The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

by David Wroblewski

  Then, for no reason Edgar could see, the smoke suddenly tripled in thickness, until the walls of the room were barely visible. The ceiling light shrank to an orange, smoke-smeared crystal. He told himself he should cough and he bent down and put his elbows on his knees but the result was feeble. He needed to clear the smoke from the room; he was being overcome. He made his way to the implements leaning in the corner. Rakes. Hoes. Any of them would do, it didn’t matter. The one that came into his hand was a pitchfork.

  When he turned, the room careened around him. Ether, he thought, because that sense of detachment had come over him again, the same as when Glen had held the cloth over his face—the feeling that he was outside his body looking back at himself. But this was different, too. It came from that dazzled feeling that swept over him. He couldn’t shake the idea that something had fallen on him. He touched his head. His fingers came away bloodless and dry.

  He made his way to the center of the workshop, trying to keep his balance. It was impossible to see the ceiling through the smoke. Every time he drew a breath something scraped inside his lungs. He forced himself to concentrate. He tried to see in his mind where the hay hatch was positioned relative to that ceiling light. Twice he staggered off to the side and had to look at his feet in order to keep from falling.

  At last, he took a guess. He lifted the pitchfork and drove it upward. The tines struck wood. When he pushed, there was solid, unyielding resistance. He yanked downward and the tines came free and he thrust up into the smoke again a foot to the right. This time something gave. He felt the hatch lift an inch, then catch, cockeyed in its slot. He shifted position and gave one final heave and felt the hatch clear the opening and slide along the mow floor above him.

  Then the pitchfork clattered down. He found himself lying on his back, though he didn’t remember falling. The air near the floor was blissfully clear. Smoke eddied and swirled about the hay hatch, a sweeping, tidal movement, like watching something alive. It had worked just the way he’d hoped, just the way it had happened in his dream that first morning after his father appeared in the rain. The sight filled him with exaltation and sadness. The smoke was rising into the mow, stretching when it came to the lip and tumbling upward. He could see nothing in the mow itself—no towering bales, no beams, no tackle, no bulbs among the rafters. Only a thousand layers of gray, lifting upward. He thought he might see flame, but it was nothing like that. Only the fluid rush of the smoke.

  He’d meant to do something after he rolled this final barrow of records out of the barn, something important. He didn’t blame Glen Papineau for doing what he’d done. He’d only wanted to ask Edgar a question, he’d said. But Edgar had something he’d wanted to say to Glen, and now he closed his eyes and imagined Glen standing there, and imagined himself saying the words so Glen could hear them.

  I’m sorry, he said. He imagined it with all his might, with all the power of his mind. I’m sorry about your father.

  He felt something recede inside him. A diminishment of barriers. He lay and watched the smoke crawl along the ceiling. After a time Almondine stepped out of some hidden place near the file cabinets. She walked to him and looked down at him and licked his face.

  Get up, she said. Hurry. She panted. Her ears were cupped forward and drawn up tight, as they were when she was most fretful, though her movements were measured and calm. He was not surprised to hear her voice. It was just as he’d heard it in his mind all his life.

  I thought I’d never see you again, he signed.

  You were lost.

  Yes. Lost.

  You didn’t need to come back. I would have found you.

  No, I did. I understood some things while I was gone.

  And you had to come back.

  Yes.

  What was it you understood.

  What my grandfather was doing. Why people want Sawtelle dogs. Who should have them. What comes next.

  You understood those things all along.

  No. Not this way.

  For a time they just looked at one another.

  So many things happened, he signed.

  Yes.

  Sit here beside me. I want to tell you about someone. His name is Henry.

  Get up, she said. Come outside.

  I told him my name was Nathoo.

  He laughed a little as he said this, knowing she would understand.

  Mowgli’s human name.

  Yes.

  Was that better.

  He thought about her question.

  At first. Later it didn’t matter. I meant to tell him different, but I never got the chance.

  Almondine sat and peered at him, brow knit, eyes like cherrywood polished to glass. It came to him then, a wholly new thought, that Nathoo was neither his name nor not his name; that even “Edgar” was a thing apart from his real name—the name Almondine had bestowed upon him in some distant past, long before he learned to carry ideas in time as memories, and whatever name that was had no expression in human words or gestures, nor could it exist beyond the curve and angle of her face, the shine of her eyes, the shape of her mouth when she looked at him.

