The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

THEY WALKED UP THROUGH THE MANTLE OF TREE SHADOW stretching across the western field. Ahead, the red siding of the barn glowed phosphorescent in the mulled sunset. A pair of does sprang over the fence on the north side of the field-two leaps each, nonchalant, long-sustained, falling earthward only as an afterthought-and crashed through the hazel and sumac. The air was still and hot and the hay rasped dryly at Edgar’s legs. Stalks of wild corn dotted the field, leaves frayed and bitten to the cane, and the Indian tobacco was brown and wilted from the heat. All of it brittle and rattling as if folded from sheets of cigarette paper.

By the time Edgar reached the rock pile, Essay had already coursed the yard, whipping the kennel dogs into a frenzy. He perched on a rock and listened. Equal parts of longing and dread washed through him, but the sound of the dogs pleased him the way a lullaby might please an old man. He picked out their voices one by one and named them. From where he sat, he could see only the roof of the house hovering darkly over the yard. He waited for some human figure to appear, but there was only the flash of Essay’s body, low and elongate, cutting through the grass as she made another round.

He stood and walked the rest of the way. The house was dark. The Impala sat parked in the grass. In the garden, he could see the green tract of cucumber and pumpkin vines and, far back by the woods, a half dozen sunflowers leaning bent-headed over it all. He peered through the living room windows hoping to see Almondine, knowing all the while that had she been home, she would already have found some way to bolt from the house.

When he entered the barn, the dogs braced their forepaws on their pen doors and greeted him with yodels and roars and howls. He went from pen to pen, letting them jump and claw his shirt, laughing at their mad dashes and play-bows and rolls. He saved Pout and Finch and Opal and Umbra for last. He knelt and mouthed their names into their ears and they washed his face with their tongues. When they had quieted, he found a coffee can and dished kibble into a pile for Essay. She started eating daintily, then leaned into it as if suddenly remembering food.

Two pups greeted him in the nursery-just two, from the litter of eight whelped before he left. They were weaned and fat, shaking their bellies and beating their tails. He squatted and scratched their chins.

What did they name you? Where are the others?

He walked to the workshop. He looked at the file cabinets and the books arranged atop them. The New Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language weighed so little in his hands. The scent of its pages like road dust. He leaned against the wall and thought of his grandfather and of Brooks’s never-ending admonitions, and he thought of Hachiko. Among the mishmash of correspondence he found the letter from Tokyo and withdrew the crumpled photograph he’d hidden there. He looked at Claude and Forte through the webwork of cracks in the emulsion, then slid it into his pocket.

He closed up the kennel and walked to the house. The kitchen door key hung from a nail in the basement. He ate straight from the refrigerator, fog pouring over his feet. Bread and cheese and roast chicken off the bone, then walked through the house cradling a five-quart bucket of vanilla ice cream under his arm, spooning it up and looking around. The kitchen clock. The stove. The candle night-light. The living room furniture sitting petrified and ogrelike in the dusk. The clothes hanging in his mother’s closet. He walked up the stairs and sat on his bed. A puff of dust lifted into the air. Across the plank flooring, dead flies lay scattered, dry husks, blue and green, with cellophaned wings. He hadn’t imagined everyone would be gone. He hadn’t imagined saying hello to the place before seeing his mother. Before seeing Almondine most of all. He had imagined sleeping in that bed again, but looking at it now, he didn’t know how he could.

He put the ice cream back in the freezer and dropped the spoon into the sink. Essay scratched at the porch door. He walked out and pushed the door open and let her trot through the house, repeating his inspection. He was seated at the table, at his father’s place, when she returned. He sat for a long time, waiting. It was hard for him not to think about what things would be like. Finally, he decided to wash up. When he lifted his face from the towel in the bathroom he saw the green soap turtle sitting on the windowsill, complete and perfect except for one shriveled hind foot.

He walked into the kitchen and found a pencil and a scrap of paper and touched the lead to the paper and stopped and looked out the kitchen windows. The windows had been propped open on sticks and a night breeze, hot as an animal exhalation, ruffled the gingham curtains. Dark, ripe apples swung from the branches outside the window. He put the pencil to the paper again. I ate while you were gone, he wrote. I’ll come back tomorrow. Then he took the photograph of Claude and Forte from his pocket and set it beside the note.

He gave Essay the option of staying or coming along. She walked down the porch steps, calm now, curiosity satisfied. He pocketed the key and stood trying to decide where to sleep. The mow, on a night that hot, would be stifling. In the milk house he found a pile of burlap sacks. They walked into the field. It was full dark by that time but the faint reach of the yard light cast his shadow before him. At the narrow end of the trees by the whale-rock he snapped the dust from the sacks and threw them down. Essay circled and circled, solving again the everlasting riddle of lying down to sleep. She came to rest with her back to him, muzzle fitted high on her foreleg. Overhead the aurora flew, sheets of wild neon. He focused on the hovering seed of the yard light flickering through the hay and breathed the scent of pollen and decay that infused the night.

They’d slept for some time when the truck crested the hill. The moon was up. The field around them like salt and silver. He sat on the burlap and watched the truck back around and stop by the porch while the kennel dogs barked a frantic greeting. Essay stood and whined. Edgar lay a hand on her hip. She nosed him and turned back to watch.

The truck disgorged the figures of Claude and his mother. Claude lifted the gate on the topper and lifted out two bags of groceries while his mother paused to settle the dogs. The porch door creaked and slapped. The kitchen light appeared dimly through the broad windows in the living room. Twice more Claude walked between the back porch and the truck. On his last trip, he stood looking around the yard, then closed the topper and walked to the porch and turned out the light.

And sitting under the stars and the sky, Edgar waited to see Almondine. She had not jumped down from the bed of the truck. He had watched for that. I just missed her, he said to himself. He closed his eyes to see it again. But she would have scented him at once. He felt himself perfectly drawn and repelled, wishing to be done with that part of his life and wishing never to let it end, knowing that whatever came next would only reduce what had already happened until there was nothing but memory, a story eroded, a dream thinly recalled.

If she wasn’t at home, then she must have gone into town with them. It was one or the other. One or the other.

He looked at the stand of birches, alone in the center of the field. It was the middle of August and when he stood, the timothy almost reached his waist. He stumbled through it, striking at the heads with his splayed hands. The trunks of the birches tilted and blurred and the leaves in their canopy quavered whitely. Then he was standing in the broad circle of grass scythed away at the base of the trees. There was the familiar white cross for the stillborn baby and the newer one for his father. And next to them, as yet unmarked, an oblong of fresh, dark ground.

It blew the breath out of him. He fell like a puppet severed from its strings. He lay with his forehead pressed to the ground, the scent of iron and loam filling his nostrils, and he clutched the dirt and poured it out of his hands. An oceanic roar filled his head. All his memory, all his past, rose up to engulf him. Images of Almondine. How she liked peanut butter but not peanuts; how she preferred lima beans to corn but refused peas; how, best of all, she adored honey, any way she could get it, licked from his fingers, from his lips, dabbed on her nose. How she liked to snatch things from his hands and let him take them back. How if he cupped her chin she would lower and lower her head all the way to the ground to stay like that. How different it was to stroke her with his palm than with his fingertips. How he could lay a hand on her side while she slept and she wouldn’t open her eyes but nonetheless understood, and her breath came differently.

He remembered a time when he was small, when Almondine was young and rambunctious, more like a wild horse than a dog to him, when she could cross the yard faster than a swallow and catch him running across that same field. He liked to sneak away-make her chase, see her fly. When she reached him, they would turn and sprint into the field, heading for a thicket of raspberry canes, a place he liked simply because he was small enough to move through it unscathed. But when they arrived, something was standing there-an animal he had never seen before, with a broad face and pointed nose and great smooth black claws. They’d run up quickly and surprised it and it turned to face them with a hoarse cough, hissing and slashing the ground, mistaking their headlong rush for a charge. Gouts of dirt sprayed the air behind its haunches. He tried to step back, but the thing bounded equally forward, tethered to him by some unseen force, staring with black marble eyes as though beholding a monster, panting throatily and turning and snapping at its hind legs and whirling to face them again, a beard of gray foam lining its jaw.

How long Almondine stood beside him he didn’t know, transfixed by how the thing crabbed forward with each step back he took. Then she glided lengthwise between them, blocking his view and hipping him so hard he nearly fell. She didn’t run to do it, used none of the enchantments of play, nothing clever, no dancing grace. She just stepped between them and stood, tail unlashed. Then she turned and licked his face and he was stunned at what he understood her to be doing. If she moved she exposed him, and therefore she would not move. She was asking him to leave, saying it was he who could save her, not the other way around. She would not even risk a fight with the thing. She would leave only if he were gone and in such a way that it wouldn’t chase. She took her eyes off it just that one instant, to make things clear.

He watched her standing there for the longest time as he backed away. When he reached the barn, she crouched and sprang and materialized at his side. And he remembered how they’d seen the thing, dead and fly-strewn, on the road the next day.

There was Almondine, playing their crib game. Dancing for him, light as a dust mote.

He thought of his father standing in the barn doorway peering skyward as a thunderstorm approached, while his mother shouted, “Gar, get indoors, for God’s sake.” That was how it was, sometimes. You put yourself in front of the thing and waited for whatever was going to happen and that was all. It scared you and it didn’t matter. You stood and faced it. There was no outwitting anything. When Almondine had been playful, she had been playful in the face of that knowledge, as defiant as before the rabid thing. It was not a morbid thought, just the world as it existed. Sometimes you looked the thing in the eye and it turned away. Sometimes it didn’t. Essay might have been taken up in the whirlwind at the lake, but she wasn’t, and there was nothing special in that except her certainty that she had driven the thing away.

In the morning, he planned to walk into the house. He didn’t know what would happen then. Claude had been the one to find his note. He understood that. If his mother had read it, she would have run out shouting his name. But the house was dark and no one had run out.

He rested a hand on Essay’s back and they watched the yard. He felt hollow as a gourd. He knew he wouldn’t sleep anymore that night. The yard light stood high and brilliant on its pole above the orchard, its glow enveloping the house and yard and all beyond that darkness and the sky black above. After a while Claude stepped from the porch and walked along the driveway. A stripe of light appeared beneath the back barn doors. In a few minutes the stripe winked out and Claude crossed back to the house and mounted the porch steps and without pause was swallowed up in the shadows.

Trudy

TRUDY LAY IN BED, HALF SLEEPING, THINKING ABOUT THE DOGS-that peculiar note of agitation she’d heard in their voices when she’d first stepped out of the truck. Not frenzy, exactly, though something akin to it, and enough to make her stop and look around the yard. She’d seen none of the usual causes for alarm-no deer poaching in the garden, no skunk scuttling into the shadows, no raccoon peering red-eyed from an apple tree. In fact, the moment she’d signed quiet the dogs had settled down. She’d decided it was just the lateness of their arrival or the spectacle of a full moon hovering in the treetops. But the edge in their voices nagged at her now. And maybe it nagged at Claude, too; as she was having these thoughts, he sat up and began to dress by the blue moonwash streaming through the window.

“I’m going to check on those pups,” he whispered.

“I’ll go with you.”

“No. Stay and sleep. Back before you know it.”

The spring on the porch door gave an iron yawn and then she was alone. The dogs, she suspected, weren’t the only reason Claude had gotten up. He was, for reasons she didn’t understand, embarrassed about his insomnia, reticent to the point of silence whenever she asked in the mornings how long he’d been awake. The first few times she’d woken to find him missing, she’d stolen out to watch him pace the yard, hands in his pockets, head down, walking until the steady rhythm of step, step, step worked whatever it was out of him. But mostly it was rainy nights that plagued Claude. He’d sit on the porch drawing the tip of his pocketknife across a bar of soap until a facsimile of something or another appeared in his hands and was carved down into something smaller and then something smaller yet until it finally disappeared entirely. The crumbs and curls she found in the trash spoke most eloquently of how long he’d sat in the dark.

Trudy had her own reason for wanting to go outside. It would have been an opportunity, though belated, to stand behind the silo-to make her nightly signal that it was safe for Edgar to come home. But it had been late when they’d parked the truck and carried in the groceries, and full dark. Even so, had she found an inconspicuous reason to go out, she might have tried anyway.

This arrangement between her and Edgar was one fact about that night in the mow she had kept secret from Claude, letting him believe, along with Glen and everyone else, that Edgar had fled, panic-stricken at the sight of Page lying so near where Gar had died. Why she’d withheld this fact from Claude, when she’d told him so much of the rest, she couldn’t have said. Partly because she’d thought it would be such a short-lived deception. The very next night she’d walked into the tall grass and stood facing the sunset, expecting to see Edgar emerge from the woods as Gar had, so long ago, shimmering into place between the aspens. Finally, afraid that Claude would ask what she was doing, she’d walked to the house, ignoring the whisper that said Edgar was there, watching, but choosing not to believe her.

So it had gone the next evening. And all the evenings after.

What had possessed her to tell Edgar to leave? Almost instantly she’d realized it was unnecessary and foolish, but by then he’d disappeared. Standing behind the silo had become her daily penance for that mistake, though one that did nothing to ease her mind. Her only consolation was that the dogs who’d followed Edgar had never turned up, which meant they were still out there. Which meant he was safe. She drew a ragged breath, thinking of it: he was all that remained of her family, and he was somewhere.

But sometimes Trudy couldn’t help imagining that Edgar had returned, just once, on an evening when she’d found no excuse to be outside and he’d lost hope and set off for good. What came into her mind at those times was the image of a black seed, grown now into a vine with stems and leaves of perfect black-an image from those days long ago that followed her last miscarriage.

(The night was hot. Her thoughts had begun to drift on a plane between reverie and sleep; circling, eddying. She gave herself over to them, a lucid passenger in her own mind.)

She and Gar had been so certain everything was okay with the pregnancy. Afterward, there had been in her a void, a raw, sunlight-scraped center-something atrocious that muttered how simple it would be to fall down the stairs. To find a quiet place on the river and walk in. Eating had been like pouring sand into her mouth. Sleep a suffocation. Relief came only when she turned inward and embraced that place. The decision was indulgent and self-pitying, yes, but time passed there in such a soothing contraction. When she opened her eyes, it was morning. Gar was holding a cup of coffee for her. When he walked away she closed her eyes and then it was another morning, and the day had passed.

Each hour spent like that poisoned her, she’d thought, yet the sensation was irresistible, enthralling, equal parts dread and desire. She’d roused herself, finally, out of a perversely selfish concern for Gar, because a retreat to that black center would provide her no peace if he were dragged down too. She’d forced herself out of bed and gone downstairs. Gar had been almost giddy. He’d left her alone on the porch and returned cradling that feral pup, so chilled it barely drew breath, black and gray and brown in his hands, eyes glittering, feet scuffling against his palm. And that was the first thing to move her-the first tangible thing-since the stillbirth. From the moment she touched the nursling she’d known it wouldn’t survive, but just as certainly had known they would have to try.

The crib had been ready for weeks. Live or die, she wanted the pup to decide there. For those preparations to have some purpose. When Almondine woke her in the night, she’d leaned over the wooden rails and carried the pup to the rocking chair and set it in the folds of her robe. She’d rocked and watched the pup. Did it have its own black place? she wondered. It wasn’t injured. Could it simply choose to live? And if it wanted to die, why did it struggle so? She traced the tines of its ribs, the pinfeather fur of its belly. Somehow a bargain was articulated between them; Trudy was unsure how that had happened, only that it was so. Then the pup closed its eyes and gave a last, infinitesimal sigh.

It was one thing to live in a world where death stood a distant figure, quite another to hold it in your hands, and Trudy had held it now twice within a month. She thought that night she’d made a pact with death itself: she could stay if she allowed death to stay as well. In choosing life, she embraced contradiction. The night passed. By the time Gar found them the next morning, a great swell of sorrow had risen in her and receded and in its wake the black place had been reduced to a grain.

Afterward she poured her life into the few of them there-into Gar, into Almondine, into the dogs and their training. She locked away that shriveled particle, ignoring and submerging it under feverish work. Years passed. Edgar was born, a never-ending mystery to them all, it seemed, except the dogs. Trudy seldom thought about that night. She came to believe that the black place had left her and to remember with the full force of her imagination would only call it back.

She’d been wrong. After Gar’s funeral, when the pneumonia was at its peak, that tiny seed appeared again in her sleep. Its hull cracked. From the fissure a thread sprouted, delicate as silk. It vanished like a skittish animal the next morning. But her deepest fever dreams were yet to come, and in them she coaxed that tendril out. It circled her hips, her waist, her breasts. It wove itself through her hair and across her face until it bound her up, every inch of it velvety black. A comfort at first. Then she woke one morning to discover the tendrils had become a cage. There was a moment of panic before she remembered how it worked; and then she drew a breath and turned toward it.

She’d made some decisions during the time that followed, bad decisions, possibly. She’d convinced herself that Edgar’s resentment toward Claude would lessen. Now she wondered if that hadn’t played a part in Edgar’s staying away. She could not look directly at this thought, or the thought that Edgar might never return. Such things could be examined only in the periphery of her mind. Such were the contradictions she’d learned to live with. In July, Claude arranged placements for two of Edgar’s litter-Opal and Umbra, the ones Edgar called “the twins”-but when the time came, Trudy balked. Had grown hysterical, in fact, at any diminishment of her son’s presence. The placements were canceled. To placate everyone, she agreed to let two pups go instead. Something they had never done before.

(In the bedroom, Claude had returned. He sat on the edge of the mattress, unbuttoning his shirt. She sighed and turned away.)

