The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

D OCTOR PAPINEAU SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE, ONCE MORE the white-haired, narrow-shouldered old man Edgar had known all his life, looking as shocked and hollowed out as Edgar felt. Hard to believe such a frail figure had lifted him out of the snow by his shirt back. But then it was hard to believe almost anything that had happened that afternoon.

Two pans simmered on the stove, lids clicking to release puffs of steam. Edgar shucked off his coat. His mother, resting a hand on his shoulder to steady herself, bent down to unlace her boots. Then they stood looking at one another. Papineau finally broke the silence. “It’s nothing much,” he said, waving a hand at the plates and bowls populating the table. “Soup and potatoes. I’m not much of a cook, but I know how to open cans and boil water.”

Edgar’s mother crossed the room and embraced the old man.

“That’s fine, Page,” she said. “It’s all we need tonight.”

Edgar pulled out a chair and sat. Almondine stepped between his knees and pressed her head against his belly and leaned in and he set his head in his hands and inhaled the dusty scent of her mane. For a long time, the room canted around them. When he lifted his head, a bowl of soup steamed at his place and Doctor Papineau was sliding a pan of quartered and skinned potatoes from the oven. He dished them around the table then seated himself.

Edgar looked at the food.

If you can eat, you should, Trudy signed.

Okay. It doesn’t feel right to be hungry.

Are you?

Yes. I don’t know. It feels like someone else being hungry.

She looked at the bandages on his hands.

Do they hurt?

His palms jangled and his left thumb throbbed, though he couldn’t remember how he’d sprained it. Facts too trivial to repeat.

Take aspirin.

I know. I will.

She dipped her spoon into her soup and lifted it to her mouth and swallowed and looked back at him. He saw the resolve behind it, and out of solidarity he rolled a chunk of potato into his soup and began to break it up.

Doctor Papineau cleared his throat. “I’ve closed my office for the morning.”

Edgar’s mother nodded. “You can sleep in the spare room-the sheets are in the bathroom. I’ll make the bed after dinner.”

“I’ll make my own bed. Don’t worry about that.”

Then it was quiet, just the tick of silverware. After a while, Edgar’s bowl was empty, though he could not have said what the soup tasted like. His mother had given up any pretense of eating.

“These things are a great shock,” Doctor Papineau said. It was apropos of nothing, and there was nothing else to say. “When Rose died, I thought I was fine. Heartbroken, but okay. But those first couple of days, I didn’t know what I was doing. You two need to be careful now, you hear me? I almost burned my house down that first night. I put the electric coffee pot on the stove and turned on the burner.”

“It’s true, Page. Thank you for reminding us.”

The vet looked at Edgar, then his mother. His expression was grave. “There’s some things we should talk about tonight.”

His voice trailed off.

“It’s okay, Page,” Edgar’s mother said. “Edgar is a part of everything that happens now, whether any of us like it or not. You don’t have to talk around anything.”

“I was going to offer to make some phone calls. Edgar will need to be out of school for a few days. I wondered if you wanted to speak to Claude, let him know what happened. And if there were other people you wanted to call. Relatives or whatnot. I could help you make a list.”

Edgar’s mother looked at Doctor Papineau and nodded. “Yes. But I would rather make the calls. Would the two of you clear the table?”

They all pushed back from their places. Doctor Papineau put the leftovers in the refrigerator and Edgar piled the dishes in the sink, relieved to be moving. He ran water and watched the suds grow over the plates. Doctor Papineau handed him a towel and said he was better off drying, with his hands like that.

Edgar’s mother walked to the counter and opened the telephone book and jotted some numbers on a scrap of paper. She looked at the shattered receiver dangling on the hook, cord end up, like a broken-necked bird, then set the apparatus on the counter and dialed. She held the receiver to her face two-handed and asked if she was speaking with the principal. She said that Edgar’s father had died.

“Thank you,” she said. “No. I appreciate that. Yes. Thank you. Goodbye.”

She lay the receiver on the counter, put both hands down, and took a breath. The speaker inside began to bleat from being off-hook and she pressed the hook to make it stop, then dialed again.

“Claude?” she said. “There’s some news. I thought you should know. It’s about Gar. Yes. He was working in the kennel this afternoon and he had…he had some sort of problem. An attack of some kind. He…No. No. We don’t know. Yes. Yes. Yes.”

There was a long silence. “I’m sorry, Claude. I don’t feel like that would be right just now. There’s nothing…Yes. Page is here. Yes. Thank goodness for him. All right. Okay. Goodbye.”

Then she dialed a third number and asked for Glen, speaking in a monotone. She arranged to meet at his office the next the morning and then she was quiet, listening to Glen talk. Edgar could only make out the moth-buzz voice from the cracked receiver, not the words. But his mother began to fold over the counter like wax softened in the sun until her forehead almost touched the papers.

“Is that absolutely required?” she whispered. “Isn’t there another…? Yes. Yes, of course, I know. But…”

More moth sounds.

“All right,” she said. Something in the sound of her voice made Edgar’s legs go weak. Doctor Papineau asked him a question. He shook his head without understanding. The vet crossed to his mother and set his hand on her shoulder. She pushed herself upright again.

“Stop now,” Doctor Papineau said, when she’d finished. He took the receiver from her hands and set it upside down on the hook. “That’s enough for one night.”

She looked back at the old man, corners of her mouth tucked, eyes shining.

“Okay,” she said. “That was…harder than I expected.”

She walked around the table to where Edgar sat and put her arms over his shoulders, letting her hands sign in front of him.

Are you okay?

He tried to reply and found he couldn’t.

I want you to go to sleep now.

What about you?

I’m going to sit quiet for a minute. Go. There’s nothing else to do.

She was right, he knew. His mother was a pragmatist, maybe from years spent training the dogs. Maybe she was born that way. He squeezed her forearms until he felt her pulse beneath his fingertips, then raised a hand to Doctor Papineau in silent good night.

AS THOUGH AGREED UPON beforehand, though it was not, he and Trudy slept in the living room. He’d carried a blanket and pillow downstairs and when he sat on the couch the power to go up again and change clothes deserted him. He pulled the hem of the blanket to his shoulders and drew up his knees and closed his eyes. A ringing began in his ears-perhaps lurking there all along but apparent only when the weight of the blanket dulled his senses. Half-slumber took him. His mother and Doctor Papineau turned out the lights and all was quiet and then a succession of images came forward, resurrected by some crow-eyed part of his mind that would neither wake nor sleep. Fragmentary emotions possessed and released him, drawn like garments from a wardrobe and discarded, one after another. Below that chaos of image and memory, something so powerfully suppressed he would barely remember it: the idea that everything once true in the world was now past, and a thousand new possibilities had been loosed. And, following that, a clap of overwhelming shame.

Sometime later he opened his eyes. His mother had drawn a blanket around her in her chair. She was tucked up into one corner. He had a faint memory of her kneeling beside him and running her hand, warm and smooth, across his forehead, palm touching his brow and ending with fingertips entwined in his hair. He had not opened his eyes in the moment. Her touch had released some tiny increment of the poison bound up in him that would, days to come, ripen into sorrow. And by the time he thought all this he could no longer tell if her caress had truly happened or whether he’d manufactured it out of necessity.

The sleep that followed was black, nothing at all contained in it. Every rasp of snow against the windows roused him up on one elbow only to have him collapse again into sleep, sawing between one world and the other. Papineau snored upstairs in the room they had once prepared for Claude. The sound penetrated the living room ceiling like the lowing of distant cattle: Moo. Moo. He woke again when he sensed Almondine walking away from him. In the dark he watched her press her nose against the blanket wrapped around his mother, scenting her as carefully as she must have scented Edgar the moment before. She stood for a time, panting softly, then returned to the center of the room. She circled and downed and their gazes met. Her ears shifted forward. After a while her eyes narrowed, then opened wide, then narrowed more, the liquid glint of them waxing and waning in the darkness. Finally, she sighed and slept.

Come morning, his memory would be of a night spent watching over them all. And each of them-dog and boy, mother and old man-would feel the same.

THEY WALKED TO THE BARN at first light. The cold was fearsome, the sky above dilute and punctured by stars. Inside the kennel, he saw they needed more straw, and he walked through the workshop and climbed the steps to the mow and flipped on the lights. The wall of bales stood tiered like a ziggurat. It was still early in winter-some bales still reached the rafters. A red-handled hay hook hung on a nail on the front wall. He dragged two bales to the center of the mow, lifted a hatch in the floor by a small ring, and looked down. Trudy stood below, waiting. “Go ahead,” she said. He pushed the bales through and watched them fall with a half-turn and whomp against the dusty cement.

He cleaned pens with a pitchfork and a wheelbarrow and dashed out fans of quicklime on the bare floors. When he cut the twine, the straw bales opened into golden sheaves. He pulled a slicker brush from his back pocket and hastily brushed the dogs. Doctor Papineau walked in while he was working, declared that he might as well look in on the pups, and disappeared through the door to the whelping room. Edgar went to his litter. Finch and Baboo, the least excitable, leaned on him from opposite sides. Essay tried to climb his front. He calmed them by cupping their bellies and muzzles and asked them to sit and do other small things in lieu of real training.

When they were done, Edgar and Trudy and the veterinarian walked up the driveway together. Doctor Papineau promised to call later and kept walking to his car and drove off. When Edgar came downstairs in fresh clothes, his mother was standing at the counter, broken receiver in her hands. He waited in the living room while she talked to someone at the telephone company about fixing the telephone. When she was finished, she came into the living room.

“You don’t have to go,” she said. “‘I’ll call Glen and say you’re not ready.”

You’re not going to Brentson’s alone. “Page can come with me.”

No.

She started to reply, then nodded. Almondine stood by the kitchen door while Edgar donned his coat, then trotted down the steps and stood by the truck. It was somehow even colder inside the cab. The vinyl seats flexed like tin. Trudy put the truck in gear and navigated up the long slope of the driveway and they drove along without conversation, listening to the crunch of ice beneath the tires. The world glowed translucent blue. Telephone poles rushed forward and fell away, wires swelling and dropping in the intervals. In Mellen, Trudy parked the truck in front of the cupolaed town hall and the three of them followed the arrows painted on the hallway until they reached the sheriff’s office. Even inside, their breath steamed. A burnt-hair smell permeated the building. A white-blond girl sat at a desk wearing a winter coat and mittens. At the center of her desk a microphone rested on a stand. She looked at them and stood and peered over the counter at Almondine. “I’ll get Glen. You’ll want to keep your coats on,” she said. “Something happened to the heat. We’re waiting for the repair guy from Ashland.”

The girl walked to the office door behind her desk and knocked. A moment later Glen Papineau emerged wearing his blue patrol jacket and hat, diminishing the room instantly. His hands, even ungloved, were like dinner plates. Edgar wondered, briefly, if Doctor Papineau had once been that big, then dismissed the idea. Old men got smaller as they aged, he knew, but no one could shrink that much.

“Trudy, Edgar, come on back. Sorry about the cold-boiler problems. You don’t want to know. I’ve been here since six. It’s a miracle we didn’t burst any pipes. Coffee, either of you? Hot chocolate?”

Trudy looked at Edgar. He shook his head.

“That’s okay, Glen,” she said.

“Well, bring ’em anyway, Annie-maybe they’ll heat the office a little. Cream and sugar in mine.”

He led them into an office somehow both spare and cluttered. Papers and notebooks mounded over his desk, but the walls were unadorned except for a framed certificate and a photograph of a youthful Glen in his Mellen High wrestler’s uniform, pinning some unknown behemoth in a fetal curl. In the picture Glen was up on his toes, almost parallel to the floor, body rigid as a log, veined thighs thick as a draft horse’s. The referee’s arm a blur as he slapped the mat.

Glen had arranged three folding chairs in front of his desk, and he motioned for Trudy and Edgar to sit down, then settled himself. Almondine approached and sniffed his knee and boot. “Hey, girl,” he said, then, “Aha,” as Annie walked in carrying three paper cups. With his forearm he cleared a swath on the desk. A stack of papers plunged off the other side.

He grinned, wryly. “My New Year’s resolution. Every year.”

“This one here’s hot chocolate,” Annie said. She set the cups in the cleared space and piled the fallen papers on the desk with an expression of despair.

“They’re here if you want ’em,” Glen said, gesturing at the steaming cups. He made a production of opening his notebook and clicking the end of his pencil. “Okay,” he said. “What we’ve got to do here is record what happened. That’s just procedure. We want to do this fast before anyone forgets anything. I apologize about this. I know it won’t be pleasant. The fact is, Pop came in this morning and gave me hell.” He paused as if suddenly embarrassed, Edgar thought, to have referred to his father as “Pop.”

“It’s okay, Glen,” Trudy said. “Just ask whatever you need to. Edgar will sign his answer to me.”

“Okay then. Trudy, when did you go into town?”

“It was eleven thirty or so when I left.”

Glen scribbled in his notebook. “And Edgar, you were home all day?”

He nodded.

“When did you first think something was wrong?”

Edgar signed his answer. “He was working in the mow and he noticed the dogs barking,” his mother said. “When he came downstairs, Gar was…lying on the floor.”

“You were in the mow?”

“We train up there when it gets cold,” Trudy said impatiently, before Edgar could reply. “You know that. You’ve been up there yourself.”

“Yeah, I have. I’m just asking to be complete. You were up there with some dogs?”

Yes. Two dogs from my litter.

“The dogs that were barking were downstairs?”

Yes.

“How long had you been in the mow?”

An hour. Maybe longer.

“You wear a watch?”

I have a pocket watch. I didn’t have it with me.

“Is there a clock in the mow?”

Yes.

“Do you remember about what time this happened?”

“You must know that from the telephone operator,” Trudy said.

“Yes. There’s a record of that. But I think it would be good to get it all down as long as we’re doing this.”

I wasn’t paying attention. It was after one o’clock, I know that.

“What sorts of things were you doing with your dogs?”

Come-fors. Proofing stays. Stay-aways. I had a hurdle set up.

“Do those things make a lot of noise?”

Not really.

“I mean, would your father have heard you upstairs?”

He would have heard the dogs running. And my footsteps.

“Could you have heard him downstairs?”

What do you mean?

“If he yelled something, would you have heard him?”

“He would have heard a shout,” Trudy said, interceding again. “We call up there all the time. With the door closed, you have to try a few times. Otherwise it’s easy to hear someone.”

Glen looked at Edgar. “And the door was closed?”

Yes.

“How about something spoken in an ordinary voice?”

“Not with the door closed,” Trudy said. “With the door open, you can hear someone talking in the workshop.”

“But you didn’t hear a shout or anything? Just the dogs?”

Edgar paused. He shook his head.

Glen made a note and turned the page over. “Okay, now I’m going to ask you a hard question, but it’s important you tell me as much as you can remember. You were working up in the mow with some dogs. You heard barking, you opened the door, you came downstairs. What did you see?”

Edgar thought about it for a moment.

I don’t remember, he signed.

His mother looked at him. You don’t remember?

No.

But you told me about it last night.

I mean, I know when I came downstairs I saw him lying there, but I don’t remember it. I just know he was lying there. It’s like I know it because someone else told me about it, not because I can see it.

She turned to the sheriff. “Glen, he doesn’t remember it much. Just that Gar was on the floor.”

“Well, that’s okay. Sometimes that happens. What’s the first thing you do remember?”

Running to the house.

“Is that when you called the operator?”

Yes.

“But that didn’t work.”

No.

“Then what?”

I ran back to the barn. No, wait. I ran up to the road. I thought I might see someone driving by who could talk on the phone. But there was nobody.

His mother repeated this. “That was after you went into the house?”

I think so. “You don’t remember for sure?”

No. But I think I went back into the house. “How did the phone get broken?”

He paused again. I don’t remember. “Pop says it was hanging in pieces when he got there.” Yes. I think I broke it, but I don’t know when.

“Okay, okay. You had them on the line and couldn’t say what was wrong. Trudy, did you ever discuss with Edgar a plan for how he might call for help if he needed to?”

“No, not really. The assumption was that Gar or I would always be there. The main thing we worried about was Edgar getting hurt when he was in the field or the woods. But he always had Almondine with him, and she’s been watching him since he was born. So…no.” Her eyes started to glisten, and she looked down. “We thought through so many possibilities. As soon as we could, we taught him how to write his name, address, and telephone number in case he got lost. We were always worried about…always thinking, ‘what if ’…”

She tipped her face down and closed her eyes. Glen produced a box of tissues and she crumpled one in her hand and drew in a breath.

“We worried about Edgar getting separated from us. Especially when he was little. But it never happened. And he was so smart. We’re talking about a kid that started reading at three years old. The last couple of years, it just wasn’t a concern. He knows how to handle himself with people who can’t sign-no, more than just handle himself: half his class knows how to read his sign. All his life he’s been teaching people. He’s good at it. Good at it. And besides, if there was ever any problem, he could just write out what he wanted to say. Nothing like this ever entered our minds.”

She stopped and wrapped her arms around her sides. Watching her do it-collect herself that way-made Edgar shudder. He could almost see her reaching inside herself to steady something, catch some falling piece of crockery. Almondine stood and poked her nose against Trudy’s hand, and she stroked the dog’s back.

“I’m sorry,” Glen said. He looked abashed. “I didn’t mean to imply you did something wrong. All I’m trying to do is get down what happened as Edgar saw it. We’re going to be done here in a couple of minutes, and then we’re done for good, I promise. Believe me, I wish we didn’t have to talk about this, but I don’t have a choice. Edgar, how you doing?”

Edgar nodded.

Glen sat back and clapped his palms on his broad knees.

“All right, let me ask you both a question: had Gar mentioned anything that might indicate he was sick? A headache? Feeling tired? Anything unusual?”

“No, nothing,” his mother said, and Edgar nodded in agreement. “I thought a lot about that last night. If he wasn’t feeling well, he didn’t say anything.”

“Would he have?”

“Maybe not. He hated going to the doctor. He says”-she paused a second and corrected herself-“said, I mean, they never fix things. They only make you feel worse.”

“Who’s your doctor?”

“Jim Frost. Same as everyone else around here, I suppose.”

“He can fill me in on Gar’s medical history?”

“He can. There’s nothing much. The only thing that even remotely resembled a medical problem was needing glasses.”

“Uh-huh. Okay.” This, too, Glen noted.

“All right. Edgar, I’m going to ask you to tell me what you remember about your father when you went back into that barn. I want to understand if he was conscious, whether you talked to him, or what.”

He was awake when I came back.

“Did you talk to him?”

No. But he was breathing.

“Could he talk?”

No.

“What did you think had happened?”

I didn’t know. He wanted to clear the scrap buckets from under the workshop stairs. When I came downstairs, he was lying in the middle of the workshop. I thought he’d hit his head, but he hadn’t. I opened up his coat. I couldn’t see anything wrong. “Then what happened?”

Then he stopped breathing.

There was silence in the office. Glen looked at Edgar and grunted sympathetically. “That’s all?”

Yes.

“And then Pop showed up.”

I guess.

“You don’t remember?”

No.

“What’s the next thing you do remember?”

Waking up in the house. Doctor Papineau talking on the telephone.

“You don’t remember walking back to the house?”

No.

“Do you remember doing anything after you went back to the barn besides being with your father?”

No.

“Your hands are beat up. Did that happen when the phone got smashed?”

No. I was banging on the pen doors to make the dogs bark.

“Why?”

To make noise.

“In case someone drove by?”

So if an ambulance came they would know to look in the kennel.

“Right.” He wrote for a minute in his notebook. “Smart. Just so you know, the operator was still on the line when you did that. She reported hearing what sounded like dogs barking.”

Just then there was a knock on the door, and Annie’s muffled voice. “Glen, boiler repair is here.”

“Okay,” he said, loudly. “Send them downstairs, would you? I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

He turned back to them. “Among my glorious duties, I supervise certain aspects of maintenance.” He grinned. “They haven’t asked me to wash dishes yet, though.”

He wrote something in his notes, then looked up. “Well, I know you two have a lot on your minds. There are some formalities to take care of, and then we’re done. Trudy, I’d like to talk to you alone before we finish up.”

She looked at Edgar. “Will you be okay waiting outside?”

He nodded. He and Almondine walked into the empty foyer. From the depths of the building came the banging of hammers on pipe and the long creeeeeee of rusted threads being turned. He looked at Annie’s neatly arranged desk-the microphone, the plant, the canister of pencils, the trays of forms-but when he tried to focus on anything his gaze kept skittering away.

