The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

by David Wroblewski

  If he was careful. He’d already made one mistake. He’d carried the bottle out of the mow only to realize how few other places he trusted. There hadn’t been time to think things through. Trudy could have walked in at any moment, and what, exactly, would he have said if she’d asked why he was carrying a bottle ribboned with Hangul lettering and with some liquid inside that looked like the purest, most distilled venom? Hiding it in the house was out of the question; it frightened him to be so near the stuff. He could barely stand to hold it in his work-gloved hands. After Gar, he’d showered until the hot water heater in his little rented apartment emptied, and when it filled, he’d emptied it all over again.

  Once he’d taken that bottle out of the mow, there were few options left. The medicine room felt all wrong—Trudy went there sometimes: she might open a drawer, think, What’s this?, twist the wax-sealed stopper, raise the bottle to her nose…So it had to be the workshop, where Trudy virtually never stepped foot except passing through on her way to the mow. He’d considered, briefly, putting it in plain sight, out on the shelves, as if it were nothing of value. With so many odds and ends there, one more bottle wouldn’t stand out. But it would stand out to anyone looking for it; and his own gaze would always be drawn to it. So he’d wrapped up the bottle in an oily rag and buried it under a mass of old letters at the back of the bottom drawer of the oldest filing cabinet. No one but Edgar cared about the filing cabinets and even Edgar couldn’t possibly care about a bunch of old letters. A good place, he’d been sure of it. And yet, the moment the bottle was safely hidden, a new worry came to him and he’d walked to the medicine room, selected a syringe from a cabinet, and worked it into the bundle of rags alongside the bottle.

  Claude was still standing on the porch steps, watching the scene playing out before him. One of Glen’s legs was thrown forward over Trudy’s hips and he had tilted them both so they were lying on their sides, facing the barn. Claude could barely see Trudy over Glen’s broad back. He sighed and stepped off the porch and onto the grass. Trudy had stopped struggling and lay enraptured, murmuring something like “no, no, not now,” watching Edgar as he came running out of the barn pushing another batch of records. The dogs were scrambling every which way. Two of them raced over, paused to scent Trudy and Glen, then leapt away. Claude knelt behind Glen, reached over his shoulders, and tried to peel the man’s enormous right hand away from where it was locked around his own left wrist.

  “Glen, enough,” he said, surprising himself with the evenness of his voice. “Let Trudy go. We can’t help you unless you let Trudy go.”

  Glen didn’t respond, but at the sound of her name, Trudy began to thrash. Though she was lithe and strong, it was no use. Glen dwarfed her. His shoulders bunched and his arms tightened until she stopped. She craned her neck to look at Claude. She was crying.

  “Make Edgar stop. Please, Claude. Make Edgar stop going in there.”

  Claude just nodded. There was nothing to say in reply. He stood and began to cross the yard, mind racing. He didn’t like having to make decisions that way; he needed time to think things through, but he could hardly sit and mull. Yes, he could stop Edgar, knock him down and hold him like Glen was holding Trudy until the fire was so advanced no one could go inside. To Trudy, it would look like he’d saved Edgar from madness, while inside, the bottle would crack and melt, its contents boil in the flames.

  Afterward, there would be Glen to account for. The man was blind, his eyes etched globes. It was a testament to Glen’s strength that he was conscious at all, even if half out of his mind with pain. The blindness would overwhelm him later on—all those late-night conversations had left Claude with no doubt about that. When that happened, Claude could insist that Glen, in his grief, had mistaken an innocent consolation over Page’s death for something else entirely, and Trudy might believe that. Glen had, after all, tried to kidnap Edgar. And if that wasn’t damning enough, after Trudy hit Glen he had reverted to this strange wrestling maneuver, moaning and rocking and refusing to release her.

  But there would still be Edgar. The boy (it was hard to think of him that way, gray-haired from the quicklime, tall, whip-thin) might make some claims, though any real evidence would long have been dispersed in the clouds. In return, Claude could raise questions of his own. What had happened with Page in the mow, really? With luck, they might find the key to the Impala in Edgar’s pocket, along with several hundred dollars. Would anyone be that surprised to find a runaway preparing to steal a car?

