David Wroblewski - The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

He tried to sort out his feelings. There was the desire to run; there was the desire to stay and put himself in front of Claude the moment he returned; there was the desire to take his mother’s explanations at face value; above all, there was the desire to forget everything that had happened, an aching desire for everything normal and familiar, for the routine of the kennel and reading at night and making dinners, just the two of them, when he could almost believe that his father had stepped out momentarily to check a new litter and would be right back.

He half expected to be spooked in the barn, but he wasn’t, maybe because the night sky was clear. If rain had been falling he wouldn’t have had the courage to stay out. He watched Essay put her feet on the front doors and try to peer over the ledge into the yard. When she tired of that she began parading in front of the dogs, whipping a piece of twine back and forth in her mouth and mock-pouncing.

Quit teasing them, he signed. Come here.

He put them in stays and got out the grooming tackle and nail clippers. They were done blowing coat for the spring, and he used the undercoat rake to draw out the last vestiges of downy gray beneath their guard coats. They lay in a circle around him, panting and watching. He brushed out Almondine first, then Opal and Umbra together, then Finch and Baboo. Tinder and Essay he saved for last because they needed to learn patience. Essay disliked being brushed and Edgar didn’t understand that. He talked to her about it and listened to her complaints but he didn’t stop. They always came to like grooming. He was proud of that. Even if he had a lot to learn as a trainer, he was as good a groom as a person could be.

The stroke of the brush from croup to withers helped him think. What was confusing was his mother’s mercurial attitude. One moment she asked him to decide the future of the kennel, the next she dictated their lives. He couldn’t tell what she truly felt about anything. An expression he’d read in a book came to him: she was taking up with a man. A dumb, old-fashioned expression. In the book it had been something simple and clear. Taking up with someone. As direct an act as turning on a light or shooting a gun, an indivisible act.

Yet this was complicated beyond any ability he had to express it. He felt he could do nothing until he had the right words, but the ones that came to mind only captured what he had been thinking, trailing his real thoughts like the tail of a meteor. To say his mother was taking up with a man: that was an idea that had occurred to him days before, maybe weeks. But only just then had the words bubbled up inside him. As soon as he heard them in his mind he discarded them as fussy and stupid, a remnant of past thought. What he was thinking that moment was something entirely else and he didn’t know if anyone had ever come up with words for those ideas. He stopped grooming Essay and tried to explain, and for a long time the dogs lay watching as his hands traced his thoughts in the air.

Anyway, he told them, all of that was beside the point after seeing his father. He’d found a syringe in the workshop last night. That was his own memory, he was sure of that much. Then his father had touched him and Edgar had been filled with his father’s memories but like some half-made vessel he’d been unable to capture them and they’d vanished, all but a few tattered vestiges. One vestige was the sight of Claude backing out of the barn doors and into a cold, white world.

His father had died from an aneurysm.

A weakness in some place called the Circle of Willis.

Except he didn’t believe that now. Claude had been there that day. He would have left tracks in the snow. Had Edgar seen tracks? Yes-his own, his mother’s, his father’s. The tracks of half a dozen other people might have been there too but he wouldn’t have known the difference, because it wasn’t anything he’d been looking for. The wind had been blowing steadily, filling every footstep and tire track with a dune of white on its lee side. Would Claude’s tracks have led up the driveway? Through the field? Into the woods? He must have gotten there somehow. Edgar remembered running out to the road, but beyond fifty or sixty yards everything had blanked out into a white wall of snow. Claude’s Impala could have been parked at the crest of the hill or two miles off; either way it would have been equally concealed. He thought, for the first of many times, about the expression on Claude’s face that morning as he’d peered in through the kitchen window. Had he seen surprise? Or guilt?

And if it had been guilt, what was Edgar supposed to think about the kiss that followed, so purposeful and defiant? Why go out of your way to bait a person who might know your terrible secret? Unless, he thought, it was better if that person were blinded by anger. Could Claude have concluded so quickly that if Edgar sounded mad with jealousy, anything else he said would be discredited?

He looked at the dogs lying sprawled in various postures of sleep, all except for Almondine, who sat leaning heavily into his thigh.

We’re going to have to sit tight, he signed. We’re just going to have to wait.

He led the dogs to their pens. He spent a minute squatting in the straw with each, drawing a hand across their muzzles and down the curve of their shoulders, making sure they were settled. Then he turned out the aisle lights, and together he and Almondine walked into the dark.

On the gravel-shot lawn, where the syringe had lain crushed in the rainwater, an oblong of grass and weeds caught his eye. He sat on his heels to look. The spot was maybe the size of his palm and at first glance he thought the grass was dead but it was not. It was lush and thick and there in the watery moonlight it was also as white as a bone.

H E LAY IN BED THAT NIGHT WITH ALMONDINE BESIDE HIM, both of them waiting for sleep that would not come. Outside, a night wind was blowing and through the high window of his room the rustle of the apple tree and the maple made a continuous surf. Almondine lay with her forelegs outstretched and her head reared up, looking with suspicion at the movement of the curtains. In time, she gave a long, gaped yawn and he reached over and set a hand on her foreleg. Wind she distrusted. Wind could come into the house and slam doors. He smoothed the fine filamentary whiskers that arched over her eyes. In the morning she would be sleeping on the floor, he thought. If she started the night on the bed she always ended on the floor. If she started on the floor there was a chance he might wake in the morning to find her on the bed but more likely she would be standing at the window or lying in the doorway. There was some notion of propriety in her about this but he had never been able to fully make sense of it.

He was looking at Almondine and trying to think of nothing when the image of his father, fingerspelling, came back to him. He sat up in his bed. What was it his father had said in those final moments? How could he have forgotten it?

Find H-A-A-something-I.

He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to see again what had happened the previous night. The rain had turned to drizzle. His father’s gestures had been vanishingly faint. Edgar sat in a reverie, watching his father’s hands, shaped by mist, tracing out the letters, and when he opened his eyes again he thought he’d misread the third letter that night. It seemed to him now to have been a C, not an A.

Find H-A-C-something-I.

The knowledge came at some cost. He’d seen his father reaching toward him again and remembered how he’d begged not to be touched, instead of saying what he wished he’d said. He believed, though he couldn’t have said why, that his father had been spelling out a name, a dog’s name. He turned on the light. On his bedside table he found a scrap of paper and a pencil and he wrote down the letters, leaving a blank for the unknown. Even incomplete, it looked familiar to him. He had no idea what it meant.