The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

by David Wroblewski

  He hoped the previous night had been a fluke, but as soon as he stretched out on the sofa it became clear he’d lost the ability to sleep on upholstered furniture. This had not previously seemed to be a skill. Just weeks before he had regularly slept in a bed, under sheets and blankets, with a roof overhead and a single small window through which to view the night. Now his body insisted he was in a chamber. The night sounds came through the half-open window as if down a long pipe. The pliability of the sofa cushions felt all wrong; far more comfortable than twigs gouging his side and bugs biting, but in the forest he and the dogs had slept touching one another—if any of them moved, the others knew it at once. Now he was forced to reach down to touch the dogs at all, and even then it was only with his fingertips. And anyone could walk up to the window before he knew it.

  Finally, he stood, blanket wrapped around him, and led the dogs through the kitchen and onto the flat expanse of the stoop. They bedded down in a tangle of canine and human limbs with the house comfortably at their flanks, eight eyes and eight ears facing into the night. One by one the dogs exhaled deep sighs. Overhead, cool white stars arced in the black sky. The moon and the thin corona around the moon shone. It looked to him empyreal—formed of light or fire—the word that would have completed the crossword puzzle. Why hadn’t he wanted to tell Henry? He pondered that question while the night sounds eddied around them, but before an answer came, he’d fallen asleep.

  Ordinary

  BIRDSONG. SCENT OF PERCOLATING COFFEE. HENRY PUSHED open the screen door and looked at Edgar and the dogs lying curled and overlapped and shook his head as if they were the most pitiful sight he’d ever seen. Baboo was the first to rise, splaying his front feet and ambling sleep-drunk to Henry. Edgar tightened his grip on Tinder and Essay, but they were awake and panting. Water rang through the pipes in the house and the shower hissed. Edgar pushed himself up and walked into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee and brought it back out on the stoop. Essay remembered her soup bone, which reminded the other dogs, and the sky brightened to the sound of three sets of teeth scraping bone. They barely looked up when Henry walked out, lunch bucket in hand. He dropped a pair of canvas work gloves onto the porch beside Edgar.

  “Follow me,” Henry said. He walked to the shed and jiggled a bent bolt out of a flap latch and threw open the doors. “Here’s the deal. I want to park that car”—he gestured at the rusting monolith on the cinderblocks—“in this shed.”

  Viewed from the outside, Henry’s shed was unremarkable if slightly ramshackle. It measured maybe fifteen feet wide and twice that deep, a windowless little structure with a peaked roof and sun-blasted white paint. But inside lay a junkyard in miniature. It took Edgar a moment before he could make his eyes settle on any one thing. The walls were encrusted with hubcaps, spools of wire, license plates, ancient tire irons, hand saws, rakes, hoes, scythes, circular saw blades, and a menagerie of antique iron tools, rusted and strange. Coils of chain link lay heaped around the perimeter like petrified snakes. A length of rain gutter crumpled and folded. An unframed mirror footed by dusty, cracked sheets of plate glass. There was a stack of rusty buckets overflowing with doodads and piece parts. Off to one side, a crumbling pyramid of red bricks topped by a thick rope, shedding fibrous creepers. Plywood sheets, delaminated like picture books fished out of a puddle. There were mounds of tires, stacks of newspaper oatmealing in place, wash pans haphazardly stacked, their enamel crazed like desert mud. A squat brown anvil. Toward the back, a cylindrical wringer washer lurked, and what looked to be either a fire hydrant or part of a truck transmission.

  And all that was around the edges. At the center stood—or stooped, rather—an ancient hay wagon. It gave the impression of a broken-backed animal driven to the ground by its burden. Three of its wheels had sprung out to the sides in expressions of shock and exasperation. Its front axle had buckled, tilting the fourth wheel inward, and the whole rotted platform melted diagonally back to front beneath a mountain of timber, shingles, doorframes, rolls of barbed wire, and rust-red stanchions. Had the wagon still been on its wheels, the debris would not have cleared the lintel.

  “You see my problem?” Henry said.

