The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

Edgar turned to her and touched a hand to his temple.

Watch me.

Her great head swiveled to face him.

Release.

He meant to catch her before she moved, but her hindquarters came off the ground before he’d even completed the sign. All he could do was lunge and clamp his fingers around the hock of her back leg. She sprawled out in the path with a loud yelp.

It was enough to make Claude glance away from the rifle sights. Then Almondine was up again, forging ahead, half dragging Edgar along the path. He finally got in front of her and put his hand around her muzzle and forced her to look him in the eye.

Speak, he signed.

And then Almondine began to bay.

This time Forte couldn’t mistake the sounds behind him for wind. He turned and saw them and leapt away all in a single motion. Claude swung the muzzle of the rifle to track the fleeing dog, but there was nothing left to sight on but swinging branches.

Edgar didn’t realize he’d loosened his grip on Almondine’s collar until she was already away, bounding down the path. She crossed in front of Claude. For a moment, the muzzle of the rifle dropped and tracked her, and then, without pause, Claude pivoted to the field and shot the smaller of the two deer as it stretched its neck, wide-eyed and preparing for flight. The other deer shrieked, executed three springing leaps, then vanished into the woods with the fawn close behind.

Edgar scrambled into the field. The doe lay kicking convulsively. Blood arced from the wound in her neck. Her eye rolled to look at him. Claude walked up beside Edgar and lowered the muzzle of the rifle to the animal’s chest and pulled the trigger. Even before the report finished coming back off the hills, Claude had turned and begun walking toward the house, rifle grasped loosely by his leg like a stick of lumber.

For a long time Edgar stood looking at the deer—her brown hide, her black-tipped ears. Crimson blood seeped from her wounds and then stopped. Almondine appeared at the edge of the field, panting. She trotted over, then froze and approached the animal step by step. The moment when Almondine had passed in front of the rifle’s muzzle kept replaying in Edgar’s mind.

Come on, he signed. Get away from that.

They met Claude walking back into the field carrying a hunting knife and a spade.

“Hold on a second,” he said.

Edgar stopped, then began to walk again.

“Okay, but you’re gonna have to make a decision in a while,” Claude said to his back. “We can help each other here if we want to.”

HE SPENT THE EVENING in the barn, Almondine close by, grooming dogs until his hands ached. Claude approached him once, but Edgar turned away. The sun had set and the stars were coming into sight overhead when the truck pulled into the driveway.

The carcass of the deer hung by one back leg from a low branch of the maple tree. His father was asking questions even before he was out of the cab. Claude walked over to meet them. Forte had finally downed a deer, he said. He’d watched it from the barn roof, but by the time he’d gotten the rifle the deer was down and the stray was working on it, and he’d fired a shot to scare it off.

“The doe was still alive but tore up pretty bad. No choice but to shoot it. I didn’t want to leave it, so I dressed it out and took off the one leg he’d chewed up and brought it back here,” he said.

The lie didn’t surprise Edgar, but what Claude said next did. He expected Claude to return to the old argument, insist they bait Forte and shoot him, or poison him. And this time it was an argument he would probably win. Instead, he suggested they forget Forte.

“As far as that dog goes,” Claude said, “I don’t think I hit it, but I know I scared the hell out of it. Took off so fast I never had time to take a second shot. We’re never going to see it again.”

He looked at Edgar as he spoke, and at first Edgar didn’t understand. His mother caught Claude’s gaze and turned to look at him.

“Where were you during all this?” she asked.

Lit by the porch light, flies penciled their shadows against the carcass of the deer. Edgar’s father turned to face him as well. Claude stood behind and between them, and the resolute expression on his face lifted. The corners of his mouth edged up into a smile.

Claude was presenting Edgar with a choice. He saw that. All his talk of scaring off Forte had just been making the terms of the deal clear. He was offering to forget the stray, let him come or go. The price was silence. Edgar looked at the carcass of the deer and then at his parents.

I was asleep in the living room, he signed. I missed everything.

IF HE AND CLAUDE HAD struck a pact that night, it remained a silent one. Claude never again suggested they try to find or kill Forte and Edgar never told his father the truth about the deer. When he could be surreptitious about it, Edgar filled the steel dish with kibble and set it behind the garden. It was empty by morning, though whether licked clean by Forte or plundered by the squirrels he couldn’t tell.

