The walls of the room began to move. He felt the soles of his feet dragging against the floor. At the door to the medicine room, Glen paused, crouched slightly, and tightened his arm so Edgar was pinned against him more securely. Then they were moving along the kennel aisle. Edgar drifted back into his body again. One of his arms worked loose and dangled limply toward the floor.
When they reached the back doors, still latched, Glen lowered him to the cement. The cloth disappeared from his face momentarily and Glen’s hand appeared, holding the beer bottle. He lifted his thumb and upended the bottle against the cloth.
It was difficult for Edgar to direct his eyes where he wanted, or even to focus. He stopped looking at Glen’s hands. One of his eyes decided to close all by itself. Through the other, he saw a stack of flat, brown bags, blurred lumps. Then the cloth was over his face again.
Glen tightened his grip, prepared to stand. The brown lumps resolved into quicklime bags, stacked beside the back doors. The empty coffee can they used for a spreader protruded from a slit in the topmost sack.
Edgar’s ribs bent as Glen hefted him to get a solid hold, then he was rising into the air. He saw his hand reach forward. The rim of the coffee can, jagged where the opener had punctured the metal, brushed his fingers, and then there was only powder against his palm, dry as moon dust. He’d tried and missed. Yet, when he could focus, the can was pinched between his fingers, his hand having somehow corrected the mistake on its own.
Glen was reaching for the door latch. Edgar closed his eyes and gripped the rim of the coffee can with all his might. It was only half full, but heavy as an anvil. All he could muster was a spastic, upward jerk. Then his hand fell back and the coffee can clattered to the floor.
A heavy layer of quicklime dropped onto his head and shoulders. He had remembered to squeeze his eyes shut, but his mouth must have been hanging open, slack from his effort and the effect of the ether. His tongue and throat were instantly coated with a bitter paste and he swallowed involuntarily and felt the heat in his mouth and retched.
Glen, too, began to cough. His arm loosened from around Edgar’s chest and slipped away. For a long moment Edgar hung suspended in the air by nothing at all. He knew it was important that he collect his feet beneath him, but before he could get started the barn began to spin like a top with him at its center and the floor lunged forward and the fireworks above Scotia Lake burst all over again behind his closed eyes.
HE WOKE GAGGING. Even before he could open his eyes, he heard Glen Papineau’s voice whispering his name.
“Edgar?” he said. “Edgar, are you there?” Then Glen muttered under his breath, “Oh Jesus.” This was followed by the thump of something hitting the floor.
Edgar reached up and carefully drew his fingers across his eyelids. His lashes were caked with quicklime and it took all his concentration to make his hands brush it away. He cracked open one eye until a slit of light registered and then the other and he blinked and looked along the cement of the kennel floor. A cloud of quicklime dust swirled through the air, sifting and settling everywhere. Glen had staggered backward and fallen. He lay on his side, curly hair grayed, face thickly powdered. His eyes were closed and his expression was a painfully contracted grimace.
“Aw Jesus,” Glen said again. He brought his hands to his face and pressed his fingers against his closed eyes. The cords in his neck stood out and he kicked at the floor—another thump. Then his hands began beating against his face open-palmed as if putting out a fire there. With great effort, he got control of them and lay panting.
“Edgar, are you there?” he repeated. His voice was hoarse but eerily calm. “Can you get me some water? I just meant to ask you a question. I wasn’t going to hurt you, I swear. But right now I need water for my eyes. Oh Jesus. Edgar?”
But Edgar lay in a fugue, seeing everything as if through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. When he tried to lift his head, the ache hit him at once and then the nausea. The florid smell of ether was everywhere now, nearly as strong as when the cloth was pressed against his face. He looked along the floor and spotted the beer bottle lying broken and liquid ether splashed around it in silver pools. Vapor shimmered in the air above it.
Edgar pushed to his knees. The rear barn doors were within arm’s reach. He tried to stand, then sank back and dragged himself up the front of them until he could work his fingers into the metal hoop of the latch handle. When the leftmost of the double doors swung open, he stumbled drunkenly into the night along with it.
He began banging the door with the flat of his hand.
