The Story of Edgar Sawtelle Read online

  The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

  A Novel

  David Wroblewski

  For Arthur and Ann Wroblewski

  There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

  —CHARLES DARWIN, The Origin of Species

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part I: Forte’s Children

  A Handful of Leaves

  Almondine

  Signs

  Edgar

  Every Nook and Cranny

  The Stray

  The Litter

  Essence

  A Thin Sigh

  Storm

  Part II: Three Griefs

  Funeral

  The Letters from Fortunate Fields

  Lessons and Dreams

  Almondine

  The Fight

  Epi’s Stand

  Courtship

  In the Rain

  Part III: What Hands Do

  Awakening

  Smoke

  Hangman

  A Way to Know for Sure

  Driving Lesson

  Trudy

  Popcorn Corners

  The Texan

  Part IV: Chequamegon

  Flight

  Pirates

  Outside Lute

  Henry

  Ordinary

  Engine No. 6615

  Glen Papineau

  Wind

  Return

  Almondine

  Part V: Poison

  Edgar

  Trudy

  Edgar

  Glen Papineau

  Edgar

  Trudy

  Edgar

  Glen Papineau

  Edgar

  Trudy

  Edgar

  Claude

  Edgar

  Claude

  Edgar

  Claude

  Trudy

  The Sawtelle Dogs

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Pusan, South Korea, 1952

  After dark the rain began to fall again, but he had already made up his mind to go and anyway it had been raining for weeks. He waved off the rickshaw coolies clustered near the dock and walked all the way from the naval base, following the scant directions he’d been given, through the crowds in the Kweng Li market square, past the vendors selling roosters in crude rattan crates and pigs’ heads and poisonous-looking fish lying blue and gutted and gaping on racks, past gray octopi in glass jars, past old women hawking kimchee and bulgoki, until he crossed the Tong Gang on the Bridge of Woes, the last landmark he knew.

  In the bar district the puddled water shimmered red and green beneath banners strung rooftop to rooftop. There were no other servicemen and no MPs and he walked for a long time, looking for a sign depicting a turtle with two snakes. The streets had no end and he saw no such sign and none of the corners were square and after a while the rain turned to a frayed and raveling mist. But he walked along, methodically turning right twice then left twice, persevering with his search even after he’d lost his bearings many times over. It was past midnight before he gave up. He was retracing his route, walking down a street he’d traversed twice before, when he finally saw the sign, small and yellow and mounted high on the corner of a bar. One of the snakes curled back to bite the turtle’s tail. As Pak had said it would.

  He’d been told to look for an alley opposite the sign, and it was there too—narrow, wet, half-cobbled, sloping toward the harbor, lit only by the signs opposite and the glow of windows scattered down its length. He walked away from the street, his shadow leading the way. Now there should be a doorway with a lantern—a red lantern. An herbalist’s shop. He looked at the tops of the buildings, took in the underlit clouds streaming over the rooftops. Through the window of a shabby bathhouse came a woman’s shriek, a man’s laughter. The needle dropped on a record and Doris Day’s voice quavered into the alley:

  I’m wild again, beguiled again,

  A simpering, whimpering child again.

  Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered am I.

  Ahead, the alley crooked to the right. Past the turn he spotted the lantern, a gourd of ruby glass envined in black wire, the flame within a rose that sprang and licked at the throat of the glass, skewing rib-shadows across the door. A shallow porch roof was gabled over the entrance. Through the single, pale window he saw only a smoke-stained silk curtain embroidered with animal figures crossing a river in a skiff. He peered down the alley then back the way he’d come. Then he rapped on the door and waited, turning up the collar of his pea coat and stamping his feet as if chilled, though it was not cold, only wet.

  The door swung open. An old man stepped out, dressed in raw cotton pants and a plain vestment made from some rough fabric just shy of burlap. His face was weathered and brown, his eyes set in origami creases of skin. Inside the shop, row upon row of milky ginseng root hung by lengths of twine, swaying pendulously, as if recently caressed.

  The man in the pea coat looked at him. “Pak said you know English.”

  “Some. You speak slow.”

  The old man pulled the door shut behind him. The mist had turned to rain again. It wasn’t clear when that had happened, but by then rain had been falling for days, weeks, and the sound of running water was so much a part of the world he could not hear it anymore. To be dry was temporary; the world was a place that shed water.

  “You have medicine?” the old man asked. “I have money to pay.”

  “I’m not looking for money. Pak told you that, didn’t he?”

  The old man sighed and shook his head impatiently. “He should not have spoke of it. Tell me what you want.”

  Behind the man in the pea coat, a stray dog hobbled down the alley, making its way gamely on three legs and eyeing the men. Its wet coat shone like a seal’s.

  “Suppose we have rats,” the man said. “Difficult ones.”

