David Wroblewski - The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

THAT NIGHT IT WAS A workingman’s dinner. Henry sat at the kitchen table and read the newspaper and ate reheated brats and potato salad. He motioned for Edgar to help himself and eyed the dogs as though expecting them to lunge for the food. He started to ask Edgar to put them outside, then seemed to reconsider. Instead, he folded the paper into quarters and pored over the crossword, tapping his pencil on the table and picking off the easy clues. Then he said, “Oh!” and walked into the living room. There was a warm pop from the phonograph speakers. Piano music began to drift through the house.

“They call this one The Goldberg Variation,” he said when he returned. He was holding a battered album cover in one hand. He looked at it again and, with self-conscious precision, corrected himself: “Variations.” He took up the crossword puzzle again, shifting and fidgeting and touching his forehead as if perturbed by the sound of the piano. He emptied his glass of beer and leaned over to the refrigerator and extracted another, pouring it down the inside curve of the glass while streamers of bubbles tumbled upward.

“Hey, read something, would you?” he said. “When you just sit there it makes it hard to concentrate.” He didn’t sound angry, just a little dejected. “There’s magazines and books in the living room.”

Edgar took the dogs outside and began grooming them using the pin brush Henry had bought. It was a cheap plastic brush, but it was better than he could do with his fingers, which were all he’d had to work with for weeks. The dogs’ undercoats were terribly matted. Twilight had ended but the kitchen window cast enough light. He worked Essay’s tail until she grew impatient, then moved to Tinder and Baboo, and then back to Essay. The piano music drifted out the screen door. When it stopped, scratchily, he listened to Henry’s footsteps pass through the living room. In a minute, a new melody began. Henry walked out onto the porch, paper and pencil in one hand, beer glass in the other, and sat with his back against the white clapboards. Baboo walked over to him. Henry tentatively pressed his fingers into the fur under Baboo’s jaw, attempting to scratch without getting slobber on his fingers. Baboo endured it for a moment, then turned his head so that Henry’s hand slid behind his ear and began to push back against Henry’s fingers.

“Nat,” Henry said, “what’s a ten-letter word for ‘Augments vision.’ Starts and ends with S.”

He slid the paper over to Edgar. “Twenty-three down.”

Edgar glanced at the crossword puzzle and set down the brush and penciled in spectacles and pushed the paper back.

“Right,” Henry said. “Should have got that.” He held his beer up to the porch light and looked through it. “Spectacles,” he repeated pensively, as if the idea of spectacles had just occurred to him. He tipped his head back against the house. When he stopped scratching Baboo, the dog nosed Henry’s hand and laid a paw on his leg.

Watch it, Edgar signed at him.

Baboo withdrew his foot.

“You know,” Henry said, “it’s probably hard to tell, but I’ve never had a dog. Not even when I was a kid. Lots of cats-three, four at a time. My best friend in elementary school had a little spotted dog named Bouncer. Maybe a twenty-pounder or so. Pretty smart. He could balance stuff on his nose. He’d follow us everywhere. But these dogs-these dogs are something else. I mean, the way they look at you and all.”

They sat in silence for a while. The light from the kitchen was skewed across the boards of the stoop.

“You had them all their lives?”

Yes.

“You trained them?”

Yes.

“How’s that one-Tinder. How’s Tinder’s foot?”

Edgar was working the myriad tangles in Essay’s tail and she wasn’t enjoying it. When he set the brush down and released her, she leapt and circled, examining her priceless appendage, then bounded over to Henry and Baboo and nosed them both. Edgar joined them. He unwrapped Tinder’s bandage and held his paw up to the light.

Henry scooted over. “Oof,” he said. “I thought I just imagined that from the other night.”

Edgar fetched the rags and the pan and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide.

“That’s the biggest bottle I could find. You can probably stretch it if you soak a rag and dab,” Henry said.

Edgar nodded. He reached over to the paper.

Why did you plant sunflowers? he wrote in the margin. He sopped up the hydrogen peroxide as Henry suggested. The edges of Tinder’s wound were red and weeping, and the hydrogen peroxide sizzled under the cloth.

“Aha. Well, interesting question,” Henry said. He sat and looked out at the field. “Call it an experiment. Usually, I plant corn, but I wanted to do something different this year. Something out of the ordinary. So I came up with this idea. Further south sunflower isn’t so uncommon, you know, but you don’t see it here much.”

When Tinder’s foot was as clean as he could get it, Edgar retrieved the tattered bandages from the clothesline.

Does it pay better than corn? he wrote.

“Not really,” Henry said. “But I don’t care. Fifty cents a pound for the seed. I could make more money with corn, but not so much more.” He looked out at the field and frowned. “I’m not sure how you harvest it, though. It’ll take forever to do it by hand. The man who harvested the corn last year thought he could get a special attachment for his combine. Then again, I might just let them sit there if they look nice. It all depends. Of course, nothing’s more depressing than a field full of dead sunflowers.” He drank his beer and looked at the stars. “You haven’t been able to talk for a long time, huh? With the hand signs and everything?”

Edgar shook his head.

“Was there an accident or something? If you don’t mind me asking, I mean.”

I was born this way, he wrote. The doctors don’t know why. Then he shrugged and wrote, Thank you for buying dog food.

Henry looked at the piles of debris. “What a god-awful mess,” he said. He turned his gaze to the car on blocks. “I appreciate the help. I need to get that heap out of the rain before it rusts to pieces. I ought to just sell it, you know.”

He stared at the car and produced another bottle of beer from somewhere. “I just can’t part with it,” he said.

Edgar nodded. He slipped a fresh sock onto Tinder’s foot and tied it up again, using his forefinger to warn the dog from chewing. Tinder broke into a pant, as if amazed Edgar had read his mind.

“Nat,” Henry said. “Have you ever been called ‘ordinary’?”

Edgar looked at him.

“You know-ordinary. Just…ordinary. I bet no one has ever accused you of that.”

No. Edgar looked at him. Not that I remember.

“Yeah, I wouldn’t think so. Running around with trained circus dogs or whatever. Jesus. Want to know something ridiculous? I have. By my own fiancée-ex-fiancée, I mean. We were going to get married in March, and then, from out of nowhere, she called it off. Said she loved me, even, but she’d decided I was too ordinary, and that over the years it would destroy our marriage. ‘Ordinary looking or what?’ I said. ‘No, just all-around ordinary,’ she said. ‘Ordinary in the way you do things, ordinary in what you see and think and say. Just ordinary.’ Once she got that idea in her head, she said she couldn’t shake it. Every time she looked at me she felt love, and she felt ordinariness at the same time.”

He took a big swallow of beer. “Now I ask you, does that make sense?”

Edgar shook his head. The fact was, it didn’t make sense to him. He loved ordinary things, ordinary days, ordinary work. Even as Henry spoke he felt a pang over the routine of the kennel-and if that couldn’t be called ordinary, what could? Besides, while Henry didn’t strike him as being highly unusual, he didn’t see any reason that should be an offense. Or for that matter, what it would even mean to be called ordinary.