The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski

  And then, midmorning of a day when the sky rang overhead, she reached a decision. She rose from her sleeping spot in the living room. In the kitchen, she set her long soft jaw on the woman’s leg and tried to make it clear she would have to look elsewhere. The woman stroked her absently, a hand familiar against her flanks and caressing behind her ears. Almondine was grateful for it. The door stood unlatched. She still had the strength to pull it open. She walked between the rows of trees on the long slope of the orchard and waited near the topmost tree.

  Perhaps he traveled. Now she would, too.

  From far away, she heard the traveler coming. For as long as she could remember, they’d passed her yard, acquaintances of the truck, exchangers of the empirical, the factual, the mathematical—traders in unknowable quantities. Longitudes and azimuths. Secants and triangulations. She had thought them intruders when she was young, but learned to pay no attention, her alarm foolish. They were benign, careening about for reasons of their own. Unstealthy, broad, and stupid, they were, but they saw a lot of the world.

  It was coming up the far side of the hill; its cloud of dust filled the air between the trees. The glint of its frontpiece appeared. She was not scared. One must try new things. Inside, she held the image of him on that first morning, awake in his mother’s sleeping arms. She’d thought what had begun then would never end. Yet he’d been too long missing for things to be wholly right. Nothing knew of him in the yard. Nothing in the house. All of it forgetting, slowly, slowly, she could feel it, and one could last only so long separated from the essence.

  A quest waited in those circumstances, always.

  The traveler was almost there. If this one knew nothing, she would ask the next. And the next. One of them would know. She’d asked the truck her question, but with silence it professed ignorance. It had not carried him lately, though it would not deny it had carried him many times before. She had never thought to ask the other travelers until that morning. The idea had come to her in a whisper.

  She stepped onto the sharp red gravel of the road. She was very nearly not there at all, so deeply was she inside her own mind. There was a time in her when he had fallen from an apple tree, a tree she’d just stepped away from. He’d landed with a thump on his back. A time in the winter when he’d piled the snow on her face until the world had gone white and she’d dug for his mittened hand. Inside her were countless mornings watching his eyes flutter open as he woke. Above all, she recalled the language the two of them had invented, a language in which everything important could be said. She did not know how to ask the traveler what she needed to ask, nor what form its reply might take. But it was upon her now, angry and rushed, and it wouldn’t be long before she knew the answer. A bloom of dust like a thundercloud chased it down the hill.

  She stood broadside in the gravel and turned her head and asked her question.

  Asked if it had seen her boy. Her essence. Her soul.

  But if the traveler understood, it showed no sign.

  Part V

  POISON

  Edgar

  THEY WALKED UP THROUGH THE MANTLE OF TREE SHADOW stretching across the western field. Ahead, the red siding of the barn glowed phosphorescent in the mulled sunset. A pair of does sprang over the fence on the north side of the field—two leaps each, nonchalant, long-sustained, falling earthward only as an afterthought—and crashed through the hazel and sumac. The air was still and hot and the hay rasped dryly at Edgar’s legs. Stalks of wild corn dotted the field, leaves frayed and bitten to the cane, and the Indian tobacco was brown and wilted from the heat. All of it brittle and rattling as if folded from sheets of cigarette paper.

  By the time Edgar reached the rock pile, Essay had already coursed the yard, whipping the kennel dogs into a frenzy. He perched on a rock and listened. Equal parts of longing and dread washed through him, but the sound of the dogs pleased him the way a lullaby might please an old man. He picked out their voices one by one and named them. From where he sat, he could see only the roof of the house hovering darkly over the yard. He waited for some human figure to appear, but there was only the flash of Essay’s body, low and elongate, cutting through the grass as she made another round.

  He stood and walked the rest of the way. The house was dark. The Impala sat parked in the grass. In the garden, he could see the green tract of cucumber and pumpkin vines and, far back by the woods, a half dozen sunflowers leaning bent-headed over it all. He peered through the living room windows hoping to see Almondine, knowing all the while that had she been home, she would already have found some way to bolt from the house.