Almondine ambled into the hallway and down to the entrance and he followed. On the street, a truck with the words “LaForge Heating and Repair, Ashland, WI” was parked behind their pickup. The day had warmed, and the street was filled with a soup of brown slush. Pale icicles dispensed a procession of water drops from the diner’s eaves. He opened the truck door and climbed in beside Almondine.

Doctor Frost rounded the corner. He entered the town hall through the door they’d just exited. Edgar tipped his head back and closed his eyes and pulled off his gloves so that his aching hands might go numb in the cold.

HIS MOTHER CLIMBED INTO the truck and keyed the ignition and they sat there while the truck idled. A semi passed on Main Street, slush flying in its wake. Further on, the little white spire of the Presbyterian church rose against the blue sky. She put her hands on the steering wheel and straightened her elbows.

“Doctor Frost-” she began, then stopped and drew a shaky breath.

Tell me.

“It’s the law that when someone dies unexpectedly, they have to do an autopsy to find out what happened. You know what an autopsy is, right?”

Edgar nodded. One happened practically every night on the detective shows.

His mother sighed. He could see she had been afraid she would have to explain it.

“The main thing to know is that your father wasn’t in pain. Doctor Frost said that it didn’t hurt. What happened is, there’s a place in a person’s head called the Circle of Willis. It’s in their brain, way down inside. You father had an aneurysm near there. That means one of his blood vessels was weak and it just broke. And that place where it was weak was so important, that he…he couldn’t live after that.”

Edgar nodded again. He didn’t know what else to say; it was so definitive. There was even a name for the place where things had gone wrong: the Circle of Willis.

“Doctor Frost said everyone is born with little flaws in their arteries and veins. Weak spots. Most people go through their whole life and never know. The flaws aren’t in places that matter: their arms, their legs. For a few people, the flaws are in bad places, and even then, those people can go their whole lives and nothing happens. But in some people, people who have a weak spot in an important place, that weak spot breaks. Sometimes they die from it. Nobody knows why it happens to some people and not others.”

His mother sat there and looked out the windshield. She laid her hand on Almondine’s neck and smoothed her fur down, and then slid her hand over to Edgar’s shoulder.

Thank you for telling me, he signed.

She turned and looked at him, really focused on him, for the first time since they’d left the house.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. She didn’t look like she was going to cry, only slack and exhausted and determined. “I think it’s better to know what happened than not,” she said. “Don’t you?”

Yes.

“And it doesn’t mean anything like that is going to happen to you or me. We have those flaws, just like everyone, but they aren’t in important places.” This, with an air of finality.

Yes.

“I have to go to Brentson’s now. Are you sure you want to come along?”

He had told her yes, and he meant it. He wasn’t scared of the funeral preparations. What scared him was sitting at home, alone, knowing he wouldn’t have the energy or the concentration to do anything but look out the window and think. He didn’t want to see the thing bloom in front of him again. What scared him was letting his mother do things by herself; he thought they ought to do everything together, for a while at least, no matter how bad. He thought that sometime later they would probably try being apart. He didn’t say any of that, he only nodded, and Trudy put the truck in gear and drove them to Brentson’s Funeral Home, where he sat beside her and listened as she explained what she wanted.

IN THE HALF-LIGHT, his mother laid her hand on his shoulder.

“Breakfast,” she said.

He sat up from the sofa and rubbed his eyes.

How much did you sleep? he signed.

“A little. Come on.”

Almondine stood and stretched and followed Edgar’s mother into the kitchen. Edgar climbed the stairs to his room and dressed and looked out the window at Almondine, wandering the yard looking for a place to urinate. He walked down the stairs and stepped onto the frigid porch in his socks and pushed the door open. Overhead, a vault of watery blue, Venus and the north star captured within. Almondine backhanded a paw of powdery snow and stood three-legged, looking at him, jaw hanging gaily.

Come on, he signed. It’s too cold.

She looked around while he shivered, then mounted the wooden steps. He dropped his hand onto her back as she passed. In the kitchen, she shook the cold from her fur and devoted herself to drinking water in loud slurps. The thermostat clicked and the furnace began to blow.

Edgar took a cup from the cupboard and walked to the Mr. Coffee sitting by the stove. He poured until the cup was half full and lifted it to his mouth. He must have made a face.

“Fill it with milk,” Trudy said. “Use lots of sugar at first.”

Okay.

He sat and they waited for the sun to rise further. After a while Trudy scrambled eggs and made toast.

“Will you cut the fence this morning?” she asked over her shoulder. “Where we talked about? We need a path to the birches so they know where to plow. Do it first thing. I don’t know when they’ll be here.”

In the workshop he tested the fencing pliers on a nail, squeezing the handles until the halves clinked to the floor. He hooked a training collar over his gloved fingers and pulled Tinder out of his pen. He slipped the loop over the dog’s head and heeled him onto a dusting of new snow so weightless it flew from beneath their feet.

The road had been plowed in the night. There were no cars coming. They would have seen them or heard them in the distance anyway, but there never were. At the top of the hill he stopped and gave Tinder a chance to finish in a sit. When the dog walked past, intent on something in the distance, he reversed. They did this twice before Tinder sat by Edgar’s knee. Then he released the dog and they waded to the fence. He pulled the pliers from his pocket and cut the barbed wire and spiraled the ends back along the fence and they broke a path through the calf-deep snow. The sun-glaze on the drifts cracked into plates underfoot. On the way back to the road Tinder threw himself down and pedaled with his legs and dug his snout beneath the snow, turning a daft eye on Edgar.

What is it about this weather? Edgar signed. It’s making all of you crazy.

In the end he had to kneel and set his mouth by the dog’s ear and make words with his lips before Tinder would let himself be guided to his feet. Once up, the dog reared back and did a little canter in place and bit the lead and tossed his head. Edgar sighed and waited. Ten steps farther, Tinder began all over again. This time Edgar gave up and unsnapped the lead and halfheartedly pitched chunks of snow for Tinder to leap at while the dog dashed through figure eights in the field with ears laid back on his skull and tail straight behind, turning so madly his hindquarters slung to the ground. When he’d run out his lunacy, he trotted back. By the time they’d returned to the barn, Tinder was heeling without flaw, and when Edgar stopped before the Dutch doors, the dog dropped into a perfect sit at his knee.

A SNOW-BLADED TRUCK passed their driveway, paused, backed up, and turned in. In the cab sat two men, knit caps on their heads and collars turned up. The driver stepped half out of the cab and leaned over the top of the door while Trudy explained what she wanted.

“Shut the door, for crying out loud,” the man in the passenger seat said. He was much older than the driver, who waved his hand as if to shoo something away and kept talking. The older man leaned over and pushed the driver out and slammed the door.

The men backed their truck up the driveway, gearbox whining. The older man was giving directions, much to the other’s annoyance. Up on the road, Edgar and Trudy climbed into the truck’s bed. When they reached the spot where Edgar had cut the fence, Trudy tapped on the cab’s back window. The driver put the truck sideways in the road and the two men produced a pair of snow shovels to clear the plow mound, and then they drove through the cut fence, exposing a swath of honey-colored hay.

The truck rounded the birches and turned back up the hill. Halfway to the road its chained tires lost purchase and they backed down and tried again. They made a second pass and then stopped the truck and stood stamping their feet and clapping their hands while Edgar’s mother explained what was to be done next.

The two men worked that morning with picks and shovels. Their argument carried over the field like the squawking of geese. In the afternoon the truck trundled down the driveway again and the men came onto the porch, bickering in hoarse whispers. Trudy opened the door. The men walked into the kitchen.

“Ma’am, there’s a problem,” the older man said.

“What is it?”

“That ground is harder than concrete. We can’t dig in it with the tools we’ve got.”

“Of course it’s hard,” his mother said. “It’s the middle of winter. It’s frozen. When we talked, you said you’d done this before.”

“Not in the winter. Not in ground frozen that solid.”

“You’ve never done this in the winter?”

“Fact is, we mostly do plowing. The occasional odd job, but mainly plowing. We’ve only serviced a few, uh, home burials, and those were in the summer.”

“Then why on earth did you say you could do this?”

The older man nodded as if this question were exactly his.

“I didn’t. My idiot son did.” He glared at the younger man, who raised his hands speechlessly. “I’m real sorry. I wanted him to call you when I found out, but I let him talk me into trying. Said we could break through the frost. I was stupid enough to go along. But it’s like digging into an iron plate.”

“So what do we do?”

The two men stood and looked at her.

“We have a burial tomorrow,” she said. Edgar could see she was getting angry. “We are going to bury my husband. This isn’t a problem I want to have to solve. Do you understand that? Did either of you spend a second thinking about what would happen if you couldn’t do this?”

The older man shook his head and said, “Ma’am, I can’t apologize enough. Whatever kind of equipment it takes to break ground like that, we don’t have it.”

They stood there for some time. Edgar stood behind the men and he could see his mother’s face as she appeared to them, frightening and regal at the same time.

We could build a fire, he signed.

She frowned, then looked back at the men.

“You can’t do it.”

“No ma’am. The folks at the cemetery must have something. Maybe they could help out.”

“Okay,” she said. “Follow me.” She tore her coat from the hook and walked out the door and in the waning afternoon light led them around the corner to the woodpile.

“Here,” she said. “I want you to load this into your truck and take it out to the field. Every stick. Edgar will show you where the wheelbarrow is. Then I want you to go into town and go to Gordy Howe’s place and get another truckload and bring that back. I’ll call him now.”

The old man scratched his head and looked at her.

“Will it be enough?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am, I think it will be. It might take some time, even then, but I believe that will do it.”

“And will you help?”

The old man smiled and nodded.

“Oh, we’ll help all right. We’ll be here until the ground is thawed.” He turned to the younger man. “Won’t we?” he said. “Son?”

ALL NIGHT THE FIRE BURNED in the snowy field. Streamers of sparks rose every time the men tossed another log onto the blaze. The birches towered orange over it all. Even the barn was painted by the light. Edgar and his mother watched from the living room. Edgar thought of the bonfires Schultz had lit to incinerate the great piles of stumps and roots.

Twice they carried food and coffee out to the men. His mother had to knock on the fogged truck window to get their attention. They refused her invitation to warm up inside the house but took the offering. On the second trip they brought the men blankets and pillows. The cordwood was heaped between the truck and the fire and the blaze occupied a rectangle at the base of the birches. Bare, wet grass surrounded the flames. Edgar’s mother walked to the fire and peered into the embers. He joined her. Heat scalded his face. When the smoke drifted back, his mother coughed but stood her ground. Edgar breathed it in, feeling not the slightest tickle.

They made beds in the living room for the third night and watched the glow from the field. Neither could sleep. They talked between long pauses.

I’ll take the chair tonight. You have the couch.

“No, I like it here.”

What were you looking for back there?

“Where?”

In the fire. It seemed like you were looking for something.

“I don’t know. I wasn’t looking for anything.” She changed to sign. Can I ask you a question?

Yes.

Are you scared?

Because of the funeral?

Because of everything.

No. Not scared. But I didn’t know it would be like this.

Neither did I.

They watched the orange firelight play against the limbs of the apple trees.

Do you think it will work?

Yes.

I like that the ground will be warm.

She looked at him. I’m very proud of you, you know.

Aren’t you supposed to tell me everything is going to be okay?

She laughed quietly. Is that what you want me to say?

I don’t think so. I don’t know if I would believe you if you did.

Lots of people are going to say it. I’ll say it too, if you want me to.

No. Don’t.

They were quiet, just looking out the windows.

Do you remember anything about your father? Your real father, I mean.

No, not a lot. He wasn’t around much. She paused, then shifted in her chair to face him. What are you thinking? You aren’t worried about going into a foster home, are you?

No.

Good. Because that’s not going to happen. Nothing is going to happen to me, or you, for that matter.

Anything can happen, though.

Anything can happen. But almost always, just normal things happen, and people have happy lives.

Were you happy before you met him?

She thought about that a moment.

I don’t know. Sometimes I was happy. As soon as we met I knew I was unhappy without him.

How was it you met again?

She smiled. In a good way. You’d only be disappointed in the details.

You aren’t ever going to tell me, are you?

I will, if you have to know.

He thought then about all the stories his parents had drawn out, how his father, usually so serious, had enjoyed the game of it and how that made him enjoy it, too. To know that one story was truer than all the rest might make it as if those moments had never happened. And perhaps it was better if they’d met many times, in many circumstances.

No, he signed after a while. Don’t tell me. He motioned toward the orange blaze in the field. Should we take anything else out?

I think they’re getting on just fine.

Good night, then.

“Good night,” his mother whispered. After that they were quiet.

IN THE CHAPEL, THERE WAS the casket in the front, and from the moment he saw it Edgar stopped remembering things in order. The drone of the minister’s sermon. Candles burning. Doctor Papineau sitting with them up front. At one point, he turned to view the mourners, thirty or forty scattered throughout the pews. Claude’s was not among the faces he saw. Afterward, they sat in Doctor Papineau’s car and followed the hearse along the main highway, onto County C, turning at last up Town Line Road and passing through the overhang of trees. They stopped where Edgar had cut the fence. Glen Papineau was one of the pallbearers, as was one of the men from the feed store. In all, a dozen of them walked across the field. Graveside, the man from the funeral home began to speak. Snatches rang back from the barn, as if endorsing only a fraction of his words.

Then a pair of headlights flickered through the bare trees. A car came to a stop and Claude appeared at the path entrance. More cars and pickups began to appear in a long line. The proceedings stopped and everyone turned. Doors opened, slammed, voices rang tinny in the cold air. Claude waved someone along. A man leading a dog. It was Art Granger and Yonder, both limping with arthritis. Then Mr. and Mrs. McCullough, with Haze, the third Sawtelle dog their family had owned. Then Mrs. Santone, with Deary. Then a lone woman with her dog, a curve of slack in its leash. A young couple with a boy and their dog. The dogs’ exhalations plumed whitely over their heads as they came down the field. For a long time people kept appearing at the top of the path-trainers who had adopted yearlings, men whose voices had sped across the telephone lines in conversation with Edgar’s father-and Claude directed them along. There was a man Edgar recognized from Wyoming; another from Chicago. But most were from around that countryside from homes that looked after Sawtelle dogs. Claude stayed on the road and directed them all down the path until the last of them had passed and they all stood in long arced rows around the birches.

Edgar looked at the dogs and then across the field at the house. Trudy wrapped her arms around him and whispered, “No, please stay,” as if she thought he meant to run from it all. But she misunderstood and he could not explain. He twisted away and crashed through the snowdrifts toward the house. No sound but the roaring in his ears. Twice he fell and pushed to his feet without looking back.

When he swung the kitchen door open, Almondine stood waiting for him. He knelt and let her chest fill over and over in the circle of his arms and together they returned to the birches, Almondine stepping along in the path he’d broken through the crusted snow. When they reached the rows of people and dogs, Almondine pushed ahead, passing through the ranks until she stood graveside. Then Edgar walked up and put his arms around his mother and they surrendered to whatever unearthly wind it was that howled over them and only them and Almondine sat her wise haunches down beneath the birches and together they watched the casket descend.

THEY’D BROUGHT WITH THEM pies and casseroles, sliced cheese and ham, bowls of black and green olives and sweet pickles, miniature slices of bread fanned like playing cards next to saucers of mustard and mayonnaise. People milled around Edgar and Trudy, murmuring reassurances, pressing hands on their shoulders. Almondine passed through the crowd, quietly presenting herself. Many of the owners stayed outside with their dogs. Claude and Doctor Papineau held leashes so the owners might come in to fill their coffee cups and speak with Trudy. To those who had traveled far, she offered room to stay, but no one accepted. They wrapped gloved hands around coffee cups and walked back outside, stopping to settle their hats before opening the door. Claude took those who wanted into the barn to see the kennel.

Husbands began to come in to let their wives know the car was running. The last of the women washed and dried dishes while cars turned around in the driveway, headlights sweeping the living room walls. Someone came asking for jumper cables. The women patted their hands on dishtowels and took their coats from the pile on the bed. And then only three visitors remained: Doctor Papineau, Glen, and Claude. They stood on the back porch in the bluing dusk. Doctor Papineau opened the kitchen door.

“We’ll take care of the dogs,” he said. “Don’t argue. Go lie down.”

Trudy nodded. “When you’re done, come get some food,” she said. “There’s so much left.” But afterward the trio walked up the drive. Two pairs of headlights brightened. Edgar watched the cars pull away. He mounted the stairs and pulled off his clothes and fell into bed with barely the strength to thump the mattress for Almondine. As soon as she’d settled herself beside him, he was asleep.

The Letters from Fortunate Fields

T HERE FOLLOWED, FOR EACH OF THEM, GOOD DAYS AND BAD, and often Edgar’s best moments coincided with his mother’s worst. She could be cheerful and determinedly energetic for days on end and then one morning he would walk downstairs and find her hunched at the kitchen table, haggard and red-eyed. Once lapsed, nothing could deliver her. It worked the same with him. Just when normal life felt almost possible-when the world held some kind of order, meaning, even loveliness (the prismatic spray of light through an icicle; the stillness of a sunrise), some small thing would go awry and the veil of optimism was torn away, the barren world revealed. They learned, somehow, to wait those times out. There was no cure, no answer, no reparation.

He returned from school one day in March to find his mother working in her bedroom, her hair a sweaty tangle about her head, her breath coming in ragged gasps. She’d already closed up the flaps on a tall stack of boxes and was folding a pair of his father’s trousers and placing them in another box. Her gaze barely paused on Edgar when he walked in. Later, he searched to see what had been lost. The drawer that once held his father’s belts and ties was filled with his mother’s gloves and scarves. On top of the dresser, only her sparse jewelry collection remained, and the wind-up alarm clock. She’d even packed away the photograph of her and his father, newlyweds, sitting on the pier in Door County.

HE WOKE ONE MORNING tantalized by an idea: if he could catch the orchard trees motionless for one second-for half of one second-if they stood wholly at rest for the briefest moment-then none of it would have happened. The kitchen door would bang open and in his father would walk, red-faced and slapping his hands and exclaiming about some newly whelped pup. Childish, Edgar knew, but he didn’t care. The trick was to not focus on any single part of any tree, but to look through them all toward a point in the air. But how insidious a bargain he’d made. Even in the quietest moment some small thing quivered and the tableau was destroyed.

How many afternoons slipped away like that? How many midnights standing in the spare room, watching the trees shiver in the moonlight? Still he watched, transfixed. Then, blushing because it was futile and silly, he forced himself to walk away.

When he blinked, an afterimage of perfect stillness.

To think it might happen when he wasn’t watching.

He turned back before he reached the door. Through the window glass, a dozen trees strummed by the winter wind, skeletons dancing pair-wise, fingers raised to heaven.

Stop it, he told himself. Just stop.

And watched some more.

THE WORK TO BE DONE was staggering.

Simplest was the maintenance of the kennel: cleaning the pens, feeding and watering the dogs, shoveling snow from the runs, and the infinity of minor repairs on the kennel’s mechanical workings. Then there was nursery duty: checking the pregnant mothers, washing the teats of the nursing and weaning mothers, taking the temperature and weights of newborns. For the blind and deaf neonates there were touch and scent regimes to be followed, neatly penciled in Gar’s hand on a yellowing paper tacked to the whelping room wall. For the newly open-eyed, there was a schedule of experiences, from the jingling of car keys to the appearance of an old bicycle horn, which they might sniff until Edgar squeezed the rubber bulb and timed how long before they crept back. A patch of carpet to walk on. A tube. A block. Sandpaper. Ice. The weekly roll-and-hold until they kicked and yipped, keeping one eye on the second hand of the clock. The sessions with aunts and uncles, learning manners, while the mother rested. For everything there were entries on log sheets, milestones checked off, reactions recorded, charts updated, the compiled story of each life. Photographs at four, six, eight, and twelve weeks, and then six and nine and twelve and eighteen months: frontal, lateral, rear, and orodental on Tri-X, the dogs positioned in front of the painted calibration grid on the medicine room wall. At night, there was the house rotation schedule, bringing in pairs or trios, and the pedigree research, and visits by stud dogs, and the heat schedules of the mothers, and the practice placements and negotiations with potential owners.

But it was the training that consumed them. The infants needed to learn the simplest things: to look, to listen, to watch, to wait. The eighteen-month-olds needed finish work and evaluation. And the adolescents-those robbers, thieves, muggers, and bullies, who knew exactly what you wanted and devoted themselves to the opposite-needed every spare minute and more.

