The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

by David Wroblewski

  Are the pups with you?

  Are you okay?

  No.

  Yes.

  I’ll get them.

  Before she could sign anything else, he ran through the double doors. The interior of the barn was eerily hot. The bulb he’d left screwed into its socket flickered away and the smoke billowed and streamed past it along the ceiling and into the night. The air smelled of hickory and burning straw. Edgar came upon the remains of Glen’s ether-soaked rag, an orange-fringed char. In two of the pens, he found straw still burning, the flames dispersed and yellow. He tore open the doors and kicked the straw until the embers were dark and he looked about. The plank walls were scorched in places. The timbers of the runs blackened. He found glowing, smoking piles of half-burnt straw in three other runs and he stomped them out. Overhead, the heavy crosswise beams were sooty but not aflame. Yet the smoke had not lessened. From outside, he could hear a shouted exchange between his mother and Claude. He ran down the aisle looking for the source of the smoke, but all he saw was a faint orange glow between two of the ceiling boards. When he looked again even that had gone black.

  From the whelping room came a pair of high, yiking cries. The air inside was clearer. The solid walls of the whelping rooms had blocked all but a thin scum of smoke, but the two pups were panicked, almost hysterical. The moment he unlatched their pen door, they scrambled past, turned the corner, hindquarters skidding out from under them, and were gone. He followed them out. He wasn’t groggy from the ether anymore, but his head throbbed. Once outside, he gasped the clear air into his lungs and raised his hand and pressed the lump where his head had struck the floor. What he felt wasn’t even pain, just the black hand of unconsciousness passing before his eyes. His knees almost buckled and he yanked his fingers away.

  The smoke pouring out of the doorway had doubled since he’d gone in, and blackened. He ran across the yard to where his mother stood among the dogs. The two pups were yapping and tumbling at her feet. She laid her hands on his shoulders and then on the sides of his face.

  “Are you okay?”

  He nodded.

  “All the dogs are out?”

  Yes.

  “Then keep away from the barn. It’s going to burn.”

  No. I put out all the flames I could find. Have you called the fire department?

  She shook her head. “We can’t get through.”

  What?

  “When they put the extension in the barn, they routed the line there first. Claude just tried the house phone. The wires must have burnt or shorted already.”

  No. No. No. The lights are on in the barn. The phone there might still work.

  “Edgar, listen to me. No one goes into the barn. Look at the smoke. Look at it. The barn is gone.”

  A glance was all it took to know she was right. Smoke had begun to seep from the eaves, rising and blacking out the stars in ebony rivulets. The sight of it pressed some tremendous weight down on Edgar. He knew very well how dry and brittle the wood in the barn was. He might have extinguished all the flames he could see, but something was smoldering inside the walls and ceiling. Even if they called that instant, it would take time for the Mellen Volunteer Fire Corps to arrive. Half an hour, maybe. And by then, the barn would be ablaze.

  All at once the image of his father lying on the workshop floor flashed into his mind. Snow, seeping toward him. How he wouldn’t look at Edgar. Wouldn’t breathe. “These records are it,” he’d once said. “Without those records, we wouldn’t know what a dog meant.”

  When Edgar turned back, his mother was looking at the house. Glen sat slumped on the porch steps, towel pressed to his face. Claude was standing beside him, speaking in a low, urgent voice and trying to pull the towel away so he could flush Glen’s eyes with a pan of water.

  “Why would Glen do this?” his mother said. “God damn him.”

  He had ether. I knocked it out of his hand.

  “What was he doing with ether?”

  He had it in a bottle. He held a rag over my face.

  She looked at the gray powder in Edgar’s hair and on his clothes.

  “You threw quicklime at him.”

  Yes.

  “That flash was ether fumes.”

  Yes. I think the heat of the light bulb set it off.

  “What did he mean to do?”

  I don’t know.