  It could work, Claude thought. All he had to do was stop Edgar—save Edgar’s life, in Trudy’s eyes—and wait. Afterward, there would be a sense of release, a new beginning for all of them. The fire, and the reconstruction, would change everything. A turning point.

  Claude was walking toward the barn, considering this, when he felt a blunt pressure against his thigh. He looked down. Essay stood before him. She’d pressed her nose into his leg, just above his knee, and his heart began to jangle, because for a moment Claude saw a syringe in the dog’s mouth. But his eyes had been fooled. There was nothing in her mouth. He’d been thinking of the night Edgar played his trick in the kennel. Essay stood in front of him, gaze resolute, mouth agape, eyes glinting and mischievous, as if waiting to see his reaction from that distant night. Was it possible the boy was so single-minded that he’d come back to play this trick again?

  All at once, Claude’s certainty wavered. He hadn’t been thinking clearly. It would not work. Not if all it took was the gaze of a dog to make his hands shake and the blood pound in his brain. He was kidding himself. Over and over again he would have to look Gar in the eye just that way.

  No, not Gar—Edgar.

  Why had he thought that? No sooner had he asked that question than he knew the answer: because Edgar, all softness stripped from his face, lit aslant by the yard light, hair grayed by quicklime, looked too much like his father. Because, carrying the files in his arms, the boy even walked with the same hunched-up step Gar had used cradling pups in and out of the whelping pens. Because some nights Claude couldn’t sleep after the tick of a bug against the bedroom window made him start up in bed, adrenaline flooding his veins, heart leaping so ferociously he’d had to walk it off, and after that he couldn’t lie down. Better to sit facing the night and take sleep that way, if it came at all. And because the look on Essay’s face made him think of the morning he’d glanced up from the sink to discover Edgar outside the window in the apple tree—how, finally, he’d had to turn away.

  When Claude looked down again, the dog had slipped away, rejoined one of the packs bounding through the yard. Claude walked to the double doors and entered, stooping. The air was breathable down by his waist, though it reeked in his nostrils and stung his eyes. He could see only a few feet ahead. When he reached the doorway of the workshop he made out the wheelbarrow, askew in the center of the workshop, and Edgar, yanking open the top drawer of a file cabinet, standing upright just long enough to scoop out the drawer’s contents, then ducking again.

  Edgar glanced over and spotted Claude in the doorway. He stopped for a moment and they looked at one another. Then Edgar turned and snatched another batch of files from the open drawer. The drawers of the file cabinets nearest the door hung half-open and empty—Edgar had been working from the newest records to the oldest. That explained why he hadn’t already walked into the yard with the bottle in his hand.

  Claude stepped past Edgar, to the last filing cabinet. He slid open the top drawer and began scooping armload after armload of records into the wheelbarrow, filling it as fast as he could, though it was already nearly overflowing. Edgar kept working on the bottom drawer of the adjacent file, turning and heaving papers. Some missed the wheelbarrow entirely and scattered toward the doorway. Then Edgar stood, took the handlebars of the wheelbarrow, and disappeared into the smoke.

  Edgar

  HE COULD HAVE KICKED HIMSELF FOR NOT THINKING OF THE wheelbarrow sooner. It was possible to get everything this way, all of it, the whole history,
outside and safe. Working frantically, he’d already pitched the contents of one complete file cabinet into the metal basin of the thing. The smoke in the workshop was bitter and thick, and he dropped to his knees to suck the clear air near the floor.

  Now he rose again and plunged his hands into a drawer and turned and dumped an armload of papers. How swiftly his mind was spinning as he worked, how euphoric the sensation of deliverance that beat in him. He felt he’d struck another bargain, just as he had watching the apple trees in the winter, and he worked with great intensity. The part of him that loved order cried out at the wildness of what he was doing, the neat march of generations so quickly scrambled. But he couldn’t stop. He’d meant to throw everything into this one final barrow load, but the papers had already begun to mound over the rim. Much more would just slide and spill as he rolled through the turn into the aisle and would be lost in the smoke.

