David Wroblewski - The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

It was difficult for Edgar to direct his eyes where he wanted, or even to focus. He stopped looking at Glen’s hands. One of his eyes decided to close all by itself. Through the other, he saw a stack of flat, brown bags, blurred lumps. Then the cloth was over his face again.

Glen tightened his grip, prepared to stand. The brown lumps resolved into quicklime bags, stacked beside the back doors. The empty coffee can they used for a spreader protruded from a slit in the topmost sack.

Edgar’s ribs bent as Glen hefted him to get a solid hold, then he was rising into the air. He saw his hand reach forward. The rim of the coffee can, jagged where the opener had punctured the metal, brushed his fingers, and then there was only powder against his palm, dry as moon dust. He’d tried and missed. Yet, when he could focus, the can was pinched between his fingers, his hand having somehow corrected the mistake on its own.

Glen was reaching for the door latch. Edgar closed his eyes and gripped the rim of the coffee can with all his might. It was only half full, but heavy as an anvil. All he could muster was a spastic, upward jerk. Then his hand fell back and the coffee can clattered to the floor.

A heavy layer of quicklime dropped onto his head and shoulders. He had remembered to squeeze his eyes shut, but his mouth must have been hanging open, slack from his effort and the effect of the ether. His tongue and throat were instantly coated with a bitter paste and he swallowed involuntarily and felt the heat in his mouth and retched.

Glen, too, began to cough. His arm loosened from around Edgar’s chest and slipped away. For a long moment Edgar hung suspended in the air by nothing at all. He knew it was important that he collect his feet beneath him, but before he could get started the barn began to spin like a top with him at its center and the floor lunged forward and the fireworks above Scotia Lake burst all over again behind his closed eyes.

HE WOKE GAGGING. Even before he could open his eyes, he heard Glen Papineau’s voice whispering his name.

“Edgar?” he said. “Edgar, are you there?” Then Glen muttered under his breath, “Oh Jesus.” This was followed by the thump of something hitting the floor.

Edgar reached up and carefully drew his fingers across his eyelids. His lashes were caked with quicklime and it took all his concentration to make his hands brush it away. He cracked open one eye until a slit of light registered and then the other and he blinked and looked along the cement of the kennel floor. A cloud of quicklime dust swirled through the air, sifting and settling everywhere. Glen had staggered backward and fallen. He lay on his side, curly hair grayed, face thickly powdered. His eyes were closed and his expression was a painfully contracted grimace.

“Aw Jesus,” Glen said again. He brought his hands to his face and pressed his fingers against his closed eyes. The cords in his neck stood out and he kicked at the floor-another thump. Then his hands began beating against his face open-palmed as if putting out a fire there. With great effort, he got control of them and lay panting.

“Edgar, are you there?” he repeated. His voice was hoarse but eerily calm. “Can you get me some water? I just meant to ask you a question. I wasn’t going to hurt you, I swear. But right now I need water for my eyes. Oh Jesus. Edgar?”

But Edgar lay in a fugue, seeing everything as if through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. When he tried to lift his head, the ache hit him at once and then the nausea. The florid smell of ether was everywhere now, nearly as strong as when the cloth was pressed against his face. He looked along the floor and spotted the beer bottle lying broken and liquid ether splashed around it in silver pools. Vapor shimmered in the air above it.

Edgar pushed to his knees. The rear barn doors were within arm’s reach. He tried to stand, then sank back and dragged himself up the front of them until he could work his fingers into the metal hoop of the latch handle. When the leftmost of the double doors swung open, he stumbled drunkenly into the night along with it.

He began banging the door with the flat of his hand.

Glen turned his face toward the sound and rose on all fours.

“O god o god o god o god,” he whispered. He crawled forward and stopped to wipe his face and eyes. Edgar pounded the door again and Glen started moving, then stopped a second time to beat the heels of his palms against his eyes. A shriek came out of him, high and incongruous, and then he pressed his face against the floor and ground it along, crying louder as he advanced.

“God, it burns! Oh, anything, please! Jesus God. Anything.”

Edgar released his grip on the door and tried to step back, but he reeled and fell into the weeds. The dark mass of the barn towered over him, a great black swath cut out of a starry sky. He sat and shook his head, a mistake; the pain nearly blacked him out again. But the fresh night air was bringing him back from the ether and he could keep his eyes focused. In a minute he would be able get his feet under him.

The dogs all stood in their pens, gazes fixed on the spectacle of Glen Papineau crawling down the aisle. It was the last thing Edgar wanted to see; he wanted the dogs out of the barn, away from those fumes. When Glen reached the threshold he worked his fingers along the bottom of the door then hoisted himself upright, pointing his face this way and that. When he tried again to pull one of his eyelids open, his body spasmed and he gave another hoarse and wordless cry and staggered past Edgar in a headlong rush.

And then Edgar got his wish, for the dogs wheeled and plunged through the passages to their outside runs. He watched as they dove through the canvas straps of their portals and disappeared, until all that remained inside the barn was the apparition of the ether fumes, quavering and rising under that single hot light bulb.

ONCE OUTSIDE, THE DOGS began to bark. Glen Papineau traced a broad circle in the south field, entering the light of the yard like an actor stepping onto a stage: enormous, thick-necked, head and shoulders powdered and tear-streaked, one hand clasped over his face as if to rip away a mask and the other hewing the air before him. He staggered up to Alice, parked beside the barn. When his blunt fingers touched her radiator, he stopped and traced the flanges of the grill, the peeling paint of the steering armature. He dropped to his knees and pressed his forehead against the close-set front tires.

“Aw, God,” he said, “I can’t see where I am. Is that a light? Can anyone hear me? Claude! Claude! They won’t even open! Can’t I please, please have some water for my eyes!”

Then Edgar heard his mother’s voice calling from the back porch.

“Glen? Glen! What are you doing?”

Edgar looked into the barn. All the front pens were empty, but some of the dogs in the back runs, unable to see Glen or his mother, yet hearing their voices, had pushed back inside. Edgar stood, testing his balance. His mother was running across the yard.

He turned away and stumbled along the slope behind the barn, clapping his hands as loudly as he could. When he reached the pen doors, he hammered bare-handed on the timbers and wires, making every noise he could to draw the dogs out. One by one, they pushed through the canvas flaps over their passageways and trotted out to him.

He was going down the line staying them when a light flashed from the rear barn doors, brilliant and blue. For a moment the birches in the south field stood icily illuminated, their shadows stretching behind them across the surf of hay. Then Edgar felt a pressure against his eardrums that slowly resolved itself into a sound, as if the sky above had been gripped at the corners and shaken out.