David Wroblewski - The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

Finally, he stood, blanket wrapped around him, and led the dogs through the kitchen and onto the flat expanse of the stoop. They bedded down in a tangle of canine and human limbs with the house comfortably at their flanks, eight eyes and eight ears facing into the night. One by one the dogs exhaled deep sighs. Overhead, cool white stars arced in the black sky. The moon and the thin corona around the moon shone. It looked to him empyreal-formed of light or fire-the word that would have completed the crossword puzzle. Why hadn’t he wanted to tell Henry? He pondered that question while the night sounds eddied around them, but before an answer came, he’d fallen asleep.

B IRDSONG. SCENT OF PERCOLATING COFFEE. HENRY PUSHED open the screen door and looked at Edgar and the dogs lying curled and overlapped and shook his head as if they were the most pitiful sight he’d ever seen. Baboo was the first to rise, splaying his front feet and ambling sleep-drunk to Henry. Edgar tightened his grip on Tinder and Essay, but they were awake and panting. Water rang through the pipes in the house and the shower hissed. Edgar pushed himself up and walked into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee and brought it back out on the stoop. Essay remembered her soup bone, which reminded the other dogs, and the sky brightened to the sound of three sets of teeth scraping bone. They barely looked up when Henry walked out, lunch bucket in hand. He dropped a pair of canvas work gloves onto the porch beside Edgar.

“Follow me,” Henry said. He walked to the shed and jiggled a bent bolt out of a flap latch and threw open the doors. “Here’s the deal. I want to park that car”-he gestured at the rusting monolith on the cinderblocks-“in this shed.”

Viewed from the outside, Henry’s shed was unremarkable if slightly ramshackle. It measured maybe fifteen feet wide and twice that deep, a windowless little structure with a peaked roof and sun-blasted white paint. But inside lay a junkyard in miniature. It took Edgar a moment before he could make his eyes settle on any one thing. The walls were encrusted with hubcaps, spools of wire, license plates, ancient tire irons, hand saws, rakes, hoes, scythes, circular saw blades, and a menagerie of antique iron tools, rusted and strange. Coils of chain link lay heaped around the perimeter like petrified snakes. A length of rain gutter crumpled and folded. An unframed mirror footed by dusty, cracked sheets of plate glass. There was a stack of rusty buckets overflowing with doodads and piece parts. Off to one side, a crumbling pyramid of red bricks topped by a thick rope, shedding fibrous creepers. Plywood sheets, delaminated like picture books fished out of a puddle. There were mounds of tires, stacks of newspaper oatmealing in place, wash pans haphazardly stacked, their enamel crazed like desert mud. A squat brown anvil. Toward the back, a cylindrical wringer washer lurked, and what looked to be either a fire hydrant or part of a truck transmission.

And all that was around the edges. At the center stood-or stooped, rather-an ancient hay wagon. It gave the impression of a broken-backed animal driven to the ground by its burden. Three of its wheels had sprung out to the sides in expressions of shock and exasperation. Its front axle had buckled, tilting the fourth wheel inward, and the whole rotted platform melted diagonally back to front beneath a mountain of timber, shingles, doorframes, rolls of barbed wire, and rust-red stanchions. Had the wagon still been on its wheels, the debris would not have cleared the lintel.

“You see my problem?” Henry said.

Edgar nodded. He looked at the ruined car on its blocks. It definitely belonged in the shed, he thought. Then Henry laid out his plan-what to tackle first, what he wanted Edgar to avoid until both of them were there. It took him a long time to explain-there was a lot to do, and he instructed Edgar in detail. “Carhartts in the closet when you get to the pokey stuff,” he said, gesturing toward a nest of barbed wire. Then he took Edgar to the barn and showed him where he could find wire cutters and a wheelbarrow. When they walked back to the house, Edgar scribbled out a request for bandages and Henry produced an old white bedsheet. They made a list of things he needed from town. And then Henry drove off.

Baboo and Essay had followed them to the shed and now stood peering into the kitchen through the screen door. Tinder had joined them, standing on three legs. He met Edgar’s gaze with a glint of defiance. Unless Edgar wanted to hold him down, his look said, he was going to start moving.

First we clean that foot, Edgar signed.

Tinder’s wound oozed a gray-green pus, odorless but nonetheless frightening. The sight made beads of sweat wick into the hair all over Edgar’s scalp. He pressed the back of his hand to the injured pad. It was not overly hot. He began to work it in the water too roughly and Tinder yelped and jerked his paw away.

I’m sorry, Edgar signed. But we can’t stop yet. He sat with his hand out. In time Tinder offered Edgar his dripping paw and the next time he went slower. Afterward he washed the old bandages in the sink and strung them up to dry on the clothesline. Tinder began to chew the new dressings.

Stop it, Edgar signed. He put the soup bone in front of Tinder and returned to the clothesline. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Tinder return to his bandages. He walked back and stopped him again.

We can just do this all day if you want, he signed.

He counted back in his mind: three days since he and the dogs had been through drills. He lined them up in the grass behind the shed. They worked through recalls and come-fors in the morning sun, then fetches, stays, and guarding. It reminded them all of home, he supposed, but back then they’d only been going through motions, answering classroom questions upon which nothing depended. Chasing. Sitting still. Scenting targets. Now the same acts drew up the ties between them, put them back together, as though shaping the world from scratch. As they worked, they put the sky in place above, the trees in the ground. They invented color and air and scent and gravity. Laughter and sadness. They discovered truth and lies and mock-lies-even then, Essay played the oldest joke there was to play, returning a stick past him as if he were invisible, cantering sideways, tossing it about in her mouth as if to ask, it’s all play, really, isn’t it? What else matters when there’s this to do?

THE FIRST PART OF HENRY’S plan was simple-pull everything onto the dirt and grass and sort it into three piles: junk to burn, junk to haul away, and junk to save. The old lumber would be burned, along with the magazines and papers; the old chair and the stanchions would be hauled away. The category of junk to be saved was largely theoretical, Henry had said. Also, while Henry wasn’t aware of anything that called the shed home, it was hard not to imagine a rat nesting inside somewhere. Edgar picked out a whacking stick and before he moved anything big, he whaled on it. A lone garter snake had slithered from behind the plywood, but so far that was it.

In short order he had the stanchions stacked haphazardly on the gravel and a mound of rubbish near the burning barrel. One after another the dogs trotted over to scent what Edgar had pulled out. Baboo and Essay marked the old car seat; when Tinder tried, it turned into a balancing problem, since he had only three good legs. Edgar made as if to stop them, then wondered what the point would be.

At noon he doled out scraps to the dogs and soaked Tinder’s foot again, rewrapping it with dry bandages from the clothesline. There was the sound of a car passing along the road. Out of habit, he glanced up to locate the dogs, but there was no real cause for concern. Baboo and Tinder were sleeping in the shade. Essay had selected a spot in the sun from which she could follow his progress. All of them were concealed behind the house. He briefly reconsidered starting down the railroad tracks, then rejected the idea again. Besides the difficulty of traveling with Tinder, and the hydrogen peroxide and other supplies that Henry would be bringing back that evening, Edgar had made a deal with Henry and he already felt more than a twinge of guilt over having burglarized the man. He didn’t want to renege. Cleaning out his shed seemed like a small repayment.