One evening after they had come in from the kennel, Edgar’s mother asked him to sit at the table. On a sheet of paper, she’d drawn a schedule with columns labeled “Edgar” and “Trudy.”

“We need to divide up the work,” she said. “We’re both doing everything right now. I’m not so worried about the nursery-Pearl’s an experienced mother, and she won’t need much watching. But I am worried about placing them. Your father spent so much time on the telephone. I have a lot of catching up to do.”

She paused and took a deep breath.

“And all that is going to detract from the training. The only bright side to the whole thing is that oldest litter is completely placed. That gives us a few months of breathing room. Then the next litter to go is yours. I don’t think they’ve been spoken for.”

She looked at him to double-check this. He nodded. His father hadn’t broached the issue of placing Edgar’s litter and it wasn’t something Edgar had been eager to hurry along.

“We have a few months then. I need to go over the contacts. For all I know, Gar had spoken agreements with people. I hope I won’t need to travel-I don’t know how we’ll manage if I do.”

She was thinking out loud. He let her go on and sat listening. Then she stopped short and turned to him.

“There is another option, Edgar, and we need to talk about it. We can sell the breeding stock and shut down the kennel. After these litters are placed, we would be done. We could probably place them all by the end of summer if we wanted to. We would have to move into town. I’m sure I could-”

He was already shaking his head.

“No, listen. We have to consider it. We’re going to have to work so hard there’ll be no time for anything else. Have you thought about what that will be like? In a year or so you’ll want to go out for track or football. You might not think so now, but when other boys are doing those things you’re going to resent being stuck out here handling dogs morning and night. What I’m afraid of is that there’ll come a time when you hate getting on the bus to come home. And I’ll know it when it happens.”

It won’t happen, he signed. I don’t want to live somewhere else.

“That’s the other thing. This isn’t always going to be your home. In four years, you graduate. I can’t possibly run this kennel alone, and even if I could, I’m not going to live out here by myself. Five years one way or another doesn’t matter much, Edgar.”

It matters to me. Besides, how do you know I’m going to leave?

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re going to college”

I’m not. I’m haven’t even thought about college.

“You will,” his mother said. “You need to understand that there are alternatives. You’re being closed-minded. Staying here and working dogs might be the hardest thing, not the easiest. Or the best. As a trainer, you’re no great shakes, Edgar. Sleeping with them in the mow doesn’t accomplish much, no matter how nice it feels.”

Edgar felt himself blushing.

“It’s not so hard to guess what’s going on when there’s silence up there for hours and you come stumbling down with straw in your hair. I know how tempting it is. I’ve done it myself.”

You sleep in the mow?

She shrugged, refusing to be drawn off track. “My point is, maybe that’s not where your aptitudes lie,” she said. “Oh, of course you’re good with the dogs-quit looking so punctured. Your worst quality as a trainer is your pride, Edgar. If we’re going to make a go of this kennel you’re going to have to learn so much more. And you’re going to have to take it seriously. You only understand the basics. Until now you’ve been training pups and helping your father. Training yearlings is much more exacting. I can’t handle them and do all the rest, too. It’s impossible.”

But I want to learn! I can help.

“What if I said I wasn’t sure I could teach you what you need to know?”

You can. I know you can. I’ve been watching you all my life.

“Yes, you have. So why, at the age of nine months, does Tinder bolt whenever he gets a chance?”

That’s not fair!

“Who said anything about fair?” His mother’s voice cracked a little on the word. He could guess her thoughts: how exactly might the word “fair” apply to any part of their situation? Furthermore, what she’d said about his training skills was true. He was lazy and indulgent; what he liked was the attention of the pups, not the training. He was inconsistent. He worked them on skills they already knew and avoided more difficult things. Worst of all, he understood there was more he should be doing, but he had no idea what it was, and that made him feel ashamed.

“You need to realize that this is a business, like a grocery store or a gas station. You’re going to find out that’s an awfully cold-blooded view. You’re asking to be a partner in it. You’ll have to think of this place as a business first and a playground with dogs second.”

You’re talking down to me, he signed. I know what we do.

“Do you? What do you think we sell?”

He must have looked at her as if she were insane.

Dogs. Dogs, of course.

“Wrong. You see, Edgar? It’s not as obvious as you think. Anyone can sell dogs. People give them away. Do you know what we charge for each dog?”

He didn’t. His father had negotiated these things, and it wasn’t something he’d talked much about.

“One thousand five hundred dollars for a trained, eighteen-month-old dog.”

One thousand five hundred dollars?

“Yes,” she said. “Your litter could be worth between nine and ten thousand dollars. It’s not now, but it could be.”

How come we aren’t we rich?

She laughed. “Because most of that money goes toward food, medicine, and expenses. We reimburse people who take care of the older dogs. If we place twenty dogs a year, which is about what we average, we squeak by. And it’s not easy to find twenty people willing to pay that much for an adult dog. Most people want pups, you know.”

He nodded. Do other dogs cost that much?

“Some. A few cost more-litters out of show ring champions.” She rolled her eyes when she said “show ring”-her attitude about the dog fancy was just shy of total contempt. “Almost all dogs cost less, though. Much less.”

How can we charge so much?

“That’s exactly what you need to learn, Edgar. When you know the answer to that question, you’ll know why we can place our dogs at all, much less at that price. You’ll also understand what it is we’re selling.”

Can’t you just tell me?

“I could try, but there are no words for some things, Edgar. Let me ask you a question. You’ve been around plenty of dogs in town. Do they seem just like ours? Different color, different breed, but otherwise the same?”

Not exactly.

“Kind of scatterbrained, right?”

Yes. But they aren’t trained, most of them.

“Do you think that’s the only difference? Our pups mature more slowly, do you understand that? They don’t have their first heat until they are two years old. And when they are little…you know how frustrating they can be. Look at Essay. We were still working on simple obedience with her when she was six months old, long after any mutt would have that stuff down pat. But try doing a shared-gaze exercise with one of those town dogs and see what happens.”

But that’s easy!

She laughed and stood and turned on the radio to the country-western station she liked and they cleared the table. She hummed under her breath as they did the dishes, but it was not joyful-more like a person singing to keep her mind off something else. Before Edgar went to bed, his mother said one last thing.

“Edgar, think about what we discussed. Give it a while. Then we need to do one of two things. Either we stay and make this kennel work-and that is going to require you to learn finish training-or we begin dismantling the kennel. There’s no point in anything halfway.”

Edgar nodded. It sounded so rational, the alternatives so clear. He knew what he wanted the moment his mother posed her question, and he knew what she wanted him to want, despite her attempt at objectivity. Another life was inconceivable. It would be much later before he’d realize they’d seduced themselves that night-seduced themselves into believing they understood all the costs and consequences of what they wanted. That no mistake they might make could equal what had already happened. That their calm wasn’t simply a veneer.

SINCE THEY WERE IN TOWN ALREADY, Trudy decided they would eat lunch at the Mellen Diner. As soon as they were seated, Doctor Papineau hailed from across the room and Trudy walked over to him. Edgar sat listening to the lunchtime chatter and looking out the window. In the corner booth, a little girl was staring at him. A moment later she marched past, whispering in a quiet singsong, and disappeared into the bathroom. When he glanced back from the window he discovered her standing beside his booth.

“Hi,” she said. She was maybe five years old, dressed in a blue jumpsuit with a rainbow-colored elephant across the bib, her hair a yellow tangle of ringlets. She leaned toward him confidentially.

“Mama says you can’t talk,” she lisped. “Is that really true?”

He looked at her and nodded.

“Not even a whisper?”

He shook his head.

She drew back and gave him an appraising look.

“How come?” she said.

He shook his head and shrugged. The little girl glanced back at her family-oblivious to her absence-and narrowed her eyes.

“Mama says I should learn some of that from you, but I can’t. I tried, but things just come out of me! I said a person who can talk ought to talk. Don’t you think that’s true?”

He nodded.

“My gramma’s like me. Wanna know what my gramma says?”

Now he was sure he didn’t know this little girl, and he didn’t know her mother or grandmother, either. Yet the more he looked at her face, the more familiar it became, as if he’d seen it often, but at a distance. He glanced back at the corner booth. Her family didn’t have one of their dogs-he would have recognized them at once if they had.

“Well, do you want to know or not?” the girl asked, stamping her foot on the linoleum.

He shrugged again. Okay. Sure.

“She says that before you were born, God told you a secret he didn’t want anyone else to know.”

He looked at her. There wasn’t much a person could say in response to a thing like that. He considered scribbling out a note to the little girl: I could just write it down. But he thought that was not her point, and she was probably too young to read anyway. He particularly wanted to tell her she didn’t have to whisper. People made mistakes like that-talking extra loud or getting nervous. But the little girl wasn’t nervous, not in the least. She acted as if she had known him all her life.

She crooked her finger at him. He leaned down and she cupped her hand by his ear.

“You could tell me the secret,” she whispered. “I wouldn’t tell. I promise. Sometimes it makes it easier if just one other person knows.”

At first the little girl stood wide-eyed and placid. He sat back and looked at her. Then her eyes squinted into crescents and her lips drew together into an angry little circle.

“You don’t remember, do you?” she scolded, and now she wasn’t whispering. “You forgot!”

Edgar’s mother, on the far side of the dining room, stopped talking with Doctor Papineau and turned.

Don’t look at me, he signed. I don’t even know who she is.

Abruptly, the little girl turned and stormed off. She’d taken five or six steps before she whirled to face him again. She was a terribly dramatic child, and Edgar had a glimpse of what it must be like in her house. She was probably staging little scenes like this all the time over eating her vegetables and watching television.

She scrunched up her face as though thinking through a knotty problem.

“Would you tell me if you did remember?” she asked, finally.

Yes.

Her expression brightened into a smile. Her face was still oddly familiar, still impossible to place.

“Oh,” she said. “Okay!” Then she skipped away. Before she reached the corner booth her attention was caught by a baby in a high chair and she stopped to poke the baby and ask questions when it started to cry.

“What was that about?” Trudy said when she slipped into the booth.

I don’t know.

“Maybe you have an admirer,” she said.

And for the third time since they’d walked into the diner, he could think of no better reply than a shrug.

THEY WORKED HARD TO distract one another whenever they recognized bleakness descending. Edgar pulled Trudy to the kitchen table to play checkers and eat popcorn. One night she snuck his entire litter into the house without waking him. In the morning, when he opened his eyes, eight dogs lifted their heads to look at him.

Edgar opened The Jungle Book and discovered that, for the first time since the funeral, he could concentrate enough to read. And reading was more comfort than anything else. “Kaa’s Hunting.” “Tales of the Bander-Log.” It didn’t matter. It touched the old life, the life before. He watched the television for news of Alexandra Honeywell and Starchild Colony, and that too provided a comfort. Yet, in the mornings, the front of his ribcage ached as if someone had dropped an anvil on his chest in the night.

The whelping rooms consoled him. Also the workshop, despite what had happened there. But it was the row of paint-chipped file cabinets, standing like sentinels against the back wall of the workshop, that drew him most. Atop the cabinets sat a small reference library. Working Dogs, by Humphrey, Warner, and Brooks. Genetics in Relation to Agriculture, by Babcock and Clausen. Veterinary Techniques for the Farm, by Wilson and Bobrow. Genetics and the Social Behavior of Dogs, by Scott and Fuller. And of course, The New Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language. The master litter book was there, too-row upon row of ledgered names and litter numbers, one line for every Sawtelle dog, all the way back to his grandfather’s time. A thousand times he must have watched his father run a finger along a page, then snatch an overstuffed folder out of a drawer. Generations of dogs filled those metal drawers. If ever a folder turned up missing, his father said it was as if they had lost the dog itself, and he would search and search, saying, “These records are it. Without them, we wouldn’t know how to plan the next litter. We wouldn’t know what a dog meant.”

The bottom drawers of the oldest cabinets contained a hash of newspaper articles and letters, most addressed to Edgar’s grandfather. There was a letter from a man in Ohio whose dog had rescued him from drowning. Another, from a woman in Washington State, described how her dogs had interceded when she’d been attacked by a mountain lion. Some letters were paper-clipped to newspaper articles from faraway cities. The Boston Globe. The New York Times. Even the London Times. The pattern was clear: his grandfather had been writing to people because their dogs had done something remarkable, something reported in the newspaper.

One letter in particular caught Edgar’s attention. It was postmarked New Jersey, and the name, Brooks, sounded familiar. He’d read the first few lines before he stood and double-checked the spine of Working Dogs, and then turned back to the letter:

May 2nd, 1934

Morristown, New Jersey

Dear Mr. Sawtelle,

Thank you for your interest in our work. I am gratified that Working Dogs is of some assistance, and not a futile documentary effort. Unfortunately, I have no plans that would take me to Wisconsin in the near future, as our work demands my presence here. As one who works with dogs, I trust you understand.

First, to your questions. We do not attempt to train our dogs to make complex choices between training objectives. Of course, the dogs make substantial judgments many times a day, both in training and in service, but a command’s intent is always unambiguously clear. For example, when recalled, the dog should always come. When told to stay, it should always stay. I can think of no benefit in asking a dog to possibly come when recalled. Scent tracking requires a high level of choice-making, but not the kind you’ve asked about. We are eminently practical in these matters. Our goal is to produce the best possible working dogs, and consequently we emphasize predictability. I would not like to guess whether the choice-making behavior you asked about can be trained for or tested accurately, or whether it is heritable. And I have no more efficacious proofing procedures in mind than those you suggest. This whole question of choice between objectives has been a cause for idle speculation on my part the last few nights, and I have even gone as far as discussing it with my colleagues. The consensus seems to be that even if it were possible, there would be little utility in it for service dogs.

Second, for reasons I suspect you already understand, we cannot consider an exchange of dogs. The six strains that comprise the Fortunate Fields breeding program represent thoroughly researched bloodlines. In order to select a foundation stock of just twenty-one animals, we examined the pedigree data of hundreds of candidates, cross-indexed against their show and working titles. As a result, all of our dogs have a proven ancestry that has produced both excellent conformation and great success at work. Introducing an unknown into the bloodlines is out of the question.

I should also like to offer two observations. First, by beginning your breeding program with dogs you found “excellent in temperament and structure” but of unpedigreed stock, you have made attaining your objective-and I admit I don’t fully understand it-immeasurably harder. While it is true that our selection of German Shepherd Dogs was essentially accidental, the choice to begin with a well-documented lineage was not. We know, for example, that our dogs have been structurally sound for at least five generations. When questions arise about the heritability of some trait, we can contact the owners of ancestors two and sometimes three generations back. For the goal of producing a scientifically constructed working dog, this is invaluable. Without such information, one might expect that the first dozen generations would exhibit extreme variability in type; to bring order from that chaos, one would have to aggressively inbreed, with the predictable amplification of undesirable as well as desirable traits.

I also feel compelled to say that it is breathtakingly naïve to imagine creating a breed of dog in the first place. To do so by selecting what you arbitrarily think are outstanding examples-whatever dogs happen to catch your fancy-and crossing them into your line will only result in a jumble, and might well create unhealthy or unviable offspring. I warn you against this course. You seem to grasp the principles of heredity, and thus I am astonished at what you think you might accomplish. You, the canine species, and our society would be better served if you accepted the realities of animal husbandry. Yours is a common vanity, one that every breeder has indulged during a weak moment-but the best of them put such thoughts aside and ask what is right for the breed. I hope you soon do so as well. What you are attempting is, in essence, the opposite of our endeavor, and I cannot recommend it.

A blank space appeared in the text, and then the letter continued:

Mr. Sawtelle,

After finishing the last passage, I set this letter aside for some days, too upset to finish it. I felt I should either write it again with a more civil tone or simply not post it. Though I am no less adamant today, in the interim I’ve found I will be traveling to Minneapolis. This is unusual and unexpected, but if I’ve read my map correctly, I may have time for a brief side trip on my return, the purpose of which will be to convince you, in person, of your folly. In addition, as a scientist, I feel some obligation to review your stock, on the remote chance it might be of use to us. I should be traveling about six weeks hence, and done with my business in Minneapolis around June 15.

Signed,

AB

The letter was a curiosity. Edgar had read Working Dogs years before and knew that Brooks was one of the original breeders on the Fortunate Fields project. The makeshift library atop the file cabinets held several books on that subject, as well as articles about Buddy, the most famous of those dogs. Fortunate Fields had originated through the philanthropy of a woman named Dorothy Eustice, whose idea was to breed dogs to help humanity-in particular, as guide dogs for the blind. An institution called The Seeing Eye had been established to carry that work forward.

Fortunate Fields was interesting because guide dogs for the blind needed to be of a special temperament: unflappable, easy to train, and happiest at work. This ruled out dogs that were, for example, unnerved by new surroundings or too laconic to be relied upon for steady work. The Sawtelle family legend-myth, Edgar had always supposed-was that his grandfather had contacted the Fortunate Fields breeders in the early days and that one of them had taken pains to advise him on breeding and training. The story went that the Sawtelle dogs even carried the blood of Buddy.

Edgar fingered through the letters. There were several more from Brooks. The next was dated two months later.

July 2nd, 1934

Morristown, New Jersey

Mr. Sawtelle,

I apologize for rushing off. Your hospitality was more than I should have hoped for-indeed, more than I should have indulged in. After seeing your dogs, I understand your enthusiasm. However, I must repeat that there is no possibility that we could use them as Fortunate Fields stock.

Having also seen your records, I understand that the difference between our approaches is one of philosophy, not technique. You are as selective, in your way, as we at Fortunate Fields. (If I am repeating what I already said while visiting, I apologize-some of it is unclear to me now.) I do not think you have much chance of success, though your definition of success is less precise than ours. That may be more sensible, as you’ve argued, but it is not scientific, and in science, progress is necessarily slow.

I also cannot let you ship a bitch here to be bred. Although I am on your side in this matter, my colleagues are unconvinced.

However, I tell you the following in confidence: a gentleman named Conrad McCalister has been living with a dog of ours, Amos, just outside of Minneapolis, for two years now. Amos is a sibling of Buddy’s, and every bit the dog she is. We consider Amos to be among our greatest successes, though Buddy gets all the publicity. With my endorsement, I believe Conrad would permit Amos to sire a litter with a bitch of your choosing. I could make sure you had the advantage of our full documentation on Amos, since you would be in a position to appreciate what it meant.

Finally, I would like to mention a personal matter, with the desire that it need never be discussed again. Our night at “The Hollow” (as I believe the establishment was called) culminated in a rather unfortunate-indeed, foolish-incident. The young lady you introduced me to has mailed several letters to my home address since then, indicating that she would rather not put the event into the proper perspective. Rest assured, I have determined that this is only a matter of misplaced affection and not something medical in nature. I believe you know her, if my memory of that night was not completely destroyed by whatever was in those shot glasses. (I shall never again hear the name “Leinenkugel” without some degree of nausea. I am grateful the beverage isn’t sold here.)

In any case, I’ve suggested to her that the best thing might be a subtle remembrance in the form of a puppy related to the famous “Buddy,” which she would acquire from you. I’ve explained to her that this would be Buddy’s paternal nephew or niece, but as you well know, those not involved in animal husbandry have little interest in exact filial relationships, and no appreciation of their significance. In any event, if you would agree to make that possible, I would be happy to send Conrad a letter endorsing the mating. And you would have my deepest gratitude.

I believe you have undertaken a particularly interesting project, Mr. Sawtelle. If my prior letter seemed harsh, please accept my apologies.

Most anxiously awaiting your reply,

Alvin Brooks

Postscript: As for naming, I see no reason to call them anything other than “Sawtelle Dogs,” or perhaps just “Sawtelles.” If they amount to anything besides well-trained mongrels, they will, after all, have been the product of your vision.

And then a third letter, postmarked almost five years later:

November 18, 1938

Morristown, New Jersey

John,

I do not share this desire to wax philosophical about the nature of men and dogs. It leads to discussions that are unscientific at best and a waste of intellectual force at worst. You are talking religion, not science.

One part of your letter intrigued me, however-your discussion of Canis posterus-the “next dogs,” as you call them. I am familiar with the theory of the dire wolf, that gigantic ancestor of wolves that trod the prehistoric earth. I, like you, believe that our modern dogs are descended from the wolves of antiquity, perhaps one hundred thousand years past. As you say, that gives us three points-more than enough to plot a trajectory-if they belong to the same evolutionary branch of the species. That is, the dire wolf may have been something entirely separate from Canis lupus, an alternative form that natural selection toyed with and discarded.

