The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. David Wroblewski

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ That was it, all the evidence: a marriage license in the ammo box, a few pictures with wavy edges.

      When they returned, Trudy began to share in the work of the kennel. Gar concentrated on the breeding and whelping and placing while Trudy took charge of the training—something that, no matter how they’d met, she shined at. Edgar’s father freely admitted his limitations as a trainer. He was too kindhearted, too willing to let the dogs get close to performing a command without getting it right. The dogs he trained never learned the difference between a sit and a down and a stay—they’d get the idea that they ought to remain approximately where they were, but sometimes they’d slide to the floor, or take a few steps and then sit, or sit up when they should have stayed down, or sit down when they should have stood still. Always, Edgar’s father was more interested in what the dogs chose to do, a predilection he’d acquired from his own father.

      Trudy changed all that. As a trainer, she was relentless and precise, moving with the same crisp economy Edgar had noticed in teachers and nurses. And she had singular reflexes—she could correct a dog on lead so fast you’d burst out laughing to see it. Her hands would fly up and drop to her waist again in a flash, and the dog’s collar would tighten with a quiet chink and fall slack again, just that fast, like watching a sleight-of-hand trick. The dog was left with a surprised look and no idea who’d hit the lead. In the winter they used the front of the cavernous hay mow for training, straw bales arranged as barriers, working the dogs in an enclosed world bounded by the loose scatter of straw underfoot and the roughhewn ridge beam above, the knotty roof planks a dark dome shot through with shingling nails and pinpoints of daylight and the crisscross of rafters hovering in the middle heights and the whole back half of the mow stacked ten, eleven, twelve high with yellow bales of straw. The open space was still enormous. Working there with the dogs, Trudy was at her most charismatic and imperious. Edgar had seen her cross the mow at a dead run, grab the collar of a dog who refused to down, and bring it to the floor, all in a single balletic arc. Even the dog had been impressed: it capered and spun and licked her face as though she had performed a miracle on its behalf.

      Even if Edgar’s parents remained playfully evasive on the subject of how they’d met, other questions they answered directly. Sometimes they lapsed into stories about Edgar himself, his birth, how they’d worried over his voice, how he and Almondine had played together from before he was out of his crib. Because he worked beside them every day in the kennel—grooming, naming, and handling the dogs while they waited turns for training—he had plenty of chances to sign questions and wait and listen. In quieter moments they even talked about the sad things that had happened. Saddest of all was the story of that cross under the birches in the south field.

      THEY WANTED A BABY. This was the fall of 1954 and they’d been married three years. They converted one of the upstairs bedrooms into a nursery and bought a rocking chair and a crib with a mobile and a dresser, all painted white, and they moved their own bedroom upstairs to the room across the hall. That spring Trudy got pregnant. After three months she miscarried. When winter came she was pregnant again, and again she miscarried at three months. They went to a doctor in Marshfield who asked what they ate, what medicines they took, how much they smoked and drank. The doctor tested his mother’s blood and declared her perfectly healthy. Some women are prone, the doctor said. Hold off a year. He told her not to exert herself.

      Late in 1957 his mother got pregnant for a third time. She waited until she was sure, and then a little longer, in order to break the news on Christmas Day. The baby, she guessed, was due in July.

      With the doctor’s admonition in mind, they changed the kennel routine. His mother still handled the younger pups herself, but when it came to working the yearlings, willful and strong enough to pull her off balance, his father came up to the mow. It wasn’t easy for any of them. Suddenly Trudy was training the dogs through Gar, and he was a poor substitute for a leash. She sat on a bale, shouting, “Now! Now!” in frustration whenever he missed a correction, which was quite often. After a while, the dogs cocked an ear toward Trudy even when Gar held the lead. They learned to work the dogs three at a time, two standing beside his mother while his father snapped the lead onto the third and took it through the hurdles, the retrieves, the stays, the balance work. With nothing else to do, his mother started simple bite-and-hold exercises to teach the waiting dogs a soft mouth. Days like that, she left the mow as tired as if she’d worked alone. His father stayed behind to do evening chores. That winter was especially frigid and sometimes it took longer to bundle up than to cross from the kennel to the back porch.

      In the evenings they did dishes. She washed, he dried. Sometimes he put the towel over his shoulder and wrapped his arms around her, pressing his hands against her belly and wondering if he would feel the baby.

      “Here,” she’d say, holding out a steaming plate. “Quit stalling.” But reflected in the frosty window over the sink he’d see her smile. One night in February, Gar felt a belly-twitch beneath his palm. A halloo from another world. That night they picked a boy name and a girl name, both counting backward in their heads and thinking that they’d passed the three-month mark but not daring to say it out loud.

      In April, gray curtains of rain swept across the field. The snow rotted and dissolved over the course of a single day and a steam of vegetable odors filled the air. Everywhere, the plot-plot of water dripping off eaves. There came a night when his father woke to find the blankets flung back and the bed sodden where his mother had lain. By the lamplight he saw a crimson stain across the sheets.

      He found her in the bathroom huddled in the claw-footed tub. In her arms she held a perfectly formed baby boy, his skin like blue wax. Whatever had happened had happened quickly, with little pain, and though she shook as if crying, she was silent. The only sound was the damp suck of her skin against the white porcelain. Edgar’s father knelt beside the tub and tried to put his arms around her, but she shivered and shook him off and so he sat at arm’s length and waited for her crying to either cease or start in earnest. Instead, she reached forward and turned the faucets and held her fingers in the water until she thought it warm enough. She washed the baby, sitting in the tub. The red stain in her nightgown began to color the water. She asked Gar to get a blanket from the nursery and she swathed the still form and passed it over. When he turned to leave she set her hand on his shoulder, and so he waited, watching when he thought he should watch and looking away at other times, and what he saw was her coming back together, particle by particle, until at last she turned to him with a look that meant she had survived it.

      But at what secret cost. Though her foster childhood had sensitized her to familial loss, the need to keep her family whole was in her nature from the start. To explain what happened later by any single event would deny either predisposition or the power of the world to shape. In her mind, where the baby had already lived and breathed (the hopes and dreams, at least, that made up the baby to her) was a place that would not vanish simply because the baby had died. She could neither let the place be empty nor seal it over and turn away as if it had never been. And so it remained, a tiny darkness, a black seed, a void into which a person might forever plunge. That was the cost, and only Trudy knew it, and even she didn’t know what it meant or would ultimately come to mean.

      She stayed in the living room with the baby while Gar led Almondine to the workshop. Up and down the aisle the dogs stood in their pens. He turned on the lights and tried to sketch out a plan on a piece of paper, but his hands shook and the dimensions wouldn’t come out right. He cut himself with the saw, peeling back the skin across two knuckles, and he bandaged them with the kit in the barn rather than walk back to the house. It took until midmorning to build a box and a cross. He didn’t paint them because in that wet weather it would have taken days for the paint to dry. He carried a shovel through the south field to the little grove of birches, their spring bark gleaming brilliant white, and there he dug a grave.

      In the house they put two blankets in the bottom of the casket and laid the swaddled baby inside. It wasn’t until then that he thought about sealing the casket. He looked at Trudy.

      “I’ve СКАЧАТЬ