For weeks after the pneumonia she forced herself out to the kennel, pretending to be recovering. No, not pretending-she was recovering, in her body. In the mornings, after Edgar boarded the school bus, the silence in the barn was intolerable. Playing music, even worse. Almondine found her and curled up and slept nearby, a comfort, but the bed called to her so strongly, the weight of her encumbrance was so great that by midmorning most days she was in the house exhausted and asleep.

One day, just after noon, Claude’s Impala appeared at the end of the driveway. Trudy watched from the porch as he swung open the barn door and walked inside. She sat in the living room and waited. Finally, she went to the barn. She found him weighing a pup and making notes. He looked at her but said nothing. That entire first week passed almost wordlessly between them except for small questions, immediate problems. Trudy didn’t welcome Claude’s presence, and she couldn’t hide that; she wanted to ask him to leave, but she knew she needed the help. Each day, before Edgar came home, Claude got into his car and drove off, sometimes with no more than a sidelong “G’bye.” Twice, when she looked up, he was simply gone.

That Saturday, when Claude didn’t show up, all she felt was relief. By midafternoon on Sunday she found herself looking out the window. The Impala appeared again late Monday morning. Trudy lay in bed, unable to rouse herself. Then, anger. What was it he wanted? Silent or not, Claude kept coming for a reason. But she needed to be left alone. What little energy she could muster was spent stumbling through the chores and looking after Edgar. She stalked to the barn. Claude was kneeling on the floor of the medicine room. The drawers and cabinets all stood open. Vials of pills and stainless-steel scissors and packages of gauze and bottles of Phisohex and Betadine surrounded him. She intended to ask him to leave but instead blurted out a question.

“Just tell me this. Do you miss him?”

Claude stood and looked at her and licked his lips. He took a breath deep enough to make his shoulders rise.

“No,” he said. And then, after a pause: “I remember him, though. I remember him just like he was.”

She had expected some facile lie. She’d hoped for that; it would make it easier to tell Claude to leave. But he’d spoken the words as if offering a gift of some kind. A reparation. In the silence that followed, she thought he might even apologize for his answer (that would be false, too), but he simply waited. His posture, and the look in his eyes, said he would go if she asked. She still didn’t understand what he was doing, but he wasn’t trying to force his presence on her. He was coming, she thought, for some purpose of his own, to assuage some memory or feeling connected with Gar. Or maybe he was making amends for not grieving his brother’s death.

“If you’re going to keep coming out, you could at least ask me what needs to be done,” she said.

“What, then?”

The first thing that came to mind was that the medicine room was a disaster, that it needed to be thoroughly cleaned, the expired medicines discarded, reorganized. But they were standing in the middle of it, and he was already engaged in exactly that.

“One of Alice’s tires went flat over the winter,” she said.

“All right. What else?”

“Nothing. Everything.”

“Leave the pens in the morning,” he said. “I’ll clean them when I come out.”

WHAT HAPPENED WAS THIS: when Trudy felt most vulnerable, she had seen in Claude a chance to anchor herself, to stop the backward slide that, alone, she could not check. She asked him to recall something of Gar.

“What do you want to know?”

“Anything. Tell me the first thing you remember about him. Your earliest memory.”

His eyes fluttered briefly and he looked away.

“You might not like it,” he said. “I knew a different Gar than you.”

“That’s okay,” she said. “Just tell me.” But inside, she thought: I hope so. If you knew the same Gar, we’re both lost.

“If you really want to know, what I remember is a snowstorm,” he said. “The start of a blizzard-the first one I’d ever seen. I couldn’t have been more than three years old, because seeing that much snow falling was a shock. We were standing in the living room looking out the window, across the backyard and down the field. Everything began to disappear-first the trees at the bottom of the field, then the whole field, and then even the barn. I got the idea that the world had changed forever. It got me so excited I wanted to go outside. I remember wanting to see how many snowflakes I could grab in my hand. Whether I could follow one of them all the way down to the ground and see it land. I wanted to taste one. I didn’t understand that it would be cold and I couldn’t see why Gar stopped me. Except, now that I think about it, he didn’t care about the cold. What he cared was that no one-”

“-put tracks in the snow,” she whispered.

Claude looked surprised and nodded.

“That’s right. He told me how, if we waited until morning, we’d wake up and be amazed. The truck would have disappeared. The barn would be an igloo. But only if we didn’t trample the snow while it was falling. But I’d latched onto the idea that something tremendous was happening-that some force had been let loose, and by morning it would all be back to normal-and I started to run. Next thing I know, he’s standing between me and the kitchen door, pushing me back and yelling.”

Yes, she thought. All those thunderstorms with Gar standing in the doorway of the barn, watching the sky. A knot inside her relaxed. Claude hadn’t known a different Gar, just a younger one. She laughed. Unbelievably, she laughed. Later she’d cried, of course, the way a person cries when a salve is finally applied to a burn. But most miraculous of all, she’d rested that night for the first time since Gar had died.

The next day she called to Claude from the porch door and poured him coffee. She’d asked whether they had ended up going out into the snow after all, or had they waited until morning. She felt she was treading some dangerous ground, that if she pulled too hard (and that was her instinct-to seize the thread of story Claude had offered and yank it with all her might) it would silence him. A seduction of sorts began. Yes: sexual. He wanted that more than she, but she wasn’t unwilling. They weren’t exactly trading one thing for the other. True, sometimes when she ran out of questions, she found herself leading him into the bedroom, and there was always an element of gratitude about the act. But there was selfishness as well. And at night, she slept. She blissfully slept.

The irony was, the more Claude’s memories of Gar released her from the haunting she felt, the more they’d occupied Claude. By listening to his stories, Trudy was finally able to say goodbye-goodbye to the young Gar, the teenaged Gar, the Gar she had never known but had, somehow, expected to know. Claude spoke about his older brother in a clear-eyed, unsentimental tone. She learned things that only a brother could know, particularly a younger brother who had grown up in Gar’s shadow, studying him, copying him, worshipping him, and fighting horrendously with him.

How could she explain any of that to Edgar? How could she say that she needed Claude because Claude knew Gar and wasn’t destroyed by his death? How could she say that when she missed Gar most she talked to Claude and he told her stories and for a moment, she remembered, really remembered, that Gar had existed. How could she explain that she could get out of bed in the morning if there was a chance she might touch Gar again?

AND SLOWLY, SHE LEARNED about Claude. The great distracter. He took an almost malevolent pleasure in tempting the dogs while she trained them. One day, when she was proofing recalls, he walked across the yard with a cardboard box filled with squirrels-not that she knew it at the time. When the dogs had crossed halfway to her, he yanked open a flap and three gray streaks shot across the lawn. The dogs had wheeled and chased.

“Okay,” she said, laughing. “How’d you do that?”

“Ah. Ancient Chinee secwet,” he said.

Claude’s gift-if that’s what it could be called-was all the more baffling for its effortlessness. He seemed to know every human recreation within a day’s drive. Unsolicited, people bore news to him of celebrations, large or small. Everything from the feed mill codgers’ plan to sample the diner’s new meat loaf to baseball games and back-alley fights. That very evening they had set out to buy groceries in Park City and ended up at, of all things, a wedding reception in someone’s backyard, the friend of a cousin of a man Claude had once met at The Hollow. Just for an hour, Claude had promised, though it had been close to midnight when they’d driven home. As an orphan, handed from relation to relation a half dozen times before she was twelve, Trudy could wield an insular self-reliance, but how could she not be charmed when a group of near-strangers welcomed them-people she’d lived among for all these years but had never met. How could that be?

Comparing Claude and Gar was a bad idea, she knew, but in this way they were such opposites. Gar had, if anything, repelled commotion, even happy commotion, in favor of a passionate orderliness. Those breeding records-so many drawers overflowing with log sheets, photographs, notes, pedigrees-Gar loved them. He’d believed as fervently in the power of breeding as she believed in training-that there was nothing in a dog’s character that couldn’t be adapted to useful work. Not changed, but accommodated and, ultimately, transformed. That was what people didn’t understand. Unless they had worked long and hard at it, most people thought training meant forcing their will on a dog. Or that training required some magical gift. Both ideas were wrong. Real training meant watching, listening, diverting a dog’s exuberance, not suppressing it. You couldn’t change a river into a sea, but you could trace a new channel for it to follow. This was a debate she and Gar had cheerfully never resolved. Gar claimed her training successes proved that his records, properly interpreted, brought each new generation of pups closer to some ideal, even if he could not put that ideal into words. Trudy knew better. The training had, if anything, gotten more difficult over the years.

But Claude paid those files scant attention. To him, they were nothing more than a means to an end. He was more interested in catching the eye of the Carruthers catalog people after the branch kennel arrangement fell through with Benson, the man from Texas, who’d witnessed enough the night Edgar had run to be apprehensive instead of enthusiastic.

Perhaps the diversions were no accident. Whenever she began to brood, Claude practically leapt to draw her away, toward wine and music, things immediate and uncomplicated. A movie in Ashland. Back road drives through bosky glades. A walk by the falls, where the Bad River crashed through granite sluices with an engulfing roar. She’d given in to that last idea more than once; standing on the footbridge across that gray chasm, he’d produced a flask of brandy and they’d watched the water clench its fist in the air and drop away. After he’d taken a few turns at the brandy, he’d murmured, “Mid these dancing rocks at once and ever, it flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion, through wood and dale the sacred river ran, then reached the caverns measureless to man, and sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean.”

He moved the old record player from the workshop to the house. He loved music of any kind-Big Band, Elvis, the Rolling Stones. Only classical music bored him with its orderly sterility. Most especially, he adored voices-crying, pleading, laughing voices-and the great melodious singers were his favorites, whether they radiated unrestrained longing or sultry indifference. He liked Frank Sinatra for his brute power. He liked Eydie Gormé for her bright untouchability. (“Blame It on the Bossa Nova” got him ridiculously worked up.) But he held a special fondness for crooners-Perry Como for example, or Mel Tormé, whom Trudy despised. Whenever Claude dropped the needle on a Mel Tormé record he’d announce, in a hushed voice, “It’s the Velvet Fog!” and give Trudy a wide-eyed stare, as if they’d found themselves trapped in a scene from a horror movie. But that was Claude-tricking her into laughing precisely because she resisted. It made her a little angry, though she ended up wishing he’d do it again, like a girl clapping and crying out for the magician to release another dove from his sleeve. Only with Claude, the dove seemed to come from inside her.

(She was in that twilight of quarter-consciousness where notions crack and drift like floes of ice. Claude lay behind her, solid, heavy, hot. She was glad he had checked the kennel. The first news she would have to give Edgar was of Almondine; how vulnerable he would be to it. She must call Glen Papineau tomorrow. But if there’d been news, he would have driven out to tell them in person. And she had to be careful; every time she asked, she chanced making the connection between Edgar and Page’s accident stronger in Glen’s mind.)

Edgar

HE SAT BY ALMONDINE’S GRAVE AND LOOKED AT THE HOUSE and the oversize barn, wondering if everything that was happening was by dint of his own imagination, though he knew it wasn’t so, just as he’d known well enough that night in the rain what was real and what was not. He thought about the first night Claude had stayed with them, how he and Almondine had snuck into the barn. How they’d found Claude asleep in the mow, but not really asleep. Looking up into the rafters.

“This is just how I remembered it,” he’d said. “Your dad and I knew every nook and cranny. We hid cigarettes up here, liquor even. The old man knew it was there somewhere but he was too proud to look for it.”

One time, they’d opened up a wall in the house and discovered Schultz’s writing hidden inside. And once, Edgar had found a loose section of floorboard near the front of the mow that lifted away. Beneath it lay a space big enough for a pack of cigarettes or a flask of whiskey. The only contents had been a lace of cobwebs and a bottle cap and at the time he’d thought nothing of it.

A bottle cap.

Someone had once hidden a bottle there.

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

He tried to remember if he’d ever looked under that board since that first, strange conversation with Claude.

Do you think you can find that bottle? You need to look for that bottle. Unless you can lay hands on it, you need to go. That’s what’s in the juice.

He stood. The moon had risen late, haloed and dimming the nearby stars. Essay had trotted off, exploring in the moonlit field, but now he couldn’t see her and he began to walk. When he neared the kennel, two dogs began to bay. The noise didn’t worry him, so long as it was brief. He even felt a kind of dark thrill, knowing that, that night, it wasn’t a deer wandering through the orchard that started them or an owl dropping onto a rabbit in the long grass.

He opened the rear kennel doors. A rectangle of moonlight skewed across the aisle and his shadow in it. Before he’d run off he could have walked into the barn in the dead of night and the dogs wouldn’t have uttered a sound, but they were on the verge of an uproar now. He groped his way to the medicine room, felt his irises shrink when he flicked the light switch up. He went down the line, crouching in front of their pens and touching them, looking at the catchlights in their eyes and signing, quiet. When they were calm he found a flashlight in the workshop and extinguished the light in the medicine room. He stood at the back doors looking for Essay, but she was nowhere to be seen and he pulled the doors shut.

In the dark he heard a dull electromechanical buzz. He shined the flashlight beam up the aisle until it stopped on a telephone mounted on one of the thick posts. They had put an extension in the barn, but the crosstalk ring was the same as ever. He lifted the receiver to his ear. Beneath the dial tone, a faint conversation, two strange voices, a man and a woman.

He walked to the workshop and climbed the steps, forcing himself past the spot where Doctor Papineau had lain. The mow still trapped the day’s heat. The rear third was stacked with fresh straw, bales all the way to the trusses. The smell would have been lovely under different circumstances. It reminded him of all the time he’d spent there, bales shoved into makeshift corrals, rolling pups until their hind legs kicked, teaching them to sit for the slicker brush and the nail clippers, or paging through the dictionary for names.

He started searching near the vestibule doorway, swinging the beam of the flashlight in downward-angled arcs and kicking straw aside until, near the far front corner, he spotted the stub of board he had in mind. One edge had been splintered by a screwdriver or a knife and he squatted and flicked open Henry’s jackknife and wedged the blade into the slot before he noticed the nails at either end and the hammer strikes in the wood. He found a pry bar in the workshop. The board tipped up a quarter inch before the old wood gave way and the pry bar popped free. It was enough to raise the nail heads.

The hollow beneath the board was just as he’d remembered, a few inches of clear space floored by one of the broad main timbers, into which a dugout had been chiseled, and as empty as when he’d first discovered it. But the bottle cap and the cobwebs were absent. And there was another difference: a fresh set of chisel marks widened a stretch of the original cavity by half an inch or more on each side. Unlike the older, carefully made depression, whose surfaces were smooth and edges straight, the new indents looked chewed into the timber. He ran his fingers along the splinters. A few amber wood chips lay scattered across the old beam.

He tried to remember how that bottle had looked, clasped between him and Ida Paine. The stopper a crude blob of glass. The ribbon, with its indecipherable lettering. The oily contents licking the insides. He looked at his palm, measured the sensation of it against the chisel marks. He sat back and shone his flashlight against the staggered yellow wall of bales. Chaff drifted through the light. With the barn broom, he swept the straw back from the front wall and crossed the floor, tapping at boards. Dozens of hiding places, Claude had said. Edgar could work until sunrise and still not test them all.

The dogs in the back runs let out a volley of barks. He cracked open the mow door and looked down to find Essay trotting past. He ran down the mow stairs and opened the back doors and clapped for her until she trotted up from the dark. Then he led her to the pen with Finch and Pout and opened the door. Before he could sign anything, she walked in and the three of them settled into the straw.

In the medicine room he sloshed water around a coffee can and tossed the grit at the drain hole and refilled it and took a swallow and carried it with him back up to the mow. He tipped the board into its slot unnailed and kicked the loose straw around until it didn’t look swept. The batteries in the flashlight had begun to fail. He flicked it off and shook it and waited and pushed the thumb switch forward again. The filament came on yellow, then dimmed back to ember-orange. It was enough light to climb the stacked bales by. Once on top, he wedged the flashlight into the crook of a rafter and wrestled bales around until he’d created a hollow and he settled in and switched off the flashlight. In the dark, the heat in the rafters congealed around him. He had to force himself to take a breath.

After a long time, swallows began to trill from their nests in the eaves. The first cicadas cried out their complaint. Far away, the porch door creaked and two of the dogs called out. The doors at the front of the barn rattled as they were hooked open. Then Claude’s voice, echoing through the kennel. Edgar wondered how long it would take before he discovered Essay. When light began to show through the cracks beneath the eaves he tipped the coffee can to his mouth. The water tasted of iron and dust and blood. Finally he slept, but it was a cursed sleep. Every sound jerked him awake. Chaff covered him like ash. With every movement came some new scratch or bite, and he drifted in and out of consciousness, not knowing what else to do besides wait.

Glen Papineau

IT HADN’T HAPPENED EXACTLY THE WAY CLAUDE PREDICTED, BUT once the seed of the idea was planted, Glen found himself brooding over Edgar Sawtelle.

Claude had worried about him filing a lawsuit, but that was the furthest thing from Glen’s mind. The fact was, over the last several months, Claude had turned out to be a pretty nice guy, a fine friend. Dragging them into court wouldn’t be right. They were nearly as busted up over his father’s death as he was, plus they had a runaway to worry about. Anything bad a person could wish on them had already happened, and worse.