  “Your navy can kill some few rats. Even poorest junk captain does this every day. Use arsenic.”

  “No. I—we—want a method. What Pak described. Something that works at once. No stomachache for the rat. No headache. The other rats should think the one rat went to sleep and didn’t wake up.”

  “As if God take him in instant.”

  “Exactly. So the other rats don’t think what happened to the one rat as unnatural.”

  The old man shook his head. “Many have wished for this. But what you ask—if such thing exist—then whoever possess this second only to God.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “God grant life and death, yes? Who calls another to God in instant has half this power.”

  “No. We all have that power. Only the method is different.”

  “When method looks like true call of God, then is something else,” the herbalist said. “More than method. Such things should be brutal and obvious. It is why we live together in peace.”

  The old man lifted his hand and pointed into the alley behind his visitor.

  “Your dog?”

  “Never seen it before.”

  The herbalist retreated into his shop, leaving the door standing open. Past the ginseng, a tangled pile of antlers lay beneath a rack of decanters. He returned carrying a small clay soup pot in one hand and in the other an even smaller bamboo box. He set the pot on the cobblestones. From inside the box he withdrew a glass bottle, s
haped as if for perfume or maybe ink. The glass was crude and warped. The top was stoppered and the irregular lip sealed with wax. Inside, a liquid was visible, clear as rainwater but slick and oily. The herbalist picked away the wax with his fingernail and pinched the stopper between thumb and index finger and produced from somewhere a long, thin reed whose end was cut on the oblique and sharpened to a needle’s point. He dipped the reed into the bottle. When it emerged, a minute quantity of the liquid had wicked into the reed and a drop shimmered on the point. The herbalist leaned into the alleyway and whistled sharply. When nothing happened, he made a kissing noise in the air that made the man’s skin crawl. The three-legged dog limped toward them through the rain, swinging its tail, and sniffed the clay pot and began to lap.

  “That’s not necessary,” the man said.

  “How otherwise will you know what you have?” the herbalist said. His tone was not kindly. He lowered the sharpened tip of the reed until it hovered a palm’s width above the dog’s withers and then he performed a delicate downward gesture with his wrist. The tip of the reed fell and pierced the dog and rose again. The animal seemed not to notice at first.

  “I said that wasn’t necessary. For Christ’s sake.”

  To this the herbalist made no reply. Then there was nothing to do but stand and watch while the rain fell, its passing almost invisible except where the wind folded it over itself.

  When the dog lay still, the herbalist replaced the stopper in the bottle and twisted it tight. For the first time, the man noticed the small green ribbon encircling the bottle’s neck, and on the ribbon, a line of black Hangul letters. The man could not read Hangul but that did not matter. He knew the meaning anyway.

  The herbalist slipped the bottle into the bamboo box. Then he flicked the reed into the alley and kicked the soup pot after. It shattered against the cobbles and the rain began to wash its contents away.

  “No one must eat from that. A small risk, but still risk. Better to break than bring inside. You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tonight I soak hands in lye. This you understand?”

  The man nodded. He retrieved a vial from his pocket. “Penicillin,” he said. “It’s not a cure. Nothing is guaranteed.”

  The herbalist took the vial from the man. He held it in the bloody lantern light and rattled the contents.

  “So small,” he said.

  “One pill every four hours. Your grandson must take them all, even if he gets better before they’re gone. Do you understand? All of them.”

  The old man nodded.

  “There are no guarantees.”

  “It will work. I do not believe so much in chance. I think here we trade one life for one life.”

  The herbalist held out the bamboo box. A palsy shook his hand or perhaps he was overwrought. He had been steady enough with the reed.

  The man slid the bamboo box into the pocket of his pea coat. He didn’t bother to say good-bye, just turned and strode up the alley past the bathhouse where Doris Day’s voice still seeped into the night. Out of habit he slipped his hand into his coat pocket and, though he knew he shouldn’t, let his fingertips trace the edges of the box.

  When he reached the street he stopped and blinked in the glare of the particolored bar signs, then glanced over his shoulder one last time. Far away, the old herbalist was out in the rain, a bent figure shuffling over the stone and dirt of the half-cobbled alley. He’d taken the dog by the back legs and was dragging it away, to where, the man did not know.