Glen turned his face toward the sound and rose on all fours.
“O god o god o god o god,” he whispered. He crawled forward and stopped to wipe his face and eyes. Edgar pounded the door again and Glen started moving, then stopped a second time to beat the heels of his palms against his eyes. A shriek came out of him, high and incongruous, and then he pressed his face against the floor and ground it along, crying louder as he advanced.
“God, it burns! Oh, anything, please! Jesus God. Anything.”
Edgar released his grip on the door and tried to step back, but he reeled and fell into the weeds. The dark mass of the barn towered over him, a great black swath cut out of a starry sky. He sat and shook his head, a mistake; the pain nearly blacked him out again. But the fresh night air was bringing him back from the ether and he could keep his eyes focused. In a minute he would be able get his feet under him.
The dogs all stood in their pens, gazes fixed on the spectacle of Glen Papineau crawling down the aisle. It was the last thing Edgar wanted to see; he wanted the dogs out of the barn, away from those fumes. When Glen reached the threshold he worked his fingers along the bottom of the door then hoisted himself upright, pointing his face this way and that. When he tried again to pull one of his eyelids open, his body spasmed and he gave another hoarse and wordless cry and staggered past Edgar in a headlong rush.
And then Edgar got his wish, for the dogs wheeled and plunged through the passages to their outside runs. He watched as they dove through the canvas straps of their portals and disappeared, until all that remained inside the barn was the apparition of the ether fumes, quavering and rising under that single hot light bulb.
ONCE OUTSIDE, THE DOGS began to bark. Glen Papineau traced a broad circle in the south field, entering the light of the yard like an actor stepping onto a stage: enormous, thick-necked, head and shoulders powdered and tear-streaked, one hand clasped over his face as if to rip away a mask and the other hewing the air before him. He staggered up to Alice, parked beside the barn. When his blunt fingers touched her radiator, he stopped and traced the flanges of the grill, the peeling paint of the steering armature. He dropped to his knees and pressed his forehead against the close-set front tires.
“Aw, God,” he said, “I can’t see where I am. Is that a light? Can anyone hear me? Claude! Claude! They won’t even open! Can’t I please, please have some water for my eyes!”
Then Edgar heard his mother’s voice calling from the back porch.
“Glen? Glen! What are you doing?”
Edgar looked into the barn. All the front pens were empty, but some of the dogs in the back runs, unable to see Glen or his mother, yet hearing their voices, had pushed back inside. Edgar stood, testing his balance. His mother was running across the yard.
He turned away and stumbled along the slope behind the barn, clapping his hands as loudly as he could. When he reached the pen doors, he hammered bare-handed on the timbers and wires, making every noise he could to draw the dogs out. One by one, they pushed through the canvas flaps over their passageways and trotted out to him.
He was going down the line staying them when a light flashed from the rear barn doors, brilliant and blue. For a moment the birches in the south field stood icily illuminated, their shadows stretching behind them across the surf of hay. Then Edgar felt a pressure against his eardrums that slowly resolved itself into a sound, as if the sky above had been gripped at
the corners and shaken out.
Trudy
S HE LAY WAITING AND LISTENING FOR THE SOUND OF EDGAR’S FOOTSTEPS on the porch. She didn’t understand what he might be looking for in the barn and she didn’t care. She was willing to humor him in any way required as long as he came to the house. It had been dark for a long time and he must be nearly done. She thought about how gaunt he’d looked. She thought about the expression on his face when she’d brought up Almondine.
The dogs began barking. Then, among the barks, a man’s voice, moaning or crying. She sat bolt upright in bed.
“What’s that?” she said. “Who’s that?”
Trudy thought Claude was sleeping, but at the sound of the dogs he’d jerked as if stung, and now he was sitting up, too. He looked wide awake. He had a puzzled expression on his face, though it seemed somehow arranged that way, and beneath the puzzlement was a look of alarm.
“Don’t get up,” he said. “I’ll check.” He was already pulling on his clothes. The man’s voice rang out again. It was coming from the backyard. Trudy couldn’t quite make out the words, but there was an unmistakable note of fear and pain in them.