  Edgar nodded. He looked at the ruined car on its blocks. It definitely belonged in the shed, he thought. Then Henry laid out his plan—what to tackle first, what he wanted Edgar to avoid until both of them were there. It took him a long time to explain—there was a lot to do, and he instructed Edgar in detail. “Carhartts in the closet when you get to the pokey stuff,” he said, gesturing toward a nest of barbed wire. Then he took Edgar to the barn and showed him where he could find wire cutters and a wheelbarrow. When they walked back to the house, Edgar scribbled out a request for bandages and Henry produced an old white bedsheet. They made a list of things he needed from town. And then Henry drove off.

  Baboo and Essay had followed them to the shed and now stood peering into the kitchen through the screen door. Tinder had joined them, standing on three legs. He met Edgar’s gaze with a glint of defiance. Unless Edgar wanted to hold him down, his look said, he was going to start moving.

  First we clean that foot, Edgar signed.

  Tinder’s wound oozed a gray-green pus, odorless but nonetheless frightening. The sight made beads of sweat wick into the hair all over Edgar’s scalp. He pressed the back of his hand to the injured pad. It was not overly hot. He began to work it in the water too roughly and Tinder yelped and jerked his paw away.

  I’m sorry, Edgar signed. But we can’t stop yet. He sat with his hand out. In time Tinder offered Edgar his dripping paw and the next time he went slower. Afterward he washed the old bandages in the sink and strung them up to dry on the clothesline. Tinder began to chew the new dressings.

  Stop it, Edgar signed. He put the soup bone in front of Tinder and returned to the clothesline. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Tinder return to his bandages. He walked back and stopped him again.

  We can just do this all day if you want, he signed.

  He counted back in his mind: three days since he and the dogs had been through drills. He lined them up in the grass behind the shed. They worked through recalls and come-fors in the morning sun, then fetches, stays, and guarding. It reminded them all of home, he supposed, but back then they’d only been going through motions, answering classroom questions upon which nothing depended. Chasing. Sitting still. Scenting targets. Now the same acts drew up the ties between them, put them back together, as though shaping the world from scratch. As they worked, they put the sky in place above, the trees in the ground. They invented color and air and scent and gravity. Laughter and sadness. They discovered truth and lies and mock-lies—even then, Essay played the oldest joke there was to play, returning a stick past him as if he were invisible, cantering sideways, tossing it about in her mouth as if to ask, it’s all play, really, isn’t it? What else matters when there’s this to do?

  THE FIRST PART OF HENRY’S plan was simple—pull everything onto the dirt and grass and sort it into three piles: junk to burn, junk to haul away, and junk to save. The old lumber would be burned, along with the magazines and papers; the old chair and the stanchions would be hauled away. The category of junk to be saved was largely theoretical, Henry had said. Also, while Henry wasn’t aware of anything that called the shed home, it was hard not to imagine a rat nesting inside somewhere. Edgar picked out a whacking stick and before he moved anything big, he whaled on it. A lone garter snake had slithered from behind the plywood, but so far that was it.

  In short order he had the stanchions stacked haphazardly on the gravel and a mound of rubbish near the burning barrel. One after another the dogs trotted over to scent what Edgar had pulled out. Baboo and Essay marked the old car seat; when Tinder tried, it turned into a balancing problem, since he had only three good legs. Edgar made as if to stop them, then wondered what the point would be.

  At noon he doled out scraps to the dogs and soaked Tinder’s foot again, rewrapping it with dry bandages from the clot
hesline. There was the sound of a car passing along the road. Out of habit, he glanced up to locate the dogs, but there was no real cause for concern. Baboo and Tinder were sleeping in the shade. Essay had selected a spot in the sun from which she could follow his progress. All of them were concealed behind the house. He briefly reconsidered starting down the railroad tracks, then rejected the idea again. Besides the difficulty of traveling with Tinder, and the hydrogen peroxide and other supplies that Henry would be bringing back that evening, Edgar had made a deal with Henry and he already felt more than a twinge of guilt over having burglarized the man. He didn’t want to renege. Cleaning out his shed seemed like a small repayment.

  Edgar walked back to the shed, letting his mind wander as he worked. Each time he salvaged something interesting—a puckered, moldy globe or an apple-masher with a broken wooden handle—he turned it over in his hands, brushing away the dirt and dust and cobwebs. He wondered about whoever had built the place. How many summers had he clamped that contraption to his kitchen table and worked the now-cracked handle, squashing apple after apple, levering the burst pulp out of the cylinder, straining the juice through cheesecloth? Did the house smell like cider the next morning? Did hornets collect on the window screen as he worked?

