The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

H E CAME UP OUT OF A DARKNESS THAT WAS NOT SLEEP BUT something vaster and more comforting, the black of willful unconsciousness or perhaps the night that precedes the first wakening, which babies know in the womb and forget ever after. There was Essay’s breath panting slow and hot against his face. When he cracked an eyelid her jet-whiskered muzzle and curious eye filled his vision and he pushed her away and curled his head to his knees and squeezed his eyelids shut. Even so, he’d glimpsed enough to know he lay inside the run farthest from the doors and nearest the whelping room, and that the bare lights blazed along the kennel aisle. Outside, rain fell, roaring, a torrent against the roof. There was the rustle of the canvas flaps and another dog trotted up, this time Tinder, who dug his muzzle into the crevice between Edgar’s chin and chest and snuffled and drew back and cocked his head with a low, puzzled groan.

Bits of straw began to itch along his neck. His shirt clung to his ribs, gelid and damp. A spasm shook his body, then another, and he gasped and despite himself drew a full breath that carried into him the odors of the kennel-sweat and urine, straw and turpentine, blood and defecation and birth and life and death-all of it alien and bitter as if the whole history of the place itself had suddenly blossomed in his chest. And with it, masked until the last instant, the memory of what had happened in the night.

Then Essay and Tinder accosted him together. He could summon only the strength to sit cross-legged against the wooden wall and bury his face in his arms, counting by sound the dogs shuffling through the straw in their pens as rain thundered onto the barn. When he lifted his head again, Essay and Tinder stammered before him and snaked their necks against his palms and shimmied. In time he pushed himself upright. Patches of wet cloth sucked away from his skin. He slipped out of the pen and walked to the Dutch doors and stood with one hand on the latch listening to water sheeting off the eaves.

He drew a breath and swung the door outward. The sapphire sky above floated a small, lone cloud made orange by the sunrise. The new leaves on the maple stirred and quaked; sparrows cartwheeled over the wet field like glazier’s points against the sky, and the swallows nesting in the eaves plunged into the morning air. The house burned white against the green of the woods. The Impala, neon blue. But there was no torrent to be seen, not even a drizzle. The sound of falling rain possessed him for one moment more and then vanished.

He was past the milk house before he remembered the syringe and turned and found it crushed in the center of a grassy puddle, needle snapped, barrel broken and awash. He cupped it in his palm and carried the pieces to the old silo where he pitched them through the rusted iron rungs and listened as they struck the far curve of cement and stone with a papery ring. Then he walked up the driveway, faster as he passed the house, the orchard, the mailbox. He started up the road, wheeled and headed the other way, breaking into a run and then dropping into a jerky reined-up step. He turned again. After a time he found himself walking back down the driveway and he began to circle the house in that same halting stride. Five times around, ten, twenty times, looking into the darkness behind the window glass. Each time he passed the old apple tree its lowest branches tugged at him and he brushed them away until he finally came to rest, panting, caught for the umpteenth time, and at last he turned to look at it.

It was an old tree, old already when he was born, maybe older than the house itself. At eye level the trunk split into three thick and nearly horizontal limbs, the longest of which arced toward the house and ended suddenly in a mass of waxy leaves. The branch would have continued through the kitchen window had it not been pruned mid-limb. He was shaking and chilled and his fingers were stiff but he managed to boost himself into the crotch of the tree and from there he worked himself onto the limb. The bark felt greasy from long days of rain. Past halfway it began to buck and wobble under his weight. Rainwater cupped in the new foliage showered him every time he moved. He worked slowly along. When he got to the stump end he steadied himself by gripping a hornlike pair of limbs and settled his sternum against the branch and lay outstretched, a swimmer among the boughs.

The window over the sink was closed, the gingham curtains parted to either side. The thin morning light was not enough to illuminate the interior, and at first only the orange power light at the base of the freezer was visible, its bulb winking and flickering. His breaths made the limb tremble like the string of an instrument wound overtight; it was no wider than his hand and its bark bit into his chest and soon his chest began to ache from it. He did not know why he was in the apple tree or what he was looking for but he lay waiting. In time, the side of the barn glowed red. One of the kennel dogs pressed into its run and looked around and retreated. The morning air was bright and water-laden. From downfield a killdeer chattered kee-dee, kee-dee.

Almondine floated into the kitchen, padding along on old legs. She paused beside the stove and circled the table and disappeared. Then Edgar’s mother walked into view, robe cinched around her waist. She stood with her back to the window and started the Mr. Coffee. She lifted her hair in a rope and dropped it outside her robe and waited. She filled her cup. She liked coffee black with just a bit of sugar-he’d made it for her many times that winter-and he watched her lift the spoon from her cup and put it wet into the sugar bowl twice and sip the coffee. The corner of the kitchen was windowed on two sides. She stood in profile looking west at the vapor writhing over the field. When Claude appeared he was dressed, as if he had just arrived. He walked up behind her and put one hand on her shoulder and let it rest there. He smoothed the collar of her robe against her neck and walked to the sink and rinsed out a cup. He didn’t look out then, just turned and poured his coffee and sat in the chair nearest the sink.

Their murmur penetrated the window glass but not their words. After a few minutes Edgar’s mother set her cup on the table and walked to the bathroom. Claude sat watching the mercator of sunlight advance up the field. Wisps of fog swirled and thinned under the new heat of morning. A flock of sparrows lit at the bird feeder at the corner of the house, bickering and flapping one another out of the way, so close Edgar could have snatched one.

He lay in the tree and watched. Claude was leaner than his father and though he was younger and without his father’s bookish stoop, his hair was shot with gray. He sat in Edgar’s father’s chair and pursed his lips and brought the coffee cup to his mouth.

Edgar had been afraid he would see them kiss.

Almondine went up to Claude and raised her face and Claude smoothed his hand over the top of her skull. Edgar’s mother emerged from the bathroom, hair turbaned. Incandescent light from the bedroom fell across the kitchen table. Claude stood and went to the sink and rinsed out his coffee cup and finally he looked out that window.

Maybe he didn’t know what he’d seen at first. His gaze passed aimlessly across the tree and moved on. Edgar had time to wonder if the new leaves were camouflage enough to hide him, though it didn’t seem possible and he didn’t care anyway. Claude swabbed the dishcloth in his cup and picked up a towel and began to dry it. But somewhere in the back of his mind there must have been a twinge, a nag, an afterimage, for when he lifted his face again he looked straight at Edgar and then he shuddered and stepped back from the sink.

A STEP BACK-A SMALL MOTION, perfectly natural, if any reaction can be said to be natural when you realize someone has climbed a tree outside the window and has been watching like a panther for God knows how long. Since you woke up, perhaps. You lean forward. The boy’s hair is wet and dripping, as if he has been there all night in the rain. He has a frozen, impudent look on his face as if the pane of glass between you could protect him from anything, from everything, and if he blinks you do not see it. After a long stare to be sure you are seeing what you see, you understand that the boy has been up there all along-the rustle wouldn’t have escaped your attention even if you had been half-asleep and distracted. And the birds would never have battled like they did over the feeder just an arm’s length away.

You weigh the idea that this is a prank. You lean back and try to quietly laugh, as if you are in on it. You turn your back and set the coffee mug on the table and then look out the window again and watch with false equanimity as the boy peers back, hands clasped around the bough he is balanced so far out upon. When his mother comes up behind you, you turn and face her and that is when you kiss. You unselfconsciously kiss. Her hand lingers on your shoulder. You stand with your back to the window, saying nothing about what you have seen, as she pulls her coat off its hook. She says one last thing and then she and Almondine are out the door and walking toward the barn.

You turn back to the window. Though you expect him to have looked away to gaze at his mother and the dog as they cross the yard, he has not. His expression is slack and his eyes fill his face. He is all watching, no reacting. And a small voice in the back of your mind says this is a boy that spends his days watching. You’re not going to win a staring contest.

And you get to thinking as well (he is still staring from his wet perch) that if this is a contest then you have already lost, because in that moment when you first understood what you were seeing through the window-when your eyes said it was so and your mind replied it was impossible-in that moment, as you think of it from the boy’s viewpoint, you know you looked frightened. You stepped back from the window, back from the sight of his foreshortened body, fronted by that face, those eyes, that shock of hair hanging over his forehead, dripping.

You stepped back and looked up and your eyes were wide. Now you glance up again, attempt an insolent grin, but it does not come off easily. It comes off forced and the grin fades as if the muscles of your face have grown paralytic and this is also something the boy can see, who has not once looked away or betrayed an emotion. But your failure to muster a smile isn’t what gets to you. What gets to you is that the boy seems to be reading your mind, can hear these thoughts, and this makes you wonder what else he has seen, what else he might know, or guess. And as you lock gazes and you finally force the amused smile you wish had come easily, what unnerves you, what finally makes you turn away, is that without moving a muscle or blinking an eye he begins to smile back.

Smoke

B Y THEN THE YARD WAS IN FULL MORNING LIGHT, THE LAWN a beaded pelt of water. Edgar clambered backward along the apple tree branch and dropped to the ground and trotted past the porch steps. His mother had hooked the barn doors open using the eyelets screwed into the red siding. From the doorway he could hear her voice. She was in one of the whelping rooms soothing a mother as she examined her pup. He walked into the workshop where metal scrap described an ocher swath across the floor. From its nail above the bench Edgar took down an old framing hammer, the one Claude had used roofing the barn the previous summer, the same one he’d lost more than once in the tall grass so that now it bore a freckled patina of rust. The thing was heavy in his hand and he meant to walk back to the house with it, but when he turned Almondine stood in the doorway. Her gaze was fixed upon him and her tail swung side to side in an unhurried wingbeat. The sight of her pulled him up short. He tightened his grip on the hammer’s handle-shaft and went forward and bent and put his free hand to her forechest to walk her back, but instead of giving way she craned her muzzle up and pressed her nose to his ear and then his neck.

He stood. A quaking breath escaped him. He looked at her peering upward, her irises grained with bay and black, the whorls of fine brown fur contouring her face, the diamond of ebony feathering down from her forehead and between her eyes and along the top of her muzzle. He jammed the claw of the hammer into his pocket and this time he set both hands against her. By the time he’d moved her clear of the doorway, the mash of his hands against her fur had quelled something in him and he wound up on his knees while she scented up and down his wet clothes.

His mother emerged from the whelping room. She had a young pup with her, spinning and biting at its leash. “There you are,” she said, then broke off to correct the pup. When she’d finished she was kneeling too and she looked over at him.

“Good grief,” she said. “You’re soaked. Have you been down in the woods already?”

No. Not-No.

He was still figuring out what to say when he heard the back porch door open and whack shut. It was all the provocation the pup needed to leap up and shake the lead in its mouth as if it were a serpent. Edgar’s mother deftly settled it and circled its muzzle with her thumb and forefinger to stop its nipping. “These guys are stir-crazy,” she said. “Thank God the rain stopped. Hurry up and get changed. I’m going to need help this morning.” She kept her attention on the pup as she spoke, waiting for it to break again. Edgar couldn’t tell if she was avoiding his gaze and he waited. When she looked over he saw she was avoiding nothing.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

He could have told her then about what he’d seen that night past, but it was as though she knelt in some place visible to him but unreachable by words. He thought if only he waited she might notice the difference in him. Maybe in the world itself. Outside, there was the thud of the Impala’s door closing. The starter turned over and the engine roughly idled. He knelt there and looked at the doorway. The hammer’s claw bit into his hip. He knew there was still time to walk to the Impala, drag open the door, bring the steel head of the hammer crashing around, but a kind of dislocation passed through him, as though some alternate Edgar had split away to pursue that different future. Then the Impala was rolling along the driveway. On the road it throated up and topped the hill.

He looked up. His mother was still watching him but he didn’t answer her. He turned back to the workshop and replaced the hammer and walked to the house. After he’d changed clothes he came downstairs to the living room and looked at the blanket and pillow lying crumpled on the couch. Claude had not been on the couch when Edgar walked through the house the night before and the gesture at pretense left him feeling hollowed out. He sat with a hand in Almondine’s ruff and stared at the couch. Finally he stood and walked out the door.

What happened next was impossible, yet it happened anyway: an ordinary morning passed. But ordinary was the very thing Edgar was least prepared for. As soon as he walked out the door, his mother asked him to begin fetching the dogs from the kennel in pairs and triples, youngest first. By the time the sun was halfway to its zenith the ordinariness of the day encroached from every direction, the concrete, tangible, undeniable world insisting that the preceding night had not happened. Those memories that had poured through him, indelible at sunrise, began to fade until all that remained was the finest scrim in his mind. It could have been any warm summer morning except for the fact that whenever Edgar closed his eyes a gloss raindrop hung in the darkness before him, the yard lights captured and inverted within. By noon he felt he was coming apart. What he felt was confusion, though it seemed more complicated than that. When his mother headed in for lunch he said he wasn’t hungry and led the last two dogs to the barn and kenneled them and put his head against the pen door and listened as they lapped their water. He found work gloves and scooped up the rubble in the workshop and poured it into the milk can and dragged the can back where it belonged.

When he was done he climbed the mow steps. Almondine stood waiting for him in the midday twilight of pinholes and cracks. He sank onto a pair of straw bales and drew his knees to his chest. Before he could reach out to her, sleep engulfed him. She stood beside his curled body and set a nostril to the finger he’d cut the night before. After a time she circled and downed and lay watching him.

IN HIS DREAM, Edgar sat atop the mow stairs, looking into the workshop. He knew that wasn’t possible-the rough timbered wall of the stairwell should have blocked his view-but his sleep had a lucidity that rendered the wall as transparent as glass. Below, his father stood at the workbench, back turned. Edgar could see the black, tousled hair on the top of his head and the temples of his glasses hooked behind his ears. The top of the workbench was covered with leatherworking tools and a tin can of grommets, and his father held a leash whose clasp end had frayed. When Edgar glanced at the file cabinets, his father stood there too, walking his fingers across the overstuffed manila folders of an open drawer and lifting one out and splaying it open. Both of them worked silently, each engrossed and oblivious to the other.

A tendril of white smoke advanced between the ceiling beams. No flames in sight, no fire to extinguish. Edgar descended the stairs and stood in the workshop. The smoke thickened into a gray haze. He inhaled a wisp of it and coughed, but his father, both his fathers, carried on, unaware. Somehow Edgar had grown impossibly tall, his head almost brushing the ceiling beams. He had the power to be ordinary-sized, he knew, but then the figures of his father would vanish and he would be alone in the workshop.

He found the hay hatch by feel alone, running his hands along the ceiling until he could trace the outline. When he pressed upward a ponderous weight resisted-Edgar himself, asleep on the bales. He shifted both hands to one edge of the hatch and pushed again, straining. A crack appeared. Streamers of smoke shot through, sucked into the space above, but the weight of the hatch was too much and he had to set it back. Then a new plume of smoke appeared, dense and black and tasting like hot metal.

The next instant, the ceiling was out of reach and he was alone in the workshop. It was night. Light from the gooseneck lamp over the front doors penetrated the small workshop window, casting a skewed yellow rectangle against the wall. Almondine appeared, leading Claude. A hesitant expression played over Claude’s face, but Almondine nosed him forward. He passed Edgar and took up the frayed lead. His hands worked the leather and soon the lead was repaired. Claude nodded and stroked Almondine’s back. Then Edgar walked to Almondine’s side and he, too, began to draw his hands along her flanks.

THEY COOKED DINNER THAT night standing side by side, Edgar frying sliced potatoes while his mother turned a pair of pork chops in a skillet, reaching over occasionally to add a dab of fat to his potatoes, like an old married couple thinking about the day while the grease spat. She set out silverware and plates and bread and butter and halved a grapefruit and sprinkled some sugar on top and put the halves face up in bowls.

They sat to eat. He pushed his spoon into the skin between the grapefruit sections and looked out the window at a world gone blue. Blue sky, blue earth, blue trees with blue leaves, as if visible through miles of clear water.

“What are you thinking?” she asked, finally.

He wanted desperately to talk about what had happened the night before but old feelings rushed forward from those first few weeks after the funeral when he’d dreamed about his father: speak and you’ll forget it all even as the words come out. You won’t remember long enough to finish. And he thought, too, about his father signing, They won’t believe you.

Do you think there is a heaven or hell? he signed.

“I don’t know. Not in the Christian way, if that’s what you mean. I think people have a right to believe in whatever they want. I just don’t.”

I don’t mean like the Bible. I mean, do you think anything at all happens to a person after they die?

She spooned up a section of grapefruit. “I guess I don’t think about those things as much as I should. It’s hard to believe it matters when there’s the same work to do either way. Lots of people think it’s an important question, though, and if they think so, then it is for them. But they have to answer it for themselves.”

If someone came in here and gave you positive proof, would you do anything different?

She shook her head. “I think it’s just as likely that someone could say that this place, right here, is heaven, hell, and earth all at the same time. And we still wouldn’t know what to do differently. Everyone just muddles through, trying not to make too many mistakes.”

I like that. This is heaven and hell and earth.