“That sounds like Glen,” she said.
“Oh Jesus. Howling drunk, I bet. He’s been hitting the sauce lately. I ran into him last week, three sheets to the wind before sunset. I told him to come over if he ever needed to talk. I didn’t think it would be in the middle of the night, though.”
Trudy dressed hurriedly and ran to the back porch. Claude stood in the doorway, looking into the yard. The truck was parked where he’d left it that afternoon, facing the hitch end of the tractor. The dogs were flagging up and down their runs, barking and looking toward the south field. At first Trudy didn’t see anything unusual there. Then the image registered: it was Glen. He was kneeling in front of the tractor with his forehead pressed against the close-set front tires, as if in supplication.
Claude seemed rooted to the porch. She pushed past him and ran across the lawn. Glen was sobbing. His hair and face and shoulders were powdered white. Behind him, the shadow of the barn was divided by a flickering light, and in it stood Edgar. The moment their gazes met, he turned and walked into the dark, staggering as he went. Trudy pulled up short, feeling as if she were splitting in two; one half of her cried, Go to Edgar! and the other half wanted only to distract Claude, close behind her, from the sight of him. The idea that Edgar might run away again was paramount in her mind. At first she didn’t even connect Glen’s presence with Edgar’s. She only wanted to turn everyone around, get them facing the house.
“Glen,” she said. “What’s going on?”
“Trudy. Please. Get water,” Glen said. “I need to wash out my eyes.” His voice was quaking. He alternately clutched the front of the tractor and held his hands over his face, as if, by tremendous will, not touching his eyes. He sucked his breath through his teeth. Tear tracks cut through the white powder on his cheeks. By then Claude was there and he knelt beside Glen.
“All right, Hoss,” he said. “We’re cutting you off for the night.” He worked his shoulder under Glen’s thick arm and began to guide him to his feet.
“No,” Trudy said. “Wait.”
Claude looked at her, his face carefully composed into a mask of surprise. She ran her fingertip across Glen’s cheek and brought it to her mouth. There was no mistaking the awful, chalky taste of quicklime and the burning sensation the moment it got wet. She looked into Glen’s flour-white face.
“What were you doing here?”
“Ask him after we’ve got him in the house,” Claude said. “That’s quicklime.”
“I know what it is,” she said. “First he’s going to explain what he was doing here.”
These last words came out as a screech.
“I just wanted to ask him a question,” Glen said. “Tell her, Claude! It was just to ask him a question.”
She turned to Claude. He shook his head and shrugged as if to say it was the ranting of a drunk.
“Liar,” she said.
Then, before she understood quite what she was doing, she’d twined her fingers into the curls atop Glen’s head and yanked his face up. Her other palm caught him squarely on the flat of his cheek. Crack of skin against skin. Glen swayed and nearly collapsed, but instead he began to whimper and clutch at his eyes.
“You’ll wait,” she said, “until I know my son is safe.”
She untangled her fingers from Glen’s hair and stood. The dogs in the front runs pressed against their pen doors, barking and whining and straining to see what was happening. From behind the kennel, Trudy heard a rattling and banging. Pen doors being opened. She had taken only a few steps toward the sound when the first azure bubble of gas bellied out of the back doors. It crawled into the air, shifting from blue to yellow as it rose. It lit the field, then disappeared, bottom to top, halfway to the eaves. There was the low huff of vaporous ignition, the sound of a match tossed into a barbeque soaked with lighter fluid. Then a second belch of flame shot out of the doorway, more orange than the first, eating itself almost before it had a chance to rise. In the still night air, a thread of smoke began to seep from the top of the doorway. It tracked upward along the red siding and pooled under the eaves. With sickening rapidity, it broadened into a gray ribbon that spanned the doorway.
Trudy stopped, flatfooted, her thoughts momentarily logjammed. She jerked about in a circle, unable to decide in which direction to move first. A vast, soft explosion had erupted in the barn. Why? They didn’t store flammables in there. Glen had been in there. He was covered with quicklime. Had Glen meant to burn down the barn? Had he doused the inside with gasoline? Why? Claude had Glen on his feet. They were walking toward the house, Glen’s massive arm draped over Claude’s shoulders. Had Claude not heard the sound? He was speaking urgently to Glen, but Trudy couldn’t make out what he was saying. Then Glen stumbled and drove them both to the ground.
