“This will just take a moment,” his mother said. She shot Edgar a quizzical look and kept talking. “We try to use every opportunity to train them. When a stranger visits, the dogs naturally want to investigate. A lot of our training is just finding ways to test their skills in new situations, like holding a stay when there’s a distraction. Here, Edgar, send one of them over.”
First, tell them the dogs see everything that happens here, he signed.
What?
Just say it. Say they see everything and they never forget. You’ll understand in a minute.
He stood and waited. He thought his mother might ignore his request, but she turned to Mr. Benson and Claude and Doctor Papineau. “Edgar says to tell you that the dogs see”—she faltered for a moment, then continued—“that they see everything that happens here, and they never forget.”
Edgar was standing before the dogs, looking down the line to make sure they didn’t break. He touched Opal under the chin. She looked at him. He released her and she dashed down the aisle to the four of them standing by the workshop. Then he pulled one of the syringes from his shirt pocket. His hand was shaking and as the syringe came out, it snagged another which went clattering to the floor. He snatched it up and placed it in Baboo’s mouth.
Tag, he signed. Then he turned to watch.
Baboo trotted down the aisle with the syringe in his mouth. Edgar kept his eyes on Claude, who had caught sight of the syringe. When Baboo reached them, he pressed his nose into Opal’s hip, and Opal looked toward Edgar. He gave a small gesture with his right hand. She dropped to the floor and lay on her side.
“Well, I’ll be,” Mr. Benson said. He stooped to stroke Baboo’s muzzle and came away with a syringe in his palm.
“What’s this?” he said. He held the syringe in the light. Before anyone could answer, Edgar sent Pout and Pout tagged Baboo and Baboo went down. Mr. Benson reached over and extracted the second syringe from Pout’s mouth.
“This is part of their training? To carry medicine?”
Seeing the expression on Claude’s face, Edgar began trembling so violently he had to kneel. Finch went next; he tagged Pout, Pout looked at Edgar, hesitated, and dropped. Then it was Umbra’s turn, and Tinder’s. Each time there was a syringe and a tag on the hip, and the dog went down.
“Well, I’ll be,” Mr. Benson said. “It’s almost like…as if…Do they think…”
Claude stood watching it all. He glanced at the open door, then back at the dogs, then at Edgar.
Edgar didn’t expect the last part to work—it was different from the rest, something he’d worked out with Essay alone. He put the remaining syringe in her mouth and signaled her down the aisle. When she reached Tinder, the only dog standing, she turned to look back at him.
Left, he signed.
Essay veered around Tinder. The barrel of the syringe was sideways in her mouth. She walked up to Claude. The safety sheath was on the needle, but when she pressed the blunt soft tip of her nose into the muscle of Claude’s leg, he flinched as if he’d been stung. Edgar was walking down the aisle, neither blinking nor averting his gaze.
“Drop it!” Claude said. “Drop it!” He looked again toward the Dutch doors and then faced into the workshop and then got control of himself and took a breath and looked steadily at Edgar. A muscle under his left eye was jerking.
“What the hell, anyway!” he said, and stalked out of the barn.
Edgar began turning in the aisle, performing a weird, exhilarated dance. He signed a broad release and the downed dogs scrambled to their feet and stirred around Mr. Benson. His mother allowed herself an angry look at him, but when she spoke, her voice was cool and modulated.
“Edgar,” she said, “would you put these dogs back in their pens? I think we’ve seen enough.”
Did you see? he signed. Did you see his face?
I certainly did.
“That was extraordinary,” Mr. Benson said. “What was that?”
“I haven’t seen that before myself,” Doctor Papineau said, “and I’ve watched these dogs do some pretty unusual things.”
Edgar’s mother turned to Mr. Benson. “It doesn’t always make sense when you see it in progress,” she said.
“Go,” she said to the dogs jostling at their feet. “Kennel up. Go.”