No, the way it worked in his mind was, suppose Edgar did turn up? Suppose Glen walked into his office one morning and a description of the boy had come over the wires? Would he call the Sawtelles straight off? Or would he want to check it out first? That seemed like the humane thing-verify it before he got their hopes up. It depended on where Edgar turned up, of course. A lot of runaways stuck surprisingly close to home, which for Edgar meant Ashland, Superior, Eau Claire, or one of the dozens of small towns in between-an easy run to fetch him. Glen could even imagine going as far as Madison, though much beyond that and Edgar might as well be in California.

Yet…suppose it was nearby? Suppose the officer who called him was a small-town cop like Glen and Glen could just walk in and say, “Yep, that’s him.” That would be the right way to do it-identify the kid in person before making calls, avoid any confusion and a bad false alarm for Trudy. He’d make small talk, they’d sign custody over, and after that it would be just Glen and Edgar in the squad car. Of course, he’d deliver Edgar safe and sound, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t stop to ask a couple of questions. Discuss what had happened in that mow. Find out, one way or another.

It was natural for Glen to imagine that conversation taking place in the squad car because he did his very best thinking there, right behind the wheel, with the trees and fields and houses sliding across the windshield. He liked to let his mind wander a bit. One thing that really bugged him was the notion that other officers-and he used that word with a grain of salt, because it implied a certain dignity and honor they didn’t all have-mocked him. He had a nickname, he knew, something hung on him since childhood. Ox. He hated it when people called him that. After graduating from Mellen High, he thought he’d left it behind, but somehow the trainees at the academy in Madison had found out. His looks didn’t help. People took one glance and thought, “That must be the one they call ‘Ox,’” practically mouthing the words. Before long, someone saw him in his blues, and that cemented his fate, that memorable but tenuous connection to Paul Bunyan, or rather, to his beast of burden: Babe the Blue Ox.

The name didn’t bother him so much as the implication that he was clumsy or stupid. But most people saw what they wanted to see. Little skinny guys looked smart. Big guys looked dumb. Even police officers, trained to see past appearances, fell into that trap. When they saw Babe the Blue Ox coming, they saw dumb, and any little mistake became emblematic.

For example, the interview with the boy. At a staff meeting in Ashland he’d let slip that Trudy had translated Edgar’s answers rather than having the kid write them out, and people had actually guffawed. Like, there goes Ox Papineau, doing the dumbest thing you could imagine. What they didn’t understand was that his pop had spent the night with the Sawtelles. He’d stopped by the office that morning ahead of them and said, in no uncertain terms, to make it quick, that Trudy and her son were wrecked, barely functioning. There wasn’t any use forcing Edgar to relive the experience and it might very well do damage. So Glen had promised he’d keep it to the point.

Plus, the night before the boiler had gone on the fritz, and he’d spent every spare minute that morning convincing it to work. When the time came for the interview, he maybe hadn’t been as prepared as he would have liked. Yes, he’d had Annie type it up and run it out for them to sign, but that didn’t stop the wingnuts in Ashland from re-enacting the scene, one of them asking questions, another waving his arms around in reply, a third spewing preposterous interpretations. It had gotten so that any time he asked a question, they launched into mock-sign while some wise guy leaned over and whispered, “He says he didn’t do it.” Which cracked them all up: stupid old Babe the Blue Ox.

So whenever he dwelt on the idea of questioning Edgar again, his spirits lifted. Not in an entirely nice way. When he was patrolling, with nothing much else going through his mind, he imagined glancing in his rearview mirror and seeing Edgar sitting back there. And then Glen asking, what the hell did happen up in that mow, Edgar? This is my father we’re talking about. I have a right to know. That’s all I want: to hear what happened.

And then, in Glen’s imagination, Edgar Sawtelle did something he’d never, ever done before: he replied out loud.

He said, “I’m sorry.” That was it, just “I’m sorry.”

In Glen’s imagination, the boy’s voice was as gravelly as an old man’s, because it had never been used. The gratifying thing was, Edgar had chosen to speak those first words to Glen because he knew he had contributed to, if not caused, Pop’s death. That showed true remorse.

Once that little movie got into Glen’s head, it stuck like a burr. He began to rehearse it in all kinds of places. Sometimes they were alone on a country road, without a farmhouse or a car for miles; sometimes he had just parked the cruiser in front of the town hall-a last-chance-before-we-go-inside kind of scene. Sometimes they were caught in traffic in Ashland. But wherever it happened to be, Glen always looked up in his mirror and asked his question, and always, Edgar Sawtelle answered out loud.

Glen had even begun to say his own part out loud as he drove.

“What the hell happened up there, Edgar? I’m asking because I’m his son and I have a right to know.”

The first time it felt silly and he blushed. Despite himself, he looked to see if the mike key wasn’t somehow, freakishly, depressed and he’d been transmitting. (He could see the reenactments of that in the locker room in Ashland.) But it was okay, totally private. And cathartic. He did it again. Even picked up the mike, pretended to key it, and asked his question, letting his eyes burn into the mirror. Sometimes he emphasized “son,” sometimes “know.” He finally settled on a version with emphasis on both, but just a little more on “son,” to make it clear he was speaking as a family member and not as a police officer.

All of that was very satisfying.

Less satisfying was that no one answered.

And that was where things stood for a couple weeks. Then, like a man shaking himself out of a dream, he understood he was being compulsive and bizarre and had to stop. It was a little too much like some other activities he could name: you shouldn’t do them, even if they felt good. Nobody had to tell you that. You just knew it wasn’t healthy.

In order to purge himself, he’d decided to talk to Claude. This time Claude had come to Glen’s house. They’d sat in the living room and talked until the wee hours. After enough beer (and “enough,” for Glen, had come to mean a twelve-pack as the summer went along; he’d stopped going to The Kettle or The Hollow, had even started driving to Ashland to stock up) he’d stammered out the basics of his little scenario.

Confiding in Claude turned out to be the right decision. Claude said two things. First, he was beginning to think that Edgar wasn’t going to come back. If he’d been gone that long-almost two months-he must be pretty committed to staying away. By then he could have made it to Canada, Mexico, or either ocean. Second, and more important, he’d thought Glen’s response was totally reasonable. After all, did Glen want to hurt Edgar? Certainly not. He just wanted to put the question to him, didn’t he? Hadn’t they both lost a father in the last year? Wouldn’t Edgar want to ask the same question if someone knew what had happened to his father? Damn right he would. When you looked at it that way, even Edgar could hardly begrudge Glen a single goddamned question when the tables were turned. In fact, the longer they talked, the more it seemed that if Edgar did show up, Claude would have no objection to Glen taking the boy for a ride before he came home. If that could be arranged. Which seemed possible, since, if he was coming home, it was probably going to be escorted by a cop.

Of course, he could always hitchhike back home, Glen said.

Even then, Claude mused, maybe something could be arranged. Claude could call, let Glen know Edgar had shown up. They’d installed a phone in the barn that summer-he could just wander out, pick up the handset. And some night when Trudy was out, Glen could swing over. Claude would look the other way. They agreed it wasn’t ideal; it would be better if Glen asked his question before Edgar got home. (Because, Glen thought, what if the answer were something more than “I’m sorry?” Then they’d have to take a ride to the tank in Ashland, go through the whole sorry juvenile justice meat grinder, which, by the way, meant that he walked away with a clean record at eighteen, no matter what. Which some people might find a little unfair.)

Glen had fretted over the logistics of it. How exactly would he get the boy into his car if he were already home? He didn’t think he could just talk Edgar into going for a ride. In fact, he’d probably fight like the dickens to avoid it, and fighting a kid hadn’t been part of the movie in his head. Because what those idiots up in Ashland didn’t understand was that “Ox” Papineau valued finesse over strength. Even in his wrestling days, lunging against three-hundred-pound behemoths with their hands hooked behind his neck, finesse always won out over simple strength. He’d tied guys into knots with finesse. And those skills hadn’t gone to waste, either. Just the other day he’d used them when Mack Holgren, fighting with his wife again, decided to swing on Glen.

Plus, in Glen’s imagination, one of the reasons the boy was willing to talk straight-was willing to talk at all-was that just being in the car made it clear how explaining himself would get him home. Glen wouldn’t say that, of course; that’s why it was finesse.

But if the boy was already home…

Glen had been puzzling aloud on that one when Claude grinned a funny, nasty little grin and held out a freshly uncapped bottle of beer. Something about the gesture set Glen at ease, because if there was one thing Claude Sawtelle understood, it was the nature of camaraderie. Claude leaned back in his chair. He took a long swallow of beer and looked over at Glen.

“Have I ever explained to you,” he said, “about Prestone?”

WHEN CLAUDE CALLED THAT NIGHT all he’d said was that Edgar had left a note on their kitchen table. Claude didn’t know if the kid had stolen a car or what. Most likely he’d hitchhiked home and was hiding in the woods somewhere. The note said he was coming back the next day, so if Glen was going to ask his question like they’d talked about, he needed to get on the stick.

Then he was faced with it: all those times he’d imagined Edgar sitting in the back of the squad car. During the day. In the country. In town. Now it looked like it was going to be out in the country, and at night.

If he acted on it at all. With the opportunity staring him in the face, Glen wasn’t sure it was such a hot idea. Claude had pretty much read his thoughts.

“Sounds kind of dumb now, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Glen admitted. “Oddball thing to do, at least.”

“Well, no one would blame you if you didn’t,” Claude said. “You’re the only one who has to live with it, either way. It’s just, I’ve been thinking, and I don’t see how it could work once he’s home. If you’ve ever seen Trudy when she’s riled up-”

“-oh, yes.”

“Then you know what would happen. When we talked, it seemed like you could just come over and take him, but now I’m thinking we were unrealistic. Could be, if you want a chance to talk with him, this is it.”

Glen admitted he probably was right about that as well.

“So. What do you think, then?” Claude asked.

Glen was quiet for a long time. “Did he say where he was going?”

“No. Just, ‘I ate while you were gone. I’ll be back tomorrow.’ I’m looking at the note right now.”

“What did you tell Trudy?”

“What do you think I told her?”

“Oh. Well, it can’t hurt to take a little drive around, I guess.”

Then Claude hung up and Glen stood, receiver in hand, listening to the off-hook stutter tone begin. He thought about the Prestone trick that Claude had explained, something he’d never heard of, but of course Prestone was almost pure ether. And Glen knew just where there was a supply of true, medical-grade ether. That made him smile, because he liked the idea of one-upping Claude just a little bit. Somewhere along the line, Glen had acquired a beat-up old whiskey flask, a good-sized one with a pull-off top, and he pocketed that now and headed out the door.

He parked the cruiser in the grass around back of the shop, unlocked the side door, and walked past the shrouded furniture and examination tables. He opened the door to the little closet pharmacy. He didn’t have to look around. In his mind’s eye he’d already located what he wanted, up on the top shelf: three tins, sitting in a row, each topped by a squat mushroom-shaped cap. The labels were printed in cream and brown:

Ether Squibb

For Anesthesia U. S. P.

1/4 lb.

POISON

Below that, in broad green script, the words “Copper protected!” were inscribed. Glen was a little surprised Claude hadn’t commented on those little cans the night he’d perused the pharmacy. They were an oddity, for certain, and Claude didn’t miss much. But then, Claude hadn’t grown up a veterinarian’s son. Perhaps he didn’t know what he was seeing.

Glen pulled a can off the shelf and gathered a few other supplies and took them outside, locking the door behind. The stuff was potent-you didn’t want to mess with it indoors unless you had the ventilation equipment roaring, or you could knock yourself into outer space. He pulled the whiskey flask from his back pocket, twisted off the cap, then punctured the mushroom cap on the ether with the cruiser’s ignition key and began pouring the ether into the flask. It dripped and gulped out, silvery clear as water. He set the tin down and widened the hole, but even then, without a funnel, it took a good long time before he was done.

He wasn’t so dumb as to think the whiskey flask wouldn’t leak vapor, but he knew a little trick from his pop. He’d snagged a surgical rubber glove on the way out, and now he stretched it over the neck of the flask and twisted the cap down, pinching the material tight. Then he peeled away the excess until just a little skirt of rubber remained below the cap.

He waved the flask under his nose. The good thing about ether was you could smell right away if it got loose on you. But his improvised rubber glove seal worked fine. Only the faintest whiff came to him, the residue of a single drip, quickly evaporating off the warm metal. A flowery petroleum odor that tingled in the back of his sinuses. He pitched the ether tin into the woods and carried the flask two-fingered to the squad car and set it on the passenger side of the broad front seat.

GLEN KNEW THOSE BACK ROADS pretty well. If he kept an eye out, he thought, he might come across the kid walking along the road or cutting through a field. He could also cruise the roads near their place looking for suspiciously parked vehicles. If it wasn’t a couple of high school kids necking, it might be Edgar, sleeping in a car he’d stolen.

He tried approaching from the south first, but there was no Edgar walking along, no cars parked in any of the dozen little pull-offs that hunters liked to use. At the hill near the Sawtelles’, Glen made a three-point turn and headed back to the highway, then came around from the north. All he saw was Jasper Dillon’s truck, broken down near the old Mellen cemetery, where it had sat for the better part of two weeks. He stopped and shone his flashlight across the dusty bed of the truck and through the window, in case Edgar was using the truck as shelter for the night, but the only thing the cab contained was a greasy toolbox and two crushed packages of Marlboros. He walked back to the squad car and pulled away. Then he was coming up on the Sawtelles’ yard, close enough to see the light at the top of their orchard. He parked about fifty yards back from where the woods cleared, pocketed the flask, a couple of rags and a flashlight, and set off.

Keeping to the far side of the gravel road, he walked the length of the yard. A dog was running loose, circling the barn in silence. Before it could spot him, he turned and cut down along the fence line north of the house. When he reached the back of their garden he found a little path worn into the woods. In the open, the late moon had given plenty of light, but once in the woods Glen had to flick the slider up on the flashlight and swing the beam to and fro across the tangle of night-black foliage to see where he was going.

Within thirty yards he knew it was pointless. If Edgar were holed up in the woods, Glen would never walk up on him with a flashlight. Maybe if he was sound asleep with a fire blazing. But why would he do that if he planned to come back the next day? Why not just walk in, save himself the trouble? And even supposing he was in those woods, the Sawtelle place was, what, ninety acres, a hundred? Glen could search for a week in broad daylight and never find him.

He turned and retraced his route. When he reached the road again, he stood looking at the house. Either he’s in that barn, Glen thought, or he’s miles from here. And there was no way of getting into the barn without the dogs raising Cain. It wasn’t going to work.

He crunched along the gravel toward the squad car. Something told him he shouldn’t drive past the Sawtelle place, having already taken so much trouble to avoid it. With the headlights off, he pulled another three-point turn and headed toward Mellen. Maybe he would patrol a few more back roads on the way home.

The moon was bright. The underbrush leaned into the road, green and hypnotic as it flowed past the high beams; red-lanterned eyes looked back from the tangle just often enough to break the pattern, keep him alert. Only after his breath came easier did he realize he’d been panting. To stop, he forced himself to sigh.

When he reached the blacktop, the cruiser picked up enough speed to level out the potholes and float along through the night. Tendrils of fog drifted palely across the road, condensing on the windshield like a kind of dream writing that he let accumulate and then erased with a swipe of the wiper blades. All of that put him at ease. After a while he couldn’t help but glance into his rearview mirror.

With great earnestness, almost bashfully, Glen let himself ask his question, out loud, one last time.

Edgar

HE TRACKED THE MORNING KENNEL ROUTINE BY SOUND FROM his hiding place, high in the mow. The August sun beat against the barn roof and the atmosphere near the rafters squeezed beads of sweat from his skin. To pass the time, he counted the points of the roofing nails hammered through the new planking and thought how in days past he had instead counted bright pinholes through the roofing boards. Light seeped around the edges of the mow door, filling the space with a dilute, perpetual dawn. By midmorning his mother had worked the two pups, then the six-month-olds and the yearlings, and rotated back to the pups. Edgar could close his eyes and hear her cajoling them in a low, even voice, see her crazywalk the little ones, ask for retrieves of the others, always testing, proofing, asking what it meant and didn’t mean to stay, watch, recall, follow. He drifted into a half-sleep suffused by those sounds, as if he himself had grown to envelop the mow and the barn and the yard. There was the slap of the porch door as Claude went inside. The twinning ring of the telephones both below and in the kitchen. The jays bickering among the ripening apples. A car idling along the road, gravel crunching under its tires as it passed the tree line by the garden.

Near noon there was a restrained clomp of feet on the mow steps, but he didn’t fully wake until the vestibule door had already swung open. He flattened himself into the hollow in the bales, sweat streaming from his face. There was a long silence. Then the door closed and there were descending footsteps. Below, the sliding gates banged shut to lock out the dogs while Claude cleaned the pens. Edgar sat up and drank from the coffee can, resisting his body’s plea to pour the water over his face. After a while he crawled to where the roofing boards converged with the walls in the corner and rose on his knees and released a stream of urine and watched it disappear into the straw.

When he could no longer endure the heat and cramped quarters, he clambered down the staggered cliff of bales through strata of cooling air, his legs trembling for fear of making noise and from being broiled so long. As soon as he touched the floor, he sank onto a bale. In the rafters above, like a great trapped beast, he could feel the heat he had escaped, waiting for him, and he sucked gulps of the cool, habitable air into his lungs and let his blood cool and the sweat dry on his skin. But before a minute had passed, he grew convinced that he had betrayed his presence somehow, that Claude must be standing below, looking at the ceiling and listening.

Just until sunset, he told himself.

He drew a slick forearm across his face and climbed back into the furnace.

IN THE AFTERNOON THE vestibule door opened and Claude walked into the open space at the front of the mow.

