The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

by David Wroblewski

  Edgar

  HE SAT BY ALMONDINE’S GRAVE AND LOOKED AT THE HOUSE and the oversize barn, wondering if everything that was happening was by dint of his own imagination, though he knew it wasn’t so, just as he’d known well enough that night in the rain what was real and what was not. He thought about the first night Claude had stayed with them, how he and Almondine had snuck into the barn. How they’d found Claude asleep in the mow, but not really asleep. Looking up into the rafters.

  “This is just how I remembered it,” he’d said. “Your dad and I knew every nook and cranny. We hid cigarettes up here, liquor even. The old man knew it was there somewhere but he was too proud to look for it.”

  One time, they’d opened up a wall in the house and discovered Schultz’s writing hidden inside. And once, Edgar had found a loose section of floorboard near the front of the mow that lifted away. Beneath it lay a space big enough for a pack of cigarettes or a flask of whiskey. The only contents had been a lace of cobwebs and a bottle cap and at the time he’d thought nothing of it.

  A bottle cap.

  Someone had once hidden a bottle there.

  My gramma’s like me. Wanna know what my gramma says?

  He tried to remember if he’d ever looked under that board since that first, strange conversation with Claude.

  Do you think you can find that bottle? You need to look for that bottle. Unless you can lay hands on it, you need to go. That’s what’s in the juice.

  He stood. The moon had risen late, haloed and dimming the nearby stars. Essay had trotted off, exploring in the moonlit field, but now he couldn’t see her and he began to walk. When he neared the kennel, two dogs began to bay. The noise didn’t worry him, so long as it was brief. He even felt a kind of dark thrill, knowing that, that night, it wasn’t a deer wandering through the orchard that started them or an owl dropping onto a rabbit in the long grass.

  He opened the rear kennel doors. A rectangle of moonlight skewed across the aisle and his shadow in it. Before he’d run off he could have walked into the barn in the dead of night and the dogs wouldn’t have uttered a sound, but they were on the verge of an uproar now. He groped his way to the medicine room, felt his irises shrink when he flicked the light switch up. He went down the line, crouching in front of their pens and touching them, looking at the catchlights in their eyes and signing, quiet. When they were calm he found a flashlight in the workshop and extinguished the light in the medicine room. He stood at the back doors looking for Essay, but she was nowhere to be seen and he pulled the doors shut.

  In the dark he heard a dull electromechanical buzz. He shined the flashlight beam up the aisle until it stopped on a telephone mounted on one of the thick posts. They had put an extension in the barn, but the crosstalk ring was the same as ever. He lifted the receiver to his ear. Beneath the dial tone, a faint conversation, two strange voices, a man and a woman.

  He walked to the workshop and climbed the steps, forcing himself past the spot where Doctor Papineau had lain. The mow still trapped the day’s heat. The rear third was stacked with fresh straw, bales all the way to the trusses. The smell would have been lovely under different circumstances. It reminded him of all the time he’d spent there, bales shoved into makeshift corrals, rolling pups until their hind legs kicked, teaching them to sit for the slicker brush and the nail clippers, or paging through the dictionary for names.

  He started searching near the vestibule doorway, swinging the beam of the flashlight in downward-angled arcs and kicking straw aside until, near the far front corner, he spotted the stub of board he had in mind. One edge had been splintered by a screwdriver or a knife and he squatted and flicked open Henry’s jackknife and wedged the blade into the slot before he noticed the nails at either end and the hammer strikes in the wood. He found a pry bar in the workshop. The board tipped up a quarter inch before the old wood gave way and the pry bar popped free. It was enough to raise the nail heads.

  The hollow beneath the board was just as he’d remembered, a few inches of clear space floored by one of the broad main timbers, into which a dugout had been chiseled, and as empty as when he’d first discovered it. But the bottle cap and the cobwebs were absent. And there was another difference: a fresh set of chisel marks widened a stretch of the original cavity by half an inch or more on each side. Unlike the older, carefully made depression, whose surfaces were smooth and edges straight, the new indents looked chewed into the timber. He ran his fingers along the splinters. A few amber wood chips lay scattered across the old beam.