The dogs trotted down the aisle. Edgar went to Essay’s pen and grabbed her by the ruff and scrubbed her up, then visited all the rest. Good girl. Yes. Good dog. Good girl. Everyone had walked out of the barn, and as he praised his dogs he listened for the Impala starting, but he heard only a hasty parting conversation between his mother and Mr. Benson.
It was full dark outside now. If he went to the house, there would be demands and arguments and he needed quiet to close his eyes and watch everything again—see the look on Claude’s face as Essay tagged him, the flush of blood across his cheeks, the muscle tugging his eyelid. He climbed the workshop stairs and flicked on the lights in the mow. As the sound of Mr. Benson’s truck faded, his mother stormed in.
“We’re going to talk, Edgar. Right here, right now. I want to know what that was about. Do you have any idea how embarrassing that was?”
Did you see his face? The look on his face?
“Whose face, Edgar? Mr. Benson’s? Who thinks I have a lunatic for a son? Or Claude’s? Who, by the way, is in the house right now, royally pissed off?”
He walked between straw bales scattered across the mow floor, then stopped and looked into the rafters. His breath roared in his ears.
It’s raining, he signed.
“What?”
Is it raining? Do you hear rain?
He ran to the front of the mow and unlatched the broad loading door and swung it open. He gripped the lintel and hung his body into space and looked into the stars burning in the clear night sky, then out toward the woods.
Remember me.
He pulled himself inside.
Come here, he signed. See for yourself.
“I can see from where I am. There’s no rain. Come away from there.”
But his patience was spent. He walked to her and tried to pull her forward. When she resisted he clasped his hands around her neck and swung her toward the mow door, his body counterweighted against hers. Bales and rafters spun around them. His mother tried to get her hands under his and pry them away. They’d halved the distance to the mow door when he lost his balance and they crashed to the floor. In the tumult, he knelt over her and pinned her arms. They panted. He let go and began to sign wildly.
Did you help him? Tell me now if you helped him.
“Help him? Help who?”
I’ll show you who.
He stood again and took his mother’s wrist and began to lug her toward the mow door, still hanging open onto the night. When she realized what he was doing, she began to kick along the floor to get to her feet.
From behind them came a hoarse cry. Not speech, not words, just a groan of apprehension. He looked over his shoulder. Inside the vestibule at the top of the stairs stood the chiaroscuro figure of a man. Edgar dropped his mother’s wrist and ran toward the door, so grim and ecstatic and oblivious he fell over a bale of straw and went down, legs kicking. When he’d scrambled to his feet again, the hay hook was in his hand. He threw himself at the doorway, hook dragging through the air behind like a great single claw. The figure stepped deeper into the shadows and tried to close the vestibule door, but Edgar struck it headlong before it latched.
The door slammed back with a splintering boom. There was a grunt and then the sound of a body tumbling heavily on the stairs. Then silence. Edgar looked up to find the hay hook driven thumb deep into the timber of the doorframe. He wrenched the thing free and flung it ringing across the mow. His mother had gotten to her feet and was running toward him, saying, “What was that? What did you do?” but he couldn’t answer at first. A savage, godish electricity ran through his nerves. From his chest, a spasm rose. His hands snapped open and shut so that he could barely force them into sig
n.
I should have done it the first night he stayed here.
Only after his mother cried out did he follow her into the vestibule. She was standing halfway down the stairs, the heels of her hands pressed to her temples. At the bottom of the stairwell lay Doctor Papineau, feet askew on a high tread, head on the workshop floor, canted horribly. One of his arms was flung forward, gesturing casually away. Edgar pushed past his mother and stepped over the veterinarian’s body. He bent to look. The old man’s eyes were skimming over even then.
Tears streamed down his mother’s face as she descended the stairs.
Edgar stood. The muscles of his legs were still twitching with whatever galvanic charge had possessed him in the mow.
Now you cry? You think this is terrible? Don’t you have dreams? Isn’t he there when you sleep?
“My God, Edgar. This is not your father. This is Doctor Papineau. This is Page.”
