The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
He stepped onto the weed-covered hump in the center of the driveway, muddy streams on either side of him. In the pale glow of the yard light, the freshly greened grass looked greasy black. The two tall pines stood shivering like sentries, water cascading down branch by branch. But there were no deer, no streak of red that would be a fox, no shining eyes of a raccoon. He turned and walked to the deserted runs, wiping a streaming hand over his face.
From one of the small doorways, a dog’s head and shoulders emerged—Essay, watching him approach, half in and half out. When he squatted down and pushed his fingers through the wire mesh, she bucked along down the run, stepped into his shadow, and licked his fingers, blinking at the rain. Her posture conveyed curiosity without anxiety, anticipation but not fear.
What’s going on out here? he signed. Where would you go if I opened this door? What would you chase?
Essay waved her tail and met his gaze as though turning the question back on him. He pulled himself upright along the timber of the door. The waterlogged wood of the frame creaked. He turned to look behind him to see what the dogs might have seen.
The yard light, high atop the pole in the orchard, cast its globe of yellow. The earth mounded away from him, passing beneath the trees of the orchard and leveling near the road. The house sat at the edge of the light, bright along the driveway side, dim where it faced the garden. The shadows of the apple trees lay stretched across the grass. The forest across the road, an undulating scrim of gray. High in the air, raindrops descended into the light, curtained by the breeze into willow shapes that swayed across the yard and back into the night.
When Edgar glanced back, Essay had retreated into the barn and a line of glittering eyes watched him from the canvas flaps. He rounded the milk house and walked through the cone of light beneath the floodlight over the barn doors. When he reached the silo, he tried to look out over the field to the west, but his eyes were dazzled and the dark began just a few yards beyond. He stared into the blackness toward the back runs and saw nothing, just the side of the silo sliding off into the dark and the silhouette of the broad roof. After a moment he turned back to the barn.
And for the second time that night something moved in front of the double doors. It took a moment to make sense of it. A change in the falling of the rain. Something about the way it fell. He stepped forward to look more closely, traced a single drop of water as it passed into the light. Just above his head, the raindrop paused, wobbling in midair like a transparent pearl, and began to fall again. It splashed into the puddle at his feet. He wiped his face and looked up. Another raindrop had taken its place, and then that one fell, to be replaced by another, and another. Nothing he could see held them in the air, yet each one hovered for a tick of time, then continued to the ground. He watched it happen a dozen times or more. Despite himself, he reached out to touch the spot, then hesitated at the last moment.
He stepped back and saw the same thing was happening all up and down the space in front of him: hundreds of raindrops—thousands—suspended for a heartbeat in the lamplight. He caught a glimpse of something, then lost it. He squeezed his eyes shut. It was like watching the orchard, trying to catch everything motionless for one instant. When he opened his eyes again, the way to see them all together had clicked into place.
Instead of raindrops, he saw a man.
His head, his torso. Arms held away from his body. All formed by raindrops suspended and instantly replaced. Near the ground, the figure’s legs frayed into tattered blue-gray sprays of water. When a gust of wind passed through the yard, the shape flickered and the branches of the apple trees twisted behind it, refracted as through melted glass.
Edgar shook his head and turned away. An endless cascade of raindrops struck his arms and neck and face. The same breeze that shimmered the figure caressed his skin, carrying a swampy, marshy smell. There was the scent of the kennel, and of the water itself.
Suddenly he needed to touch something, something too solid to exist in a dream. He stumbled to the barn. He ran his palm against the planks of siding. A wood sliver snagged his skin and slid into the flesh at the base of his thumb. The pain was brief and hot and unquestionably real.
He glanced around. The figure in the rain had turned to watch.
He attended once more to the barn, his examination now minute and frantic. He traced the rusted iron door hinge with his fingertips, and the jagged crevices between the boards, where the shadows were as sharp as the line dividing the moon. He knew if he waited long enough he would see crazy things—fantastic, inexplicable, dreamlike things—but everywhere he looked he found the ordinary stuff of the world. Painted wood. Pitted iron. Water falling earthward from his face, each droplet’s path so foreshortened it seemed motionless and shrinking until it struck the ground. He shut his eyes and listened to his breath blowing.
When he turned, rain fell evenly through the light. He was alone. He looked about, then spotted the figure standing near the corner of the milk house. Having once learned the trick, Edgar could not unsee him. The figure gestured. His legs blurred into skirts of rain and then he disappeared from view. The dogs began to bark.
Edgar found him standing in front of the pens. All the dogs were out, peering forward, unafraid, excited recognition in their voices. Their tails jerked back and forth, throwing sprays of water. The figure turned to him and his arms moved in sign. Trails of water fell through the air. The distance and the figure’s indistinct form made it difficult to read.
Edgar stepped forward. The figure repeated the sign.
Release a dog.
Edgar blinked in the rain.
Why?
You think I’m not real. Open a pen.
