The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
The final photograph had been taken in their yard. In it, the barn appeared in the distance, rising darkly above the slope of the side lawn. His father was looking on from near the milk house, a tiny figure. In the foreground stood Claude, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. A massive, full-grown dog had just leapt into his outstretched arms. He was laughing and staggering backward. And one of his eyes was black.
Edgar sat looking at the photograph. The dog, in motion when the shutter was tripped, appeared mostly as a blur, but it was very big, that much was obvious. It didn’t look like one of their dogs, not exactly, a mix of some kind, though predominantly shepherd, with a dark face, high-set ears, and a saber tail. Edgar turned the photograph over. On the back, in his father’s draftsman-like handwriting, a caption read: Claude and Forte, July 1948.
CLAUDE HAD TAKEN ON the kennel paperwork, an idea Edgar’s mother welcomed. Edgar found Claude at the kitchen table often, letters spread about, talking on the telephone for follow-ups and new placements. If Edgar walked in during one of his conversations, Claude would cut his conversation short, as if his brother’s work was hard enough without his being under observation as well. The files and records themselves were neatly organized and legible; the problem was mastering the lineage of the dogs available for breeding the next litter and holding all the requisite information in his head. Claude knew the basics, of course. John Sawtelle had drilled the principles of animal husbandry into both his sons. But Claude had been away from the kennel long enough that the complex scoring system, refined by Edgar’s father over the years, was now a mystery to him.
On the other hand, Claude’s attitude toward any accomplishment was cool indifference, a studious lack of awe. No matter what the feat, whether a pyrotechnic piano solo on a variety show or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar sinking a last-minute skyhook for the Bucks, Claude was unimpressed. He often declared that a person could get anything he wanted if he was willing to go slow enough. The pianist, he would point out, had sacrificed his childhood practicing—of course he could tickle the ivories. Jabbar was born tall and he worked at the game five days a week, all year round.
“Everyone gets good at their job,” he said. “It’s osmosis. The most ordinary thing in the world.”
Edgar’s mother laughed when Claude started in, having decided it was a form of backhanded compliment, since the more impressive the feat, the more steadfastly Claude held to his position. It wasn’t disrespectful, he maintained, because the principle applied to everyone, straight across the board: Trudy, Edgar, and most especially Claude himself. It was never a question of whether Claude could learn to do something, just a question of whether it would be worthwhile and how long it would take. This was his approach to mastering the kennel records (and learning to read sign, for that matter, despite the fact that he walked past the sign dictionary in the living room every day). If he kept his hands in the files long enough, the scoring system would become clear and the merits and flaws of the various lines would sink in without effort. During telephone conversations he idly flipped through whatever folder happened to be in front of him, doodling lineage charts on the newspaper.
His father had been planning a litter for a sweet-natured black and chestnut mother named Olive. He’d spoken of finding a perfect cross, but Claude had searched fruitlessly in Edgar’s father’s notebook. As Edgar well knew, that notebook was a mess of illegible notes, lists, reminders, and diagrams. The same man who filled out log records with the precision of a penmanship teacher wrote his notes in a madman’s scribble. But Olive was coming into heat soon, and Claude sat at the table after dinner behind an avalanche of manila folders. Late one evening, he walked into the living room.
“I have Gar’s cross for Olive,” he said.
Edgar’s mother looked up from the magazine she’d been reading. “Who?”
“Drift,” he said. “He’s sired three good litters. Healthy as a horse. He’s down in Park City.”
Edgar’s mother nodded. She had intuition on crosses, based on her memory of how past litters behaved, but she had always been indifferent to the detailed research, leaving that to Edgar’s father. The pups were what excited her, all their talents as yet unrevealed. But Edgar saw the problem at once, and he was signing a response before he had time for second thoughts.
That’s a line cross. A bad one.
Trudy looked back at Claude and interpreted. “A line cross?”
