The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
They crossed to the house. Almondine huffed along beside them. Behind the steamed, translucent kitchen window Doctor Papineau appeared for a moment at the sink, then stepped out of sight. When they reached the porch they paused to kick the snow off their boots and they climbed the steps and walked inside.
Part II
THREE GRIEFS
Funeral
DOCTOR PAPINEAU SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE, ONCE MORE the white-haired, narrow-shouldered old man Edgar had known all his life, looking as shocked and hollowed out as Edgar felt. Hard to believe such a frail figure had lifted him out of the snow by his shirt back. But then it was hard to believe almost anything that had happened that afternoon.
Two pans simmered on the stove, lids clicking to release puffs of steam. Edgar shucked off his coat. His mother, resting a hand on his shoulder to steady herself, bent down to unlace her boots. Then they stood looking at one another. Papineau finally broke the silence. “It’s nothing much,” he said, waving a hand at the plates and bowls populating the table. “Soup and potatoes. I’m not much of a cook, but I know how to open cans and boil water.”
Edgar’s mother crossed the room and embraced the old man.
“That’s fine, Page,” she said. “It’s all we need tonight.”
Edgar pulled out a chair and sat. Almondine stepped between his knees and pressed her head against his belly and leaned in and he set his head in his hands and inhaled the dusty scent of her mane. For a long time, the room canted around them. When he lifted his head, a bowl of soup steamed at his place and Doctor Papineau was sliding a pan of quartered and skinned potatoes from the oven. He dished them around the table then seated himself.
Edgar looked at the food.
If you can eat, you should, Trudy signed.
Okay. It doesn’t feel right to be hungry.
Are you?
Yes. I don’t know. It feels like someone else being hungry.
She looked at the bandages on his hands.
Do they hurt?
His palms jangled and his left thumb throbbed, though he couldn’t remember how he’d sprained it. Facts too trivial to repeat.
Take aspirin.
I know. I will.
She dipped her spoon into her soup and lifted it to her mouth and swallowed and looked back at him. He saw the resolve behind it, and out of solidarity he rolled a chunk of potato into his soup and began to break it up.
Doctor Papineau cleared his throat. “I’ve closed my office for the morning.”
Edgar’s mother nodded. “You can sleep in the spare room—the sheets are in the bathroom. I’ll make the bed after dinner.”
“I’ll make my own bed. Don’t worry about that.”
Then it was quiet, just the tick of silverware. After a while, Edgar’s bowl was empty, though he could not have said what the soup tasted like. His mother had given up any pretense of eating.
“These things are a great shock,” Doctor Papineau said. It was apropos of nothing, and there was nothing else to say. “When Rose died, I thought I was fine. Heartbroken, but okay. But those first couple of days, I didn’t know what I was doing. You two need to be careful now, you hear me? I almost burned my house down that first night. I put the electric coffee pot on the stove and turned on the burner.”
“It’s true, Page. Thank you for reminding us.”
The vet looked at Edgar, then his mother. His expression was grave. “There’s some things we should talk about tonight.”
His voice trailed off.
“It’s okay, Page,” Edgar’s mother said. “Edgar is a part of everything that happens now, whether any of us like it or not. You don’t have to talk around anything.”
“I was going to offer to make some phone calls. Edgar will need to be out of school for a few days. I wondered if you wanted to speak to Claude, let him know what happened. And if there were other people you wanted to call. Relatives or whatnot. I could help you make a list.”
Edgar’s mother looked at Doctor Papineau and nodded. “Yes. But I would rather make the calls. Would the two of you clear the table?”
They all pushed back from their places. Doctor Papineau put the leftovers in the refrigerator and Edgar piled the dishes in the sink, relieved to be moving. He ran water and watched the suds grow over the plates. Doctor Papineau handed him a towel and said he was better off drying, with his hands like that.
Edgar’s mother walked to the counter and opened the telephone book and jotted some numbers on a scrap of paper. She looked at the shattered receiver dangling on the hook, cord end up, like a broken-necked bird, then set the apparatus on the counter and dialed. She held the receiver to her face two-handed and asked if she was speaking with the principal. She said that Edgar’s father had died.
“Thank you,” she said. “No. I appreciate that. Yes. Thank you. Goodbye.”
She lay the receiver on the counter, put both hands down, and took a breath. The speaker inside began to bleat from being off-hook and she pressed the hook to make it stop, then dialed again.
“Claude?” she said. “There’s some news. I thought you should know. It’s about Gar. Yes. He was working in the kennel this afternoon and he had…he had some sort of problem. An attack of some kind. He…No. No. We don’t know. Yes. Yes. Yes.”
There was a long silence. “I’m sorry, Claude. I don’t feel like that would be right just now. There’s nothing…Yes. Page is here. Yes. Thank goodness for him. All right. Okay. Goodbye.”
Then she dialed a third number and asked for Glen, speaking in a monotone. She arranged to meet at his office the next the morning and then she was quiet, listening to Glen talk. Edgar could only make out the moth-buzz voice from the cracked receiver, not the words. But his mother began to fold over the counter like wax softened in the sun until her forehead almost touched the papers.