  When he entered the barn, the dogs braced their forepaws on their pen doors and greeted him with yodels and roars and howls. He went from pen to pen, letting them jump and claw his shirt, laughing at their mad dashes and play-bows and rolls. He saved Pout and Finch and Opal and Umbra for last. He knelt and mouthed their names into their ears and they washed his face with their tongues. When they had quieted, he found a coffee can and dished kibble into a pile for Essay. She started eating daintily, then leaned into it as if suddenly remembering food.

  Two pups greeted him in the nursery—just two, from the litter of eight whelped before he left. They were weaned and fat, shaking their bellies and beating their tails. He squatted and scratched their chins.

  What did they name you? Where are the others?

  He walked to the workshop. He looked at the file cabinets and the books arranged atop them. The New Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language weighed so little in his hands. The scent of its pages like road dust. He leaned against the wall and thought of his grandfather and of Brooks’s never-ending admonitions, and he thought of Hachiko. Among the mishmash of correspondence he found the letter from Tokyo and withdrew the crumpled photograph he’d hidden there. He looked at Claude and Forte through the webwork of cracks in the emulsion, then slid it into his pocket.

  He closed up the kennel and walked to the house. The kitchen door key hung from a nail in the basement. He ate straight from the refrigerator, fog pouring over his feet. Bread and cheese and roast chicken off the bone, then walked through the house cradling a five-quart bucket of vanilla ice cream under his arm, spooning it up and looking around. The kitchen clock. The stove. The candle night-light. The living room furniture sitting petrified and ogrelike in the dusk. The clothes hanging in his mother’s closet. He walked up the stairs and sat on his bed. A puff of dust lifted into the air. Across the plank flooring, dead flies lay scattered, dry husks, blue and green, with cellophaned wings. He hadn’t imagined everyone would be gone. He hadn’t imagined saying hello to the place before seeing his mother. Before seeing Almondine most of all. He had imagined sleeping in that bed again, but looking at it now, he didn’t know how he could.

  He put the ice cream back in the freezer and dropped the spoon into the sink. Essay scratched at the porch door. He walked out and pushed the door open and let her trot through the house, repeating his inspection. He was seated at the table, at his father’s place, when she returned. He sat for a long time, waiting. It was hard for him not to think about what things would be like. Finally, he decided to wash up. When he lifted his face from the towel in the bathroom he saw the green soap turtle sitting on the windowsill, complete and perfect except for one shriveled hind foot.

  He walked into the kitchen and found a pencil and a scrap of paper and touched the lead to the paper and stopped and looked out the kitchen windows. The windows had been propped open on sticks and a night breeze, hot as an animal exhalation, ruffled the gingham curtains. Dark, ripe apples swung from the branches outside the window. He put the pencil to the paper again. I ate while you were gone, he wrote. I’ll come back tomorrow. Then he took the photograph of Claude and Forte from his pocket and set it beside the note.

  He gave Essay the option of staying or coming along. She walked down the porch steps, calm now, curiosity satisfied. He pocketed the key and stood trying to decide where to sleep. The mow, on a night that hot, w
ould be stifling. In the milk house he found a pile of burlap sacks. They walked into the field. It was full dark by that time but the faint reach of the yard light cast his shadow before him. At the narrow end of the trees by the whale-rock he snapped the dust from the sacks and threw them down. Essay circled and circled, solving again the everlasting riddle of lying down to sleep. She came to rest with her back to him, muzzle fitted high on her foreleg. Overhead the aurora flew, sheets of wild neon. He focused on the hovering seed of the yard light flickering through the hay and breathed the scent of pollen and decay that infused the night.

  They’d slept for some time when the truck crested the hill. The moon was up. The field around them like salt and silver. He sat on the burlap and watched the truck back around and stop by the porch while the kennel dogs barked a frantic greeting. Essay stood and whined. Edgar lay a hand on her hip. She nosed him and turned back to watch.