After they cleared the table and washed dishes, they walked to the barn and checked the night rotation schedule and pulled two yearlings to bring up to the house. The dogs roughhoused the length of the barn. When they came up to Almondine they stopped abruptly and presented themselves.

“You know, you need to get that litter named,” his mother said. “It’s been two weeks.”

Her tone was mild, but all of a sudden his head was throbbing and he felt dizzy with some mixture of anger and embarrassment and uncertainty-above all, with the overwhelming effort required to pretend that nothing had changed.

What’s the difference? Name them anything you want. Don’t name them at all.

She looked at him. “You’ve been dragging all day. Are you sick?”

Maybe I am, he signed. Maybe I’m getting tired of the smell of perfume.

“Don’t take an attitude,” she said. Her face flushed. “What’s bothering you?”

We train and train and then one day we just hand them over to strangers and it starts all over again. There’s never any end to it. There’s never any point. We don’t have any more choice in it than they do.

“Oh, I see. And did you have an alternative in mind?”

I don’t know. Something that doesn’t involve shoveling out dog pens every morning. Something that doesn’t mean we have to spend all day in a barn. Something just the two of us could do.

This last he hadn’t known he was going to say and he felt himself blushing.

She searched his face for a long time and ran her hands through her hair, letting it spill over her fingers like strands of dark glass. “This is going to be hard to understand, Edgar. I’ve put off talking about it with you and now I think that was a mistake. I’m sorry.”

You’re sorry. For what, exactly?

Then it was her turn to blush. She sat up straight and a kind of leonine recurve came into her posture.

“I know you saw your father and Claude fighting, but what you didn’t see is that those were old fights. Fights that had been going on all their lives. I don’t understand it, probably no one does, not Claude, not even your father if he were here. But I know this: it’s possible for two good people to be all wrong when they’re around each other. Give Claude a chance. I have, and I’ve discovered a different person than I expected.”

He closed his eyes.

A different person.

“Yes.”

After four months.

“Edgar, do you actually think that how long a person grieves is a measure of how much they loved someone? There’s no rule book that says how to do this.” She laughed, bitterly. “Wouldn’t that be great? No decisions to make. Everything laid right out for us. But there’s no such thing. You want facts, don’t you? Rules. Proof. You’re like your father that way. Just because a thing can’t be logged, charted, and summarized doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Half the time we walk around in love with the idea of a thing instead of the reality of it. But sometimes things don’t turn out that way. You have to pay attention to what’s real, what’s in the world. Not some imaginary alternative, as if it’s a choice we could make.”

But he’s not gone.

His heart pounding as he signed it.

“I know. And all the same, you and I buried him. But he’s here, too, isn’t he? In this kennel, in the house, everywhere. But unless we walk away from this place and never come back we’re going to live with that every day. Do you understand?”

No, he signed. Then: Yes.

“And is that the same as saying he’s alive? Do we treat that feeling as if he were really here?”

He found he couldn’t answer her. What if he did think that the length of a person’s grief was a measure of their love? He was as troubled by the simple fact of her asking that question as by his own inability to answer. And something else bothered him, something that had happened during the morning training sessions. One of the pups had been in that contrary mood that came over them sometimes, when they cared more about drama than praise. The pup had been provoking his mother, taunting, goading any way it could, purposefully misunderstanding what she’d asked of it, tackling its littermates-anything to make her angry. But it hadn’t worked. The carefully modulated tone of her voice and her equally modulated posture had conveyed only nonchalant indifference. It wasn’t until Edgar kenneled the pup that she said, “Next time he pulls that nonsense, I’m going to wring his neck,” and he’d realized that in fact she had been angry. Furious, in fact. That was part of her skill, wasn’t it, not to show any feelings that worked against the training? But if she could fool him about a pup, what might she be concealing when they talked about Claude?

Then his mother said Claude would be coming back in a day or two, and he would be bringing some things to stay. Edgar asked did she love him, and she said, not the way she’d loved his father. He asked if they were going to be married. She said, honey I’m still married, as far as I’m concerned. She said she didn’t expect it to make sense to anyone, maybe especially not to him, and that she could see how the two things might not add up and she didn’t know how else to explain it except just to say that it did, for her. He knew she was a direct person, with little patience for explanations. Claude was coming back for a while, and though she didn’t say it, the implication was it could turn into a long while. Maybe forever.

Perhaps his shrug surprised her. He saw he had no vote in the matter, and didn’t bother to ask for one. When his mother chose to be imperial, arguing with her was hopeless. You could disagree with her words all you wanted, but her bearing was irrefutable. He said he’d stay out in the kennel a while, and she led the two dogs away. At the doorway she looked back at him as though she were about to add one last thing, then she seemed to think better of it and turned and walked to the house.

AFTER SHE WAS GONE HE hooked the top of the kennel doors back and let the night breeze blow in and opened the pens for his litter to run the aisle. Edgar knelt beside Almondine and set a hand in her ruff and for the first time that day he felt some measure of calm.

I wish you had been out here with me last night. Then at least I could be sure it really happened.

His recollection was vivid enough to make his insides tremble, but there were gaps, too. He’d woken up in the barn, in the pen with Essay and Tinder. He didn’t remember going inside or anything that happened after standing in the rain. And in the morning the syringe lay broken in the grass, as if he’d stepped on it, but he didn’t remember that happening, either.

He tried to sort out his feelings. There was the desire to run; there was the desire to stay and put himself in front of Claude the moment he returned; there was the desire to take his mother’s explanations at face value; above all, there was the desire to forget everything that had happened, an aching desire for everything normal and familiar, for the routine of the kennel and reading at night and making dinners, just the two of them, when he could almost believe that his father had stepped out momentarily to check a new litter and would be right back.

He half expected to be spooked in the barn, but he wasn’t, maybe because the night sky was clear. If rain had been falling he wouldn’t have had the courage to stay out. He watched Essay put her feet on the front doors and try to peer over the ledge into the yard. When she tired of that she began parading in front of the dogs, whipping a piece of twine back and forth in her mouth and mock-pouncing.

Quit teasing them, he signed. Come here.

He put them in stays and got out the grooming tackle and nail clippers. They were done blowing coat for the spring, and he used the undercoat rake to draw out the last vestiges of downy gray beneath their guard coats. They lay in a circle around him, panting and watching. He brushed out Almondine first, then Opal and Umbra together, then Finch and Baboo. Tinder and Essay he saved for last because they needed to learn patience. Essay disliked being brushed and Edgar didn’t understand that. He talked to her about it and listened to her complaints but he didn’t stop. They always came to like grooming. He was proud of that. Even if he had a lot to learn as a trainer, he was as good a groom as a person could be.

The stroke of the brush from croup to withers helped him think. What was confusing was his mother’s mercurial attitude. One moment she asked him to decide the future of the kennel, the next she dictated their lives. He couldn’t tell what she truly felt about anything. An expression he’d read in a book came to him: she was taking up with a man. A dumb, old-fashioned expression. In the book it had been something simple and clear. Taking up with someone. As direct an act as turning on a light or shooting a gun, an indivisible act.

Yet this was complicated beyond any ability he had to express it. He felt he could do nothing until he had the right words, but the ones that came to mind only captured what he had been thinking, trailing his real thoughts like the tail of a meteor. To say his mother was taking up with a man: that was an idea that had occurred to him days before, maybe weeks. But only just then had the words bubbled up inside him. As soon as he heard them in his mind he discarded them as fussy and stupid, a remnant of past thought. What he was thinking that moment was something entirely else and he didn’t know if anyone had ever come up with words for those ideas. He stopped grooming Essay and tried to explain, and for a long time the dogs lay watching as his hands traced his thoughts in the air.

Anyway, he told them, all of that was beside the point after seeing his father. He’d found a syringe in the workshop last night. That was his own memory, he was sure of that much. Then his father had touched him and Edgar had been filled with his father’s memories but like some half-made vessel he’d been unable to capture them and they’d vanished, all but a few tattered vestiges. One vestige was the sight of Claude backing out of the barn doors and into a cold, white world.

His father had died from an aneurysm.

A weakness in some place called the Circle of Willis.

Except he didn’t believe that now. Claude had been there that day. He would have left tracks in the snow. Had Edgar seen tracks? Yes-his own, his mother’s, his father’s. The tracks of half a dozen other people might have been there too but he wouldn’t have known the difference, because it wasn’t anything he’d been looking for. The wind had been blowing steadily, filling every footstep and tire track with a dune of white on its lee side. Would Claude’s tracks have led up the driveway? Through the field? Into the woods? He must have gotten there somehow. Edgar remembered running out to the road, but beyond fifty or sixty yards everything had blanked out into a white wall of snow. Claude’s Impala could have been parked at the crest of the hill or two miles off; either way it would have been equally concealed. He thought, for the first of many times, about the expression on Claude’s face that morning as he’d peered in through the kitchen window. Had he seen surprise? Or guilt?

And if it had been guilt, what was Edgar supposed to think about the kiss that followed, so purposeful and defiant? Why go out of your way to bait a person who might know your terrible secret? Unless, he thought, it was better if that person were blinded by anger. Could Claude have concluded so quickly that if Edgar sounded mad with jealousy, anything else he said would be discredited?

He looked at the dogs lying sprawled in various postures of sleep, all except for Almondine, who sat leaning heavily into his thigh.

We’re going to have to sit tight, he signed. We’re just going to have to wait.

He led the dogs to their pens. He spent a minute squatting in the straw with each, drawing a hand across their muzzles and down the curve of their shoulders, making sure they were settled. Then he turned out the aisle lights, and together he and Almondine walked into the dark.

On the gravel-shot lawn, where the syringe had lain crushed in the rainwater, an oblong of grass and weeds caught his eye. He sat on his heels to look. The spot was maybe the size of his palm and at first glance he thought the grass was dead but it was not. It was lush and thick and there in the watery moonlight it was also as white as a bone.

Hangman

H E LAY IN BED THAT NIGHT WITH ALMONDINE BESIDE HIM, both of them waiting for sleep that would not come. Outside, a night wind was blowing and through the high window of his room the rustle of the apple tree and the maple made a continuous surf. Almondine lay with her forelegs outstretched and her head reared up, looking with suspicion at the movement of the curtains. In time, she gave a long, gaped yawn and he reached over and set a hand on her foreleg. Wind she distrusted. Wind could come into the house and slam doors. He smoothed the fine filamentary whiskers that arched over her eyes. In the morning she would be sleeping on the floor, he thought. If she started the night on the bed she always ended on the floor. If she started on the floor there was a chance he might wake in the morning to find her on the bed but more likely she would be standing at the window or lying in the doorway. There was some notion of propriety in her about this but he had never been able to fully make sense of it.

He was looking at Almondine and trying to think of nothing when the image of his father, fingerspelling, came back to him. He sat up in his bed. What was it his father had said in those final moments? How could he have forgotten it?

Find H-A-A-something-I.

He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to see again what had happened the previous night. The rain had turned to drizzle. His father’s gestures had been vanishingly faint. Edgar sat in a reverie, watching his father’s hands, shaped by mist, tracing out the letters, and when he opened his eyes again he thought he’d misread the third letter that night. It seemed to him now to have been a C, not an A.

Find H-A-C-something-I.

The knowledge came at some cost. He’d seen his father reaching toward him again and remembered how he’d begged not to be touched, instead of saying what he wished he’d said. He believed, though he couldn’t have said why, that his father had been spelling out a name, a dog’s name. He turned on the light. On his bedside table he found a scrap of paper and a pencil and he wrote down the letters, leaving a blank for the unknown. Even incomplete, it looked familiar to him. He had no idea what it meant.

Almondine trailed him down the stairs. His mother had turned out the lights in the living room and kitchen and lay in bed reading. It was ten by the kitchen clock.

“Edgar?” she called.

He walked to the door of her bedroom.

“I wish I hadn’t been short with you tonight.”

He shrugged.

“Do you want to talk more?”

No. I can’t sleep. I’m going out to the barn to look for names.

“Don’t stay out long. You’ve got circles under your eyes.”

He held the door for Almondine, but she decided it would be better to sleep on the porch. He walked to the workshop and pulled down the master litter book and paged through it. If he could find a name that fit, he would be able to get the dog’s number and, from there, its file.

And then?

He didn’t know what would happen then.

It took almost an hour to look through the entries, at first scanning the pages, then going more slowly, considering each name for a diminutive. He wound up with nothing-no possibilities, nothing even close. He made a list, filling in the blank with every possible letter and crossing out whatever looked like nonsense: “Hacdi” and “Hacqi” and “Hacwi.” It was like playing hangman, where you guessed a word one letter at a time while your opponent filled in the head, body, arms, and legs of a man on a gallows.

But in this case it was surprisingly difficult to eliminate prospects. The possibility that it was a foreign name had occurred to him, and names were more idiosyncratic than regular words. In the end, he simply had to guess. He crossed out all but six possibilities:

Hacai.

Hacci.

Hachi.

Hacki.

Hacli.

Hacti.

He looked up each word in The New Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language, though, as he suspected, none had entries. He paged through the master litter book one last time, looking for names that could be abbreviated or distorted, but even as he ran his finger down the pages he knew it was hopeless.

Again and again, his eye returned to “Hachi.” The missing letter was an H, he was sure of it-index and middle finger extended horizontally from a closed hand. He visualized his father’s hands, translucent and wind-smeared. The problem was, the wind had gusted and he had barely seen the sign in the first place. In despair, he replaced the master litter book atop the cabinets. He could go through the files one by one, he supposed, though that would take days, weeks even. He leaned his head against a cabinet. He kicked the bottom drawer.

The drawer containing the letters.

Then he got it. Hachi was right, but it was only part of the name. Hachi-something. Hachigo? Hachiru? He’d seen the name in a letter perused and discarded while searching for letters from Brooks. He dropped to his knees and yanked open the drawer. Now that he knew what to look for, it didn’t take long. He recognized the handwriting even before he’d spotted the name.

Hachiko.

May 1935

Chicago

John,

Just a note to let you know that my friends in the diplomatic corps have sent some sad news. Hachiko was found dead in Shibuya station on the seventh of March, in the very spot where I met him so many years ago. He was waiting for Ueno, of course. By all accounts, he still made the trek each day unless his arthritis was so bad he couldn’t walk.

I have included a photograph, sent to me by my friends, of the monument that was erected for him. He walked past it for the better part of his last year. I suppose he never noticed it at all. Yet another example of our dogs exceeding their so-called masters.

How is it, John, I feel I have lost an old friend, though I met him only twice? Perhaps it is because of our Ouji. He and Charles, Jr., are inseparable companions, and I don’t think I exaggerate when I say they have equaled the bond I once had with Lucky.

I take some consolation knowing that a fraction of Hachiko’s bloodline is in my care-and yours. I hope the grand experiment is proceeding well. (I know you don’t like me calling it that, but I can’t help teasing you sometimes.) Last month, while visiting my district in Chicago, I met a family that owned a Sawtelle dog. I saw them walking down the street and bolted from the car like a madman. Perhaps you remember them? The Michaelsons? It is probably my imagination, but I swear I saw a trace of Ouji in their dog. Could it possibly be from one of his matings?

Yours, as always,

Charles Adwin

Eighth Illinois District,

United States House of Representatives

Nothing in the letter seemed significant. Edgar didn’t know of anyone named Charles Adwin. Why had his father told him to find Hachiko? Hachiko, whoever that was, was dead, and had been for many years.

He sat back.

Ueno? Ouji?

He turned back to the file cabinet. He had searched one drawer, but there was a second, also filled with old correspondence and miscellany. He began searching it for a letter postmarked from Washington, perhaps Chicago, and thus he almost missed what he was looking for, because it bore international postage. Only Charles Adwin’s distinctively broad handwriting made him take a closer look.

October 1928

Tokyo

Dear Mr. Sawtelle,

With some difficulty, I have contacted the family of Hachiko and discovered, to my amazement, that there is indeed another litter produced from the same sire and dam. I do not know how you knew this, or if this was a spectacularly lucky guess. Nor do I pretend to understand your breeding project. I know little about dogs and simply admire them like most people, ignorantly, I suppose. But admire them I do, and I have known the best of them. As a boy I had a Setter named Lucky that was the moral superior of any man I’ve known, myself included.

Hachiko is a phenomenon here in Tokyo, much talked about among the residents. The stories are true. I have stood on the Shibuya train platform in the afternoon and watched him walk out of the crowd, alone, and sit and wait for the train to arrive. He is a regal animal, pale cream in color, and he moves with great dignity. I have, as well, walked over to him and stroked his thick pelt and looked into his eyes, and I must say I felt the presence of a great soul. As we stood there, the train arrived and the doors opened and Hachiko watched to see if his master, Professor Ueno, would disembark, but of course he didn’t. Ueno hasn’t stepped off that train for nearly three years, since a stroke felled him at the university. Hachiko must know by now that he isn’t going to appear, but he waited anyway. And so I waited alongside him. A pair of foolish boys stood off to one side of the platform, laughing and taunting the dog, and before I knew what I was doing, I had run over to them and chased them away in a fury-hardly the behavior of a diplomat. Hachiko was not so easily distracted. Indeed, so assured in his posture was he, so patiently did he sit and watch that train, that I felt we were the ones blind to the truth, not Hachiko. After a long wait, he stood and walked back into the crowd, alone. The next day, he was there again, waiting for the train. I know, because I returned as well, drawn to this quiet drama for reasons I cannot easily explain.