  Baboo and Tinder stayed with Henry.

  Yes.

  I shouldn’t have turned away when I saw you with Claude that day. I don’t know what happened to me.

  You were lost.

  I was lost.

  Get up, she said one last time.

  Come, he said. Lie here by me.

  Almondine settled herself and leaned her chest against his side. Her face was near his face and she looked at him and followed his gaze up toward the ceiling.

  He closed his eyes, then opened them again with a jerk, afraid that Almondine had gone, but there had been no need to worry. They lay on the floor and watched the smoke writhe across the ceiling. It was not so much like smoke at all anymore, but a river, broad and placid, beginning nowhere and ending nowhere, flowing on and on. The two of them lay on the bank of that river as it swept past like the creek in flood time. Perhaps this river, too, had once been divided by a fence. But no more.

  On the far side a figure appeared, distant but recognizable—someone he’d longed to see so often since that night the dogs had howled in the rain and the world had begun to turn on such a new and terrible axis. He’d meant to say something that night, the most important thing of all, it seemed to him now, but he’d cowered when the moment came and the chance was lost and afterward he’d been damned.

  He set his fingers in the fur at the base of Almondine’s throat. Breaths came into her and left, came and left. He closed his eyes, for how long he didn’t know. When he opened them again the river was just the same but somehow the man had crossed to meet them. Or perhaps they had crossed. He couldn’t be sure. Either way it made him happy. He felt he had a voice inside him for the first time and with it he could say what he’d meant to say all along. The man was close. There was no need to cry out the words. He could whisper, even, if he wanted.

  He smiled.

  “I love you,” said Edgar Sawtelle.

  Claude

  HE SAT WITH HIS BACK TO THE WORKSHOP DOOR, WAITING and counting, watching Edgar lying in front of him. A vortex of smoke was rushing upward into the dark rectangle overhead. There had been one terrible moment when he’d thought, it isn’t working, but he’d been mistaken. Instead of advancing on Claude, the boy had used the pitchfork to open the hay hatch. After he fell, he’d lain looking into the mow and working his hands over his chest in a stream of sign that Claude could not hope to read. That had gone on for a long time. Then, as if Edgar had come to some sort of decision, he draped one hand atop his chest, laid the other on the floor beside his leg, and hadn’t moved since.

  Claude thought of that rain-soaked alley in Pusan—what it had been like watching the old man drop the tip of his sharpened reed onto the crippled dog’s withers—how gentle the motion—how the dog had paused from its lapping at the crock of soup and looked up and crumpled. There had been only an instant’s delay. It
seemed as if the contents of the bottle never acted the same way twice. Perhaps, over time, it had lost potency. Perhaps it drew on something different in each person. He would have liked to go back now and ask the old man to explain it. The bottle sat across the room, at the base of the workbench. He had to fight the desire to scramble over and twist the glass stopper into place—to seal it up again, at least for as long as he was confined to the same room with it. Only his dread of nearing the stuff stopped him. And if he touched it again, he couldn’t be certain he would leave it behind.

  He debated whether he should carry Edgar’s body out. He could sling the boy over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry and stagger into the yard. That way would be better for Trudy, he thought, and he would have done as she asked. Or he could tell Trudy the boy had grown confused and wandered into the smoky center of the barn, and though he’d searched and searched, he’d finally been driven out by the smoke, certain that Edgar must have emerged from the back doors. That was better—but only if it looked as if he had searched for a very long time—as long as humanly possible. Dangerously long. He forced himself to sit one minute more. He concentrated on stopping the jitter in his knees. It cost him nothing to wait, besides breathing a little smoke and having to look at the boy lying there. Claude could not fix his gaze on Edgar for long without a tremor rising from his insides, but that was foolish. If anything, the boy looked peaceful.