  The truck disgorged the figures of Claude and his mother. Claude lifted the gate on the topper and lifted out two bags of groceries while his mother paused to settle the dogs. The porch door creaked and slapped. The kitchen light appeared dimly through the broad windows in the living room. Twice more Claude walked between the back porch and the truck. On his last trip, he stood looking around the yard, then closed the topper and walked to the porch and turned out the light.

  And sitting under the stars and the sky, Edgar waited to see Almondine. She had not jumped down from the bed of the truck. He had watched for that. I just missed her, he said to himself. He closed his eyes to see it again. But she would have scented him at once. He felt himself perfectly drawn and repelled, wishing to be done with that part of his life and wishing never to let it end, knowing that whatever came next would only reduce what had already happened until there was nothing but memory, a story eroded, a dream thinly recalled.

  If she wasn’t at home, then she must have gone into town with them. It was one or the other. One or the other.

  He looked at the stand of birches, alone in the center of the field. It was the middle of August and when he stood, the timothy almost reached his waist. He stumbled through it, striking at the heads with his splayed hands. The trunks of the birches tilted and blurred and the leaves in their canopy quavered whitely. Then he was standing in the broad circle of grass scythed away at the base of the trees. There was the familiar white cross for the stillborn baby and the newer one for his father. And next to them, as yet unmarked, an oblong of fresh, dark ground.

  It blew the breath out of him. He fell like a puppet severed from its strings. He lay with his forehead pressed to the ground, the scent of iron and loam filling his nostrils, and he clutched the dirt and poured it out of his hands. An oceanic roar filled his head. All his memory, all his past, rose up to engulf him. Images of Almondine. How she liked peanut butter but not peanuts; how she preferred lima beans to corn but refused peas; how, best of all, she adored honey, any way she could get it, licked from his fingers, from his lips, dabbed on her nose. How she liked to snatch things from his hands and let him take them back. How if he cupped her chin she would lower and lower her head all the way to the ground to stay like that. How different it was to stroke her with his palm than with his fingertips. How he could lay a hand on her side while she slept and she wouldn’t open her eyes but nonetheless understood, and her breath came differently.

  He remembered a time when he was small, when Almondine was young and rambunctious, more like a wild horse than a dog to him, when she could cross the yard faster than a swallow and catch him running across that same field. He liked to sneak away—make her chase, see her fly. When she reached him, they would turn and sprint into the field, heading for a thicket of raspberry canes, a place he liked simply because he was small enough to move through it unscathed. But when they arrived, something was standing there—an animal he had never seen before, with a broad face and pointed nose and great smooth black claws. They’d run up quickly and surprised it and it turned to face them with a hoarse cough, hissing and slashing the ground, mistaking their headlong rush for a charge. Gouts of dirt sprayed the air behind its haunches. He tried to step back, but the thing bounded equally forward, tethered to him by some unseen force, staring with black marble eyes as though beholding a monster, panting throatily and turning and snapping at its hind legs and whirling to face them again, a beard of gray foam lining its jaw.

  How long Almondine stood beside him he didn’t know, transfixed by how the thing crabbed forward with each step back he took. Then she glided lengthwise between them, blocking his view and hipping him so hard he nearly fell. She didn’t run to do it, used none of the enchantments of play, nothing clever, no dancing grace. She just stepped between them and stood, tail unlashed. Then she turned and licked his face and he was stunned at what he understood her to be doing. If she moved she exposed him, and therefore she would not move. She was asking him to leave, saying it was he who could save her, not the other way around. She would not even risk a fight with the thing. She would leave only if he were gone and in such a way that it wouldn’t chase. She took her eyes off it just that one instant, to make things clear.

  He watched her standing there for the longest time as he backed away. When he reached the barn, she crouched and sprang and materialized at his side. And he remembered how they’d seen the thing, dead and fly-strewn, on the road the next day.

  There was Almondine, playing their crib game. Dancing for him, light as a dust mote.