“Edgar?” he said, softly. Then, after a long pause, “Edgar?”

Edgar pressed himself into the hollow in the bales and held his breath. When the pounding in his head was too much to bear, he allowed himself an exhalation so measured he thought he might suffocate. There were footsteps on straw. A tremor shook the stack of bales. Something heavy thumped to the floor. The bales shook again, and there was another thump. For one protracted moment Edgar was sure Claude had begun tearing down the monolith of straw to get at him.

The shaking and thumping continued in a steady rhythm. Though there was barely enough room between the bales and the rafters, Edgar wormed his way forward. Claude was working by the long western wall, his head five or six feet below Edgar’s. He wore a pair of canvas work gloves and he was dragging out bale after bale and letting them tumble to the floor. It wasn’t easy-the bales were stacked one pair lengthwise over another crosswise so that no column could shear away. He’d already opened a semicircular cavity, deeper at the bottom than at the top, and his shirt was dark with sweat halfway down his back. Edgar could hear him gasping in the heat. When thirty or forty bales lay on the floor, he stopped and pulled the gloves off his hands and picked up a hammer from the floor and knelt in the cavity he’d created, half concealed from Edgar. There was the screech of a nail pulled from dry wood and a board clattering. Claude leaned back and rubbed his hands together as if reconsidering, then fetched his work gloves and put them on and shot his fingers together to seat them.

The thought crossed Edgar’s mind to pitch a bale down. Forty or fifty pounds of densely packed straw, dropped from that height, could knock Claude flat. But what would that accomplish? He wouldn’t stay down. Besides, Claude was already glancing uneasily toward the vestibule door; in such cramped quarters, long before Edgar could wrestle a bale to the edge and tip it over, Claude would hear and look up.

Then Claude was backing away from the bales. He set something small and glinting on the floor. A bottle, an old-time bottle, with a crude blob of glass for a stopper and a ribbon around the neck with black markings. Claude stood looking at it, as mesmerized as Edgar. Then he moved the bottle against the mow wall with a gloved hand and thrashed up a pile of loose straw to cover it. He began to restack the bales. Edgar retreated. Shortly, there were footsteps on the mow floor, the click of the vestibule door latch, and more footsteps on the stairs. Edgar waited for the sound of Claude’s boots on the driveway, but all he heard was his mother’s voice as she encouraged the pups in the yard. He elbowed forward. Claude hadn’t bothered to wrestle the topmost bales into place. Near the floor, the stacks bulged from the otherwise neat stair step of yellow. Where Claude had momentarily covered the bottle in straw, Edgar now saw only a stretch of bare planking.

He tipped the coffee can to his mouth and then climbed down, his body oily with sweat. He dragged away the bales Claude had moved. The wood plank was splintered where the nails had been pulled. He pressed the point of Henry’s jackknife into the crack and pried it up. He didn’t know what he expected to find. The hole was dry and empty, like the one he’d found the night before, though deeper. It could easily accommodate the bottle Claude had set aside-the bottle that had not been a figment of his imagination. Or of Ida Paine’s.

It existed. He’d seen it, in daylight, if only for a moment.

He walked to the front wall and cracked open the mow door and pressed one eye to the gap, blinking against the midday brilliance. Fresh air poured across his face, hot from the August sun but soothingly cool after what he’d endured in the rafters. The mow door was hinged on the side nearest the house and he could see only downfield, where grasshoppers leapt like firecrackers ignited under the rays of the run.

Then Claude’s footsteps sounded on the gravel. The truck started, idled alongside the barn, and stopped again. Edgar’s mother called the pups. She would not keep them out for long in the heat, he thought. He listened for a moment, then shut the mow door and walked to the top of the stairs.

Trudy

WHEN TRUDY REACHED THE SHADE OF THE BARN, SHE TURNED and knelt and recalled the pups, then coaxed them down the long concrete aisle. They were too old to be sleeping in the whelping pens, but keeping four-month-olds there during the heat of August wasn’t all bad. Pups that age still had a hard time regulating their body temperature, and didn’t always have the sense to get out of the sun. The whelping rooms, sealed from the outside, were often the coolest part of the kennel.

She was latching their pen door when she felt his arms around her. She let out a brief pip of a cry before a hand clamped over her mouth and another was thrust in front of her face, fingerspelling like lightning.

Quiet. Only sign. Okay?

She nodded. He let go and stepped back and she turned to look at Edgar.

He stood holding a finger to his lips. His cheekbones jutted from his face and the line of his jaw swept so sharply toward his throat that he seemed to be made all of sinew and bone. His hair lay matted and sun-browned across his forehead and his ragged clothes reeked as though he’d spent days in the barn. But his eyes were startlingly, almost preternaturally, clear, looking steadily at her from a face lined by tracks of sweat cut through dirt. The sight of him raced ahead of her thoughts, condensing only afterward into distinct, namable feelings, as if her mind were accommodating too slowly the flash of a bright light: overwhelming relief, knowing her son was safe; fury, for his punishingly long absence; bewilderment at his appearance, which spoke of a long, harrowing journey. Before she could distill any of those thoughts into words, he was looking past her, through the whelping room door and into the main kennel.

Where’s Claude? he signed.

He’s changing the oil in the truck. Where have you been? Are you okay?

He reached over and pulled the door closed.

I wasn’t going to come back. I almost didn’t.

But why? I signaled for you the very next morning. I told them you ran because you were upset after what happened to your father.

They were looking for me.

Of course they were. You were a runaway. But it’s all right now. I told them it was an accident. She paused and corrected herself. It was an accident.

Did you find my note?

What note?

You were gone when I got here last night. I left a note on the table.

There was no note.

Claude found it, then.

She had to think for a minute about what that meant.

I need you to do something, he signed.

Just come to the house. Don’t go away again.

If you do this, I promise to stay. But I need one night out here, alone. After dark I need you to keep Claude in the house, no matter what.

Why?

Because he’s hiding something here.

Claude?

Yes.

What would he hide?

He stared at her, as though trying to divine something.

What? What is it?

Have you seen him?

Claude?

No. In the rain. Have you seen him?

She blinked. She didn’t know what Edgar was talking about. She shook her head. All this time she had imagined him coming back and everything being okay, but instead Almondine was gone and here was Edgar and he was obviously not okay. Not okay at all. He was starved and crazed.

Just come to the house.

I don’t want him to know I was here.

You said he already knows.

Yes, but he doesn’t know I was out here. Not in the barn.

Okay.

Don’t cry. Take a breath.

Okay.

You can’t tell him. If you tell him, I’ll go away again. I swear it. I’ll never come back. You’ll never see me again.

She shook her head and signed, No, no.

You know I’ll do it.

Yes.

You’ll make sure he stays in the house after dark?

I could say I wanted a night away. We could go into town.

No. Keep him in the house.

What if I can’t?

You have to. Turn the porch light on if you can’t. Turn it on if I should stay away.

All right.

When this is done I’ll come back for good, I promise.

Okay.

Then there was the slam of the truck door and Claude’s footsteps along the kennel aisle. Edgar stepped into the nearest whelping pen and pressed up against the wall. The pups began to yip and leap.

“Everything good in there?” Claude called.

“You bet,” Trudy said, taking a breath and trying to sound breezy. “Just teaching these wild things to sit for a brushing.”

“Need a hand?”

“Nope. I’ll shout if I do.”

“Okay. Done with the truck in twenty minutes,” he said. She heard Claude fetch something from the workshop and walk outside.

Edgar slipped out of the whelping pen.

I’ll be back after dark, he signed. Remember, if the porch light is on, I’ll stay away until tomorrow.

Edgar. There’s something I need to tell you. Something bad.

He looked back at her.

I know. I was by the birches last night.

I’m so sorry, Edgar.

He shook his head and wiped his eyes roughly and pushed past her and looked down the barn aisle.

I put Essay in with Pout and Finch.

What?

She’s in the run with Pout and Finch. Claude must have found her this morning when he fed them.

No. He would have told me.

He’s hoping I’ll leave again.

Before she had a chance to ask Edgar anything else, he slipped past and trotted out the rear doors. Trudy followed and stood at the threshold and watched him cut across the field and disappear into the thicket without breaking his stride. When she came back in, she stopped at one of the runs and rapped on the wood frame of the door. Finch and Pout pushed through the passageway from outside. A moment later, Essay joined them. The dogs had been watching Edgar leave as well.

Edgar

WHEN HE REACHED THE CREEK, HE PEELED OFF HIS SHIRT and submerged it in the cool shallows and wiped the sweat and chaff from his skin. It was hot, very hot, and the air was sticky-wet and he stood waiting while the beads of water evaporated. Then he walked to the vast dying oak at the far corner of their land, hoping to find Forte there. The tree stood black and vacant of leaves on all but a few high limbs. The moment he settled himself against its gnarled roots, he understood why the place had once appealed to the stray: from where he sat, Edgar had a clear view down the trail both ways. Neither the creek nor the road was visible, but a person approaching from either direction would be, and the trunk of the oak was broad enough to hide behind. But he didn’t think he’d have to worry about that. Claude would have no reason to look for him in that spot over any other. He had never been along when Edgar and his father walked the fence line and he knew nothing of the tree’s significance.

Edgar lay back and watched the mosaic of sky pass through the naked branches. In his mind the image of Doctor Papineau kept appearing, the old man twisted and dying at the bottom of the mow stairs. After all that had happened, it seemed far too much to wish that Doctor Papineau hadn’t fallen, hadn’t died, but Edgar thought how he would like to talk to Glen Papineau. He felt he couldn’t stay unless he did that, but neither could he think of how to put his feelings into words. Regret was too simple. Woe, perhaps, was the closest thing. But it was a woe mingled with anger, and he didn’t know what the word for that would be. And that wasn’t right, anyway.

He thought, too, about what he’d said to his mother, and what he hadn’t said as well. She had to believe he would run again if she didn’t help, so he’d withheld what he knew she’d most wanted to hear-that he’d been so glad to see her; that touching her had nearly overwhelmed him. His memory of her had grown abstract while he’d been gone; the details of her face, the way she smelled, the vast, charismatic aura of her. He’d desperately wanted to tell her what he’d learned from living, working, running with the dogs day and night, about Henry Lamb and Tinder and Baboo, about the sunflowers, the fireworks, about the old man who had spoken from the back of Henry’s shed. The temptation to return to the house with her had been so powerful he’d finally had to run before his resolve collapsed under the weight of his loneliness.

And loneliness was a big part of it: his proximity to the house and the knowledge that Almondine was gone had swept a desolation through him like he’d never known. He thought of the letters between Brooks and his grandfather, all those debates about the dogs and what they might become, how Brooks had said it would be better to imagine how men might become more suitable for dogs and not the other way around.

After the last night, nearly sleepless in the heat, neither the afternoon sun nor the chatter of the squirrels could keep him awake long. He was thinking about Brooks and the dogs when exhaustion and sorrow combined to press him into unconsciousness. The August sun beat down. The cicadas paused their automaton scream when a cloud passed over the sun. Presently the sky cleared and they took it up again.

He woke when he heard a loud rattle approaching in the underbrush along the creek. Before he had a chance to move, Essay burst into the clearing and ran up to him, panting and scenting him frenetically. Someone had collared her and, near the buckle, a span of the collar was crudely wound with gray duct tape.

He sat Essay and removed the collar and peeled the tape away. There, folded in thirds, he found the photograph he had left on the kitchen table beside his note, the photograph of Claude holding Forte in his arms. Inside that, three one-hundred-dollar bills, a twenty, and a ten.

And a key to the Impala.

Glen Papineau

IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON WHEN CLAUDE CALLED THE OFFICE, WHICH made Glen uneasy. Not good to be having such conversations at work, but he didn’t have time to object; Claude’s tone was so obviously rushed that Glen understood their conversation would last only a few seconds.

“What happened last night?”

“Nothing. There weren’t any cars parked around your place. The yard was empty. I walked your fence line a ways, but there wasn’t any point.”

“He hasn’t shown up here.”

“I bet he’s in that barn, Claude. Didn’t you say he’d been sleeping up in the mow before he ran off?”

“Maybe he was there last night, but not now. It’s hot as hell up there during the day.”

“Think he’ll come back?”

“Yeah.”

“To the barn or the house?”

“I don’t know. I have a hunch he’s planning to take the Impala and run. I just discovered the spare key missing.”

Glen thought about that for a second. That would make things easy. He could pursue in the squad car, say he recognized the vehicle but not the driver.

“Okay. I’ll come out tonight.”

“Wait until dark. I’ll make sure we stay in the house. I might even try to get Trudy away up to Ashland. Anyway, if you see a light in the barn, it’s Edgar.”

“What if he comes to the house?”

“Then I’ll put the porch light on. If you see the porch light, forget it. We’ll work something else out.”

“Porch light on means he’s in the house?”

“Yeah. And if you think he’s in the barn, come up from the south field. Use the doors on that end. The dogs are less likely to see you.”

And that had been the end of the conversation. When five o’clock rolled around, Glen went back to his house. The day had been blistering and the evening hadn’t cooled much. A guy Glen’s size had a job staying cool. He sat in his kitchen, drank a beer, and then another. He looked at the whiskey flask standing in the middle of his kitchen table. He’d dumped the ether from the night before onto the lawn when he’d gotten home-the stuff was highly flammable and you didn’t leave it standing around, particularly in a poorly sealed vessel. The spot where he’d dumped it was already marked by a kidney-shaped brown patch.

When it was almost sunset he drove the cruiser to the shop. He took a tin of ether, just like the night before, but this time he didn’t bother opening it, just set it on the car seat and drove out to Town Line Road. He parked his car in the weeds on the far side of the hill from the Sawtelle place. Then he pocketed the rag and the flask and took the rest of his equipment-a church key and a six-pack with the tin of ether wedged in-and walked up the road. A natural embankment rose on the side opposite the Sawtelle property at the very crest of the hill. Glen scrambled heavily up the rocks and settled himself where he had a view of the house and the huge old barn.

The scene before him was awfully pretty. He could see down into the yard and along the hills rolling to the west. Whoever decided to build a farmhouse there had made a smart decision, he thought, nestling it down in a valley like that, protected from the wind yet flanked by open field on two sides. Both the truck and the Impala were parked in the yard. The porch light was dark, meaning Edgar hadn’t gone into the house. It felt like a stakeout, Glen thought, sitting there. He’d never been on one of those-not much need for it around Mellen. The idea tickled him. He cracked a Leiney’s as the twilight drained down the western horizon and stars began to volunteer in the evening sky.

For a long time, he watched the field and saw nothing but creation. He rehearsed in his mind how he would put his question to Edgar, how he wanted to emphasize that he was asking as Pop’s only child, not as an officer of the law. Behind him, enough of a moon had risen that he could see the leaves shiver on the long, thin stretch of maples that jutted into the field, a slim finger of woodland pointing to where they’d buried Gar, an island of birches in the middle of that shimmering lake of hay.

He thought about what would happen. Once Edgar was groggy he would carry the boy to his car. He couldn’t weigh more than one-twenty. Glen could sprint across the field carrying that much. And when Edgar came awake again, they would be traveling down some back road.

Faintly, he saw the gray silhouette of a figure wading through the hay, halfway between the road and the woods farther back. A dog accompanied the figure. They paused at the birches. Glen grabbed the tin of ether and scrambled down the embankment and crossed the road, keeping his gaze fixed on the two of them. There wasn’t really any doubt about who it was, but he had to be careful now. He waited to see whether a light would go on in the barn, or whether the Impala might suddenly roar to life. The figure disappeared into the darkness behind the barn. There came a brief volley of barks, then silence.

It wasn’t until Glen reached around to get the whiskey flask out of his back pocket that he remembered he’d laid it aside at the top of the embankment. The ether tin was too squat to fit in his pocket. He looked at the beer bottle in his hand. He drained it in a gulp and punctured the little mushroom cap on the ether and tipped the vessels together. Vapor curled down the side of the bottle, spilling over his fingers in silvery waves before dissipating into the night air. When he was done he stuffed a corner of the rag into the bottle and waved the arrangement under his nose. His nostrils didn’t even tingle. And if a little ether leaked, he wasn’t worried. It took a lot of anything to affect Ox Papineau. Every once in a great while, his size worked in his favor.

He tucked the beer bottle into his back pocket and checked his watch.

If that porch light didn’t come on in the next five minutes, Glen told himself, Edgar Sawtelle was going for a ride.

Edgar

THEY CAME UP ALONG THE SOUTH FENCE AND CROSSED THE shallow swells of the field, with Essay, for once, content to stay near his side. The dry hay stroked his legs as he walked. A whippoorwill whistled from the woods. In the distance another sadly replied. They stopped at the birches and watched the yard. The truck was parked beside the milk house; the Impala, in the turnout by the porch. The yard light cast a yellow glow against the squat obelisk of the barn, leaving the back double doors in shadow. He saw no stripe of light glowing between or beneath the doors. Most important of all, the porch light was dark. Claude was in the house, then.

When they reached the barn, he paused and turned the latch on the back door and eased it open. Inside was darkness and the musky scent of the dogs intensified by enclosure and heat. Two dogs bayed a greeting, but before they could continue, he and Essay stepped inside. He switched on the aisle lights and walked along the runs, quieting the dogs, and when he finished, he went to the run where Finch and Pout stood and opened the door and let Essay glide in. She nosed her littermates and turned back. Edgar squatted in front of the pen door.

Last time, he signed. Just a little while longer.

