The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. David Wroblewski
as Gar Sawtelle. Strychnine, then.” Claude glanced up toward the porch. His expression almost but not quite hid a grin, and what he said next had the sound of a taunt, though Edgar did not understand what it meant.
“You’ve done it before, Gar. You’ve done it before with a stray.”
There was a pause, long enough that Edgar ventured a look out the window. Though his father stood in profile, half turned toward the field, Edgar could see the anger in his face. But his voice, when he replied, was even.
“So I’m told,” he said. Then, with finality, “We take them into Park Falls now.” He walked up the porch steps and into the kitchen, face flushed. He took a stack of breeding records from the top of the freezer and set them on the table, and he worked there for the rest of the evening. Claude sauntered into the living room and paged through a magazine, then climbed the stairs, and all the while a silence occupied the house so profound that when the lead snapped in his father’s pencil, Edgar heard him swear under his breath and throw it across the room.
THEN, FOR DAYS, NO SIGN of the stray. Almondine would stop and stare across the creek, but neither Edgar nor his father saw anything, and after a few moments he’d clap her along. He liked to think she’d caught the stray’s scent, but Almondine often stared into the bushes like that, drawn by exotic scents unknown to people.
Edgar woke one night to the sound of a howl echoing across the field, a long, lonely oooooooooohr-ohr-ooooh that finished in a high-pitched chatter. He sat in the dark and listened, wondering if it had only been in his dreams. There was a long silence, then another howl, this time farther away.
What happens if he comes in? he asked his father the next morning.
“He’s gone, Edgar. If he was going to come in, he would have already.”
But I heard him last night. He was howling.
“If he comes in, we’ll take him to Park Falls,” his father said. Then he glanced up and saw Edgar’s expression, and added, “Probably.”
That evening Edgar pulled two yearlings into the kennel aisle and got the grooming tackle. By the time he’d finished, the setting sun bathed the back of the house in crimson. Claude stood on the porch smoking. As Edgar mounted the porch steps, Claude lifted his cigarette to his mouth and drew on it and pointed its incandescent tip toward the field.
“Look there,” he said.
Edgar turned. Down near the edge of the forest, three deer sprang across the field in parabolic leaps. Behind them, in grim pursuit, the small, earthbound figure of the stray. When the deer vanished into the aspen the stray stopped and circulated as if winded, or confused. Then it too passed into the trees. Claude stubbed out his cigarette in the bowl of an ashtray as the sun dropped below the horizon.
“There’s how it’s staying alive,” he said. The light had gone gray around them and Claude turned and walked into the kitchen.
Late that night, an argument. Edgar made out only some of it from his bedroom. Claude said now there was no choice—it would never come in on its own once it started chasing deer. His father said that he wasn’t about to shoot it if there was any other way. They’d seen no downed deer. Then something else Edgar couldn’t make out.
“What happens if it goes onto someone else’s property?” his mother said. “We’ll be blamed for it, even if it isn’t one of ours. You know we will.”
Around it went among them, their voices faint and sibilant through the floorboards. Then silence without agreement. The spring on the porch door creaked. Footsteps along the driveway. The barn doors rattled on their old hinges.
The next morning, his father handed Edgar a steel food bowl with a hole drilled in the rim and a section of light chain. He dumped two handfuls of kibble into the bowl. They looped the chain around the trunk of the old oak and snapped it. The next day the bowl was empty. They moved it twenty yards up the trail, refilled it, and chained it to a birch.
FIXING THE BARN ROOF, it turned out, was a perfect job for Claude. It hadn’t taken long to see how ferociously solitary the man was. A day spent alone climbing the ladder and ripping tarpapered shingles from old planking left him whistling and jaunty. Sometimes he balanced himself on the long axis of the barn’s peak and watched them working the dogs. He might have been earning his keep, but the barn roof was also a convenient surveyor’s point, a perch from which their entire, insular little kingdom was revealed. Time and again when Edgar looked up, he found Claude in the process of turning back to work.
As soon as the situation required him to work with Edgar’s father, however, arguments arose, puzzling and disconcerting. Though the details differed each time, Edgar got the idea that Claude and his father had slipped without their knowing it into some irresistible rhythm of taunt and reply whose references were too subtle or too private to decipher. Whatever the dynamic, it wasn’t Claude’s only aversion. Group conversations left him looking bored or trapped. He found reasons to dodge the dinner table, and when he did join them, he seemed to lean away as if ready to walk off if things took an unpleasant turn. Yet he never actually left. He just sat, responding to questions with a word or a nod and watching and listening.
It wasn’t that he disliked talk. He just preferred conversations one on one, and then he liked to tell stories about odd things he’d seen happen, though he himself was seldom the story’s subject. One evening, after Edgar had coaxed a new mother out of her whelping pen for grooming, Claude slipped through the barn doors and ambled over. He knelt and stroked the dog’s ear between his thumb and forefinger.
“Your dad had a dog once,” he said. “Named him Forte. He ever tell you about that?”
Edgar shook his head.
“We were just out of high school, before I went into the navy. Your grandpa came up with the name, because of his size. That one was a stray, too, and only ever half tame because of the time he spent in the woods. But he was a dog, you know? Smart as any we’d seen. Good build, good bones, ran a hundred-twenty, hundred-thirty pounds once he was fed right. Your grandfather had no qualms about using him for breeding stock when he saw what he had.” Claude talked about how strong Forte was, how quick, how the only bad thing about him was how he liked to fight, and how his grandfather made Forte his father’s responsibility, because, Claude said, “that dog was so much like Gar.”
This last comment made Edgar look up in surprise.
“Oh, yes. Once upon a time your father was a hell-raiser. Come home drunk, or sometimes not at all. Those two were made for each other. Your dad taught him a trick where he’d whistle and the dog would jump into his arms, all hundred-twenty pounds of him. They’d go into Park Falls and your father would let Forte fight somebody else’s dog and of course Forte would win, and as often as not the other guy’d pick an argument, and there they’d be, man and dog fighting side by side. They’d come home bloody and sleep so late the next morning your grandpa would get mad and kick them out of bed.”
Edgar had never seen his father lift his hand in anger, not against a dog and not against a person. He couldn’t imagine him letting a dogfight happen. But Claude just grinned and shook his head as if reading Edgar’s thoughts.
“Hard to believe, right? Just like from looking at me you wouldn’t necessarily think I was the one patching things up all the time, but that’s true, too. Anyway, your father fell in love with that dog, even though he wouldn’t listen worth a damn. One night he grabs me and Forte and we drive to The Hollow. He downs a fair number of beers and pretty soon some guy says he’s heard of Forte and next thing I know, we’re bouncing along a back road in the dust of this guy’s truck. Your father’s at the wheel, weaving all over, but it doesn’t matter because we’re so far back in the woods there’s nobody else on the road.
“He stops in the driveway outside the man’s house, which turns out to be just a shack. There’s no lights. Your father leaves the headlights on, and as we watch, the guy walks to a shed and a minute later out comes the biggest, blackest mastiff I’ve ever seen in my life. The thing puts its front feet on the hood of the