David Wroblewski - The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

Edgar lay awake in his bed, hoping now the dogs would start up again. Or that he would hear Forte’s howl. With his attention so pitched, he began half hearing a voice-the voice he’d heard in the barn when he’d slept there. The voice he’d heard (now he remembered) the night before. Always intertwined with some other sound. He heard his name cried as the bedsprings creaked; a wordless call in a gust of wind against the windowpane. He sat up and pulled books off the shelves, running his eyes over the letters like so many scribbles, until the sky lightened outside his window.

At breakfast he waited for his mother to mention the barking.

Did the dogs wake you last night? he asked, finally.

“No. Were they barking?”

A lot.

“That’s okay,” she said. “They get restless with the thaw.”

By the time he’d finished evening chores that next day he was so tired he staggered up the stairs and fell into bed. It was pitch dark when the sound of his name woke him. This time it had come through the splash of rain in the gutters. He sat up in bed, arms folded, listening. In a minute, the dogs began again. He slipped out of bed without turning on the light, raised the sash, and craned his head out. Everywhere, rain was falling. Directly below his window, Claude’s Impala sat parked in the driveway.

In each pen, a dog stood, baying.

He slipped on his jeans and shirt and haphazardly tied his shoes. He crept down the stairs, hand on Almondine’s back to slow her. His mother’s bedroom was dark. The clock in the kitchen read one thirty.

He knelt before Almondine.

You have to stay. I don’t want you getting wet.

He opened the porch door and leaned out. A breeze tousled his hair. There was no lightning, no thunder, just the steady whisper of warm rain, like the murmur of the creek-the sound that had once made Almondine pounce on the snow-covered creek as if something hid there. Silvery sheets of water poured into the gutters around their roof.

Near the door was a light switch. When he flipped it, the goosenecked flood lamp over the barn doors came on, casting a cone of light across the rough planks of the double doors. He half-expected to see a woodchuck or a fox scurrying off but there was only the glint of rain dropping into the light. And yet the dogs kept barking with such a strange mixture of alarm and recognition, wet and shining as they looked into the yard. A flicker danced in the rain before them and was gone. Edgar was about to turn back inside when something caught his attention near the barn door. When he looked closer, there was just rain.

Then, abruptly, the dogs fell silent. They braced themselves four-footed and shook off and one by one trotted to the portals at the back of their runs, where they pushed through the canvas flaps and disappeared.

Whatever was making them bark, Edgar thought, had to be inside the kennel. He was never going to find out what it was standing on the porch. He turned to Almondine one last time and knelt to quiet her. Then he stepped into the rain and began to cross the yard.

H E WAS DRENCHED BEFORE HE REACHED THE CORNER OF THE house. The same rain, warm on his hand, now soaked through his shirt and jeans, chilling him, but it was pointless to go back for a coat. He walked to the Impala and pressed his hand against the hood. The engine was cold as a stone.

He stepped onto the weed-covered hump in the center of the driveway, muddy streams on either side of him. In the pale glow of the yard light, the freshly greened grass looked greasy black. The two tall pines stood shivering like sentries, water cascading down branch by branch. But there were no deer, no streak of red that would be a fox, no shining eyes of a raccoon. He turned and walked to the deserted runs, wiping a streaming hand over his face.

From one of the small doorways, a dog’s head and shoulders emerged-Essay, watching him approach, half in and half out. When he squatted down and pushed his fingers through the wire mesh, she bucked along down the run, stepped into his shadow, and licked his fingers, blinking at the rain. Her posture conveyed curiosity without anxiety, anticipation but not fear.

What’s going on out here? he signed. Where would you go if I opened this door? What would you chase?

Essay waved her tail and met his gaze as though turning the question back on him. He pulled himself upright along the timber of the door. The waterlogged wood of the frame creaked. He turned to look behind him to see what the dogs might have seen.

The yard light, high atop the pole in the orchard, cast its globe of yellow. The earth mounded away from him, passing beneath the trees of the orchard and leveling near the road. The house sat at the edge of the light, bright along the driveway side, dim where it faced the garden. The shadows of the apple trees lay stretched across the grass. The forest across the road, an undulating scrim of gray. High in the air, raindrops descended into the light, curtained by the breeze into willow shapes that swayed across the yard and back into the night.

When Edgar glanced back, Essay had retreated into the barn and a line of glittering eyes watched him from the canvas flaps. He rounded the milk house and walked through the cone of light beneath the floodlight over the barn doors. When he reached the silo, he tried to look out over the field to the west, but his eyes were dazzled and the dark began just a few yards beyond. He stared into the blackness toward the back runs and saw nothing, just the side of the silo sliding off into the dark and the silhouette of the broad roof. After a moment he turned back to the barn.

And for the second time that night something moved in front of the double doors. It took a moment to make sense of it. A change in the falling of the rain. Something about the way it fell. He stepped forward to look more closely, traced a single drop of water as it passed into the light. Just above his head, the raindrop paused, wobbling in midair like a transparent pearl, and began to fall again. It splashed into the puddle at his feet. He wiped his face and looked up. Another raindrop had taken its place, and then that one fell, to be replaced by another, and another. Nothing he could see held them in the air, yet each one hovered for a tick of time, then continued to the ground. He watched it happen a dozen times or more. Despite himself, he reached out to touch the spot, then hesitated at the last moment.

He stepped back and saw the same thing was happening all up and down the space in front of him: hundreds of raindrops-thousands-suspended for a heartbeat in the lamplight. He caught a glimpse of something, then lost it. He squeezed his eyes shut. It was like watching the orchard, trying to catch everything motionless for one instant. When he opened his eyes again, the way to see them all together had clicked into place.

Instead of raindrops, he saw a man.

His head, his torso. Arms held away from his body. All formed by raindrops suspended and instantly replaced. Near the ground, the figure’s legs frayed into tattered blue-gray sprays of water. When a gust of wind passed through the yard, the shape flickered and the branches of the apple trees twisted behind it, refracted as through melted glass.

Edgar shook his head and turned away. An endless cascade of raindrops struck his arms and neck and face. The same breeze that shimmered the figure caressed his skin, carrying a swampy, marshy smell. There was the scent of the kennel, and of the water itself.

Suddenly he needed to touch something, something too solid to exist in a dream. He stumbled to the barn. He ran his palm against the planks of siding. A wood sliver snagged his skin and slid into the flesh at the base of his thumb. The pain was brief and hot and unquestionably real.