The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
“Okay,” she said. “Follow me.” She tore her coat from the hook and walked out the door and in the waning afternoon light led them around the corner to the woodpile.
“Here,” she said. “I want you to load this into your truck and take it out to the field. Every stick. Edgar will show you where the wheelbarrow is. Then I want you to go into town and go to Gordy Howe’s place and get another truckload and bring that back. I’ll call him now.”
The old man scratched his head and looked at her.
“Will it be enough?” she said.
“Yes, ma’am, I think it will be. It might take some time, even then, but I believe that will do it.”
“And will you help?”
The old man smiled and nodded.
“Oh, we’ll help all right. We’ll be here until the ground is thawed.” He turned to the younger man. “Won’t we?” he said. “Son?”
ALL NIGHT THE FIRE BURNED in the snowy field. Streamers of sparks rose every time the men tossed another log onto the blaze. The birches towered orange over it all. Even the barn was painted by the light. Edgar and his mother watched from the living room. Edgar thought of the bonfires Schultz had lit to incinerate the great piles of stumps and roots.
Twice they carried food and coffee out to the men. His mother had to knock on the fogged truck window to get their attention. They refused her invitation to warm up inside the house but took the offering. On the second trip they brought the men blankets and pillows. The cordwood was heaped between the truck and the fire and the blaze occupied a rectangle at the base of the birches. Bare, wet grass surrounded the flames. Edgar’s mother walked to the fire and peered into the embers. He joined her. Heat scalded his face. When the smoke drifted back, his mother coughed but stood her ground. Edgar breathed it in, feeling not the slightest tickle.
They made beds in the living room for the third night and watched the glow from the field. Neither could sleep. They talked between long pauses.
I’ll take the chair tonight. You have the couch.
“No, I like it here.”
What were you looking for back there?
“Where?”
In the fire. It seemed like you were looking for something.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t looking for anything.” She changed to sign. Can I ask you a question?
Yes.
Are you scared?
Because of the funeral?
Because of everything.
No. Not scared. But I didn’t know it would be like this.
Neither did I.
They watched the orange firelight play against the limbs of the apple trees.
Do you think it will work?
Yes.
I like that the ground will be warm.
She looked at him. I’m very proud of you, you know.
Aren’t you supposed to tell me everything is going to be okay?
She laughed quietly. Is that what you want me to say?
I don’t think so. I don’t know if I would believe you if you did.
Lots of people are going to say it. I’ll say it too, if you want me to.
No. Don’t.
They were quiet, just looking out the windows.
Do you remember anything about your father? Your real father, I mean.
No, not a lot. He wasn’t around much. She paused, then shifted in her chair to face him. What are you thinking? You aren’t worried about going into a foster home, are you?
No.
Good. Because that’s not going to happen. Nothing is going to happen to me, or you, for that matter.
Anything can happen, though.
Anything can happen. But almost always, just normal things happen, and people have happy lives.
Were you happy before you met him?
She thought about that a moment.
I don’t know. Sometimes I was happy. As soon as we met I knew I was unhappy without him.
How was it you met again?
She smiled. In a good way. You’d only be disappointed in the details.
You aren’t ever going to tell me, are you?
I will, if you have to know.
He thought then about all the stories his parents had drawn out, how his father, usually so serious, had enjoyed the game of it and how that made him enjoy it, too. To know that one story was truer than all the rest might make it as if those moments had never happened. And perhaps it was better if they’d met many times, in many circumstances.
No, he signed after a while. Don’t tell me. He motioned toward the orange blaze in the field. Should we take anything else out?
I think they’re getting on just fine.
Good night, then.
“Good night,” his mother whispered. After that they were quiet.
IN THE CHAPEL, THERE WAS the casket in the front, and from the moment he saw it Edgar stopped remembering things in order. The drone of the minister’s sermon. Candles burning. Doctor Papineau sitting with them up front. At one point, he turned to view the mourners, thirty or forty scattered throughout the pews. Claude’s was not among the faces he saw. Afterward, they sat in Doctor Papineau’s car and followed the hearse along the main highway, onto County C, turning at last up Town Line Road and passing through the overhang of trees. They stopped where Edgar had cut the fence. Glen Papineau was one of the pallbearers, as was one of the men from the feed store. In all, a dozen of them walked across the field. Graveside, the man from the funeral home began to speak. Snatches rang back from the barn, as if endorsing only a fraction of his words.
Then a pair of headlights flickered through the bare trees. A car came to a stop and Claude appeared at the path entrance. More cars and pickups began to appear in a long line. The proceedings stopped and everyone turned. Doors opened, slammed, voices rang tinny in the cold air. Claude waved someone along. A man leading a dog. It was Art Granger and Yonder, both limping with arthritis. Then Mr. and Mrs. McCullough, with Haze, the third Sawtelle dog their family had owned. Then Mrs. Santone, with Deary. Then a lone woman with her dog, a curve of slack in its leash. A young couple with a boy and their dog. The dogs’ exhalations plumed whitely over their heads as they came down the field. For a long time people kept appearing at the top of the path—trainers who had adopted yearlings, men whose voices had sped across the telephone lines in conversation with Edgar’s father—and Claude directed them along. There was a man Edgar recognized from Wyoming; another from Chicago. But most were from around that countryside from homes that looked after Sawtelle dogs. Claude stayed on the road and directed them all down the path until the last of them had passed and they all stood in long arced rows around the birches.
