The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

by David Wroblewski

  “Nat,” Henry said, “what’s a ten-letter word for ‘Augments vision.’ Starts and ends with S.”

  He slid the paper over to Edgar. “Twenty-three down.”

  Edgar glanced at the crossword puzzle and set down the brush and penciled in spectacles and pushed the paper back.

  “Right,” Henry said. “Should have got that.” He held his beer up to the porch light and looked through it. “Spectacles,” he repeated pensively, as if the idea of spectacles had just occurred to him. He tipped his head back against the house. When he stopped scratching Baboo, the dog nosed Henry’s hand and laid a paw on his leg.

  Watch it, Edgar signed at him.

  Baboo withdrew his foot.

  “You know,” Henry said, “it’s probably hard to tell, but I’ve never had a dog. Not even when I was a kid. Lots of cats—three, four at a time. My best friend in elementary school had a little spotted dog named Bouncer. Maybe a twenty-pounder or so. Pretty smart. He could balance stuff on his nose. He’d follow us everywhere. But these dogs—these dogs are something else. I mean, the way they look at you and all.”

  They sat in silence for a while. The light from the kitchen was skewed across the boards of the stoop.

  “You had them all their lives?”

  Yes.

  “You trained them?”

  Yes.

  “How’s that one—Tinder. How’s Tinder’s foot?”

  Edgar was working the myriad tangles in Essay’s tail and she wasn’t enjoying it. When he set the brush down and released her, she leapt and circled, examining her priceless appendage, then bounded over to Henry and Baboo and nosed them both. Edgar joined them. He unwrapped Tinder’s bandage and held his paw up to the light.

  Henry scooted over. “Oof,” he said. “I thought I just imagined that from the other night.”

  Edgar fetched the rags and the pan and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide.

  “That’s the biggest bottle I could find. You can probably stretch it if you soak a rag and dab,” Henry said.

  Edgar nodded. He reached over to the paper.

  Why did you plant sunflowers? he wrote in the margin. He sopped up the hydrogen peroxide as Henry suggested. The edges of Tinder’s wound were red and weeping, and the hydrogen peroxide sizzled under the cloth.

  “Aha. Well, interesting question,” Henry said. He sat and looked out at the field. “Call it an experiment. Usually, I plant corn, but I wanted to do something different this year. Something out of the ordinary. So I came up with this idea. Further south sunflower isn’t so uncommon, you know, but you don’t see it here much.”

  When Tinder’s foot was as clean as he could get it, Edgar retrieved the tattered bandages from the clothesline.

  Does it pay better than corn? he wrote.

  “Not really,” Henry said. “But I don’t care. Fifty cents a pound for the seed. I could make more money with corn, but not so much more.” He looked out at the field and frowned. “I’m not sure how you harvest it, though. It’ll take forever to do it by hand. The man who harvested the corn last year thought he could get a special attachment for his combine. Then again, I might just let them sit there if they look nice. It all depends. Of course, nothing’s more depressing than a field full of dead sunflowers.” He drank his beer and looked at the stars. “You haven’t been able to talk for a long time, huh? With the hand signs and everything?”

  Edgar shook his head.

  “Was there an accident or something? If you don’t mind me asking, I mean.”

  I was born this way, he wrote. The doctors don’t know why. Then he shrugged and wrote, Thank you for buying dog food.

  Henry looked at the piles of debris. “What a god-awful mess,” he said. He turned his gaze to the car on blocks. “I appreciate the help. I need to get that heap out of the rain before it rusts to pieces. I ought to just sell it, you know.”

  He stared at the car and produced another bottle of beer from somewhere. “I just can’t part with it,” he said.

  Edgar nodded. He slipped a fresh sock onto Tinder’s foot and tied it up again, using his forefinger to warn the dog from chewing. Tinder broke into a pant, as if amazed Edgar had read his mind.

  “Nat,” Henry said. “Have you ever been called ‘ordinary’?”

  Edgar looked at him.

  “You know—ordinary. Just…ordinary. I bet no one has ever accused you of that.”

  No. Edgar looked at him. Not that I remember.