Hachiko’s story has become widely enough known that strangers passing through Shibuya station recognize him at once. Some have begun to set food out for him. There are stories of people bursting into tears at the sight of the dog sitting and waiting. As I have already confessed, I was not without some emotion myself. I suppose one cannot conceive of such devotion in man or animal until one has seen it with one’s own eyes. There is already talk of erecting a monument to the dog.

Frankly, I was prepared to dismiss your request, but meeting Hachiko changed my mind. With some difficulty, I was able to locate the breeder. This involved following Hachiko through the streets of Tokyo, to the house where Ueno lived. There the dog paused, briefly, and I fully expected him to walk to the door. Instead he turned his gaze up the street and continued to the home of Professor Ueno’s gardener, who now cares for the dog. (The professor had no family.) The gardener was able to direct me to the breeder, Osagawa-san. I introduced myself and explained your request, and that was when I found out there was a litter. He was adamant that no dog of his could be shipped in the manner you suggest. He does not believe a pup would survive such a trip intact in mind and body, and refuses to consider the idea. He said (after I calmed him) that you are welcome to come to see the pups yourself, at which time he would discuss whether you might be a fit owner. I explained that such a trip was not within your means. Osagawa-san is quite devoted to his dogs. I think he is right about the pup traveling. Though they have been used to hunt bear, the dogs seem extraordinarily sensitive, and even if we found a place for one on a ship to San Francisco or Seattle, there are thousands more miles to go by train before he would find his way to you, with no one to look after him. It simply isn’t practical. I’m sure you understand.

However, another avenue may have opened, if you would consider it. An unexpected result of my visit has been the opportunity to acquire one of these pups for my own family. We have named him Ouji, which means, roughly translated, “Prince.” He is a fine specimen. At four months of age, he lacks the sagacity of Hachiko, but that is to be expected. At times he is a terror to us, but I believe the day will come when I shall thank you for bringing us together. I see in him some of the character I remember in Lucky so many years ago, and though it might be my imagination, I may have caught a glimmer of what I saw in Hachiko’s gaze on the train platform.

The opportunity I suggest is this. In the next twelve months I expect to end my assignment here in Japan and return to my home. I have already announced my intention to resign. Life in the diplomatic corps has been good, but I cannot deny my midwestern roots. In the spring my wife, son, and I will board a ship bound for San Francisco, and by fall we should be settled in Chicago again. Ouji will be about eighteen months old then, and if you should want to come and meet him, you would be welcome. If you are interested, and he is suitable, I don’t think he would object to siring a litter for you. I’ve already put the question to him, but he was busy demolishing a corner of my briefcase and did not answer.

I apologize for failing to plead your case with Ogasawa-san; however, I owe you a debt of gratitude for inspiring my visit to Hachiko. It is a moment that may well have changed my life. You see, my decision to come home was finalized during the long walk beside Hachiko as he made his way through the streets of Tokyo. I cannot justify the feeling, but it seemed possible-indeed, likely-that a third presence accompanied us, someone whom only Hachiko could see. And in that moment, I understood that I had been too long away from home.

Before I close, I must voice one final thought. I cannot believe you thought any plan to ship an unaccompanied pup via freightliner and rail would have worked. I have half entertained the notion that you manipulated me from afar into adopting a sire for your project. If that is the case, then you are a genius, sir, and we could use your kind in the diplomatic corps.

Yours,

Charles Adwin

Senior Secretary

United States Ambassador to Japan

Edgar leaned back, letter in hand. He didn’t have to puzzle over its significance. His father had been pointing him toward something like evidence, though not of anything Claude had done.

I am no dream, his father had been saying. It’s happened before.

A Way to Know for Sure

T HE METRONOME OF THE KENNEL TICKED AWAY, SUNRISE AND sunset. A new litter was arranged, a late-summer whelping expected. Four dogs from the oldest litter were placed over the next two weeks, entailing a frantic burst of finish training, evaluation, and paperwork. Doctor Papineau found a reason to drop in whenever the adoptive owners arrived, exuding what seemed to Edgar an increasingly proprietary air. And Edgar found himself drawn between opposed desires: To wait and watch or to run away. To tell his mother what he suspected or to fling himself at Claude. Days, his head rang with fatigue. Nights, he dropped onto the bed and lay for hours as his gaze jittered across the ceiling. Summer storms drew him like a moth to a porch light and he walked aimlessly through the rain, coring his interior with second thoughts, treble thoughts. The strangest kind of curse had been laid upon him: knowledge without hope of evidence. He felt haunted not so much by his father’s figure as by his father’s memories, poured into him that night only to be lost again. Nothing he did could recall them. There-was that a memory of his own or a shred of his father’s? Or had his ceaseless inward scrutiny manufactured phantoms that were no one’s recollections at all? His mind seemed capable of twisting back along any slithery line of thought, reflecting its own desires like a bead of mercury jiggling before a mirror, recalling anything he wanted, true or false. Whenever the rain stopped he was left disappointed and angry-angry most of all at his father and then aghast at himself for it.

And despite his mother’s declaration, Claude did not come to stay all at once. There was never a clear boundary, never a decisive moment to which Edgar could object. If Claude spent the afternoon working in the kennel, he would leave before evening came. The next day he might not show up at all, or might stop by long after dark to leave a bottle of wine while the Impala idled in the driveway, some companion waiting in the passenger seat, features underlit by the dashboard while the radio played. And his mother following Claude to his car.

Sit tight, Edgar told himself. Just wait.

That meant sitting at the dinner table and watching Claude slice and chew and swallow and smile while Edgar’s heart vibrated like a hummingbird in his chest. It meant sitting in the living room afterward, pretending indifference. Mornings, it meant looking at the soap shavings scattered about the porch, and the cakes become turtles frozen in the act of hatching-altogether too much like Edgar himself, caught and unable to move as days lapped and receded. It meant, worst of all, being obliged to help Claude in the kennel, where, despite his resolve, Edgar too often replied to Claude in slashing, incomprehensible torrents of sign. But when he could stay calm and watch, he saw not one Claude but many: the quiet one, the jovial one, the confidential one, the one who sat silent in a group. When people came to visit, he watched Claude steer them outside to walk through the apple orchard or into the field or up the road. Anyplace quiet, private. There would be talk and laughter. A gesture of surprise. A head nodded in agreement.

None of which told Edgar what he needed to know. In the end he was certain of only one thing: Claude kept coming back. Whatever Claude wanted, whatever he had done-no matter how nonchalant he acted-he had to keep coming back.

THE WHITE PATCH HAD SPREAD, or so it seemed. A lone dandelion, as bleached and colorless as the grass around it, sprouted in the center, mop half-open. Edgar plucked the albino thing and pressed the scentless mass to his nose. When Almondine began to investigate the spot, he shooed her back and rolled the wheelbarrow over, spade rattling in the bed.

His mother emerged from the depths of the barn and stood watching.

“What are you doing?”

He dug the point of the spade into the white patch.

Does that look normal to you?

“What?”

This right here. This spot.

She looked at the patches of dead grass scattered around the lawn, all withered from the dogs’ urine, then back at Edgar with an unhappy expression. When he looked up again she was gone. He dug out a hole until it was below the dandelion’s taproot and carted the dirt into the field by the hazels. He filled the hole with quicklime from the bags stacked by the rear barn doors and poured a bucket of water over it all and watched the quicklime slake. When he’d finished, he filled a coffee can with the same chalky powder and walked to the hazels and salted down the dirt.

DUSK. BATS WHICKERED THROUGH the corona of insects around the yard light. The dogs’ attention spans were long now and they began to show rare, unnameable talents, which Edgar cultivated for hours in lieu of being in the house. There were long recalls in the field, Baboo and Tinder bounding through lime-colored hay from some far zenith. Finch and Opal, learning to untie simple knots. When asked to clear a leash tangled around her feet, Essay would crouch and leap, avoiding in one adroit move the laborious process of stepping out of the loops. In the mow, he sat the dogs in a circle and knotted a treat into a rag and tethered it to one of the fly lines threaded through a pulley in the rafters. He released a dog by name. If any other dog moved, the treat flew into the air and all the dogs grumbled. When he ran out of ways to proof them, he stood in the doorway of the barn and looked at Claude’s Impala and listened to the music playing through the living room windows, waiting for the lights there to go out.

AFTER DINNER ONE EVENING Claude maneuvered Doctor Papineau out to the kennel, unaware, it seemed, that Edgar was there. When he heard them coming, he stepped into the dark outside the rear barn doors and listened. The two men walked into the whelping room, then came out and stood looking into the night.

“Maybe it is time,” Doctor Papineau was saying. “I’ve maintained these dogs are a too-well-kept secret for years now.”

“Well, you know what I think,” Claude said, “but Trudy might appreciate your advice. She respects your opinion something fierce.”

“I don’t know about that. With Trudy, it’s better to wait to be asked than to offer an opinion.”

In the dark, Edgar grinned. He wasn’t sure what they were talking about, but he remembered well the night Doctor Papineau had provoked his mother and how quickly the old man had backpedaled.

“We’d want to rethink your share if you came in on this. Twenty percent might be more reasonable.”

Doctor Papineau grunted, a low hmmm-hmmm-hmm. “I never have gotten around to selling that lot on Lake Namekegon. It’s just sitting there,” he said. “How many does he want to start with?”

“Twelve, for now. A pilot run at Christmas, and then something bigger next year.”

“I suppose I could talk to Trudy next time I’m out.”

They were quiet for a time.

“You know, Stumpy’s is having a fish boil on Saturday. First of the summer.”

“Is that right. Lake trout?”

They turned and walked up the kennel aisle.

“Whitefish, I think. Why don’t we swing by and pick you up? I could make myself scarce if you wanted to talk to Trudy then.”

Edgar watched them go. After Doctor Papineau had driven away, he walked into the house and clapped his leg to call Almondine to go upstairs, all the while feeling Claude’s gaze on his back.

WHEN SATURDAY NIGHT CAME, Edgar made it clear he wasn’t going anywhere with Claude. His mother feigned indifference, as with a contrary pup, though he knew she felt otherwise. The moment the Impala’s taillights disappeared, he rifled the mail drawer, then the kennel files laid on top of the freezer, and the working notebooks. Almondine sat and watched him search. In the closet, he checked the pockets of Claude’s coat and trousers. He found nothing to help make sense of that overheard conversation.

Then he turned to more unlikely places-the ammo box with the old telegram, the truck, and finally the spare room. It was almost empty, and had been since Claude moved out, but on the interior wall was a small door. He crouched and opened it and looked into the unfinished rafter space above the kitchen. There, stacked haphazardly across the dusty batts of pink insulation, were a dozen cardboard boxes, the ones his mother had packed that winter day he’d come upon her with her hair wild about her head and so lost in grief she had not even seen him. He knelt on the joists and pulled the boxes into the room. They were printed with logos for canned tomatoes, baked beans, ketchup, their flaps crossed and taped down. The heaviest were jammed with shirts and trousers exuding the faint scent of his father’s aftershave. Edgar ran his hands along the insides, feeling for anything not fabric. Two of the boxes held coats and hats, and two more, shoes. Finally, a smaller box of miscellany: his father’s spring-banded wristwatch, his razor, his key ring, his empty leather billfold, shiny on the flanks but the corners stretched and pale and the stitching unraveling on one side.

From the bottom Edgar lifted out a Mellen High School yearbook, class of 1948. Tucked inside the front cover was his father’s diploma, printed on thick stock with “Mellen High School” crested across the top. He paged through the black-and-white photographs until he found his father among the twenty-five graduates, between Donald Rogers and Marjory Schneider. His father’s expression was severe in the style of many of the portraits and his gaze focused on some distant concern. He’d worn glasses even then. Edgar turned to the sophomores. Claude was listed as one of three without a picture.

Edgar scrutinized the posed group shots and candids-the football team, the farm club, the choral group, the crowd in the cafeteria. In the process, two loose photographs slipped from the latter pages. People and places he did not recognize. He shook the yearbook over his lap. Three more photographs fluttered out. In one, his father stood on a lakeshore, fishing. In the other, he sat in a truck, sporting several days’ growth of beard. His elbow rested on the open window and his hand was draped over the steering wheel.

The final photograph had been taken in their yard. In it, the barn appeared in the distance, rising darkly above the slope of the side lawn. His father was looking on from near the milk house, a tiny figure. In the foreground stood Claude, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. A massive, full-grown dog had just leapt into his outstretched arms. He was laughing and staggering backward. And one of his eyes was black.

Edgar sat looking at the photograph. The dog, in motion when the shutter was tripped, appeared mostly as a blur, but it was very big, that much was obvious. It didn’t look like one of their dogs, not exactly, a mix of some kind, though predominantly shepherd, with a dark face, high-set ears, and a saber tail. Edgar turned the photograph over. On the back, in his father’s draftsman-like handwriting, a caption read: Claude and Forte, July 1948.

CLAUDE HAD TAKEN ON the kennel paperwork, an idea Edgar’s mother welcomed. Edgar found Claude at the kitchen table often, letters spread about, talking on the telephone for follow-ups and new placements. If Edgar walked in during one of his conversations, Claude would cut his conversation short, as if his brother’s work was hard enough without his being under observation as well. The files and records themselves were neatly organized and legible; the problem was mastering the lineage of the dogs available for breeding the next litter and holding all the requisite information in his head. Claude knew the basics, of course. John Sawtelle had drilled the principles of animal husbandry into both his sons. But Claude had been away from the kennel long enough that the complex scoring system, refined by Edgar’s father over the years, was now a mystery to him.

On the other hand, Claude’s attitude toward any accomplishment was cool indifference, a studious lack of awe. No matter what the feat, whether a pyrotechnic piano solo on a variety show or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar sinking a last-minute skyhook for the Bucks, Claude was unimpressed. He often declared that a person could get anything he wanted if he was willing to go slow enough. The pianist, he would point out, had sacrificed his childhood practicing-of course he could tickle the ivories. Jabbar was born tall and he worked at the game five days a week, all year round.

“Everyone gets good at their job,” he said. “It’s osmosis. The most ordinary thing in the world.”

Edgar’s mother laughed when Claude started in, having decided it was a form of backhanded compliment, since the more impressive the feat, the more steadfastly Claude held to his position. It wasn’t disrespectful, he maintained, because the principle applied to everyone, straight across the board: Trudy, Edgar, and most especially Claude himself. It was never a question of whether Claude could learn to do something, just a question of whether it would be worthwhile and how long it would take. This was his approach to mastering the kennel records (and learning to read sign, for that matter, despite the fact that he walked past the sign dictionary in the living room every day). If he kept his hands in the files long enough, the scoring system would become clear and the merits and flaws of the various lines would sink in without effort. During telephone conversations he idly flipped through whatever folder happened to be in front of him, doodling lineage charts on the newspaper.

His father had been planning a litter for a sweet-natured black and chestnut mother named Olive. He’d spoken of finding a perfect cross, but Claude had searched fruitlessly in Edgar’s father’s notebook. As Edgar well knew, that notebook was a mess of illegible notes, lists, reminders, and diagrams. The same man who filled out log records with the precision of a penmanship teacher wrote his notes in a madman’s scribble. But Olive was coming into heat soon, and Claude sat at the table after dinner behind an avalanche of manila folders. Late one evening, he walked into the living room.

“I have Gar’s cross for Olive,” he said.

Edgar’s mother looked up from the magazine she’d been reading. “Who?”

“Drift,” he said. “He’s sired three good litters. Healthy as a horse. He’s down in Park City.”

Edgar’s mother nodded. She had intuition on crosses, based on her memory of how past litters behaved, but she had always been indifferent to the detailed research, leaving that to Edgar’s father. The pups were what excited her, all their talents as yet unrevealed. But Edgar saw the problem at once, and he was signing a response before he had time for second thoughts.

That’s a line cross. A bad one.

Trudy looked back at Claude and interpreted. “A line cross?”

“Let’s see,” Claude said. “Olive was sired by…” He retreated into the kitchen and rummaged through papers. “I’ll be damned,” they heard him say. “Olive and Drift are both from the same sire, one generation apart. Half Nelson. Sired by Nelson, who was out of Bridger and Azimuth.”

“What’s the problem with that?” his mother asked.

Remember Half Nelson and Osmo? Edgar signed.

“Oh yes,” she said. “Not good.”

Claude had returned, but he couldn’t read Edgar’s sign.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that a couple of years ago, Half Nelson sired a litter out of Osmo, with three pups stillborn and the rest with straight fronts. Gar decided it was a bad cross.”