I must make something clear before I go on. You speak of natural selection and evolution as if they were one and the same, but natural selection-the undirected survival of an individual or individuals-is merely one mechanism of evolution, and not the only one. Mutation, for example, is another mechanism-one way in which novelty gets introduced. As you well know, conscientious animal husbandry serves the same function in domesticated animals that natural selection serves in the wild.

Yet, in geometry, given two points, a line may be drawn. Perhaps the same is true in biology. Suppose those two points we take are the wolf and the domestic dog. That does imply something else farther along the same line-the “next dog,” as you like to phrase it.

But this is where your thinking goes awry, for along any such biological line, the farther points are not more advanced than the earlier points, they are only better adapted. That is, evolution and sophistication are not necessarily one and the same. And so your endless speculation on the nature of Canis posterus, and hence the next small change that will make them better workers (which is my dream) or companions (yours) is futile, since the forces of selection would either have to know in advance what small change is desired, or be able to recognize it when it happens by pure accident. The latter is not a realistic possibility-mutations occur at an extremely low rate in any population, and of course the chance of a specific mutation that would better adapt a dog for companionship…well, it is possible, but statistically unlikely.

Which leaves you in the uncomfortable position of speculating on a change that cannot happen unless you already know what it will be (or have the sort of time on your hands that natural selection has). That is the crux of the layman’s trouble in understanding evolution: it works on a time scale so far beyond personal experience that one must train oneself to think in eons, not decades. Here at Fortunate Fields, we have carefully defined objective criteria known in advance by which our animals may be measured for fitness; we know exactly which behaviors to select for. Therefore, though our progress must be slow, we are confident it will also be steady.

Since you insist on speculating, however, I will say this much. There are limits to what even the most rigorously scientific breeding program can accomplish-based not only on the foundation stock and the limits of precision we have for measuring the dogs, but on limits that come from within us-limits, in other words, of our own imagination, and of ourselves as conscientious human beings. In the end, to create better dogs, we will have to become better people.

And that, sir, is the last speculation you will hear from me along these lines.

There was more in the letter, an exchange of kennel techniques, clarification of older letters. What interested Edgar was how Alvin Brooks had signed the letter. To move such a formal man from that first outraged letter to one in which he closed with “Affectionately” must have taken dozens if not hundreds of exchanges. Why had these, of all the letters, been kept? Probably chance, he knew. But he dug back into the file cabinets to see what else he could find, opening letter after letter and setting it aside.

It all made him think about their records. The paperwork on a dog didn’t end when it left the kennel. At his father’s request, new owners sent back letters every few months describing how the dog they’d adopted was getting along. When a dog reached five years of age, his father had contacted the owners to fill out another form. And when the dog died, yet another form was filled out, recording the age, cause of death, behavior late in life, and so on. Edgar’s father sometimes even called the dog’s veterinarian. As a result, the file for every dog expanded over time until it was stuffed with notes, letters, photographs.

“A litter,” Edgar’s father once told him, “is like an x-ray of its parents and its parents’ parents, but an x-ray that takes years to develop, and even then it’s faint. The more x-rays you have, the better the picture you get.”

This made sense. A dog might sire half a dozen litters, each with six or seven pups. That meant forty or more pups who reflected the qualities of the sire. If, for an extreme example, cleft palates showed up in every litter-meaning pups that had to be put down-you knew that the sire carried a propensity toward cleft palate. (Of course, if a sire produced cleft palates more than once, they stopped breeding him, and a red slash was drawn across the dog’s folder.)

Just before a dog left the kennel, it was evaluated one last time. They called this “the finish.” There were no special tests in the finish, just the same things they’d always tested for, the same exercises, the same measurements. The difference was, this time the results were rolled up into a numerical score representing the dog in maturity. That finish score was the best indication of what its ancestors had passed on-the best x-ray.

Once a finish score was assigned, Edgar’s father recalculated all its ancestors’ finish scores, going back five generations. This was how evidence accumulated about how true the dog bred, how reliably it passed on its qualities, good or bad, to succeeding generations. A second number told them how many of a dog’s progeny had contributed to the master score-an index of confidence. When planning litters, the choice between two dogs with nearly identical finish scores favored the dog with the highest index of confidence-the one who had been tested most thoroughly. This was a system Edgar’s grandfather had worked out and refined, apparently in long discussions with Brooks, and which his father had practiced, modified, and improved.

It wasn’t a perfect scheme, of course. While the finish score gave an idea of how well a dog fared in testing, there were intangibles to consider. Not temperament, which they broke down into individual behaviors and assessed, and not physical qualities, which were easily measured, but how the dog combined all these things, for the whole of every dog was always greater than the sum of its parts. Some, for example, seemed capable of inspiration: they clued in on a new way of doing things more often than others. There was no way to measure this. And there was the dog’s personality, which was distinct from its temperament. A dog with a keen sense of humor would find ways to make jokes with you, and could be a joy to work with. Others were serious and contemplative, and they were good for other reasons.

Edgar’s father had sometimes grumbled that all he did was keep track of a dog’s faults, though what he meant was, even the best records in the world couldn’t capture the whole of the dog. They could record only what could be measured. And the measuring and testing of the dogs, the follow-up calls and letters, the reassessment of the ancestors of a placed dog, all served to remind his father of a dog’s total character. When it came time to plan a litter, the scores and numbers were only a guide. It hadn’t been unusual for him to select against the numbers based on intuition.

But his father’s complaint also pointed to the fact that the records mainly prevented bad pairings-breeding, say, two dogs that tended to produce weak fronts. That was the interesting thing about planning a cross. Two brilliant dogs couldn’t be bred if it risked a litter full of stifles so straight the dogs would be crippled by the time they were five years old. And so the first question about any potential pairing was not how great the offspring would be, but what problems it might produce.

Thinking about all this, Edgar began to understand what his mother meant when she’d claimed not to have the words to describe what made their dogs valuable. Partly it was the training. They spent long hours doing crazywalking, stays, releases, shared-gaze drills, and all the rest until the pups paid attention to where they were going and where they were looking; they learned that a certain expression on a person’s face meant that something interesting lay behind them, or in another room. He’d taken that for granted, but now that his mother had pointed it out, he saw how uncommon this was.

So a dog’s value came from the training and the breeding. And by breeding, Edgar supposed he meant both the bloodlines-the particular dogs in their ancestry-and all the information in the file cabinets. Because the files, with their photographs, measurements, notes, charts, cross-references, and scores, told them the story of the dog-what a dog meant, as his father put it.

Sometimes when Edgar got an idea, a whole series of other ideas clicked into place right behind it, as if they had logjammed somewhere in his mind, waiting for the way to clear. Suddenly, he saw how the training, the breeding, and the record-keeping worked together, how the training tested the dogs for their qualities, their ability to learn different kinds of work. That explained the training notes and why the Sawtelles had to raise the dogs to maturity: if they placed a pup, they wouldn’t know what kind of dog it became. But the Sawtelles could compare them because they trained every dog. So it made sense that a dog’s finish score could alter the scores of its ancestors, which in turn influenced the dogs used for the next mating. As if every dog had a voice in selecting the following generations.

Edgar closed his eyes and waited until he could hold it all in his mind, and once that happened, he wanted so badly to ask his father about it, to be sure he’d understood things correctly, that it nearly made him cry. But the only way left to him was through the records. And yet-he felt this, but couldn’t find the words for it-something else made the dogs valuable, too, something that hadn’t been among this sudden cascade of ideas. He wished he could read his grandfather’s side of the correspondence to understand what he’d meant by “the next dogs.”

No matter how naïve or wild-eyed his grandfather might have sounded to Brooks, Edgar thought John Sawtelle’s vision might not have been so quixotic.

He had a feeling, in fact, that it might already have come to pass.

Lessons and Dreams

A FEW WEEKS AFTER THE FUNERAL, AFTER THE SHOCK HAD WORN off and some of the kennel routines were established again, Edgar’s dreams began. In them, his father did the most ordinary things-walking along the driveway to fetch the mail, reading in his armchair, lifting a puppy in the dim light of the whelping room to take a closer look. Edgar looked for some connection between his last waking thoughts and what he saw when he fell asleep. One night he found himself walking creekside with his father, the sumac and chokecherry green and jungle lush, though he knew, even in the dream, that outside his window the fields lay buried under thick drifts of snow. Then his father turned and said something, something important. When Edgar woke he lay still, trying to fix those words in his mind, but by the time he shuffled into the kitchen, he couldn’t even remember whether his father had signed or spoken.

Trudy peered at him over her coffee cup.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

Nothing.

“Was it a dream?” she asked. “Your father?”

Her guess surprised him. He didn’t know how to answer. Was she having dreams, too? It seemed possible-some mornings she looked as fragile as a baby bird. She was trying to shield him from whatever bad feelings she had, he could see that. She stayed up late sitting at the kitchen table and pretending to work. Half the time he cooked dinner for her because she seemed to have forgotten to eat. She only pushed the food around on her plate, then stood and began to wash dishes. When she talked with people in town she was calm and poised (though tired-looking), but beneath it Edgar saw something fractured.

And there was, he discovered, a kind of selfishness in him about those dreams. They might have been false memories, but they were memories nonetheless, stolen time. In the end he just shrugged and headed out to start the morning chores. He hadn’t fooled her, but they didn’t talk about it, either, which, for the time being, was good enough.

HIS MOTHER HAD HIM set up a low barrier in the mow-a pair of uprights with dowels sticking out, like a track-and-field hurdle. A rough curtain of red ribbon hung from the rod. She asked Edgar to bring up one of the dogs. At first he intended to use Essay, who loved to climb and jump. Then he remembered his mother’s admonition about training the dogs on exercises they had already mastered, so he chose Finch instead. He stayed the dog on the far side of the barrier, then walked to his mother’s side.

“Have him jump the barrier,” she said.

She wasn’t asking for a stupendous feat: the rod was on the lowest set of dowels, six inches above the floor. Finch could step over it. When Edgar signaled a recall, Finch wandered forward. He sniffed the uprights then skirted them without stepping over the rod. He trotted the remaining distance and finished in front of Edgar, swishing his tail and glancing back and forth between the two of them.

“What did you think of that?” his mother asked.

He did it wrong, Edgar signed.

“All right, let me put it another way. What did you do wrong?”

Nothing. He knew exactly what I wanted. He had to go out of his way to avoid it.

“Is that so?”

Edgar looked at Finch, whose mouth was hanging open slightly, ears erect, eyes shining with mischief. Of course Finch knew he was supposed to jump the barrier-not only had Finch seen other dogs do the same thing, but Finch himself had jumped that barrier many times, even when it was set much higher (though never reliably, Edgar had to admit). Certainly, Finch wasn’t scared of the barrier, as some dogs were. And on top of all that, it was obviously the shortest path between them.

Yes, he signed. You saw him.

“Okay,” his mother said. “We’ll forget for a moment that when Finch finally got here, you didn’t acknowledge it. He’s still waiting for that, by the way, but he’s a patient dog. He knows you’ll get around to it. There’s even a chance he won’t have forgotten what you’re praising him for by then. In the meantime, why don’t you take him back around? Maybe we can do this over and figure out what the trouble is.”

Abashed, Edgar scratched Finch’s chest and smoothed the fur over the dog’s forehead. He looped his fingers through his collar, but before he could take a step, his mother said, “Stop!”

He turned to look at her.

“Why did you just praise Finch?”

He laughed, silently, shoulders shaking. His mother seemed determined to ask absurd questions.

Because he came when called.

“Really?” She looked puzzled. “Okay. Well.” She raised an arm and signaled them forward with a limp hand, a queen dismissing courtiers. “Proceed.”

He led Finch across the mow, giving the uprights a wide berth so as not to accidentally reinforce the incorrect path. When they’d gotten halfway back to the starting position, his mother again shouted, “Stop!”

They stopped. The barrier was within reach of Edgar’s left hand. Far away, near the mow door, his mother stood with her fingers woven into her hair like a madwoman, as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

“What in the world do you think you’re doing?” she said.

This was an act, he knew, and it made him laugh all over again.

Taking Finch to his stay-spot.

“But you didn’t go over the barrier!”

You didn’t ask me to go over the barrier.

“Exactly,” she said. “You see? You can’t train a dog to do something if you don’t know what you want him to do. When you recalled Finch, you didn’t know what you wanted. How can I tell? Because you said one thing to him and expected something else, just like I did. If I had known what I wanted from you I would have asked for it. But I didn’t know until you were already past the barrier. Now I know what I want. Come back here. You’ve taught me what I want.”

Dutifully, he led Finch back to her side.

“Thank you,” she said, bowing a little.

You’re welcome, he signed, bowing in return. He was having a hard time keeping the grin off his face.

“Who was the teacher in that exchange?”

He pointed at her.

“Oh really?”

Oh. I taught you.

“So who was the teacher?”

I was.

“Right. What do you say when someone goes out of their way to teach you something?”

Thank you?

“Exactly. Why did you praise Finch before?”

Because he taught me something?

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

Telling. Because he taught me something.

“Exactly.”

When his mother dropped her theatrical stance and smiled he wasn’t sure where his tears came from. He didn’t feel sad-in fact, he was laughing-but his vision suddenly blurred up. Tears of shock, he supposed, at discovering he’d spent his entire life on the kennel and yet still misunderstood something so elementary. And the force of her personality could be overwhelming. He turned away and passed a sleeve over his face before something even more embarrassing could happen.

She watched for a moment. “Oh Edgar,” she said. “I don’t mean to be hard on you. I’m just trying to make a point. Remember what I said about not being able to explain what people pay us for? I wasn’t being coy. One of the things you need to learn is that training is almost never about words. I could try to explain these things, but the words wouldn’t mean much. It’s like what just happened here: I told you the words for this idea right when we started, but that didn’t mean you understood them. But maybe now you see why someone would pay for a ‘trained’ dog instead of a pup?”

He thought about this, then nodded.

“Especially another trainer?”

He nodded again.

“So why don’t you take this fabulous teacher named Finch back over the barrier and stay him, and let’s try again.”

This time she had him stand across the mow beside Finch with a short lead attached to his collar, and she performed the recall. Edgar ran alongside Finch and made sure he jumped the barrier-he only needed one correction in three trials. Then they switched and she ran alongside him for three more trials, while Edgar did the recall.

He thanked Finch each time for teaching him something. In return, the dog’s eyes glinted, and he tried to put his feet on Edgar’s chest and lick his face. Quite happily, Edgar let him.

DOCTOR PAPINEAU CAME for dinner several nights later.

“Here it is,” he announced, as he walked in. He was accompanied by a blast of cold air and a white bakery box, held aloft like a prize. A longtime widower, Doctor Papineau patronized the cafés and bakeries between Park Falls and Ashland. He held strong opinions on who served the best of his favorite foods, from eggs over easy to strawberry cheesecake.

“Lemon meringue,” he declared. “I bought it by hand.” This joke was part of the tradition as well. “I told Betsy down at the Mellen Bakery to set aside the best she had. She did, too-she’s got a little crush on me, I think, ever since I heroically removed her cat’s kidney stones.”

Edgar’s mother lifted the box from Papineau’s hand. “Well, she’ll have to get in line behind the waitresses down in Park Falls,” she said, smiling. “Cold enough for you, Page?”

“Nope,” he said cheerfully. “I’d like to see it colder than this.”

“Oh, really?” she said. “Why’s that?”

“Because, when I’m soaking in the Florida sun I like to read the newspaper and check the weather here. If I don’t see solid minus signs, I feel cheated.”

“Ah yes. The annual migration.”

“Ah yes. I enjoy it more every year.”

They spent dinner talking about the kennel. Edgar’s mother had taken one of the older dogs to see Doctor Papineau that week and he had diagnosed hypothyroid. They talked about the medication. Then he inquired about how she and Edgar were holding up, commenting obliquely on how tired they looked. Trudy put him off. Things had been hard, she said, but they were under control. They had a schedule worked out.

Edgar’s mother embroidered their success a bit. While it was true that things were slowly returning to normal, it also wasn’t unusual for her to be in the barn until nine o’clock, with another hour spent over paperwork at the kitchen table. Edgar worked evenings as well, pulling out dogs for grooming and training. He’d negotiated for two hours with them each night; Trudy said there had to be time for schoolwork, and if he was efficient, an hour and a half would be plenty for training. Saturdays were the exception-they slept as late as they wanted and ran errands in town. But even then, if Edgar happened to wake first, he’d sneak out to the barn and start the chores, hoping that, just once, his mother would open her eyes and realize there was nothing to do. Often, before he’d worked even twenty minutes, the barn doors would open and she would walk in, puffy-eyed, weary, and looking thinner every week. On top of it all, there was the cough she’d developed. It doubled her over sometimes.

“You two are doing an amazing job,” Doctor Papineau said. “I can’t believe how fast you’ve got back on your feet. I remember what it was like when Rose died. I wasn’t fit for anything for months.” He looked thoughtful. “I’m just wondering if you can keep up the pace.”

“Why couldn’t we?” his mother said. “It won’t be long before the weather turns, and things get so much easier when we can train outdoors. Then school lets out for the summer. That’s going to make a big difference.”

“And a couple of months later, it’ll start up again,” Papineau said. He knew where the plates and silverware were and he had dished out slices of pie-he liked to serve the desserts he brought.

“Well, what else can we do?” his mother said, looking cross. “There’s only the two of us here. Maybe we’ll have to skip a litter in the fall. That would make things tight, but I’ve been going over our finances and we could make ends meet. I’m sorry if that means your share is going to be a little smaller, but it’s the best we can do for now.”

Papineau waved her comment aside with his fork.

“What I’m wondering is, have you considered that maybe the real solution involves three people?”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning there’s a Sawtelle boy in town who knows this kennel inside and out.”

“Claude is hardly a boy,” his mother said. “And you know how things ended between him and Gar.”

“Water under the bridge, isn’t it? He’s been helping me out at the office, Trudy, and I have to tell you that he still has a gift. I remember what he was like twenty years ago.”

“And we both know how he learned all that. You don’t get good at ministering to torn-up dogs unless you’re around them a lot.”

“Okay, okay. I didn’t come here to debate Claude’s past. The thing is, where is the slack in your schedule, Trudy? There’s no room for anything to go wrong, and eventually something always does. Look at the last year. How many things that happened could you have planned for? I’m not talking about Gar, I mean in the kennel. Your barn was hit by a tornado. Did you plan for that? I seem to recall at least one nursing mother last year with mastitis, and we both know how much time bottle-feeding takes. Have you planned for that?”

“All right, Page, here’s a question: suppose we hired someone to help out. How would I pay them? The money isn’t there. We make ends meet. We pay our bills. We have a little savings. Period. That truck isn’t going to last much longer and when it’s time to buy a new one I don’t want to be firing hired help to do it. I won’t even start down that road.”

“It was just an idea, Trudy,” Doctor Papineau said. “I’m trying to help.”

“It was a bad idea,” she said. “Is that why you’re here? To protect your investment?”

It finally began to dawn on Edgar what the references to Doctor Papineau’s “share” meant. He signed a question at his mother, but she shook her head angrily and stood and stalked around the table. She ended up standing by the counter where Doctor Papineau had left the pie tin, and in a single swift motion pitched it into the trash.

“I may not have been born here, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know how this place operates after twenty years. Twenty years, let me remind you, during which Claude was most definitely not here.”

Edgar’s mother was forty-one years old at that moment. He knew she could mask her feelings perfectly when she wanted to because there were dogs who misbehaved expressly to get a reaction, not caring whether it was pleasure or anger. Oftentimes it wasn’t until much later that he understood a dog had gotten under her skin. She was certainly capable of that same self-control during a dinner conversation, and yet there she stood, giving herself over to her anger, almost reveling in it. The dark circles under her eyes had disappeared; her shoulders had dropped into a relaxed readiness, her posture suddenly sinuous and limber, like a dancer or a lioness. She looked as if she might as easily spring onto the table as curl up to sleep. Partly calculated, he supposed, to look as far from helpless as possible, wholly in control of their fate, but partly also a surrender to her own willfulness. He thought he ought to be scared by such a magisterial fit of temper, but in truth, he’d never felt safer in his life.