  “Yeah, I wouldn’t think so. Running around with trained circus dogs or whatever. Jesus. Want to know something ridiculous? I have. By my own fiancée—ex-fiancée, I mean. We were going to get married in March, and then, from out of nowhere, she called it off. Said she loved me, even, but she’d decided I was too ordinary, and that over the years it would destroy our marriage. ‘Ordinary looking or what?’ I said. ‘No, just all-around ordinary,’ she said. ‘Ordinary in the way you do things, ordinary in what you see and think and say. Just ordinary.’ Once she got that idea in her head, she said she couldn’t shake it. Every time she looked at me she felt love, and she felt ordinariness at the same time.”

  He took a big swallow of beer. “Now I ask you, does that make sense?”

  Edgar shook his head. The fact was, it didn’t make sense to him. He loved ordinary things, ordinary days, ordinary work. Even as Henry spoke he felt a pang over the routine of the kennel—and if that couldn’t be called ordinary, what could? Besides, while Henry didn’t strike him as being highly unusual, he didn’t see any reason that should be an offense. Or for that matter, what it would even mean to be called ordinary.

  “Darn right, it doesn’t,” Henry declared in a sudden burst of indignation. Then he wilted. “She had a point, though. What exactly have I done out of the ordinary? Every day I go down to the central office, and at the end of every day I come home. I have a house like everyone else. I plant a crop in a field and harvest it every fall. I have a car on blocks that I tinker with. I like to fish. What isn’t ordinary about that?”

  Is she ordinary? Edgar wrote.

  Henry looked at Edgar as if he hadn’t considered the question before.

  “Well, I guess you might not pick Belva out of the crowd walking down the street. But she’s pretty unusual once you get to know her. For instance, one of her eyes is blue, the other one is brown, so that puts her out of the ordinary right there. Also, she’s an atheist. She says if there was a God, both her eyes would be the same color. Myself, I believe in God, but I just don’t want to lose an entire morning at church. I figure God doesn’t care whether you worship in the church or on your drive to work. Belva says that doesn’t count as being either an atheist or a believer; that’s just lazy.”

  Do you believe in ghosts?

  “Wouldn’t surprise me,” Henry said, as if this confirmed his darkest suspicions. But he wanted to talk about Belva; it was as though he could picture her right then, in front of them.

  “You should see her ankles—gorgeous, delicate ankles, ankles like the ones on statues. We were engaged for two years.” He heaved a sigh. “She’s dating some guy at the bank.”

  Hasn’t anything out of the ordinary happened to you?

  “Not that I know of,” Henry said. Actually, he moaned this. Then he snapped his fingers. “No, wait. You want to know the most unusual thing that ever happened to me? One time last year I went to the supermarket. Middle of the day, hardly anyone there. I’m going down the aisles, buying milk and soup and potatoes, and I remember I need bread. So I go to the bread aisle. There’s loaves and loaves of bread sitting on the shelves at the far end of the aisle. I start pushing my cart toward the bread. And what do you think happens?”

  Edgar shrugged.

  “That’s right, you don’t know,” he said. “Because it’s not ordinary. What happens is, before I reach the end of the aisle, one of the loaves sort of unsquashes itself and falls to the floor. Nobody touched it, it just stretched itself out like an accordion and there it went. Plop. I pick up the l
oaf and put it back on the shelf. Then I push on over to the condiments. Now, here’s the unordinary part: I’m heading to checkout, and I turn down the bread aisle again. And what do I hear from behind me?”

  He gave Edgar a significant look.

  What? Edgar signed, though he probably could have guessed.

  “Plop!” Henry said. “That’s right. I turned around and there was the very same loaf of bread lying on the floor.”

  What did you do?

  “I’m not an idiot. I bought it, of course. I put my regular brand back.”

  Was it better?

  “Same difference,” Henry said, shrugging. “I switched back the next week.” He took a long swallow of beer. “So there you have it. That’s the peak. The apex. The apogee. That’s the exotic life that Belva turned down.”

  That doesn’t happen to everybody, Edgar wrote.

  Henry shrugged. “It would be great to see a UFO, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

  Then the piano music began to skip and Henry walked inside to fix the record. Baboo went to the door and watched through the screen. Baboo, it seemed, had come to some sort of decision about Henry—Edgar had been noticing it all night. When Henry was seated again, Baboo stood next to him, eye to eye, and waited until Henry discovered that he needed to be scratched under the chin or on the top of the head or across his back just in front of his tail. Even sober, Henry might not have been aware of how deftly Baboo placed Henry’s hand where he wanted to be scratched.