  He had glanced at the workshop door when Claude appeared, crouching low and squinting against the smoke. Claude’s expression was a kind of perfect blankness, or rather, a mélange of expressions, any one of them fleeting and half made and out of registration with the next. Edgar thought that someone else, watching from another viewpoint, might see concern or apprehension there, or fear, or desire, or revulsion. But for Edgar, the result was something incomprehensible, unreadable, committing to nothing and summing to nothing. As it had always been with Claude. Edgar had not in the least forgotten what he’d seen in the mow, or that stream of memory that had passed through him in the rain. He had never had much of a plan for when he returned except to say what he knew was true and keep saying it, without evidence, without proof.

  Then, before he had a chance to do anything, Claude was past him and had yanked open the topmost drawer of last file cabinet and begun shoveling armloads of paper into the wheelbarrow. He didn’t say anything or even hold Edgar’s gaze. When Edgar understood what Claude was doing, he turned back to the files and they worked side by side. The wheelbarrow was quickly overfilled. There was no time to explain and no language for it. Edgar just grabbed the wheelbarrow’s handles and ran through doorway. Keeping low enough to breathe clear air was difficult and twice he had to halt to steady the mound of papers.

  As soon as he was outside he dropped to his knees and forced another coughing fit; this time it tore at his throat. Then he stood and shoved the wheelbarrow into the grass and pitched it over and watched the papers scatter, sheets of white and cream everywhere, the writing on them like every language in the world, some ancient, others yet to be invented. Pictures and pedigrees and log sheets and notes, everywhere he looked. The story of forty generations. Fifty.

  He looked toward the house. His mother lay bound up in Glen Papineau’s arms. When she saw Edgar, she stopped struggling and turned her face to him.

  “Let it go, Edgar! Let it go!”

  I can’t, he signed. Not yet.

  He turned back to the smoldering kennel. His mother’s cries, intertwined with Glen’s moans, made an unnerving duet. The once-narrow ribbon of smoke had become an opaque mass that belched from the top half of the barn’s entryway. He wondered if the straw in the mow had caught fire. Not even the tiniest lick of flame was visible, though plumes of black smoke poured from the roofline.

  He understood what it meant to go back into the workshop. He did not believe Claude was there to help him. Yet every file he rescued restored some piece of a world that he thought had been lost forever. For so long he’d lived divided—from his father, from himself, now from Almondine. What he meant to do was not a question for him of wisdom or foolishness, courage or fearlessness, insight or ignorance. It was only that he could not split himself the way he once had; could not choose between imperatives. To resurrect or revenge. To fight or turn away.

  Inside were two more cabinets filled with files and the letters from Brooks and the master litter book and The New Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language with Alexander McQueen’s essay on the significance of naming and page upon page of notes, markers of every dog Edgar had ever known. He pushed the wheelbarrow forward at a trot, and for the last time he passed though the double doors and into the barn. If he worked fast he could be in and out in three minutes. And if he needed more time, he had an idea that might clear the smoke long enough to get everything else.

  An idea that had come to him long ago, in a dream.

  Claude

  THE MOMENT EDGAR DISAPPEARED THROUGH THE WORKSHOP door and into the smoke, Claude snatched open the bottom file drawer and dug the rag-wrapped bundle from beneath the mass of letters and newspaper clippings. The syringe, folded into the oily fabric, worked loose and fell into the drawer and he pawed through the chaos before his fingers touched the round plastic barrel. He retreated across photographs and pedigrees scattered over the floor like a lunatic’s history of the kennel. When he reached the workbench, he turned his back to the room and knelt.

  He wrapped the rag around his hand and grasped the bottle through it and worked the stopper loose and with great care set it on the floor away from himself, far back in the corner. He twisted the sheath off the needle. His motions were careful, but he was working in a rush, and by accident he jabbed the needle’s point lightly into the flesh of his right palm. Before he even felt the sting, he’d jerked his hand away. The puncture was too small to release even a single drop of blood, but an infinitesimal red meniscus colored the needle’s point.