  Then, from the mow, came a sound. A groan that rose in pitch to a squeal like shearing tin. Claude looked up. There was no change in the character of the smoke, and no flames glowed through the open hatch, but suddenly it felt dangerous to be in that barn for even a second longer. The boy had been right about one thing—opening the hatch had cleared much of the smoke from the workshop. But, Claude was deciding right then, it had been a less-than-great idea for other reasons, and the more he thought about it, the less desire he had to stay in the barn. Black, fluid smoke from under the door had begun to creep around either side of him.

  Standing brought on a wave of dizziness. He stepped back from the door, taking care to avoid the boy’s body. Standing hands to knees, he gasped breaths of the clear air. Then he twisted the knob on the workshop door. It was as if he’d swept aside a dam. The acrid smoke that poured in tore at his throat, forcing him back into the corner. He knelt and coughed and when he looked up again the smoke was rushing toward the open hay hatch. Not rising, rushing. And for the first time he saw the interior of the mow glowing orange through that curtain of gray.

  And brightening.

  He scrambled into the kennel aisle, hands on the floor. The atmosphere roiled in barrels around him. He was at the double doors, poised to step through, when something made him pause and drag the back of his knuckles across his tearing eyes. Precisely where the smoke belched into the light of the hooded lamp outside the doors stood the figure of a man. As Claude watched, the figure tattered and disappeared. Claude closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the figure had returned, not so much engulfed in the smoke as made of it. Through it, Claude saw the papers Edgar had retrieved, scattered across the grass of the lawn.

  Glen, was his first thought. But Glen’s voice echoed from out in the yard. And even at a glance, Claude recognized his brother’s form.

  This was hypoxia, hallucination, smoke rapture—what happened to oxygen-starved divers. He knelt and pressed his face against the cement floor to suck clear air into his lungs. As he stood again, the last ceiling light in the aisle winked out. Outside, the hooded lamp above the doors cast its light just long enough for Claude to see clearly that it was Gar, beyond any doubt.

  And then it was dark. He stood for a moment trying to force himself forward, but in the end he turned to face the interior of the barn. Another pair of doors waited on the far end. He could traverse the length of the kennel and gain the clear summer night air that way—a few seconds’ travel, if he hurried.

  He navigated along in the darkness, imagining the arrangement of kennel runs on either side of him, the long straight aisle, the door to the whelping room ahead, the beams of the mow passing above one by one. He didn’t break into a run until the timbers began to shriek far overhead, a twisting scream this time that made him sure the entire structure must be ready to collapse. And yet, that couldn’t be happening. He’d barely seen a flame.

  He stared up at the sound. Through a gap in the smoke, a thin pair of orange lines. Heat on his face.

  He had taken only a step or two in full flight when an imageless blaze of white blossomed and dissipated before him. Then he was sitting on the cement. It took a moment for the pain to register, to understand he’d run into one of the posts lining the aisle. He reached out, felt it, sooty and warm, though he couldn’t see it. His throat burned as if he’d swallowed acid. When he clambered to his feet, a coughing fit nearly drove him to the floor all over again.

  The collision had turned him around. At first he couldn’t tell which way he’d been heading. Over the sound of the timbers he thought he heard his name being called.

  “What was that?” he shouted. “Who is it?”

  But there was no reply—just his own voice, returning flatly through the smoke. He shouted again. Something about the shape of the echo gave him his bearings. To his left he made out a dim rectangle of light through the smoke. A doorway, but front or back? He turned away from it and began to walk, hands outstretched, moving in the straightest line he could.

  His fingertips touched wood, then a hinge, then the wire of a pen door. He stepped back and corrected to the right. He had only to follow the perfectly straight line of the aisle to find the back doors. It should have been simple. He took another step into the blackness. Time and again his hands pressed against wire where there should have been open air. The aisle seemed to veer left, but when he moved left, it veered right, as though the sound in his ears was not the breaking strain of burning wood, but the agony of those great beams twisting.

  At last a wind began to pass along the aisle, dragging smoke across his face like a streamer of hot silk. Now he had reason to panic, but to his surprise the sensation was exquisite, as if he had longed for it all his life. He stopped. Then even the sound of the timbers quieted and there was just the hollow roar of wind. He stood in the darkness, eyes closed, letting the smoke caress him. Then he lifted his hands and twined his fingers into the warm wire mesh he knew he would find waiting.