  Henry leaned his head back against the house and, after a time, fell asleep, mumbling. Edgar and the dogs were left looking into the summer night. The music reminded Edgar of New Year’s Eve, so long past, when he had danced with his mother; how his father had cut in, how the two them had swayed by the lights of the Christmas tree; how he had stolen curds to give to these same dogs to celebrate. Back then, he’d hardly known them, he thought.

  Then the piano music ended and Henry jerked awake. “Now suppose I joined the navy,” he said, vehemently replying to some argument in his dreams. “I sail off somewhere. Burma. After a while I stop being ordinary. Okay. But how’s Belva gonna know? That’s the problem. I have to stop being ordinary right here in Lute.” He leaned forward and looked blearily at Edgar. Then he must have understood what had happened, because he stood and heaved a dramatic yawn. “Okay,” he said. “That’s it. I’m done.”

  Edgar and the dogs followed Henry into the house. Henry might have been amused to find them sleeping on the porch one morning, but he didn’t want to try the man’s patience. When he came into the living room the dogs had already curled up on the throw rug. He turned off the light on the end table and hung his arm off the sofa and laid a hand on Tinder. In the dark, he thought about the old man in the shed. He checked the blanket to make sure it wasn’t wrapped around his legs. In all their days of running through the Chequamegon, he had never once forgotten to look down the legs of his pants for spiders, but his first night indoors he’d been flummoxed by a blanket.

  Something had changed, he realized. Settled there on the couch, he felt none of the previous night’s trapped sensation, and he thought that part of him had decided to trust Henry, that this was a place they could sleep through the night in peace. Perhaps that had happened only a few minutes before. Perhaps when he was watching Baboo.

  Then the counting part of his mind began its litany: Three days in one place. Beginning of August. How much faster would they have to move once Tinder healed? How much longer could they stay? How far could they get before it turned cold? How far away could they get at all? Finally, Edgar eased himself off the sofa, nudging one of the dogs over, and he arranged himself, amidst a chorus of sighs and groans, so that he was touching them all.

  Please, he told himself, half warning, half prayer. Don’t get used to this.

  Engine No. 6615

  FOR SIX DAYS EDGAR HAD BEEN WORKING IN HENRY’S SHED. Mornings he washed and dressed Tinder’s foot. The bandages were no longer stained from weeping, but if Edgar worked too hard at cleaning the wound, the wash water turned pink. Despite Edgar’s attempts to keep Tinder in quiet down-stays, whenever Essay and Baboo wrestled in the yard, Tinder hobbled along, his foot clubbed by a graying sock. Sometimes he yelped and rolled, but he quickly hopped up again. Evenings, they listened to scratchy library records Henry brought home, music composed by Russian generals: Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Shostakovich. During dinner Henry swore at the crossword while Edgar read the liner notes. Afterward, Edgar tended to Tinder’s foot and taught Henry sign.

  Henry had departed on Saturday midmorning with a list of errands to run. He expected to return by early afternoon, he said, though with his luck, it could be evening and the day would be shot. After he left, Edgar stood in the shed deciding what to tackle first. The walls had been stripped of rusted tools and saw blades. The disintegrating wagon was half excavated. As Edgar wrestled with an oval wall mirror, miraculously unbroken, he felt the tingle of evaporating sweat on his neck, the sign that the old farmer had appeared in the shed’s farthest recesses.

  That mirror, that’s one I hate to let go, he said. That was my daughter’s the whole time she was growing up. It probably seen her more than me—everything from a baby up to twenty years old. Sometimes I wonder if all that might still be inside it. Got to make an impression on a thing, reflecting the same person every day.

  Edgar swiped a rag along the glass and peered in. The mirror’s surface was dusty and the silver had been eaten away in islands of black. He waited for ghostly afterimages to form: a baby in its mother’s arms, a girl brushing her hair, a young woman twirling blithely in a prom dress. But all he saw was his own reflection leaning up toward him.

  There’s no one there, he replied.

  Oh, said the man. Well, I thought maybe.

  The best way to keep the man talking, Edgar had learned, was to stay quiet and wait. He leaned the mirror back against the wagon and began collecting the broken china that lay around it and dropping the pieces into a chipped ceramic pan.

