea where he’d heard of hypnosis. She couldn’t remember seeing anything on TV that might have put it in his head. She didn’t think any of his books mentioned it. Wherever he had picked it up, he’d been walking around with that idea for weeks—months, maybe—without mentioning it even once. Just watching, thinking, wondering. That was the kind of boy he was. And she realized that he was, in some sense, already lost to her—had outgrown her in some essential way. He wasn’t keeping secrets. If she had known to ask him if he was interested in hypnosis, he would have told her. He just hadn’t offered the information because she hadn’t asked.

  And the obvious question was: What else was he thinking about? What else had he already learned that no one even suspected?

  Edgar’s career as a hypnotist continued for several weeks. At the high point, he mesmerized little Alex Franklin into throwing a snowball into the playground teacher’s ear. When Trudy investigated further, it turned out that Alex Franklin had made that claim. Edgar had only told the boy, deeply under the influence of his swinging timepiece, to take a bite of a snowball that looked more than a tad yellow. Instead, Alex had extended his arms like Frankenstein’s monster and trundled toward the teacher, then wound up and let fly. Edgar hadn’t expected that. The whole hypnosis business was unpredictable, he’d confessed.

  Which led to a discussion about responsibility. It was like with the dogs, Trudy had told him. If you asked them to do something, you were responsible for what happened next, even if that wasn’t what you intended. You were especially responsible to the dogs, she said, because they respected you enough to do what you’d asked, even if it seemed like nonsense to them. If you wanted them to trust you, you had better take responsibility, every single time.

  And then she’d let him try to hypnotize her, but she didn’t get sleepy, sleepy. He’d been disappointed, but she wouldn’t lie to him about it. Nor would Gar. Nor would Almondine, nor any of the puppies (who wanted to swat the watch out of his hands and chew it to bits). Then Edgar gave up on the whole idea, though he didn’t stop carrying the watch around. Once in a while he opened the cover and checked it against the kitchen clock and wound it, but Trudy suspected he did this only when he was around them. By the time the snow had melted that spring, she found the watch lying buried among his touchingly small, white Fruit of the Loom underwear in his bottom dresser drawer.

  IF EDGAR HAD BEEN INWARD and opaque to her at five, now he was a total mystery. Since Gar’s death, he’d been sleepwalking through his days, looking angry one minute, then tragic, then thoughtful and happy a moment later. Only working his litter seemed to capture his attention. She told herself she shouldn’t worry. After all, he could have been shooting drugs (if a person could even find drugs in Mellen, which she doubted). If he really wanted to spend day and night in the kennel, let him.

  Truthfully, this latest obsession hadn’t started until long after Gar died, really, the last couple of weeks of school, when he’d taken to running off from his classes. She’d talked with the princi
pal. She wasn’t going to have them cracking down on Edgar and ruining his attitude toward school for good when he was muddling through what, she was sure, would turn out to have been the worst period of his life. He was delicate right now—deal with this rebellion wrong, and it would set. She didn’t think that the lessons from dog training always transferred to people, but it was just the nature of things that if you punished anyone, dog or boy, when they got close to a thing, they’d get it in their head the thing was bad. She’d seen people ruin dogs too many times by forcing them to repeat a trial that scared the dog or even hurt it. Not finding a variation on the same task, not coming at things from a different angle, not making the dog relish whatever it was that had to be done, was a failure of the imagination.

  And in this case, the analogy applied. She’d told the principal she didn’t give a damn whether Edgar showed up even one more day that semester after what he’d been through, and if they pushed him any harder, she would withdraw him herself. They knew as well as Trudy that the teachers were coasting the last couple of weeks. Who cared if he sat in class and stared out the window or if he just wasn’t there? How many farm kids, she asked, went truant when it was time to show livestock at the county fair? She could use the help around the kennel anyway.

  Then there was Claude, whom Edgar objected to. In his position, who wouldn’t? After Gar’s death, she and Edgar had grown so close it was almost as if they had been a couple themselves, making dinner, curling up together on the couch to watch television, arms wrapped around each other. She’d fallen asleep that way more than once. And on other nights, when he’d been the one to sleep, she’d stroked his brow like he was a baby. After that, of course he would be jealous. Maybe she should have held back from him a little, let him handle his grief his own way, but when you’re hurting, and your son is hurting, you do what you need to do.

  Besides, Claude wasn’t something she’d planned—about the last thing she’d had in mind, particularly after the nasty falling-out between him and Gar. (Not that she understood that—a brother thing, buried under too many layers of family history for her to unearth.) Things with Claude had just, well, happened one morning—a breakdown on her part, a strange, momentary kindness on his. It hadn’t felt wrong; afterward she’d even felt as though some great burden had been lifted—as though she’d been given permission to carry on with a different life. What Edgar didn’t understand was that it was all going to be a compromise from then on out. That wasn’t something she could say, not to Edgar, not to anyone, but she knew it was true. They’d had the real thing, the golden world, the paradise, the kingdom on earth, and you didn’t get that twice. When a second chance came, you took it for what it was worth. Yes, Claude had proposed; that was silly, foolishness, not worth discussing. Not then, anyway, not when there was so much work to be done.

  She and Gar had had the predictable discussion about what they’d want the other to do if one of them died. She’d been direct and forthright about his responsibilities: “I want you to spend the rest of your life in abject mourning,” she’d said. “Cry in public twice a week. A shrine in the orchard would be nice, but I realize you’re going to be busy handling the kennel and giving lectures on my divinity, so I won’t insist on that.”