He had decided more than that, Edgar thought. His father had considered that litter a disaster. He’d paid scant attention to superficial traits like coat color, but bones mattered, and straight fronts, which meant bad angulation in the dog’s forelegs, were hard to eliminate from a line. And yet Osmo had borne good litters from other sires. Edgar’s father had spent most of a day pulling folders and making notes until he’d tapped his pencil twice and announced he’d found what he was looking for, line crosses with a common ancestor in Nelson. Edgar sat with him while he talked it through, and he could still see the diagrams they’d drawn.

“Would have been nice to know that a couple of days ago,” Claude said.

“Edgar didn’t know you were considering Drift until just now,” his mother said, before Edgar could respond. She turned to him. “Who would be good, then? Do you have an opinion?”

Edgar wanted to leave Claude hanging, make him work it out for himself so he would look foolish and slow. Any help he gave Claude would only advance his brainless theory of osmosis, but Edgar wasn’t sure Claude wouldn’t take a wild guess, and he couldn’t stand the idea of the dogs being used clumsily.

Gleam, he signed. Or one of his sibs.

After Trudy translated, Claude pursed his lips and returned to the kitchen while Edgar grinned. His mother gave him a don’t-push-it-buster squint and turned back to her magazine. He knew what Claude would find: Gleam was a four-year-old brindle, placed with a farm family east of town. The little boy who lived there sometimes sought out Edgar at school to tell him about the dog. He also knew Claude wouldn’t find any problem with the cross; he’d have to go back seven generations before he found any common ancestry, if he bothered to look that far.

When Edgar came downstairs the next morning Claude was sitting at the table, manila folders stacked before him. “We’re going with Gleam,” he said. He waved a coffee cup over the records. “Did you want to check me on this? I’m going to call the owner this afternoon and arrange it.”

Edgar tried to think of a response but his mind seized up. He shrugged and walked to the doorway.

“Look,” Claude said. “Is there something in particular you want to say? It’s just me and you here. Whatever’s on your mind will stay between us.”

Edgar stopped.

I bet it will, he signed. He thought how he’d capitulated the night before, how he’d helped Claude though it was the last thing in the world he’d wanted to do. Slowly, and with great precision, so that the gesture was unmistakable, Edgar angled his left hand in front of him and shot his right beneath it, index finger as straight as the knife it was meant to evoke.

Murder. That’s what’s on my mind.

Claude’s eyes tracked Edgar’s hands. He looked as if he were searching his memory, nodding all the while noncommittally.

Edgar turned and walked onto the porch.

“I just want you to know,” Claude called from the kitchen. “Picking Gleam like that. I was impressed.”

Edgar pushed through the screen door and let it slam, blood rising in his cheeks. He’d mustered the resolve to accuse Claude to his face, yet somehow Claude had twisted the moment into a chance to look magnanimous. And to whom? No one had been there to see it. Worst of all, Claude’s compliment had elicited in him a flush of pride that made him instantly loathe himself.

The problem-the very troubling problem-was that, when he wanted to, Claude could sound so much like Edgar’s father.

NIGHT. HE STOOD IN THE bathroom and crossed his arms at his waist and peeled his shirt over his head and looked in the mirror. Where a story had once been written in mottled blue and green, now only pale and ordinary flesh.

Memory of his father’s hands sinking into that spot. How, with the slightest pressure, his heart might have stopped. The stream of memory passing through him like rain, now as faint and undetailed as dreams called back from sleep. He pressed a thumb to his sternum. A familiar ache lit his ribs.

He swung his arm wide, hand curled into a fist.

The sensation, when he brought it to his chest, exquisite.

WARM AFTERNOONS, HE WALKED with Almondine into the woods, where they slept under the dying oak. Sometimes he took Essay or Tinder along to make it look like training. Whenever his mother insisted he spend the night in the house, he waited until she and Claude were asleep, then led Almondine downstairs, bearing all his weight onto the creaking treads. From the bedroom doorway his mother watched him rummage through the refrigerator.

“What are you doing?”

Going to the barn.

“It’s eleven o’clock at night!”

So?

“Oh, for God’s sake. If you can’t sleep, read something.”

He slammed the back door and stalked across the yard.

Yet he couldn’t oppose them in everything. One problem that irked him especially was naming the newest litter, something he’d delayed for three weeks. But now the pups’ eyes were open and their milk teeth were beginning to come through and they had begun exploring. The earliest puppy training would start soon-the playing of unusual sounds, the setting up of miniature stairs and hoops and all those puzzles for infants-and when that began they had to have names. He carried the dark blue New Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language into the whelping pen and sank cross-legged into the straw. Four pups bumbled to the edge of the whelping box and looked at him.

The spine of the dictionary cracked dryly when he laid it open. He sprayed the pages through his fingers. Annotations flickered past, the oldest in his father’s handwriting, but most in his own squarish lettering. Good names had once lived between the dictionary’s covers: Butter. Surrey. Pan. Cable. Argo. Sometimes he could even remember the exact place he’d been sitting when the word had risen from the page and declared itself to be a name. At the back of the dictionary was an essay by Alexander McQueen, the editor, entitled, “2,000 Names and Their Meanings: A Practical Guide for Parents and All Others Interested in Better Naming.” Edgar knew it by heart. “The naming of an infant is of more than passing importance,” McQueen had written. He’d listed seven rules for choosing names, such as “The name should be worthy,” “It should be easy to pronounce,” and “It should be original.” Now, the more Edgar thought about those rules, the more the unclaimed words turned to nonsense: Spire. Encore. Pretend. Herb. The mother dog lifted her nose to scent the dry pages, then sighed to acknowledge his difficulties, and he closed the dictionary.

The pups had fallen asleep, except one who fussed at a nipple, nursing then letting go then taking it again. He reached past the pup and rolled the nipple between his fingers and brought his fingers wet to his nose and tongue.

What are you complaining about? he signed.

He set aside the dictionary and shifted the pup back into place, stroking it two-fingered while it nursed and he didn’t stop until it, too, lay asleep.

AFTERWARD, HE HERDED HIS LITTER into the workshop and up the narrow steps, stopping only to retrieve the photograph of Claude and Forte from its hiding place, tucked into the envelope with the Hachiko letter. The mow was still warm from the day’s heat. He swung open the broad door at the front and let the night air wash in, cool and thick with pollen. The dogs wrestled and plunged across the straw bales at the back, for the once-vast wall of yellow had diminished to a low platform. They would need more straw soon. That meant a day standing at the mow door, waiting at a creaking conveyer for bales and driving in the hay hook and stacking them crosshatched to the rafters. He looked out at the dark woods. He wondered if Schultz had imagined teams of men working where he stood at harvest time, shouting, cursing, taunting those below to bring on the hay as they hauled on the sling ropes.

When the dogs settled down he shut the door and they began to work. He’d forsaken the regular training schedule, instead teaching them playful acts with no point and no purpose. Tagging one another. Carrying scraps of doweling from place to place. Dropping to the floor during a carry. Watching the dogs was the only thing that put him at ease, and he made a game of it, trying variations, setting up barriers, switching the order, testing connotations. A tag, they decided, meant not merely scenting another dog, but a solid nose-push. A carry meant not dropping a thing, even when a tennis ball rolled by. Edgar found a pen and an old spoon and a length of welding rod and he asked the dogs to take those items in their mouths instead of doweling, despite their strange texture and taste.

When they’d agreed on this new meaning of carry, an hour had passed and he declared a break. While the dogs lounged in the loose straw, Edgar took out the photograph of Claude and Forte. The stray was on his mind for the first time in a long while. Such a foolish dream to have hoped the dog would come in from the woods. He thought of that day in the field, how swiftly Claude had turned to shoot the doe after the stray bolted. After a while he slid the photograph back into his pocket and he read from The Jungle Book, letting his hands swipe through the air.

So loud did he howl that Tha heard him and said, “What is the sorrow?’” And the First of the Tigers, lifting up his muzzle to the new-made sky, which is now so old, said: “Give me back my power, O Tha. I am made ashamed before all the Jungle, and I have run away from an Hairless One, and he has called me a shameful name.” “And why?” said Tha. “Because I am smeared with the mud of the marshes,” said the first of the Tigers. “Swim, then, and roll on the wet grass, and if it be mud it will surely wash away,” said Tha; and the First of the Tigers swam, and rolled, and rolled, till the Jungle ran round and round before his eyes, but not one little bar upon his hide was changed, and Tha, watching him, laughed. Then the First of the Tigers said, “What have I done that this comes to me?” Tha said, “Thou hast killed the buck, and thou hast let Death loose in the Jungle, and with Death has come Fear, so that the People of the Jungle are afraid one of the other as thou art afraid of the Hairless One.” The First of the Tigers said, “They will never fear me, for I knew them since the beginning.” Tha said, “Go and see.” And the First of the Tigers ran to and fro, calling aloud to the deer and the pig and the sambhur and the porcupine and all the Jungle Peoples; but they all ran away from him who had been their Judge, because they were afraid.

He roused the dogs again and began rehearsing two new commands. He began with away, demonstrating in small increments: at first it was enough to look somewhere else without moving. The shared gaze training helped now, and they caught on quickly. Then he coaxed them into taking a step, then several steps, then running all the way across the mow. Finch was the first to get it: no place in particular to go, just not here. The dog fairly danced with excitement.

Far more difficult was the idea that another dog might convey a command. For example, if he wanted Baboo to down, all Edgar had to do was lift his hand in the air-Sawtelle pups knew that sign when they were three months old. But now he wanted Baboo to down if Finch or Essay nosed him on the hip. They called this linking-teaching a dog that one action automatically followed another. Linking was what made a dog sit when his companion stopped walking. Linking was what made for a clean finish on a recall, when the dog not only returned but circled behind and sat on one’s left. And when it came to linking, the Sawtelle dogs were genuinely gifted.

He put Baboo in a stay and stepped one pace back.

Tag, he signed to Essay, indicating Baboo.

The instant Essay touched the dog, Edgar raised his hand. Baboo downed. A moment of revelry. They practiced again, this time with Baboo tagging. After dozens of trials-with breaks to race for a knotted rag thrown into the dark corners of the mow-they’d all gotten the hang of it. He moved them farther apart-five, ten, twenty feet-using a long line threaded through a floor ring for corrections at a distance. After more practice, with just a hint of down the dogs dropped when tagged-not every time, but half the time, then two thirds of the time, until finally he could stand motionless and watch while Essay dashed across the mow, nosed Baboo’s hindquarters, and Baboo sank to the floor.

Edgar celebrated by rolling them onto their backs and holding their feet against his face. They were fastidious about their pads and when he inhaled against them, an earthy popcorn smell filled his senses. The dogs craned their necks to watch, eyeing him as if astounded, and boxing and writhing to coax him back again. He clapped them to their feet for more practice. Always the same few commands now. He played them again in different orders with different pairings. Different obstacles. Longer or shorter releases.

Roll on your back.

Carry this to the other dog.

Tag that dog.

It was very late, and he was almost tired enough to sleep when he chose a sequence at random and watched them work it out. Opal trotted across the mow holding a dowel in her mouth. She tagged Umbra. Umbra dropped to the floor.

Something about the sight of it brought Edgar to his feet. He had them repeat the sequence.

Carry this to that dog.

Tag that dog.

Down when you are tagged.

All at once blood was roaring in his ears. He understood that an idea had slowly been dawning on him, parceled out over the course of days in bits and pieces from some dim compartment of his mind. They went through the drill again. Each time, he saw more clearly the image of Claude backing out of the barn, looking for something dropped or flung away, the white snowy world behind him.

If that sight brought the memory back for Edgar, might it do the same for Claude?

When he was too tired to run the dogs, he sat and peered at the photograph of Claude and Forte. He closed his eyes and lay on his side, distantly aware that the dogs had gathered around, watching. For so long he’d lurched between one truth and another. Nothing had seemed certain, nothing had even seemed knowable.

But now-perhaps-he’d found a way to know for sure.

Driving Lesson

H E HEARD THE SOUND OF FOOTSTEPS ON THE MOW STAIRS, and his mother ducked around the vestibule door, her dark hair in a loose ponytail that swung sinuously across her shoulders. Essay, Tinder, and Opal were in the mow with Edgar, in sit-stays at the moment, and he was holding a length of thick rope, knotted at both ends, of the kind they used for practicing retrieves. Almondine lay sprawled near the doorway.

“How about a ride into town?” his mother said. “We could stop for lunch.”

The three yearlings, excited by his mother’s appearance, began to lift their haunches off the floor and Edgar stepped into their line of sight and caught their gazes until they settled back into sits. When he was sure they would stick, he turned to his mother.

I want to keep working Essay, he signed, a half-truth. He’d begun the morning practicing the tag-and-down sequence but they’d fought him on it, playing dumb after being pushed night after night. He wanted more than anything to be left alone to work, for there to be no chance that the sight of Claude near his mother would bring on one of those cramps of anger that could snatch his breath away. The idea of the three of them squeezed into the truck-or worse, the Impala-set off a caw of panic in his mind. His mood, after a night of half-recalled dreams in which he repeatedly slipped from the branches of the apple tree into some formless abyss, was already black and raw.

“Okay,” she said, cheerily. “Someday you’ll be my son again, I just know it.”

He heard their voices in the yard and then the truck started and crunched along the driveway, and Edgar and the dogs went back to work. He clapped up Almondine and they went through a few retrieves while the yearlings watched. When Essay had executed three fetches in a row without a mistake, Edgar rotated Opal through the routine, then Tinder, and then he began with Essay again, this time, lest she grow bored, tossing the rope into a maze of straw bales he had hastily constructed. When Tinder finished, he led them all downstairs.

He decided to eat an early lunch rather than risk their coming back while he was in the house. He walked past the Impala, checking the impulse to mule-kick a dent into its side, and let Almondine up the porch steps ahead of him. When he walked into the kitchen Claude was sitting at the table. He was smoking a cigarette, and the newspaper was quartered in his hand. Edgar’s first impulse was to turn and stalk out while the spring on the porch door was still jangling, but he forced himself to cross the kitchen and yank open the refrigerator and pile sandwich fixings on the table. Claude kept reading as Edgar slapped together slices of bread and cheese and pimiento loaf. At last Claude laid aside the newspaper.

“I’m glad you came in,” he said. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

Edgar faced the cool depths of the refrigerator and pretended to hunt for something. Then he pulled out a chair across from Claude and sat and began to eat his sandwich.

“You know how to drive that truck?” Claude asked.

Edgar shook his head, which was the truth. His father had let him steer now and then from the passenger side, but only briefly.

“Now, that’s a crime,” Claude said. “When Gar and I were your age, we’d already been driving for quite a while. It’s handy sometimes, you know.”

Edgar tore off a corner of his sandwich and handed it down to Almondine.

“I’ve been trying to talk your mom into the idea we ought to teach you, but she’s not convinced. She’s in favor of Driver’s Ed.” He said “Driver’s Ed” as if it were the silliest thing in the world. “One day our dad just took us out and showed us how. That’s all. After about an afternoon of tooling around, we were all set. Down to Popcorn Corners and back to begin with-a milk run, like they say.”

Edgar thought he understood where Claude was heading and he nodded.

“Of course, you and I have an advantage. It was all stick back then, every truck we ever had. But the Impala’s automatic. As long as your mom’s off in town, I was thinking you and I might have a little fun. Something we could slip off and do, something your mom doesn’t necessarily even need to know about. By the time you get into Driver’s Ed you’ll be the best in your class. Plus, you’ll impress the hell out of your mom the first time you two go for a practice drive. What do you say?”

Edgar looked at Claude.

O, he fingerspelled, as he took a bite of his sandwich.

K, he signed.

Claude watched Edgar’s hands, then slapped the table. “There you go,” he said. “Swallow it down, son, it’s time to take the wheel. Your whole life’s about to change.” He rattled the newspaper together and stood and twirled the car keys around his finger. Edgar set the remains of his sandwich on the table and stood and walked out with Almondine at his heels.

The Impala was parked facing the road, driver’s-side wheels resting in the grass. Claude opened the passenger door and prepared to get in, but when he saw Almondine, he tipped the seat forward and said, “Jump in, honey. Your boy’s about to amaze you.” Then Claude said one thing more. He was looking down the drive with his forearm resting on the roof of the car. He patted the metal with the flat of his hand.

“Right here’s something Gar would never have done,” he said. “He’d have kept you pinned down as long as he could.”

Almondine had jumped into the back seat. Now she was looking out at Edgar, panting. He’d been hearing a ringing in his ears ever since Claude had said the word “son,” and now something that had been hanging by a thread inside him seemed to come loose.

He opened the driver’s-side door.

Come out, he signed to Almondine. You have to stay home.

She looked at him and panted.

Come, he signed. He stepped back. Almondine maneuvered out of the car again and he led her up the porch steps and into the kitchen. He squatted down in front of her and ran his hand over her head and down her ruff and he took a long look at the sublime pattern of gold and brown in her irises. You’re a good girl, he signed. You know that.

Then he closed the door and walked back to the Impala. Claude stood watching him over the flat blue expanse of its roof. The three little vents set into the car’s flanks reminded Edgar of shark’s gills.