“Let’s see,” Claude said. “Olive was sired by…” He retreated into the kitchen and rummaged through papers. “I’ll be damned,” they heard him say. “Olive and Drift are both from the same sire, one generation apart. Half Nelson. Sired by Nelson, who was out of Bridger and Azimuth.”
“What’s the problem with that?” his mother asked.
Remember Half Nelson and Osmo? Edgar signed.
“Oh yes,” she said. “Not good.”
Claude had returned, but he couldn’t read Edgar’s sign.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that a couple of years ago, Half Nelson sired a litter out of Osmo, with three pups stillborn and the rest with straight fronts. Gar decided it was a bad cross.”
He had decided more than that, Edgar thought. His father had considered that litter a disaster. He’d paid scant attention to superficial traits like coat color, but bones mattered, and straight fronts, which meant bad angulation in the dog’s forelegs, were hard to eliminate from a line. And yet Osmo had borne good litters from other sires. Edgar’s father had spent most of a day pulling folders and making notes until he’d tapped his pencil twice and announced he’d found what he was looking for, line crosses with a common ancestor in Nelson. Edgar sat with him while he talked it through, and he could still see the diagrams they’d drawn.
“Would have been nice to know that a couple of days ago,” Claude said.
“Edgar didn’t know you were considering Drift until just now,” his mother said, before Edgar could respond. She turned to him. “Who would be good, then? Do you have an opinion?”
Edgar wanted to leave Claude hanging, make him work it out for himself so he would look foolish and slow. Any help he gave Claude would only advance his brainless theory of osmosis, but Edgar wasn’t sure Claude wouldn’t take a wild guess, and he couldn’t stand the idea of the dogs being used clumsily.
Gleam, he signed. Or one of his sibs.
After Trudy translated, Claude pursed his lips and returned to the kitchen while Edgar grinned. His mother gave him a don’t-push-it-buster squint and turned back to her magazine. He knew what Claude would find: Gleam was a four-year-old brindle, placed with a farm family east of town. The little boy who lived there sometimes sought out Edgar at school to tell him about the dog. He also knew Claude wouldn’t find any problem with the cross; he’d have to go back seven generations before he found any common ancestry, if he bothered to look that far.
When Edgar came downstairs the next morning Claude was sitting at the table, manila folders stacked before him. “We’re going with Gleam,” he said. He waved a coffee cup over the records. “Did you want to check me on this? I’m going to call the owner this afternoon and arrange it.”
Edgar tried to think of a response but his mind seized up. He shrugged and walked to the doorway.
“Look,” Claude said. “Is there something in particular you want to say? It’s just me and you here. Whatever’s on your mind will stay between us.”
Edgar stopped.
I bet it will, he signed. He thought how he’d capitulated the night before, how he’d helped Claude though it was the last thing in the world he’d wanted to do. Slowly, and with great precision, so that the gesture was unmistakable, Edgar angled his left hand in front of him and shot his right beneath it, index finger as straight as the knife it was meant to evoke.
Murder. That’s what’s on my mind.
Claude’s eyes tracked Edgar’s hands. He looked as if he were searching his memory, nodding all the while noncommittally.
Edgar turned and walked
“I just want you to know,” Claude called from the kitchen. “Picking Gleam like that. I was impressed.”
Edgar pushed through the screen door and let it slam, blood rising in his cheeks. He’d mustered the resolve to accuse Claude to his face, yet somehow Claude had twisted the moment into a chance to look magnanimous. And to whom? No one had been there to see it. Worst of all, Claude’s compliment had elicited in him a flush of pride that made him instantly loathe himself.
The problem—the very troubling problem—was that, when he wanted to, Claude could sound so much like Edgar’s father.
NIGHT. HE STOOD IN THE bathroom and crossed his arms at his waist and peeled his shirt over his head and looked in the mirror. Where a story had once been written in mottled blue and green, now only pale and ordinary flesh.