  Gar had been more modest. He’d wanted her to remarry the moment she met someone who made her happy, no sooner and no later. That was Gar in a nutshell, of course—when you asked him a serious question, you got a serious answer, every single time. She’d loved him for that, among many other things. He was passionate in a way that Claude would never be—passionate about principles and passionate about order, which he’d seen as a primary good. Like those file cabinets, filled with records. The kennel had been important when he talked about what should happen if he were to die; he hadn’t said it straight out, but he’d clearly expected Trudy would find a way to carry on the work with the dogs.

  So Trudy thought Gar wouldn’t necessarily object to how things were working out. It looked like the kennel would be back in order by the end of the summer. And what they had both cared most about was that the other person find a way to be happy. Gar might not have liked some of the changes Claude was suggesting, but Gar had envisioned remaining a one-kennel, boutique breeder forever. Claude was less concerned with bloodlines, which freed him up to think more broadly about other things.

  In the meantime, it was a matter of seeing into Edgar more clearly, making sure he got through this bad patch. And that’s all it was—a bad patch. There wasn’t anything seriously wrong.

  She’d have known at once if there were.

  Popcorn Corners

  THE NEXT DAY EDGAR SET OUT AGAIN FOR POPCORN CORNERS—this time alone, by bicycle. Anything to get away from the house while Claude was there, and he was there all the time now. Edgar slipped the picture of Claude and Forte into his back pocket and pedaled away to the north, retracing the route he and Claude had traveled along that thin gravel line cut through the Chequamegon Forest. A county gravel truck roared past, drawing a tawny billow in its wake. The air was still thick with dust when he came to the blacktop and turned onto a small forest road. He passed marshes boiling with frogs and snakes, and later, a turtle, plodding between the ditches like a living hubcap, its beaked mouth open and panting.

  A stop sign appeared in the distance. When he reached it, he surveyed the entirety of Popcorn Corners: a tavern, a grocery, three equally decrepit houses, a band of feral chickens that lived in the culverts. He coasted past the tavern, which sported a Hamm’s Beer sign, lit to show the beer bear fishing in a shimmering Land of Sky Blue Waters, and halted in front of the grocery, covered with white clapboards that hung slightly off parallel, as if covering some profound skew of the building’s timbers. A pair of colossal ash trees cast their shadows across the storefront and a single antiquated gas pump tilted among the weeds off to the side.

  The small parking lot was empty. He lowered his bicycle to the ground and pulled the screen door through its quarter-circle in the dirt. Up front, behind a long, grooved wooden counter, sat Ida Paine, the hawk-nosed, farsighted proprietor of the store. Stacks of cigarette cartons filled the shelves behind her—red-and-white Lucky Strikes, aqua Newports, desert-colored Camels. From somewhere, a radio droned out the news from the AM station in Ashland. Edgar raised a hand in greeting. Ida returned the gesture in silence.

  He and Ida had a long, though stilted, acquaintance. He could remember his father carrying him into the store when he was barely a toddler. Though Ida had never yet said a word to Edgar, he never tired of looking at her. He liked especially to watch her hands as she rang up purchases. They moved with an agile independence that made him think of tiny, hairless monkeys. Her right hand slid dry goods down the counter while her left hand danced across the keys of an ancient adding machine. And Ida, unblinking, looked her customers up and down, her pupils magnified to the size of quarters through dish-lensed spectacles. After each entry, her left hand slammed the adding machine lever down hard enough to stamp the numerals into a piece of oak.

  The locals were inured to all this, but strangers sometimes lost their wits. “That it?” she would ask when she’d totaled their items, cocking her head and fixing them with a stare. “Anything else?” The veiny digits of her left hand punched the keys of the adding machine and leapt onto the lever. Thump! The thump really startled them. Or maybe it was the head-cock. You could see people stop to think, was that really it? The question began to reverberate in their minds, a metaphysical conundrum. Wasn’t there something else? They began to wonder if this could possibly be their Final Purchase: four cans of beans and franks, a bag of Old Dutch potato chips, and half a dozen bobbers. Was that it? Wasn’t there something else they ought to get? And for that matter, had they ever accomplished anything of significance in their entire lives? “No,” they’d gulp, peering into Ida’s depthless black pupils, “that’s all,” or sometimes, “Um, pack of Luckies?” This last was issued as a question, as if they had begun to suspect that an inco
rrect answer would get them flung into a chasm. Cigarettes often came to their minds, partly because Ida herself smoked like a fiend, a white curl always streaming from her mouth to rise and merge with the great galaxy of smoke wreathing over her head. But mainly, when the uninitiated stood before Ida Paine, they found themselves thinking that the future was preordained. So why not take up cigarettes?

  When something Ida didn’t know the price of landed on her counter, her right hand would pick it up and twirl it until she spied the white sticker with its purple numerals, and then she would glance at a yellowing index card taped to the counter and say, without emotion, “On sale today.” She never declared the price. Edgar listened for these asides. On the drive home he liked to match the stickers with the numbers on the adding machine tape that came with their purchases. Sometimes, the numbers all added up; more often everything was scrambled. He’d once gone through the exercise of totaling up the stickers himself. Though none of the individual numbers was correct, the total had been exactly right.

  He walked along the farthest aisle, past the canned milk and SpaghettiOs and the cereal. There was nothing he wanted, really, and he didn’t have much money, but he dawdled. The plate-glass window facing the road admitted less light than a person would have guessed, and the gloom only increased farther back. He half expected to find spiders spinning webs in the darker recesses, but that was the thing with the Popcorn Corners grocery—at first glance it seemed disheveled and broken down, but when you looked closer, you found clean and neat. The rear of the store was a butcher shop, the domain of Ida’s gaunt, aproned, white-hatted husband. When Edgar was little, he’d entertained the notion that Ida’s husband lived behind the meat case among the grinders and cutters and the scent of chilled blood and flesh.