Edgar looked at the old man lying there, so small and frail. The same man who’d summoned the strength to lift him out of the snow by the back of his shirt.
He wasn’t so innocent. I heard them talking.
His mother put her face in her hands. “How are we going to tell Glen?” she said. “I don’t understand what’s happened with you. We’re going to have to…have to…”
She looked at him. “Wait,” she said. “I need to think for a minute. Page fell down the stairs.”
She dropped into sign. You need to go.
I’m not going anywhere.
Yes, you are. I want you to run, get out into the field. Find a place to hide until tomorrow.
Why?
Just go!
So you can be rid of us both?
He didn’t see her hand moving any more than the dogs saw her leash corrections. A hot jolt traveled from his cheek to his spine. He staggered back against the wall to keep from toppling onto Doctor Papineau’s body. The side of his face felt like it had been set on fire.
Don’t you dare, she signed, and she was Raksha now, Mother Wolf. You’re talking to your mother and you’ll do as I say. I want you to go. Stay away until you see me standing behind the silo, alone. Watch in the evening. When you see me, it’s safe to come back. Until then, disappear. Even if we call, stay away.
He turned and stumbled out of the workshop and into a yard pale and blue in the moonlight. He squinted past the light above the kennel doors. The night sky cloudless. There was no time to fetch tackle. He rounded the barn and unlatched the pen doors and signaled his litter out. Seven dogs bounded into the grass. Together they ran down the slope behind the barn until they reached the rock pile, and there Edgar sat, senseless, while the dogs milled about. He watched Claude cross from the house to the barn and back. He closed his eyes. Time passed, whether a minute or an hour, he couldn’t have said. Then his mother was calling, “Edgar! Edgar!” Her voice toylike and shrunken.
The stars wheeled in his vision. Impossible that he had ever lived there.
He stood. He began to run, the dogs beside him. As they reached the woods, a squad car appeared on the road at the top of the hill, blue and red flashers strobing the trees and throwing off a dopplered siren scream. Glen Papineau, come to find his father. Now there was no going back for Almondine, he thought. And having thought it, found it almost impossible not to turn back.
The moonlight was enough to see the two birches marking the entrance to the old logging trail. The dogs crashed through the underbrush in crazy ellipse, all but Baboo, who trailed a few steps behind. The woods were so much darker than the field. He didn’t understand how little progress they’d made until the headlights of the squad car, bouncing over the tractor-rutted field, lit the tree trunks in front of him. Spears and creases of white shot between the trees, but Edgar would not turn his dark-adapted eyes back to look. They wouldn’t bring the squad car into the woods—it couldn’t make headway on the logging path, and there would be no way to turn it around without miring it.
Fifty yards from the creek, the ground began to slope downward. The dogs were cast wide about him now. When he reached the water, he clapped his hands. Baboo had stayed nearby and sat by his leg, panting. Finch materialized from a stand of bracken, followed by Opal and Umbra, like shadows out of shadows. Then Pout and Tinder. In the dark, it took a long time to be sure it was Essay who was missing. He stood again and clapped hard and listened to the water flowing along the creek bed. Then he could wait no longer. When he walked into the creek, the water covered his ankles, cool and slick. He grabbed the first fence post he touched and hauled it back and forth until it came loose, gasping in its hole. The thing was as heavy as a granite pillar and he had to kneel in the water to get it to move. When it finally came up, he balanced the rough end of it on a flat rock in the creek.
Two of the dogs bounded into the water even before he could call them, though in the dark he couldn’t tell who. He pushed them under the wire and they stood on the far side and shook off. He clapped for the others. The remaining four dogs paced beside the creek but would come no farther. A flashlight beam began to cut through the air overhead. The dogs whined and looked over their shoulders. Finally Edgar stepped out of the creek and knelt and put his hands in their ruffs and pressed his face against the crowns of their heads. Finch and Pout and Opal and Umbra. Then he stepped back and released them. At first they sat and looked at him uncertainly. Then Finch wheeled and tracked up the slope in the direction they’d come and the other three followed, crashing along his trail.