“Is that absolutely required?” she whispered. “Isn’t there another…? Yes. Yes, of course, I know. But…”
More moth sounds.
“All right,” she said. Something in the sound of her voice made Edgar’s legs go weak. Doctor Papineau asked him a question. He shook his head without understanding. The vet crossed to his mother and set his hand on her shoulder. She pushed herself upright again.
“Stop now,” Doctor Papineau said, when she’d finished. He took the receiver from her hands and set it upside down on the hook. “That’s enough for one night.”
She looked back at the old man, corners of her mouth tucked, eyes shining.
“Okay,” she said. “That was…harder than I expected.”
She walked around the table to where Edgar sat and put her arms over his shoulders, letting her hands sign in front of him.
Are you okay?
He tried to reply and found he couldn’t.
I want you to go to sleep now.
What about you?
I’m going to sit quiet for a minute. Go. There’s nothing else to do.
She was right, he knew. His mother was a pragmatist, maybe from years spent training the dogs. Maybe she was born that way. He squeezed her forearms until he felt her pulse beneath his fingertips, then raised a hand to Doctor Papineau in silent good night.
AS THOUGH AGREED UPON beforehand, though it was not, he and Trudy slept in the living room. He’d carried a blanket and pillow downstairs and when he sat on the couch the power to go up again and change clothes deserted him. He pulled the hem of the blanket to his shoulders and drew up his knees and closed his eyes. A ringing began in his ears—perhaps lurking there all along but apparent only when the weight of the blanket dulled his senses. Half-slumber took him. His mother and Doctor Papineau turned out the lights and all was quiet and then a succession of images came forward, resurrected by some crow-eyed part of his mind that would neither wake nor sleep. Fragmentary emotions possessed and released him, drawn like garments from a wardrobe and discarded, one after another. Below that chaos of image and memory, something so powerfully suppressed he would barely remember it: the idea t
Sometime later he opened his eyes. His mother had drawn a blanket around her in her chair. She was tucked up into one corner. He had a faint memory of her kneeling beside him and running her hand, warm and smooth, across his forehead, palm touching his brow and ending with fingertips entwined in his hair. He had not opened his eyes in the moment. Her touch had released some tiny increment of the poison bound up in him that would, days to come, ripen into sorrow. And by the time he thought all this he could no longer tell if her caress had truly happened or whether he’d manufactured it out of necessity.
The sleep that followed was black, nothing at all contained in it. Every rasp of snow against the windows roused him up on one elbow only to have him collapse again into sleep, sawing between one world and the other. Papineau snored upstairs in the room they had once prepared for Claude. The sound penetrated the living room ceiling like the lowing of distant cattle: Moo. Moo. He woke again when he sensed Almondine walking away from him. In the dark he watched her press her nose against the blanket wrapped around his mother, scenting her as carefully as she must have scented Edgar the moment before. She stood for a time, panting softly, then returned to the center of the room. She circled and downed and their gazes met. Her ears shifted forward. After a while her eyes narrowed, then opened wide, then narrowed more, the liquid glint of them waxing and waning in the darkness. Finally, she sighed and slept.
Come morning, his memory would be of a night spent watching over them all. And each of them—dog and boy, mother and old man—would feel the same.
THEY WALKED TO THE BARN at first light. The cold was fearsome, the sky above dilute and punctured by stars. Inside the kennel, he saw they needed more straw, and he walked through the workshop and climbed the steps to the mow and flipped on the lights. The wall of bales stood tiered like a ziggurat. It was still early in winter—some bales still reached the rafters. A red-handled hay hook hung on a nail on the front wall. He dragged two bales to the center of the mow, lifted a hatch in the floor by a small ring, and looked down. Trudy stood below, waiting. “Go ahead,” she said. He pushed the bales through and watched them fall with a half-turn and whomp against the dusty cement.
He cleaned pens with a pitchfork and a wheelbarrow and dashed out fans of quicklime on the bare floors. When he cut the twine, the straw bales opened into golden sheaves. He pulled a slicker brush from his back pocket and hastily brushed the dogs. Doctor Papineau walked in while he was working, declared that he might as well look in on the pups, and disappeared through the door to the whelping room. Edgar went to his litter. Finch and Baboo, the least excitable, leaned on him from opposite sides. Essay tried to climb his front. He calmed them by cupping their bellies and muzzles and asked them to sit and do other small things in lieu of real training.
When they were done, Edgar and Trudy and the veterinarian walked up the driveway together. Doctor Papineau promised to call later and kept walking to his car and drove off. When Edgar came downstairs in fresh clothes, his mother was standing at the counter, broken receiver in her hands. He waited in the living room while she talked to someone at the telephone company about fixing the telephone. When she was finished, she came into the living room.
“You don’t have to go,” she said. “‘I’ll call Glen and say you’re not ready.”
You’re not going to Brentson’s alone. “Page can come with me.”
No.