Memory of his father’s hands sinking into that spot. How, with the slightest pressure, his heart might have stopped. The stream of memory passing through him like rain, now as faint and undetailed as dreams called back from sleep. He pressed a thumb to his sternum. A familiar ache lit his ribs.
He swung his arm wide, hand curled into a fist.
The sensation, when he brought it to his chest, exquisite.
WARM AFTERNOONS, HE WALKED with Almondine into the woods, where they slept under the dying oak. Sometimes he took Essay or Tinder along to make it look like training. Whenever his mother insisted he spend the night in the house, he waited until she and Claude were asleep, then led Almondine downstairs, bearing all his weight onto the creaking treads. From the bedroom doorway his mother watched him rummage through the refrigerator.
“What are you doing?”
Going to the barn.
“It’s eleven o’clock at night!”
So?
“Oh, for God’s sake. If you can’t sleep, read something.”
He slammed the back door and stalked across the yard.
Yet he couldn’t oppose them in everything. One problem that irked him especially was naming the newest litter, something he’d delayed for three weeks. But now the pups’ eyes were open and their milk teeth were beginning to come through and they had begun exploring. The earliest puppy training would start soon—the playing of unusual sounds, the setting up of miniature stairs and hoops and all those puzzles for infants—and when that began they had to have names. He carried the dark blue New Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language into the whelping pen and sank cross-legged into the straw. Four pups bumbled to the edge of the whelping box and looked at him.
The spine of the dictionary cracked dryly when he laid it open. He sprayed the pages through his fingers. Annotations flickered past, the oldest in his father’s handwriting, but most in his own squarish lettering. Good names had once lived between the dictionary’s covers: Butter. Surrey. Pan. Cable. Argo. Sometimes he could even remember the exact place he’d been sitting when the word had risen from the page and declared itself to be a name. At the back of the dictionary was an essay by Alexander McQueen, the editor, entitled, “2,000 Names and Their Meanings: A Practical Guide for Parents and All Others Interested in Better Naming.” Edgar knew it by heart. “The naming of an infant is of more than passing importance,” McQueen had written. He’d listed seven rules for choosing names, such as “The name should be worthy,” “It should be easy to pronounce,” and “It should be original.” Now, the more Edgar thought about those rules, the more the unclaimed words turned to nonsense: Spire. Encore. Pretend. Herb. The mother dog lifted her nose to scent the dry pages, then sighed to acknowledge his difficulties, and he closed the dictionary.
The pups had fallen asleep, except one who fussed at a nipple, nursing then letting go then taking it again. He reached past the pup and rolled the nipple between his fingers and brought his fingers wet to his nose and tongue.
What are you complaining about? he signed.
He set aside the dictionary and shifted the pup back into place, stroking it two-fingered while it nursed and he didn’t stop until it, too, lay asleep.
AFTERWARD, HE HERDED HIS LITTER into the workshop and up the narrow steps, stopping only to retrieve the photograph of Claude and Forte from its hiding place, tucked into the envelope with the Hachiko letter. The mow was still warm from the day’s heat. He swung open the broad door at the front and let the night air wash in, cool and thick with pollen. The dogs wrestled and plunged across the straw bales at the back, for the once-vast wall of yellow had diminished to a low platform. They would need more straw soon. That meant a day standing at the mow door, waiting at a creaking conveyer for bales and driving in the hay hook and stacking them crosshatched to the rafters. He looked out at the dark woods. He wondered if Schultz had imagined teams of men working where he stood at harvest time, shouting, cursing, taunting those below to bring on the hay as they hauled on the sling ropes.
When the dogs settled down he shut the door and they began to work. He’d forsaken the regular training schedule, instead teaching them playful acts with no point and no purpose. Tagging one another. Carrying scraps of doweling from place to place. Dropping to the floor during a carry. Watching the dogs was the only thing that put him at ease, and he made a game of it, trying variations, setting up barriers, switching the order, testing connotations. A tag, they decided, meant not merely scenting another dog, but a solid nose-push. A carry meant not dropping a thing, even when a tennis ball rolled by. Edgar found a pen and an old spoon and a length of welding rod and he asked the dogs to take those items in their mouths instead of doweling, despite their strange texture and taste.