  He tried to remember how that bottle had looked, clasped between him and Ida Paine. The stopper a crude blob of glass. The ribbon, with its indecipherable lettering. The oily contents licking the insides. He looked at his palm, measured the sensation of it against the chisel marks. He sat back and shone his flashlight against the staggered yellow wall of bales. Chaff drifted through the light. With the barn broom, he swept the straw back from the front wall and crossed the floor, tapping at boards. Dozens of hiding places, Claude had said. Edgar could work until sunrise and still not test them all.

  The dogs in the back runs let out a volley of barks. He cracked open the mow door and looked down to find Essay trotting past. He ran down the mow stairs and opened the back doors and clapped for her until she trotted up from the dark. Then he led her to the pen with Finch and Pout and opened the door. Before he could sign anything, she walked in and the three of them settled into the straw.

  In the medicine room he sloshed water around a coffee can and tossed the grit at the drain hole and refilled it and took a swallow and carried it with him back up to the mow. He tipped the board into its slot unnailed and kicked the loose straw around until it didn’t look swept. The batteries in the flashlight had begun to fail. He flicked it off and shook it and waited and pushed the thumb switch forward again. The filament came on yellow, then dimmed back to ember-orange. It was enough light to climb the stacked bales by. Once on top, he wedged the flashlight into the crook of a rafter and wrestled bales around until he’d created a hollow and he settled in and switched off the flashlight. In the dark, the heat in the rafters congealed around him. He had to force himself to take a breath.

  After a long time, swallows began to trill from their nests in the eaves. The first cicadas cried out their complaint. Far away, the porch door creaked and two of the dogs called out. The doors at the front of the barn rattled as they were hooked open. Then Claude’s voice, echoing through the kennel. Edgar wondered how long it would take before he discovered Essay. When light began to show through the cracks beneath the eaves he tipped the coffee can to his mouth. The water tasted of iron and dust and blood. Finally he slept, but it was a cursed sleep. Every sound jerked him awake. Chaff covered him like ash. With every movement came some new scratch or bite, and he drifted in and out of consciousness, not knowing what else to do besides wait.

  Glen Papineau

  IT HADN’T HAPPENED EXACTLY THE WAY CLAUDE PREDICTED, BUT once the seed of the idea was planted, Glen found himself brooding over Edgar Sawtelle.

  Claude had worried about him filing a lawsuit, but that was the furthest thing from Glen’s mind. The fact was, over the last several months, Claude had turned out to be a pretty nice guy, a fine friend. Dragging them into court wouldn’t be right. They were nearly as busted up over his father’s death as he was, plus they had a runaway to worry about. Anything bad a person could wish on them had already happened, and worse.

  No, the way it worked in his mind was, suppose Edgar did turn up? Suppose Glen walked into his office one morning and a description of the boy had come over the wires? Would he call the Sawtelles straight off? Or would he want to check it out first? That seemed like the humane thing—verify it before he got their hopes up. It depended on where Edgar turned up, of course. A lot of runaways stuck surprisingly close to home, which for Edgar meant Ashland, Superior, Eau Claire, or one of the dozens of small towns in between—an easy run to fetch him. Glen could even imagine going as far as Madison,
though much beyond that and Edgar might as well be in California.

  Yet…suppose it was nearby? Suppose the officer who called him was a small-town cop like Glen and Glen could just walk in and say, “Yep, that’s him.” That would be the right way to do it—identify the kid in person before making calls, avoid any confusion and a bad false alarm for Trudy. He’d make small talk, they’d sign custody over, and after that it would be just Glen and Edgar in the squad car. Of course, he’d deliver Edgar safe and sound, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t stop to ask a couple of questions. Discuss what had happened in that mow. Find out, one way or another.

