The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

by David Wroblewski

  So it had gone the next evening. And all the evenings after.

  What had possessed her to tell Edgar to leave? Almost instantly she’d realized it was unnecessary and foolish, but by then he’d disappeared. Standing behind the silo had become her daily penance for that mistake, though one that did nothing to ease her mind. Her only consolation was that the dogs who’d followed Edgar had never turned up, which meant they were still out there. Which meant he was safe. She drew a ragged breath, thinking of it: he was all that remained of her family, and he was somewhere.

  But sometimes Trudy couldn’t help imagining that Edgar had returned, just once, on an evening when she’d found no excuse to be outside and he’d lost hope and set off for good. What came into her mind at those times was the image of a black seed, grown now into a vine with stems and leaves of perfect black—an image from those days long ago that followed her last miscarriage.

  (The night was hot. Her thoughts had begun to drift on a plane between reverie and sleep; circling, eddying. She gave herself over to them, a lucid passenger in her own mind.)

  She and Gar had been so certain everything was okay with the pregnancy. Afterward, there had been in her a void, a raw, sunlight-scraped center—something atrocious that muttered how simple it would be to fall down the stairs. To find a quiet place on the river and walk in. Eating had been like pouring sand into her mouth. Sleep a suffocation. Relief came only when she turned inward and embraced that place. The decision was indulgent and self-pitying, yes, but time passed there in such a soothing contraction. When she opened her eyes, it was morning. Gar was holding a cup of coffee for her. When he walked away she closed her eyes and then it was another morning, and the day had passed.

  Each hour spent like that poisoned her, she’d thought, yet the sensation was irresistible, enthralling, equal parts dread and desire. She’d roused herself, finally, out of a perversely selfish concern for Gar, because a retreat to that black center would provide her no peace if he were dragged down too. She’d forced herself out of bed and gone downstairs. Gar had been almost giddy. He’d left her alone on the porch and returned cradling that feral pup, so chilled it barely drew breath, black and gray and brown in his hands, eyes glittering, feet scuffling against his palm. And that was the first thing to move her—the first tangible thing—since the stillbirth. From the moment she touched the nursling she’d known it wouldn’t survive, but just as certainly had known they would have to try.

  The crib had been ready for weeks. Live or die, she wanted the pup to decide there. For those preparations to have some purpose. When Almondine woke her in the night, she’d leaned over the wooden rails and carried the pup to the rocking chair and set it in the folds of her robe. She’d rocked and watched the pup. Did it have its own black place? she wondered. It wasn’t injured. Could it simply choose to live? And if it wanted to die, why did it struggle so? She traced the tines of its ribs, the pinfeather fur of its belly. Somehow a bargain was articulated between them; Trudy was unsure how that had happened, only that it was so. Then the pup closed its eyes and gave a last, infinitesimal sigh.

  It was one thing to live in a world where death stood a distant figure, quite another to hold it in your hands, and Trudy had held it now twice within a month. She thought that night she’d made a pact with death itself: she could stay if she allowed death to stay as well. In choosing life, she embraced contradiction. The night passed. By the time Gar found them the next morning, a great swell of sorrow had risen in her and receded and in its wake the black place had been reduced to a grain.

  Afterward she poured her life into the few of them there—into Gar, into Almondine, into the dogs and their training. She locked away that shriveled particle, ignoring and submerging it under feverish work. Years passed. Edgar was born, a never-ending mystery to them all, it seemed, except the dogs. Trudy seldom thought about that night. She came to believe that the black place had left her and to remember with the full force of her imagination would only call it back.

  She’d been wrong. After Gar’s funeral, when the pneumonia was at its peak, that tiny seed appeared again in her sleep. Its hull cracked. From the fissure a thread sprouted, delicate as silk. It vanished like a skittish animal the next morning. But her deepest fever dreams were yet to come, and in them she coaxed that tendril out. It circled her hips, her waist, her breasts. It wove itself through her hair and across her face until it bound her up, every inch of it velvety black. A comfort at first. Then she woke one morning to discover the tendrils had become a cage. There was a moment of panic before she remembered how it worked; and then she drew a breath and turned toward it.