One evening, as Edgar was crossing the lawn, in that dilated moment after sunset when the sky holds all the light, he saw Forte watching from the far side of the garden and he stopped, hoping the dog would finally trot into the yard. Instead, he edged back. Edgar returned to the barn. He filled the steel dish with kibble and walked up the carefully weeded rows of sweet peas and corn and musk melon until he stood a single pace away. Even then the dog would not come forward. It was Edgar who took the final step, out of the garden and into the wild grass growing at the tree line. There, Forte ate the kibble from Edgar’s hand, trembling. Afterward, he let Edgar lay a hand on his shoulder. Thus began a ritual that would last all that summer and into the fall. A week might pass before the stray appeared again. Edgar would carry food out and the dog would eat while Edgar worked burrs from his coat. Always, before Edgar had finished, Forte would begin to pant and then he would turn and walk away and bed down at the forest’s edge, where the lights of the house glittered in his eyes. And if Edgar came closer then, the dog would rise and wheel and trot into the woods without pausing to look back or making a sound.

The Litter

HE WOKE THAT DAY TO AN EMPTY BEDROOM AND THE DISTANT recollection of Almondine jumping off the bed in the gray morning light. He’d meant to follow her but then he lay back, and when he opened his eyes again the sun was bright and the curtains billowing inward, carrying with them a volley of echo-doubled hammer strikes—Claude at work on the field side of the barn roof. He kicked off the covers and dressed and descended the stairs, sneakers in hand. Almondine lay sprawled in a parallelogram of sunlight on the porch. His father and mother were at the kitchen table sharing pages from the Mellen Weekly Record. Morning chores had been done and the two kennel dogs, brought to the house on the nightly rotation, were back in their runs.

Edgar ate toast on the porch, looking out at the field. Almondine rolled onto her back, splayed and crocodilian, and stared at his plate. He looked down at her and grinned.

Too bad, he signed, munching.

Almondine swabbed her tongue across her chops and swallowed.

“Edgar, when is school over?” his father called from the kitchen.

Edgar inspected the remaining square inch of his toast. Butter on the edges, the top heaped with red raspberry jam. He nibbled from the crust and smacked his lips. Almondine flexed on her backbone to get a better look. Finally he held the toast out, pinched between thumb and forefinger so her whiskers would brush his palm, an ancient habit. She scrambled to her feet and sniffed his offering, pretending to be unsure whether it would suit her, then lifted the toast daintily away with her small front teeth.

Edgar walked into the kitchen and set his plate on the table.

Friday is the last day, he signed.

“I checked Iris this morning. She’s carrying her pups pretty low,” his father said. Edgar looked at his father looking solemnly back at him. Was there a problem? Was this too early for Iris? He tried to remember if he had groomed her the day before, or even touched her.

“What would you think of making this litter yours?”

It took a second to register what his father was saying. He blinked and looked out at the barn. The lines in the red siding pulsed through a wave in the porch window glass. “You’d do the birth work. I’d be there, but it would be your responsibility. And you’d look after the pups,” his father said. “Every day. If any get sick, you’d take care of them, no matter what else you’d rather do. And you’d do the training, right up to placement, even when school starts.”

Edgar nodded. He was smiling, stupidly, but he couldn’t stop.

“With my help,” his mother said. “If you want it.”

She laughed a little and touched his arm and sat back. His father held the newspaper folded in his lap. They looked so satisfied just then, and suddenly he knew they’d been discussing this for a long time, watching him, trying to gauge whose litter would be best. He hadn’t asked for any such thing. Ordinarily his father oversaw the whelping. When the pups were old enough, they became his mother’s charges. While she trained them, his father arranged placements. Edgar already had endless chores around the kennel, divided between the two of them. He fed and watered the dogs, cleaned their pens, and groomed them—his specialty. He helped with training, too, crazywalking the pups, performing the shared-gaze exercises, creating distractions when his mother wanted to proof the dogs. But this was different. They wanted Edgar to handle a single litter from birth through placement.