Let’s go.

He didn’t care if Claude understood his sign. His body language was clear enough.

Claude dropped into the bucket seat on the passenger side. He rolled down his window and Edgar did the same. “You know the gas from the brake, right? Everybody knows that.”

Claude handed Edgar his ring of keys. Edgar examined them up in the light and gave the gas pedal an experimental push.

“You don’t want to pump the gas,” Claude said. “You’ll flood it.”

The key slid smoothly into the ignition and the Impala’s starter whirred and the engine roared to life. Edgar held the key twisted over a moment too long and there was a horrendous grinding noise. He let up, then seeing the expression on Claude’s face, twisted it again. He pulled his foot off the gas pedal and set it on the floor and listened to the motor idle.

Claude started talking again, but Edgar wasn’t paying attention. He tested the brake pedal experimentally, felt it give under his foot. The shifter was on the column. The orange tip of the gear indicator was under the speedometer. He’d seen people do this before with automatic transmissions; he pulled the shift lever back and dropped it into D.

The car began to roll forward.

“That’s right,” Claude said. “Nice and easy.”

The steering wheel turned with a strange oily smoothness compared to Alice. Edgar wondered if the Impala had power steering. Stranger yet was the huge flat hood extending in front of them. He was used to a thin orange oblong with a smokestack coughing black fumes. This felt like steering from behind a vast blue table. The engine sounded distant and muffled. And he couldn’t see what the front wheels were doing-he had to steer by feel alone.

“That’s good,” Claude said. “Just ease it down the drive and we’ll see what’s coming. Take a left, head down toward the Corners so your mom won’t catch us if she’s coming back from town.”

Edgar looked at him and nodded. He began to press the gas pedal, and then, without quite realizing he’d made any decision, his foot kept pressing down, a surprisingly long way, until it was flat against the floor.

The Impala bellowed. It fishtailed in place on the dirt and gravel of the driveway. Edgar had a good grip on the wheel, and he kept the car more or less straight ahead as it shot forward-maybe a little on the grass to the right, but that was better than clipping the house.

“Whoa there, son,” Claude exclaimed. “You got a tiger by the tail. Let up! Whoa!”

It took no time at all to reach the end of the driveway. Edgar wondered how fast they were going but he didn’t have time to look at the speedometer, so much was happening. For one thing the trees in the orchard were coming up fast on the right. For another, he had craned around to watch the barn receding in the back window, and that was difficult to do with his foot squashed down on the gas. When he faced front again, he thought a very long time before he decided not to run the car straight off the road into the woods across the driveway, because he knew they weren’t really going that fast. Out on the road, they’d be able to pick up a lot more speed. As the last apple tree blurred past the side window he started turning the wheel.

Claude had stopped shouting “Whoa!” as if they were on a horse-drawn wagon and reached over to throw the wheel to the left. They struggled a little trying to agree on when to return the wheel to center; Edgar thought that should happen when the mailbox was dead square in front of the windshield but Claude wanted to start earlier than that. Together, they worked out a compromise. The Impala’s nose heaved left and the car performed a deeply satisfying slide and then they were crossways in the road, or nearly, and there was the deafening sound of gravel being chewed up under the tires and spat at the quarter panels. Claude now had both his hands on the wheel; he had definite ideas about the direction they should be headed.

Okay, Edgar signed, you steer.

He took his hands away, keeping his foot smashed down on the gas pedal. Unburdened of the task of navigating, he could twist around to look through the rear window again; it was exhilarating to see the road shrinking away like a broad brown strip of taffy being pulled out of the trunk. Also, now he had time to check the speedometer. He didn’t know if it was right; it didn’t seem like they could be climbing past fifty already-they weren’t even to the fence line. Maybe it was just the wheels spinning out on the gravel. On the other hand, they had started moving pretty fast once Claude got them headed down the center of the road. Claude had once said the car was a four-twenty-something. Edgar thought that was good; he thought that meant it would go very, very fast.

Air began to roar through the open windows.

Don’t we get to listen to some music? he signed.

Then Claude was shouting about the gas pedal. Edgar reached past him and turned on the radio. Over the roar of the engine, he heard the steely twang of a guitar.

Country music, he signed. My favorite.

He pressed one of the big black preset buttons to switch channels, then another.

I really don’t like it when you call me son, he signed. That’s not right. I’m not your son.

He turned the radio off again.

“I can’t understand you,” Claude said. “Let up on the gas, for Christ sakes.”

In fact, he signed, I really don’t like you being in my house at all.

Claude reached over and tried to shift the transmission into neutral, but Edgar put his hands on the steering wheel again and wrenched it to the left. The car slewed across the gravel and a stand of maple trees filled the windshield. Claude let go of the shifter and put both hands back on the wheel and, to Edgar’s surprise, was able to square their line of travel with the road again.

Now the speedometer was up to seventy-three. The Impala was jittering around as if it were traveling on a strip of ball bearings. That was the fastest he had ever traveled in a car, Edgar thought, and it was interesting that it was on gravel. The speed really ate up the road; ahead, he could see where the dirt merged onto the broad curve of blacktop that continued north and veered east to Popcorn Corners. There was a little bridge over a creek up ahead, and he wondered if they could get the Impala up to seventy-five by the time they reached it. Before he had a chance to ponder it further, they’d arrived. There was a lurch, and when they landed again, Edgar felt as if his body were still sailing through the air while his eyes had fallen back to earth.

He smiled at Claude and checked the speedometer. They’d made it to seventy-five after all. The hood of the Impala was tarnished, and that was a shame. On a nice day, he bet it would be fine to see the clouds climbing across that blue mirror stretched out in front of them. Like flying into the sky.

“Okay,” Claude said. He had quickly gotten the knack of steering from the passenger side. They hardly wobbled at all, which was a good thing, because the road was narrow.

“Okay,” Claude repeated. “You’re the boss. What do you want?”

Edgar wondered that himself. He didn’t really have a plan. In fact, the whole driving thing had been Claude’s idea. And there was that clanging in his head. It was driving him batty; he tried hammering the heel of his palm against his forehead to make it stop. It didn’t help-though, at least now his head had a reason to ring. He turned and grinned sheepishly at Claude.

Why not go all the way to Popcorn Corners, he signed. A milk run, like they say.

“I don’t understand you,” Claude said. “You know I can’t read-”

P-O-P-C-O

“Don’t fucking fingerspell at me,” Claude shouted. “Let up on the gas!”

And then, before Edgar could react, Claude reached past him and flipped the transmission lever up into neutral. From where he sat, Claude couldn’t have seen the shifter window in the dashboard, so it had to have been a wild guess, and he might easily have thrown it into reverse instead. That was an interesting possibility, and one Edgar hadn’t considered before. What happened if you dropped into reverse going, what, sixty-four miles an hour? No, make that fifty-eight. Fifty.

The sound of the Impala’s engine, roaring while in gear, now rose to a shriek, as if it might leap from its moorings. Claude twisted the key and the engine died. They drifted to a stop. For a while there was just the sound of the two of them panting and a clicking, thumping sound. Edgar looked down and discovered his foot spastically pumping the gas pedal. Their plume of dust caught up with them, then swept past, a dry, brown fog. The cooling engine block made a low ticking sound.

When do I learn to parallel park? Edgar signed. I hear that’s tricky.

Claude pulled the keys out of the ignition and sat back in the passenger seat. He couldn’t possibly have understood what Edgar had signed, but he started to laugh anyway. Pretty soon he was howling and slapping his knee. Edgar got out of the car and began to walk back up the road toward the house, two or three miles distant. Behind him, he heard the passenger door slam and the crunch of footsteps on gravel. The starter on the Impala whined and stopped, whined and stopped.

Before Edgar had gotten far up the road, Claude had backed the car around and then it was rolling along beside Edgar. The engine made a wounded sound and something was tapping or clicking under the hood. Wha-ting! Wha-ting! Wha-ting! Tingtingtingtingtingtingtingtingting!

“Guess I had it wrong about driving,” Claude said. “No hard feelings?”

Edgar walked along.

“While you’re enjoying your stroll, you might want to consider that you and I have people in common. Your mother, for instance.”

And my father, he signed.

Claude couldn’t help trying to read his sign, even when Edgar flashed it out. The Impala rolled alongside him while Claude replayed the gestures in his mind.

“Yeah, likewise,” Claude said, taking a wild guess. Then he gave the Impala the gas. It knocked and stuttered down the road. He’d gone about a half mile toward the house before the car slid to a stop again and he climbed out.

“You’re just like your father! Goddamn it all!” he shouted, kicking the gravel. Then he turned and climbed into the Impala and roared away.

Trudy

I F TRUDY HADN’T BEEN PREOCCUPIED AS SHE DROVE TO MELLEN, she might have felt pleasure in the trip, for it was one of those perfectly warm June days when the sun felt like a voluptuous and reassuring hand pressing down on a person’s skin. Ordinarily she liked the radio, but the roar of air past the truck window was best for thinking, and Edgar was on her mind. He was engaged in a rebellion she didn’t completely understand. It was over Claude, she knew that much. Three nights in the last week he’d refused to come in from the kennel, sleeping instead in the mow. But whenever she tried to talk to him, he just walked off or stood there and shut her out as only Edgar could.

He had, of course, always been hard to read, even as a little boy, so inward and stoic, beyond anything she’d expected. He had virtually never cried as an infant. Almondine had done his demanding for him, half nursemaid, half courier. His teachers attributed his stoicism to his lost voice, but Trudy knew that wasn’t it. In fact, Edgar had started communicating with a desperate urgency when he was only a year old. By the time he was two he had absorbed the clumsily demonstrated basics of sign language and begun, to her amazement, to construct a vocabulary of his own. There’d been a period-memorable but exhausting-when he’d demanded she name things from the moment he woke until his eyes fluttered closed in exhausted sleep. The ferocity with which he applied himself was almost frightening, and though she supposed it could have been a perverse form of motherly pride, she could not believe such obsession was typical. Almost in self defense, they’d handed him the dictionary and started him naming the pups.

He had also been demonstrative and intelligent from the very beginning, his questions startlingly insightful. She would watch him absorb a new idea and wonder what effect it would have on him, because, with Edgar, everything came out, eventually, somehow. But the process-how he put together a story about the world’s workings-that was mysterious beyond all ken. In a way, she thought, it was the only disappointing thing about having a child. She’d imagined he would stay transparent to her, more part of her, for so much longer. But despite the proximity of the daily work, Edgar had ceased long before to be an open book. A friend, yes. A son she loved, yes. But when it came to knowing his thoughts, Edgar could be as opaque as a rock.

A perfect example had been the Christmas when he was five. He’d started kindergarten that year. Every morning they stood together at the end of the driveway and she’d watched him board the school bus, and every noon he’d returned, hands upraised to greet Almondine, who almost flattened the boy as soon as he stepped clear of the bus, making such a spectacle that other children called Almondine’s name from the bus window. Edgar had been excited to be around other children that fall, but he wouldn’t tell her much about school unless she probed him. What had they done that day? Was his teacher nice? Did she read stories? Then she would coax him into telling her the story. Sometimes there was a sign he didn’t have yet, and together they would look it up in the sign dictionary, and if that failed, invent one on the spot. When December came, he’d sat at the kitchen table and written out a wish list for Santa and sealed it in an envelope before she could read it. She’d had to wait until he was asleep to steam the envelope open.

At the top of his list he’d written, Pocket watch WITH A CHAIN.

It had taken her completely by surprise. He had never once expressed a desire for a watch, and he already knew how to tell time-he’d learned when he was four. For a few long weeks he had included the time in everything he said-At six fifteen we are going to eat dinner. When I get done with my bath it will be eight thirty. That had quickly lost its thrill, but perhaps his obsession with telling time had just been internalized, gone opaque. In any case, it was the number one thing on his list and she was determined he would find it under the tree. She and Gar located a watch shop in Ashland whose proprietor rummaged around in back and produced an old pocket watch that a boy might use (and almost certainly break). And it came with a long chain. The winding knob was intricately knurled and engraved on the brass cover was a flowery letter C. Trudy liked the C. They could say it stood for Christmas. The man told them it would run for almost a whole day when fully wound; perhaps it lost five or ten minutes, but that would okay for a boy-better, in fact, since he would have to wind and set it frequently. They’d wrapped the watch and put it under the tree and made sure that the smallish box in green foil was the last one Edgar opened. He’d looked at the watch in his hand and smiled exactly the smile she’d been hoping for, and then he slipped it neatly into the pocket of his pajamas.

“Aren’t you even going to open it?” Trudy cried. “Press the little lever! Look at the hands!”

He took it out of his pocket and let them demonstrate how to wind the works and set the time. He watched intently, but when they’d finished, he closed it up and slipped it back into his pocket. That was the last they saw of it for almost a week, until Trudy walked into the living room and found Almondine in a sit and Edgar swinging the watch back and forth before her eyes. Almondine panted and looked past the swinging timepiece at Edgar. When Edgar understood that someone else was in the room he turned around.

It doesn’t work on dogs, he signed.

“You’re trying to hypnotize her?” Trudy had said. “That’s why you wanted a watch?”

He nodded. Come on, he signed to Almondine. It’ll work better on puppies. And he pulled on his coat and marched out to the kennel while Trudy stood there, mouth hanging open.

That had been the moment she’d realized how he carried things around inside, things entirely separate from her. Five years old, barely in kindergarten. She had no idea where he’d heard of hypnosis. She couldn’t remember seeing anything on TV that might have put it in his head. She didn’t think any of his books mentioned it. Wherever he had picked it up, he’d been walking around with that idea for weeks-months, maybe-without mentioning it even once. Just watching, thinking, wondering. That was the kind of boy he was. And she realized that he was, in some sense, already lost to her-had outgrown her in some essential way. He wasn’t keeping secrets. If she had known to ask him if he was interested in hypnosis, he would have told her. He just hadn’t offered the information because she hadn’t asked.

And the obvious question was: What else was he thinking about? What else had he already learned that no one even suspected?

Edgar’s career as a hypnotist continued for several weeks. At the high point, he mesmerized little Alex Franklin into throwing a snowball into the playground teacher’s ear. When Trudy investigated further, it turned out that Alex Franklin had made that claim. Edgar had only told the boy, deeply under the influence of his swinging timepiece, to take a bite of a snowball that looked more than a tad yellow. Instead, Alex had extended his arms like Frankenstein’s monster and trundled toward the teacher, then wound up and let fly. Edgar hadn’t expected that. The whole hypnosis business was unpredictable, he’d confessed.

Which led to a discussion about responsibility. It was like with the dogs, Trudy had told him. If you asked them to do something, you were responsible for what happened next, even if that wasn’t what you intended. You were especially responsible to the dogs, she said, because they respected you enough to do what you’d asked, even if it seemed like nonsense to them. If you wanted them to trust you, you had better take responsibility, every single time.

And then she’d let him try to hypnotize her, but she didn’t get sleepy, sleepy. He’d been disappointed, but she wouldn’t lie to him about it. Nor would Gar. Nor would Almondine, nor any of the puppies (who wanted to swat the watch out of his hands and chew it to bits). Then Edgar gave up on the whole idea, though he didn’t stop carrying the watch around. Once in a while he opened the cover and checked it against the kitchen clock and wound it, but Trudy suspected he did this only when he was around them. By the time the snow had melted that spring, she found the watch lying buried among his touchingly small, white Fruit of the Loom underwear in his bottom dresser drawer.

IF EDGAR HAD BEEN INWARD and opaque to her at five, now he was a total mystery. Since Gar’s death, he’d been sleepwalking though his days, looking angry one minute, then tragic, then thoughtful and happy a moment later. Only working his litter seemed to capture his attention. She told herself she shouldn’t worry. After all, he could have been shooting drugs (if a person could even find drugs in Mellen, which she doubted). If he really wanted to spend day and night in the kennel, let him.

Truthfully, this latest obsession hadn’t started until long after Gar died, really, the last couple of weeks of school, when he’d taken to running off from his classes. She’d talked with the principal. She wasn’t going to have them cracking down on Edgar and ruining his attitude toward school for good when he was muddling through what, she was sure, would turn out to have been the worst period of his life. He was delicate right now-deal with this rebellion wrong, and it would set. She didn’t think that the lessons from dog training always transferred to people, but it was just the nature of things that if you punished anyone, dog or boy, when they got close to a thing, they’d get it in their head the thing was bad. She’d seen people ruin dogs too many times by forcing them to repeat a trial that scared the dog or even hurt it. Not finding a variation on the same task, not coming at things from a different angle, not making the dog relish whatever it was that had to be done, was a failure of the imagination.

And in this case, the analogy applied. She’d told the principal she didn’t give a damn whether Edgar showed up even one more day that semester after what he’d been through, and if they pushed him any harder, she would withdraw him herself. They knew as well as Trudy that the teachers were coasting the last couple of weeks. Who cared if he sat in class and stared out the window or if he just wasn’t there? How many farm kids, she asked, went truant when it was time to show livestock at the county fair? She could use the help around the kennel anyway.