  It was natural for Glen to imagine that conversation taking place in the squad car because he did his very best thinking there, right behind the wheel, with the trees and fields and houses sliding across the windshield. He liked to let his mind wander a bit. One thing that really bugged him was the notion that other officers—and he used that word with a grain of salt, because it implied a certain dignity and honor they didn’t all have—mocked him. He had a nickname, he knew, something hung on him since childhood. Ox. He hated it when people called him that. After graduating from Mellen High, he thought he’d left it behind, but somehow the trainees at the academy in Madison had found out. His looks didn’t help. People took one glance and thought, “That must be the one they call ‘Ox,’” practically mouthing the words. Before long, someone saw him in his blues, and that cemented his fate, that memorable but tenuous connection to Paul Bunyan, or rather, to his beast of burden: Babe the Blue Ox.

  The name didn’t bother him so much as the implication that he was clumsy or stupid. But most people saw what they wanted to see. Little skinny guys looked smart. Big guys looked dumb. Even police officers, trained to see past appearances, fell into that trap. When they saw Babe the Blue Ox coming, they saw dumb, and any little mistake became emblematic.

  For example, the interview with the boy. At a staff meeting in Ashland he’d let slip that Trudy had translated Edgar’s answers rather than having the kid write them out, and people had actually guffawed. Like, there goes Ox Papineau, doing the dumbest thing you could imagine. What they didn’t understand was that his pop had spent the night with the Sawtelles. He’d stopped by the office that morning ahead of them and said, in no uncertain terms, to make it quick, that Trudy and her son were wrecked, barely functioning. There wasn’t any use forcing Edgar to relive the experience and it might very well do damage. So Glen had promised he’d keep it to the point.

  Plus, the night before the boiler had gone on the fritz, and he’d spent every spare minute that morning convincing it to work. When the time came for the interview, he maybe hadn’t been as prepared as he would have liked. Yes, he’d had Annie type it up and run it out for them to sign, but that didn’t stop the wingnuts in Ashland from re-enacting the scene, one of them asking questions, another waving his arms around in reply, a third spewing preposterous interpretations. It had gotten so that any time he asked a question, they launched into mock-sign while some wise guy leaned over and whispered, “He says he didn’t do it.” Which cracked them all up: stupid old Babe the Blue Ox.

  So whenever he dwelt on the idea of questioning Edgar again, his spirits lifted. Not in an entirely nice way. When he was patrolling, with nothing much else going through his mind, he imagined glancing in his rearview mirror and seeing Edgar sitting back there. And then Glen asking, what the hell did happen up in that mow, Edgar? This is my father we’re talking about. I have a right to know. That’s all I want: to hear what happened.

  And then, in Glen’s imagination, Edgar Sawtelle did something he’d never, ever done before: he replied out loud.

  He said, “I’m sorry.” That was it, just “I’m sorry.”

  In Glen’s imagination, the boy’s voice was as gravelly as an old man’s, because it had never been used. The gratifying thing was, Edgar had chosen to speak those first words to Glen because he knew he had contributed to, if not caused, Pop’s death. That showed true remorse.

  Once that little movie got into Glen’s head, it stuck like a burr. He began to rehearse it in all kinds of places. Sometimes they were alone on a country road, without a farmhouse or a car for miles; sometimes he had just parked the cruiser in front of the town hall—a last-chance-before-we-go-inside kind of scene. Sometimes they were caught in traffic in Ashland. But wherever it happened to be, Glen always looked up in his mirror and asked his question, and always, Edgar Sawtelle answered out loud.

  Glen had even begun to say his own part out loud as he drove.

  “What the hell happened up there, Edgar? I’m asking because I’m his son and I have a right to know.”

  The first time it felt silly and he blushed. Despite himself, he looked to see if the mike key wasn’t somehow, freakishly, depressed and he’d been transmitting. (He could see the reenactments of that in the locker room in Ashland.) But it was okay, totally private. And cathartic. He did it again. Even picked up the mike, pretended to key it, and asked his question, letting his eyes burn into the mirror. Sometimes he emphasized “son,” sometimes “know.” He finally settled on a version with emphasis on both, but just a little more on “son,” to make it clear he was speaking as a family member and not as a police officer.

