David Wroblewski - The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

Then she tipped her head and looked at Edgar one-eyed, a primeval bird in its cage. “Child,” she said from the gloom, “come in here and show me what it is you brought with you.”

He almost didn’t go back in. He stood and looked at his bicycle and then at the clapboard siding with its crazing paint and thought how, though every individual board looked straight and square, when you took them all together something was cockeyed. But in the end he pulled open the screen door and walked to the counter. From his back pocket he drew out the photograph of Claude and Forte and set it on the scored wood between them.

Ida’s right hand scrambled across the counter and lifted it up for her to see.

“That one hasn’t been here for a long time,” she said. She looked from the photograph to Edgar and back again. “I remember him, though. Those dogfights.” Her left hand placed a nickel on the counter. “Take your deposit,” she said.

He reached out and set the empty Coke bottle on the counter. Before he could let go of it, Ida’s adding machine hand sprung forward. Its fingers encircled his wrist with a surprising might and pinned his hand hard against the counter. At once his fingers cramped closed around the fluted bottle. Then, before he quite understood what was happening, Ida’s other hand had pressed the photograph of Claude and Forte against his free palm and she’d somehow curled his fingers closed and locked that hand shut as well. Then she leaned over the counter toward him.

“You think you can find that bottle?” she said. “You need to look for that bottle. Because unless you can lay hands on it, you need to go. You understand me? You need to go. That’s what’s in the juice.”

He didn’t understand her. Not in the least. Her face was dreadfully close to his and her fingers were squeezing his fist until the crushed photograph bit into his palm. The smoke above her head crawled in knots and ropes. Images he didn’t understand occupied his mind’s eye: a dark, cobbled alleyway, a dog limping through the rain, an elderly Oriental man holding a slender length of cane with great delicacy. Edgar looked at the Coke bottle in his rigor-locked hand and Ida’s monkey fingers encasing his wrist like a hot iron manacle and then he saw that the bottle had changed. It had taken the shape of an antique cruet or inkwell, maybe a prescription bottle from olden days. Some oily liquid glazed the inside, prismatic, clear, viscous. The thing was banded with a ribbon, and the ribbon was covered with markings in some foreign alphabet.

“And if you go,” she whispered, “don’t you come back, not for nothing. Don’t you let the wind change your mind. It’s just wind, that’s all.”

Then she cocked her head and looked at him. She blinked. He recognized in her then a wizened version of the little girl with Shirley Temple curls, the one who had confronted him in the Mellen diner and asked for the secret he didn’t know.

My gramma’s like me. Wanna know what my gramma says?

A slab of a hand appeared on Ida Paine’s shoulder, carrying with it the odor of blood and flesh. Then the butcher stood behind the old woman, his white apron smeared with sausage-size lines of red.

“Ida,” the man said. “Ida.”

“It’s just wind,” she repeated. “It means nothing.”

Her fingers uncurled from his wrist. Instantly, Edgar felt his grip relax and the bottle was simply a Coke bottle again and not the odd-looking vessel they’d grappled over. Ida snatched it and slumped onto her stool, chin on her chest, drawing great, deep breaths. Smoke issued lazily from her nostrils. When her eyes, magnified through the lenses of her glasses, went momentarily pink, he saw the doll-like face of the little girl again.

She says that before you were born, God told you a secret he didn’t want anyone else to know.

The butcher lifted the Coke bottle from Ida’s grip and clomped to the rear of the store. There was a clank as he racked the empty. For some time Edgar stood rooted to the unvarnished floor of the Popcorn Corners grocery while the radio hissed out pork futures.

The next thing he knew he was pedaling like a maniac over the gravel of Town Line Road, halfway home.

FOREWARNED WAS NOT FOREARMED. The catastrophe, when it came, turned on a vanity of Edgar’s so broad and innocent that he would look back on the events of that afternoon and find blame only in himself.

He had nearly arrived home, pedaling the upslope on the last small hill before their field opened greenly to the west, when the shakes came over him, first in his hands, then his shoulders and chest, until he thought he would either be sick or jerk the handlebars sideways and pitch onto the gravel. He ground the coaster brake under his heel and stumbled away to sit in the weeds beside the road.

Whatever had happened under Ida Paine’s grip had been frightening enough, but worse, it had brought on a sudden, suffocating desire to recall his father’s memories, those memories he’d held so briefly. He closed his eyes, pressed his palms to his head. He heard the hiss of rain striking the new grass and he felt the thousand soft impressions of it falling coldly on his skin. He remembered his father’s hands passing into his chest. The sensation of his beating heart cradled. The images sieving through him. The dogfights. The desire to stand between Claude and the world. A whole history he couldn’t know. But their substance was again lost to him, as fugitive as the shape of a candle’s flame.

I have to go back, he thought. She can help me remember. She knows something about Claude-what had she said about dogfights? And who was the old man he’d seen in the alleyway? What was he holding? But he thought of how Ida looked afterward, slumped on her chair like the empty shell of an old woman, and he wondered if she would even remember talking to him. If he asked her about the old man in the alley, he felt sure she wouldn’t know what he was talking about. And anyway, he didn’t have the courage to face her again. Not for a long time. Maybe not ever.

When he remembered the photograph, he clapped his shirt pocket. Empty. Sweat broke out across his forehead. At first he thought he’d left it at the grocery. If so, he’d have to go back. He lay in the grass and frantically searched his pants pockets until he found it, bent in half and roughly jammed in the back right. The photograph was in bad shape after being crushed in his convulsed fist under Ida’s fingers. The emulsion was shot through by white cracks half a dozen ways. He pressed it flat. It puckered into meaningless, geometric bas-relief, dividing the image into triangles and trapezoids. But Claude and Forte were still unmistakably the subjects. Edgar propped his arm on his knee and held the photograph out and looked at it. When his hand stopped quaking he remounted the bicycle.

He topped the hill and coasted up their driveway. It was mid-afternoon. The Impala was parked behind the tractor and Edgar’s mother was crossing from the barn to the house with a set of training notes in hand. As he rolled past, she called to him.

“Edgar! Could you unload the truck? I was at the feed mill yesterday.”

He walked his bike into the milk house, wishing he could have gotten home unseen, to go somewhere with Almondine and think before he had to face his mother or Claude. At least his mother had been preoccupied; by the time he shut the milk house door, she had disappeared into the house. He turned the corner into the barn to get the wheelbarrow. As he passed the workshop, he glanced through the doorway out of habit. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular. He didn’t even know anyone was there.

Claude stood before the workbench, bent over something small, perhaps a jammed spring latch for a lead, tinkering with it like a watchmaker. Almondine lay on the floor, hips tilted, peering up at Claude, relaxed and complacent, her mouth hanging open in a quiet pant. A wedge of light streamed from the high workshop window. Motes of straw dust hung suspended in the air. Everything there was lit in degrees of light and shadow-Claude’s shoulders and head, the chaff on his shoes, the saws and hammers hanging from the pegboard, the outscooped curve of Almondine’s chest, the contour of her head and ears, the scythe of her tail trailing along the dusty floor. Almondine turned to look at Edgar, sleepy-eyed and relaxed, and then back at Claude. All of this was framed in the doorway, like some sort of painting, but it was the accident of a moment, something unpracticed and undesigned.