Edgar looked at the dogs and then across the field at the house. Trudy wrapped her arms around him and whispered, “No, please stay,” as if she thought he meant to run from it all. But she misunderstood and he could not explain. He twisted away and crashed through the snowdrifts toward the house. No sound but the roaring in his ears. Twice he fell and pushed to his feet without looking back.
When he swung the kitchen door open, Almondine stood waiting for him. He knelt and let her chest fill over and over in the circle of his arms and together they returned to the birches, Almondine stepping along in the path he’d broken through the crusted snow. When they reached the rows of people and dogs, Almondine pushed ahead, passing through the ranks until she stood graveside. Then Edgar walked up and put his arms around his mother and they surrendered to whatever unearthly wind it was that howled over them and only them and Almondine sat her wise haunches down beneath the birches and together they watched the casket descend.
THEY’D BROUGHT WITH THEM pies and casseroles, sliced cheese and ham, bowls of black and green olives and sweet pickles, miniature slices of bread fanned like playing cards next to saucers of mustard and mayonnaise. People milled around Edgar and Trudy, murmuring reassurances, pressing hands on their shoulders. Almondine passed through the crowd, quietly presenting herself. Many of the owners stayed outside wit
Husbands began to come in to let their wives know the car was running. The last of the women washed and dried dishes while cars turned around in the driveway, headlights sweeping the living room walls. Someone came asking for jumper cables. The women patted their hands on dishtowels and took their coats from the pile on the bed. And then only three visitors remained: Doctor Papineau, Glen, and Claude. They stood on the back porch in the bluing dusk. Doctor Papineau opened the kitchen door.
“We’ll take care of the dogs,” he said. “Don’t argue. Go lie down.”
Trudy nodded. “When you’re done, come get some food,” she said. “There’s so much left.” But afterward the trio walked up the drive. Two pairs of headlights brightened. Edgar watched the cars pull away. He mounted the stairs and pulled off his clothes and fell into bed with barely the strength to thump the mattress for Almondine. As soon as she’d settled herself beside him, he was asleep.
The Letters from Fortunate Fields
THERE FOLLOWED, FOR EACH OF THEM, GOOD DAYS AND BAD, and often Edgar’s best moments coincided with his mother’s worst. She could be cheerful and determinedly energetic for days on end and then one morning he would walk downstairs and find her hunched at the kitchen table, haggard and red-eyed. Once lapsed, nothing could deliver her. It worked the same with him. Just when normal life felt almost possible—when the world held some kind of order, meaning, even loveliness (the prismatic spray of light through an icicle; the stillness of a sunrise), some small thing would go awry and the veil of optimism was torn away, the barren world revealed. They learned, somehow, to wait those times out. There was no cure, no answer, no reparation.
He returned from school one day in March to find his mother working in her bedroom, her hair a sweaty tangle about her head, her breath coming in ragged gasps. She’d already closed up the flaps on a tall stack of boxes and was folding a pair of his father’s trousers and placing them in another box. Her gaze barely paused on Edgar when he walked in. Later, he searched to see what had been lost. The drawer that once held his father’s belts and ties was filled with his mother’s gloves and scarves. On top of the dresser, only her sparse jewelry collection remained, and the wind-up alarm clock. She’d even packed away the photograph of her and his father, newlyweds, sitting on the pier in Door County.
HE WOKE ONE MORNING tantalized by an idea: if he could catch the orchard trees motionless for one second—for half of one second—if they stood wholly at rest for the briefest moment—then none of it would have happened. The kitchen door would bang open and in his father would walk, red-faced and slapping his hands and exclaiming about some newly whelped pup. Childish, Edgar knew, but he didn’t care. The trick was to not focus on any single part of any tree, but to look through them all toward a point in the air. But how insidious a bargain he’d made. Even in the quietest moment some small thing quivered and the tableau was destroyed.
How many afternoons slipped away like that? How many midnights standing in the spare room, watching the trees shiver in the moonlight? Still he watched, transfixed. Then, blushing because it was futile and silly, he forced himself to walk away.
When he blinked, an afterimage of perfect stillness.
To think it might happen when he wasn’t watching.
He turned back before he reached the door. Through the window glass, a dozen trees strummed by the winter wind, skeletons dancing pair-wise, fingers raised to heaven.
Stop it, he told himself. Just stop.
And watched some more.
THE WORK TO BE DONE was staggering.
