David Wroblewski - The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

Remember me.

He pulled himself inside.

Come here, he signed. See for yourself.

“I can see from where I am. There’s no rain. Come away from there.”

But his patience was spent. He walked to her and tried to pull her forward. When she resisted he clasped his hands around her neck and swung her toward the mow door, his body counterweighted against hers. Bales and rafters spun around them. His mother tried to get her hands under his and pry them away. They’d halved the distance to the mow door when he lost his balance and they crashed to the floor. In the tumult, he knelt over her and pinned her arms. They panted. He let go and began to sign wildly.

Did you help him? Tell me now if you helped him.

“Help him? Help who?”

I’ll show you who.

He stood again and took his mother’s wrist and began to lug her toward the mow door, still hanging open onto the night. When she realized what he was doing, she began to kick along the floor to get to her feet.

From behind them came a hoarse cry. Not speech, not words, just a groan of apprehension. He looked over his shoulder. Inside the vestibule at the top of the stairs stood the chiaroscuro figure of a man. Edgar dropped his mother’s wrist and ran toward the door, so grim and ecstatic and oblivious he fell over a bale of straw and went down, legs kicking. When he’d scrambled to his feet again, the hay hook was in his hand. He threw himself at the doorway, hook dragging through the air behind like a great single claw. The figure stepped deeper into the shadows and tried to close the vestibule door, but Edgar struck it headlong before it latched.

The door slammed back with a splintering boom. There was a grunt and then the sound of a body tumbling heavily on the stairs. Then silence. Edgar looked up to find the hay hook driven thumb deep into the timber of the doorframe. He wrenched the thing free and flung it ringing across the mow. His mother had gotten to her feet and was running toward him, saying, “What was that? What did you do?” but he couldn’t answer at first. A savage, godish electricity ran through his nerves. From his chest, a spasm rose. His hands snapped open and shut so that he could barely force them into sign.

I should have done it the first night he stayed here.

Only after his mother cried out did he follow her into the vestibule. She was standing halfway down the stairs, the heels of her hands pressed to her temples. At the bottom of the stairwell lay Doctor Papineau, feet askew on a high tread, head on the workshop floor, canted horribly. One of his arms was flung forward, gesturing casually away. Edgar pushed past his mother and stepped over the veterinarian’s body. He bent to look. The old man’s eyes were skimming over even then.

Tears streamed down his mother’s face as she descended the stairs.

Edgar stood. The muscles of his legs were still twitching with whatever galvanic charge had possessed him in the mow.

Now you cry? You think this is terrible? Don’t you have dreams? Isn’t he there when you sleep?

“My God, Edgar. This is not your father. This is Doctor Papineau. This is Page.”

Edgar looked at the old man lying there, so small and frail. The same man who’d summoned the strength to lift him out of the snow by the back of his shirt.

He wasn’t so innocent. I heard them talking.

His mother put her face in her hands. “How are we going to tell Glen?” she said. “I don’t understand what’s happened with you. We’re going to have to…have to…”

She looked at him. “Wait,” she said. “I need to think for a minute. Page fell down the stairs.”

She dropped into sign. You need to go.

I’m not going anywhere.

Yes, you are. I want you to run, get out into the field. Find a place to hide until tomorrow.

Why?

Just go!

So you can be rid of us both?

He didn’t see her hand moving any more than the dogs saw her leash corrections. A hot jolt traveled from his cheek to his spine. He staggered back against the wall to keep from toppling onto Doctor Papineau’s body. The side of his face felt like it had been set on fire.

Don’t you dare, she signed, and she was Raksha now, Mother Wolf. You’re talking to your mother and you’ll do as I say. I want you to go. Stay away until you see me standing behind the silo, alone. Watch in the evening. When you see me, it’s safe to come back. Until then, disappear. Even if we call, stay away.

He turned and stumbled out of the workshop and into a yard pale and blue in the moonlight. He squinted past the light above the kennel doors. The night sky cloudless. There was no time to fetch tackle. He rounded the barn and unlatched the pen doors and signaled his litter out. Seven dogs bounded into the grass. Together they ran down the slope behind the barn until they reached the rock pile, and there Edgar sat, senseless, while the dogs milled about. He watched Claude cross from the house to the barn and back. He closed his eyes. Time passed, whether a minute or an hour, he couldn’t have said. Then his mother was calling, “Edgar! Edgar!” Her voice toylike and shrunken.

The stars wheeled in his vision. Impossible that he had ever lived there.

He stood. He began to run, the dogs beside him. As they reached the woods, a squad car appeared on the road at the top of the hill, blue and red flashers strobing the trees and throwing off a dopplered siren scream. Glen Papineau, come to find his father. Now there was no going back for Almondine, he thought. And having thought it, found it almost impossible not to turn back.

The moonlight was enough to see the two birches marking the entrance to the old logging trail. The dogs crashed through the underbrush in crazy ellipse, all but Baboo, who trailed a few steps behind. The woods were so much darker than the field. He didn’t understand how little progress they’d made until the headlights of the squad car, bouncing over the tractor-rutted field, lit the tree trunks in front of him. Spears and creases of white shot between the trees, but Edgar would not turn his dark-adapted eyes back to look. They wouldn’t bring the squad car into the woods-it couldn’t make headway on the logging path, and there would be no way to turn it around without miring it.

Fifty yards from the creek, the ground began to slope downward. The dogs were cast wide about him now. When he reached the water, he clapped his hands. Baboo had stayed nearby and sat by his leg, panting. Finch materialized from a stand of bracken, followed by Opal and Umbra, like shadows out of shadows. Then Pout and Tinder. In the dark, it took a long time to be sure it was Essay who was missing. He stood again and clapped hard and listened to the water flowing along the creek bed. Then he could wait no longer. When he walked into the creek, the water covered his ankles, cool and slick. He grabbed the first fence post he touched and hauled it back and forth until it came loose, gasping in its hole. The thing was as heavy as a granite pillar and he had to kneel in the water to get it to move. When it finally came up, he balanced the rough end of it on a flat rock in the creek.

Two of the dogs bounded into the water even before he could call them, though in the dark he couldn’t tell who. He pushed them under the wire and they stood on the far side and shook off. He clapped for the others. The remaining four dogs paced beside the creek but would come no farther. A flashlight beam began to cut through the air overhead. The dogs whined and looked over their shoulders. Finally Edgar stepped out of the creek and knelt and put his hands in their ruffs and pressed his face against the crowns of their heads. Finch and Pout and Opal and Umbra. Then he stepped back and released them. At first they sat and looked at him uncertainly. Then Finch wheeled and tracked up the slope in the direction they’d come and the other three followed, crashing along his trail.