  She’d made some decisions during the time that followed, bad decisions, possibly. She’d convinced herself that Edgar’s resentment toward Claude would lessen. Now she wondered if that hadn’t played a part in Edgar’s staying away. She could not look directly at this thought, or the thought that Edgar might never return. Such things could be examined only in the periphery of her mind. Such were the contradictions she’d learned to live with. In July, Claude arranged placements for two of Edgar’s litter—Opal and Umbra, the ones Edgar called “the twins”—but when the time came, Trudy balked. Had grown hysterical, in fact, at any diminishment of her son’s presence. The placements were canceled. To placate everyone, she agreed to let two pups go instead. Something they had never done before.

  (In the bedroom, Claude had returned. He sat on the edge of the mattress, unbuttoning his shirt. She sighed and turned away.)

  For weeks after the pneumonia she forced herself out to the kennel, pretending to be recovering. No, not pretending—she was recovering, in her body. In the mornings, after Edgar boarded the school bus, the silence in the barn was intolerable. Playing music, even worse. Almondine found her and curled up and slept nearby, a comfort, but the bed called to her so strongly, the weight of her encumbrance was so great that by midmorning most days she was in the house exhausted and asleep.

  One day, just after noon, Claude’s Impala appeared at the end of the driveway. Trudy watched from the porch as he swung open the barn door and walked inside. She sat in the living room and waited. Finally, she went to the barn. She found him weighing a pup and making notes. He looked at her but said nothing. That entire first week passed almost wordlessly between them except for small questions, immediate problems. Trudy didn’t welcome Claude’s presence, and she couldn’t hide that; she wanted to ask him to leave, but she knew she needed the help. Each day, before Edgar came home, Claude got into his car and drove off, sometimes with no more than a sidelong “G’bye.” Twice, when she looked up, he was simply gone.

  That Saturday, when Claude didn’t show up, all she felt was relief. By midafternoon on Sunday she found herself looking out the window. The Impala appeared again late Monday morning. Trudy lay in bed, unable to rouse herself. Then, anger. What was it he wanted? Silent or not, Claude kept coming for a reason. But she needed to be left alone. What little energy she could muster was spent stumbling through the chores and looking after Edgar. She stalked to the barn. Claude was kneeling on the floor of the medicine room. The drawers and cabinets all stood open. Vials of pills and stainless-steel scissors and packages of gauze and bottles of Phisohex and Betadine surrounded him. She intended to ask him to leave but instead blurted out a question.

  “Just tell me this. Do you miss him?”

  Claude stood and looked at her and licked his lips. He took a breath deep enough to make his shoulders rise.

  “No,” he said. And then, after a pause: “I remember him, though. I remember him just like he was.”

  She had expected some facile lie. She’d hoped for that; it would make it easier to tell Claude to leave. But he’d spoken the words as if offering a gift of some kind. A reparation. In the silence that followed, she thought he might even apologize for his answer (that would be false, too), but he simply waited. His posture, and the look in his eyes, said he would go if she asked. She still didn’t understand what he was doing, but
he wasn’t trying to force his presence on her. He was coming, she thought, for some purpose of his own, to assuage some memory or feeling connected with Gar. Or maybe he was making amends for not grieving his brother’s death.

  “If you’re going to keep coming out, you could at least ask me what needs to be done,” she said.

  “What, then?”

  The first thing that came to mind was that the medicine room was a disaster, that it needed to be thoroughly cleaned, the expired medicines discarded, reorganized. But they were standing in the middle of it, and he was already engaged in exactly that.

  “One of Alice’s tires went flat over the winter,” she said.

  “All right. What else?”

  “Nothing. Everything.”

  “Leave the pens in the morning,” he said. “I’ll clean them when I come out.”

  WHAT HAPPENED WAS THIS: when Trudy felt most vulnerable, she had seen in Claude a chance to anchor herself, to stop the backward slide that, alone, she could not check. She asked him to recall something of Gar.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Anything. Tell me the first thing you remember about him. Your earliest memory.”

