The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
THE DOCTOR BRINGS IN SOMEONE NEW, a man with a beard and black hair that falls to his shoulders. The man signs hello to him, a flick of his hand off his forehead, then asks him something, signing faster than Edgar has ever seen, one sign melting into another.
Too fast, he signs.
He grabs the man’s wrists and makes him to do it again.
The man turns to the doctor, speaks a few words, and the doctor nods.
You sound funny, Edgar signs. The man laughs, and even that is odd.
Do I? he signs. I’m deaf. I’ve never heard my voice.
Edgar stares at him as if he didn’t know a deaf person would look just the same. From behind the man, his mother frowns and shakes her head.
How old are you? the man signs.
Almost four, he says. He holds up four fingers, with his thumb tucked in, bumps the I-hand twice against his heart.
You’re very good. I couldn’t sign like you when I was four.
I’m backward from you. I can hear okay.
Yes. It’s good we both sign.
Can you sign with your dogs? Mine don’t always understand.
My dog never understands, the man signs, smiling.
Almondine understands when I say this. And Edgar signs something that only he and Almondine know. They watch Almondine approach.
The man pauses and looks at the doctor.
STANDING IN THE AISLE OF THE BARN. His father sits in one of the pens with a mother, stroking her ears. The mother is so old even her tail shows gray. She lies on her side, panting. His father points to the ceiling beams running crossways to the main aisle and tells him they came from trees Schultz felled in the woods behind the barn.
“The first spring, leaves sprouted from those beams,” he says, and Edgar sees for the first time the knots and scrapes, sees the tree hidden in each beam and sees as well Schultz and his ponies heaving them up through the field. A string of bare lightbulbs runs the length of the aisle, one descending from every other beam.
“Hang on, gorgeous,” his father says, turning back to the mother.
When Doctor Papineau arrives, Edgar leads him into the barn.
“Over here, Page,” Edgar’s father says.
Doctor Papineau enters the pen and kneels. He runs his hands over the mother’s belly and presses the coined tip of a stethoscope to her chest. Then he walks to his car and fetches a satchel.
Edgar’s father turns to him.
“Go up to the house now,” he says.
From the satchel, Doctor Papineau lifts a bottle and a syringe.
TWO ROLLING HILLS SPAN the south field, one near their yard, one farther out. There’s a rock pile in the middle, and a small grove of birches, and a cross. Waves of hay lie over in the August breeze. Edgar plunges through the field, trying to lose Almondine. Always their game. He cuts around the rocks, dives under a birch and lies as quietly as he can. He peers at the white cross, standing alone between him and the yard, and he wonders again what it means. It is so simple, straight, and square, and sometime not too long before, it has taken on a fresh, brilliant white coat of paint.
Then the stalks of hay part and Almondine trots up, panting. She flops down and presses a paw to his chest as if to say, don’t do that again. It’s too hot for these games. But he jumps up and races away, and she’s there beside him, mouth open in a smile.
So often, she runs ahead.
So often, he finds her waiting when he arrives.
A LATE SPRING AFTERNOON. Edgar and his mother sit on the living room couch. The television shows gray static, and the speakers hiss. All the shades are raised. Clouds like bruises scud over the fields. Outside, a sizzle-flash. There’s a snap from the kitchen as sparks fly from the electric sockets. He counts one, two, three, until the thunder rolls back at them from the hills.
“It’s the iron in the ground, it draws the lightning,” his father has said. “See how red the dirt is? This is where the Iron Range begins.”
The pines flap their branches in the gusts, swimmers in the wind. He walks to the window to see if the treetops actually pierce the clouds. A tatter of white steam passes over the thrashing treetops, sliding counter to the motion of the storm.
“Come away from the window,” his mother says.
Splats of rain hit the glass. Outside, an instant of brilliant light, and sparks leap from the kitchen outlets again. Thunder never arrives, and the extended silence is eerie.
Was that cold lightning?
“Probably.”
There’s hot lightning and cold lightning, she has told him. Only hot lightning makes thunder. The difference is important: a person hit by hot lightning is fried on the spot. A person struck by cold lightning walks away without a mark.
His mother sits on the chair and watches the clouds. “I wish your father would come in here.”
I’ll get him.
“No you won’t. You’ll stay right here with me.” She gives him a look that means no kidding around.
I’m taller than you now, he signs, trying to make her relax. Lately, he’s begun to tease her about being the shortest in the family. She gives him a tight-lipped smile and turns back to the television. He doesn’t quite know what they should be looking for, just that it will be obvious. From a Reader’s Digest article she’s learned about the Weller Method, which they are now performing. The television is tuned to Channel 2 and dimmed until the static is nearly black.
“We just keep watching,” she’d explained. “If a tornado comes near, the screen turns white from the electrical field.”
They divide their attention between the jitter on the tube and the advancing shelf of cloud. His mother has an endless store of meteorological anecdotes: ball lightning, tornadoes, hurricanes. But today, as during all the worst storms, a haunted look occupies her face, and he knows those stories roil inside her like the clouds in the sky. The television fizzles and crackles. Still, she is okay until Almondine comes over and leans against her for reassurance.