Then there was Claude, whom Edgar objected to. In his position, who wouldn’t? After Gar’s death, she and Edgar had grown so close it was almost as if they had been a couple themselves, making dinner, curling up together on the couch to watch television, arms wrapped around each other. She’d fallen asleep that way more than once. And on other nights, when he’d been the one to sleep, she’d stroked his brow like he was a baby. After that, of course he would be jealous. Maybe she should have held back from him a little, let him handle his grief his own way, but when you’re hurting, and your son is hurting, you do what you need to do.

Besides, Claude wasn’t something she’d planned-about the last thing she’d had in mind, particularly after the nasty falling-out between him and Gar. (Not that she understood that-a brother thing, buried under too many layers of family history for her to unearth.) Things with Claude had just, well, happened one morning-a breakdown on her part, a strange, momentary kindness on his. It hadn’t felt wrong; afterward she’d even felt as though some great burden had been lifted-as though she’d been given permission to carry on with a different life. What Edgar didn’t understand was that it was all going to be a compromise from then on out. That wasn’t something she could say, not to Edgar, not to anyone, but she knew it was true. They’d had the real thing, the golden world, the paradise, the kingdom on earth, and you didn’t get that twice. When a second chance came, you took it for what it was worth. Yes, Claude had proposed; that was silly, foolishness, not worth discussing. Not then, anyway, not when there was so much work to be done.

She and Gar had had the predictable discussion about what they’d want the other to do if one of them died. She’d been direct and forthright about his responsibilities: “I want you to spend the rest of your life in abject mourning,” she’d said. “Cry in public twice a week. A shrine in the orchard would be nice, but I realize you’re going to be busy handling the kennel and giving lectures on my divinity, so I won’t insist on that.”

Gar had been more modest. He’d wanted her to remarry the moment she met someone who made her happy, no sooner and no later. That was Gar in a nutshell, of course-when you asked him a serious question, you got a serious answer, every single time. She’d loved him for that, among many other things. He was passionate in a way that Claude would never be-passionate about principles and passionate about order, which he’d seen as a primary good. Like those file cabinets, filled with records. The kennel had been important when he talked about what should happen if he were to die; he hadn’t said it straight out, but he’d clearly expected Trudy would find a way to carry on the work with the dogs.

So Trudy thought Gar wouldn’t necessarily object to how things were working out. It looked like the kennel would be back in order by the end of the summer. And what they had both cared most about was that the other person find a way to be happy. Gar might not have liked some of the changes Claude was suggesting, but Gar had envisioned remaining a one-kennel, boutique breeder forever. Claude was less concerned with bloodlines, which freed him up to think more broadly about other things.

In the meantime, it was a matter of seeing into Edgar more clearly, making sure he got through this bad patch. And that’s all it was-a bad patch. There wasn’t anything seriously wrong.

She’d have known at once if there were.

Popcorn Corners

T HE NEXT DAY EDGAR SET OUT AGAIN FOR POPCORN CORNERS-this time alone, by bicycle. Anything to get away from the house while Claude was there, and he was there all the time now. Edgar slipped the picture of Claude and Forte into his back pocket and pedaled away to the north, retracing the route he and Claude had traveled along that thin gravel line cut through the Chequamegon Forest. A county gravel truck roared past, drawing a tawny billow in its wake. The air was still thick with dust when he came to the blacktop and turned onto a small forest road. He passed marshes boiling with frogs and snakes, and later, a turtle, plodding between the ditches like a living hubcap, its beaked mouth open and panting.

A stop sign appeared in the distance. When he reached it, he surveyed the entirety of Popcorn Corners: a tavern, a grocery, three equally decrepit houses, a band of feral chickens that lived in the culverts. He coasted past the tavern, which sported a Hamm’s Beer sign, lit to show the beer bear fishing in a shimmering Land of Sky Blue Waters, and halted in front of the grocery, covered with white clapboards that hung slightly off parallel, as if covering some profound skew of the building’s timbers. A pair of colossal ash trees cast their shadows across the storefront and a single antiquated gas pump tilted among the weeds off to the side.

The small parking lot was empty. He lowered his bicycle to the ground and pulled the screen door through its quarter-circle in the dirt. Up front, behind a long, grooved wooden counter, sat Ida Paine, the hawk-nosed, farsighted proprietor of the store. Stacks of cigarette cartons filled the shelves behind her-red-and-white Lucky Strikes, aqua Newports, desert-colored Camels. From somewhere, a radio droned out the news from the AM station in Ashland. Edgar raised a hand in greeting. Ida returned the gesture in silence.

He and Ida had a long, though stilted, acquaintance. He could remember his father carrying him into the store when he was barely a toddler. Though Ida had never yet said a word to Edgar, he never tired of looking at her. He liked especially to watch her hands as she rang up purchases. They moved with an agile independence that made him think of tiny, hairless monkeys. Her right hand slid dry goods down the counter while her left hand danced across the keys of an ancient adding machine. And Ida, unblinking, looked her customers up and down, her pupils magnified to the size of quarters through dish-lensed spectacles. After each entry, her left hand slammed the adding machine lever down hard enough to stamp the numerals into a piece of oak.

The locals were inured to all this, but strangers sometimes lost their wits. “That it?” she would ask when she’d totaled their items, cocking her head and fixing them with a stare. “Anything else?” The veiny digits of her left hand punched the keys of the adding machine and leapt onto the lever. Thump! The thump really startled them. Or maybe it was the head-cock. You could see people stop to think, was that really it? The question began to reverberate in their minds, a metaphysical conundrum. Wasn’t there something else? They began to wonder if this could possibly be their Final Purchase: four cans of beans and franks, a bag of Old Dutch potato chips, and half a dozen bobbers. Was that it? Wasn’t there something else they ought to get? And for that matter, had they ever accomplished anything of significance in their entire lives? “No,” they’d gulp, peering into Ida’s depthless black pupils, “that’s all,” or sometimes, “Um, pack of Luckies?” This last was issued as a question, as if they had begun to suspect that an incorrect answer would get them flung into a chasm. Cigarettes often came to their minds, partly because Ida herself smoked like a fiend, a white curl always streaming from her mouth to rise and merge with the great galaxy of smoke wreathing over her head. But mainly, when the uninitiated stood before Ida Paine, they found themselves thinking that the future was preordained. So why not take up cigarettes?

When something Ida didn’t know the price of landed on her counter, her right hand would pick it up and twirl it until she spied the white sticker with its purple numerals, and then she would glance at a yellowing index card taped to the counter and say, without emotion, “On sale today.” She never declared the price. Edgar listened for these asides. On the drive home he liked to match the stickers with the numbers on the adding machine tape that came with their purchases. Sometimes, the numbers all added up; more often everything was scrambled. He’d once gone through the exercise of totaling up the stickers himself. Though none of the individual numbers was correct, the total had been exactly right.

He walked along the farthest aisle, past the canned milk and SpaghettiOs and the cereal. There was nothing he wanted, really, and he didn’t have much money, but he dawdled. The plate-glass window facing the road admitted less light than a person would have guessed, and the gloom only increased farther back. He half expected to find spiders spinning webs in the darker recesses, but that was the thing with the Popcorn Corners grocery-at first glance it seemed disheveled and broken down, but when you looked closer, you found clean and neat. The rear of the store was a butcher shop, the domain of Ida’s gaunt, aproned, white-hatted husband. When Edgar was little, he’d entertained the notion that Ida’s husband lived behind the meat case among the grinders and cutters and the scent of chilled blood and flesh.

Bottles kept catching his eye, especially smaller bottles. He picked up a bottle of fingernail polish remover and carried it for a while. He knew of only two uses for it-the second was to kill butterflies, an act he’d seen performed but had never done himself. The idea reminded him of Claude and Epi and the Prestone. He picked up bottles of saccharine, bottles of syrup, bottles of corn oil, and hefted them and set them down again.

At last, he returned to the front counter. Ida stood with her back turned, twisting the radio’s antenna as the speaker hissed and crackled. Then she turned and centered him in her black pupils. He pointed at the soda case outside and she nodded. Her left hand groped toward the adding machine, paused over the keys, and withdrew. He expected her to ask her question, but all she said was, “Nickel for the bottle.”

He dropped a quarter and a nickel into her palm. She stopped cold for a moment, blinked, then turned and dropped the coins into the cash drawer. Outside, he lifted a bottle of Coca-Cola from the red cooler and pried off the top using the zinc bucktooth of the opener and watched the soda fizz. Clouds had appeared in the blue sky during his ride and now they’d begun to clot, turn dark. The breeze carried with it a vestige of spring chill.

The window sash by the cash register slid up. Ida Paine’s face appeared gray behind the screen.

“You miss your daddy,” she said. “He was a good man. He came in about a week before and I got a feeling then. Nothing certain. Happens all the time. Someone hands across corn flakes, soup-nothing. Then they’ll hand over some little thing and I’ll get a jolt off it, it’s so loaded up. It’s not a message. People will tell you it’s a message, but they’re wrong. What it is, you pay attention to it long enough, you can start to read it. Read the juice.”

Through the screen he could make out the shape of her face, the glint of her glasses, the stream of smoke fluttering up from her nostrils.

“Some juice feels good,” she said. “Some juice feels bad.”

He nodded. There was hot and cold lightning.

“What can you do?” she said. “No one knows when something like that’s going to happen. Weight of a coin can make all the difference. Man came in once, told me how he’d nearly died except for the change in his pocket, change I’d made for him the day before. Something about that dime being just the right size to turn a screw, and without it, he’d’ve been lost.”

She didn’t expect a response, he knew that. He stood waiting for her to go on and thought about all the times he’d watched Ida Paine’s left hand hop over the keys of her adding machine.

“When your daddy came in that last time he bought milk and eggs. That’s all. I rung up the milk same as any day, but with the eggs there was so much juice it was like a hand grabbed me when I touched them. I dropped the whole carton on the floor. He went back and got himself another one. I was half afraid to ring it up. And I had this powerful feeling-almost never happens-that I should charge your daddy more for those eggs, not less. More, you see? But I can’t do that. People get mad. But your daddy, he looked at me and said, ‘Here’s for both.’ I should have taken the money. That would have been the right thing to do. But I said, no, that it was me that dropped them, and I wouldn’t charge for both. And that time, the total rang up two dollars, even-steven.”

She was silent for a long time.

“Even-steven,” she repeated. “That was the last time I saw him. I should’ve come, but I couldn’t. To the funeral, I mean.”

Then she tipped her head and looked at Edgar one-eyed, a primeval bird in its cage. “Child,” she said from the gloom, “come in here and show me what it is you brought with you.”

He almost didn’t go back in. He stood and looked at his bicycle and then at the clapboard siding with its crazing paint and thought how, though every individual board looked straight and square, when you took them all together something was cockeyed. But in the end he pulled open the screen door and walked to the counter. From his back pocket he drew out the photograph of Claude and Forte and set it on the scored wood between them.

Ida’s right hand scrambled across the counter and lifted it up for her to see.

“That one hasn’t been here for a long time,” she said. She looked from the photograph to Edgar and back again. “I remember him, though. Those dogfights.” Her left hand placed a nickel on the counter. “Take your deposit,” she said.

He reached out and set the empty Coke bottle on the counter. Before he could let go of it, Ida’s adding machine hand sprung forward. Its fingers encircled his wrist with a surprising might and pinned his hand hard against the counter. At once his fingers cramped closed around the fluted bottle. Then, before he quite understood what was happening, Ida’s other hand had pressed the photograph of Claude and Forte against his free palm and she’d somehow curled his fingers closed and locked that hand shut as well. Then she leaned over the counter toward him.

“You think you can find that bottle?” she said. “You need to look for that bottle. Because unless you can lay hands on it, you need to go. You understand me? You need to go. That’s what’s in the juice.”

He didn’t understand her. Not in the least. Her face was dreadfully close to his and her fingers were squeezing his fist until the crushed photograph bit into his palm. The smoke above her head crawled in knots and ropes. Images he didn’t understand occupied his mind’s eye: a dark, cobbled alleyway, a dog limping through the rain, an elderly Oriental man holding a slender length of cane with great delicacy. Edgar looked at the Coke bottle in his rigor-locked hand and Ida’s monkey fingers encasing his wrist like a hot iron manacle and then he saw that the bottle had changed. It had taken the shape of an antique cruet or inkwell, maybe a prescription bottle from olden days. Some oily liquid glazed the inside, prismatic, clear, viscous. The thing was banded with a ribbon, and the ribbon was covered with markings in some foreign alphabet.

“And if you go,” she whispered, “don’t you come back, not for nothing. Don’t you let the wind change your mind. It’s just wind, that’s all.”

Then she cocked her head and looked at him. She blinked. He recognized in her then a wizened version of the little girl with Shirley Temple curls, the one who had confronted him in the Mellen diner and asked for the secret he didn’t know.

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

A slab of a hand appeared on Ida Paine’s shoulder, carrying with it the odor of blood and flesh. Then the butcher stood behind the old woman, his white apron smeared with sausage-size lines of red.

“Ida,” the man said. “Ida.”

“It’s just wind,” she repeated. “It means nothing.”

Her fingers uncurled from his wrist. Instantly, Edgar felt his grip relax and the bottle was simply a Coke bottle again and not the odd-looking vessel they’d grappled over. Ida snatched it and slumped onto her stool, chin on her chest, drawing great, deep breaths. Smoke issued lazily from her nostrils. When her eyes, magnified through the lenses of her glasses, went momentarily pink, he saw the doll-like face of the little girl again.

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

The butcher lifted the Coke bottle from Ida’s grip and clomped to the rear of the store. There was a clank as he racked the empty. For some time Edgar stood rooted to the unvarnished floor of the Popcorn Corners grocery while the radio hissed out pork futures.

The next thing he knew he was pedaling like a maniac over the gravel of Town Line Road, halfway home.

FOREWARNED WAS NOT FOREARMED. The catastrophe, when it came, turned on a vanity of Edgar’s so broad and innocent that he would look back on the events of that afternoon and find blame only in himself.

He had nearly arrived home, pedaling the upslope on the last small hill before their field opened greenly to the west, when the shakes came over him, first in his hands, then his shoulders and chest, until he thought he would either be sick or jerk the handlebars sideways and pitch onto the gravel. He ground the coaster brake under his heel and stumbled away to sit in the weeds beside the road.

Whatever had happened under Ida Paine’s grip had been frightening enough, but worse, it had brought on a sudden, suffocating desire to recall his father’s memories, those memories he’d held so briefly. He closed his eyes, pressed his palms to his head. He heard the hiss of rain striking the new grass and he felt the thousand soft impressions of it falling coldly on his skin. He remembered his father’s hands passing into his chest. The sensation of his beating heart cradled. The images sieving through him. The dogfights. The desire to stand between Claude and the world. A whole history he couldn’t know. But their substance was again lost to him, as fugitive as the shape of a candle’s flame.

I have to go back, he thought. She can help me remember. She knows something about Claude-what had she said about dogfights? And who was the old man he’d seen in the alleyway? What was he holding? But he thought of how Ida looked afterward, slumped on her chair like the empty shell of an old woman, and he wondered if she would even remember talking to him. If he asked her about the old man in the alley, he felt sure she wouldn’t know what he was talking about. And anyway, he didn’t have the courage to face her again. Not for a long time. Maybe not ever.

When he remembered the photograph, he clapped his shirt pocket. Empty. Sweat broke out across his forehead. At first he thought he’d left it at the grocery. If so, he’d have to go back. He lay in the grass and frantically searched his pants pockets until he found it, bent in half and roughly jammed in the back right. The photograph was in bad shape after being crushed in his convulsed fist under Ida’s fingers. The emulsion was shot through by white cracks half a dozen ways. He pressed it flat. It puckered into meaningless, geometric bas-relief, dividing the image into triangles and trapezoids. But Claude and Forte were still unmistakably the subjects. Edgar propped his arm on his knee and held the photograph out and looked at it. When his hand stopped quaking he remounted the bicycle.

He topped the hill and coasted up their driveway. It was mid-afternoon. The Impala was parked behind the tractor and Edgar’s mother was crossing from the barn to the house with a set of training notes in hand. As he rolled past, she called to him.

“Edgar! Could you unload the truck? I was at the feed mill yesterday.”

He walked his bike into the milk house, wishing he could have gotten home unseen, to go somewhere with Almondine and think before he had to face his mother or Claude. At least his mother had been preoccupied; by the time he shut the milk house door, she had disappeared into the house. He turned the corner into the barn to get the wheelbarrow. As he passed the workshop, he glanced through the doorway out of habit. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular. He didn’t even know anyone was there.

Claude stood before the workbench, bent over something small, perhaps a jammed spring latch for a lead, tinkering with it like a watchmaker. Almondine lay on the floor, hips tilted, peering up at Claude, relaxed and complacent, her mouth hanging open in a quiet pant. A wedge of light streamed from the high workshop window. Motes of straw dust hung suspended in the air. Everything there was lit in degrees of light and shadow-Claude’s shoulders and head, the chaff on his shoes, the saws and hammers hanging from the pegboard, the outscooped curve of Almondine’s chest, the contour of her head and ears, the scythe of her tail trailing along the dusty floor. Almondine turned to look at Edgar, sleepy-eyed and relaxed, and then back at Claude. All of this was framed in the doorway, like some sort of painting, but it was the accident of a moment, something unpracticed and undesigned.

