The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
All that winter and all through the spring, Almondine had known something was going to happen, but no matter where she looked she couldn't find it. Sometimes, when she entered a room, there was the feeling that the thing that was going to happen had just been there, and she would stop and pant and peer around while the feeling seeped away as mysteriously as it had arrived. Weeks might pass without a sign, and then a night would come, when, lying nose to tail beneath the window in the kitchen corner, listening to the murmur of conversation and the slosh and clink of dishes being washed, she felt it in the house again and she whisked her tail across the baseboards in long, pensive strokes and silently collected her feet beneath her and waited. When half an hour passed and nothing appeared, she groaned and sighed and rolled onto her back and waited to see if it was somewhere in her sleep. She began investigating unlikely crevices: behind the refrigerator, where age-old layers of dust whirled into frantic life under her breath; within the tangle of chair legs and living feet beneath the kitchen table; inside the boots and shoes sagging in a line beside the back porch door -- none with any success, though freshly baited mousetraps began to appear behind the appliances, beyond the reach of her delicate, inquisitive nose. Once, when Edgar's parents left their closet door open, she'd spent an entire morning crouched on the bedroom floor, certain she'd finally cornered the thing among the jumble of shoes and drapes of cloth. She lost patience after a while and walked to the threshold, scenting the musty darkness, and she would have begun her search in earnest, but Trudy called from the yard and she was forced to leave it be. By the time she remembered the closet later that day the thing was gone and there was no telling where it might have gotten to. Sometimes, after she'd searched and failed to find the thing that was going to happen, she stood beside Edgar's mother or father and waited for them to call it out. But they'd forgotten about it -- or more likely, had never known in the first place. There were things like that, she'd learned, obvious things they didn't know. The way they ran their hands down her sides and scratched along her backbone consoled her, but the fact was, she wanted a job to do. By then she'd been in the house for almost a year, away from her littermates, away from the sounds and smells of the kennel, with only the daily training work to occupy her. Now even that had become routine, and she was not the kind of dog who could be idle for long without growing unhappy. If they didn't know about this thing, it was all that much more important that she find it and show them.
In April she began to wake in the night and wander the house, pausing beside the vacant couch and the blowing furnace registers to ask what they knew, but they never answered. Or knew but couldn't say. Always, at the end of those moonlight prowls, she found herself standing in the room with the crib (where, at odd moments, she might discover Trudy rearranging the chest of drawers or brushing her hand through the mobile suspended over it). From the doorway her gaze was drawn to the rocking chair, bathed in the pale night light that filtered through the curtained window. She recalled a time when she'd slept beside that chair while Trudy rocked in the dark. She approached and dropped her nose below the seat and lifted it an inch, encouraging it to remember and tell her what more it knew, but it only tilted back and forth in silence.
It was clear that the bed positively knew the secret, but it wasn't saying, no matter how many times she asked; Edgar's parents awoke one night to find her dragging away the blanket in a moment of spite. In the mornings she poked her nose at the truck -- the traveler, as she thought of it -- sitting petrified in the driveway, but it too kept all secrets close, and made no reply.
Then Essay and Tinder accosted him together. He could summon only the strength to sit cross-legged against the wooden wall and bury his face in his arms, counting by sound the dogs shuffling through the straw in their pens as rain thundered onto the barn. When he lifted his head again, Essay and Tinder stammered before him and snaked their necks against his palms and shimmied. In time he pushed himself upright. Patches of wet cloth sucked away from his skin. He slipped out of the pen and walked to the Dutch doors and stood with one hand on the latch listening to water sheeting off the eaves.
He drew a breath and swung the door outward. The sapphire sky above floated a small, lone cloud made orange by the sunrise. The new leaves on the maple stirred and quaked; sparrows cartwheeled over the wet field like glazier's points against the sky, and the swallows nesting in the eaves plunged into the morning air. The house burned white against the green of the woods. The Impala, neon blue. But there was no torrent to be seen, not even a drizzle. The sound of falling rain possessed him for one moment more and then vanished.
He was past the milk house before he remembered the syringe and turned and found it crushed in the center of a grassy puddle, needle snapped, barrel broken and awash. He cupped it in his palm and carried the pieces to the old silo where he pitched them through the rusted iron rungs and listened as they struck the far curve of cement and stone with a papery ring. Then he walked up the driveway, faster as he passed the house, the orchard, the mailbox. He started up the road, wheeled and headed the other way, breaking into a run and then dropping into a jerky reined-up step. He turned again. After a time he found himself walking back down the driveway and he began to circle the house in that same halting stride. Five times around, ten, twenty times, looking into the darkness behind the window glass. Each time he passed the old apple tree its lowest branches tugged at him and he brushed them away until he finally came to rest, panting, caught for the umpteenth time, and at last he turned to look at it.