  Whole years went by I wasn’t so happy here, the old man said. Most of the late 1950s in particular. The Eisenhower years. Bad times.

  You were a farmer?

  Yup.

  Didn’t you like farming?

  Oh, gosh, I guess I hated it sometimes. Do you know how early you have to get up to milk cows? You get to ’em late, they try to step on your feet. They see you with the stool and the bucket at ten in the morning and you better be walking directly down the center of the aisle, because sure enough a ten-pound hoof is gonna come striking out. They’ll kick you squarely in the nuts if they think they got a shot at it. I know one fella it happened to. He quit farming and moved to Chicago soon as he could walk again.

  Edgar thought about this.

  Was his name Schultz, by any chance?

  Naw, one of the Krauss boys, the old man said. Anyway, just out of fear, if nothing else, you get up when it’s pitch dark and they’re still a little sleepy. You milk until your hands ache. Then you shovel out the stalls, which is no great treat. I was always amazed at just how much poop come out of a cow. Little hay goes in, huge cowpies come out. How does that happen?

  I don’t know much about cows, Edgar signed, after a long pause.

  And that’s just the work before breakfast, the man continued. Then there’s planting and harvesting. Things breaking down. Calves birthed in big blue placentas with veins thick as your finger. Mastitis. Worms. You ever seen a cow magnet? Unbelievable. Looks like a giant metal bullet. You shove it right down the cow’s throat and a year or two later it comes out the other end covered with nails, bolts, hunks of wire. I know a man found his watch that way. We cut silage right up to the time snow flew, wondering if we were going to kill everything by putting it up wet. Fences broken, cows wandering in the woods. Some nights I’d come to the house so tired I didn’t know if I could lift a fork to my mouth.

  If you didn’t like it, why didn’t you quit?

 
To do what? Wasn’t anything I knew better than farming. I was cursed, that was the problem. Just because I didn’t like it didn’t mean I wasn’t good at it. I could call the weather, for instance. I’d walk outside one spring day and think, now we can plant. Down at the feed store they’d say, George, you’re going to get frozen out. You put in too early and you’re going to lose three quarters of it. But I had a sense. Always got it right, too; even if snow fell, it was a dusting. Farmers around here started planting as soon as they heard I’d bought seed.

  That doesn’t sound like a curse to me.

  It’s a curse all right, you’re just too young to know about that sort of thing. To be good at something you don’t care about? It isn’t even unusual. Plenty of doctors hate medicine. Most of your businessmen lose their appetite at the sight of a receipt. It’s a common thing. Old Bert down to town, he despises that grocery store. Says the routine bores him out of his mind: ordering, stocking, worrying about produce going bad. One day he told me he dreams about tomatoes more than he dreams about his own wife.

  What would you have done if you could have quit?

  I’d’ve been a railroad engineer. Best job in the world. You turn a crank and ten thousand tons of freight starts to move. You ever been inside a locomotive?

  No.

  I was up in Duluth once and I went to the rail yards just to look at locomotives and I got to talking with a fellow and he knew one of the engineers walking by. He says, Hey Lem, come on over here. And this fellow—he’s dressed in overalls and a conductor’s cap just like you might see on television—he walks over. This man says, here’s a gentleman never seen the inside of a locomotive. Is that right, Lem says, and he walks to a telephone and makes a call to someone. Maybe the trainmaster, I don’t know. Then he hangs up. Well, come on, he says. We start walking down the platform, past all the hopper cars and tankers and cabooses and he says over his shoulder, whatcha wanna see? Steamer or diesel? Steamer, I says. And he leads me to engine number six-six-one-five—the number was painted in big letters on the side. It was one of them big ones, cowcatcher like a bushy mustache, covered with bolts the size of your head, drive rods thick as your leg. Black, like it was carved out of a solid block of ore. He just points and names things. Air reservoir. Cylinder. Sandbox. Steam dome. Injectors. Drive wheel. Then he scrambles up a ladder and motions me up, and we stand inside the cab. He keeps naming things off. Firehole. Reverser. Regulator. Throttle. That engine was cold and dead while we was standing in it—Lem said it was in for repairs—but even like that, a person could feel the power in it.