  Trudy

  FOR THE LONGEST TIME NEITHER CLAUDE NOR EDGAR APPEARED in the doorway of the barn. Trudy called until her throat grew raw, her voice a high and wordless lament, and her body thrashed and twisted in the cage of Glen’s arms. In time, she fell silent. She began to think it wasn’t Glen holding her at all but the black vine, grown now thick and strong and pressing its roots into the soil to draw the earth tight against her and outward then in all directions so that its tendrils pinched and grabbed at time itself and time, like a slowly scrolling stage backdrop, became entangled; and the black vine drew down that canvas to lie slack and unsprocketed beneath a great proscenium where upstage all manner of machinery and instruments nameless and never before seen lay roughly strewn.

  And there Trudy found herself unable to look away from all those things she’d worked so hard not to see. When she’d viewed the canvas long enough, so that no part of it remained hidden from her and no part mistaken, the black vine relaxed its grip and time curled up upon its spindles again and rolled forward and Trudy was lying once more on the grass of the yard. Slowly, slowly, her face was turned until the light of the present world shone in the glassy lune of her eye.

  And as she watched, flames began to eat through the long, shingled roof of the barn—not the tiny licks of orange that had so horribly filigreed the eaves, but real fire now, living fire that burst forth into the air and disappeared and erupted again as if lunging in desperation to grasp the night and pull it in. A gout of flame flashed high above the barn’s roof, twisting inside a pillar of smoke, a scarlet rose that blossomed and vanished. From inside th
e mammoth came a low, prolonged groan. The center beam of the roof sagged. Then the wreathing smoke shuddered and retreated into the barn, as if the structure had drawn its maiden breath, and the inferno began. As quickly as that: one moment, a mass of smoke; the next, all was flame. The wakening scorched Trudy’s face. The light it cast painted the fields and woods all around them red.

  As heat washed over them, Glen Papineau released Trudy and stood and put his hands in the air and began to slap at his face and chest and hair, throwing a nimbus of quicklime into the air around him.

  Am I burning? he cried. Oh God! Have I caught fire?

  But Trudy neither moved nor answered. She was not there. She did not know she was unbound. Glen Papineau staggered away, navigating by meridians of heat. Trudy lay on the grass, eyes fixed on the open doors of the barn and the flames that thrust through them like incandescent limbs.

  And Glen Papineau plunged across the yard, a blinded bull, stumbling, falling, rising again, bellowing over and over, What’s happened? What’s happened? For God sakes, what’s happened?

  The Sawtelle Dogs

  THEY HAD MEASURED THEIR LIVES BY PROXIMITY TO THAT silent, inward creature, that dark-haired, sky-eyed boy who smoothed his hands along their flanks and legs and withers and muzzles, a boy they’d watched since the moment of their birth, a boy who appeared each morning carrying water and food and, every afternoon, a brush. Who pronounced names upon them from the leaves of a book. They had taught him while they watched him; they had learned by listening to Almondine. And though they had seldom seen it, they understood the meaning of fire: they looked at the flames soaring into the night sky and the sparks bursting from the timbers, flying upward, ever upward, and the bats flickering into the smoke and curling and plummeting and they knew they had no home.

  They circled the fire until their chests belled and their tongues hung loose from their mouths. Embers settled on the pile of papers the boy had made and a few of these began to curl and rise flaming into the air. The flames leapt to the orchard trees by wind and sympathy, until only the house and the young maple and the elderly apple tree whose fingers brushed the house opposed them. Red beams beat across the trees. In the south field, the birches and the white crosses glowed like rubies. The shadows of the dogs, cast from the top of the hill, darkened the forests. Great drabs of tar flew sputtering from the barn roof until the whole structure became transparent, down to the glowing ribs. The wires of the pens pooled like water and boiled away. The fiberglass top of the truck crinkled and smoked and shrank inward, belching a nacreous yellow cloud. The wires strung between the house and barn lay snaked and smoking along the ground. In time, the tires of the truck swelled and burst like gunshots and the truck tipped its lee side toward the flames, lacking the sense to save itself. Far away, on the distant ledge of the world, a thunderhead glowed in response to the fire’s call, but if those clouds came they would offer nothing but an inspection of the bones, charred and smoldering.