  When he looked at the bottle again, an iridescent rivulet had crept up the throat of the glass. He set the needle against the shear lip. To see the fluid wick so eagerly into that minute steel artery made his skin crawl. He needed only a drop but half a cc got into the barrel before he could put his thumb above the plunger and even then its insistent, upward force felt to him like some feral thing lunging from its cage. With effort, he pushed all but a fraction back into the bottle. When he drew the syringe away, a silver filament quivered in the air. He set the needle tip against the glass and turned it and withdrew it again, leaving a drop of clear oil that shivered and collapsed and slid down the inner curve of the bottle’s neck. He left the bottle unstoppered and tossed away the rag and turned, holding the syringe at arm’s length, and he waited.

  The file cabinets opposite stood hazy and remote through the dense smoke. He wasn’t sure Edgar meant to come back, but he could drop the syringe and be out of the barn in seconds if things suddenly felt unsafe. Fire didn’t move that quickly, he thought. He looked at the bare bulb shining in its ceiling socket and wondered how long before the insulation on the wiring melted. The smoke carried a meaty, awful scent of roasted flesh. A nest of mice, he thought, or a bird in the eaves, overcome. All that smoke and still not a sound, not a flame. Outside, he could hear Trudy crying and calling out.

  Then Edgar appeared, hunkered down behind the empty wheelbarrow, bent so low over the thing that the skids scraped the cement floor. He jammed it nose first into the space below the mow stairs and dropped to his knees and yanked open the bottommost drawer of the oldest cabinet—exactly where the bottle had been hidden—and began to heave out letters and papers. Claude stood. He remembered how the old herbalist had used a sharpened reed. How his withered hands had shaken with palsy afterward. Now that seemed like such a mild reaction, for Claude was suddenly conscious of all the mechanism of nerve and muscle and ligament that animated his fingers. The syringe began to tremble in his grip. With his free hand he squeezed his shaking wrist until the bones inside ground against one other.

  He crossed the workshop.

  The act itself took just an instant.

  When it was done he backed away, reaching behind with one hand to swing the workshop door closed. All at once his teeth began chattering and he bit down so hard to make them stop that a groan escaped him. He had to get hold of himself, he thought. All he needed to do now was keep Edgar in the room and let time pass. But his heart threw itself against his ribs and the blood rushing through him felt as heavy as mercury. He pressed his back to the door
and slid to the cement, and noticed for the first time that the syringe was still in his hand. With a convulsive jerk, he flung it away. As he had with Gar.

  Edgar kept pitching files into the wheelbarrow as if nothing had happened. Then, abruptly, he sat back on his heels and looked over his head and behind, as if startled by a sound. He turned toward Claude, but his gaze hardly lingered. Then he stood and made his way across the workshop, working hand over hand along the shelves beneath the stairs, and he began looking for something in the corner, where the long-handled tools stood in a tangle.

  When he turned, Edgar held a pitchfork in his hand.

  Aw, God, Claude thought.

  But Edgar wasn’t looking at Claude. He walked to the center of the workshop, bent low to keep his face out of the thick mass of smoke. He crouched for a moment, squinting and wiping the tears from his eyes, and swaying as he fixed the position of something near the light fixture on the ceiling.

  Then Edgar stood and drove the pitchfork straight up into the smoke.

  Edgar

  HIS FIRST THOUGHT WAS THAT SOMETHING HAD FALLEN ON him and dazzled a nerve, the way it happened when a person struck their elbow. A bolt of coldness in the back of his neck, nothing more. He had time to reach into the file drawer and press another handful of letters and papers between his palms and turn and dump them into the wheelbarrow, and then an icy wave radiated down his back and toward his limbs, settling in his crotch and knees and armpits and in the palms of his hands. Strange beyond words, the sensation. He reached back and touched his neck. He turned. Nothing had fallen. Claude had pushed the workshop door closed and now sat clumsily at the base of it, looking frightened and panting through his mouth.