  She was shaking her head. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “How did he even know you—”

  Then her voiced trailed off. She seemed to register for the first time that Glen Papineau was not in uniform. He was dressed in jeans and a checkered, short-sleeved shirt with its own bib of quicklime. Claude had coaxed him into setting aside the towel, and as they watched, he pulled back Glen’s eyelids and tipped water across his broad face. When the liquid touched his eyes, Glen’s back arched. He pushed Claude away with a sweep of his hand and hunched over again.

  “How did he know?” she said. She took a tremulous breath. Tears spilled onto her cheeks. She began to walk toward the porch, hands fisted at her side. Then her strides lengthened and she was running and her voice rose to a wail, asking the same question over and over.

  EDGAR FORCED HIMSELF TO turn away from the house, and away from the real, living dogs on the ground at his feet. Those dogs could take care of themselves for the few minutes it would take him to do what he had in mind. He ran to the front barn doors and rolled the heavy iron brace bar away and pulled the doors open. A billow of gray smoke engulfed him, carrying with it the smell of roasting straw and wood. He stepped back. After a minute the smoke leveled out around five feet above the barn floor.

  If he stayed low, under the ceiling of smoke, he could easily reach the workshop door. The cabinets themselves would be impossible to move, but he could carry out individual files. The most valuable would be the newest, going back five generations. How many times could he go in? How many files each trip? They would get scrambled, but there would be time later to sort them out. He permitted himself a quick look at the porch steps. His mother stood facing Claude and Glen.

  “How did you know, Glen?” she cried. “Tell me how you knew Edgar was here.”

  Claude was standing beside Glen on the steps. He leaned over and began to say something.

  “Shut up, Claude. Shut up. I want to hear this from Glen.”

  But Glen sat silently rocking and grinding the towel against his face. Trudy knelt and put her hands on either side of Glen’s massive head and wrenched it toward her.

  If Edgar watched even a moment longer he thought he would run toward the house, toward Claude, and then there would be no hope. He began drawing the deepest breaths he could, and before the doubts and second-guesses could begin, he ran into the smoldering barn.

  HOT SMOKE BILLOWED over his back. The sole light bulb, at the far end of the barn, flickered between folds of smoke. Walking, he might have crossed the distance to the workshop in a few seconds, but with his head down and peering about for flames, it took much longer. He touched the handle of the workshop door and rubbed his thumb over his fingertips, like a safecracker, to take the temperature. Warm, but no warmer than anything else in the barn. He swung the door open. Smoke sucked into the darkness and equalized between the aisle and the workshop.

  His eyes began to itch and a stream of tears leaked onto his face. He scrambled through the doorway and flipped the light switch and the bulb in the ceiling fixture came on. He breathed a little sigh of relief. He knew the room so well he could find his way to the file cabinets in total darkness, but he wouldn’t be able to locate the records he wanted just by feel, and there was no time to find the flashlight.

  He opened the highest drawer of the rightmost file cabinet. A solid mass of paper, divided a hundred times, came toward him, the tab edges on the tops of the manila folders running in a long, ragged hump down the center and each penciled with a name. Cotton. Vesta. Hoop. Frog. He drove his hands into the mass, awkwardly lifting out a swath, and in the process scattering notes a
nd photographs and paper clips. He left them and turned and scuttled through the doorway and down the aisle. The papers were heavy and they slid dryly against one another in his arms. Then he was in the yard, in the clear air. At the far edge of the lawn he stopped and bent and spilled the papers onto the ground.

  And for the briefest instant, Edgar felt something new, something impossible and wholly out of place. A sense of elation. As if he’d somehow traveled back to the moment his father lay on the workshop floor and found the thing that could save him. Then, just as quickly, the sensation was gone. Something in him clamored for it again, at once. He ran to the barn and flailed heedlessly through the smoke and filled his arms with another pack of manila folders and all the papers and photographs inside them. He’d almost reached the double doors when the cement floor surged upward; he saw it tilting at him but there was no time to recover and he smashed shoulder-first into the hinges of the right-hand door, kicking as he fell and clutching the papers to his chest.