  His eyes fluttered briefly and he looked away.

  “You might not like it,” he said. “I knew a different Gar than you.”

  “That’s okay,” she said. “Just tell me.” But inside, she thought: I hope so. If you knew the same Gar, we’re both lost.

  “If you really want to know, what I remember is a snowstorm,” he said. “The start of a blizzard—the first one I’d ever seen. I couldn’t have been more than three years old, because seeing that much snow falling was a shock. We were standing in the living room looking out the window, across the backyard and down the field. Everything began to disappear—first the trees at the bottom of the field, then the whole field, and then even the barn. I got the idea that the world had changed forever. It got me so excited I wanted to go outside. I remember wanting to see how many snowflakes I could grab in my hand. Whether I could follow one of them all the way down to the ground and see it land. I wanted to taste one. I didn’t understand that it would be cold and I couldn’t see why Gar stopped me. Except, now that I think about it, he didn’t care about the cold. What he cared was that no one—”

  “—put tracks in the snow,” she whispered.

  Claude looked surprised and nodded.

  “That’s right. He told me how, if we waited until morning, we’d wake up and be amazed. The truck would have disappeared. The barn would be an igloo. But only if we didn’t trample the snow while it was falling. But I’d latched onto the idea that something tremendous was happening—that some force had been let loose, and by morning it would all be back to normal—and I started to run. Next thing I know, he’s standing between me and the kitchen door, pushing me back and yelling.”

  Yes, she thought. All those thunderstorms with Gar standing in the doorway of the barn, watching the sky. A knot inside her relaxed. Claude hadn’t known a different Gar, just a younger one. She laughed. Unbelievably, she laughed. Later she’d cried, of course, the way a person cries when a salve is finally applied to a burn. But most miraculous of all, she’d rested that night for the first time since Gar had died.

  The next day she called to Claude from the porch door and poured him coffee. She’d asked whether they had ended up going out into the snow after all, or had they waited until morning. She felt she was treading some dangerous ground, that if she pulled too hard (and that was her instinct—to seize the thread of story Claude had offered and yank it with all her might) it would silence him. A seduction of sorts began. Yes: sexual. He wanted that more than she, but she wasn’t unwilling. They weren’t exactly trading one thing for the other. True, sometimes when she ran out of questions, she found herself leading him into the bedroom, and there was always an element of gratitude about the act. But there was selfishness as well. And at night, she slept. She blissfully slept.

  The irony was, the more Claude’s memories of Gar released her from the haunting she felt, the more they’d occupied Claude. By listening to his stories, Trudy was finally able to say goodbye—goodbye to the young Gar, the teenaged Gar, the Gar she had never known but had, somehow, expected to know. Claude spoke about his older brother in a clear-eyed, unsentimental tone. She learned things that only a brother could know, particularly a younger brother who had grown up in Gar’s shadow, studying him, copying him, worshipping him, and fighting horrendously with him.

  How could she explain any of that to Edgar? How could she say that she needed Claude because Claude knew Gar and wasn’t destroyed by his death? How could she say that when she missed Gar most she talked to Claude and he told her stories and for a moment, she remembered, really remembered, that Gar had existed. How could she explain that she could get out of bed in the morning if there was a chance she might touch Gar again?

  AND SLOWLY, SHE LEARNED about Claude. The great distracter. He took an almost malevolent pleasure in tempting the dogs while she trained them. One day, when she was proofing recalls, he walked across the yard with a cardboard box filled with squirrels—not that she knew it at the time. When the dogs had crossed halfway to her, he yanked open a flap and three gray streaks shot across the lawn. The dogs had wheeled and chased.

  “Okay,” she said, laughing. “How’d you do that?”

  “Ah. Ancient Chinee secwet,” he said.