  Part I

  FORTE’S CHILDREN

  A Handful of Leaves

  IN THE YEAR 1919, EDGAR’S GRANDFATHER, WHO WAS BORN WITH an extra share of whimsy, bought their land and all the buildings on it from a man he’d never met, a man named Schultz, who in his turn had walked away from a logging team half a decade earlier after seeing the chains on a fully loaded timber sled let go. Twenty tons of rolling maple buried a man where Schultz had stood the moment before. As he helped unpile logs to extract the wretched man’s remains, Schultz remembered a pretty parcel of land he’d spied north and west of Mellen. The morning he signed the papers he rode one of his ponies along the logging road to his new property and picked out a spot in a clearing below a hill and by nightfall a workable pole stable stood on that ground. The next day he fetched the other pony and filled a yoked cart with supplies and the three of them walked back to his crude homestead, Schultz on foot, reins in hand, and the ponies in harness behind as they drew the cart along and listened to the creak of the dry axle. For the first few months he and the ponies slept side by side in the pole shed and quite often in his dreams Schultz heard the snap when the chains on that load of maple broke.

  He tried his best to make a living there as a dairy farmer. In the five years he worked the land, he cleared one twenty-five-acre field and drained another, and he used the lumber from the trees he cut to build an outhouse, a barn, and a house, in that order. So that he wouldn’t need to go outside to tote water, he dug his well in the hole that would become the basement of the house. He helped raise barns all the way from Tannery Town to Park Falls so there’d be plenty of help when his time came.

  And day and night he pulled stumps. That first year he raked and harrowed the south field a dozen times until even his ponies seemed tired of it. He stacked rocks at the edges of the fields in long humped piles and burned stumps in bonfires that could be seen all the way from Popcorn Corners—the closest town, if you called that a town—and even Mellen. He managed to build a small stone-and-concrete silo taller than the barn, but he never got around to capping it. He mixed milk and linseed oil and rust and blood and used the concoction to paint the barn and outhouse red. In the south field he planted hay, and in the west, corn, because the west field was wet and the corn would grow faster there. During his last summer on the farm he even hired two men from town. But when autumn was on the horizon, something happened—no one knew just what—and he took a meager early harvest, auctioned off his livestock and farm implements, and moved away, all in the space of a few weeks.

  At the time, John Sawtelle was traveling up north with no thought or intention of buying a farm. In fact, he’d put his fishing tackle into the Kissel and told Mary, his wife, he was delivering a puppy to a man he’d met on his last trip. Which was true, as far as it went. What he didn’t mention was that he carried a spare collar in his pocket.

  THAT SPRING THEIR DOG, Violet, who was good but wild-hearted, had dug a hole under the fence when she was in heat and run the streets with romance on her mind. They’d ended up chasing a litter of seven around the backyard. He could have given all the pups away to strangers, and he suspected he was going to have to, but the thing was, he liked having those pups around. Liked it in a primal, obsessive way. Violet was the first dog he’d ever owned, and the pups were the first pups he’d ever spent time with, and they yapped and chewed on his shoelaces and looked him in the eye. At night he found himself listening to records and sitting on the grass behind the house and teaching the pups odd little tricks they soon forgot while he and Mary talked. They were newlyweds, or almost. They sat there for hours and hours, and it was the finest time so far in his life. On those nights, he felt connected to something ancient and important that he couldn’t name.

  But he didn’t like the idea of a stranger neglecting one of Vi’s pups. The best thing would be if he could place them all in the neighborhood so he could keep tabs on them, watch them grow up, even if from a distance. Surely there were half a dozen kids within an easy walk who wanted a dog. People might think it peculiar, but they wouldn’t mind if he asked to see the pups once in while.

  Then he and a buddy had gone up to the Chequamegon, a long drive but worth it for the fishing. Plus, the Anti-Saloon League hadn’t yet penetrated the north woods, and wasn’t likely to, which was another thing he admired about the area. They’d stopped at The Hollow, in Mellen, and ordered a beer, and as they talked a man walked in followed by a dog, a big dog, gray and white with b
rown patches, some mix of husky and shepherd or something of that kind, a deep-chested beast with a regal bearing and a joyful, jaunty carriage. Every person in the bar seemed to know the dog, who trotted around greeting the patrons.

  “That’s a fine looking animal,” John Sawtelle remarked, watching it work the crowd for peanuts and jerky. He offered to buy the dog’s owner a beer for the pleasure of an introduction.

  “Name’s Captain,” the man said, flagging down the bartender to collect. With beer in hand he gave a quick whistle and the dog trotted over. “Cappy, say hello to the man.”

  Captain looked up. He lifted a paw to shake.

  That he was a massive dog was the first thing that impressed Edgar’s grandfather. The second thing was less tangible—something about his eyes, the way the dog met his gaze. And, gripping Captain’s paw, John Sawtelle was visited by an idea. A vision. He’d spent so much time with pups lately he imagined Captain himself as a pup. Then he thought about Vi—who was the best dog he’d ever known until then—and about Captain and Vi combined into one dog, one pup, which was a crazy thought because he had far too many dogs on his hands already. He released Captain’s paw and the dog trotted off and he turned back to the bar and tried to put that vision out of his mind by asking where to find muskie. They weren’t hitting out on Clam Lake. And there were so many little lakes around.