David Wroblewski - The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

“Where does this young man come in?” Mr. Benson said when they came down again. “He earns his meals, I’m sure.”

“Well, for one thing, Edgar names the pups,” his mother said. “And he’s in charge of grooming. And this year, he’s training his first litter. I expect they’ll be ready by fall.”

Mr. Benson asked to see Edgar’s litter, and Claude set his hand on Edgar’s shoulder and told him to bring them out. Until that moment Edgar hadn’t decided to have his litter play out what they’d practiced. He’d always imagined some circumstance with just him and the dogs and Claude, but now he saw it didn’t matter who else was there. There was no choice anyway. He had to have an answer. He couldn’t stand the knowing-and-not-knowing, the residue of memory without the memory itself, the coming-apart every time he sat across the table from Claude. All he needed was one unguarded moment, like the one when Claude first spotted him watching from the apple tree. An expression had flashed across Claude’s face then, shock or guilt or fear, but whichever, it had vanished before Edgar had understood what it might reveal. This time he would be ready. He would see it for what it was. And if he saw guilt, he would not be stopped by anyone’s touch, not his mother’s, not Almondine’s. He would not sink to his knees, shaking like a newborn calf.

“Let’s proof them on stays while we’re at it,” his mother said.

He nodded. He walked past the pens and into the medicine room, where he yanked open the drawer reserved for Doctor Papineau’s supplies and stuffed six syringes into the breast pocket of his shirt. It looked strange, he knew, and he tried to act nonchalant as he walked out again. He brought out Opal and Umbra and stayed them in the aisle, then Pout, Baboo, Tinder, Finch, and finally Essay. The seven of them sat, twitchy and excited, forty feet down the aisle from his mother and Mr. Benson and Claude.

“This will just take a moment,” his mother said. She shot Edgar a quizzical look and kept talking. “We try to use every opportunity to train them. When a stranger visits, the dogs naturally want to investigate. A lot of our training is just finding ways to test their skills in new situations, like holding a stay when there’s a distraction. Here, Edgar, send one of them over.”

First, tell them the dogs see everything that happens here, he signed.

What?

Just say it. Say they see everything and they never forget. You’ll understand in a minute.

He stood and waited. He thought his mother might ignore his request, but she turned to Mr. Benson and Claude and Doctor Papineau. “Edgar says to tell you that the dogs see”-she faltered for a moment, then continued-“that they see everything that happens here, and they never forget.”

Edgar was standing before the dogs, looking down the line to make sure they didn’t break. He touched Opal under the chin. She looked at him. He released her and she dashed down the aisle to the four of them standing by the workshop. Then he pulled one of the syringes from his shirt pocket. His hand was shaking and as the syringe came out, it snagged another which went clattering to the floor. He snatched it up and placed it in Baboo’s mouth.

Tag, he signed. Then he turned to watch.

Baboo trotted down the aisle with the syringe in his mouth. Edgar kept his eyes on Claude, who had caught sight of the syringe. When Baboo reached them, he pressed his nose into Opal’s hip, and Opal looked toward Edgar. He gave a small gesture with his right hand. She dropped to the floor and lay on her side.

“Well, I’ll be,” Mr. Benson said. He stooped to stroke Baboo’s muzzle and came away with a syringe in his palm.

“What’s this?” he said. He held the syringe in the light. Before anyone could answer, Edgar sent Pout and Pout tagged Baboo and Baboo went down. Mr. Benson reached over and extracted the second syringe from Pout’s mouth.

“This is part of their training? To carry medicine?”

Seeing the expression on Claude’s face, Edgar began trembling so violently he had to kneel. Finch went next; he tagged Pout, Pout looked at Edgar, hesitated, and dropped. Then it was Umbra’s turn, and Tinder’s. Each time there was a syringe and a tag on the hip, and the dog went down.

“Well, I’ll be,” Mr. Benson said. “It’s almost like…as if…Do they think…”

Claude stood watching it all. He glanced at the open door, then back at the dogs, then at Edgar.

Edgar didn’t expect the last part to work-it was different from the rest, something he’d worked out with Essay alone. He put the remaining syringe in her mouth and signaled her down the aisle. When she reached Tinder, the only dog standing, she turned to look back at him.

Left, he signed.

Essay veered around Tinder. The barrel of the syringe was sideways in her mouth. She walked up to Claude. The safety sheath was on the needle, but when she pressed the blunt soft tip of her nose into the muscle of Claude’s leg, he flinched as if he’d been stung. Edgar was walking down the aisle, neither blinking nor averting his gaze.

“Drop it!” Claude said. “Drop it!” He looked again toward the Dutch doors and then faced into the workshop and then got control of himself and took a breath and looked steadily at Edgar. A muscle under his left eye was jerking.

“What the hell, anyway!” he said, and stalked out of the barn.

Edgar began turning in the aisle, performing a weird, exhilarated dance. He signed a broad release and the downed dogs scrambled to their feet and stirred around Mr. Benson. His mother allowed herself an angry look at him, but when she spoke, her voice was cool and modulated.

“Edgar,” she said, “would you put these dogs back in their pens? I think we’ve seen enough.”

Did you see? he signed. Did you see his face?

I certainly did.

“That was extraordinary,” Mr. Benson said. “What was that?”

“I haven’t seen that before myself,” Doctor Papineau said, “and I’ve watched these dogs do some pretty unusual things.”

Edgar’s mother turned to Mr. Benson. “It doesn’t always make sense when you see it in progress,” she said.

“Go,” she said to the dogs jostling at their feet. “Kennel up. Go.”

The dogs trotted down the aisle. Edgar went to Essay’s pen and grabbed her by the ruff and scrubbed her up, then visited all the rest. Good girl. Yes. Good dog. Good girl. Everyone had walked out of the barn, and as he praised his dogs he listened for the Impala starting, but he heard only a hasty parting conversation between his mother and Mr. Benson.

It was full dark outside now. If he went to the house, there would be demands and arguments and he needed quiet to close his eyes and watch everything again-see the look on Claude’s face as Essay tagged him, the flush of blood across his cheeks, the muscle tugging his eyelid. He climbed the workshop stairs and flicked on the lights in the mow. As the sound of Mr. Benson’s truck faded, his mother stormed in.

“We’re going to talk, Edgar. Right here, right now. I want to know what that was about. Do you have any idea how embarrassing that was?”

Did you see his face? The look on his face?

“Whose face, Edgar? Mr. Benson’s? Who thinks I have a lunatic for a son? Or Claude’s? Who, by the way, is in the house right now, royally pissed off?”

He walked between straw bales scattered across the mow floor, then stopped and looked into the rafters. His breath roared in his ears.

It’s raining, he signed.

“What?”

Is it raining? Do you hear rain?

He ran to the front of the mow and unlatched the broad loading door and swung it open. He gripped the lintel and hung his body into space and looked into the stars burning in the clear night sky, then out toward the woods.