The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. David Wroblewski
dad didn’t show you?”
No.
“Well, he wouldn’t. You’ll figure it out on your own anyway. And when you do, remember that your old dad and I blazed that particular trail.”
Claude looked around at the mow. “Maybe a lot else is different, but this barn is just how I remembered it. Your dad and I knew every nook and cranny in this place. We hid cigarettes up here, liquor even—we used to sneak up for a belt in the middle of summer days. The old man knew it was here somewhere, but he was too proud to look. I bet if I tried I could find half a dozen loose boards right now.”
Some people got uncomfortable talking with Edgar, imagining they would have to turn everything into a question—something he could answer by shrugging, nodding, or shaking his head. The same people tended to be unnerved by the way Edgar watched them. Claude didn’t seem to mind in the least.
“Did you have something you wanted to ask,” he said, “or was this purely a spy mission?”
Edgar walked to the work bench at the front of the mow and returned with a scrap of paper and a pencil.
What are you doing up here? he wrote.
Claude glanced at the paper and let it drop to the floor.
“Not sure I can explain it. That is, I can explain it, but I’m not sure I can explain it to you. If you know what I mean.”
Edgar must have given Claude a blank look.
“Okay, your father asked me not to get into too much detail here, but, uh, let’s just say I’ve been inside a lot. I got really tired of being inside all the time. Little room, not much sun, that sort of thing. So when I got in that room tonight, even trimmed out and fancy like your mom made it, it occurred to me that it wasn’t much bigger than the room I’d been in. And that didn’t seem like the right way to spend my first…” A bemused look crossed his face. “My first night home. I started thinking maybe I’d sleep on the lawn, or even the back of the truck. Watch the sun rise. Thing is, the outside is awfully big. That make any sense? Spend a long time cooped up, you go outside and it feels almost bad at first?”
Edgar nodded. He set two fingers on the palm of one hand and swept them over his head.
“Exactly right. Whoosh.” Claude swept his hand over his head too. “Know what Scotch is?” he asked.
Edgar pointed at his bottle.
“Good man. Seems like most people get interested in liquor eventually, and they’re either going to try it on their own…”
The bottle of Scotch tipped itself toward him invitingly. Edgar shook his head.
“Not interested, eh? Good man again. Not that I’d have let you have much. Just wanted to see if you were curious.”
Claude unscrewed the bottle cap, took a sip, and looked squarely back at Edgar.
“Still, it would be a big favor to me if you’d keep this between us. I’m not doing any harm up here, right? Just relaxing and thinking, enjoying this place. Your folks would probably end up all worried for no reason. This way, they don’t know you’re sneaking out at night, and they don’t know I went for a stroll, either.”
Claude’s smile, Edgar decided, looked only a little like his father’s.
“You’d better get back to the house now. If I know your dad, he wakes everybody up at the crack of dawn to start work.”
Edgar nodded and stood. He was about to clap Almondine over when he realized she was already standing in the vestibule, looking down the stairs. He walked over to join her.
“Here’s a trick that might come in handy,” Claude said to his back. “You know that stair that squeaks? About halfway up? Try it over by the left. There’s a quiet spot, not easy to find, but it’s there. If you get in the door without slamming it, you’re home free.”
Edgar turned and looked back into the mow.
I know that spot, he signed. We found it this morning.
But Claude didn’t see him. He’d sprawled backward across the bale, fingers meshed behind his head, looking through the gap in the roofing boards and into the night sky. He didn’t look drowsy, more like a man lost in thought. It came to Edgar that Claude hadn’t really been asleep at all as they’d worked their way along to get a better look at him. He’d been teasing them, or maybe testing them, though for what reason Edgar could not imagine.
The next morning, Edgar came downstairs to find his uncle seated at the kitchen table, eyes bloodshot, voice croaking. He didn’t mention their late-night encounter; instead, he asked Edgar to teach him the sign for coffee. Edgar rowed one fist atop the other as if turning the crank of a grinder. Then his father walked out to the porch and Claude joined him and they talked about the barn roof.
“I can start on it,” Claude said.
“You ever reroofed a barn?”
“No. Or a house. How hard can it be?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
That afternoon, Edgar’s father and Claude returned from the building supply in Park Falls with a new ladder tied to the truck topper and the truck bed filled with pine planks, tar paper, and long, flat boxes of asphalt shingles. They stacked the supplies in the grass behind the back runs and over it all they spread a new brown tarpaulin.
The Stray
MORNINGS, CLAUDE STOOD ON THE PORCH SIPPING COFFEE, breakfast plate balanced on his palm. After dinner, he sat on the steps and smoked. Sometimes he unwrapped a bar of soap and turned it over and after a while began to shave away curls with a pocketknife. One morning, not long after Claude moved in, Edgar picked up the bathroom soap and discovered the head of a turtle emerging from the end.
For a long time, Edgar and his father had had a ritual of walking the fence line after first chores, before the sun had cooked the water out of the grass and the air had thickened with dust and pollen. Almondine came along sometimes, but she was getting older, and just as often when Edgar told her they were going, she rolled on her back and held her feet prayerfully above her breastbone. His father never invited Claude, not even those first weeks of summer, before the arguments between them overshadowed everything else.
Their route started behind the garden, where the fence stood just inside the woods’ edge. Then they followed the fencepost-riddled creek to the far corner of their property, where an ancient, dying oak stood, so thick-branched and massive its bare black limbs threw full shade on the root-crossed ground. A small clearing surrounded the tree, as if the forest had stepped back to make room for it to perish. From there they bore east, the land sweeping upward and passing through sumac and wild blackberry and sheets of lime-colored hay. The last quarter mile they walked the road. It wasn’t unusual for Edgar’s father to go the whole way in silence, and when he was quiet, each step became the step of some earlier walk (spray of water from laurel branches; the musty scent of rotting leaves rising from their footfalls; crows and flickers scolding one another across the field), until Edgar could draw up a memory—maybe an invention—of being carried along the creek as an infant while Almondine bounded ahead, man and boy and dog pressing through the woods like voyageurs.
It was on a dark morning that summer, on one of these walks, when they first saw the stray. During the night a white tide had swallowed the earth. At sunrise the near corner of the milk house shouldered through the fog, but the barn and the silo had disappeared, and the woods were a country of the only-near, where the things Edgar saw at all he saw in extraordinary detail and the rest had ceased to exist. The creek ran from nowhere to nowhere. The limbs of the dying oak hung like shadows overhead. In the sky, the sun was reduced to a minuscule gray disk.
They were almost home, walking the road, the world cottoned out ahead, when something caught Edgar’s eye. He stopped near the narrow grove of trees that