Not until Opal rounded the back corner of the barn and bolted past her did Trudy know for certain that Edgar had to be all right: he was releasing the dogs from their pens. She ran along the front pens, unlatching the doors and throwing them open, clapping and shouting, “Out! Come on! Out!” By the time she finished, two dozen dogs were loose; another twelve or fourteen were rounding the barn from the back. Packs formed and reformed and flowed into one another and split apart as they dashed behind the barn and across the yard and circled the house and garden. Claude had gotten Glen to his feet again, and the two men waded through the dogs that surrounded them.
“Get!” Claude shouted at the dogs, and “Come on, come on” to Glen.
“Call the fire department,” Trudy shouted. “He’s set the barn on fire!”
Claude stared back at her for a moment. Then he nodded and turned. With Glen’s arm draped across his shoulders, they hobbled the rest of the way to the porch steps and he there guided the man down and ran past him into the house.
Two of the dogs began to snarl at each other. Trudy ran to the nearest and lifted it by its tail and wheeled it backward, shouting, “Go! Leave! Get!” to the other. She dropped the dog’s tail and stepped quickly forward and shook it by the ruff. When she looked up, a pair of dogs were running through the orchard, close to the road. “You two,” she called. “Come!” The dogs wheeled and began heading toward her but instead joined one of the packs circulating in the yard. She began methodically recalling and downing dogs, one by one, looking over her shoulder and waiting for Edgar to appear, and every time she looked again, more smoke streamed from the barn.
She was surprised, given the chaos of the moment, how many of the dogs held their stays, but every one looked as if it might bolt the moment she turned away; they craned their necks to watch the others plunging through the field and circling the house and charging up to the porch steps, where Glen Papineau sat cradling his face in his hands.
Edgar
F OURTEEN RUNS JUTTED INTO THE LONG NIGHT-SHADOW OF the barn. Edgar staggered along palming up the wooden
latches and flinging open the doors without waiting for the dogs to emerge. The afterimage of the fire-flash twisted in the air before him like a violet snake. By the time he opened the last run, nearest the silo, the dogs were circling him in the dark, pawing one another and bucking in excited, foreshortened leaps. Then the sound of Glen Papineau’s voice echoed from the front yard. Opal and Umbra stopped, cocked their heads, then turned and galloped side by side through the pack and rounded the stone belly of the silo.
Yes, he signed at the rest. He swept his hands along their sides to get them moving. Go! Get! They turned their heads to mouth his hands, then, one after another bolted past the silo until only Essay remained, seated in the grass. She was nosing the plush fur along the back of her hind leg. He knelt and pushed her muzzle away and ran his hand across singed fur. Brittle as wire. Another patch on her tail. The flash must have caught her on the way out, he thought, but the canvas flaps over the door had damped it. Essay nosed his hand aside impatiently and chewed at her leg and snorted to clear the scent from her nostrils. She scrambled to her feet and shook out.
Edgar gestured toward the silo. You too. Get.
She looked at him, blinking, then turned and bounded into the pale light, shadow out of shadow, a thing created mid-leap, her ears pricked forward, eyes wide, jaw agape, for the very first time wolflike to Edgar’s eyes.
He ran to the rear of the barn. A band of smoke crawled past the lintel above the double doors and lifted skyward. How long had it taken to release the dogs? A minute? Two? How could that much smoke be pouring from the barn? From his vantage point he could see Glen sitting on the porch steps, hands to his face. A half-circle of dogs surrounded him with their heads cocked. Edgar’s mother held a dozen or more dogs in quivering down-stays in the side yard and twice that number still ran wild, bunching up in packs and sailing through the orchard, splitting and joining in a chaotic ballet. As he watched, his mother halted a dog by name and walked to it and downed it using both hands. Then, noticing the gazes of the dogs, she turned. They began a simultaneous exchange of sign.
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle Page 54