“That’s it,” she says. “Down we go.”
The basement stairs are on the back porch. Through the screen door they see his father standing in the doorway of the barn, his hair tousled by the wind. He’s leaning against the jamb, almost casually, his face turned skyward.
“Gar!” his mother shouts. “Come in. We’re going to the basement.”
“I’ll stay here,” he calls back. The wind makes his voice tinny and small. “It’s going to be a wild one. You go on.”
She shakes her head and ushers them down the stairs. “Shoo, shoo,” she says. “Let’s go.”
Almondine plunges down the steps before them. There’s a latched door at the bottom and she waits with nose pressed to the crack, sniffing. Once inside, they squint at the clouds through the dusty basement transom windows. No rain is falling—only drips and blobs of water blown sideways through the air.
“What does he think he’ll accomplish out there?” she says, fuming. “All he wants to do is watch the storm.”
You’re right. He just stands in the doorway like that.
“The dogs can take care of themselves. It’s having him out there that stirs them up. As if he could protect the barn. It’s ridiculous.”
Lightning plunges into the field nearby. Thunder shakes the house.
“Oh, God,” his mother says.
This last strike has started Edgar’s heart smashing, too. He dashes up the cement stairs for a look. As he reaches the top, there’s a blue-white flash, dazzlingly bright, and a bomb sound, then he’s flying down the stairs again, but not before he’s seen for himself: his father, still standing with one hand on the barn door, braced as if daring the storm to touch him.
And it is clear then that everything so far has been a prelude. The wind blows not in fits and gusts but with a sustained howl that makes Edgar wonder when the windows will shatter from the pressure. Almondine whines and he draws his hand along her back and croup. A timber groans from inside the walls. His mother has herded them to the so
“Sit tight,” his mother says.
Edgar can see her thinking, eye of the storm, but his father’s voice echoes across the yard: “That was a doozy!” Outside, it is impossible not to look first at the sky, where a field of summer cumulus, innocuous and white, stretches westward. The storm clouds glower above the treetops across the road. The house and barn seem untouched. The pine trees stand quiet and whole, the apple trees intact at first glance, until he notices that every blossom has been stripped bare, every petal swept away by the wind. Hardly a drop of rain has fallen, and the air is dusty and choking. Edgar and Almondine circulate through the house, plugging in the stove, the toaster, the dryer, the air-conditioner in the living room window. The mailman pauses his car beside the mailbox and drives off with a wave. Edgar jogs up the driveway to fetch the contents, a single letter, hand-addressed to his father. The postmark says, Portsmouth, Virginia.
He is reaching for the handle on the porch door when his father’s shout rises from behind the barn.
THE FOUR OF THEM STAND in the weeds behind the barn, gazing upward. A ragged patch of shingles the size of the living room floor hangs from the eaves like a flap of crusty skin, thick with nails. A third of the roof lies exposed, gray and bare. Before their eyes the barn has become the weathered hull of a ship, upturned.
But what astonishes them, what makes them stand with jaws agape, is this: near the peak, a dozen roofing boards have detached from the rafters and curled back in long, crazy-looking hoops that stop just short of making a circle. The most spectacular corkscrew up and away, as if a giant hand had reached down and rolled them between its fingers. Where the boards have peeled back, the ribs of the barn show through, roughly joined and mortised by Schultz so long ago. The breeze rattles the roofing boards like bones. A thin alphabet of yellow straw dust escapes from the mow and flies over the barn’s long spine.
After a while, Edgar remembers the letter.
Lifts it, absently.
Holds it out to his father.
Every Nook and Cranny
EARLY MORNING, A WEEK AFTER THE STORM HAD INFLICTED ITS peculiar damage on the barn roof. Edgar and Almondine stood atop the bedroom stairs, boy and dog surveying twelve descending treads, their surfaces crested by smooth-sanded knots and shot with cracks wide enough to stand a nickel in and varnished so thickly by Schultz that all but the well-worn centers shone with a maroon gloss. Treacherous for people in stockinged feet and unnerving to the four-legged. What most impressed Edgar was not their appearance but their gift for vocalization—everything from groans to nail-squeals and many novelties besides, depending on the day of the week or the humidity or what book you happened to be carrying. The challenge that morning was to descend in silence—not just Edgar, but Edgar and Almondine together.
He knew the pattern of quiet spots by heart. Far right on the twelfth and eleventh step, tenth and ninth safe anywhere, the eighth, good on the left, the sixth and fifth, quiet in the middle, a tricky switch from the far right of the fourth to left-of-middle on the third, and so on. But the seventh step had never let them by without a grunt or a rifle-shot crack. He’d lost interest in the riddle of it for a long time, but the sight of the barn’s demented roofing planks had reminded him that wood in all shapes could be mysterious and he’d resolved to try again.
He negotiated the first four steps and turned. Here, he signed, pointing to a place on the tread for Almondine. Here. Here. Each time she placed a broad padded foot where his fingers touched the tread, and silence ensued. Then he stood on the eighth step, the brink, with Almondine nosing his back and waiting.