Doctor Papineau, however, was entirely daunted. He tipped his chair back onto its rear legs and held his hands out. “Whoa,” he said. “Your decision. I’m not suggesting you do anything that doesn’t feel right. But think about this: eventually, something will go wrong. What are you going to do then? That’s all I’m saying. What are you going to do then?”

“YES,” TRUDY SAID, after Doctor Papineau had left. “He has a stake in the kennel. Ten percent.”

Are there others? Edgar asked.

“No. Years ago, when we were strapped for money, Page helped us out. Back then, it was impossible to get a loan, so he paid us five thousand dollars in exchange for a share in the kennel. He has obligations, though.”

That’s why you never pay him for vet work.

“Right.”

What about Claude?

“Claude sold your father his share in the kennel when your grandfather died.”

Edgar had more questions, but suddenly his mother looked exhausted, and there would be plenty of chances to ask in the morning.

TIME AND AGAIN EDGAR REREAD the letters from Brooks. They were like a puzzle to be solved. Brooks was given to proclamations and dire warnings. Pitched arguments were made for or against the importance of gait, hocks, flanks, the function of the tail; the optimum angle of the pasterns, how much this might vary between the Fortunate Fields lines and the Sawtelle dogs; whether one could ever discriminate between willingness to work and more general intelligence; whether body sensitivity was learned or inherited. The arguments often ascended into theory. Brooks sounded like a man dragging John Sawtelle into the age of science.

“I have the advantage of knowing,” he wrote, “that long after I am gone my work will provide a foundation upon which future generations of dogs, breeders, and trainers may build. Skill and talent alone are not enough. If these are bound up in you and you alone, and not in data and precisely recorded procedures, what will your efforts amount to? A few dogs-a few successes-then nothing. Only the briefest flash of light in the darkness.”

There had been some setback in 1935, though Edgar couldn’t tell what it was-some illness had flashed through the kennel, perhaps, or some spectacular training failure. In any case, it was serious enough for Brooks to shift from debate to encouragement. “There is nothing to do now but take stock of your accomplishments,” he wrote. “Now your records must serve you instead of the dogs. Study them. Look at how many of your dogs have succeeded in the world. Your records are a history of your accomplishments, John. They will show you why you undertook this work in the first place.”

Edgar had never seen his father capriciously select a dog for breeding, but in those early days, there was nothing yet to call a Sawtelle Dog-just John Sawtelle’s dogs. What drove Brooks mad was Edgar’s grandfather’s habit of spotting a dog on the street and deciding it carried some essential quality. The replies from New Jersey sometimes rose to a shriek: “How many times have we argued about this, John? Each time you do this, you introduce more variability into your bloodlines than you will ever profit by. Why do you place your trust in chance?”

Edgar arranged the letters from Brooks in chronological order. The last of them seemed to close the argument forever.

December 16, 1944

Morristown, New Jersey

John,

You may be the most stubborn man I’ve ever met. Let me rebut your points one last time, though I fear no one will ever change your mind on this. At least we are in agreement that by careful documentation of phenotype, one can increase or decrease the preponderance of a quality if one measures it objectively and reinforces it for many generations through selective breeding. The poorest farmer knows this can be done, and benefits from it: he chooses Herefords, Holsteins, or Guernseys depending on his needs. He has definite opinions on whether a Percheron or a Belgian should stand in the traces.

Likewise, we apply the scientific principles of heredity toward the perfection of a breed, so that instead of only one dog out of two litters being suitable for service, 90 percent make the grade. How are we doing this? By defining and measuring those qualities that make a good working dog. And this is where we differ. You feel less need to choose specific traits a priori, believing instead that excellent traits will simply emerge if the finest individuals, taken as a whole, are brought into the line.

Let us employ the metaphor of salt. We can’t see the salt in a glass of water, but we can taste it. Combining two slightly salty glasses and reducing them gives us a saltier result. Done enough, the invisible becomes visible: salt crystals. We may not have set out to create salt crystals, but now we have them. This is analogous to what you propose. You have cleverly arranged to work with strong brine. You don’t know what you will find if you continue to distill it, only that “this tastes ever so slightly saltier than that.” And so, by the seat of your pants, you choose one cross over another.

At Fortunate Fields, on the other hand, we not only know we are trying to produce salt crystals, we know the desired size, shape, and color of those crystals and we have carefully documented the salinity of the sire and dam of every litter, as well as their offspring.

Yet I have seen your records and you are nearly as rigorous as Fortunate Fields. I confess, our rigor and precision wearies me at times. I don’t claim our process is easy. Quite the opposite-if this were easy it would have been done long ago. But I do claim that it is the only way to obtain reliable results.

In the end, the difference between you and me comes down to the difference between the artist and the factory man. The artist does not know what he wants, but looks for good paint, good brushes, and good canvas. He trusts that talent will produce a desirable result. Sadly, for most people, it does not. The factory man says, what can I make that I can rely on? It may not be the ideal, but I must be able to tell my customers that each time they buy, they will receive the same product. The factory man values predictability above “mere” excellence for good reason-would you frequent a bakery where one cake in ten was inspired, but the other nine inedible?

I realize this portrays you as the romantic figure and me as the plodder. Perhaps you think that diminishes me. I do not. Change the analogy from bread to medicine, and you will feel the same urgency I do. You might be willing to gamble on the odd cake, but if your infant is sick, you will choose the medicine with predictable results every time. I sacrifice brilliance to make a good medicine available to mankind.

No one can say if you are that person who, given good paint, good brushes, and a fine canvas, can produce something better than the factory man. That is, and has always been, beyond the realm of science. You do have the attitude of the dreamer about you. For that reason, I haven’t the heart to argue anymore about this-it is a hopeless task. And for a simple factory man like me, an effort must be abandoned once its hopelessness is exposed. Only the artist perseveres in such circumstances.

However, I’ll leave you with a question. Suppose, guided only by intuition, you capture the greatness you seek. Never mind that you cannot define “greatness” scientifically. What makes you think you will even recognize it when it appears? Some believe that gross animal behavior may be reducible to a set of simple, indivisible traits and that only the multiplicity of ways in which those traits combine creates the illusion of complexity. Suppose you stumble across one small change with dozens of ramifications in the gross behavior of the animal? How will you know what you’ve done? How will you ever achieve it again?

The painter who creates one masterpiece, never to produce another, is well known. If you have a success, it will most likely be singular. Can you be satisfied with that, John?

Almondine

T O HER, THE SCENT AND THE MEMORY OF HIM WERE ONE. WHERE it lay strongest, the distant past came to her as if that morning: Taking a dead sparrow from her jaws, before she knew to hide such things. Guiding her to the floor, bending her knee until the arthritis made it stick, his palm hotsided on her ribs to measure her breaths and know where the pain began. And to comfort her. That had been the week before he went away.

He was gone, she knew this, but something of him clung to the baseboards. At times the floor quivered under his footstep. She stood then and nosed into the kitchen and the bathroom and the bedroom-especially the closet-her intention to press her ruff against his hand, run it along his thigh, feel the heat of his body through the fabric.

Places, times, weather-all these drew him up inside her. Rain, especially, falling past the double doors of the kennel, where he’d waited through so many storms, each drop throwing a dozen replicas into the air as it struck the waterlogged earth. And where the rising and falling water met, something like an expectation formed, a place where he might appear and pass in long strides, silent and gestureless. For she was not without her own selfish desires: to hold things motionless, to measure herself against them and find herself present, to know that she was alive precisely because he needn’t acknowledge her in casual passing; that utter constancy might prevail if she attended the world so carefully. And if not constancy, then only those changes she desired, not those that sapped her, undefined her.

And so she searched. She’d watched his casket lowered into the ground, a box, man-made, no more like him than the trees that swayed under the winter wind. To assign him an identity outside the world was not in her thinking. The fence line where he walked and the bed where he slept-that was where he lived, and they remembered him.

Yet he was gone. She knew it most keenly in the diminishment of her own self. In her life, she’d been nourished and sustained by certain things, him being one of them, Trudy another, and Edgar, the third and most important, but it was really the three of them together, intersecting in her, for each of them powered her heart a different way. Each of them bore different responsibilities to her and with her and required different things from her, and her day was the fulfillment of those responsibilities. She could not imagine that portion of her would never return. With her it was not hope, or wistful thoughts-it was her sense of being alive that thinned by the proportion of her spirit devoted to him.

As spring came on, his scent about the place began to fade. She stopped looking for him. Whole days she slept beside his chair, as the sunlight drifted from eastern-slant to western-slant, moving only to ease the weight of her bones against the floor.

And Trudy and Edgar, encapsulated in mourning, somehow forgot to care for one another, let alone her. Or if they knew, their grief and heartache overwhelmed them. Anyway, there was so little they might have done, save to bring out a shirt of his to lie on, perhaps walk with her along the fence line, where fragments of time had snagged and hung. But if they noticed her grief, they hardly knew to do those things. And she without the language to ask.

H IS MOTHER’S COUGH WAS BAD IN THE MORNINGS, THOUGH IT was gone by the time they’d finished chores. At school one afternoon, he was called to the office. His mother had telephoned. She would pick him up in the circle drive fronting the school. At first he thought nothing of it; sometimes errands coincided with the end of the school day. He waited under the long-roofed entryway as the buses revved their engines and lumbered forward. He didn’t see the pickup until they were gone. His mother sat in the cab, head tipped back, until a coughing fit curled her forward. He trotted up the sidewalk, watching the truck rock on its springs. When he opened the door, the heater was blasting.

What happened? he signed. You look terrible.

“I’m not sure. I got dizzy working in the mow and went to the house to lie down. This thing has gotten-”

She thumped her chest lightly, which triggered a spasm of coughing. She crossed her fists over her chest and doubled up, then rested her hands on the steering wheel. When she looked over at him, her face was shining with sweat.

“I called-” she began, then switched to sign. I called Doctor Frost.

When can you see him?

She looked at her watch. Ten minutes ago.

Then go, he signed. Go!

DOCTOR FROST PRACTICED OUT OF a converted house east of town. His waiting room contained a half dozen chairs and a coffee table covered with ancient National Geographic magazines. A tall, narrow window had been cut into the back wall for his receptionist. Before they could sit down, the doctor appeared, sandy-haired, with wire-rimmed glasses, and led Edgar’s mother to an examination room. Edgar sat on the couch and looked out the windows. The sun was sinking below the treetops. A pair of jays screamed at each other from the pine trees, launching themselves into loopy, tumbling flights. From inside the exam room came an indistinct conversation.

“Again, please,” he heard Doctor Frost say, and another fit of coughing.

A moment later, the doctor appeared at the receptionist’s window.

“Edgar,” he said. “Why don’t you come back and join the party?”

In the examination room, Trudy sat in the corner on a chair. Doctor Frost patted the black exam bench and asked Edgar to untuck his shirt and he pressed a stethoscope against his ribs.

“Cough,” he said.

Edgar exhaled a quiet gasp.

“Clear,” the doctor murmured. He jotted a note on his pad and turned and pressed his thumbs into the soft skin under Edgar’s jaw, looking absently into space, then looked down Edgar’s throat with a small, lighted examination scope.

“Say ‘Ah.’”

A-H-H-H-H, he fingerspelled.

Doctor Frost glanced at his mother.

“He just said ‘ah’ for you,” she said weakly, and smiling.

“Okay, sense of humor intact,” the doctor said. “Try anyway.”

Then he clapped Edgar’s shoulder and told him to button up. He folded his arms across his clipboard and looked at them.

“Edgar’s lungs are clear. He hasn’t picked up what you have, Trudy, which is pneumonia. I need to run a lab test on that sputum sample, but there’s really not much doubt-the crackle in your right lung is pronounced. I’m tempted to send you up to Ashland for chest x-rays, but I’m going to hold off and maybe save you a little money. Right now this is mild, and you’re a young woman, and we’re catching it early. We’re going to get you on antibiotics and knock it out quick. There’s a catch, though-”

“This is mild?” his mother interjected.

“Relatively, though I wish you’d come in three or four days ago. This stuff is nothing to fool with. I’m not trying to alarm you, but I want you to understand that pneumonia is dangerous. People die from it. Any worse and I’d have you in the hospital.”

His mother shook her head and started to say something, but before she could speak a coughing fit took her. Doctor Frost waved his hand.

“I know, I know-a possibility we want to avoid. So you’re going to have to do what I say. All right?”

She nodded. Doctor Frost looked at Edgar until he nodded, too.

“Here’s my concern. Edgar’s cough reflex is abnormal. Coughing involves constricting the vocal cords, which, as we know, is difficult for him. With pneumonia, coughing is good and bad. It’s bad because it wears you out. But it’s good because it gets the crud out of your lungs. If Edgar catches this, he’ll naturally be less inclined to cough, and the bad stuff will accumulate in his lungs. That would be worse than for the ordinary person. Much worse. Understand?”

Again, they both nodded. Doctor Frost looked at Edgar’s mother.

“It would be ideal if Edgar stayed somewhere else for a week.”

She shook her head. “There’s nowhere else.”

“Nowhere? How about with Claude?”

She laughed wheezily and rolled her eyes, but there was a flash of anger in her expression as well. Edgar could see her thinking: small-town busybodies!

“Absolutely not.”

“All right, then we have to minimize contact between you two for the next ten days. No meals together, no sitting around in the living room watching television, no hugs and kisses. Can you quarantine a portion of your house? Someplace you can sleep and keep the doors closed?”

“Not perfectly. I can close my bedroom door. But it opens onto the kitchen, and there’s only one bathroom.”

“I don’t like that, but I suppose it’ll have to do. I realize I’m suggesting extraordinary measures here, but this is an unusual situation.” He turned back to the chart and scribbled. When he finished he looked up. “There’s one other thing, Trudy. You need bed rest-don’t cheat on that.”

“How long?”

“A week. Ten days would be better. You’re going to sleep as much as you can for the next week.”

“You’re joking.”

“Not in the least. I’m telling you, Trudy, don’t push this thing. Antibiotics aren’t miracle drugs. If you run yourself down, they won’t help.”

He turned to Edgar.

“Edgar, if you start feeling like you have a chest cold, if your chest gets tight, let Trudy know. Sometimes people don’t want to admit they’re getting sick. But if you play that game, it’s going to be tough. Understood?”

Doctor Frost led them to the waiting room. He appeared in a few minutes at the receptionist’s window with a prescription and a vial of pills, handed Edgar’s mother a Dixie cup filled with water, and had her swallow the first dose on the spot.

IN THE TRUCK, EDGAR sat listening to the whistle in his mother’s breath. She frowned and turned on the radio.

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “Quit worrying.”

They drove on, music crackling over the truck’s speaker.

“You’re going to have to do the kennel by yourself.”

I know.

When they got home, Trudy went to her bedroom, pulled off her shoes, and dragged the blankets over her shoulders. Edgar stood in the doorway and watched her.

“Is spring break next week?”

Yes.

“I’ll call the school and have you excused until then.”

Okay.

“Maybe your teachers can send assignments home on the school bus.”

Okay.

“About the kennel. Just get the chores done. Check the pups every morning and night. Don’t worry about training.”

I can do some training.

“Then work your litter the most. Nothing fancy. One dog in motion at a time. Remember that.”

Okay, okay.

“Spend as much time as you can in the kennel. Take books. Stay out of the house unless you need to eat, sleep, or-” Before she could finish, a cough wracked her shoulders off the bed. When she stopped, she was propped up on one arm, panting.

What if you need something?

“I won’t need anything. I can make soup and toast for myself. I’m going to be sleeping anyway. Now close the door, please.”

He stood memorizing her features under the yellow lamplight.

She pointed at the door. “Out,” she mouthed.

WHEN HE AND ALMONDINE returned to the house that night, the bedroom door was closed and his mother’s wind-up alarm clock sat on the kitchen table. He turned off the kitchen light and held the clock to his ear and looked at the green radium dots on the tips of the hands. A glow shone yellow beneath the bedroom door. He eased the door open. On the bed, his mother lay in a fetal curl, her eyes closed. Her exhalations sounded ever so slightly easier than they had that afternoon. He stood watching and listening for a long time. Almondine pushed past him into the room and scented his mother’s thin hand, resting lax and upturned on the sheet, and returned to his side. He closed the bedroom door and stood thinking, turning the wind-up alarm over and over in his hands. Then he walked upstairs. He pulled the blankets off his bed and squeezed his pillow under his elbow and carried them out to the barn. He pushed together four bales of straw in the aisle between the pens and he spread the blankets over the bales and sat and unlaced his shoes and looked at the row of lightbulbs shining over the aisle. He trotted barefoot to the front doors and flipped the light switch. A clap of dark filled the kennel. He flipped the switch up again and took a galvanized pail from the workshop and worked his way along the aisle, stepping onto the upturned pail and licking his fingertips against the heat of the bulbs. He unscrewed all but one, and that far down near the whelping rooms. In the semidark he twisted the knob on the back of the clock until the alarm hand pointed to five then set the clock on the bales beside the pillow and lay back.

Almondine stood on the cement, watching him doubtfully.

Come on, he signed, patting the bales. It’s just like in the house.

She circled the setup then climbed aboard and lay with her muzzle near his face. Wind rattled the doors. A pup yipped from the whelping rooms. He pressed his hand into the plush on Almondine’s chest, feeling its rise and fall, rise and fall.

He was genuinely terrified of getting sick. It was going to be hard enough keeping his mother in bed; if she thought he was sick, she would do the kennel work anyway, and then she would end up hospitalized. And yet, despite his apprehensions, the prospect of running the kennel alone excited him. He wanted to prove he could do it, that nothing would go wrong. And now that he’d begun to see the real problems in training, he felt so many possibilities whenever he worked his dogs.

There was another feeling as well, something darker and harder to think through, because there was a part of him that wanted to be away from her. Ever since the funeral, they’d depended on each other so heavily that it was a relief to be alone, self-reliant. Perhaps he thought distancing himself from his mother might distance the fact of his father’s death. He understood that might be part of it, and if so, it was an illusion, but that didn’t change how he felt. He lay under the gaze of the kennel dogs, his hand on Almondine’s side, and thought about being alone.

WHILE HE WAS EATING BREAKFAST, his mother talked to him through the closed door, pausing to catch her breath at disturbing intervals.

“Have you been to the barn yet?”

He swung the bedroom door halfway open. She looked at him glassy-eyed.

Everything is okay. Are you okay?

“About the same. Real tired.”

Have you taken those pills?

“Yes,” she said. “I mean, not yet. I will when I eat breakfast.”

I’ll make it for you.

He expected her to say no, but she nodded.

“Just toast and strawberry jam. And orange juice. Just set it on the table before you go.”

He closed the bedroom door. He mixed up the orange juice, toasted the toast, and covered it with plenty of jam, his heart pounding all the while. When he looked in again, she was asleep. He waited a moment, trying to decide what the right thing to do was, then knocked on the door.

“I’m up,” she said groggily.

Breakfast is ready, he signed. I’ll check back at noon.

FOR THE NEXT THREE DAYS HE KNEW she’d been awake only because the breakfasts he prepared were gone at lunchtime and the soup eaten when he checked at night. She must have called the school, because the bus didn’t slow down at their driveway. Invariably, she was asleep when he looked in on her, a book splayed out on the covers beyond her fingertips. Whenever he woke her she seemed startled; it took a minute for her to make sense of his questions. He asked how she felt; she said she could tell the antibiotics were working. She asked if there were problems in the kennel; he said no.

They both lied.

Each night Edgar lay awake, ridiculously tormented by the windup clock, which, along with its ticking, issued a ratcheting, grinding noise he’d never noticed before. When he finally managed to sleep, his father appeared beside his makeshift bed, so close and real Edgar didn’t believe he was dreaming until he found himself sitting up and Almondine licking his face. The fourth morning, he fumbled the jangling alarm into silence and promptly fell back into slumber, worrying even then that he might dream of his father again. And worrying equally that he might not. Instead, he dreamed he could breathe words effortlessly into the air. The ability hadn’t just appeared, it had returned, as if he’d had a voice in the womb but lost it when he’d entered the world. And in his dream, he had chosen not to speak into the telephone, not to summon the ambulance that would have saved his father’s life.

He woke frantic, sobbing. It took a moment before he could marshal the courage to draw a breath, shape his lips, and exhale.

Silence.

The awful thing was, his voice sounded all wrong in his dream-low, like his father’s, and gravelly. But any voice coming from inside him would have sounded wrong, no less than the buzzing-fly noise from the flashlight-shaped thing the doctors had pressed against his neck. That had given him a voice, but it hadn’t been worth it. Unless, of course, he’d had it the day his father fell down in the barn.