“With a little luck, she’ll hold off whelping until school is out,” his father said. “We have to keep an eye on her, though. You never know.” He picked up his paper and folded it in the middle, then glanced over. “You look like you’re about to have puppies,” he said.

Then Edgar started laughing. Almondine came in from the porch to see what was happening, fanning her tail and holding her ears flat. She walked around the table pressing her nose into their hands.

Thank you, Edgar signed. He dropped his hands and lifted them again and put them down when he couldn’t think of anything else to say. He went to the refrigerator and poured milk into his glass and drank it with the door open. From the back of the refrigerator he retrieved a package of cheese curds. He ate one in plain sight, palmed the rest, and walked out into the brilliant summer daylight.

THE WHELPING ROOM, set near the back of the barn and enclosed by thick plank walls, was a warmer, darker, quieter place than any other in the kennel. The wood of the walls reeked with birth odors: blood, placenta, milk, sweat. The pens were half-sized, with no outside access, to keep the temperature steady. His father had to stoop under the dropped ceiling. Low-wattage bulbs cast a pale light that made puppies’ eyes glimmer, and an old-time wall thermometer hung in each pen—one backed by a Pepsi bottle, another a blue-and-white Valvoline label, both marked with a thick black line at eighty degrees. In the passageway, a battery wall clock with a sweep second hand ticked away quietly.

A mother and her month-old litter occupied the first pen, the pups just old enough to escape the whelping box. They tumbled over one another and pressed their blunt black muzzles through the wire and nibbled Edgar’s fingers, and then, for no reason he could see, spooked and scrambled away.

In the farthest pen, Iris lay quietly panting, her back to the whelping box in the corner. He knelt beside her while she tongue-stroked the back of his wrist. He placed one hand on the hot crepe of her belly and in the other a cheese curd appeared. Iris tongued it off his palm. She sniffed her belly where he’d touched her.

You’re going to have to work real hard soon, he signed. You know that, don’t you?

Iris swallowed and looked at him, eyes wet in the cave light. He reached into his pocket and held out another curd.

HE DREAMED HE WAS RUNNING, feet pounding beneath him, breath coming in gasps. Always he arrived too late. The third night he woke in a fit of anxiety and he was at the kitchen door, on his way to check Iris, before he decided it was a bad idea. At breakfast he peeled an egg and he and his father walked to the barn. He rehearsed in his mind the case for skipping school, but before his father even touched Iris, he said, “It won’t be today.”

Edgar squatted and stroked her face and broke the egg into pieces and fed it to her while his father tried to explain how he knew.

“Look at her eyes,” he said. “Are they teary? Is she walking in circles?” He felt the curve of Iris’s huge belly, her hindquarters, looked at her gums, took her temperature. He always had an explanation, but the truth, Edgar suspected, was that his father just knew, and didn’t know how he knew. They looked up Iris’s birthing history; she’d whelped on her sixty-second day with her first litter of six and at sixty-four days with her second litter of five. Friday would be day sixty-two.

When they were finished, Edgar collared Iris and snapped on a lead and let her walk wherever she liked. She headed for the tall grass behind the barn, then the Wolf River apple trees at the top of the orchard. Her hind legs rowed out to her sides when she walked. When Almondine approached, serious and respectful, Iris stood for inspection.

Edgar boarded the school bus in despair. Ten thousand hours later, it ground to a halt in front of their driveway. He felt weightless as he opened the whelping room door. Iris lay sleeping, solitary, enormous. When Friday passed, he barely noticed that school was over. It was just another day when Iris would surely whelp while he was away.

WHEN HE LOOKED IN on Saturday morning, the bedding in the whelping box had been scratched up into a pile. Instead of lying outstretched in her usual gestative pose, Iris was pacing and panting. She came forward with her ponderous gait. Once outside, she forged into the hayfield, aiming for the hazel stand.

“That sounds interesting,” his father said, noncommittally, when Edgar found him in the workshop. They walked to the nursery. Iris had settled herself back in the whelping box.

“How’s it going, girl? Today the day?”

She looked back and bumped her tail against the slats. His father put his hands in his pockets and leaned against the wall and watched her. “Not right this minute,” he said after a while, “but it’s going to be sometime today. I want you to check her every half hour from now on. But stay out of this pen—we just want to know if she is sleeping, walking, or what.”