Edgar walked to Essay’s pen. He flipped up the latch and linked his fingers through the wire mesh and pulled the door open. Essay bounded out at once. She dropped her nose to the ground at the spot where the figure had stood and slid a paw along the grass. She looked at Edgar and then into the yard. Her tail swung happily behind her. The figure gestured a recall, but Essay was already closing the distance at a trot. When she arrived she circled several times, her shape contorting as she passed behind and finished on his left in a sit. The figure stepped forward, a water-shimmer, and turned and signaled a down. Essay dropped onto the wet grass at once. The figure bent down and passed his hand across the side of her face. A stream of water coursed along her already soaked cheek and she panted happily and pulled her lips back in a grin of pleasure and lapped at the figure’s hand. Her tongue passed through a stream of water. She closed her mouth reflexively and swallowed and began to pant again.
The figure looked back toward the barn and signaled a broad sit and in unison all seven dogs behind Edgar sat. Then he signaled a release. One by one they stood. They trotted back into the barn. A moment later the canvas flaps parted and seven muzzles appeared.
You see?
At last, the figure signaled Essay to kennel. She trotted to her pen and disappeared into the barn. Before Edgar had latched the door behind her, she had joined the other dogs looking out at them.
He turned back to the rain.
Edgar.
What—what are you doing here?
Don’t you recognize me?
I don’t want to say. I’m not sure. I might.
How many times have we stood here and looked back at the house together? How many times have we counted the deer in the field from here? How many times did I lift you into the branches of those trees to pick an apple? Look at me Edgar. What do you see?
I don’t know.
What do you see?
I know why you’re here. I’m so sorry. I tried so hard.
You think you might have saved me.
I couldn’t think of what to do. I tried everything.
I would have died anyway.
No. I couldn’t tell them. There could have been doctors.
They would have done nothing.
But I was there. I made it worse!
The rain-figure bowed
Edgar couldn’t help himself. He stepped back. Instantly, a wave of remorse washed through him.
I’m sorry, he signed. I didn’t mean that.
You didn’t understand what you were seeing that day.
The figure turned and melted away toward the front of the barn, then rounded the corner of the old milk house. After a moment Edgar followed. He stood before the barn doors. Under the floodlight, his sign was easy to read.
Go inside. Now. Before the rain stops.
And do what?
Search.
For what?
What he lost. What he thinks is lost forever.
Then the figure stepped away from the door. Edgar tipped the old iron bar away and turned the latch handle. Inside, it was dark but dry and the cessation of rain shocked him. He looked out the door, but it was only rain falling again. None of the dogs barked, though a few stood watching from their pens.
He pushed the workshop door open and froze, unable to cross the threshold at first. He reached inside and flipped up the light switch and surveyed the room: workbench to the left, the pegboard covered with tools mounted on the wall above it. Vise twisted open halfway. Except for the filing cabinets, they had barely touched any of it that winter, and a velvet hoar of straw dust lay over the bench. Across from him, the mow stairs led upward, and in front of them, shelves filled with cans of paint and creosote, their labels stained with drips and runners.
He took a breath and stepped inside. He took the paint cans off the shelf and stacked them on the workbench. Though the rest of the workshop was covered in dust, the paint cans were not; only a thin powder covered them, as though they had been recently moved. When he finished, only a pile of old brushes and rollers remained, stacked haphazardly at one end of the shelf, and these he put on the workbench, too.
Beneath the shelves, on the floor, sat the two enormous cans of scrap his father had been trying to move that day, brimming with bent nails, stripped screws, spare machine parts, the iron rusted to a dark brown, the steel parts dull gray. He crouched and tried to tip the nearest one out from the wall. After the third or fourth heave, the welded metal handle snapped off and he tumbled backward. He returned to it on all fours, hugged it, and lunged. The bucket tottered and fell and he quickly rolled it along, leaving a trail of orange scrap. He knelt and swabbed the scrap about.
The second can had lost its handle long before. Another spray of scrap. In the process, something sharp had sliced the tip of his finger. Blood mixed with the rust on his hands and began to drip to the floor. He got down on his knees again, but it was hopeless and he sat back. Under the mow stairs, a jumble of dusty odds and ends lay tucked into the crevice where the stair stringers met the concrete floor—a paintbrush, long ago fallen from behind the shelf, a bunched-up rag, a tin of washers. He scuttled over. One by one he tossed them into the workshop. A maroon drop of blood caught in the cobweb below the last tread and shivered blackly in the air. He reached out and brushed the cobweb away.
There, against the wall, lay a plastic-barreled syringe. He picked it up and blew the dust away and held it to the light. The plunger had been pressed three quarters of the way down; the black double gasket touched the final graduated mark on the barrel. The needle’s shaft reflected the light in a long clean line. He shook the thing. Two glassy crystals clicked within the barrel.
He walked into the rain with the syringe in his hand, night-blind from the barn lights. The rain had slackened to a drizzle, and at first he couldn’t make out his father and he looked around in a panic before realizing he stood exactly where Edgar had last seen him. The rain had grown so fine his form was barely discernible.
Edgar held out the syringe.
This was under the stairs.
Yes.
What does it mean?
You’ve seen him use one.
Claude?