He began to take shortcuts with the kennel routine. In order to train all the dogs, he raced through the chores. He found he could clean three or four pens while he fed the dogs if he dumped a pile of food on the cement. Something told him this was a bad idea, but it worked. At night the dogs seemed edgy but that was because the schedule had changed-no one slept in the kennel night after night, much less ran down the aisle and threw open the their pen doors to let them race after tennis balls. The late-night training, he told himself, was excellent proofing practice.

It was past midnight on the fourth day when he finally stretched out on the bales and pulled the blankets over him. He’d turned out all the lights and settled himself beside Almondine when he heard his name spoken in a distinct, feminine voice. He sat up and listened. It had only been the squeak of the heater fan, he decided. A few minutes later, a thought began to nag at him: What if it hadn’t been the heater fan at all? What if his mother was standing on the back porch, calling? He cast off his blanket and threw open the barn doors but all he saw was a barren yard and the porch standing dark and empty.

IN SOME WAYS, TRUDY THOUGHT, it would have been better if the antibiotics had made her downright sick. As it was, she lay in bed, chilled one moment, boiling the next. She was indifferent to food, though she forced herself to eat. On the third day she’d called Doctor Frost’s office as promised, hoping she was saying what he wanted to hear. She was tired, she told him, but not feverish. She was sleeping a lot. That was normal, Frost said. She should beware of dehydration, be careful not to skip doses of the antibiotics. They talked briefly about Edgar. She told the doctor he showed no sign of a cough. Did she think she could drive into town at the end of the week? Was her cough still productive? And so on. She didn’t mention that she grew sickeningly dizzy whenever she stood, or that she’d been so foggy-minded she’d forgotten his phone number twice while dialing. And she might have stretched the truth about the fever. But she kept focused long enough to maintain the conversation, which felt like a triumph.

Afterward she fell back into bed. Was it time for her next set of pills? Or had she taken them? One late afternoon had begun to look much like the next, but she was sure she had taken the pills before she called Frost. The antibiotics made her terribly sleepy. She recalled Edgar standing in the bedroom doorway, telling her that things were going smoothly in the kennel. He’d grown so serious since his father’s death.

She rolled over. Sleep was the important thing. The way these things worked, tomorrow she would wake up on the other side of it. The fever would have broken, and she would sit up, read a bit, make some phone calls. Get on top of the paperwork.

She took the vial of pills from the dresser and shook them onto the blanket and counted them. It was surprising. So many left.

ON THE FIFTH EVENING, Edgar slipped into the house, checked on his mother, and ate dinner. After washing dishes, he and Almondine walked to the barn to do the chores, but when they got there, exhaustion settled on him like a lead blanket. The straw bales felt luxurious, the pillow soft as a cloud, and for the first night in a long time, there were no dreams. He awoke with Almondine breathing in his face. The windup alarm clock said two o’clock. He sat up and rubbed a hand across his face. There was something wrong with that. He hadn’t done the evening chores.

He could get away with leaving everything else until morning, but he didn’t like the idea of leaving the dogs without water, and as long as he was going to do that, he could feed them, too. He scooped a mound of kibble into the middle of the aisle and filled a bucket of water from the tap in the medicine room. When he threw open their doors, his litter bounded into the aisle, bumping his legs and dashing for the food. He’d piled up enough for all the dogs, not just three or four pens’ worth, and he needed to get them out fast so that the first ones didn’t gorge themselves and leave the last ones hungry. By the time he’d gone down the aisle, eighteen dogs were scrambling over the cement floor, jockeying for position. Edgar stepped into a pen and began to fill the water trough.

He never saw what started the fight. There was a yelp, and from the corner of his eye he saw a dog leap into the air. Finch. He dropped the pail of water and stepped into the aisle and that was all the time it took for him to realize the enormity of his mistake. One dog in motion at a time, his mother had said. It was one of many rules in the kennel, rules that didn’t always make sense, or even seem important, until some situation drew the lesson out.

Finch landed and nosed his right hind leg and turned back to the mass of dogs, head lowered, grimacing nastily to show his teeth. He spun to face one of the older females, a dog named Epi, dominant in her litter, bigger than Finch, and not in the least fearful.

In all his life, Edgar had seen only one real dog fight. That had been broken up when his parents sprayed water on the antagonists, hauling them away by their tails. Later, his father said a person never, ever reached between fighting dogs. To make his point, he’d pulled up his sleeve and shown Edgar the puckered scar running along the axis of his forearm, jagged and shiny. A dog in a fight will bite before it realizes what it’s doing, he’d said. It won’t mean to hurt you, but it will see motion and react.

Some of the dogs were backing away from Finch and Epi, hackles raised. Edgar clapped his hands, grabbed two dogs, and hauled them into the nearest pen. Then another two. The noise had grown instantly deafening. He kenneled Tinder, Essay, and Pout. Baboo had already retreated to his run; Edgar shoved Opal and Umbra in after him and ran down the aisle wrestling dogs into their pens one after another and slinging shut the doors.

When he turned, only three dogs remained in the kennel aisle: Finch, Epi, and Almondine. Finch lay on his back. Epi stood over him, jaws buried in the fur at the base of his throat. On her muzzle there was a smear of red. Finch alternately lay limp and struggled to escape. A pace away, Almondine stood with her lips raised, growling, but the moment she stepped forward, Epi released Finch and lashed her muzzle toward Almondine, ears flattened. Almondine jerked her head away but stood her ground.

The important thing was to separate them. Edgar ran forward, coming at Epi from behind. He thought briefly of kicking her to force her away, but he’d have to kick hard, maybe hard enough to injure her, and he wouldn’t do that. Anyway, he was too close and running too fast. When he reached Epi’s hindquarters, he simply threw himself at her.

Later, he would try to understand it all from Epi’s point of view. Someone had appeared over her shoulder. A dog’s eyes are oriented along the axis of their muzzle, with less peripheral vision than a human being. Edgar intended to thread his fingers through her collar and pin her to the ground using the momentum of his fall, like his mother sometimes did when a dog refused to down. Done right, a dog would be flattened before it had time to resist. If you had enough surprise. If you used enough force. If you got a solid grip on its collar.

Edgar wound up with none of these.

Epi threw her body sideways until her hind feet skidded out on the smooth cement. She could have turned and fled, but her mind was geared toward engagement, and by the time Edgar rolled onto his side, she towered over him. All he could do was loop two fingers through her collar, but without his hands free, he couldn’t issue a command, and Epi wouldn’t have obeyed anyway.

If it was idiotic to step into a dogfight, it was suicidal to fall into one. He lay on his back, Epi’s body suspended over him, all arcs of muscle and fur, and before he could move, she stepped back, arched her neck, and bit him.

In fact, she bit him twice, lightning fast. The first time, her teeth barely touched his skin, as if she were taking bearings, but the second time was for real and by then he was resigned to it, even felt she had the right. The surprise was that she restrained herself, suppressed the bite pressure that could have crushed the bones in his forearm, checked the upward jerk that could have sliced across tendon, muscle, and vein from wrist to elbow in a track just like his father’s. Instead, a flicker of recognition appeared in her amber eyes. She was a good dog, just besieged and confused, and when the point of her canine tooth penetrated his arm, she froze.

Then Almondine’s muzzle entered his field of vision from the right. She was taking no chances. Epi was younger and stronger, and if Almondine had ever been in a dogfight, it was so long past that Edgar could not recall it. But Almondine didn’t want to fight. She wanted Epi off him, off her boy. She didn’t bark or growl, she didn’t try to bite Epi’s neck or harry Epi into releasing Edgar’s arm.

At that moment, Almondine had one idea: to blind Epi.

TRUDY SAT UP IN BED, annoyed and confused. In her dream, Gar had been on the television, talking to her, so it was terrible enough to wake up at all, and doubly bad when she understood that what had woken her was the dogs, barking and crying, every one of them. Her first thought was that an animal had gotten into the barn. This happened every so often, though God knew why, since the place surely reeked of dog. But once inside, the sounds either paralyzed the animal or drove it into a mindless panic. One time it had been a raccoon; another, unbelievably, a cat. The uproar that had ensued sounded alarmingly like what she now heard coming from the barn.

She tried to stand but lost her balance and began to cough. A yellow haze spread across her vision. Pain shot along her ribs. She sat down on the corner of the bed. The house was pitch dark. She tried calling to Edgar, but she couldn’t raise her voice above a whisper. When she felt strong enough to stand again she made her way slowly to the bottom of the stairs.

“Edgar?” she said. “Edgar?”

She waited for a light to come on in his room, or for Almondine to appear. When neither happened, she walked up the stairs. At the top of the stairs, she paused for breath. His bedroom door was open. She walked to the doorway and turned on the overhead light.

The sheets had been carelessly pulled off, the pillow and blankets gone. She made her way down the stairs again, her movements slow and cautious. Something bad was happening in the barn. She pulled on a pair of slacks and a shirt over her nightgown, slipped her feet into unlaced boots, and opened the door.

EDGAR’S EYES WERE FIXED on the sight of Epi’s jaws on his forearm, how his skin had rucked up around her canine tooth like a loose stocking. There was no blood yet, and no pain, only a pulling sensation in the skin of his arm.

And so, lying there on the floor, all he saw was a blur and then a gash opened near Epi’s eye. Then Almondine’s muzzle was stretched wide next to Epi’s face and a sound came from her he’d never before heard from a dog-not a bark, but a scream, so raw and ferocious and bloody that, for all the baying and howling of the dogs until that moment, the kennel might as well have been silent.

Epi released his arm and scrambled backward. Before he could move, Almondine had straddled him and when he tried to sit up, she thumped him with her hip hard enough to knock him over, as if he were a pup. He had to scoot from beneath her to climb to his feet. Her pelt contracted when he touched her.

Epi had retreated to the front of the barn, alternately growling and nosing the door. A trail of black drops led across the cement. She pawed at her muzzle and shook her head. Edgar led Almondine to the medicine room and flashed his hands over her. She wasn’t cut or bleeding. He stayed her, firmly, and turned to Finch. He led the dog to the center of the aisle where the light was brightest. He wouldn’t take any weight on his left front foot. When Edgar tried to examine him, Finch jerked his leg away, but not before Edgar saw the gash near the dog’s left elbow, and a flash of white through the dog’s blood-matted coat. He ran his hands along Finch’s muzzle and throat. His fingers came back wet, but not bloody.

Kennel up, he signed. Finch hobbled to his pen. Once the latch was closed, he turned to Epi, pacing near the front door. Whenever he made eye contact with her, she flattened her ears against her skull and lifted her hackles. Her cheek looked like it had been opened with a knife. The sight made his heart thud.

He’d knelt and begun to coax Epi forward when the door swung open and his mother stood illuminated against the night. Instantly, Epi bolted, forcing his mother to step back and grab the door to keep her balance. She watched Epi flee into the darkness, then turned to Edgar.

What are you doing here? he signed, frantically.

“What’s going on?”

There was a problem. A fight.

“But it’s the middle of the night. Your arm-are you hurt?”

He looked down. Blood was smeared across his shirtsleeve. He couldn’t tell if it was his or Finch’s. He pushed it flat against his side, hoping to conceal the gash on his forearm.

I don’t think so. Not much. But Epi’s face is cut. She’s going to need stitches. Almondine bit her. Finch is lame. I can’t tell how bad.

His mother teetered and corrected herself.

You shouldn’t be outside, he signed. Go back to the house.

He tried to turn her around.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Look at your arm.”

Go back to the house. First let’s do that.

“Edgar, I’m here already. I might as well stay.”

No! Doctor Frost said you could end up in the hospital! He said you could die!

She started to respond, but a coughing fit doubled her over. When it passed, he steered her into the night. It wasn’t especially cold for spring, but neither was it warm, and he wanted to get her to the house. Then he remembered Almondine. She sat near the medicine room, watching them from the aisle. He clapped his leg, but she wouldn’t budge.

Come on, he signed. Come on! We don’t have time to screw around. She took a few steps forward, then faltered and sank to the cement.

He turned to his mother. Just go, he signed. Please.

Almondine was up again by the time he reached her, walking unsteadily toward the door. He hovered alongside.

What is it? he signed. What? What?

By the time he’d slung the kennel doors closed after her, she’d regained some equilibrium and she trotted behind his mother. He shooed them all up the porch steps. Once inside, Almondine lay down again, panting. He dropped to his knees beside her.

Something’s wrong, he signed. She stumbled, back in the barn.

“Was she bitten?”

No. I checked.

He slid his hand under her belly and motioned her up. He lifted her feet and flexed her joints, watching for a wince. His mother made him describe Finch’s injuries and Epi’s; she didn’t ask how any of it had happened, or how Almondine had been involved. She just looked at Edgar like he wasn’t making sense.

We need to call someone, Edgar signed. He kicked the floor in frustration.

His mother began to talk through the options. “Page is in Florida until…” She glanced at the calendar on the wall. “It’s what? Wednesday? He won’t be back until next Monday.”

I’m not talking about Doctor Papineau, he signed.

“There’s no use calling that vet in Ashland. Not in the middle of the night. He’ll never…”

But Edgar was shaking his head.

“Well, what then?” she said, annoyed. “If we can get them in the truck, I could drive…”

He lifted the telephone receiver and set it on the countertop.

Call Claude, he signed. Call him right now.

Epi’s Stand

T RUDY SAT AT THE TABLE AND WATCHED EDGAR CLOSE THE kitchen door as he headed out again to find Epi. She’d made coffee, hoping it would clear her head, and a cup sat on the table issuing ribbons of steam. The overhead light starred and sparked in the periphery of her vision. She found it hard not to squint and would have walked to the switch to turn off the lights but she lacked the energy and possibly the balance.

Something had changed. It was difficult to gauge exactly what, but every movement ached. She could draw a deep breath, but when she exhaled there was a wheeze in her right lung, the sound transmitted through her flesh and bones. She shivered and sweated at the same time. This is the sort of thing that made people believe in possession, she thought. And she did feel inhabited, taken over, usurped by something blind and ferocious. What had Doctor Frost said about the antibiotics? How long before they took hold? The walls of the kitchen receded alarmingly. She felt a doubling, a sense of being inside her body and floating above herself at the same time.

She closed her eyes to shut it out. After a time, she jerked awake.

Just stay awake, she told herself. But the reason escaped her.

She stood. She made her way toward the bedroom, watching it all from above, her blue and shrunken hands reaching forward, gripping the counter, Almondine, lying on her side by the refrigerator, panting, the kitchen table with the now-cool cup of coffee, the feed store calendar with a picture of a farm hanging by the door. How oddly the veins crawled over the bones of her fingers. She was wearing an old flannel shirt of Gar’s over her nightgown. Her hair stood out in a wild tangle.

When she reached the bedroom door she stopped to look at Almondine. She’d had some sort of spell in the barn, Edgar had said, but Almondine was fine. She lay there resting, showing none of the inward look of a dog in pain. She was just old. Edgar needed to start babying Almondine, stop expecting her to have the energy she’d had five years ago. Trudy thought of the very first night Almondine spent in that house, a bumbling ten-week-old. There’d been a thunderstorm, she remembered, and Almondine had whined half the night, frightened and lonely for her littermates. Now her muzzle had grayed and she couldn’t stand up quickly after a long sleep. But her gaze was as steady and clear as it had ever been. That gaze was what had made them choose her out of all the other pups. Nowadays it seemed to take in more than Almondine could possibly express, and it gave her a sad, pensive look.

Trudy closed the bedroom door behind her. She dragged a twist of linen across her shoulders and lay back. Someone was coming. Page? No, Claude. There’d been a dogfight. She’d tried to get Edgar to explain as he maneuvered her back to the house, but he’d said he would explain later, and she lacked the strength to argue. More and more, he was his father’s son, so certain he was right.

In the morning she would call Doctor Frost and tell him the antibiotics weren’t working.

There was a chance he would want to send her to the hospital.

Perhaps she’d give it one more day.

CLAUDE ARRIVED IN A SNOUTY, mean-looking car with the letters SS overhanging the front grill. Impala, said the insignia on the blue scoop of its front fender. It was a twenty-minute drive from Mellen, and unless Claude had been ready to key the ignition the moment his mother called, Edgar thought, he’d driven very fast. Claude brought the car to a halt near the barn, where Edgar stood waiting.

“Your mom said there was fight?” Claude asked. The odor of beer and cigarettes clung to him like a halo.

Edgar handed across the note he had written in advance.

Epi is behind the barn. I can’t get near her.

“Where is she hurt?”

He ran his finger along his eyebrow.

Claude cupped his hands in front of his mouth and shivered and looked up at the night sky. His breath whitened in the air. He walked past Edgar and into the barn. In the medicine room he rifled the cabinets. When he was finished, he turned back empty-handed.

“Is there still Prestone in the milk house?” he asked.

Edgar looked at him.

“You know, starter fluid. We used it in the tractor last fall. There was almost a full can back then. Go see how much is left.”

Edgar ran to the milk house and pulled the chain on the ceiling bulb. He surveyed the tangle of rakes, shovels, and hoes tilting in the corner. Rototiller. Lawn mower. Chainsaw. He spotted a red-and-yellow aerosol near a row of oil cans on a shelf, grabbed it, and ducked out. Claude met him by the barn door with a collar and a training lead tucked under his arm, and a large plastic bag into which he was putting a rag from the medicine room, neatly folded into a square pad. Edgar handed over the Prestone.

“How much we got?” Claude shook the can. He clamped the bag around his wrist and pressed the nozzle against the rag. The bag puffed out with fog. “Ninety-nine percent ether,” he said. He looked suddenly concerned. “You aren’t smoking, are you?”

Edgar shook his head before he understood Claude wasn’t serious.

“Good thing, too,” he said. “Otherwise, there’d be a big flash and you’d be able to tell all your friends about your uncle Claude, the Human Torch.”

When the hiss from the aerosol tapered off, Claude extracted his hand and held the bag up. The saturated rag slid greasily inside. He waved the arrangement under Edgar’s nose. A sweet tang like sugar and gasoline swept through his sinuses. It made the hairs at the back of his neck crawl upright.

“At least it’s cold tonight,” Claude said, taking a cursory whiff of his own. “In the summer this would already be half gone. You might want to keep upwind anyway. This isn’t exactly airtight.”

Then Edgar led Claude behind the barn, quarter lit at best by the occluded yard light and the gooseneck lamp over the kennel doors. Epi heard them coming and backed up defensively until she stood in front of an unused old dog house near the silo. Drops of blood stained the snow around her.

“If we both come up she’ll run,” Claude said. He was carefully looking at a point on the ground a few feet in front of him. “Go around the other side of the silo.”

Edgar hesitated.

“Get going,” Claude said. “Before she decides to cut through that way.”

Edgar turned and rounded the stony circumference, passing briefly back into the light before he reached the thick cement pier a foot high and three feet wide that connected the barn foundation to the silo. Through the gap he could see the dog house and the kennel runs beyond and the dogs standing in them, watching. Meltwater from the roof had rotted a line into the crystallized snowpack beneath the eaves.

Epi stood stock still, fixated on Claude. Edgar crouched on the cement pier, ready to intercept her if she bolted his way.

HOW IT GOT STARTED even Claude didn’t remember. There must have been some first time in the kennel, some formative moment, when a pup had injured itself and backed into a corner, scared and defensive, and Claude had stepped past everyone to somehow enchant it, which was the only word for what he could do. He knew instinctively how to approach, how to touch, how to confuse and distract, so that, fearful or not, the dog found itself acquiescing. Maybe that first time had happened when he was very young. In any case, it was something he’d known how to do all of his life.

In high school, Claude began working afternoons and weekends at Doctor Papineau’s shop. At first, it was odd jobs-clean up, repair, filing, walking the convalescent dogs. He liked the antiseptic smell of the place and the rows of prescription drugs on the shelves, like bottles of magic. When animals needed their dressings changed, he helped with that, too, asking many questions, which flattered the veterinarian, and seldom forgetting the answers, which impressed him. In time, Claude persuaded Doctor Papineau to let him assist on minor surgeries. The veterinarian showed him how to administer intramuscular injections of sedative, as well as the older skill-waning even then in veterinary practice-of the ether drip.