She started to reply, then nodded. Almondine stood by the kitchen door while Edgar donned his coat, then trotted down the steps and stood by the truck. It was somehow even colder inside the cab. The vinyl seats flexed like tin. Trudy put the truck in gear and navigated up the long slope of the driveway and they drove along without conversation, listening to the crunch of ice beneath the tires. The world glowed translucent blue. Telephone poles rushed forward and fell away, wires swelling and dropping in the intervals. In Mellen, Trudy parked the truck in front of the cupolaed town hall and the three of them followed the arrows painted on the hallway until they reached the sheriff’s office. Even inside, their breath steamed. A burnt-hair smell permeated the building. A white-blond girl sat at a desk wearing a winter coat and mittens. At the center of her desk a microphone rested on a stand. She looked at them and stood and peered over the counter at Almondine. “I’ll get Glen. You’ll want to keep your coats on,” she said. “Something happened to the heat. We’re waiting for the repair guy from Ashland.”
The girl walked to the office door behind her desk and knocked. A moment later Glen Papineau emerged wearing his blue patrol jacket and hat, diminishing the room instantly. His hands, even ungloved, were like dinner plates. Edgar wondered, briefly, if Doctor Papineau had once been that big, then dismissed the idea. Old men got smaller as they aged, he knew, but no one could shrink that much.
“Trudy, Edgar, come on back. Sorry about the cold—boiler problems. You don’t want to know. I’ve been here since six. It’s a miracle we didn’t burst any pipes. Coffee, either of you? Hot chocolate?”
Trudy looked at Edgar. He shook his head.
“That’s okay, Glen,” she said.
“Well, bring ’em anyway, Annie—maybe they’ll heat the office a little. Cream and sugar in mine.”
He led them into an office somehow both spare and cluttered. Papers and notebooks mounded over his desk, but the walls were unadorned except for a framed certificate and a photograph of a youthful Glen in his Mellen High wrestler’s uniform, pinning some unknown behemoth in a fetal curl. In the picture Glen was up on his toes, almost parallel to the floor, body rigid as a log, veined thighs thick as a draft horse’s. The referee’s arm a blur as he slapped the mat.
Glen had arranged three folding chairs in front of his desk, and he motioned for Trudy and Edgar to sit down, then settled himself. Almondine approached and sniffed his knee and boot. “Hey, girl,” he said, then, “Aha,” as Annie walked in carrying three paper cups. With his forearm he cleared a swath on the desk. A stack of papers plunged off the other side.
He grinned, wryly. “My New Year’s resolution. Every year.”
“This one here’s hot chocolate,” Annie said. She set the cups in the cleared space and piled the fallen papers on the desk with an expression of despair.
“They’re here if you want ’em,” Glen said, gesturing at the steaming cups. He made a production of opening his notebook and clicking the end of his pencil. “Okay,” he said. “What we’ve got to do here is record what happened. That’s just procedure. We want to do this fast before anyone forgets anything. I apologize about this. I know it won’t be pleasant. The fact is, Pop came in this morning and gave me hell.” He paused as if suddenly embarrassed, Edgar thought, to have referred to his father as “Pop.”
“It’s okay, Glen,” Trudy said. “Just ask whatever you need to. Edgar will sign his answer to me.”
“Okay then. Trudy, when did you go into town?”
“It was eleven thirty or so when I left.”
Glen scribbled in his notebook. “And Edgar, you were home all day?”
He nodded.
“When did you first think something was wrong?”
Edgar signed his answer. “He was working in the mow and he noticed the dogs barking,” his mother said. “When he came downstairs, Gar was…lying on the floor.”
“You were in the mow?”
“We train up there when it gets cold,” Trudy said impatiently, before Edgar could reply. “You know that. You’ve been up there yourself.”
“Yeah, I have. I’m just asking to be complete. You were up there with some dogs?”
Yes. Two dogs from my litter.
“The dogs that were barking were downstairs?”
Yes.
“How long had you been in the mow?”
An hour. Maybe longer.
“You wear a watch?”
I have a pocket watch. I
“Is there a clock in the mow?”
Yes.
“Do you remember about what time this happened?”
“You must know that from the telephone operator,” Trudy said.
“Yes. There’s a record of that. But I think it would be good to get it all down as long as we’re doing this.”
I wasn’t paying attention. It was after one o’clock, I know that.
“What sorts of things were you doing with your dogs?”
Come-fors. Proofing stays. Stay-aways. I had a hurdle set up.
“Do those things make a lot of noise?”
Not really.
“I mean, would your father have heard you upstairs?”
He would have heard the dogs running. And my footsteps.
“Could you have heard him downstairs?”
What do you mean?
“If he yelled something, would you have heard him?”
“He would have heard a shout,” Trudy said, interceding again. “We call up there all the time. With the door closed, you have to try a few times. Otherwise it’s easy to hear someone.”
Glen looked at Edgar. “And the door was closed?”
Yes.
“How about something spoken in an ordinary voice?”
“Not with the door closed,” Trudy said. “With the door open, you can hear someone talking in the workshop.”
“But you didn’t hear a shout or anything? Just the dogs?”
Edgar paused. He shook his head.
Glen made a note and turned the page over. “Okay, now I’m going to ask you a hard question, but it’s important you tell me as much as you can remember. You were working up in the mow with some dogs. You heard barking, you opened the door, you came downstairs. What did you see?”