He swung his foot over the seventh tread like a dowser looking for water. Toward the right side, he knew, the thing creaked. In the middle, it let out a sound like a rust-seized door hinge. His foot hovered and drifted over the wood. Finally, it came to a stop above an owl-eyed swirl of grain near the wall on the left. He carefully settled his weight onto the tread.
Silence.
He stepped quickly down to the sixth and fifth and turned back and picked up Almondine’s foot and stroked it.
He tapped the owl-eye. Here.
She stepped down.
Yes, good girl.
In time they stood at the base of the stairs together, having arrived without a sound. A quiet moment of exaltation passed between them and they headed for the kitchen. He didn’t intend to tell anyone he’d found the way down. They were a small family living in a small farmhouse, with no neighbors and hardly any time or space to themselves. If he managed to share one secret with his father and a different one with his mother and yet another with Almondine the world felt that much larger.
THEY DIDN’T SAY WHERE HIS FATHER was going, only that it was a long day’s drive before he would return with Claude. It was late May and school was in session, though barely, and when he asked to go along he knew the answer would be no. That morning he and Almondine and his mother watched the truck top the hill on Town Line Road and then they walked to the barn for morning chores. A pile of secondhand LPs and an old suitcase-style record player occupied a lower shelf of the workshop. Two pennies had been taped to the needle arm, covering the lightning-bolt Z in the “Zenith” embossed in the fluted metal. Through the speaker grill a person could make out the filaments glowing igneous orange in their silver-nippled tubes. His mother unsleeved one of her favorite records and set it on the turntable. Edgar cleaned the kennel to the sound of Patsy Cline’s voice. When he finished he found his mother in the whelping room. She was holding a pup in the air in front of her, examining it and singing under her breath how she was crazy for tryin’, crazy for cryin’, crazy for loving it.
The truck was still gone when he got off the school bus that afternoon. His mother enlisted his help retrieving sheets from the clothesline.
“Don’t they smell great?” she said, holding the fabric to her face. “It’s so nice to hang them out again.”
They tramped up the stairs to the spare room, located across the hallway from Edgar’s bedroom. That morning it had been brimming with stacks of Dog World and Field and Stream and a menagerie of castoff furniture and broken appliances and many other familiars. A rollaway bed with a pinstriped mattress closed up clam-style. A set of seat-split kitchen chairs. Two brass floor lamps, teetering like long-legged birds. And most of all, innumerable cross-flapped cardboard boxes, which he’d spent long afternoons digging through hoping to unearth an old photo album. They had photographs of every dog they’d ever raised but none of themselves. Perhaps, he’d thought, one of those boxes held some faded image that would reveal how his mother and father had met.
His mother swung the door open with a flourish.
“What do you think?” she asked. “I’ll give you a hint. Personally, I can’t believe the difference.”
She was right. The room was transformed. The boxes were gone. The window glass sparkled. The wooden floor had been swept and mopped and the foldaway bed had been laid out flat and at its head a little table he had never seen before acted as a nightstand. A warm breeze sucked the freshly laundered curtains against the screen and blew them out again and somehow the whole room smelled like a lemon orchard.
Great, he signed. It’s never looked this good.
“Of course not, it’s been filled with junk! Know what the best part is? Your father says that this used to be Claude’s room when he was growing up. Can you imagine that? Here, you get that side.” She billowed a sheet over the mattress and they tucked their way up from the foot of the bed. Each of them stuffed a pillow into a pillowcase. His mother kept looking at him as they worked. Finally
“What’s bothering you?”
Nothing. I don’t know. He paused and looked around. What did you do with everything?
“I found some nooks and crannies. A lot of it I put in the basement. I thought you and your father could cart those old chairs to the dump this weekend.”
Then she slipped into sign, which she performed unhurriedly and with great precision.
Did you want to ask me something about Claude?
Have I ever met him? When I was little?
No. I’ve only met him once myself. He enlisted in the navy the year before I met your father, and he’s only been back once, for your grandfather’s funeral.
Why did he join the navy?
I don’t know. Sometimes people enlist to see more of the world. Your father says Claude didn’t always get along with your grandfather. That’s another reason people enlist. Or maybe none of those things.
How long is he staying?
A while. Until he finds a place of his own. He’s been gone a long time. He might not stay at all. This might be too small of a place for him now.
Does he know about the dogs?
She laughed. He grew up here. He probably doesn’t know them like your father does, not anymore. He sold his share of the kennel to your father when your grandfather died.
Edgar nodded. After they were finished he waited until his mother was occupied and then carried the lamps up from the basement to his room. He set them on opposite ends of his bookshelves, and he and Almondine spent the afternoon pulling books off the shelves and leafing through them.
IT WAS LONG AFTER DARK when the headlights of the truck swept the living room walls. Edgar and his mother and Almondine waited on the back porch while his father turned the truck around by the barn. The porch light glinted off the glass of the windshield and the truck rolled to a stop. His father got out of the cab, his expression serious, even cross, though it softened when he looked up at them. He gave a small, silent wave, then walked to the rear of the truck and opened the topper and lifted out a lone suitcase. At first Claude stayed inside the cab, visible only in silhouette. He craned his neck to look around. Then the passenger door swung open and he stepped out and Edgar’s father walked up beside him.