And, to Edgar’s eye, beautiful.

His breath stopped as if he’d had the wind knocked out of him. Suddenly nothing at all about the situation seemed tolerable. He saw with absolute clarity that he’d lulled himself into acquiescence and complicity. But now some last thing gave way inside him, something with no name. Perhaps it could be called the hope of redemption. For him. For Claude. For all of them. When it was gone, he felt that he had become someone else, that the Edgar who had split away that first morning after the rain had at last returned, and in that new state, as that new person, he believed Almondine had acted unforgivably, her pose so lovely and serene, completing that homely tableau as if Claude belonged right where he stood, when in fact he belonged anywhere else. In jail. Or worse.

He managed to keep walking. He grabbed the wheelbarrow from the far side of the barn and hurled it before him along the aisle and onto the driveway. Then Almondine trotted up beside him. He flung the handles forward and turned and raised his hand above his head to down her.

She looked at him for a moment, then dropped to the ground.

He turned and kicked the wheelbarrow ahead, runners raking clouds of dust from the driveway. Almondine broke and came forward and this time he whirled and lifted her by the ruff until her front feet came off the ground and he shook her and shook her and shook her. Then he let go and downed her again and turned away. He loaded the heavy sacks of quicklime into the wheelbarrow and piled the bags of food on top crosswise and walked around to the handles and backed the wheelbarrow away from the truck. He meant simply to walk away without another word to her but at the last minute he turned and knelt, his arms and shoulders trembling so violently he almost lost his balance.

I’m sorry, he signed. I’m sorry. But you have to stay. Stay.

He rolled the overloaded wheelbarrow up the driveway, staggering. When he tried to turn it toward the barn the thing tipped and the feed bags spilled onto the ground. One of them split and its contents poured out and he kicked it over and over until kibble was spread out in a brown swath across the ground. He reached down and threw fistfuls toward the woods until he couldn’t breathe. After a while he righted the wheelbarrow and loaded all the bags of food that had not split into the wheelbarrow’s bed and bore it heavily forward. He emerged from the barn with a rake clattering inside. He made a pile of the loose food and shoveled it into the wheelbarrow with his hands. It took a long time. Spots danced before his eyes as if he had stared into the sun.

Almondine was holding her down-stay behind the truck when he walked out of the barn. He passed her on his way to the house, stride halting and overbalanced as though his spine had fused into a column of stone, and then he threw his hands into the sign for a release.

At the porch steps, he turned back. Almondine stood in the sun panting and looking at him, tail uncurled behind her.

Go away, he signed. Release. Go away. Get away!

And before she could move, he walked up the porch steps and into the house.

The Texan

T HE INSOMNIA THAT NIGHT WAS BEYOND ANYTHING EDGAR HAD experienced, a goblin presence in his room, goading him between self-recrimination one minute and white anger the next. The sight of Almondine lying at Claude’s feet like an idiot puppy had wounded something in Edgar so close to his center, so bright, so painful, he couldn’t bear to look at it. He sat flinging out arguments, rebuttals, accusations, his heart firing like a piston in his chest, his thoughts whirling like flies around some phosphorescent blaze. He should have acted that morning, so long ago, the moment he’d understood what Claude had done. The hammer had been in his hand. Instead he’d faltered and doubted, and the flame in him had choked to embers. But one breath of pure air had drawn it up again. That had been Almondine. None of it was her fault, he knew. And yet he couldn’t forgive her.

When his mother saw how he’d been treating Almondine, late in the evening, she’d dropped any pretense of patience. He would stop immediately, and while he was at it, she said, he was going to rejoin the household and quit the nonsense about sleeping in the kennel. He’d stormed upstairs and slammed the door and stood swaying with rage and confusion. The red rays of sunrise were coating the woods before he at last fell into an exhausted slumber. But it was no rest and no balm. When the sound of his mother working a pair of dogs in the yard woke him it was almost a relief.

He sat on the bed and looked at the closed bedroom door. He couldn’t recall a morning in his life when he hadn’t opened his eyes to the sight of Almondine. When she was younger (when they were younger) she’d stood beside his bed and nosed the tender part of his foot to wake him; later, she’d slept beside him, rising while he stretched and yawned. Even if she’d gone downstairs to greet the early risers, no matter how quietly he walked to the stairwell, she was there waiting, front feet on the bottom tread, peering up at him.

He pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. He could hear the scrabble of her nails on the hallway floor. When he turned the knob and swung the door back, she pretended it was a surprise, and she bucked in place and landed with her front feet spread wide, head lowered, ears twisted back. And he meant to forgive her, but at the sight of her, playful and coy, all his arguments from the past night possessed him again: How she pandered. How she was so much like another person he could name that she ought to go find her instead. Or even him, since she didn’t care who gave her the attention she craved. She danced along behind him, catching the cuffs of his jeans. It took her a minute to follow him down the varnished stairs-the headlong plunge of her youth replaced by cautious navigation-but she darted past as he crossed the living room and whirled to face him, making a little yowl and play-bowing again.

He signed a down and stepped over her.

Two empty coffee cups sat on the kitchen table, the chairs pulled out to hold invisible occupants. He swabbed out a cup from the sink and poured himself the dregs from the coffee pot. It tasted like acid on his tongue. He swallowed once and flung the rest down the drain.

HIS MOTHER WAS WORKING the two dogs to be placed that day, Singer and Indigo. She would, he knew, be in a terrible mood. On the mornings of placements all she talked about were the qualities that made the dogs unprepared to leave. Edgar knew the litany by heart. All that time spent building their confidence. All that work teaching them a language in which questions could be asked and answered-all of it about to be abandoned and lost. His father had always been more circumspect about placement, but then he had surrendered the pups once already, to training. He was also the one who managed the carefully scheduled mail and telephone correspondence with new owners to keep track of the dogs, so in a sense he never lost them. Edgar’s mother, on the other hand, would storm around the house, indignant at the idiocy of owners, their laziness, their lack of compassion, flinging papers, slamming doors.

The irony was, a person wouldn’t have known any of that from watching her as she worked the dogs, not even on the day they were placed, because with the dogs, she became a different woman, almost a character she played-the trainer, who was interested only in what the dogs were doing in that moment. The trainer showed no anger when dogs were unruly. The trainer gave instant, forceful guidance. As their time for placement approached, the only difference the dogs might notice was that they got less attention; if they were a bit lonely, it helped them bond with their new owners.

Edgar didn’t attempt to help his mother. He did morning chores, then pulled Tinder and Baboo and drilled them on close work-heels, stays, leash tangles, and the things they had been practicing in secret: the tag, the drop, the carrying of small items in their mouths. Claude was bottle-feeding one of the new pups. When he came out of the whelping room, Edgar took the dogs into the field.

And Almondine placed herself along his route wherever he went. If he was behind the barn, she lay near the silo. If he was in the barn, she waited in the shade of the eaves to meet his glance. Each time he refused her. Finally, she lost heart and found a place to sleep. It took a long time for that to happen, but he saw the moment she finally turned away. And he let her go.

JUST BEFORE DINNER Doctor Papineau parked his sedan on the grass behind the Impala. Edgar watched from the barn as the old man clapped a hand on Claude’s shoulder and they walked into the house. Shortly, an unfamiliar pickup slowed to a stop at their driveway and turned and trundled past the house. It was a big truck with an elaborate topper and Texas license plates. His mother and Claude and Doctor Papineau walked out of the house with Almondine trailing. There was something about watching Almondine from the barn, thirty yards distant, something in her carriage, tentative and almost frail, that finally made Edgar understand how cruel he’d been. He made a promise in his mind to make things up to her that night, though there was nothing he could do just then-events required him to stay where he was for a little while longer.

Claude walked around to the driver’s window and gestured at the turnaround. The pickup backed around and stopped again, facing the road. Then the door opened and a man stepped out. There was a short conversation. Almondine greeted the visitor along with the rest of them. Then Edgar’s mother looked over and called, “Edgar, would you bring out Singer and Indigo?”

This was the start of the presentation, in which he’d always played a very specific role. When he’d been little, it had especially impressed new owners to see a child hardly taller than the dogs lead them out of the kennel. Now that he was older, the presentation was less dramatic, but the stagey element remained: after the new owner arrived, after introductions and talk, Edgar emerged with the dog (or dogs, in this case-not uncommon, since they placed many pairs). His father had loved the little choreographed drama of it. After all, he’d said, owners meet their dogs just once. Why not make sure they remember it? It was a small, extra guarantee the dogs would be treated right. Sometimes the owners gasped when Edgar and the dogs appeared; he’d even seen his mother smile, despite her dire predictions, as he measured out steps along the drive, affecting a relaxed, nothing-out-of-the-ordinary expression.

The dogs, excited by a stranger’s arrival, raced one another along the lengths of their pens, pushing out through the canvas flaps to get a look and turning and pushing back in again. Edgar quieted them and walked to the pen that held the two dogs to be placed. Singer was a gloss russet male with an imposing stance but an easygoing demeanor. Indigo was petite for a Sawtelle dog and as black as if dipped in ink, except for a blaze of cream on her chest and another swirl across her hips. Edgar drew the slicker brush from his back pocket and went over them one last time. Indigo’s coat was fine and luxurious when brushed up. The dogs stomped in the straw and panted under his brush. Singer protested the delay with a deep moan.

Hold on, he signed. You’ll know soon enough.

He stroked their faces and squatted in front of them. He made them look at him steadily and he put his hands on their chests, seeking the spot that would calm them. Then he put collars on them and brought them into a heel, one on each side, hands on their withers, and they walked up the barn aisle. When they stepped outside, the knot of people by the house shifted. The talking ceased. Edgar paused for a moment with the old goosenecked light fixture overhead. His father had often joked about hearing angels sing when he and the dogs turned that corner.

“Oh my,” he heard the man say.

When they were halfway up the drive, Edgar patted each dog lightly on the shoulders. They turned to look at him. He flicked out a release and they arrowed forward, all silken motion, feet thumping softly on the ground as they ran. Then there was chaos and introductions. The new owner was a slight man, leanly built, with brown hair and jug ears and a thick mustache. His accent matched his license plate, a heavy drawl. He knew dogs; he presented the back of his hand rather than his fingers; his touch was confident and slow. Occasionally, the dogs might be skittish with a new owner, but not this man and these dogs.

“They sure do look at you, don’t they?” he said.

Edgar’s mother and Claude explained about the gaze exercises and then they introduced Edgar. The man’s name was Benson.

“Pleased to meet you,” Mr. Benson said, shaking his hand. They let Mr. Benson get a good look at the dogs, see their structure. Edgar ran them through recalls to get them moving. Mr. Benson knew what to look for. He checked their stifles and hocks and he commented on their gait. By the time they had finished, the sun was almost set and they walked to the house together, the dogs surging ahead to wait by the door.

“Son,” Mr. Benson said, “you’ve got the touch with these dogs, even more so than your mama.” He turned to Trudy. “No offense, ma’am. I mean that as the highest compliment. I’ve never seen like the way they do for him.”

“None taken,” she said. Edgar could see she was reluctantly charmed by the man, and proud of the dogs’ behavior, which had been flawless. “Edgar makes it look effortless.”

“It’s not even so much effort,” Mr. Benson said. “It’s something else. It don’t have a name. They just want to work for him.”

Edgar’s mother laughed. “Don’t be too impressed. They’re on their best behavior tonight. We’ll go over things more thoroughly tomorrow. Indigo has a couple of bad habits you should know about. But they’re good dogs.”

“Well, I’m daunted by the prospect of living up to what these dogs have been used to,” Mr. Benson said. “I’m not ashamed to admit it. I wonder why they’d listen to a dope like me after working with y’all.”

They downed the two dogs, along with Almondine, in the living room and sat down to dinner. Mr. Benson said he lived in the hill country near San Antonio. He wondered if they had ever been there, and they said no, and he told them about it, the live oaks and the pecan trees and the wild mistletoe and the river. They asked about his trip. The drive had been long, he said, but he loved the open highway, that stretch of asphalt opening out before him.

Edgar sat and listened. Mr. Benson had taken a room at Fisher’s Paradise, south of town. He was staying for several days. He liked to talk, almost a match for Doctor Papineau, but his thoughts ran to philosophy and religion. “Tell you something I think is curious,” he said. “In the Bible there’s hardly no mention of dogs. What there is makes them out like vermin. I can’t make sense of that, can you?”

“Sure,” Edgar’s mother said. “Back in those times, for every dog that lived with people, a dozen more ate garbage and ran through the streets. Companion dogs were the exception.”

The man nodded and looked at all of them. Edgar got the impression he’d raised this question before at other tables.

“‘Give not that which is holy to the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before the swine’-that’s Matthew. It’s always bothered me. I’m a heathen nowadays, though. People in my congregation fall faint if I walk in on a Sunday. But a lot of them aren’t as holy as a good dog.”

Doctor Papineau was inspired to contemplate the population of dogs on the Ark, and from there the conversation turned back to Singer and Indigo. Edgar’s mood had lightened, briefly, while he worked the dogs, but as Claude began explaining the history of the kennel, it turned wretched again. Mr. Benson didn’t question Claude’s authority, though to Edgar every word he spoke marked him as an impostor. Now Claude was explaining about Buddy and the blood tie between the Sawtelle dogs and the Fortunate Fields breeding program. That surprised Edgar-he thought what he’d learned through the letters was a secret, or forgotten, but it wasn’t, and there was no reason Claude wouldn’t know. Now he was explaining how many dogs they placed each season and how the breeding program established by Edgar’s grandfather worked; how half the dogs they placed went to families who had already owned a Sawtelle dog; how the majority of breeding dogs were fostered by farm families nearby. And as Edgar sat and listened to Claude, he wondered why he hadn’t plunged the Impala into the trees when he’d had the chance.

When they finished dinner, his mother brought out Doctor Papineau’s cheesecake and poured coffee. Mr. Benson commented on the cheesecake, and Doctor Papineau chimed in with his shopworn joke. Something about it made Edgar angry. Whenever he looked at Doctor Papineau he saw that fatherly hand laid on Claude’s shoulder and he thought the old man was a fool to let himself be manipulated so transparently. Even the new owner had begun to bother Edgar. Most wanted to get away from the table as soon as possible, to release their dogs from their stays and touch them, but Mr. Benson seemed oddly incurious. The dogs were patiently holding stays; Singer was even dozing. But anyone could see they were waiting to spring up and investigate the man all over again.

Then Mr. Benson turned to Claude.

“Now, I’ve got something to ask, and you should just say no if I’ve overstepped. Of course, we’ll get to this tomorrow when we work through the branch contract and pick out stock, but I’d be obliged if I might have a look at your kennel. That’s a fine barn. I haven’t seen many like it since I passed Killeen. And I want to see for myself what sort of magic happens there.”

Claude and Doctor Papineau were looking at the man with equally self-satisfied expressions. Edgar turned to his mother.

What is he talking about?

She waved him off with a small gesture. He signed again.

Why is he talking about a branch contract?

She turned to him, her expression calm, but beneath that, flushed with anger.

Not now, she signed. You haven’t wanted to talk for weeks. We’ll discuss it later.

What does he mean, selecting stock? Breeding stock?

Not now.

Mr. Benson was watching the exchange and he leaned back.

“I don’t mean to be rude. It was just itching at me. Maybe that’s for tomorrow.”

“Not at all,” Claude said. “I have to tell you, though, there’s nothing magic to be found out there. Just slow, steady work.”

Claude led Mr. Benson outside, followed by Edgar’s mother and Doctor Papineau. Singer and Indigo loped ahead. Edgar stood on the porch. He recalled that game of canasta they’d played the autumn before. You can get anything you want in this world if you’re willing to go slow enough, Claude had said. At the time, Edgar had taken it as beer-fueled backwoods munificence, but now he heard it as a perverse taunt.

When did you start wanting this so badly? he wondered, watching Claude walk alongside the stranger, explaining what they did as something to be replicated, capitalized, multiplied. Was it one of those afternoons you spent on the barn roof watching us all? Were you surprised at what your brother had accomplished after you left? Or have you been thinking of this for longer than that? How slow have you been willing to go?

From out in the yard, Mr. Benson’s voice rose in reply to some question Claude had asked.

“I have good news for you there,” he said. “I talked with the son, James, the night before I left. He’s very excited about this idea, calls it a unique opportunity. He keeps saying over and over: a Caruthers dog, a milestone in catalog merchandising-the first time a breed has ever been brand-named. Says he’s got a mock-up of the Christmas wish-book on his desk, pups on the inside of the front cover and everything. Course, they’re the wrong kind of pups right now, but they can fix that picture in one day flat.”