I’ll stay and wait.

“No. Don’t spend any more time here than you have to. When you come in, be quiet and slow. She’s worried now and she’s wondering how to protect her babies. If we bother her too much, she could panic. Understand? She could try to eat her pups to keep them safe.”

Okay, he signed. It wasn’t what he wanted to hear, though he understood the reasoning.

“The next thing to watch for is when she starts licking herself or walking around the whelping box. Once that starts, we’ve got work to do.”

NOW TIME THICKENED LIKE wet cement. From his dresser he dug out a pocket watch he’d gotten for Christmas many years before and wound it and set it and shook it to make sure it was running.

He and Almondine walked the path to the creek, but before they’d gone more than halfway he turned and ran back, slapping through the ferns. They arrived five minutes early for the next check. He sat with his back against the narrow front wheels of the tractor while Almondine dozed, annoyingly relaxed, in the cool grass. When the time had passed, he found Iris lying in her box, muzzle atop folded forelegs; she caught his eye and raised her head. In the other whelping pen, a litter charged the door and tried to bite through the rubber toe of his sneaker when he pressed it to the wire. He went to the house, looked at the watch, compared it with the time on the kitchen clock. He fetched The New Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language and opened it at random. His eyes jittered over the words. Intake. Intangible. Intarsia. He flipped a hunk of pages. Perilous. Perimeter. Perimorph. Ridiculous, impossible names for dogs. His toes twitched, his heels rattled against the floor. He slapped the dictionary shut and knelt in front of the television, twisting the channel knob to Wausau, Eau Claire, Ashland.

His father parceled out small jobs, concocting them, Edgar suspected, more out of mercy than necessity: pile newspapers outside the pen door; lay towels on the newspapers; straighten the bedding in the whelping box; wash the steel pan in the workshop, fill it with water, and put it on the stove; put scissors and hemostat in the pan and boil the water; put a bottle of Phisohex on the towels; set out thread and iodine; get a short lead.

After dinner, when the next half hour had passed, he excused himself and walked to the barn. They always seem to start at dinnertime, his father had said. The dogs were standing in their pens, muzzles slowly turning to track his progress down the aisle.

All it took was one glance. For fear of making a commotion, he forced himself to walk the whole length of the barn, but as soon as the evening sky opened overhead, his legs made the decision on their own and he bolted for the house.

“REMEMBER WHAT I SAID about her getting nervous? She’ll be calm if she knows we’re calm, so move slow. She’s an old hand at this. Our job is to watch and help just a little. That’s all. Iris is going to be doing all the work. We’re just keeping her company.”

Edgar was waddling along behind his father, a basin of warm water sloshing in his arms.

Okay, he nodded. He took a breath, let it out. The setting sun cast his father’s shadow back along the driveway.

“Now,” Gar said, “let’s find out how she’s doing.”

Iris stood in her whelping box, head down, digging frantically. She paused briefly when they entered the whelping room, glanced at them, then turned back to her work.

“Go ahead,” his father said, gesturing at the door.

Edgar stepped inside the pen, carrying the pan, and set it down in the corner. His father handed him the newspapers, the towels, and all the paraphernalia he’d collected during the afternoon. Iris stopped digging and walked to the door. His father squatted down and stroked her face and chest; he ran the tip of his finger along her gum line and put his palm against her swollen belly; in return, she pressed forward until one of her feet was outside the threshold of the pen door. His father placed his hands on her shoulders and eased her back. He had Edgar latch the hook and eye on the inside of the door and Iris returned to the whelping box and lay down.

Now what? Edgar signed.

“Now we wait.”

After twenty minutes or so, Iris stood and circled inside the whelping box. She whined and panted, then sat. After a few more minutes, she stood again. She shivered, turned her head all the way back to her hindquarters, and licked at her hip. She shivered again.

Shouldn’t she be lying down? Edgar signed.

“Sit tight,” his father said. “She’s doing just fine.”

Iris lowered herself nearly to the floor, hips suspended above the bedding. A spasm shook her body. She whined quietly, grunted, then raised her hips and turned to look behind her. A newborn pup, dark and shiny in its embryonic sac, lay on the gray bedding.