  The impact brought him to his senses. He lay for a time half in and half out of the barn. After a few breaths of clear air he pushed to his feet and staggered into the grass. When he reached the folders he’d already rescued, he bent at his waist and let the papers flutter and splash to the ground.

  Remember me.

  Far in the distance, his mother’s voice.

  “Edgar! Stay out of there!”

  She was standing by the porch. Glen had gripped her wrist in one giant hand like a straw in a vise. Edgar looked at her and shook his head. There was no time to argue. She couldn’t feel what he felt or hear what he heard. She wouldn’t understand the rightness of it. There were no words for the sensation that had washed through him.

  His mother would have run forward to stop him, but she couldn’t break Glen’s grip. She whirled and began to beat at Glen’s face with her free hand. It brought the enormous man to his feet. He was confused and in terrible pain and he stood thrashing his head side to side to avoid her blows. His stance was wide-legged and low. And then, in one fluid motion, he swept one of his thick legs under hers and folded her up in his arms and together they toppled onto the grass. By the time they came to rest, Glen had scissored his legs over hers.

  “What’s happening?” Glen said. His voice was filled with pain and fear but not the slightest hint of physical effort, as if all those wrestler’s reflexes had come forward of their own volition to protect him. “Why won’t anyone help me?” he cried. “Doesn’t anyone understand I can’t see?”

  Edgar took a breath and turned away. The last thing he saw was the entwined figures of Glen Papineau and his mother, as she twisted and fought in his arms. And Claude, standing on the porch steps above them.

  HE TROLLEYED ALONG PALM and knuckle into the workshop, careful now to stay below the strata of smoke, holding his breath as long as he could until it burst out of him. He was able to get the remainder of the first drawer’s files. Coming out with his arms filled, it was much harder to stay low. His eyes teared and the light in the workshop became a greasy blur of yellow and gray. He had to be careful not to gulp the air. The crashing dizziness of his last attempt was warning enough. Even so, he felt smoke burning along his windpipe and in his lungs. Outside, he spilled the papers onto the ground and dropped to his knees. He supposed a normal person would have been coughing, but all he felt was a strange wooziness. He bent and forced himself through the motions, hacking and gasping to drive the smoke out of him.

  He looked up to find Essay standing before him, tail flagging. Her ears were up high on her head, fully attentive, eyes gay and glittering. The same expression she’d worn parading around the cove after the tornado. She looked prepared to follow him into the barn. He took her ruff in his hands to shake her down, scare her away, then stopped himself. They were done with commands. He put his hand under her belly and drew her attention into him.

  Away, he signed, pouring into the gesture all the force he could muster. I know you understand. I know it’s your choice. But please. Away!

  Essay backed up a step, eyes intent on him. She looked at the other dogs circling under the apple trees. Then she faced Edgar again and bucked a little and held his gaze.

  Yes, he signed. Yes.

  She bounded forward and swiped her tongue across his face and bolted into the mass of dogs, all of them up now and running, even the ones Edgar’s mother had stayed. He wanted desperately to know if Essay had understood him, but short of giving up on the records and rushing after her, there was no way to be sure.

  He turned back to the barn. He had almost passed through the wide double doors and into the smoky interior when he thought of the milk house and what he would find sitting inside it. He crossed along the front of the barn and when he reached the milk house door he flung it open.

  The first time he saw a flame, he told himself, he would stop.

  Claude

  LET IT BURN, CLAUDE THOUGHT.