He fetched a bucket from the workshop and carried it down the aisle, working from the front doors to the back, upending it and boosting himself up and unscrewing the light bulbs, all but the one nearest the back door, licking his fingers against their quick heat. The act familiar from those nights when his mother was housebound with pneumonia and he’d slept on the makeshift bed of bales. As he worked his way down the aisle, he planned where to search. There was no point looking in the mow. Claude hadn’t thought the bottle was safe there; he wouldn’t have put it back. It could be in the workshop or the medicine room or behind some loose board. It could also be in the Impala, but he doubted that. Nothing important would be in the Impala, not after Essay had appeared with a key. Seeing Claude rub his hands together and don gloves before touching the bottle made him think it wouldn’t be in the house, either-he wouldn’t have it nearer himself than absolutely necessary. But Edgar felt equally certain Claude wouldn’t have thrown the bottle and its contents away. He could have done that months ago, but something in the way he’d handled it spoke of enthrallment as well as fear.

Edgar began with the medicine room. Half a dozen enameled white cabinets hung on the far wall. Only two contained medicine; the others held stacks of towels and scales and odds and ends rarely used. He sorted through each cabinet, opening the doors and peering in and lifting out the contents and replacing them before moving on, forcing himself to go slowly and look twice, despite his impulse to rush. He didn’t want to doubt himself and have to check again. When he finished with the cabinets, he rifled the drawers beneath the counter, discovering as he went that he could run his hands through each drawer’s contents without removing things and yet be certain that nothing as big as the bottle had been missed.

It wasn’t there. At least not in the obvious places. To search for nooks and loose boards, he needed a flashlight. He walked to the workshop. Then he realized the flashlight was still in the mow, where he’d left it. He mounted the steps and, working almost entirely by feel, climbed the bales. The filament of the flashlight glowed like an ember when he pushed the switch, then darkened. He located a fresh set of batteries in the many-drawered chest on the workshop’s far wall.

He walked back to the medicine room, engrossed in the problem of how to reach the boards between the ceiling beams. He could tap each one to see if it was loose. He could get the stepladder from the milk house or maybe stand on the floor and use a rake handle. He noticed, absently, the dogs all standing by their doors, worked up again by his running around. But they stayed quiet, as he had asked. After all, it wasn’t so unusual for him to be working late at night in the barn. They would calm down soon enough.

He turned the corner into the medicine room, still in reverie. There was just time to register a whiff of something aromatic. From the corner of his eye he saw a figure standing off to the side. Then the barn whirled around him. A hand as big and solid as a steak pressed a wet cloth over his face. Instantly, his eyes began to water. He choked and then, despite himself, inhaled. It was as if someone had immersed his face in rotting flowers.

The odor was unmistakable.

Prestone. Ether.

The flashlight clattered to the floor. He dug the fingers of both his hands into the hand covering his face, but the wrist and arm holding it in place were thick and cable-muscled and he couldn’t budge them, not even a fraction of an inch. The owner of the hand didn’t attempt to move. He just stood and held the cloth against Edgar’s face while he flailed.

“Just wait,” the man said. “This’ll only take a minute.”

It was no surprise to hear Glen Papineau’s voice. Only Glen had hands that big. Edgar gave up trying to pull the cloth away from his face and began instead to swing his fists backward, to no avail. Glen simply wrapped another arm around Edgar’s chest and pinned his arms; in one of his hands he held a beer bottle with his thumb over the top.

Edgar held his breath, counted the racing beats of his heart.

“The longer you wait, the bigger your breath,” Glen said, and tightened the pressure over his face. He was right, of course. After a time-an impossibly short time-Edgar began to suffocate, and he drew another breath of the nauseating stuff. And then, because his lungs were still burning, he needed to do it again, and again.

Everything grew quiet. They stood for a while and he heard only the huff of his own breath. He grew drowsy-just the way he’d imagined people might if they stared at the pocket watch he’d gotten for Christmas when he was little. Only the pocket watch hadn’t worked, and this did, and it was the rhythm of his breathing and not the swinging of the fob. A detachment came over him, even drowning, as he was, in flowers. He stopped struggling. He began to float some distance from his body, just an inch or two above himself at first. The smell of ether slowly diminished. After a certain point he didn’t float any farther away.

The walls of the room began to move. He felt the soles of his feet dragging against the floor. At the door to the medicine room, Glen paused, crouched slightly, and tightened his arm so Edgar was pinned against him more securely. Then they were moving along the kennel aisle. Edgar drifted back into his body again. One of his arms worked loose and dangled limply toward the floor.

When they reached the back doors, still latched, Glen lowered him to the cement. The cloth disappeared from his face momentarily and Glen’s hand appeared, holding the beer bottle. He lifted his thumb and upended the bottle against the cloth.

It was difficult for Edgar to direct his eyes where he wanted, or even to focus. He stopped looking at Glen’s hands. One of his eyes decided to close all by itself. Through the other, he saw a stack of flat, brown bags, blurred lumps. Then the cloth was over his face again.

Glen tightened his grip, prepared to stand. The brown lumps resolved into quicklime bags, stacked beside the back doors. The empty coffee can they used for a spreader protruded from a slit in the topmost sack.

Edgar’s ribs bent as Glen hefted him to get a solid hold, then he was rising into the air. He saw his hand reach forward. The rim of the coffee can, jagged where the opener had punctured the metal, brushed his fingers, and then there was only powder against his palm, dry as moon dust. He’d tried and missed. Yet, when he could focus, the can was pinched between his fingers, his hand having somehow corrected the mistake on its own.

Glen was reaching for the door latch. Edgar closed his eyes and gripped the rim of the coffee can with all his might. It was only half full, but heavy as an anvil. All he could muster was a spastic, upward jerk. Then his hand fell back and the coffee can clattered to the floor.

A heavy layer of quicklime dropped onto his head and shoulders. He had remembered to squeeze his eyes shut, but his mouth must have been hanging open, slack from his effort and the effect of the ether. His tongue and throat were instantly coated with a bitter paste and he swallowed involuntarily and felt the heat in his mouth and retched.

Glen, too, began to cough. His arm loosened from around Edgar’s chest and slipped away. For a long moment Edgar hung suspended in the air by nothing at all. He knew it was important that he collect his feet beneath him, but before he could get started the barn began to spin like a top with him at its center and the floor lunged forward and the fireworks above Scotia Lake burst all over again behind his closed eyes.

HE WOKE GAGGING. Even before he could open his eyes, he heard Glen Papineau’s voice whispering his name.

“Edgar?” he said. “Edgar, are you there?” Then Glen muttered under his breath, “Oh Jesus.” This was followed by the thump of something hitting the floor.

Edgar reached up and carefully drew his fingers across his eyelids. His lashes were caked with quicklime and it took all his concentration to make his hands brush it away. He cracked open one eye until a slit of light registered and then the other and he blinked and looked along the cement of the kennel floor. A cloud of quicklime dust swirled through the air, sifting and settling everywhere. Glen had staggered backward and fallen. He lay on his side, curly hair grayed, face thickly powdered. His eyes were closed and his expression was a painfully contracted grimace.

“Aw Jesus,” Glen said again. He brought his hands to his face and pressed his fingers against his closed eyes. The cords in his neck stood out and he kicked at the floor-another thump. Then his hands began beating against his face open-palmed as if putting out a fire there. With great effort, he got control of them and lay panting.

“Edgar, are you there?” he repeated. His voice was hoarse but eerily calm. “Can you get me some water? I just meant to ask you a question. I wasn’t going to hurt you, I swear. But right now I need water for my eyes. Oh Jesus. Edgar?”

But Edgar lay in a fugue, seeing everything as if through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. When he tried to lift his head, the ache hit him at once and then the nausea. The florid smell of ether was everywhere now, nearly as strong as when the cloth was pressed against his face. He looked along the floor and spotted the beer bottle lying broken and liquid ether splashed around it in silver pools. Vapor shimmered in the air above it.

Edgar pushed to his knees. The rear barn doors were within arm’s reach. He tried to stand, then sank back and dragged himself up the front of them until he could work his fingers into the metal hoop of the latch handle. When the leftmost of the double doors swung open, he stumbled drunkenly into the night along with it.

He began banging the door with the flat of his hand.

Glen turned his face toward the sound and rose on all fours.

“O god o god o god o god,” he whispered. He crawled forward and stopped to wipe his face and eyes. Edgar pounded the door again and Glen started moving, then stopped a second time to beat the heels of his palms against his eyes. A shriek came out of him, high and incongruous, and then he pressed his face against the floor and ground it along, crying louder as he advanced.

“God, it burns! Oh, anything, please! Jesus God. Anything.”

Edgar released his grip on the door and tried to step back, but he reeled and fell into the weeds. The dark mass of the barn towered over him, a great black swath cut out of a starry sky. He sat and shook his head, a mistake; the pain nearly blacked him out again. But the fresh night air was bringing him back from the ether and he could keep his eyes focused. In a minute he would be able get his feet under him.

The dogs all stood in their pens, gazes fixed on the spectacle of Glen Papineau crawling down the aisle. It was the last thing Edgar wanted to see; he wanted the dogs out of the barn, away from those fumes. When Glen reached the threshold he worked his fingers along the bottom of the door then hoisted himself upright, pointing his face this way and that. When he tried again to pull one of his eyelids open, his body spasmed and he gave another hoarse and wordless cry and staggered past Edgar in a headlong rush.

And then Edgar got his wish, for the dogs wheeled and plunged through the passages to their outside runs. He watched as they dove through the canvas straps of their portals and disappeared, until all that remained inside the barn was the apparition of the ether fumes, quavering and rising under that single hot light bulb.

ONCE OUTSIDE, THE DOGS began to bark. Glen Papineau traced a broad circle in the south field, entering the light of the yard like an actor stepping onto a stage: enormous, thick-necked, head and shoulders powdered and tear-streaked, one hand clasped over his face as if to rip away a mask and the other hewing the air before him. He staggered up to Alice, parked beside the barn. When his blunt fingers touched her radiator, he stopped and traced the flanges of the grill, the peeling paint of the steering armature. He dropped to his knees and pressed his forehead against the close-set front tires.

“Aw, God,” he said, “I can’t see where I am. Is that a light? Can anyone hear me? Claude! Claude! They won’t even open! Can’t I please, please have some water for my eyes!”

Then Edgar heard his mother’s voice calling from the back porch.

“Glen? Glen! What are you doing?”

Edgar looked into the barn. All the front pens were empty, but some of the dogs in the back runs, unable to see Glen or his mother, yet hearing their voices, had pushed back inside. Edgar stood, testing his balance. His mother was running across the yard.

He turned away and stumbled along the slope behind the barn, clapping his hands as loudly as he could. When he reached the pen doors, he hammered bare-handed on the timbers and wires, making every noise he could to draw the dogs out. One by one, they pushed through the canvas flaps over their passageways and trotted out to him.

He was going down the line staying them when a light flashed from the rear barn doors, brilliant and blue. For a moment the birches in the south field stood icily illuminated, their shadows stretching behind them across the surf of hay. Then Edgar felt a pressure against his eardrums that slowly resolved itself into a sound, as if the sky above had been gripped at the corners and shaken out.

Trudy

SHE LAY WAITING AND LISTENING FOR THE SOUND OF EDGAR’S FOOTSTEPS on the porch. She didn’t understand what he might be looking for in the barn and she didn’t care. She was willing to humor him in any way required as long as he came to the house. It had been dark for a long time and he must be nearly done. She thought about how gaunt he’d looked. She thought about the expression on his face when she’d brought up Almondine.

The dogs began barking. Then, among the barks, a man’s voice, moaning or crying. She sat bolt upright in bed.

“What’s that?” she said. “Who’s that?”

Trudy thought Claude was sleeping, but at the sound of the dogs he’d jerked as if stung, and now he was sitting up, too. He looked wide awake. He had a puzzled expression on his face, though it seemed somehow arranged that way, and beneath the puzzlement was a look of alarm.

“Don’t get up,” he said. “I’ll check.” He was already pulling on his clothes. The man’s voice rang out again. It was coming from the backyard. Trudy couldn’t quite make out the words, but there was an unmistakable note of fear and pain in them.

“That sounds like Glen,” she said.

“Oh Jesus. Howling drunk, I bet. He’s been hitting the sauce lately. I ran into him last week, three sheets to the wind before sunset. I told him to come over if he ever needed to talk. I didn’t think it would be in the middle of the night, though.”

Trudy dressed hurriedly and ran to the back porch. Claude stood in the doorway, looking into the yard. The truck was parked where he’d left it that afternoon, facing the hitch end of the tractor. The dogs were flagging up and down their runs, barking and looking toward the south field. At first Trudy didn’t see anything unusual there. Then the image registered: it was Glen. He was kneeling in front of the tractor with his forehead pressed against the close-set front tires, as if in supplication.

Claude seemed rooted to the porch. She pushed past him and ran across the lawn. Glen was sobbing. His hair and face and shoulders were powdered white. Behind him, the shadow of the barn was divided by a flickering light, and in it stood Edgar. The moment their gazes met, he turned and walked into the dark, staggering as he went. Trudy pulled up short, feeling as if she were splitting in two; one half of her cried, Go to Edgar! and the other half wanted only to distract Claude, close behind her, from the sight of him. The idea that Edgar might run away again was paramount in her mind. At first she didn’t even connect Glen’s presence with Edgar’s. She only wanted to turn everyone around, get them facing the house.

“Glen,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“Trudy. Please. Get water,” Glen said. “I need to wash out my eyes.” His voice was quaking. He alternately clutched the front of the tractor and held his hands over his face, as if, by tremendous will, not touching his eyes. He sucked his breath through his teeth. Tear tracks cut through the white powder on his cheeks. By then Claude was there and he knelt beside Glen.

“All right, Hoss,” he said. “We’re cutting you off for the night.” He worked his shoulder under Glen’s thick arm and began to guide him to his feet.

“No,” Trudy said. “Wait.”

Claude looked at her, his face carefully composed into a mask of surprise. She ran her fingertip across Glen’s cheek and brought it to her mouth. There was no mistaking the awful, chalky taste of quicklime and the burning sensation the moment it got wet. She looked into Glen’s flour-white face.

“What were you doing here?”

“Ask him after we’ve got him in the house,” Claude said. “That’s quicklime.”

“I know what it is,” she said. “First he’s going to explain what he was doing here.”

These last words came out as a screech.

“I just wanted to ask him a question,” Glen said. “Tell her, Claude! It was just to ask him a question.”

She turned to Claude. He shook his head and shrugged as if to say it was the ranting of a drunk.

“Liar,” she said.

Then, before she understood quite what she was doing, she’d twined her fingers into the curls atop Glen’s head and yanked his face up. Her other palm caught him squarely on the flat of his cheek. Crack of skin against skin. Glen swayed and nearly collapsed, but instead he began to whimper and clutch at his eyes.

“You’ll wait,” she said, “until I know my son is safe.”

She untangled her fingers from Glen’s hair and stood. The dogs in the front runs pressed against their pen doors, barking and whining and straining to see what was happening. From behind the kennel, Trudy heard a rattling and banging. Pen doors being opened. She had taken only a few steps toward the sound when the first azure bubble of gas bellied out of the back doors. It crawled into the air, shifting from blue to yellow as it rose. It lit the field, then disappeared, bottom to top, halfway to the eaves. There was the low huff of vaporous ignition, the sound of a match tossed into a barbeque soaked with lighter fluid. Then a second belch of flame shot out of the doorway, more orange than the first, eating itself almost before it had a chance to rise. In the still night air, a thread of smoke began to seep from the top of the doorway. It tracked upward along the red siding and pooled under the eaves. With sickening rapidity, it broadened into a gray ribbon that spanned the doorway.

Trudy stopped, flatfooted, her thoughts momentarily logjammed. She jerked about in a circle, unable to decide in which direction to move first. A vast, soft explosion had erupted in the barn. Why? They didn’t store flammables in there. Glen had been in there. He was covered with quicklime. Had Glen meant to burn down the barn? Had he doused the inside with gasoline? Why? Claude had Glen on his feet. They were walking toward the house, Glen’s massive arm draped over Claude’s shoulders. Had Claude not heard the sound? He was speaking urgently to Glen, but Trudy couldn’t make out what he was saying. Then Glen stumbled and drove them both to the ground.

Not until Opal rounded the back corner of the barn and bolted past her did Trudy know for certain that Edgar had to be all right: he was releasing the dogs from their pens. She ran along the front pens, unlatching the doors and throwing them open, clapping and shouting, “Out! Come on! Out!” By the time she finished, two dozen dogs were loose; another twelve or fourteen were rounding the barn from the back. Packs formed and reformed and flowed into one another and split apart as they dashed behind the barn and across the yard and circled the house and garden. Claude had gotten Glen to his feet again, and the two men waded through the dogs that surrounded them.

“Get!” Claude shouted at the dogs, and “Come on, come on” to Glen.

“Call the fire department,” Trudy shouted. “He’s set the barn on fire!”

Claude stared back at her for a moment. Then he nodded and turned. With Glen’s arm draped across his shoulders, they hobbled the rest of the way to the porch steps and he there guided the man down and ran past him into the house.

Two of the dogs began to snarl at each other. Trudy ran to the nearest and lifted it by its tail and wheeled it backward, shouting, “Go! Leave! Get!” to the other. She dropped the dog’s tail and stepped quickly forward and shook it by the ruff. When she looked up, a pair of dogs were running through the orchard, close to the road. “You two,” she called. “Come!” The dogs wheeled and began heading toward her but instead joined one of the packs circulating in the yard. She began methodically recalling and downing dogs, one by one, looking over her shoulder and waiting for Edgar to appear, and every time she looked again, more smoke streamed from the barn.