Occasionally, a dog came in wild with fright. Doctor Papineau had a noose pole for such situations, but people hated seeing it used, and Claude learned to work without it, crawling into the back of the truck-or wherever the frantic dog hid-and emerging with a docile animal and an empty syringe. He was bitten more than once, but they were fear bites, quick and shallow, and Claude had excellent reflexes. He became a masterful judge of how far a dog could be pushed. And eventually he craved the thrill of those moments more than anything.

On Sunday afternoons, when the shop was closed, Claude cleaned up and administered medications by himself; he knew where to call Doctor Papineau in case of an emergency. And if, on those Sundays, a dog was boarded that Claude had taken a dislike to, when he was done with his work he let it out to run the halls. Then he jimmied Doctor Papineau’s desk for the key to the pharmacy room, prepared whichever method of sedation most interested him that day, and began to search. Once the dog was unconscious, he carried it to its pen and checked his watch. Both methods had their uses, he decided, but he was faster and more adept with the needle.

Though not perfect. Doctor Papineau attributed the first dog’s death to post-surgical trauma. The second dog, however, puzzled the veterinarian. He’d questioned Claude for a long time about the dog’s condition that Sunday. The session had left Claude shaken, and after that, there were no more incidents at the shop.

Late night, autumn 1947. Claude was leaning against the wall at the back of a long-abandoned barn, watching the crowd, all men, disperse into the cool night. A few of the men led dogs muzzled and close-leashed against their thighs. A few more stood cocooned in silence and disappointment. A man counted out money into another’s hand. The roughshod plywood ring had been dismantled already and under the light of two white gas lanterns someone was pitching water across the boards to rinse the blood away. Outside, bitter laughter, black undercurrent of animosity. An argument followed, quickly shouted down.

Then Gar appeared, shouldering his way inside. He blinked at the glare of the lanterns. He was about to leave when he spotted Claude and walked over, glowering.

“Come on,” he said. “We’re leaving.”

“I got myself here. I can get myself home.”

“If you leave the house with me, you’re damn well going to walk back in with me. The only thing I want to know right now is whether any of our dogs were here.”

“No.”

“Tell me which dogs.”

“I said no. Why do you think I’m here, anyway?”

“I don’t know why you’re here. That’s what we’re going to talk about after we leave.”

Then a man trotted into the barn. “Hey, Doc,” he called, waving Claude forward. Gar looked at Claude and then at the men cleaning the plywood. Claude had kicked the satchel behind him when his brother walked in, but Gar spotted it anyway. He picked it up. He looked at the initials embossed on the top. Then he opened it and looked inside.

“You’re kidding me,” he said. “You patch them up afterward? Is that the idea?”

The man called again, this time more urgently. Claude started to take the satchel, but Gar pushed him back against the beam.

“Wait here,” he said. He walked over to the man. Claude couldn’t hear the conversation but he saw Gar shaking his head. The man cradled his arm in front of him and pointed off somewhere. Gar shook his head again. Finally he turned and motioned to Claude and the three of them walked out of the barn, Claude carrying the satchel. Out on the road, motors started and tires rolled over gravel and the beams of headlights swung cross-eyed through the trees. Claude could see the bite punctures in the corded muscles of the man’s forearm.

A shaggy shepherd cross with a stocky build and a blunt muzzle was chained to a tree near the road. As they approached, the dog hobbled to its feet and began to bay, one bloody hind leg held off the ground.

“Knock it off!” the man shouted.

The dog licked its chops and limped forward. The owner sidled up to it, but the moment he tried to slip an arm under its flanks, the animal set his muzzle beside the man’s ear. Even from where Claude stood, the baleful rumble in the dog’s throat was unmistakable.

“See?” the man said, backing away. “He was okay when we first got out here. Now I can’t get him in the truck.”

Gar looked at Claude. “You can tranquilize him?”

Claude nodded.

Gar guided the man back a few paces. Claude set the satchel on the ground and opened the jawed top and pulled out a bottle and a syringe. He drew fluid into the syringe. Then he walked to a point just beyond the reach of the dog’s chain and whistled a warbly double-tone-tweee, tweee.

The dog tipped its head, curious.

NOW, IN THE DARK behind the barn, Claude had turned sideways to Epi. He kept his gaze averted, elbows pressed to his sides, knees bent, trying to minimize his profile as he crabbed toward her with a slow side shuffle. He was mumbling a monotone stream of nonsense, the words an endless, senseless flow of noise. “Say, honey,” he said. “Such a good girl. Goodness gracious. Such a sweetie pie.” He held the plastic bag crumpled against his far hip, and something metallic glinted in his hand. He moved a foot closer, then paused, his delay just long enough that he seemed to be drifting pointlessly inward, every gesture slight and contained and almost accidental so that he hardly seemed to be moving at all, never a direct glance, never a raised voice, but closer, always closer, and always the steady meaningless patter.

Epi retreated toward the empty dog house, looking wide-eyed across her flank. She knew she was trapped, and she turned to look at Edgar. He thought she might decide to come to him, but the howls and the flashing teeth and the desire to flee overwhelmed all else in her mind and she froze. Edgar raised his hand to sign a down. She saw him and turned back to Claude and lowered her head miserably, mouth closed up, ears flattened. The gash on her face was black and wet and she dragged a paw across the cut and sank to the cold snow and tucked her feet up tight beneath her. She sized up ways past Claude. When he was three small side steps away from her, she retreated into the dog house and, shortly, a low growl emanated from inside.

Claude opened the plastic bag. Fumes wavered toward the ground. He pitched the soaked rag far back into the doghouse and quickly turned and sealed the door with his jacketed back.

“Wait,” he said to Edgar. He’d stopped the patter and all was quiet. Inside the dog house there was a panicky clomping as Epi positioned herself between the rags and the door. Claude sat looking downfield. A long time passed. Finally, he rose and stepped back.

“Come on, girl,” he said. “Come on out.”

Epi’s muzzle appeared. She blinked and stepped into the night. She tottered and growled uncertainly. Claude closed the distance between them in two quick steps and cuffed her under the chin with his left hand and stepped back. Her jaws snapped shut hollowly.

“None of that,” he said.

In her confusion-compounded by the night’s events and the ether fumes and now this lightning strike from Claude-Epi let her topline soften and her tail uncurl. For a moment all defiance left her, as if she were letting herself be taken down finally and forever in some fight that still carried on in her mind. Then Claude’s arm was looped over her back, his hand against her belly. She flashed her muzzle back at him in surprise, but he already had the needle between her shoulder blades, talking again, low and quiet, and he stayed there even after he’d tossed the syringe away, stroking her and waiting.

“Okay, honey,” he said. “Edgar, keep still. If you spook her, I’m the one she’ll bite. Time to lie down and rest, sweetie. Been a long night. Such a good girl.”

He ran his hand down Epi’s back. She sagged and folded herself against the ground and a shudder passed through her.

“Bring that lead over,” Claude said. “Slow.”

Then: “Put it on her.”

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s find out what we’ve got here.” Claude knelt and slipped one arm under Epi’s brisket and the other under her flanks and she came up in his arms, the whites of her eyes showing and her body lax. They rounded the silo and Claude waited under the metal-hooded flood lamp while Edgar fumbled with the door latch.

“There’s a bag in the car,” Claude said, walking into the kennel. “Front seat. Go get it.”

Claude was in the medicine room when Edgar returned. Epi lay stretched out on the examination table, limp but awake, keening feebly as Claude shaved the side of her face with the electric clippers. He stopped periodically to pour antiseptic over the pink skin he’d exposed, flushing loose hairs from her wound. Beneath the velvet fur her skin was freckled. The brown liquid streamed down the fur of her neck and puddled on the table.

Edgar set the weathered satchel he carried near the wall. The initials PP were embossed along its top, the curves and arches of the letters abraded over time into a pale felt. Claude lay the clippers aside and rummaged through the bag, producing black suture thread and a needle, both of which he doused with antiseptic. The wound was smaller than Edgar expected, opening just below Epi’s eye and ending near the corner of her mouth. Whenever Claude applied pressure, blood seeped from the ragged edges of the laceration and the sight made yellow rings jitter at the edge of Edgar’s vision.

You made this happen, he thought. Stop it. Pay attention.

He clenched his hands until they ached, and watched. Twice, Claude dropped the needle into Epi’s fur while placing stitches. He cursed under his breath and re-rinsed it with antiseptic.

“Is there another dog hurt?”

Edgar nodded.

“Look in that bag for a bottle of pills marked ‘Valium.’”

The bag sat jawed open on the floor. Edgar pulled out bottles and examined them then turned and held one out for Claude to see.

“That’s the one. Give it two of those and wait for me.”

Claude returned to his suturing. Edgar shook out the pills and walked to Finch’s pen. The dog met him, hobbling gamely on three legs. By the time Claude carried Epi out of the medicine room and settled her in her pen, with her head cushioned by a pair of towels, Finch had relaxed into sleep.

The stitches in Epi’s face were neat and black and even. Edgar counted twelve, top to bottom. Claude had smeared a glistening salve over the wound. Edgar dipped three fingers into the water dish and let the drops fall on Epi’s tongue and listened to the pop and hum of the clippers. By the time Claude carried Finch out, Epi had come awake enough to lift her head and watch. She tried to climb to her feet, but Edgar ran his hand along her back and guided her down again.

Courtship

I N THE HOUSE, CLAUDE WALKED ACROSS THE KITCHEN AND knocked at the closed bedroom door, coat bunched in his hand. Edgar knelt and stroked Almondine’s muzzle.

What happened tonight? he signed. Why couldn’t you stand?

She dug her nose along his arm and legs, scenting him to divine what had happened after he left the house. Her eyes were bright. She searched his face. When he was satisfied she was okay, he stood and walked to the bedroom door, where Claude was still waiting.

“Trudy?” Claude said, knocking a second time.

The door swung back. Edgar’s mother stood there holding the jamb for balance. Her hair was matted with sweat, her eyes set in hollowed circles above chalk-white cheekbones. Claude drew a quick breath at the sight of her.

“Christ, Trudy,” he said. “You need a doctor.”

She turned and sat on the bed. She looked past Claude as if his presence hadn’t registered.

“Edgar?” she said. “Is Epi okay? What time is it?”

Before Edgar could sign an answer, Claude said, “She had a cut near her eye, but it wasn’t deep. Finch is going to be limping for a few days, that’s all. They looked worse than they actually were.”

Edgar’s mother nodded.

“Thank you, Gar. You’re right, I don’t think these antibiotics are working,” she said. “Could you drive me to see Doctor Frost?”

They stood in silence for a moment. At first Trudy didn’t recognize her mistake but Claude’s posture straightened as if he’d laid a hand on some low-voltage wire. Something like embarrassment and fear and another feeling he couldn’t name made Edgar’s face flush.

“Yes,” Claude said. “I can do that.”

Trudy passed her hand in front of her face as if clearing cobwebs.

“Claude, I mean,” she said. “Claude. I’m going to lie back down. Wake me at eight, would you? Then I’ll call and make an appointment.”

“Not a chance,” Claude said. “We’re going now.”

“But he won’t even be in his office for another hour and a half.”

“He will be after I call him,” Claude said.

She insisted Edgar stay behind, that he not get near her. Reluctantly, he agreed to stay and watch Epi and Finch and Almondine. Claude backed his car up the driveway and headed toward town with Edgar’s mother huddled against the passenger-side door.

Edgar dragged himself through morning chores, lining the pens with the straw bales he’d slept on before the fight. He checked on the pups in the whelping room and weighed them for the log sheets and sat in the straw in the corner of their pen and dozed. The pups mustered the courage to mount an attack. He brushed them aside, but they charged again, biting his fingers and shoes and the belt loops on his jeans, and then he pushed himself up and went to Epi’s pen.

LATER, HE WOULD BLAME himself for not seeing what would happen, as if he could have prevented it, but during the weeks that followed, his preoccupation was above all with his mother’s health and the mending of the injured dogs. He cleansed and salved Epi’s sutures every morning, and held warm compresses in place until they had cooled in his hands, leaving for school with his fingers stained brown from antiseptic. Her fur began to grow in, but she was distrustful and skittish. Finch’s leg healed quickly. Most important of all, Almondine’s spell in the kennel was not repeated.

But lying in bed, Edgar would reenact the events of that night, changing the smallest action to stop everything from unraveling.

If I had let fewer dogs out…

If I hadn’t fallen asleep…

If I had fed them the right way…

Sometimes he worked himself all the way back to If she hadn’t gotten sick…If I could have made a sound…If he hadn’t died…

The future, when he thought about it at all, held little threat and little promise. When the Impala returned that afternoon, and his mother emerged on steadier feet, new prescription in hand, he thought all their mistakes had finally been made. She needed to recover. His father had died in January; it was only the end of May. They needed to stick to the routine they’d established during the intervening months. In that way, their life would return to its original shape, like a spring stretched in bad times but contracting eventually into happiness. That the world could come permanently unsprung never occurred to him. And so, for the longest time, he was oblivious to what was happening, for where his mother was concerned, some things seemed no more possible than if she might suddenly fly through the air.

THE PACE OF WORK hadn’t slackened. The pups came first, then the food, the water, the cleaning, the meds. The rest of their time was devoted to training. While his mother was still recovering, Claude arrived in the morning, unloaded supplies, and helped with chores. Edgar walked Finch up and down the aisle so he could judge the dog’s recovery. Afterward, Claude stayed only long enough for a cup of coffee, drinking it standing up, with his jacket on; Edgar’s mother talked to Claude about what needed to be done in the kennel, as though they had come to some agreement about his helping out. Then he set his coffee down and walked to his car.

After she was back on her feet, Claude stopped appearing in the mornings. Since he wasn’t there when Edgar boarded the school bus, there was no reason to believe he’d been there at all, until one afternoon he came across a pile of white soap shavings on the porch steps. Claude came for dinner the next evening. The moment he entered, Edgar’s mother’s movements grew slower, more languid. And when the conversation turned to Epi and Finch, Edgar understood that Claude had been out to the kennel many times since Edgar had last seen him, including that day. By then, nearly a month had passed.

After dinner, Edgar went upstairs. He listened to their footsteps, their murmured talk not quite covered by the noise of the television. Her words filtered up to him lying in his bed.

“Oh, Claude. What are we going to do?”

Her question ended with a sigh.

Edgar rolled over and waited for sleep. Listening and not listening.

If she hadn’t been gone that day…

If I hadn’t been in the mow…

If I’d been able to speak…

Sometime in the night, the Impala started with a throaty rumble. In the morning, when Edgar stood beside his bed, fiery spikes radiated from the center of his chest.

IT WAS WARM NOW, at least on some nights. One evening he walked out onto the porch and straddled an old kitchen chair to watch the sun set. Days of sunshine had melted the snow in the field, and a brief rain had rinsed everything clean. Almondine found a spot on the old rug and began chewing a bone, her mouth propped open against the hollow end. Shortly, the kitchen door opened and his mother’s hands came to rest on his shoulders. They listened to the water drip from the trees.

“I like that sound,” she said, “I used to sit here and listen to water run off the roof like that before you were born.”

I know, he signed. You’re very old.

He felt rather than heard her laugh. She dug her fingers lightly into his shoulders. “This is the time of year your father found that wolf pup. Do you remember us telling you about that?”

Parts of it.

“See those aspens down there?” She reached over his shoulder, and he closed an eye and sighted along her arm at a stand of trees occupying the lower corner of the field. “When he came up from the woods that day, those were only saplings. You could wrap your fingers around the trunks of most of them. They’d just begun to leaf out. I happened to be looking there when your father came through. It was the most amazing thing-he just shimmered into place, walking so slow and cautious. At first I thought he’d hurt himself. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up to see it.”

Because you thought he was hurt? Or because of how it looked?

“Both, I suppose. I should have known he was carrying a pup right away. He was walking the same way he carried a newborn in the kennel.”

With his shoulders hunched.

“Yes. But from a distance, I didn’t recognize it.”

The sound of her voice was pleasant, and Edgar felt like listening, and he supposed she felt like talking. He’d heard bits and pieces of the story as far back as he could remember, but now she told him about the miscarriages that preceded it, the final trip to the hospital, the figures in the rain. By the time she finished, the aspens at the back of the field had dissolved into the gloaming.

Did you ever name the baby?

“No,” she said, at length.

Suppose it had lived.

His mother took a deep breath.

“I think I know what you’re getting at, Edgar. Please don’t ask me to compare different kinds of grief. What I’m trying to tell you is that after the miscarriage, I lost myself for a while. Time passed that I don’t remember much about. I can’t explain what it was like, exactly, but I remember feeling angry that I’d never had a chance to know that baby before he died, not even for one minute. And I remember thinking I’d found a place where none of it had happened, where I could just rest and sleep.”

He nodded. He recalled how, waiting in the barn beside his father that day, something had blossomed before his eyes when he closed them, something dark and forever inward-turning. He recalled how after a time he had found himself walking along a road, how the one Edgar had stayed with his father and the other had kept walking, how all around the road was pitch dark and how rain was falling on him and gently drenching him. And he remembered thinking that as long as he stayed on the road he was safe.

“Do you want to know why that hasn’t happened to me now?” she said.

Why?

“Because I did have a chance to know your father. It’s so unfair he died that I could scream, but I was lucky enough to know him for almost twenty years. That’s not enough. I could never have known him enough, not if we both lived to be a hundred. But it is something, and that makes a difference to me.” She paused again. “What happened to your father isn’t your fault, Edgar.”

I know.

“No, Edgar, you don’t know. Do you think I can’t read you? Do you think I can’t see? You think just because you don’t make a sign for something it isn’t written all over your body? In how you stand and walk? Do you know you’re hitting yourself in your sleep? Why are you doing that?”

It took a moment to sink in. When he stood, the chair clattered to the floor behind him.

What do you mean?

“Unbutton your shirt.”

He tried to walk away, but she laid a hand on his shoulder. “Do it, Edgar. Please.”

He unfastened the line of buttons and let his shirt fall open. A bruise, mottled with sickly blue and green, covered the center of his chest.

Somewhere, an icy tuning fork struck a bar of silver and rang and rang. He walked to the bathroom and stood before the mirror and pressed a fingertip into the bruise. An ache pulsed outward along his ribs.

How long had he been waking with that feeling of an anvil having been dropped on his chest? A week? A month?

“What is that?” Trudy said, when he walked into the kitchen. “Goddamn it, Edgar. What’s going on with you? You’re so closed up around your sadness you’ve left me here alone. You can’t do that. You can’t shut me out. As if you’re the only one who lost someone.” She put her hands on his shoulders. “In the mornings when you walk into the kitchen, I’ll see you out of the corner of my eye and think you’re him-”

That’s crazy. I don’t look anything like him.

“Yes you do, Edgar. You move like him. You walk like him. I’ve watched you in the whelping room and you even carry the pups like him, just the way you described, with your shoulders hunched up, taking those careful steps. Do you realize that there are times when I need to leave the house, when it’s just you and me, because I look at you and I feel like he isn’t gone? I come back from the barn some nights and I can’t help myself. I go up to your room to watch you. It’s the only time you let me near. It’s the only way I can get close. To you or him.”

I’m not him. I’m not half who he was.

Then a wrack of shivers ran through him. He pushed past Trudy onto the porch, buttoning his shirt. There was something else he’d wanted to say, but discovering the bruise on his chest had swept everything else from his mind.

“Edgar, I know what it’s like to disappear into bad feelings. I know how tempting it is. You think by going further into it you’ll finally come out the other side and everything will be okay, but it doesn’t work that way. You need to talk to me. I can’t shake the feeling you haven’t told me everything that happened.”

I did. I told you. I came down from the mow and there he was. I had to wait for someone to show up.

“The handset on the phone was shattered.”

I got mad and hit it on the countertop. I told you that.

“What else, Edgar? What else happened?”

Nothing!

“Then what is that?” she said, pointing at his chest.

I don’t know! I must have fallen against something. I just don’t remember.

“Edgar, I’ve watched you do it in your sleep. You’re hitting your chest. You’re trying to sign something. What is it?”

He couldn’t reply, paralyzed by the memory of throwing his fist against his body. Every time he thought of it he almost shook with the blow. He stood on the porch, his ragged exhalation matching hers, until at last he remembered what he’d wanted to say.

Claude isn’t like him, either.

Now it was his mother’s turn to be silent. She looked past him into the field and sighed. “After that last miscarriage, I wanted to have an operation to make it impossible for me to get pregnant. I liked that idea-that way I could be sure I’d never feel that bad ever again. But your father said I was only imagining the worst case. One more time, he said. Not because it won’t be terrible if it happens again, but because it will be wonderful if it doesn’t. And he was right, Edgar. The next time, we had you. I can’t imagine what our lives would have been like if your father hadn’t believed so strongly in fresh starts.”