  He thought of his father standing in the barn doorway peering skyward as a thunderstorm approached, while his mother shouted, “Gar, get indoors, for God’s sake.” That was how it was, sometimes. You put yourself in front of the thing and waited for whatever was going to happen and that was all. It scared you and it didn’t matter. You stood and faced it. There was no outwitting anything. When Almondine had been playful, she had been playful in the face of that knowledge, as defiant as before the rabid thing. It was not a morbid thought, just the world as it existed. Sometimes you looked the thing in the eye and it turned away. Sometimes it didn’t. Essay might have been taken up in the whirlwind at the lake, but she wasn’t, and there was nothing special in that except her certainty that she had driven the thing away.

  In the morning, he planned to walk into the house. He didn’t know what would happen then. Claude had been the one to find his note. He understood that. If his mother had read it, she would have run out shouting his name. But the house was dark and no one had run out.

  He rested a hand on Essay’s back and they watched the yard. He felt hollow as a gourd. He knew he wouldn’t sleep anymore that night. The yard light stood high and brilliant on its pole above the orchard, its glow enveloping the house and yard and all beyond that darkness and the sky black above. After a while Claude stepped from the porch and walked along the driveway. A stripe of light appeared beneath the back barn doors. In a few minutes the stripe winked out and Claude crossed back to the house and mounted the porch steps and without pause was swallowed up in the shadows.

  Trudy

  TRUDY LAY IN BED, HALF SLEEPING, THINKING ABOUT THE DOGS—that peculiar note of agitation she’d heard in their voices when she’d first stepped out of the truck. Not frenzy, exactly, though something akin to it, and enough to make her stop and look around the yard. She’d seen none of the usual causes for alarm—no deer poaching in the garden, no skunk scuttling into the shadows, no raccoon peering red-eyed from an apple tree. In fact, the moment she’d signed quiet the dogs had settled down. She’d decided it was just the lateness of their arrival or the spectacle of a full moon hovering in the treetops. But the edge in their voices nagged at her now. And maybe it nagged at Claude, too; as she was having these thoughts, he sat up and began to dress by the blue moonwash streaming through the window.

  “I’m going to check on those pups,” he whispered.

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “No. Stay and sleep. Back before you know it.”

  The spring on the porch door gave an iro
n yawn and then she was alone. The dogs, she suspected, weren’t the only reason Claude had gotten up. He was, for reasons she didn’t understand, embarrassed about his insomnia, reticent to the point of silence whenever she asked in the mornings how long he’d been awake. The first few times she’d woken to find him missing, she’d stolen out to watch him pace the yard, hands in his pockets, head down, walking until the steady rhythm of step, step, step worked whatever it was out of him. But mostly it was rainy nights that plagued Claude. He’d sit on the porch drawing the tip of his pocketknife across a bar of soap until a facsimile of something or another appeared in his hands and was carved down into something smaller and then something smaller yet until it finally disappeared entirely. The crumbs and curls she found in the trash spoke most eloquently of how long he’d sat in the dark.

  Trudy had her own reason for wanting to go outside. It would have been an opportunity, though belated, to stand behind the silo—to make her nightly signal that it was safe for Edgar to come home. But it had been late when they’d parked the truck and carried in the groceries, and full dark. Even so, had she found an inconspicuous reason to go out, she might have tried anyway.

  This arrangement between her and Edgar was one fact about that night in the mow she had kept secret from Claude, letting him believe, along with Glen and everyone else, that Edgar had fled, panic-stricken at the sight of Page lying so near where Gar had died. Why she’d withheld this fact from Claude, when she’d told him so much of the rest, she couldn’t have said. Partly because she’d thought it would be such a short-lived deception. The very next night she’d walked into the tall grass and stood facing the sunset, expecting to see Edgar emerge from the woods as Gar had, so long ago, shimmering into place between the aspens. Finally, afraid that Claude would ask what she was doing, she’d walked to the house, ignoring the whisper that said Edgar was there, watching, but choosing not to believe her.