Simplest was the maintenance of the kennel: cleaning the pens, feeding and watering the dogs, shoveling snow from the runs, and the infinity of minor repairs on the kennel’s mechanical workings. Then there was nursery duty: checking the pregnant mothers, washing the teats of the nursing and weaning mothers, taking the temperature and weights of newborns. For the blind and deaf neonates there were touch and scent regimes to be followed, neatly penciled in Gar’s hand on a yellowing paper tacked to the whelping room wall. For the newly open-eyed, there was a schedule of experiences, from the jingling of car keys to the appearance of an old bicycle horn, which they might sniff until Edgar squeezed the rubber bulb and timed how long before they crept back. A patch of carpet to walk on. A tube. A block. Sandpaper. Ice. The weekly roll-and-hold until they kicked and yipped, keeping one eye on the second hand of the clock. The sessions with aunts and uncles, learning manners, while the mother rested. For everything there were entries on log sheets, milestones checked off, reactions recorded, charts updated, the compiled story of each life. Photographs at four, six, eight, and twelve weeks, and then six and nine and twelve and eighteen months: frontal, lateral, rear, and orodental on Tri-X, the dogs positioned in front of the painted calibration grid on the medicine room wall. At night, there was the house rotation schedule, bringing in pairs or trios, and the pedigree research, and visits by stud dogs, and the heat schedules of the mothers, and the practice placements and negotiations with potential owners.
But it was the training that consumed them. The infants needed to learn the simplest things: to look, to listen, to watch, to wait. The eighteen-month-olds needed finish work and evaluation. And the adolescents—those robbers, thieves, muggers, and bullies, who knew exactly what you wanted and devoted themselves to the opposite—needed every spare minute and more.
One evening after they had come in from the kennel, Edgar’s mother asked him to sit at the table. On a sheet of paper, she’d drawn a schedule with columns labeled “Edgar” and “Trudy.”
“We need to divide up the work,” she said. “We’re both doing everything right now. I’m not so worried about the nursery—Pearl’s an experienced mother, and she won’t need much watching. But I am worried about placing them. Your father spent so much time on the telephone. I have a lot of catching up to do.”
She paused and took a deep breath.
“And all that is going to detract from the training. The only bright side to the whole thing is that oldest litter is completely placed. That gives us a few months of breathing room. Then the next litter to go is yours. I don’t think they’ve been spoken for.”
She looked at him to double-check this. He nodded. His father hadn’t broached the issue of placing Edgar’s litter and it wasn’t something Edgar had been eager to hurry along.
“We have a few months then. I need to go over the contacts. For all I know, Gar had spoken agreements with people. I hope I won’t need to travel—I don’t know how we’ll manage if I do.”
She was thinking out loud. He let her go on and sat listening. Then she stopped short and turned to him.
“There is another option, Edgar, and we need to talk about it. We can sell the breeding stock and shut down the kennel. After these litters are placed, we would be done. We could probably place them all by the end of summer if we wanted to. We would have to move into town. I’m sure I could—”
He was already shaking his head.
“No, listen. We have to consider it. We’re going to have to work so hard there’ll be no time for anything else. Have you thought about what that will be like? In a year or so you’ll want to go out for track or football. You might not think so now, but when other boys are doing those things you’re going to resent being stuck out here handling dogs morning and night. What I’m afraid of is that there’ll come a time when you hate getting on the bus to come home. And I’ll know it when it happens.”
It won’t happen, he signed. I don’t want to live somewhere else.
“That’s the other thing. This isn’t always going to be your home. In four years, you graduate. I can??
It matters to me. Besides, how do you know I’m going to leave?
“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re going to college”
I’m not. I’m haven’t even thought about college.
“You will,” his mother said. “You need to understand that there are alternatives. You’re being closed-minded. Staying here and working dogs might be the hardest thing, not the easiest. Or the best. As a trainer, you’re no great shakes, Edgar. Sleeping with them in the mow doesn’t accomplish much, no matter how nice it feels.”
Edgar felt himself blushing.
“It’s not so hard to guess what’s going on when there’s silence up there for hours and you come stumbling down with straw in your hair. I know how tempting it is. I’ve done it myself.”
You sleep in the mow?
She shrugged, refusing to be drawn off track. “My point is, maybe that’s not where your aptitudes lie,” she said. “Oh, of course you’re good with the dogs—quit looking so punctured. Your worst quality as a trainer is your pride, Edgar. If we’re going to make a go of this kennel you’re going to have to learn so much more. And you’re going to have to take it seriously. You only understand the basics. Until now you’ve been training pups and helping your father. Training yearlings is much more exacting. I can’t handle them and do all the rest, too. It’s impossible.”
But I want to learn! I can help.
“What if I said I wasn’t sure I could teach you what you need to know?”
You can. I know you can. I’ve been watching you all my life.
“Yes, you have. So why, at the age of nine months, does Tinder bolt whenever he gets a chance?”
That’s not fair!
“Who said anything about fair?” His mother’s voice cracked a little on the word. He could guess her thoughts: how exactly might the word “fair” apply to any part of their situation? Furthermore, what she’d said about his training skills was true. He was lazy and indulgent; what he liked was the attention of the pups, not the training. He was inconsistent. He worked them on skills they already knew and avoided more difficult things. Worst of all, he understood there was more he should be doing, but he had no idea what it was, and that made him feel ashamed.