  All of that was very satisfying.

  Less satisfying was that no one answered.

  And that was where things stood for a couple weeks. Then, like a man shaking himself out of a dream, he understood he was being compulsive and bizarre and had to stop. It was a little too much like some other activities he could name: you shouldn’t do them, even if they felt good. Nobody had to tell you that. You just knew it wasn’t healthy.

  In order to purge himself, he’d decided to talk to Claude. This time Claude had come to Glen’s house. They’d sat in the living room and talked until the wee hours. After enough beer (and “enough,” for Glen, had come to mean a twelve-pack as the summer went along; he’d stopped going to The Kettle or The Hollow, had even started driving to Ashland to stock up) he’d stammered out the basics of his little scenario.

  Confiding in Claude turned out to be the right decision. Claude said two things. First, he was beginning to think that Edgar wasn’t going to come back. If he’d been gone that long—almost two months—he must be pretty committed to staying away. By then he could have made it to Canada, Mexico, or either ocean. Second, and more important, he’d thought Glen’s response was totally reasonable. After all, did Glen want to hurt Edgar? Certainly not. He just wanted to put the question to him, didn’t he? Hadn’t they both lost a father in the last year? Wouldn’t Edgar want to ask the same question if someone knew what had happened to his father? Damn right he would. When you looked at it that way, even Edgar could hardly begrudge Glen a single goddamned question when the tables were turned. In fact, the longer they talked, the more it seemed that if Edgar did show up, Claude would have no objection to Glen taking the boy for a ride before he came home. If that could be arranged. Which seemed possible, since, if he was coming home, it was probably going to be escorted by a cop.

  Of course, he could always hitchhike back home, Glen said.

  Even then, Claude mused, maybe something could be arranged. Claude could call, let Glen know Edgar had shown up. They’d installed a phone in the barn that summer—he could just wander out, pick up the handset. And some night when Trudy was out, Glen could swing over. Claude would look the other way. They agreed it wasn’t ideal; it would be better if Glen asked his question before Edgar got home. (Because, Glen thought, what if the answer were something more than “I’m sorry?” Then they’d have to take a ride to the tank in Ashland, go through the whole sorry juvenile justice meat grinder, which, by the way, meant that he walked away with a clean record at eighteen, no matter what. Which some people might find a little unfair.)

  Glen had fretted over the logistics of it. How exactly would he get the boy into his car if he were already home? He didn’t think he could just talk Edgar into going for a ride. In fact
, he’d probably fight like the dickens to avoid it, and fighting a kid hadn’t been part of the movie in his head. Because what those idiots up in Ashland didn’t understand was that “Ox” Papineau valued finesse over strength. Even in his wrestling days, lunging against three-hundred-pound behemoths with their hands hooked behind his neck, finesse always won out over simple strength. He’d tied guys into knots with finesse. And those skills hadn’t gone to waste, either. Just the other day he’d used them when Mack Holgren, fighting with his wife again, decided to swing on Glen.

  Plus, in Glen’s imagination, one of the reasons the boy was willing to talk straight—was willing to talk at all—was that just being in the car made it clear how explaining himself would get him home. Glen wouldn’t say that, of course; that’s why it was finesse.

  But if the boy was already home…

  Glen had been puzzling aloud on that one when Claude grinned a funny, nasty little grin and held out a freshly uncapped bottle of beer. Something about the gesture set Glen at ease, because if there was one thing Claude Sawtelle understood, it was the nature of camaraderie. Claude leaned back in his chair. He took a long swallow of beer and looked over at Glen.

  “Have I ever explained to you,” he said, “about Prestone?”

  WHEN CLAUDE CALLED THAT NIGHT all he’d said was that Edgar had left a note on their kitchen table. Claude didn’t know if the kid had stolen a car or what. Most likely he’d hitchhiked home and was hiding in the woods somewhere. The note said he was coming back the next day, so if Glen was going to ask his question like they’d talked about, he needed to get on the stick.