  He was standing on the bottom porch step watching disaster unfold and trying to decide what to do. The disaster was not that the barn was going to burn; certainly not. The barn was insured, after all, and the dogs were outside and safe, even if they were running loose at the moment. At worst, losing the barn would make things inconvenient for a few months—they’d have to board the dogs somewhere, though finding families to look after them in the interim wouldn’t be that hard—but, realistically, they’d have a better, more modern barn before snow fell. Nor was the disaster what had happened to Glen; though Claude had flushed Glen’s eyes with water as soon as they’d reached the house, the quicklime had already done gruesome damage. It was hard to feel sorry for Glen. The man must have used enough Prestone out there to launch a rocket. Not what Claude had suggested at all.

  No, the disaster was that Edgar kept running into the barn for those records, returning again and again to the workshop, and the filing cabinets, while smoke poured from the barn’s eaves. Edgar had even fetched the wheelbarrow from the milk house and, as Claude watched, begun rolling it in a broad arc toward the barn doors.

  If all that weren’t strange enough, Glen had now taken Trudy in some sort of wrestler’s hold. In a moment, Claude was going to have to say something or do something to make Glen release her, but he didn’t know what that might be. The man had wrapped his huge limbs around Trudy and his embrace reminded Claude somehow of the tree roots at Angkor Wat, slowly crushing those ancient stone temples. The way Glen was acting, he might not stop unless he was unconscious. Yet Claude didn’t want to step in until he was sure nothing could be done about the barn. The barn had to be a lost cause. That was why he’d told Trudy the telephone line was dead. By now, it probably was dead.

  There was something enthralling about the sight of smoke rising from the barn, black into black, erasing such a broad swath of stars. It reminded Claude just how big that old barn was. When he’d first arrived home he’d been struck all over again by its size; then, quickly enough, it had become ordinary in his eyes, the way it had been when he was growing up, making other people’s barns look like miniatures. The volume of smoke belching off the roof put things into perspective again and he marveled at the man who had originally built the place—what plans must he have had, to build a barn like that?

  Better take a good look, Claude thought. He watched the smoke seeping from the gaps around the big mow door—the door Edgar had thrown open the night he’d pushed Papineau down the mow stairs; the door they had hauled six wagonloads of straw bales through, just two weeks earlier, in a long day of sweaty, exhausting effort. Strange: all that smoke rupturing outward, writhing and folding over itself, and yet, no sound, no flames. Claude knew enough about fire to understand that this was a phase, that the fire, or what was soon going to be a fire, was smoldering along the old timbers, probably in the straw as well, exploring hidden paths and alleyways in search of fuel and oxygen. He looked into the sky again. In the waxing moonlight, there was not a cloud to be seen.

  Edgar appeared out of the smoke, pushing a wh
eelbarrow mounded with papers. The sight chilled Claude. Trudy, thrashing pointlessly, began shouting to Edgar to stay away from the barn. But Edgar wasn’t in any immediate danger. Only a few steps lay between the workshop and the barn doors and unless the whole structure suddenly burst into flame there was little chance of his getting caught inside. Until then, at least on the surface of things, Edgar was doing right by salvaging the files. A help later. Not imperative, but good to have.

  The problem was that bottle. In truth, Claude had lost his nerve—the bottle had already been well hidden in the mow, and he knew it, but when it looked like Edgar might be snooping up there Claude had panicked and dug it out. After that night with Benson, and that bizarre reenactment, he’d been certain Edgar had found it once already. He should have poured the bottle’s contents into the creek the very next morning—he’d fantasized about doing that so many times—but he’d never answered the question of what would happen once he dumped the stuff. Would it just sink into the ground, disappear? Or would it trace some subterranean channel back to the house, to the well—to him? More important—and this was hard to admit—once whatever roiled inside that bottle was gone, it was gone for good, and the idea that it could solve his worst problems had become part of Claude’s nature. The knowledge gave him confidence, the way some men drew confidence from a wad of money in the bank or a gun in the glove compartment of their car. It had become, at times, almost a living presence to him. I exist for a reason. And then the exhilaration and self-loathing when he’d listened. But, if he was careful now, that bottle would be incinerated and, along with it, the very worst part of him.