The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. David Wroblewski
bag out to the porch along with a flashlight and a book. He had untied and unrolled the sleeping bag in front of the screen door and was settling down to read when Almondine, as if she knew his plan and didn’t like it, stepped into the narrow space between Edgar and the screen door and lay down. He poked her in the flank where she was ticklish and she stood with a harrumph, then stepped over him and lay down again, this time draping her tail across his face.
Okay, I get the point, he signed, aggravated but smiling. He coaxed her into standing, this time more gently, cupping his hand under her belly, and he rearranged the sleeping bag. When he was done, there was space enough for them both to look through the screen, though Edgar had to crane his neck to see the spot behind the garden where the bowl sat. Almondine lay with her head on her paws, panting contentedly and watching Edgar with her flecked brown eyes. He drew his fingers along the soft fur of her ears and through her mane, and soon her eyes drifted shut and her breaths deepened on the exhale. He watched her and shook his head. She could be so vehement at times and, yet, when everything had been put her way, so gentle and accommodating and radiating certainty that the world was in order. After a while he propped himself up on his elbows. Under the glow of the flashlight, he paged through The Jungle Book until he found the passage that had come to his mind over and over that day.
Mowgli put up his strong brown hand, and just under Bagheera’s silky chin, where the giant rolling muscles were all hid by the glossy hair, he came upon a little bald spot.
“There is no one in the jungle that knows that I, Bagheera, carry that mark—the mark of the collar; and yet, Little Brother, I was born among men, and it was among men that my mother died—in the cages of the King’s Palace at Oodeypore. It was because of this that I paid the price for thee at the Council when thou wast a little naked cub. Yes, I too was born among men. I had never seen the jungle. They fed me behind bars from an iron pan till one night I felt that I was Bagheera—the Panther—and no man’s plaything, and I broke the silly lock with one blow of my paw and came away; and because I had learned the ways of men, I became more terrible in the jungle than Shere Khan. Is it not so?”
“Yes,” said Mowgli; “all the jungle fear Bagheera—all except Mowgli.”
He switched off the flashlight and laid his head next to Almondine’s. He wondered if it was like that somehow with the stray, whether it had decided after some terrible moment that it was no man’s plaything, or whether it was some combination of frightened and crazy, like Claude said. In time the television went silent. Claude walked upstairs. His mother leaned out from the doorway.
“Good night, Edgar,” she said.
Good night, he signed—drowsily, he hoped. He could feel her sizing up the arrangement.
“What are you up to?”
It’s hot upstairs. We want to sleep where there is a breeze.
When the house had been silent for as long as he could stand it, he sat up, unlatched the door, and slipped outside. Almondine tried to follow, but he shut the door between them. She could open it, sometimes, by catching her claws at the bottom—but he hushed her, holding her gaze until he knew she understood. He walked to the flower bed beneath the kitchen window, and there he lifted a bread bag from among the green straps of the irises and crossed the garden and filled the dish with the kibble he’d packed into the top of the bag. Then he sat on the porch steps, leaning against the door’s cross brace, and waited. Eventually, his gaze lifted to the stars.
He woke to the sound of Almondine, behind the screen door, breathing hoarsely at his shoulder. The yard was flush with moonlight. It didn’t come to him at once why he was sitting there. His gaze wandered along the clothesline sagging from the house to where it vanished into the shadow of the maple tree. The rattle of kibble against the steel pan finally shook him out of his reverie. He jerked upright. Across the expanse of stakes and seedlings, the stray stood, eating greedily and watching Edgar, its chest silver in the moonlight.
He stood, slowly, and carried the bread bag, heavy and cold, into the shadow of the maple and knelt. The iron scent of blood wafted upward as he opened the bag—ground beef, stolen that afternoon from the freezer. He squeezed a portion into a ball and let out a soft whistle. The dog lifted its head and looked at Edgar. Then it turned back to the bowl to lick up the last dots of kibble and stood on three legs and scratched its chest with its hind fourth.
Edgar pitched the meat underhand, just as his father had done on the trail. The pale mirrors of the dog’s eyes glinted. It stepped out of the weeds and pressed its nose into the night air. Another chunk of ground beef sailed out and rattled the leaves of a tomato plant. The animal began to pick its way through the rows of vines and seedlings and foot-high corn stalks, pausing at one offering, then the other.
Edgar divided the remaining meat into two greasy lumps. One came to rest midway between them, no more than ten yards away. The dog went to it, sniffed, and swallowed the meat in a single gulp, then lifted its head and ran its tongue along its chops. The other lump of meat Edgar held in his hands. For a long time neither moved. Edgar leaned forward and set the meat on the grass. The dog walked forward and took the meat and swallowed and stood panting and looking at Edgar. A slash of matted fur crossed its forehead and burrs were twisted into its coat. When Edgar held out his hand, the dog stepped closer and at last licked the blood and grease from his fingers. Edgar ran his free hand through the dog’s ruff. He knew then it was possible to bring the dog in the rest of the way. Not that it would happen that night, but it could happen. The dog wasn’t crazy. Not all its trust was gone. It was undecided, that was all. It had watched them and what it had seen was not enough to make it stay or go. As his father had thought.
Edgar was trying to decide what to do next when Almondine began to whine and tear at the porch door. In four bounds the stray crossed the garden and disappeared. By the time Edgar got to the porch, one of the kennel dogs had pushed into its run, baying, and another was following. Edgar settled Almondine and turned toward the barn.
Quiet, he signed.
The dogs stopped and yawned, but nearly ten minutes passed before they ceased their pacing and bedded down again.
WHEN HE OPENED HIS EYES the next morning, a fluted circle of dirty white lay just beyond the porch steps. He sat on his sleeping bag and rubbed his eyes. What he saw looked like a coffee filter—a soggy paper coffee filter, stained brown. When he walked outside to investigate, Almondine pushed past and, to his surprise, urinated on the thing. Then she rounded the corner of the house with her nose to the ground.
A black plastic trash bag lay in the front yard, chewed open, its contents strewn about—empty soup cans, a Wheaties box, bits of packages, newspapers, a milk carton. When he bent to peer at one of the papers, he saw his own handwriting in the crossword puzzle. The date on the newspaper was three days past. They had taken it to the dump the day before.
Over breakfast, they speculated over how the trash had gotten there. Claude said it was a prank, some kids out drinking. Edgar’s mother was the first to conclude that it must have been the stray. The dump was about a quarter of a mile down Town Line Road, up a narrow dirt drive that dead-ended in a semicircle of rubbish and the carcasses of stoves and refrigerators.
“Why would it drag garbage all the way back from the dump, for Christ sake?” Claude said.
His mother looked thoughtful. “Maybe it’s retrieving,” she said.
“Retrieving? Why?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Grateful for the food? ‘Here’s something you lost, thought you’d want it back’—that sort of thing.”
She was right, Edgar knew it at once, but he was the only one who understood the full significance of the dog’s labors. He considered telling them what had happened the night before, but that meant explaining how a pound of ground beef had disappeared.
The next morning a long-discarded pair of his jeans lay neatly unfolded in the front yard, as if a boy had evaporated from within them. The morning after that, a single tennis shoe, mangled and gray. His father laughed, but Claude was incensed. He stalked away to his roofing work.
“Imagine