Almondine walked up behind Edgar and stood at the threshold of the kitchen door. He’d wanted to make amends with her all evening, but now he was seething again and in his mind he saw her lying in the workshop, light streaming over her like some kind of painting, and Claude at work. He swung the kitchen door shut and made sure the latch caught. He trotted after the others. The long twilight had faded. A fitful wind shook the maple. To the west, the canopy of the forest shivered against the darkening rim of blue.

“I forget sometimes what it’s like to be this far from city light,” Mr. Benson was saying. “Our night sky is never this black, with San Antone so close. D’you ever see the northern lights?”

But before anyone could respond to the man’s question, something curious happened. A gust of wind passed through the yard, carrying with it a sheet of warm rain, translucent and swift. The drops pelted the roofs of the vehicles and splashed thinly across them all. The dogs snapped at the air. Dust rose from the driveway. Then the rain was gone, returned to the night. Everyone looked up. There was nothing overhead but a field of stars.

“That don’t surprise me,” Mr. Benson said. “That happens back home. Rain’ll fall smack out of a clear sky. That rain could have been in the air in North Dakota and only now touched ground.”

They’d come to a stop in front of the barn, near the leaden pock of quicklime where the grass had once turned white. The man squatted down to stroke Indigo’s chest. It was the first time he’d touched either of the dogs since dinner, and when he stood again he produced a handkerchief from his pocket and wrung his hands in the cloth and pulled it along each finger.

“It occurs to me every once in a while that it’s raining somewhere, even when the sky is clear-there’s more water in the air than we’re apt to think. You took all the water out of the air, there’d be a flood that only Noah would recognize. When I can’t make sense of things, I try to think big enough to see rain falling somewhere. Water’s always moving-that’s the view I try to get. If it’s not falling, it’s coming up through the ground getting ready to fall again. That comforts me, I can’t say why. Sometimes I only need to get above the treetops. Late afternoons where I live, you can see half a dozen big ole bull thunderstorms coming along, shafts of light between them and rain trailing underneath like a jellyfish. Sometimes, though, I have to go up high enough to see most of the whole country-way, way out to California-before I see rain and clear sky both. That’s all in my mind, of course. But no matter where I am, if I can get to where I see it raining and where it’s clear, that’s when I can do my most powerful thinking.”

Then Mr. Benson caught himself.

“Good God,” he said. “I didn’t realize how long I’ve been sitting alone in a truck.”

Edgar’s mother laughed and they walked into the kennel. None of them seemed to take more note of the rain, though to Edgar, it had felt like a hand brushing his face. For a moment he was unable to move. When he caught up, the dogs began to bark. His mother hushed them, a small thing that impressed the man greatly. Mr. Benson started asking questions: how long did they let the pups nurse, did they believe in docking dewclaws at birth, why didn’t they use sawdust instead of straw, and so on. Claude took down the master litter book and pulled a file at random and talked about the breeding research and the log sheets and the scoring, all with great authority, like a man describing furniture. Edgar’s mother led Mr. Benson up to the mow and showed him the fly lines, the floor rings, and all the rest.

“Where does this young man come in?” Mr. Benson said when they came down again. “He earns his meals, I’m sure.”

“Well, for one thing, Edgar names the pups,” his mother said. “And he’s in charge of grooming. And this year, he’s training his first litter. I expect they’ll be ready by fall.”

Mr. Benson asked to see Edgar’s litter, and Claude set his hand on Edgar’s shoulder and told him to bring them out. Until that moment Edgar hadn’t decided to have his litter play out what they’d practiced. He’d always imagined some circumstance with just him and the dogs and Claude, but now he saw it didn’t matter who else was there. There was no choice anyway. He had to have an answer. He couldn’t stand the knowing-and-not-knowing, the residue of memory without the memory itself, the coming-apart every time he sat across the table from Claude. All he needed was one unguarded moment, like the one when Claude first spotted him watching from the apple tree. An expression had flashed across Claude’s face then, shock or guilt or fear, but whichever, it had vanished before Edgar had understood what it might reveal. This time he would be ready. He would see it for what it was. And if he saw guilt, he would not be stopped by anyone’s touch, not his mother’s, not Almondine’s. He would not sink to his knees, shaking like a newborn calf.

“Let’s proof them on stays while we’re at it,” his mother said.

He nodded. He walked past the pens and into the medicine room, where he yanked open the drawer reserved for Doctor Papineau’s supplies and stuffed six syringes into the breast pocket of his shirt. It looked strange, he knew, and he tried to act nonchalant as he walked out again. He brought out Opal and Umbra and stayed them in the aisle, then Pout, Baboo, Tinder, Finch, and finally Essay. The seven of them sat, twitchy and excited, forty feet down the aisle from his mother and Mr. Benson and Claude.

“This will just take a moment,” his mother said. She shot Edgar a quizzical look and kept talking. “We try to use every opportunity to train them. When a stranger visits, the dogs naturally want to investigate. A lot of our training is just finding ways to test their skills in new situations, like holding a stay when there’s a distraction. Here, Edgar, send one of them over.”

First, tell them the dogs see everything that happens here, he signed.

What?

Just say it. Say they see everything and they never forget. You’ll understand in a minute.

He stood and waited. He thought his mother might ignore his request, but she turned to Mr. Benson and Claude and Doctor Papineau. “Edgar says to tell you that the dogs see”-she faltered for a moment, then continued-“that they see everything that happens here, and they never forget.”

Edgar was standing before the dogs, looking down the line to make sure they didn’t break. He touched Opal under the chin. She looked at him. He released her and she dashed down the aisle to the four of them standing by the workshop. Then he pulled one of the syringes from his shirt pocket. His hand was shaking and as the syringe came out, it snagged another which went clattering to the floor. He snatched it up and placed it in Baboo’s mouth.

Tag, he signed. Then he turned to watch.

Baboo trotted down the aisle with the syringe in his mouth. Edgar kept his eyes on Claude, who had caught sight of the syringe. When Baboo reached them, he pressed his nose into Opal’s hip, and Opal looked toward Edgar. He gave a small gesture with his right hand. She dropped to the floor and lay on her side.

“Well, I’ll be,” Mr. Benson said. He stooped to stroke Baboo’s muzzle and came away with a syringe in his palm.

“What’s this?” he said. He held the syringe in the light. Before anyone could answer, Edgar sent Pout and Pout tagged Baboo and Baboo went down. Mr. Benson reached over and extracted the second syringe from Pout’s mouth.

“This is part of their training? To carry medicine?”

Seeing the expression on Claude’s face, Edgar began trembling so violently he had to kneel. Finch went next; he tagged Pout, Pout looked at Edgar, hesitated, and dropped. Then it was Umbra’s turn, and Tinder’s. Each time there was a syringe and a tag on the hip, and the dog went down.

“Well, I’ll be,” Mr. Benson said. “It’s almost like…as if…Do they think…”

Claude stood watching it all. He glanced at the open door, then back at the dogs, then at Edgar.

Edgar didn’t expect the last part to work-it was different from the rest, something he’d worked out with Essay alone. He put the remaining syringe in her mouth and signaled her down the aisle. When she reached Tinder, the only dog standing, she turned to look back at him.

Left, he signed.

Essay veered around Tinder. The barrel of the syringe was sideways in her mouth. She walked up to Claude. The safety sheath was on the needle, but when she pressed the blunt soft tip of her nose into the muscle of Claude’s leg, he flinched as if he’d been stung. Edgar was walking down the aisle, neither blinking nor averting his gaze.

“Drop it!” Claude said. “Drop it!” He looked again toward the Dutch doors and then faced into the workshop and then got control of himself and took a breath and looked steadily at Edgar. A muscle under his left eye was jerking.

“What the hell, anyway!” he said, and stalked out of the barn.

Edgar began turning in the aisle, performing a weird, exhilarated dance. He signed a broad release and the downed dogs scrambled to their feet and stirred around Mr. Benson. His mother allowed herself an angry look at him, but when she spoke, her voice was cool and modulated.

“Edgar,” she said, “would you put these dogs back in their pens? I think we’ve seen enough.”

Did you see? he signed. Did you see his face?

I certainly did.

“That was extraordinary,” Mr. Benson said. “What was that?”

“I haven’t seen that before myself,” Doctor Papineau said, “and I’ve watched these dogs do some pretty unusual things.”

Edgar’s mother turned to Mr. Benson. “It doesn’t always make sense when you see it in progress,” she said.

“Go,” she said to the dogs jostling at their feet. “Kennel up. Go.”

The dogs trotted down the aisle. Edgar went to Essay’s pen and grabbed her by the ruff and scrubbed her up, then visited all the rest. Good girl. Yes. Good dog. Good girl. Everyone had walked out of the barn, and as he praised his dogs he listened for the Impala starting, but he heard only a hasty parting conversation between his mother and Mr. Benson.

It was full dark outside now. If he went to the house, there would be demands and arguments and he needed quiet to close his eyes and watch everything again-see the look on Claude’s face as Essay tagged him, the flush of blood across his cheeks, the muscle tugging his eyelid. He climbed the workshop stairs and flicked on the lights in the mow. As the sound of Mr. Benson’s truck faded, his mother stormed in.

“We’re going to talk, Edgar. Right here, right now. I want to know what that was about. Do you have any idea how embarrassing that was?”

Did you see his face? The look on his face?

“Whose face, Edgar? Mr. Benson’s? Who thinks I have a lunatic for a son? Or Claude’s? Who, by the way, is in the house right now, royally pissed off?”

He walked between straw bales scattered across the mow floor, then stopped and looked into the rafters. His breath roared in his ears.

It’s raining, he signed.

“What?”

Is it raining? Do you hear rain?

He ran to the front of the mow and unlatched the broad loading door and swung it open. He gripped the lintel and hung his body into space and looked into the stars burning in the clear night sky, then out toward the woods.

Remember me.

He pulled himself inside.

Come here, he signed. See for yourself.

“I can see from where I am. There’s no rain. Come away from there.”

But his patience was spent. He walked to her and tried to pull her forward. When she resisted he clasped his hands around her neck and swung her toward the mow door, his body counterweighted against hers. Bales and rafters spun around them. His mother tried to get her hands under his and pry them away. They’d halved the distance to the mow door when he lost his balance and they crashed to the floor. In the tumult, he knelt over her and pinned her arms. They panted. He let go and began to sign wildly.

Did you help him? Tell me now if you helped him.

“Help him? Help who?”

I’ll show you who.

He stood again and took his mother’s wrist and began to lug her toward the mow door, still hanging open onto the night. When she realized what he was doing, she began to kick along the floor to get to her feet.

From behind them came a hoarse cry. Not speech, not words, just a groan of apprehension. He looked over his shoulder. Inside the vestibule at the top of the stairs stood the chiaroscuro figure of a man. Edgar dropped his mother’s wrist and ran toward the door, so grim and ecstatic and oblivious he fell over a bale of straw and went down, legs kicking. When he’d scrambled to his feet again, the hay hook was in his hand. He threw himself at the doorway, hook dragging through the air behind like a great single claw. The figure stepped deeper into the shadows and tried to close the vestibule door, but Edgar struck it headlong before it latched.

The door slammed back with a splintering boom. There was a grunt and then the sound of a body tumbling heavily on the stairs. Then silence. Edgar looked up to find the hay hook driven thumb deep into the timber of the doorframe. He wrenched the thing free and flung it ringing across the mow. His mother had gotten to her feet and was running toward him, saying, “What was that? What did you do?” but he couldn’t answer at first. A savage, godish electricity ran through his nerves. From his chest, a spasm rose. His hands snapped open and shut so that he could barely force them into sign.

I should have done it the first night he stayed here.

Only after his mother cried out did he follow her into the vestibule. She was standing halfway down the stairs, the heels of her hands pressed to her temples. At the bottom of the stairwell lay Doctor Papineau, feet askew on a high tread, head on the workshop floor, canted horribly. One of his arms was flung forward, gesturing casually away. Edgar pushed past his mother and stepped over the veterinarian’s body. He bent to look. The old man’s eyes were skimming over even then.

Tears streamed down his mother’s face as she descended the stairs.

Edgar stood. The muscles of his legs were still twitching with whatever galvanic charge had possessed him in the mow.

Now you cry? You think this is terrible? Don’t you have dreams? Isn’t he there when you sleep?

“My God, Edgar. This is not your father. This is Doctor Papineau. This is Page.”

Edgar looked at the old man lying there, so small and frail. The same man who’d summoned the strength to lift him out of the snow by the back of his shirt.

He wasn’t so innocent. I heard them talking.

His mother put her face in her hands. “How are we going to tell Glen?” she said. “I don’t understand what’s happened with you. We’re going to have to…have to…”

She looked at him. “Wait,” she said. “I need to think for a minute. Page fell down the stairs.”

She dropped into sign. You need to go.

I’m not going anywhere.

Yes, you are. I want you to run, get out into the field. Find a place to hide until tomorrow.

Why?

Just go!

So you can be rid of us both?

He didn’t see her hand moving any more than the dogs saw her leash corrections. A hot jolt traveled from his cheek to his spine. He staggered back against the wall to keep from toppling onto Doctor Papineau’s body. The side of his face felt like it had been set on fire.

Don’t you dare, she signed, and she was Raksha now, Mother Wolf. You’re talking to your mother and you’ll do as I say. I want you to go. Stay away until you see me standing behind the silo, alone. Watch in the evening. When you see me, it’s safe to come back. Until then, disappear. Even if we call, stay away.

He turned and stumbled out of the workshop and into a yard pale and blue in the moonlight. He squinted past the light above the kennel doors. The night sky cloudless. There was no time to fetch tackle. He rounded the barn and unlatched the pen doors and signaled his litter out. Seven dogs bounded into the grass. Together they ran down the slope behind the barn until they reached the rock pile, and there Edgar sat, senseless, while the dogs milled about. He watched Claude cross from the house to the barn and back. He closed his eyes. Time passed, whether a minute or an hour, he couldn’t have said. Then his mother was calling, “Edgar! Edgar!” Her voice toylike and shrunken.

The stars wheeled in his vision. Impossible that he had ever lived there.

He stood. He began to run, the dogs beside him. As they reached the woods, a squad car appeared on the road at the top of the hill, blue and red flashers strobing the trees and throwing off a dopplered siren scream. Glen Papineau, come to find his father. Now there was no going back for Almondine, he thought. And having thought it, found it almost impossible not to turn back.

The moonlight was enough to see the two birches marking the entrance to the old logging trail. The dogs crashed through the underbrush in crazy ellipse, all but Baboo, who trailed a few steps behind. The woods were so much darker than the field. He didn’t understand how little progress they’d made until the headlights of the squad car, bouncing over the tractor-rutted field, lit the tree trunks in front of him. Spears and creases of white shot between the trees, but Edgar would not turn his dark-adapted eyes back to look. They wouldn’t bring the squad car into the woods-it couldn’t make headway on the logging path, and there would be no way to turn it around without miring it.

Fifty yards from the creek, the ground began to slope downward. The dogs were cast wide about him now. When he reached the water, he clapped his hands. Baboo had stayed nearby and sat by his leg, panting. Finch materialized from a stand of bracken, followed by Opal and Umbra, like shadows out of shadows. Then Pout and Tinder. In the dark, it took a long time to be sure it was Essay who was missing. He stood again and clapped hard and listened to the water flowing along the creek bed. Then he could wait no longer. When he walked into the creek, the water covered his ankles, cool and slick. He grabbed the first fence post he touched and hauled it back and forth until it came loose, gasping in its hole. The thing was as heavy as a granite pillar and he had to kneel in the water to get it to move. When it finally came up, he balanced the rough end of it on a flat rock in the creek.

Two of the dogs bounded into the water even before he could call them, though in the dark he couldn’t tell who. He pushed them under the wire and they stood on the far side and shook off. He clapped for the others. The remaining four dogs paced beside the creek but would come no farther. A flashlight beam began to cut through the air overhead. The dogs whined and looked over their shoulders. Finally Edgar stepped out of the creek and knelt and put his hands in their ruffs and pressed his face against the crowns of their heads. Finch and Pout and Opal and Umbra. Then he stepped back and released them. At first they sat and looked at him uncertainly. Then Finch wheeled and tracked up the slope in the direction they’d come and the other three followed, crashing along his trail.

Edgar walked into the shallow water of the creek and scrambled beneath the barbed wire. He lost his footing trying to reseat the post; the hole had filled with mud and suddenly he found himself lying flat in the water and wet to the sternum. In the end he left the post standing cockeyed in the stream. He’d wanted to set it back the right way but doubted it would make much difference.

He sank to the ground on the far bank of the creek. Not two but three dogs greeted him: Baboo and Tinder and Essay, Essay having crossed elsewhere on her own terms. They jostled and licked his face and danced around him like savages performing some ancient, unnamed ritual. As though they knew exactly what lay ahead. His hands, when he rose, were covered with clay. A paste of it had begun to dry and crack on his face. He cupped his hands in the creek and emptied the water over his head again and again. Then he stood and turned from everything he knew and the four of them began to make their way into the dark Chequamegon.