He turned and stared out into the night.

“Edgar, there’s a difference between missing him and wanting nothing to change,” she said. “They aren’t the same things at all. And we can’t do anything about either one. Things always change. Things would be changing right now if your father were alive, Edgar. That’s just life. You can fight it or you accept it. The only difference is, if you accept it, you get to do other things. If you fight it, you’re stuck in the same spot forever. Does that make sense?”

But aren’t some changes worth fighting?

“You know that’s true.”

So how do you know which is which?

“I don’t know a way to tell for sure,” she said. “You ask, ‘Why am I really fighting this?’ If the answer is ‘Because I’m scared of what things will be like,’ then, most times, you’re fighting for the wrong reason.”

And if that’s not the answer?

“Then you dig in your heels and you fight and fight and fight. But you have to be absolutely sure you can handle a different kind of change, because in the end, things will change anyway, just not that way. In fact, if you get into a fight like that, it pretty much guarantees things are going to change.”

He nodded. He knew she was right but he hated what she said. A person could stop a specific thing, but they couldn’t stop change in general. Rivers can’t run backward. Yet, he felt there must be an alternative, neither willfulness nor resignation. He couldn’t put words to it. All he knew was, neither of them had changed their minds and neither of them could find anything more to say. He stood there until his mother turned and went into the kitchen, then he pushed open the porch door and walked to the barn.

THERE WAS PLENTY OF binder twine lying around the mow. With a little trial and error, he fashioned a double loop and a tail that he could knot around the bed frame. The thing was easily hidden beneath the blankets, and if she walked in at night, she wouldn’t see it. He passed his wrists through the rabbit ears. All it took was a twist to keep them from slipping free while he slept.

Late at night, the rotary dial on the telephone resonated through the walls, the rip of a digit rolled clockwise, the grind of the dial working backward, loud enough to wake him. Whatever part of her conversation wasn’t captured by the handset rode on air currents through that old house, a gray smoke so fine it drifted up the stairs and through the furnace registers, and wherever it brushed a wall, or a curtain, or a lightbulb, it crumbled into a dust that settled over everything.

In the mornings, he tucked the twine into the toe of an old tennis shoe and looked at his chest in the mirror.

It worked surprisingly well.

THE FIRST THUNDERSTORM OF spring came through in the middle of a night, lightning flashing through the sky and thunder rattling the glass in the windows. In the morning, the storm had lapsed into a ceaseless, undramatic rain. Slow, even sheets of water that paused for a minute or an hour, but soon enough returned, along with the splash of water running off the eaves. After two days, the basement began flooding. It was no surprise, and no emergency, either. The legs of the tables had long been set in coffee cans. Edgar watched the water seep through the rocks Schultz had set in the basement walls. The float rose in the sump pit twice an hour and the lights flickered as the motor engaged. Then a thump as the column of water hit the elbow in the vent pipe.

Outside, the world became a riot of vegetable odors, boggy and florid-the waft of old hay, tamarack, algae, moss, sweet sap and rotted leaves, iron and copper and worms-a musky yawn that hung in the yard.

FOR TWO NIGHTS IN a row the dogs woke him.

They’d begun leaving the run doors up at night and the dogs slept with their muzzles propped across the wooden thresholds. From his bedroom window he could make out their black noses and shining eyes. The first night he ignored their barks and rolled over and covered his head with his pillow, but the second night he detected a kind of fervor in their tone that drew him fully awake. He picked out the voices of Essay and Opal over the drumming of falling rain. He and Almondine knelt at the window. The dogs were standing wet in their runs, tails slashing happily behind them.

Deer in the orchard, he thought. Or a raccoon.

He went to the spare bedroom, where the window faced the orchard and the road. There was nothing to see. By the time he’d walked back to his room, the dogs were silent again. It occurred to him that the dogs might have seen Forte, and that idea cheered him. The stray seemed just contrary enough to come back after wintering with some adopted family.

Edgar lay awake in his bed, hoping now the dogs would start up again. Or that he would hear Forte’s howl. With his attention so pitched, he began half hearing a voice-the voice he’d heard in the barn when he’d slept there. The voice he’d heard (now he remembered) the night before. Always intertwined with some other sound. He heard his name cried as the bedsprings creaked; a wordless call in a gust of wind against the windowpane. He sat up and pulled books off the shelves, running his eyes over the letters like so many scribbles, until the sky lightened outside his window.

At breakfast he waited for his mother to mention the barking.

Did the dogs wake you last night? he asked, finally.

“No. Were they barking?”

A lot.

“That’s okay,” she said. “They get restless with the thaw.”

By the time he’d finished evening chores that next day he was so tired he staggered up the stairs and fell into bed. It was pitch dark when the sound of his name woke him. This time it had come through the splash of rain in the gutters. He sat up in bed, arms folded, listening. In a minute, the dogs began again. He slipped out of bed without turning on the light, raised the sash, and craned his head out. Everywhere, rain was falling. Directly below his window, Claude’s Impala sat parked in the driveway.

In each pen, a dog stood, baying.

He slipped on his jeans and shirt and haphazardly tied his shoes. He crept down the stairs, hand on Almondine’s back to slow her. His mother’s bedroom was dark. The clock in the kitchen read one thirty.

He knelt before Almondine.

You have to stay. I don’t want you getting wet.

He opened the porch door and leaned out. A breeze tousled his hair. There was no lightning, no thunder, just the steady whisper of warm rain, like the murmur of the creek-the sound that had once made Almondine pounce on the snow-covered creek as if something hid there. Silvery sheets of water poured into the gutters around their roof.

Near the door was a light switch. When he flipped it, the goosenecked flood lamp over the barn doors came on, casting a cone of light across the rough planks of the double doors. He half-expected to see a woodchuck or a fox scurrying off but there was only the glint of rain dropping into the light. And yet the dogs kept barking with such a strange mixture of alarm and recognition, wet and shining as they looked into the yard. A flicker danced in the rain before them and was gone. Edgar was about to turn back inside when something caught his attention near the barn door. When he looked closer, there was just rain.

Then, abruptly, the dogs fell silent. They braced themselves four-footed and shook off and one by one trotted to the portals at the back of their runs, where they pushed through the canvas flaps and disappeared.

Whatever was making them bark, Edgar thought, had to be inside the kennel. He was never going to find out what it was standing on the porch. He turned to Almondine one last time and knelt to quiet her. Then he stepped into the rain and began to cross the yard.

In the Rain

H E WAS DRENCHED BEFORE HE REACHED THE CORNER OF THE house. The same rain, warm on his hand, now soaked through his shirt and jeans, chilling him, but it was pointless to go back for a coat. He walked to the Impala and pressed his hand against the hood. The engine was cold as a stone.

He stepped onto the weed-covered hump in the center of the driveway, muddy streams on either side of him. In the pale glow of the yard light, the freshly greened grass looked greasy black. The two tall pines stood shivering like sentries, water cascading down branch by branch. But there were no deer, no streak of red that would be a fox, no shining eyes of a raccoon. He turned and walked to the deserted runs, wiping a streaming hand over his face.

From one of the small doorways, a dog’s head and shoulders emerged-Essay, watching him approach, half in and half out. When he squatted down and pushed his fingers through the wire mesh, she bucked along down the run, stepped into his shadow, and licked his fingers, blinking at the rain. Her posture conveyed curiosity without anxiety, anticipation but not fear.

What’s going on out here? he signed. Where would you go if I opened this door? What would you chase?

Essay waved her tail and met his gaze as though turning the question back on him. He pulled himself upright along the timber of the door. The waterlogged wood of the frame creaked. He turned to look behind him to see what the dogs might have seen.

The yard light, high atop the pole in the orchard, cast its globe of yellow. The earth mounded away from him, passing beneath the trees of the orchard and leveling near the road. The house sat at the edge of the light, bright along the driveway side, dim where it faced the garden. The shadows of the apple trees lay stretched across the grass. The forest across the road, an undulating scrim of gray. High in the air, raindrops descended into the light, curtained by the breeze into willow shapes that swayed across the yard and back into the night.

When Edgar glanced back, Essay had retreated into the barn and a line of glittering eyes watched him from the canvas flaps. He rounded the milk house and walked through the cone of light beneath the floodlight over the barn doors. When he reached the silo, he tried to look out over the field to the west, but his eyes were dazzled and the dark began just a few yards beyond. He stared into the blackness toward the back runs and saw nothing, just the side of the silo sliding off into the dark and the silhouette of the broad roof. After a moment he turned back to the barn.

And for the second time that night something moved in front of the double doors. It took a moment to make sense of it. A change in the falling of the rain. Something about the way it fell. He stepped forward to look more closely, traced a single drop of water as it passed into the light. Just above his head, the raindrop paused, wobbling in midair like a transparent pearl, and began to fall again. It splashed into the puddle at his feet. He wiped his face and looked up. Another raindrop had taken its place, and then that one fell, to be replaced by another, and another. Nothing he could see held them in the air, yet each one hovered for a tick of time, then continued to the ground. He watched it happen a dozen times or more. Despite himself, he reached out to touch the spot, then hesitated at the last moment.

He stepped back and saw the same thing was happening all up and down the space in front of him: hundreds of raindrops-thousands-suspended for a heartbeat in the lamplight. He caught a glimpse of something, then lost it. He squeezed his eyes shut. It was like watching the orchard, trying to catch everything motionless for one instant. When he opened his eyes again, the way to see them all together had clicked into place.

Instead of raindrops, he saw a man.

His head, his torso. Arms held away from his body. All formed by raindrops suspended and instantly replaced. Near the ground, the figure’s legs frayed into tattered blue-gray sprays of water. When a gust of wind passed through the yard, the shape flickered and the branches of the apple trees twisted behind it, refracted as through melted glass.

Edgar shook his head and turned away. An endless cascade of raindrops struck his arms and neck and face. The same breeze that shimmered the figure caressed his skin, carrying a swampy, marshy smell. There was the scent of the kennel, and of the water itself.

Suddenly he needed to touch something, something too solid to exist in a dream. He stumbled to the barn. He ran his palm against the planks of siding. A wood sliver snagged his skin and slid into the flesh at the base of his thumb. The pain was brief and hot and unquestionably real.

He glanced around. The figure in the rain had turned to watch.

He attended once more to the barn, his examination now minute and frantic. He traced the rusted iron door hinge with his fingertips, and the jagged crevices between the boards, where the shadows were as sharp as the line dividing the moon. He knew if he waited long enough he would see crazy things-fantastic, inexplicable, dreamlike things-but everywhere he looked he found the ordinary stuff of the world. Painted wood. Pitted iron. Water falling earthward from his face, each droplet’s path so foreshortened it seemed motionless and shrinking until it struck the ground. He shut his eyes and listened to his breath blowing.

When he turned, rain fell evenly through the light. He was alone. He looked about, then spotted the figure standing near the corner of the milk house. Having once learned the trick, Edgar could not unsee him. The figure gestured. His legs blurred into skirts of rain and then he disappeared from view. The dogs began to bark.

Edgar found him standing in front of the pens. All the dogs were out, peering forward, unafraid, excited recognition in their voices. Their tails jerked back and forth, throwing sprays of water. The figure turned to him and his arms moved in sign. Trails of water fell through the air. The distance and the figure’s indistinct form made it difficult to read.

Edgar stepped forward. The figure repeated the sign.

Release a dog.

Edgar blinked in the rain.

Why?

You think I’m not real. Open a pen.

Edgar walked to Essay’s pen. He flipped up the latch and linked his fingers through the wire mesh and pulled the door open. Essay bounded out at once. She dropped her nose to the ground at the spot where the figure had stood and slid a paw along the grass. She looked at Edgar and then into the yard. Her tail swung happily behind her. The figure gestured a recall, but Essay was already closing the distance at a trot. When she arrived she circled several times, her shape contorting as she passed behind and finished on his left in a sit. The figure stepped forward, a water-shimmer, and turned and signaled a down. Essay dropped onto the wet grass at once. The figure bent down and passed his hand across the side of her face. A stream of water coursed along her already soaked cheek and she panted happily and pulled her lips back in a grin of pleasure and lapped at the figure’s hand. Her tongue passed through a stream of water. She closed her mouth reflexively and swallowed and began to pant again.

The figure looked back toward the barn and signaled a broad sit and in unison all seven dogs behind Edgar sat. Then he signaled a release. One by one they stood. They trotted back into the barn. A moment later the canvas flaps parted and seven muzzles appeared.

You see?

At last, the figure signaled Essay to kennel. She trotted to her pen and disappeared into the barn. Before Edgar had latched the door behind her, she had joined the other dogs looking out at them.

He turned back to the rain.

Edgar.

What-what are you doing here?

Don’t you recognize me?

I don’t want to say. I’m not sure. I might.

How many times have we stood here and looked back at the house together? How many times have we counted the deer in the field from here? How many times did I lift you into the branches of those trees to pick an apple? Look at me Edgar. What do you see?

I don’t know.

What do you see?

I know why you’re here. I’m so sorry. I tried so hard.

You think you might have saved me.

I couldn’t think of what to do. I tried everything.

I would have died anyway.

No. I couldn’t tell them. There could have been doctors.

They would have done nothing.

But I was there. I made it worse!

The rain-figure bowed his head. A space of perhaps three feet separated them. After a moment the figure looked up and stepped forward and began to raise his hands as if to embrace him.

Edgar couldn’t help himself. He stepped back. Instantly, a wave of remorse washed through him.

I’m sorry, he signed. I didn’t mean that.

You didn’t understand what you were seeing that day.

The figure turned and melted away toward the front of the barn, then rounded the corner of the old milk house. After a moment Edgar followed. He stood before the barn doors. Under the floodlight, his sign was easy to read.

Go inside. Now. Before the rain stops.

And do what?

Search.

For what?

What he lost. What he thinks is lost forever.

Then the figure stepped away from the door. Edgar tipped the old iron bar away and turned the latch handle. Inside, it was dark but dry and the cessation of rain shocked him. He looked out the door, but it was only rain falling again. None of the dogs barked, though a few stood watching from their pens.

He pushed the workshop door open and froze, unable to cross the threshold at first. He reached inside and flipped up the light switch and surveyed the room: workbench to the left, the pegboard covered with tools mounted on the wall above it. Vise twisted open halfway. Except for the filing cabinets, they had barely touched any of it that winter, and a velvet hoar of straw dust lay over the bench. Across from him, the mow stairs led upward, and in front of them, shelves filled with cans of paint and creosote, their labels stained with drips and runners.

He took a breath and stepped inside. He took the paint cans off the shelf and stacked them on the workbench. Though the rest of the workshop was covered in dust, the paint cans were not; only a thin powder covered them, as though they had been recently moved. When he finished, only a pile of old brushes and rollers remained, stacked haphazardly at one end of the shelf, and these he put on the workbench, too.

Beneath the shelves, on the floor, sat the two enormous cans of scrap his father had been trying to move that day, brimming with bent nails, stripped screws, spare machine parts, the iron rusted to a dark brown, the steel parts dull gray. He crouched and tried to tip the nearest one out from the wall. After the third or fourth heave, the welded metal handle snapped off and he tumbled backward. He returned to it on all fours, hugged it, and lunged. The bucket tottered and fell and he quickly rolled it along, leaving a trail of orange scrap. He knelt and swabbed the scrap about.

The second can had lost its handle long before. Another spray of scrap. In the process, something sharp had sliced the tip of his finger. Blood mixed with the rust on his hands and began to drip to the floor. He got down on his knees again, but it was hopeless and he sat back. Under the mow stairs, a jumble of dusty odds and ends lay tucked into the crevice where the stair stringers met the concrete floor-a paintbrush, long ago fallen from behind the shelf, a bunched-up rag, a tin of washers. He scuttled over. One by one he tossed them into the workshop. A maroon drop of blood caught in the cobweb below the last tread and shivered blackly in the air. He reached out and brushed the cobweb away.

There, against the wall, lay a plastic-barreled syringe. He picked it up and blew the dust away and held it to the light. The plunger had been pressed three quarters of the way down; the black double gasket touched the final graduated mark on the barrel. The needle’s shaft reflected the light in a long clean line. He shook the thing. Two glassy crystals clicked within the barrel.

He walked into the rain with the syringe in his hand, night-blind from the barn lights. The rain had slackened to a drizzle, and at first he couldn’t make out his father and he looked around in a panic before realizing he stood exactly where Edgar had last seen him. The rain had grown so fine his form was barely discernible.

Edgar held out the syringe.

This was under the stairs.

Yes.

What does it mean?

You’ve seen him use one.

Claude?

Edgar looked at the Impala sitting in the driveway, then the dark house. At his bedroom window, he thought he saw the shine of Almondine’s eyes.

He’s proposed.

She won’t accept.

She laughed at him. But she will. When she’s alone, she’ll accept.

She won’t! She-

Before Edgar could protest again, his father set his hand flat against the center of Edgar’s chest. A whispery splash on his skin. At first he thought his father only meant to lay his hand on him in a gesture that meant, be still and listen, but then he brought his other hand forward and Edgar felt something pass into him, and his father made as if to cradle Edgar’s heart. The sensation was so strange Edgar thought his heart would stop. But his father only cupped the thing in his hands as though it were a newborn pup. On his face Edgar made out regret and anger and joy and most of all unutterable sorrow.

Any thought to protest or resist left him. The world grayed. Then memories flooded into Edgar in a cascade, like the drops of rain passing through his father’s figure; images seen by a baby, a toddler, a young man, an adult. All his father’s memories given to him at once.

Standing over a crib looking at a silent baby whose hands move over his chest. Trudy, a young woman, laughing. Almondine, a wet, blind pup. Vision of a young boy with a younger boy beside him holding something in the air; something bloody. And smiling. A thousand ruby-lit dogs. And with the images, a sense of responsibility; the need to put himself between Claude and the world. Dogs fighting. Storms mounting the field. Trees slipstreaming past the truck windows. Dogs: sleeping, running, sick, joyful, dying. Always and everywhere, dogs. Then Claude, retreating from the workshop, searching the floor for something. Darkness. And now, standing before him, a boy as clear as glass, his heart beating in two cupped hands.

Edgar fell to his knees, gasping. He leaned forward, emptied his stomach into a pool of rainwater. From the corner of his eye he saw the syringe lying in the mud, light glinting off the shaft of the needle.

He looked up, panting. His father was still there.

Whatever he’s wanted, he’s taken, ever since he was a child.

I’ll tell the police.

They won’t believe you.

Edgar began to sob.

You’re not real. You can’t be real.

Find-

What? Stop! I couldn’t read that.

His father signed it again, fingerspelling the last word.

Find H-A-A…

He couldn’t make it out. It was H-A-A and then something else, followed by a very distinct I: H-A-A-something-I.

I still didn’t…

The mist had lessened further, and his father was barely visible. His hands sprayed away on a gust of wind. Then he vanished entirely. Edgar thought he was gone forever, but when the wind died he reappeared, kneeling now in front of him, his hands so faint Edgar could barely make out the motion.

A touch of the thumb to the forehead.

The I-hand held to his chest.

Remember me.

And then his father reached forward a second time.

He thought he would rather die himself than feel that sensation again. He scrabbled along the muddy ground until the barn was against his back and signed furiously into the night, arms crossed over his head.

Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!

After that everything quieted to absolute silence. The mist grew so refined it made no noise as it came to earth, only the drip of water from the eaves. He could not bring himself to look up until it had stopped altogether.

From behind a feathered break of clouds, the moon emerged, a gleaming sickle of bone as pointed as the syringe beside him. The trees at the edge of the forest glowed blue. He walked along the driveway and looked back at the barn. The dogs were at the front of their pens holding sit-stays, coats like mercury. Their muzzles tracked him as he approached. They lowered their brows and ducked their heads, not wanting to be out anymore. But they did not move.

From the moment they opened their eyes the dogs were taught to watch and listen and trust. To think and choose. This was the lesson behind every minute of training. They were taught something beyond simple obedience: that through the training all things could be spoken. Edgar himself believed this-believed they had the right to ask of the dogs certain things. But the more forcefully they asked, the more certain they had to be, for the dogs would obey. Doubtful, uncomfortable, uneasy, frightened: they would obey.

The line of dogs waited for him to signal a release.

The clouds gaped and folded and closed across the moon.