When they’d agreed on this new meaning of carry, an hour had passed and he declared a break. While the dogs lounged in the loose straw, Edgar took out the photograph of Claude and Forte. The stray was on his mind for the first time in a long while. Such a foolish dream to have hoped the dog would come in from the woods. He thought of that day in the field, how swiftly Claude had turned to shoot the doe after the stray bolted. After a while he slid the photograph back into his pocket and he read from The Jungle Book, letting his hands swipe through the air.
So loud did he howl that Tha heard him and said, “What is the sorrow?’” And the First of the Tigers, lifting up his muzzle to the new-made sky, which is now so old, said: “Give me back my power, O Tha. I am made ashamed before all the Jungle, and I have run away from an Hairless One, and he has called me a shameful name.” “And why?” said Tha. “Because I am smeared with the mud of the marshes,” said the first of the Tigers. “Swim, then, and roll on the wet grass, and if it be mud it will surely wash away,” said Tha; and the First of the Tigers swam, and rolled, and rolled, till the Jungle ran round and round before his eyes, but not one little bar upon his hide was changed, and Tha, watching him, laughed. Then the First of the Tigers said, “What have I done that this comes to me?” Tha said, “Thou hast killed the buck, and thou hast let Death loose in the Jungle, and with Death has come Fear, so that the People of the Jungle are afraid one of the other as thou art afraid of the Hairless One.” The First of the Tigers said, “They will never fear me, for I knew them since the beginning.” Tha said, “Go and see.” And the First of the Tigers ran to and fro, calling aloud to the deer and the pig and the sambhur and the porcupine and all the Jungle Peoples; but they all ran away from him who had been their Judge, because they were afraid.
He roused the dogs again and began rehearsing two new commands. He began with away, demonstrating in small increments: at first it was enough to look somewhere else without moving. The shared gaze training helped now, and they caught on quickly. Then he coaxed them into taking a step, then several steps, then running all the way across the mow. Finch was the first to get it: no place in particular to go, just not here. The dog fairly danced with excitement.
Far more difficult was the idea that another dog might convey a command. For example, if he wanted Baboo to down, all Edgar had to do was lift his hand in the air—Sawtelle pups knew that sign when they were three months old. But
He put Baboo in a stay and stepped one pace back.
Tag, he signed to Essay, indicating Baboo.
The instant Essay touched the dog, Edgar raised his hand. Baboo downed. A moment of revelry. They practiced again, this time with Baboo tagging. After dozens of trials—with breaks to race for a knotted rag thrown into the dark corners of the mow—they’d all gotten the hang of it. He moved them farther apart—five, ten, twenty feet—using a long line threaded through a floor ring for corrections at a distance. After more practice, with just a hint of down the dogs dropped when tagged—not every time, but half the time, then two thirds of the time, until finally he could stand motionless and watch while Essay dashed across the mow, nosed Baboo’s hindquarters, and Baboo sank to the floor.
Edgar celebrated by rolling them onto their backs and holding their feet against his face. They were fastidious about their pads and when he inhaled against them, an earthy popcorn smell filled his senses. The dogs craned their necks to watch, eyeing him as if astounded, and boxing and writhing to coax him back again. He clapped them to their feet for more practice. Always the same few commands now. He played them again in different orders with different pairings. Different obstacles. Longer or shorter releases.
Roll on your back.
Carry this to the other dog.
Tag that dog.
It was very late, and he was almost tired enough to sleep when he chose a sequence at random and watched them work it out. Opal trotted across the mow holding a dowel in her mouth. She tagged Umbra. Umbra dropped to the floor.