It was an old tree, old already when he was born, maybe older than the house itself. At eye level the trunk split into three thick and nearly horizontal limbs, the longest of which arced toward the house and ended suddenly in a mass of waxy leaves. The branch would have continued through the kitchen window had it not been pruned mid-limb. He was shaking and chilled and his fingers were stiff but he managed to boost himself into the crotch of the tree and from there he worked himself onto the limb. The bark felt greasy from long days of rain. Past halfway it began to buck and wobble under his weight. Rainwater cupped in the new foliage showered him every time he moved. He worked slowly along. When he got to the stump end he steadied himself by gripping a hornlike pair of limbs and settled his sternum against the branch and lay outstretched, a swimmer among the boughs.
The shaking and thumping continued in a steady rhythm. Though there was barely enough room between the bales and the rafters, Edgar wormed his way forward. Claude was working by the long western wall, his head five or six feet below Edgar's. He wore a pair of canvas work gloves and he was dragging out bale after bale and letting them tumble to the floor. It wasn't easy -- the bales were stacked one pair lengthwise over another crosswise so that no column could shear away. He'd already opened a semicircular cavity, deeper at the bottom than at the top, and his shirt was dark with sweat halfway down his back. Edgar could hear him gasping in the heat. When thirty or forty bales lay on the floor, he stopped and pulled the gloves off his hands and picked up a hammer from the floor and knelt in the cavity he'd created, half concealed from Edgar. There was the screech of a nail pulled from dry wood and a board clattering. Claude leaned back and rubbed his hands together as if reconsidering, then fetched his work gloves and put them on and shot his fingers together to seat them.
The thought crossed Edgar's mind to pitch a bale down. Forty or fifty pounds of densely packed straw, dropped from that height, could knock Claude flat. But what would that accomplish? He wouldn't stay down. Besides, Claude was already glancing uneasily toward the vestibule door; in such cramped quarters, long before Edgar could wrestle a bale to the edge and tip it over, Claude would hear and look up.
Then Claude was backing away from the bales. He set something small and glinting on the floor. A bottle, an old-time bottle, with a crude blob of glass for a stopper and a ribbon around the neck with black markings. Claude stood looking at it, as mesmerized as Edgar. Then he moved the bottle against the mow wall with a gloved hand and thrashed up a pile of loose straw to cover it. He began to restack the bales. Edgar retreated. Shortly, there were footsteps on the mow floor, the click of the vestibule door latch, and more footsteps on the stairs. Edgar waited for the sound of Claude's boots on the driveway, but all he heard was his mother's voice as she encouraged the pups in the yard. He elbowed forward. Claude hadn't bothered to wrestle the topmost bales into place. Near the floor, the stacks bulged from the otherwise neat stair step of yellow. Where Claude had momentarily covered the bottle in straw, Edgar now saw only a stretch of bare planking.
He tipped the coffee can to his mouth and then climbed down, his body oily with sweat. He dragged away the bales Claude had moved. The wood plank was splintered where the nails had been pulled. He pressed the point of Henry's jackknife into the crack and pried it up. He didn't know what he expected to find. The hole was dry and empty, like the one he'd found the night before, though deeper. It could easily accommodate the bottle Claude had set aside -- the bottle that had not been a figment of his imagination. Or of Ida Paine's.
It existed. He'd seen it, in daylight, if only for a moment.
He walked to the front wall and cracked open the mow door and pressed one eye to the gap, blinking against the midday brilliance. Fresh air poured across his face, hot from the August sun but soothingly cool after what he'd endured in the rafters. The mow door was hinged on the side nearest the house and he could see only downfield, where grasshoppers leapt like firecrackers ignited under the rays of the run.
Then Claude's footsteps sounded on the gravel. The truck started, idled alongside the barn, and stopped again. Edgar's mother called the pups. She would not keep them out for long in the heat, he thought. He listened for a moment, then shut the mow door and walked to the top of the stairs.
She was latching their pen door when she felt his arms around her. She let out a brief pip of a cry before a hand clamped over her mouth and another was thrust in front of her face, fingerspelling like lightning.
Quiet. Only sign. Okay?
She nodded. He let go and stepped back and she turned to look at Edgar.