Edgar walked into the shallow water of the creek and scrambled beneath the barbed wire. He lost his footing trying to reseat the post; the hole had filled with mud and suddenly he found himself lying flat in the water and wet to the sternum. In the end he left the post standing cockeyed in the stream. He’d wanted to set it back the right way but doubted it would make much difference.
He sank to the ground on the far bank of the creek. Not two but three dogs greeted him: Baboo and Tinder and Essay, Essay having crossed elsewhere on her own terms. They jostled and licked his face and danced around him like savages performing some ancient, unnamed ritual. As though they knew exactly what lay ahead. His hands, when he rose, were covered with clay. A paste of it had begun to dry and crack on his face. He cupped his hands in the creek and emptied the water over his head again and again. Then he stood and turned from everything he knew and the four of them began to make their way into the dark Chequamegon.
Part IV
CHEQUAMEGON
Flight
THIN REMNANTS OF MOONLIGHT PERMEATED THE WOODS. SWEET fern arced throat-high over the old logging path, cloaking blackberry canes hidden like saw blades in sheaths. Spray of dark sumac. Shafts of birch and aspen, faintly luminescing. Overhead, a pale and narrowing crack divided the forest canopy, marking their way more clearly than any earthly thing. For fear of jutting branches, he held his hands across his face and let the blackberry thorns rip his clothes. Now and then he stopped and clapped for the dogs. They came and snuffled nose and lip against his palm and vanished again, so sure in the dark. He paused. Peered after them. Shadow upon shadow, all of it. He swung his foot forward and began again. All around, fireflies glowed their radium bellies. The voices calling after them had long since faded into the creak of tree trunks flexing in the night breeze like the timbers of a vast ship. They hadn’t circled; he couldn’t have said how he knew. The direction of the wind, perhaps, or the westering cast of the moonlight. When a stand of birches glowed blue where he expected a gap he understood the path had fizzled out or they’d lost it.
After a time he came upon the dogs, bunched and waiting. He counted noses, then moved his hands about in the dark, trying to understand why they’d stopped. His fingers brushed a wire, barbed and rusted, and a weather-split fence post. He slid his hands down the knotted wood until he’d located the bottom strand of wire, then he sidestepped away from the fence post, bent over and tracing the barbs loosely with his fingers. He stopped when there was enough slack to haul the wire up. He
clapped twice and the dogs came forward. By touch he moved them under the wire—Essay first, he guessed, then Tinder, then Baboo. They were panting and hot as they went. He rolled under last of all and stood and pointlessly brushed off his clothes, wet and hanging on him like sheets of wax. He looked up. Islands of stars in a lake of black. The forest spectral and pathless all around. He set off in a direction he hoped was west. Hours of the night passed.
He stopped when the woods opened onto a glade. The moon was high and bright, and before him the charcoaled skeletons of trees rose from blue marsh grass. He blinked at the excess moonlight in the clearing and clapped for the dogs. High in the crown of a charred tree, an owl revolved its dished face, and one branch down, three small replicas followed. Baboo came at once. Tinder had begun pushing into the tall grass and he turned and trotted back. Edgar clapped again and waited. When Essay did not appear he led Tinder and Baboo into the trees and touched his hand to the ground. The dogs circled and downed. He paced a few steps away and unzipped his pants. His urine seemed to take with it all the warmth in his body. He peeled off his wet shirt and jeans and hung them on a branch and stood there in the night, clad only in underpants. Clammy as they were, he could not bring himself to take them off. He walked back and lay next to Baboo. Baboo raised his head and looked at Edgar’s arm draped across his chest and laid his head down again. When they were all settled, Essay stepped out of a deer track in the sedge. She sniffed the three of them and walked to the clearing’s edge and peered upward and returned and stood panting until Edgar sat up and set his hand on her croup. She downed and tucked against his back, grunting with what sounded like disapproval. One after another the dogs heaved sighs and pressed their heads tight to their sides.
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle Page 34