  He couldn’t have pinpointed when, exactly, he knew he wasn’t alone. He’d been working slowly, passing in and out of reverie, when his neck hairs began to prickle, as if a rivulet of sweat had been reduced there to salt by the wind, a sensation that at first meant nothing to him. The second time it happened, he glimpsed, from the corner of his eye, a figure standing in the depths of the shed, and he stumbled backward into the sunshine and stared into the the gray morass of shadow.

  He looked at the dogs sprawled about the yard. He walked around the shed, keeping a good distance away from it. There were no windows to look through and all he could do was trace the runs of clapboard with their paint peeling off like thin, irregular patches of birch bark. When he’d come full circle he stood outside the doorway and shielded his eyes and peered inside. He could see the outline of the old wagon and the rubbish mounded over it, but that was all. He’d tipped his whacking stick into the corner just inside the door and he leaned in and snatched it and rapped the wooden doorframe. After a while he walked back inside and beat the pile of stanchions until a cloud of orange rust dust filled the shed. All else lay inert. He stood nodding to himself. When he turned, the dogs were lined up in the doorway looking at him.

  Good idea, he signed. Down. Watch me.

  After the dogs were settled, he went cautiously back to work. The next time he felt the prickle along the back of his neck, he forced himself to look at the dogs first. Only Baboo was still awake, lying panting and unalarmed in the sun. Edgar let his gaze drift toward the rear of the shed. The figure, seen from the corner of his eye, was there, yet when he turned to face it squarely, it was not.

  He compiled an impression bit by bit: a slump-shouldered old fellow with a farmer’s thick arms and a broad belly. He wore blue jeans and a grease-stained T-shirt and a feed store cap rested high on his graying head of hair. When the man finally spoke, his voice was low, almost a whisper, and he pronounced words with an accent Edgar recognized from many hours spent listening to old farmers at the feed store who said “da” for “the” and “dere” for “there.”

  It was the wife, the man said. Nothin’ could go to waste. Everything had to be saved.

  Edgar, wary of what had happened the last time he’d looked, forced himself to concentrate on wrenching a pair of car wheels free.

  She wanted to keep every God-darned thing in case we needed it for parts, the man said. I could of used this shed for better, I’ll tell you that. I ended up having to put all the real machinery over to the neighbor’s.

  Edgar stacked the wheels one atop the other and knelt and began sorting through some smaller items to keep his eyes on his hands.

  Take that coal furnace there.

  Edgar ventured a glance toward a hulking metal form behind the wagon. He didn’t dare examine it too closely, for he could feel his gaze drawn toward the old farmer, but it certainly looked like it had once been a furnace. Until that moment he’d only noticed something round and metal and riveted.

  We put that into the basement before we even laid the first floorboards. God, it was big! Took three of us all morning. Rained cats and dogs the whole time. That wasn’t so bad, though. Gettin’ it out was lots worse—had to bust it into pieces with a sledgehammer. “Make sure and save that,” she says. “You never know.”

  From the corner of his eye Edgar saw the man shake his head.

  I can’t tell you how many ton of coal I shoveled into that thing. Got so I was pretty fond of it. Called it Carl. Gotta go stoke Carl, I’d say, when it got cold. Or, Carl’s going to have a hell of a time tonight, when a blizzard come through.

  How long did you live here? Edgar signed. But he let himself look, and once again there was no one there. He carried a steering wheel out to the yard and devoted himself to his work until his neck hairs stood again.

  Thirty-seven years, the man said. About fifteen years in, nothing fit in the shed no more, so she let me haul some away. She wrung her hands the whole time. Ah, I shouldn’t be so hard on her. She was a sweet woman, and she loved our kids like crazy. After she died I found a shoebox full of wire twists from bread bags. Thousands of ’em! Probably ever one we ever brought into the house. What was she thinking we would use them for?

  Edgar didn’t try to respond. He averted his eyes and selected an old crate filled with broken canning jars to carry to the discard pile. Then he pulled a wire cutter from his back pocket and began cutting a snarl of barbed wire and fence posts, bending lengths of wire straight and tossing them into a pile like the stems of iron roses.

