The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. David Wroblewski
There’s a latched door at the bottom and she waits with nose pressed to the crack, sniffing. Once inside, they squint at the clouds through the dusty basement transom windows. No rain is falling—only drips and blobs of water blown sideways through the air.
“What does he think he’ll accomplish out there?” she says, fuming. “All he wants to do is watch the storm.”
You’re right. He just stands in the doorway like that.
“The dogs can take care of themselves. It’s having him out there that stirs them up. As if he could protect the barn. It’s ridiculous.”
Lightning plunges into the field nearby. Thunder shakes the house.
“Oh, God,” his mother says.
This last strike has started Edgar’s heart smashing, too. He dashes up the cement stairs for a look. As he reaches the top, there’s a blue-white flash, dazzlingly bright, and a bomb sound, then he’s flying down the stairs again, but not before he’s seen for himself: his father, still standing with one hand on the barn door, braced as if daring the storm to touch him.
And it is clear then that everything so far has been a prelude. The wind blows not in fits and gusts but with a sustained howl that makes Edgar wonder when the windows will shatter from the pressure. Almondine whines and he draws his hand along her back and croup. A timber groans from inside the walls. His mother has herded them to the southwest corner of the basement, anecdotally the safest if a tornado lifts the house off its foundation Wizard of Oz–style. The wind blows for a long time, so long it becomes laughable. And strangely: with the gale at full force, sunlight begins to stream through the transom windows. That is the first sign the storm will pass. Only later does the solid roar of air slacken in descending octaves until all that remains is an ironic summer breeze.
“Sit tight,” his mother says.
Edgar can see her thinking, eye of the storm, but his father’s voice echoes across the yard: “That was a doozy!” Outside, it is impossible not to look first at the sky, where a field of summer cumulus, innocuous and white, stretches westward. The storm clouds glower above the treetops across the road. The house and barn seem untouched. The pine trees stand quiet and whole, the apple trees intact at first glance, until he notices that every blossom has been stripped bare, every petal swept away by the wind. Hardly a drop of rain has fallen, and the air is dusty and choking. Edgar and Almondine circulate through the house, plugging in the stove, the toaster, the dryer, the air-conditioner in the living room window. The mailman pauses his car beside the mailbox and drives off with a wave. Edgar jogs up the driveway to fetch the contents, a single letter, hand-addressed to his father. The postmark says, Portsmouth, Virginia.
He is reaching for the handle on the porch door when his father’s shout rises from behind the barn.
THE FOUR OF THEM STAND in the weeds behind the barn, gazing upward. A ragged patch of shingles the size of the living room floor hangs from the eaves like a flap of crusty skin, thick with nails. A third of the roof lies exposed, gray and bare. Before their eyes the barn has become the weathered hull of a ship, upturned.
But what astonishes them, what makes them stand with jaws agape, is this: near the peak, a dozen roofing boards have detached from the rafters and curled back in long, crazy-looking hoops that stop just short of making a circle. The most spectacular corkscrew up and away, as if a giant hand had reached down and rolled them between its fingers. Where the boards have peeled back, the ribs of the barn show through, roughly joined and mortised by Schultz so long ago. The breeze rattles the roofing boards like bones. A thin alphabet of yellow straw dust escapes from the mow and flies over the barn’s long spine.
After a while, Edgar remembers the letter.
Lifts it, absently.
Holds it out to his father.
Every Nook and Cranny
EARLY MORNING, A WEEK AFTER THE STORM HAD INFLICTED ITS peculiar damage on the barn roof. Edgar and Almondine stood atop the bedroom stairs, boy and dog surveying twelve descending treads, their surfaces crested by smooth-sanded knots and shot with cracks wide enough to stand a nickel in and varnished so thickly by Schultz that all but the well-worn centers shone with a maroon gloss. Treacherous for people in stockinged feet and unnerving to the four-legged. What most impressed Edgar was not their appearance but their gift for vocalization—everything from groans to nail-squeals and many novelties besides, depending on the day of the week or the humidity or what book you happened to be carrying. The challenge that morning was to descend in silence—not just Edgar, but Edgar and Almondine together.
He knew the pattern of quiet spots by heart. Far right on the twelfth and eleventh step, tenth and ninth safe anywhere, the eighth, good on the left, the sixth and fifth, quiet in the middle, a tricky switch from the far right of the fourth to left-of-middle on the third, and so on. But the seventh step had never let them by without a grunt or a rifle-shot crack. He’d lost interest in the riddle of it for a long time, but the sight of the barn’s demented roofing planks had reminded him that wood in all shapes could be mysterious and he’d resolved to try again.
He negotiated the first four steps and turned. Here, he signed, pointing to a place on the tread for Almondine. Here. Here. Each time she placed a broad padded foot where his fingers touched the tread, and silence ensued. Then he stood on the eighth step, the brink, with Almondine nosing his back and waiting.
He swung his foot over the seventh tread like a dowser looking for water. Toward the right side, he knew, the thing creaked. In the middle, it let out a sound like a rust-seized door hinge. His foot hovered and drifted over the wood. Finally, it came to a stop above an owl-eyed swirl of grain near the wall on the left. He carefully settled his weight onto the tread.
Silence.
He stepped quickly down to the sixth and fifth and turned back and picked up Almondine’s foot and stroked it.
He tapped the owl-eye. Here.
She stepped down.
Yes, good girl.
In time they stood at the base of the stairs together, having arrived without a sound. A quiet moment of exaltation passed between them and they headed for the kitchen. He didn’t intend to tell anyone he’d found the way down. They were a small family living in a small farmhouse, with no neighbors and hardly any time or space to themselves. If he managed to share one secret with his father and a different one with his mother and yet another with Almondine the world felt that much larger.
THEY DIDN’T SAY WHERE HIS FATHER was going, only that it was a long day’s drive before he would return with Claude. It was late May and school was in session, though barely, and when he asked to go along he knew the answer would be no. That morning he and Almondine and his mother watched the truck top the hill on Town Line Road and then they walked to the barn for morning chores. A pile of secondhand LPs and an old suitcase-style record player occupied a lower shelf of the workshop. Two pennies had been taped to the needle arm, covering the lightning-bolt Z in the “Zenith” embossed in the fluted metal. Through the speaker grill a person could make out the filaments glowing igneous orange in their silver-nippled tubes. His mother unsleeved one of her favorite records and set it on the turntable. Edgar cleaned the kennel to the sound of Patsy Cline’s voice. When he finished he found his mother in the whelping room. She was holding a pup in the air in front of her, examining it and singing under her breath how she was crazy for tryin’, crazy for cryin’, crazy for loving it.
The truck was still gone when he got off the school bus that afternoon. His mother enlisted his help retrieving sheets from the clothesline.
“Don’t they smell great?” she said, holding the fabric to her face. “It’s so nice to hang them out again.”
They tramped up the stairs to the spare room, located across the hallway from Edgar’s bedroom. That morning it had been brimming with stacks of Dog World and Field and Stream and a menagerie of castoff furniture and broken appliances and many other familiars. A rollaway bed with a pinstriped mattress closed up clam-style. A set of seat-split kitchen