She was surprised, given the chaos of the moment, how many of the dogs held their stays, but every one looked as if it might bolt the moment she turned away; they craned their necks to watch the others plunging through the field and circling the house and charging up to the porch steps, where Glen Papineau sat cradling his face in his hands.

Edgar

FOURTEEN RUNS JUTTED INTO THE LONG NIGHT-SHADOW OF the barn. Edgar staggered along palming up the wooden latches and flinging open the doors without waiting for the dogs to emerge. The afterimage of the fire-flash twisted in the air before him like a violet snake. By the time he opened the last run, nearest the silo, the dogs were circling him in the dark, pawing one another and bucking in excited, foreshortened leaps. Then the sound of Glen Papineau’s voice echoed from the front yard. Opal and Umbra stopped, cocked their heads, then turned and galloped side by side through the pack and rounded the stone belly of the silo.

Yes, he signed at the rest. He swept his hands along their sides to get them moving. Go! Get! They turned their heads to mouth his hands, then, one after another bolted past the silo until only Essay remained, seated in the grass. She was nosing the plush fur along the back of her hind leg. He knelt and pushed her muzzle away and ran his hand across singed fur. Brittle as wire. Another patch on her tail. The flash must have caught her on the way out, he thought, but the canvas flaps over the door had damped it. Essay nosed his hand aside impatiently and chewed at her leg and snorted to clear the scent from her nostrils. She scrambled to her feet and shook out.

Edgar gestured toward the silo. You too. Get.

She looked at him, blinking, then turned and bounded into the pale light, shadow out of shadow, a thing created mid-leap, her ears pricked forward, eyes wide, jaw agape, for the very first time wolflike to Edgar’s eyes.

He ran to the rear of the barn. A band of smoke crawled past the lintel above the double doors and lifted skyward. How long had it taken to release the dogs? A minute? Two? How could that much smoke be pouring from the barn? From his vantage point he could see Glen sitting on the porch steps, hands to his face. A half-circle of dogs surrounded him with their heads cocked. Edgar’s mother held a dozen or more dogs in quivering down-stays in the side yard and twice that number still ran wild, bunching up in packs and sailing through the orchard, splitting and joining in a chaotic ballet. As he watched, his mother halted a dog by name and walked to it and downed it using both hands. Then, noticing the gazes of the dogs, she turned. They began a simultaneous exchange of sign.

Are the pups with you?

Are you okay?

No.

Yes.

I’ll get them.

Before she could sign anything else, he ran through the double doors. The interior of the barn was eerily hot. The bulb he’d left screwed into its socket flickered away and the smoke billowed and streamed past it along the ceiling and into the night. The air smelled of hickory and burning straw. Edgar came upon the remains of Glen’s ether-soaked rag, an orange-fringed char. In two of the pens, he found straw still burning, the flames dispersed and yellow. He tore open the doors and kicked the straw until the embers were dark and he looked about. The plank walls were scorched in places. The timbers of the runs blackened. He found glowing, smoking piles of half-burnt straw in three other runs and he stomped them out. Overhead, the heavy crosswise beams were sooty but not aflame. Yet the smoke had not lessened. From outside, he could hear a shouted exchange between his mother and Claude. He ran down the aisle looking for the source of the smoke, but all he saw was a faint orange glow between two of the ceiling boards. When he looked again even that had gone black.

From the whelping room came a pair of high, yiking cries. The air inside was clearer. The solid walls of the whelping rooms had blocked all but a thin scum of smoke, but the two pups were panicked, almost hysterical. The moment he unlatched their pen door, they scrambled past, turned the corner, hindquarters skidding out from under them, and were gone. He followed them out. He wasn’t groggy from the ether anymore, but his head throbbed. Once outside, he gasped the clear air into his lungs and raised his hand and pressed the lump where his head had struck the floor. What he felt wasn’t even pain, just the black hand of unconsciousness passing before his eyes. His knees almost buckled and he yanked his fingers away.

The smoke pouring out of the doorway had doubled since he’d gone in, and blackened. He ran across the yard to where his mother stood among the dogs. The two pups were yapping and tumbling at her feet. She laid her hands on his shoulders and then on the sides of his face.

“Are you okay?”

He nodded.

“All the dogs are out?”

Yes.

“Then keep away from the barn. It’s going to burn.”

No. I put out all the flames I could find. Have you called the fire department?

She shook her head. “We can’t get through.”

What?

“When they put the extension in the barn, they routed the line there first. Claude just tried the house phone. The wires must have burnt or shorted already.”

No. No. No. The lights are on in the barn. The phone there might still work.

“Edgar, listen to me. No one goes into the barn. Look at the smoke. Look at it. The barn is gone.”

A glance was all it took to know she was right. Smoke had begun to seep from the eaves, rising and blacking out the stars in ebony rivulets. The sight of it pressed some tremendous weight down on Edgar. He knew very well how dry and brittle the wood in the barn was. He might have extinguished all the flames he could see, but something was smoldering inside the walls and ceiling. Even if they called that instant, it would take time for the Mellen Volunteer Fire Corps to arrive. Half an hour, maybe. And by then, the barn would be ablaze.

All at once the image of his father lying on the workshop floor flashed into his mind. Snow, seeping toward him. How he wouldn’t look at Edgar. Wouldn’t breathe. “These records are it,” he’d once said. “Without those records, we wouldn’t know what a dog meant.”

When Edgar turned back, his mother was looking at the house. Glen sat slumped on the porch steps, towel pressed to his face. Claude was standing beside him, speaking in a low, urgent voice and trying to pull the towel away so he could flush Glen’s eyes with a pan of water.

“Why would Glen do this?” his mother said. “God damn him.”

He had ether. I knocked it out of his hand.

“What was he doing with ether?”

He had it in a bottle. He held a rag over my face.

She looked at the gray powder in Edgar’s hair and on his clothes.

“You threw quicklime at him.”

Yes.

“That flash was ether fumes.”

Yes. I think the heat of the light bulb set it off.

“What did he mean to do?”

I don’t know.

She was shaking her head. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “How did he even know you-”

Then her voiced trailed off. She seemed to register for the first time that Glen Papineau was not in uniform. He was dressed in jeans and a checkered, short-sleeved shirt with its own bib of quicklime. Claude had coaxed him into setting aside the towel, and as they watched, he pulled back Glen’s eyelids and tipped water across his broad face. When the liquid touched his eyes, Glen’s back arched. He pushed Claude away with a sweep of his hand and hunched over again.

“How did he know?” she said. She took a tremulous breath. Tears spilled onto her cheeks. She began to walk toward the porch, hands fisted at her side. Then her strides lengthened and she was running and her voice rose to a wail, asking the same question over and over.

EDGAR FORCED HIMSELF TO turn away from the house, and away from the real, living dogs on the ground at his feet. Those dogs could take care of themselves for the few minutes it would take him to do what he had in mind. He ran to the front barn doors and rolled the heavy iron brace bar away and pulled the doors open. A billow of gray smoke engulfed him, carrying with it the smell of roasting straw and wood. He stepped back. After a minute the smoke leveled out around five feet above the barn floor.

If he stayed low, under the ceiling of smoke, he could easily reach the workshop door. The cabinets themselves would be impossible to move, but he could carry out individual files. The most valuable would be the newest, going back five generations. How many times could he go in? How many files each trip? They would get scrambled, but there would be time later to sort them out. He permitted himself a quick look at the porch steps. His mother stood facing Claude and Glen.

“How did you know, Glen?” she cried. “Tell me how you knew Edgar was here.”

Claude was standing beside Glen on the steps. He leaned over and began to say something.

“Shut up, Claude. Shut up. I want to hear this from Glen.”

But Glen sat silently rocking and grinding the towel against his face. Trudy knelt and put her hands on either side of Glen’s massive head and wrenched it toward her.

If Edgar watched even a moment longer he thought he would run toward the house, toward Claude, and then there would be no hope. He began drawing the deepest breaths he could, and before the doubts and second-guesses could begin, he ran into the smoldering barn.

HOT SMOKE BILLOWED over his back. The sole light bulb, at the far end of the barn, flickered between folds of smoke. Walking, he might have crossed the distance to the workshop in a few seconds, but with his head down and peering about for flames, it took much longer. He touched the handle of the workshop door and rubbed his thumb over his fingertips, like a safecracker, to take the temperature. Warm, but no warmer than anything else in the barn. He swung the door open. Smoke sucked into the darkness and equalized between the aisle and the workshop.

His eyes began to itch and a stream of tears leaked onto his face. He scrambled through the doorway and flipped the light switch and the bulb in the ceiling fixture came on. He breathed a little sigh of relief. He knew the room so well he could find his way to the file cabinets in total darkness, but he wouldn’t be able to locate the records he wanted just by feel, and there was no time to find the flashlight.

He opened the highest drawer of the rightmost file cabinet. A solid mass of paper, divided a hundred times, came toward him, the tab edges on the tops of the manila folders running in a long, ragged hump down the center and each penciled with a name. Cotton. Vesta. Hoop. Frog. He drove his hands into the mass, awkwardly lifting out a swath, and in the process scattering notes and photographs and paper clips. He left them and turned and scuttled through the doorway and down the aisle. The papers were heavy and they slid dryly against one another in his arms. Then he was in the yard, in the clear air. At the far edge of the lawn he stopped and bent and spilled the papers onto the ground.

And for the briefest instant, Edgar felt something new, something impossible and wholly out of place. A sense of elation. As if he’d somehow traveled back to the moment his father lay on the workshop floor and found the thing that could save him. Then, just as quickly, the sensation was gone. Something in him clamored for it again, at once. He ran to the barn and flailed heedlessly through the smoke and filled his arms with another pack of manila folders and all the papers and photographs inside them. He’d almost reached the double doors when the cement floor surged upward; he saw it tilting at him but there was no time to recover and he smashed shoulder-first into the hinges of the right-hand door, kicking as he fell and clutching the papers to his chest.

The impact brought him to his senses. He lay for a time half in and half out of the barn. After a few breaths of clear air he pushed to his feet and staggered into the grass. When he reached the folders he’d already rescued, he bent at his waist and let the papers flutter and splash to the ground.

Remember me.

Far in the distance, his mother’s voice.

“Edgar! Stay out of there!”

She was standing by the porch. Glen had gripped her wrist in one giant hand like a straw in a vise. Edgar looked at her and shook his head. There was no time to argue. She couldn’t feel what he felt or hear what he heard. She wouldn’t understand the rightness of it. There were no words for the sensation that had washed through him.

His mother would have run forward to stop him, but she couldn’t break Glen’s grip. She whirled and began to beat at Glen’s face with her free hand. It brought the enormous man to his feet. He was confused and in terrible pain and he stood thrashing his head side to side to avoid her blows. His stance was wide-legged and low. And then, in one fluid motion, he swept one of his thick legs under hers and folded her up in his arms and together they toppled onto the grass. By the time they came to rest, Glen had scissored his legs over hers.

“What’s happening?” Glen said. His voice was filled with pain and fear but not the slightest hint of physical effort, as if all those wrestler’s reflexes had come forward of their own volition to protect him. “Why won’t anyone help me?” he cried. “Doesn’t anyone understand I can’t see?”

Edgar took a breath and turned away. The last thing he saw was the entwined figures of Glen Papineau and his mother, as she twisted and fought in his arms. And Claude, standing on the porch steps above them.

HE TROLLEYED ALONG PALM and knuckle into the workshop, careful now to stay below the strata of smoke, holding his breath as long as he could until it burst out of him. He was able to get the remainder of the first drawer’s files. Coming out with his arms filled, it was much harder to stay low. His eyes teared and the light in the workshop became a greasy blur of yellow and gray. He had to be careful not to gulp the air. The crashing dizziness of his last attempt was warning enough. Even so, he felt smoke burning along his windpipe and in his lungs. Outside, he spilled the papers onto the ground and dropped to his knees. He supposed a normal person would have been coughing, but all he felt was a strange wooziness. He bent and forced himself through the motions, hacking and gasping to drive the smoke out of him.

He looked up to find Essay standing before him, tail flagging. Her ears were up high on her head, fully attentive, eyes gay and glittering. The same expression she’d worn parading around the cove after the tornado. She looked prepared to follow him into the barn. He took her ruff in his hands to shake her down, scare her away, then stopped himself. They were done with commands. He put his hand under her belly and drew her attention into him.

Away, he signed, pouring into the gesture all the force he could muster. I know you understand. I know it’s your choice. But please. Away!

Essay backed up a step, eyes intent on him. She looked at the other dogs circling under the apple trees. Then she faced Edgar again and bucked a little and held his gaze.

Yes, he signed. Yes.

She bounded forward and swiped her tongue across his face and bolted into the mass of dogs, all of them up now and running, even the ones Edgar’s mother had stayed. He wanted desperately to know if Essay had understood him, but short of giving up on the records and rushing after her, there was no way to be sure.

He turned back to the barn. He had almost passed through the wide double doors and into the smoky interior when he thought of the milk house and what he would find sitting inside it. He crossed along the front of the barn and when he reached the milk house door he flung it open.

The first time he saw a flame, he told himself, he would stop.

Claude

LET IT BURN, CLAUDE THOUGHT.

He was standing on the bottom porch step watching disaster unfold and trying to decide what to do. The disaster was not that the barn was going to burn; certainly not. The barn was insured, after all, and the dogs were outside and safe, even if they were running loose at the moment. At worst, losing the barn would make things inconvenient for a few months-they’d have to board the dogs somewhere, though finding families to look after them in the interim wouldn’t be that hard-but, realistically, they’d have a better, more modern barn before snow fell. Nor was the disaster what had happened to Glen; though Claude had flushed Glen’s eyes with water as soon as they’d reached the house, the quicklime had already done gruesome damage. It was hard to feel sorry for Glen. The man must have used enough Prestone out there to launch a rocket. Not what Claude had suggested at all.

No, the disaster was that Edgar kept running into the barn for those records, returning again and again to the workshop, and the filing cabinets, while smoke poured from the barn’s eaves. Edgar had even fetched the wheelbarrow from the milk house and, as Claude watched, begun rolling it in a broad arc toward the barn doors.

If all that weren’t strange enough, Glen had now taken Trudy in some sort of wrestler’s hold. In a moment, Claude was going to have to say something or do something to make Glen release her, but he didn’t know what that might be. The man had wrapped his huge limbs around Trudy and his embrace reminded Claude somehow of the tree roots at Angkor Wat, slowly crushing those ancient stone temples. The way Glen was acting, he might not stop unless he was unconscious. Yet Claude didn’t want to step in until he was sure nothing could be done about the barn. The barn had to be a lost cause. That was why he’d told Trudy the telephone line was dead. By now, it probably was dead.

There was something enthralling about the sight of smoke rising from the barn, black into black, erasing such a broad swath of stars. It reminded Claude just how big that old barn was. When he’d first arrived home he’d been struck all over again by its size; then, quickly enough, it had become ordinary in his eyes, the way it had been when he was growing up, making other people’s barns look like miniatures. The volume of smoke belching off the roof put things into perspective again and he marveled at the man who had originally built the place-what plans must he have had, to build a barn like that?

Better take a good look, Claude thought. He watched the smoke seeping from the gaps around the big mow door-the door Edgar had thrown open the night he’d pushed Papineau down the mow stairs; the door they had hauled six wagonloads of straw bales through, just two weeks earlier, in a long day of sweaty, exhausting effort. Strange: all that smoke rupturing outward, writhing and folding over itself, and yet, no sound, no flames. Claude knew enough about fire to understand that this was a phase, that the fire, or what was soon going to be a fire, was smoldering along the old timbers, probably in the straw as well, exploring hidden paths and alleyways in search of fuel and oxygen. He looked into the sky again. In the waxing moonlight, there was not a cloud to be seen.

Edgar appeared out of the smoke, pushing a wheelbarrow mounded with papers. The sight chilled Claude. Trudy, thrashing pointlessly, began shouting to Edgar to stay away from the barn. But Edgar wasn’t in any immediate danger. Only a few steps lay between the workshop and the barn doors and unless the whole structure suddenly burst into flame there was little chance of his getting caught inside. Until then, at least on the surface of things, Edgar was doing right by salvaging the files. A help later. Not imperative, but good to have.

The problem was that bottle. In truth, Claude had lost his nerve-the bottle had already been well hidden in the mow, and he knew it, but when it looked like Edgar might be snooping up there Claude had panicked and dug it out. After that night with Benson, and that bizarre reenactment, he’d been certain Edgar had found it once already. He should have poured the bottle’s contents into the creek the very next morning-he’d fantasized about doing that so many times-but he’d never answered the question of what would happen once he dumped the stuff. Would it just sink into the ground, disappear? Or would it trace some subterranean channel back to the house, to the well-to him? More important-and this was hard to admit-once whatever roiled inside that bottle was gone, it was gone for good, and the idea that it could solve his worst problems had become part of Claude’s nature. The knowledge gave him confidence, the way some men drew confidence from a wad of money in the bank or a gun in the glove compartment of their car. It had become, at times, almost a living presence to him. I exist for a reason. And then the exhilaration and self-loathing when he’d listened. But, if he was careful now, that bottle would be incinerated and, along with it, the very worst part of him.