“Wash your hands,” his father said. He’d closed his eyes and tipped his head back against the wall. “Use the Phisohex.”

As Edgar rubbed his hands together in the water, he heard a squeak from the whelping box. Iris had already torn the birth membrane away and had turned the new pup on its back. She was running her tongue along its head then its belly and hind legs. Its fur glistened and it kicked its hind legs and squeaked again.

“Has she chewed through the cord?” his father asked.

Edgar nodded.

“Wet one of the small towels and take a dry one and a couple of sheets of newspaper. Kneel over to the whelping box. Go slow. Use the wet towel to clean off the pup. Hold it right near Iris so she can see what you’re doing. That’s right. She’s just checking you; it’s okay if the pup cries a little. Make sure its nose and mouth are clear. Hold it in your left hand and get the dry towel with your other hand and dry it off. You can rub a little. Go ahead. That’s good, you want to dry it off as much as you can. Now set it down in front of her.”

Edgar performed each step as instructed. His father sat with his back against the wall, eyes closed, his voice quiet and even, as if describing a dream in which the pups were born. When Edgar set the pup down, Iris began to lick it again. Edgar took a deep breath and listened to his father’s voice as he walked him through tying the umbilical with thread and dabbing the stub with iodine.

“Now look for the afterbirth. Do you see what I mean by the afterbirth? Is it all the way out of her? Trace the umbilical cord to find out. Put it into the newspaper and roll it up and set it by the door. Don’t move fast. Now go back to the pup. Pick it up. Use both hands. Remember to praise Iris when we’re done, she’s being very good about all this. Very gracious. Don’t be scared if she grabs your hand; it just means she’s not ready to let you touch her pup yet. While you’re holding it, she’s going to be watching you; try not to take it out of her reach, and never out of her sight. Look it over. Does it look normal? Look at its face. Is it okay? Good. Now set it down so its head is near a nipple. Good. Watch for a minute. Is it taking the nipple? Move the pup a little closer. How about now? Is it taking the nipple? Good.”

Iris lay with her neck flat on the bedding, eyes half shut. Breaths like sighs lifted her chest. Edgar discovered he could hear the faint suckling of the pup over the thunderous pounding in his ears. He scooted backward until he could lean against the wall. He took a long, quavering breath and looked over at his father.

“You forgot to praise her,” his father said, his voice so quiet Edgar barely heard it. He’d opened his eyes again and he was smiling. “But wait awhile now. She wants to rest.”

THE PUPS ARRIVED about a half an hour apart. When the third was nursing, Edgar’s father gathered up the newspapers piled by the door and walked out of the whelping room. He came back carrying a pan of warm milk. Edgar held it while Iris lapped, then ran his fingers into the bowl and let her lick the last drops, and then he held her water bowl. She turned to her pups, rolling them and licking them until they cried, and then, satisfied, lowered her muzzle to the bedding.

The fourth pup looked normal in every way, yet it sagged in Edgar’s hand when he lifted it. His father pressed the limp shape to his ear and held his breath. He swung the pup high into the air and quickly down to the floor, listened, and did it again. Then he shook his head and lay the stillborn pup aside.

Did I do something wrong? Edgar signed.

“No,” his father said. “Sometimes a pup just isn’t strong enough to survive whelping. It doesn’t mean you did anything wrong and it doesn’t mean that there’s any problem with the rest of the litter. But now would be a good time to walk her. She’ll relax for the rest of the whelping.” Edgar nodded and collected the short lead and gently slapped his thigh to coax Iris out of the whelping box. She bent her head to her pups and licked them away from her. They began to peep like chicks. She allowed Edgar to lead her into the yard. The night was cloudless and Almondine watched them from the porch, whining quietly.

Not yet, he signed. Soon.

Iris made for the top of the orchard, urinated, then pulled heavily toward the barn. As he closed the barn doors, and the swath of yellow light narrowed against the woods opposite, he saw a flash of eyeshine, two pale green disks that vanished and appeared again. Forte, he thought. He wished he could take the time to walk out and be sure but instead he turned and led Iris to the whelping room. The pen door stood open. His father was gone, along with the stillborn pup. Iris stood over her pups, methodically licking them, then lay and nudged them into the circle of her legs.