  When she died, the old farmer continued, I thought, now I can clean that shed. I come outside, opened the doors and thought, nope, can’t do it. Thirty-seven years of putting in, I can’t start taking out now. Would have been like burying her twice. So I sold it all and moved to town. When we had the auction, I told people they could have everything in the shed for twenty bucks if they emptied it out. Not one person took me up on it.

  Then, despite Edgar’s best efforts, his glance slipped toward the man again and he was gone. Edgar worked and waited. The afternoon passed. Then Henry arrived home, bringing the dog food and other supplies Edgar had requested and several cans of paint and brushes. He’d brought something else, too: phonograph records, which he made a point of taking out of the car immediately so they wouldn’t melt in the hot sun.

  The dogs sallied excitedly around the yard, letting out creaking yawns to calm themselves until Henry reemerged from the house. Edgar stayed Tinder, who keened quietly. The other two accosted Henry. The man hadn’t been around many dogs, that much was obvious. He stood watching, arms in the air like someone wading in a pool. When Baboo sat in front of him, rather than scratching behind the dog’s ear or stroking his ruff, to everyone’s surprise Henry gripped him by the muzzle and shook it like a hand. The gesture was well meant, and possibly Henry even thought the dog liked it, but Baboo lowered his head tolerantly and cast a sidelong glance Edgar’s way. Essay, having witnessed Baboo’s fate, danced skittishly away when her turn came. Finally Henry walked over and patted Tinder’s head open-handedly, as if tamping down a stubborn cowlick. He sized up the debris piles, which had grown impressively over the course of the day, and walked to the shed and looked in.

  “Jesus,” Henry said. “There’s just as much here as when you started.”

  This was Edgar’s sentiment exactly and he was relieved to hear Henry confirm it. He started to put the work gloves back on, but Henry interrupted him.

  “That’s enough for one day,” he said. “If you keep at it any longer I’ll feel obligated to help.”

  Edgar pulled the shed doors closed and dropped the bent bolt back into the rusty latch. They walked together to Henry’s car. Henry fished two sweating six-packs from the
floor of the passenger’s side. In the back seat lay a forty-pound sack of dog food. Edgar slung it over his shoulder and carried it to the stoop and he sat and fed the dogs straight from the bag, cupping the kibble in his hands.

  THAT NIGHT IT WAS A workingman’s dinner. Henry sat at the kitchen table and read the newspaper and ate reheated brats and potato salad. He motioned for Edgar to help himself and eyed the dogs as though expecting them to lunge for the food. He started to ask Edgar to put them outside, then seemed to reconsider. Instead, he folded the paper into quarters and pored over the crossword, tapping his pencil on the table and picking off the easy clues. Then he said, “Oh!” and walked into the living room. There was a warm pop from the phonograph speakers. Piano music began to drift through the house.

  “They call this one The Goldberg Variation,” he said when he returned. He was holding a battered album cover in one hand. He looked at it again and, with self-conscious precision, corrected himself: “Variations.” He took up the crossword puzzle again, shifting and fidgeting and touching his forehead as if perturbed by the sound of the piano. He emptied his glass of beer and leaned over to the refrigerator and extracted another, pouring it down the inside curve of the glass while streamers of bubbles tumbled upward.

  “Hey, read something, would you?” he said. “When you just sit there it makes it hard to concentrate.” He didn’t sound angry, just a little dejected. “There’s magazines and books in the living room.”

  Edgar took the dogs outside and began grooming them using the pin brush Henry had bought. It was a cheap plastic brush, but it was better than he could do with his fingers, which were all he’d had to work with for weeks. The dogs’ undercoats were terribly matted. Twilight had ended but the kitchen window cast enough light. He worked Essay’s tail until she grew impatient, then moved to Tinder and Baboo, and then back to Essay. The piano music drifted out the screen door. When it stopped, scratchily, he listened to Henry’s footsteps pass through the living room. In a minute, a new melody began. Henry walked out onto the porch, paper and pencil in one hand, beer glass in the other, and sat with his back against the white clapboards. Baboo walked over to him. Henry tentatively pressed his fingers into the fur under Baboo’s jaw, attempting to scratch without getting slobber on his fingers. Baboo endured it for a moment, then turned his head so that Henry’s hand slid behind his ear and began to push back against Henry’s fingers.