  Claude’s gift—if that’s what it could be called—was all the more baffling for its effortlessness. He seemed to know every human recreation within a day’s drive. Unsolicited, people bore news to him of celebrations, large or small. Everything from the feed mill codgers’ plan to sample the diner’s new meat loaf to baseball games and back-alley fights. That very evening they had set out to buy groceries in Park City and ended up at, of all things, a wedding reception in someone’s backyard, the friend of a cousin of a man Claude had once met at The Hollow. Just for an hour, Claude had promised, though it had been close to midnight when they’d driven home. As an orphan, handed from relation to relation a half dozen times before she was twelve, Trudy could wield an insular self-reliance, but how could she not be charmed when a group of near-strangers welcomed them—people she’d lived among for all these years but had never met. How could that be?

  Comparing Claude and Gar was a bad idea, she knew, but in this way they were such opposites. Gar had, if anything, repelled commotion, even happy commotion, in favor of a passionate orderliness. Those breeding records—so many drawers overflowing with log sheets, photographs, notes, pedigrees—Gar loved them. He’d believed as fervently in the power of breeding as she believed in training—that there was nothing in a dog’s character that couldn’t be adapted to useful work. Not changed, but accommodated and, ultimately, transformed. That was what people didn’t understand. Unless they had worked long and hard at it, most people thought training meant forcing their will on a dog. Or that training required some magical gift. Both ideas were wrong. Real training meant watching, listening, diverting a dog’s exuberance, not suppressing it. You couldn’t change a river into a sea, but you could trace a new channel for it to follow. This was a debate she and Gar had cheerfully never resolved. Gar claimed her training successes proved that his records, properly interpreted, brought each new generation of pups closer to some ideal, even if he could not put that ideal into words. Trudy knew better. The training had, if anything, gotten more difficult over the years.

  But Claude paid those files scant attention. To him, they were nothing more than a means to an end. He was more interested in catching the eye of the Carruthers catalog people after the branch kennel arrangement fell through with Benson, the man from Texas, who’d witnessed enough the night Edgar had run to be apprehensive instead of enthusiastic.

  Perhaps the diversions were no accident. Whenever she began to brood, Claude practically leapt to draw her away, toward wine and music, things immediate and uncomplicated. A movie in Ashland. Back road drives
through bosky glades. A walk by the falls, where the Bad River crashed through granite sluices with an engulfing roar. She’d given in to that last idea more than once; standing on the footbridge across that gray chasm, he’d produced a flask of brandy and they’d watched the water clench its fist in the air and drop away. After he’d taken a few turns at the brandy, he’d murmured, “Mid these dancing rocks at once and ever, it flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion, through wood and dale the sacred river ran, then reached the caverns measureless to man, and sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean.”

  He moved the old record player from the workshop to the house. He loved music of any kind—Big Band, Elvis, the Rolling Stones. Only classical music bored him with its orderly sterility. Most especially, he adored voices—crying, pleading, laughing voices—and the great melodious singers were his favorites, whether they radiated unrestrained longing or sultry indifference. He liked Frank Sinatra for his brute power. He liked Eydie Gormé for her bright untouchability. (“Blame It on the Bossa Nova” got him ridiculously worked up.) But he held a special fondness for crooners—Perry Como for example, or Mel Tormé, whom Trudy despised. Whenever Claude dropped the needle on a Mel Tormé record he’d announce, in a hushed voice, “It’s the Velvet Fog!” and give Trudy a wide-eyed stare, as if they’d found themselves trapped in a scene from a horror movie. But that was Claude—tricking her into laughing precisely because she resisted. It made her a little angry, though she ended up wishing he’d do it again, like a girl clapping and crying out for the magician to release another dove from his sleeve. Only with Claude, the dove seemed to come from inside her.

  (She was in that twilight of quarter-consciousness where notions crack and drift like floes of ice. Claude lay behind her, solid, heavy, hot. She was glad he had checked the kennel. The first news she would have to give Edgar was of Almondine; how vulnerable he would be to it. She must call Glen Papineau tomorrow. But if there’d been news, he would have driven out to tell them in person. And she had to be careful; every time she asked, she chanced making the connection between Edgar and Page’s accident stronger in Glen’s mind.)