If he was careful. He’d already made one mistake. He’d carried the bottle out of the mow only to realize how few other places he trusted. There hadn’t been time to think things through. Trudy could have walked in at any moment, and what, exactly, would he have said if she’d asked why he was carrying a bottle ribboned with Hangul lettering and with some liquid inside that looked like the purest, most distilled venom? Hiding it in the house was out of the question; it frightened him to be so near the stuff. He could barely stand to hold it in his work-gloved hands. After Gar, he’d showered until the hot water heater in his little rented apartment emptied, and when it filled, he’d emptied it all over again.

Once he’d taken that bottle out of the mow, there were few options left. The medicine room felt all wrong-Trudy went there sometimes: she might open a drawer, think, What’s this?, twist the wax-sealed stopper, raise the bottle to her nose…So it had to be the workshop, where Trudy virtually never stepped foot except passing through on her way to the mow. He’d considered, briefly, putting it in plain sight, out on the shelves, as if it were nothing of value. With so many odds and ends there, one more bottle wouldn’t stand out. But it would stand out to anyone looking for it; and his own gaze would always be drawn to it. So he’d wrapped up the bottle in an oily rag and buried it under a mass of old letters at the back of the bottom drawer of the oldest filing cabinet. No one but Edgar cared about the filing cabinets and even Edgar couldn’t possibly care about a bunch of old letters. A good place, he’d been sure of it. And yet, the moment the bottle was safely hidden, a new worry came to him and he’d walked to the medicine room, selected a syringe from a cabinet, and worked it into the bundle of rags alongside the bottle.

Claude was still standing on the porch steps, watching the scene playing out before him. One of Glen’s legs was thrown forward over Trudy’s hips and he had tilted them both so they were lying on their sides, facing the barn. Claude could barely see Trudy over Glen’s broad back. He sighed and stepped off the porch and onto the grass. Trudy had stopped struggling and lay enraptured, murmuring something like “no, no, not now,” watching Edgar as he came running out of the barn pushing another batch of records. The dogs were scrambling every which way. Two of them raced over, paused to scent Trudy and Glen, then leapt away. Claude knelt behind Glen, reached over his shoulders, and tried to peel the man’s enormous right hand away from where it was locked around his own left wrist.

“Glen, enough,” he said, surprising himself with the evenness of his voice. “Let Trudy go. We can’t help you unless you let Trudy go.”

Glen didn’t respond, but at the sound of her name, Trudy began to thrash. Though she was lithe and strong, it was no use. Glen dwarfed her. His shoulders bunched and his arms tightened until she stopped. She craned her neck to look at Claude. She was crying.

“Make Edgar stop. Please, Claude. Make Edgar stop going in there.”

Claude just nodded. There was nothing to say in reply. He stood and began to cross the yard, mind racing. He didn’t like having to make decisions that way; he needed time to think things through, but he could hardly sit and mull. Yes, he could stop Edgar, knock him down and hold him like Glen was holding Trudy until the fire was so advanced no one could go inside. To Trudy, it would look like he’d saved Edgar from madness, while inside, the bottle would crack and melt, its contents boil in the flames.

Afterward, there would be Glen to account for. The man was blind, his eyes etched globes. It was a testament to Glen’s strength that he was conscious at all, even if half out of his mind with pain. The blindness would overwhelm him later on-all those late-night conversations had left Claude with no doubt about that. When that happened, Claude could insist that Glen, in his grief, had mistaken an innocent consolation over Page’s death for something else entirely, and Trudy might believe that. Glen had, after all, tried to kidnap Edgar. And if that wasn’t damning enough, after Trudy hit Glen he had reverted to this strange wrestling maneuver, moaning and rocking and refusing to release her.

But there would still be Edgar. The boy (it was hard to think of him that way, gray-haired from the quicklime, tall, whip-thin) might make some claims, though any real evidence would long have been dispersed in the clouds. In return, Claude could raise questions of his own. What had happened with Page in the mow, really? With luck, they might find the key to the Impala in Edgar’s pocket, along with several hundred dollars. Would anyone be that surprised to find a runaway preparing to steal a car?

It could work, Claude thought. All he had to do was stop Edgar-save Edgar’s life, in Trudy’s eyes-and wait. Afterward, there would be a sense of release, a new beginning for all of them. The fire, and the reconstruction, would change everything. A turning point.

Claude was walking toward the barn, considering this, when he felt a blunt pressure against his thigh. He looked down. Essay stood before him. She’d pressed her nose into his leg, just above his knee, and his heart began to jangle, because for a moment Claude saw a syringe in the dog’s mouth. But his eyes had been fooled. There was nothing in her mouth. He’d been thinking of the night Edgar played his trick in the kennel. Essay stood in front of him, gaze resolute, mouth agape, eyes glinting and mischievous, as if waiting to see his reaction from that distant night. Was it possible the boy was so single-minded that he’d come back to play this trick again?

All at once, Claude’s certainty wavered. He hadn’t been thinking clearly. It would not work. Not if all it took was the gaze of a dog to make his hands shake and the blood pound in his brain. He was kidding himself. Over and over again he would have to look Gar in the eye just that way.

No, not Gar-Edgar.

Why had he thought that? No sooner had he asked that question than he knew the answer: because Edgar, all softness stripped from his face, lit aslant by the yard light, hair grayed by quicklime, looked too much like his father. Because, carrying the files in his arms, the boy even walked with the same hunched-up step Gar had used cradling pups in and out of the whelping pens. Because some nights Claude couldn’t sleep after the tick of a bug against the bedroom window made him start up in bed, adrenaline flooding his veins, heart leaping so ferociously he’d had to walk it off, and after that he couldn’t lie down. Better to sit facing the night and take sleep that way, if it came at all. And because the look on Essay’s face made him think of the morning he’d glanced up from the sink to discover Edgar outside the window in the apple tree-how, finally, he’d had to turn away.

When Claude looked down again, the dog had slipped away, rejoined one of the packs bounding through the yard. Claude walked to the double doors and entered, stooping. The air was breathable down by his waist, though it reeked in his nostrils and stung his eyes. He could see only a few feet ahead. When he reached the doorway of the workshop he made out the wheelbarrow, askew in the center of the workshop, and Edgar, yanking open the top drawer of a file cabinet, standing upright just long enough to scoop out the drawer’s contents, then ducking again.

Edgar glanced over and spotted Claude in the doorway. He stopped for a moment and they looked at one another. Then Edgar turned and snatched another batch of files from the open drawer. The drawers of the file cabinets nearest the door hung half-open and empty-Edgar had been working from the newest records to the oldest. That explained why he hadn’t already walked into the yard with the bottle in his hand.

Claude stepped past Edgar, to the last filing cabinet. He slid open the top drawer and began scooping armload after armload of records into the wheelbarrow, filling it as fast as he could, though it was already nearly overflowing. Edgar kept working on the bottom drawer of the adjacent file, turning and heaving papers. Some missed the wheelbarrow entirely and scattered toward the doorway. Then Edgar stood, took the handlebars of the wheelbarrow, and disappeared into the smoke.

Edgar

HE COULD HAVE KICKED HIMSELF FOR NOT THINKING OF THE wheelbarrow sooner. It was possible to get everything this way, all of it, the whole history, outside and safe. Working frantically, he’d already pitched the contents of one complete file cabinet into the metal basin of the thing. The smoke in the workshop was bitter and thick, and he dropped to his knees to suck the clear air near the floor.

Now he rose again and plunged his hands into a drawer and turned and dumped an armload of papers. How swiftly his mind was spinning as he worked, how euphoric the sensation of deliverance that beat in him. He felt he’d struck another bargain, just as he had watching the apple trees in the winter, and he worked with great intensity. The part of him that loved order cried out at the wildness of what he was doing, the neat march of generations so quickly scrambled. But he couldn’t stop. He’d meant to throw everything into this one final barrow load, but the papers had already begun to mound over the rim. Much more would just slide and spill as he rolled through the turn into the aisle and would be lost in the smoke.

He had glanced at the workshop door when Claude appeared, crouching low and squinting against the smoke. Claude’s expression was a kind of perfect blankness, or rather, a mélange of expressions, any one of them fleeting and half made and out of registration with the next. Edgar thought that someone else, watching from another viewpoint, might see concern or apprehension there, or fear, or desire, or revulsion. But for Edgar, the result was something incomprehensible, unreadable, committing to nothing and summing to nothing. As it had always been with Claude. Edgar had not in the least forgotten what he’d seen in the mow, or that stream of memory that had passed through him in the rain. He had never had much of a plan for when he returned except to say what he knew was true and keep saying it, without evidence, without proof.

Then, before he had a chance to do anything, Claude was past him and had yanked open the topmost drawer of last file cabinet and begun shoveling armloads of paper into the wheelbarrow. He didn’t say anything or even hold Edgar’s gaze. When Edgar understood what Claude was doing, he turned back to the files and they worked side by side. The wheelbarrow was quickly overfilled. There was no time to explain and no language for it. Edgar just grabbed the wheelbarrow’s handles and ran through doorway. Keeping low enough to breathe clear air was difficult and twice he had to halt to steady the mound of papers.

As soon as he was outside he dropped to his knees and forced another coughing fit; this time it tore at his throat. Then he stood and shoved the wheelbarrow into the grass and pitched it over and watched the papers scatter, sheets of white and cream everywhere, the writing on them like every language in the world, some ancient, others yet to be invented. Pictures and pedigrees and log sheets and notes, everywhere he looked. The story of forty generations. Fifty.

He looked toward the house. His mother lay bound up in Glen Papineau’s arms. When she saw Edgar, she stopped struggling and turned her face to him.

“Let it go, Edgar! Let it go!”

I can’t, he signed. Not yet.

He turned back to the smoldering kennel. His mother’s cries, intertwined with Glen’s moans, made an unnerving duet. The once-narrow ribbon of smoke had become an opaque mass that belched from the top half of the barn’s entryway. He wondered if the straw in the mow had caught fire. Not even the tiniest lick of flame was visible, though plumes of black smoke poured from the roofline.

He understood what it meant to go back into the workshop. He did not believe Claude was there to help him. Yet every file he rescued restored some piece of a world that he thought had been lost forever. For so long he’d lived divided-from his father, from himself, now from Almondine. What he meant to do was not a question for him of wisdom or foolishness, courage or fearlessness, insight or ignorance. It was only that he could not split himself the way he once had; could not choose between imperatives. To resurrect or revenge. To fight or turn away.

Inside were two more cabinets filled with files and the letters from Brooks and the master litter book and The New Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language with Alexander McQueen’s essay on the significance of naming and page upon page of notes, markers of every dog Edgar had ever known. He pushed the wheelbarrow forward at a trot, and for the last time he passed though the double doors and into the barn. If he worked fast he could be in and out in three minutes. And if he needed more time, he had an idea that might clear the smoke long enough to get everything else.

An idea that had come to him long ago, in a dream.

Claude

THE MOMENT EDGAR DISAPPEARED THROUGH THE WORKSHOP door and into the smoke, Claude snatched open the bottom file drawer and dug the rag-wrapped bundle from beneath the mass of letters and newspaper clippings. The syringe, folded into the oily fabric, worked loose and fell into the drawer and he pawed through the chaos before his fingers touched the round plastic barrel. He retreated across photographs and pedigrees scattered over the floor like a lunatic’s history of the kennel. When he reached the workbench, he turned his back to the room and knelt.

He wrapped the rag around his hand and grasped the bottle through it and worked the stopper loose and with great care set it on the floor away from himself, far back in the corner. He twisted the sheath off the needle. His motions were careful, but he was working in a rush, and by accident he jabbed the needle’s point lightly into the flesh of his right palm. Before he even felt the sting, he’d jerked his hand away. The puncture was too small to release even a single drop of blood, but an infinitesimal red meniscus colored the needle’s point.

When he looked at the bottle again, an iridescent rivulet had crept up the throat of the glass. He set the needle against the shear lip. To see the fluid wick so eagerly into that minute steel artery made his skin crawl. He needed only a drop but half a cc got into the barrel before he could put his thumb above the plunger and even then its insistent, upward force felt to him like some feral thing lunging from its cage. With effort, he pushed all but a fraction back into the bottle. When he drew the syringe away, a silver filament quivered in the air. He set the needle tip against the glass and turned it and withdrew it again, leaving a drop of clear oil that shivered and collapsed and slid down the inner curve of the bottle’s neck. He left the bottle unstoppered and tossed away the rag and turned, holding the syringe at arm’s length, and he waited.

The file cabinets opposite stood hazy and remote through the dense smoke. He wasn’t sure Edgar meant to come back, but he could drop the syringe and be out of the barn in seconds if things suddenly felt unsafe. Fire didn’t move that quickly, he thought. He looked at the bare bulb shining in its ceiling socket and wondered how long before the insulation on the wiring melted. The smoke carried a meaty, awful scent of roasted flesh. A nest of mice, he thought, or a bird in the eaves, overcome. All that smoke and still not a sound, not a flame. Outside, he could hear Trudy crying and calling out.

Then Edgar appeared, hunkered down behind the empty wheelbarrow, bent so low over the thing that the skids scraped the cement floor. He jammed it nose first into the space below the mow stairs and dropped to his knees and yanked open the bottommost drawer of the oldest cabinet-exactly where the bottle had been hidden-and began to heave out letters and papers. Claude stood. He remembered how the old herbalist had used a sharpened reed. How his withered hands had shaken with palsy afterward. Now that seemed like such a mild reaction, for Claude was suddenly conscious of all the mechanism of nerve and muscle and ligament that animated his fingers. The syringe began to tremble in his grip. With his free hand he squeezed his shaking wrist until the bones inside ground against one other.

He crossed the workshop.

The act itself took just an instant.

When it was done he backed away, reaching behind with one hand to swing the workshop door closed. All at once his teeth began chattering and he bit down so hard to make them stop that a groan escaped him. He had to get hold of himself, he thought. All he needed to do now was keep Edgar in the room and let time pass. But his heart threw itself against his ribs and the blood rushing through him felt as heavy as mercury. He pressed his back to the door and slid to the cement, and noticed for the first time that the syringe was still in his hand. With a convulsive jerk, he flung it away. As he had with Gar.

Edgar kept pitching files into the wheelbarrow as if nothing had happened. Then, abruptly, he sat back on his heels and looked over his head and behind, as if startled by a sound. He turned toward Claude, but his gaze hardly lingered. Then he stood and made his way across the workshop, working hand over hand along the shelves beneath the stairs, and he began looking for something in the corner, where the long-handled tools stood in a tangle.

When he turned, Edgar held a pitchfork in his hand.

Aw, God, Claude thought.

But Edgar wasn’t looking at Claude. He walked to the center of the workshop, bent low to keep his face out of the thick mass of smoke. He crouched for a moment, squinting and wiping the tears from his eyes, and swaying as he fixed the position of something near the light fixture on the ceiling.

Then Edgar stood and drove the pitchfork straight up into the smoke.

Edgar

HIS FIRST THOUGHT WAS THAT SOMETHING HAD FALLEN ON him and dazzled a nerve, the way it happened when a person struck their elbow. A bolt of coldness in the back of his neck, nothing more. He had time to reach into the file drawer and press another handful of letters and papers between his palms and turn and dump them into the wheelbarrow, and then an icy wave radiated down his back and toward his limbs, settling in his crotch and knees and armpits and in the palms of his hands. Strange beyond words, the sensation. He reached back and touched his neck. He turned. Nothing had fallen. Claude had pushed the workshop door closed and now sat clumsily at the base of it, looking frightened and panting through his mouth.

Then, for no reason Edgar could see, the smoke suddenly tripled in thickness, until the walls of the room were barely visible. The ceiling light shrank to an orange, smoke-smeared crystal. He told himself he should cough and he bent down and put his elbows on his knees but the result was feeble. He needed to clear the smoke from the room; he was being overcome. He made his way to the implements leaning in the corner. Rakes. Hoes. Any of them would do, it didn’t matter. The one that came into his hand was a pitchfork.

When he turned, the room careened around him. Ether, he thought, because that sense of detachment had come over him again, the same as when Glen had held the cloth over his face-the feeling that he was outside his body looking back at himself. But this was different, too. It came from that dazzled feeling that swept over him. He couldn’t shake the idea that something had fallen on him. He touched his head. His fingers came away bloodless and dry.

He made his way to the center of the workshop, trying to keep his balance. It was impossible to see the ceiling through the smoke. Every time he drew a breath something scraped inside his lungs. He forced himself to concentrate. He tried to see in his mind where the hay hatch was positioned relative to that ceiling light. Twice he staggered off to the side and had to look at his feet in order to keep from falling.

At last, he took a guess. He lifted the pitchfork and drove it upward. The tines struck wood. When he pushed, there was solid, unyielding resistance. He yanked downward and the tines came free and he thrust up into the smoke again a foot to the right. This time something gave. He felt the hatch lift an inch, then catch, cockeyed in its slot. He shifted position and gave one final heave and felt the hatch clear the opening and slide along the mow floor above him.

Then the pitchfork clattered down. He found himself lying on his back, though he didn’t remember falling. The air near the floor was blissfully clear. Smoke eddied and swirled about the hay hatch, a sweeping, tidal movement, like watching something alive. It had worked just the way he’d hoped, just the way it had happened in his dream that first morning after his father appeared in the rain. The sight filled him with exaltation and sadness. The smoke was rising into the mow, stretching when it came to the lip and tumbling upward. He could see nothing in the mow itself-no towering bales, no beams, no tackle, no bulbs among the rafters. Only a thousand layers of gray, lifting upward. He thought he might see flame, but it was nothing like that. Only the fluid rush of the smoke.

