David Wroblewski - The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

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.

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.