Edgar looked at the Impala sitting in the driveway, then the dark house. At his bedroom window, he thought he saw the shine of Almondine’s eyes.
He’s proposed.
She won’t accept.
She laughed at him. But she will. When she’s alone, she’ll accept.
She won’t! She—
Before Edgar could protest again, his father set his hand flat against the center of Edgar’s chest. A whispery splash on his skin. At first he thought his father only meant to lay his hand on him in a gesture that meant, be still and listen, but then he brought his other hand forward and Edgar felt something pass into him, and his father made as if to cradle Edgar’s heart. The sensation was so strange Edgar thought his heart would stop. But his father only cupped the thing in his hands as though it were a newborn pup. On his face Edgar made out regret and anger and joy and most of all unutterable sorrow.
Any thought to protest or resist left him. The world grayed. Then memories flooded into Edgar in a cascade, like the drops of rain passing through his father’s figure; images seen by a baby, a toddler, a young man, an adult. All his father’s memories given to him at once.
Standing over a crib looking at a silent baby whose hands move over his chest. Trudy, a young woman, laughing. Almondine, a wet, blind pup. Vision of a young boy with a younger boy beside him holding something in the air; something bloody. And smiling. A thousand ruby-lit dogs. And with the images, a sense of responsibility; the need to put himself between Claude and the world. Dogs fighting. Storms mounting the field. Trees slipstreaming past the truck windows. Dogs: sleeping, running, sick, joyful, dying. Always and everywhere, dogs. Then Claude, retreating from the workshop, searching the floor for something. Darkness. And now, standing before him, a boy as clear as glass, his heart beating in two cupped hands.
Edgar fell to his knees, gasping. He leaned forward, emptied his stomach into a pool of rainwater. From the corner of his eye he saw the syringe lying in the mud, light glinting off the shaft of the needle.
He looked up, panting. His father was still there.
Whatever he’s wanted, he’s taken, ever since he was a child.
I’ll tell the police.
They won’t believe you.
Edgar began to sob.
You’re not real. You can’t be real.
Find—
What? Stop! I couldn’t read that.
His father signed it again, fingerspelling the last word.
Find H-A-A…
He couldn’t make it out. It was H-A-A and then something else, followed by a very distinct I: H-A-A-something-I.
I still didn’t…
The mist had lessened further, and his father was barely visible. His hands sprayed away on a gust of wind. Then he vanished entirely. Edgar thought he was gone forever, but when the wind died he reappeared, kneeling now in front of him, his hands so faint Edgar could barely make out the motion.
A touch of the thumb to the forehead.
The I-hand held to his chest.
Remember me.
And then his father reached forward a second time.
He thought he would rather die himself than feel that sensation again. He scrabbled along the muddy ground until the barn was against his back and signed furiously into the night, arms crossed over his head.
Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!
After that everything quieted to absolute silence. The mist grew so refined it made no noise as it came to earth, only the drip of water from the eaves. He could not bring himself to look up until it had stopped altogether.
From behind a feathered break of clouds, the moon emerged, a gleaming sickle of bone as pointed as the syringe beside him. The trees at the edge of the forest glowed blue. He walked along the driveway and looked back at the barn. The dogs were at the front of their pens holding sit-stays, coats like mercury. Their muzzles tracked him as he approached. They lowered their brows and ducked their heads, not wanting to be out an
From the moment they opened their eyes the dogs were taught to watch and listen and trust. To think and choose. This was the lesson behind every minute of training. They were taught something beyond simple obedience: that through the training all things could be spoken. Edgar himself believed this—believed they had the right to ask of the dogs certain things. But the more forcefully they asked, the more certain they had to be, for the dogs would obey. Doubtful, uncomfortable, uneasy, frightened: they would obey.
The line of dogs waited for him to signal a release.
The clouds gaped and folded and closed across the moon.
Part III
WHAT HANDS DO
Awakening
HE CAME UP OUT OF A DARKNESS THAT WAS NOT SLEEP BUT something vaster and more comforting, the black of willful unconsciousness or perhaps the night that precedes the first wakening, which babies know in the womb and forget ever after. There was Essay’s breath panting slow and hot against his face. When he cracked an eyelid her jet-whiskered muzzle and curious eye filled his vision and he pushed her away and curled his head to his knees and squeezed his eyelids shut. Even so, he’d glimpsed enough to know he lay inside the run farthest from the doors and nearest the whelping room, and that the bare lights blazed along the kennel aisle. Outside, rain fell, roaring, a torrent against the roof. There was the rustle of the canvas flaps and another dog trotted up, this time Tinder, who dug his muzzle into the crevice between Edgar’s chin and chest and snuffled and drew back and cocked his head with a low, puzzled groan.
Bits of straw began to itch along his neck. His shirt clung to his ribs, gelid and damp. A spasm shook his body, then another, and he gasped and despite himself drew a full breath that carried into him the odors of the kennel—sweat and urine, straw and turpentine, blood and defecation and birth and life and death—all of it alien and bitter as if the whole history of the place itself had suddenly blossomed in his chest. And with it, masked until the last instant, the memory of what had happened in the night.