He’d meant to do something after he rolled this final barrow of records out of the barn, something important. He didn’t blame Glen Papineau for doing what he’d done. He’d only wanted to ask Edgar a question, he’d said. But Edgar had something he’d wanted to say to Glen, and now he closed his eyes and imagined Glen standing there, and imagined himself saying the words so Glen could hear them.

I’m sorry, he said. He imagined it with all his might, with all the power of his mind. I’m sorry about your father.

He felt something recede inside him. A diminishment of barriers. He lay and watched the smoke crawl along the ceiling. After a time Almondine stepped out of some hidden place near the file cabinets. She walked to him and looked down at him and licked his face.

Get up, she said. Hurry. She panted. Her ears were cupped forward and drawn up tight, as they were when she was most fretful, though her movements were measured and calm. He was not surprised to hear her voice. It was just as he’d heard it in his mind all his life.

I thought I’d never see you again, he signed.

You were lost.

Yes. Lost.

You didn’t need to come back. I would have found you.

No, I did. I understood some things while I was gone.

And you had to come back.

Yes.

What was it you understood.

What my grandfather was doing. Why people want Sawtelle dogs. Who should have them. What comes next.

You understood those things all along.

No. Not this way.

For a time they just looked at one another.

So many things happened, he signed.

Yes.

Sit here beside me. I want to tell you about someone. His name is Henry.

Get up, she said. Come outside.

I told him my name was Nathoo.

He laughed a little as he said this, knowing she would understand.

Mowgli’s human name.

Yes.

Was that better.

He thought about her question.

At first. Later it didn’t matter. I meant to tell him different, but I never got the chance.

Almondine sat and peered at him, brow knit, eyes like cherrywood polished to glass. It came to him then, a wholly new thought, that Nathoo was neither his name nor not his name; that even “Edgar” was a thing apart from his real name-the name Almondine had bestowed upon him in some distant past, long before he learned to carry ideas in time as memories, and whatever name that was had no expression in human words or gestures, nor could it exist beyond the curve and angle of her face, the shine of her eyes, the shape of her mouth when she looked at him.

Baboo and Tinder stayed with Henry.

Yes.

I shouldn’t have turned away when I saw you with Claude that day. I don’t know what happened to me.

You were lost.

I was lost.

Get up, she said one last time.

Come, he said. Lie here by me.

Almondine settled herself and leaned her chest against his side. Her face was near his face and she looked at him and followed his gaze up toward the ceiling.

He closed his eyes, then opened them again with a jerk, afraid that Almondine had gone, but there had been no need to worry. They lay on the floor and watched the smoke writhe across the ceiling. It was not so much like smoke at all anymore, but a river, broad and placid, beginning nowhere and ending nowhere, flowing on and on. The two of them lay on the bank of that river as it swept past like the creek in flood time. Perhaps this river, too, had once been divided by a fence. But no more.

On the far side a figure appeared, distant but recognizable-someone he’d longed to see so often since that night the dogs had howled in the rain and the world had begun to turn on such a new and terrible axis. He’d meant to say something that night, the most important thing of all, it seemed to him now, but he’d cowered when the moment came and the chance was lost and afterward he’d been damned.

He set his fingers in the fur at the base of Almondine’s throat. Breaths came into her and left, came and left. He closed his eyes, for how long he didn’t know. When he opened them again the river was just the same but somehow the man had crossed to meet them. Or perhaps they had crossed. He couldn’t be sure. Either way it made him happy. He felt he had a voice inside him for the first time and with it he could say what he’d meant to say all along. The man was close. There was no need to cry out the words. He could whisper, even, if he wanted.

He smiled.

“I love you,” said Edgar Sawtelle.

Claude

HE SAT WITH HIS BACK TO THE WORKSHOP DOOR, WAITING and counting, watching Edgar lying in front of him. A vortex of smoke was rushing upward into the dark rectangle overhead. There had been one terrible moment when he’d thought, it isn’t working, but he’d been mistaken. Instead of advancing on Claude, the boy had used the pitchfork to open the hay hatch. After he fell, he’d lain looking into the mow and working his hands over his chest in a stream of sign that Claude could not hope to read. That had gone on for a long time. Then, as if Edgar had come to some sort of decision, he draped one hand atop his chest, laid the other on the floor beside his leg, and hadn’t moved since.

Claude thought of that rain-soaked alley in Pusan-what it had been like watching the old man drop the tip of his sharpened reed onto the crippled dog’s withers-how gentle the motion-how the dog had paused from its lapping at the crock of soup and looked up and crumpled. There had been only an instant’s delay. It seemed as if the contents of the bottle never acted the same way twice. Perhaps, over time, it had lost potency. Perhaps it drew on something different in each person. He would have liked to go back now and ask the old man to explain it. The bottle sat across the room, at the base of the workbench. He had to fight the desire to scramble over and twist the glass stopper into place-to seal it up again, at least for as long as he was confined to the same room with it. Only his dread of nearing the stuff stopped him. And if he touched it again, he couldn’t be certain he would leave it behind.

He debated whether he should carry Edgar’s body out. He could sling the boy over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry and stagger into the yard. That way would be better for Trudy, he thought, and he would have done as she asked. Or he could tell Trudy the boy had grown confused and wandered into the smoky center of the barn, and though he’d searched and searched, he’d finally been driven out by the smoke, certain that Edgar must have emerged from the back doors. That was better-but only if it looked as if he had searched for a very long time-as long as humanly possible. Dangerously long. He forced himself to sit one minute more. He concentrated on stopping the jitter in his knees. It cost him nothing to wait, besides breathing a little smoke and having to look at the boy lying there. Claude could not fix his gaze on Edgar for long without a tremor rising from his insides, but that was foolish. If anything, the boy looked peaceful.

Then, from the mow, came a sound. A groan that rose in pitch to a squeal like shearing tin. Claude looked up. There was no change in the character of the smoke, and no flames glowed through the open hatch, but suddenly it felt dangerous to be in that barn for even a second longer. The boy had been right about one thing-opening the hatch had cleared much of the smoke from the workshop. But, Claude was deciding right then, it had been a less-than-great idea for other reasons, and the more he thought about it, the less desire he had to stay in the barn. Black, fluid smoke from under the door had begun to creep around either side of him.

Standing brought on a wave of dizziness. He stepped back from the door, taking care to avoid the boy’s body. Standing hands to knees, he gasped breaths of the clear air. Then he twisted the knob on the workshop door. It was as if he’d swept aside a dam. The acrid smoke that poured in tore at his throat, forcing him back into the corner. He knelt and coughed and when he looked up again the smoke was rushing toward the open hay hatch. Not rising, rushing. And for the first time he saw the interior of the mow glowing orange through that curtain of gray.

And brightening.

He scrambled into the kennel aisle, hands on the floor. The atmosphere roiled in barrels around him. He was at the double doors, poised to step through, when something made him pause and drag the back of his knuckles across his tearing eyes. Precisely where the smoke belched into the light of the hooded lamp outside the doors stood the figure of a man. As Claude watched, the figure tattered and disappeared. Claude closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the figure had returned, not so much engulfed in the smoke as made of it. Through it, Claude saw the papers Edgar had retrieved, scattered across the grass of the lawn.

Glen, was his first thought. But Glen’s voice echoed from out in the yard. And even at a glance, Claude recognized his brother’s form.

This was hypoxia, hallucination, smoke rapture-what happened to oxygen-starved divers. He knelt and pressed his face against the cement floor to suck clear air into his lungs. As he stood again, the last ceiling light in the aisle winked out. Outside, the hooded lamp above the doors cast its light just long enough for Claude to see clearly that it was Gar, beyond any doubt.

And then it was dark. He stood for a moment trying to force himself forward, but in the end he turned to face the interior of the barn. Another pair of doors waited on the far end. He could traverse the length of the kennel and gain the clear summer night air that way-a few seconds’ travel, if he hurried.

He navigated along in the darkness, imagining the arrangement of kennel runs on either side of him, the long straight aisle, the door to the whelping room ahead, the beams of the mow passing above one by one. He didn’t break into a run until the timbers began to shriek far overhead, a twisting scream this time that made him sure the entire structure must be ready to collapse. And yet, that couldn’t be happening. He’d barely seen a flame.

He stared up at the sound. Through a gap in the smoke, a thin pair of orange lines. Heat on his face.

He had taken only a step or two in full flight when an imageless blaze of white blossomed and dissipated before him. Then he was sitting on the cement. It took a moment for the pain to register, to understand he’d run into one of the posts lining the aisle. He reached out, felt it, sooty and warm, though he couldn’t see it. His throat burned as if he’d swallowed acid. When he clambered to his feet, a coughing fit nearly drove him to the floor all over again.

The collision had turned him around. At first he couldn’t tell which way he’d been heading. Over the sound of the timbers he thought he heard his name being called.

“What was that?” he shouted. “Who is it?”

But there was no reply-just his own voice, returning flatly through the smoke. He shouted again. Something about the shape of the echo gave him his bearings. To his left he made out a dim rectangle of light through the smoke. A doorway, but front or back? He turned away from it and began to walk, hands outstretched, moving in the straightest line he could.

His fingertips touched wood, then a hinge, then the wire of a pen door. He stepped back and corrected to the right. He had only to follow the perfectly straight line of the aisle to find the back doors. It should have been simple. He took another step into the blackness. Time and again his hands pressed against wire where there should have been open air. The aisle seemed to veer left, but when he moved left, it veered right, as though the sound in his ears was not the breaking strain of burning wood, but the agony of those great beams twisting.

At last a wind began to pass along the aisle, dragging smoke across his face like a streamer of hot silk. Now he had reason to panic, but to his surprise the sensation was exquisite, as if he had longed for it all his life. He stopped. Then even the sound of the timbers quieted and there was just the hollow roar of wind. He stood in the darkness, eyes closed, letting the smoke caress him. Then he lifted his hands and twined his fingers into the warm wire mesh he knew he would find waiting.

Trudy

FOR THE LONGEST TIME NEITHER CLAUDE NOR EDGAR APPEARED in the doorway of the barn. Trudy called until her throat grew raw, her voice a high and wordless lament, and her body thrashed and twisted in the cage of Glen’s arms. In time, she fell silent. She began to think it wasn’t Glen holding her at all but the black vine, grown now thick and strong and pressing its roots into the soil to draw the earth tight against her and outward then in all directions so that its tendrils pinched and grabbed at time itself and time, like a slowly scrolling stage backdrop, became entangled; and the black vine drew down that canvas to lie slack and unsprocketed beneath a great proscenium where upstage all manner of machinery and instruments nameless and never before seen lay roughly strewn.

And there Trudy found herself unable to look away from all those things she’d worked so hard not to see. When she’d viewed the canvas long enough, so that no part of it remained hidden from her and no part mistaken, the black vine relaxed its grip and time curled up upon its spindles again and rolled forward and Trudy was lying once more on the grass of the yard. Slowly, slowly, her face was turned until the light of the present world shone in the glassy lune of her eye.

And as she watched, flames began to eat through the long, shingled roof of the barn-not the tiny licks of orange that had so horribly filigreed the eaves, but real fire now, living fire that burst forth into the air and disappeared and erupted again as if lunging in desperation to grasp the night and pull it in. A gout of flame flashed high above the barn’s roof, twisting inside a pillar of smoke, a scarlet rose that blossomed and vanished. From inside the mammoth came a low, prolonged groan. The center beam of the roof sagged. Then the wreathing smoke shuddered and retreated into the barn, as if the structure had drawn its maiden breath, and the inferno began. As quickly as that: one moment, a mass of smoke; the next, all was flame. The wakening scorched Trudy’s face. The light it cast painted the fields and woods all around them red.

As heat washed over them, Glen Papineau released Trudy and stood and put his hands in the air and began to slap at his face and chest and hair, throwing a nimbus of quicklime into the air around him.

Am I burning? he cried. Oh God! Have I caught fire?

But Trudy neither moved nor answered. She was not there. She did not know she was unbound. Glen Papineau staggered away, navigating by meridians of heat. Trudy lay on the grass, eyes fixed on the open doors of the barn and the flames that thrust through them like incandescent limbs.

And Glen Papineau plunged across the yard, a blinded bull, stumbling, falling, rising again, bellowing over and over, What’s happened? What’s happened? For God sakes, what’s happened?

THEY HAD MEASURED THEIR LIVES BY PROXIMITY TO THAT silent, inward creature, that dark-haired, sky-eyed boy who smoothed his hands along their flanks and legs and withers and muzzles, a boy they’d watched since the moment of their birth, a boy who appeared each morning carrying water and food and, every afternoon, a brush. Who pronounced names upon them from the leaves of a book. They had taught him while they watched him; they had learned by listening to Almondine. And though they had seldom seen it, they understood the meaning of fire: they looked at the flames soaring into the night sky and the sparks bursting from the timbers, flying upward, ever upward, and the bats flickering into the smoke and curling and plummeting and they knew they had no home.

They circled the fire until their chests belled and their tongues hung loose from their mouths. Embers settled on the pile of papers the boy had made and a few of these began to curl and rise flaming into the air. The flames leapt to the orchard trees by wind and sympathy, until only the house and the young maple and the elderly apple tree whose fingers brushed the house opposed them. Red beams beat across the trees. In the south field, the birches and the white crosses glowed like rubies. The shadows of the dogs, cast from the top of the hill, darkened the forests. Great drabs of tar flew sputtering from the barn roof until the whole structure became transparent, down to the glowing ribs. The wires of the pens pooled like water and boiled away. The fiberglass top of the truck crinkled and smoked and shrank inward, belching a nacreous yellow cloud. The wires strung between the house and barn lay snaked and smoking along the ground. In time, the tires of the truck swelled and burst like gunshots and the truck tipped its lee side toward the flames, lacking the sense to save itself. Far away, on the distant ledge of the world, a thunderhead glowed in response to the fire’s call, but if those clouds came they would offer nothing but an inspection of the bones, charred and smoldering.

The woman lay sprawled on the heat-curled grass between the house and the fire, deaf to their calls, deaf to the cries of the blind man standing over her, ignorant and insensate, as though she had departed her body and left it heaving on the shores of the world. Those who understood saw that the time inside her had been boiled away by the heat of the fire and, if anything, thought she might rise transformed into a swan or a dove.

The heat grew. It drove them first toward the house, then to the garden behind the maple. Fire echoed between the now incandescent orchard and the cracked stone pedestal of the barn. Those dogs were not all equally good; some of them fought and others cowered and still others traced idiotic paths around the spectacle and harassed the blind man as he dragged the woman across the grass. Yet witnesses they were, one and all, trained and bred to watch, taught by their broody mothers to use their eyes, taught by the boy himself to wait for a gesture that put meaning into a world where none existed. Among them, the two pups whimpered and cried and pressed against whoever didn’t snarl. One way or another, all oriented themselves against that hemisphere of fire. Some turned their faces into the night. Some sank to their bellies and rested their jaws on their forefeet, facing into the flames like Sphinxes into the sunset.

Essay ran down into the field then. A few of the other dogs followed, including her littermates and also the two pups, these last, slow and confused. When she reached the rock pile, Essay waited until all had stopped with her, then she circled back toward the yard, snarling at any who tried to follow. They milled and waited. She appeared again with half a dozen more dogs following, the rest unwilling to leave the aureole of heat. She trotted through the pack and along the edge of the field, her back reddened by the blaze. When they reached the old logging road, she passed the birches without hesitation and departed the field near the southwest corner, cutting crosswise through the forest. In the woods, they slowed their pace. The dogs spread out beside and behind her.

They passed through fence after fence. Some of the dogs fell away, lost or disheartened, but she did not stop or circle back. They would follow or they would not, she had only made the possibility clear. Night birds decried their passage. A ménage of deer sprang from their bedding grounds. She led the dogs along, checking her way, though it had been marked so obviously that some ran ahead. And then, realizing she’d lost the pups, she did stop and backtrack. She found them huddled near a fallen tree, whimpering and shaking in the moonlight. She lowered her muzzle and they licked at her face and swatted their tails through the bracken, and in return she mouthed their necks and nosed along their sides and feet and bellies, then turned and trotted away. So coaxed, they began to follow again.

The forest streamed round. The night passed. They tracked through marshes and forded creeks until the dark vault overhead gave way to a deep orange, the sky ignited by what they’d left behind. Presently, Essay emerged from the woods. Before her, a field sloped away, fallow for many seasons and dotted with scrub pine. The grass bent wet and heavy in the still morning. From behind her came the hoarse cry of the diaspora, bursting through the underbrush. When the sun broke over the treetops, all before her glittered.

To the west, across the field, Forte paced the tree line, his figure cutting back and forth on the thin fog that clung to the ground. To the east, where the field bottomed out, a scattering of lights twinkled among the trees and here and there the slanted rooftop of a house was visible. Essay could hear the earth breathing around her. If not for the white steeple that rose over the treetops and the headlights that flickered into view on a blacktop far away, she might have been looking on a scene from the beginning of the world. A thing like a song or a poem rang in her ears. There was Forte. There was the village. One by one, the Sawtelle dogs trotted from between the trunks of the trees and followed the forest’s edge until they all stood together, Finch and Opal and Umbra and Pout and the two unnamed pups and all the others who had followed through the night. They traced Essay’s gaze across the field, first east, then west, and shuffled about her and licked her muzzle, making their desires known, and then they waited.

Essay stepped into the grass. She stood, paw lifted to her chest, nose raised to scent the air, watching it all. For an instant, as the morning light brightened, everything in the field stood motionless. She looked behind her one last time, into the forest and along the way they’d come, and when she was sure all of them were together now and no others would appear, she turned and made her choice and began to cross.