"The Story of Edgar Sawtelle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wroblewski David)

Edgar

THIS WILL BE HIS EARLIEST MEMORY.

Red light, morning light. High ceiling canted overhead. Lazy click of toenails on wood. Between the honey-colored slats of the crib a whiskery muzzle slides forward until its cheeks pull back and a row of dainty front teeth bare themselves in a ridiculous grin.

The nose quivers. The velvet snout dimples.

All the house is quiet. Be still. Stay still.

Fine, dark muzzle fur. Black nose, leather of lacework creases, comma of nostrils flexing with each breath. A breeze shushes up the field and pillows the curtains inward. The apple tree near the kitchen window caresses the house with a tick-tickety-tick-tick. As slowly as he can, he exhales, feigning sleep, but despite himself his breath hitches. At once, the muzzle knows he is awake. It snorts. Angles right and left. Withdraws. Outside the crib, Almondine’s forequarters appear. Her head is reared back, her ears cocked forward.

A cherry-brindled eye peers back at him.

Whoosh of her tail.

Be still. Stay still.

The muzzle comes hunting again, tunnels beneath his blanket, below the farmers and pigs and chicks and cows dyed into that cotton world. His hand rises on fingers and spider-walks across the surprised farmyard residents to challenge the intruder. It becomes a bird, hovering before their eyes. Thumb and index finger squeeze the crinkled black nose. The pink of her tongue darts out but the bird flies away before Almondine can lick it. Her tail is switching harder now. Her body sways, her breath envelops him. He tugs the blackest whisker on her chin and this time her tongue catches the palm of his hand ever so slightly. He pitches to his side, rubs his hand across the blanket, blows a breath in her face. Her ears flick back. She stomps a foot. He blows again and she withdraws and bows and woofs, low in her chest, quiet and deep, the boom of an uncontainable heartbeat. Hearing it, he forgets and presses his face against the rails to see her, all of her, take her inside him with his eyes, and before he can move, she smears her tongue across his nose and forehead! He claps a hand to his face but it’s too late-she’s away, spinning, biting her tail, dancing in the moted sunlight that spills through the window glass.

BOUNCING ON HIS MOTHER’S HIP as she walks down the aisle of the kennel. Dogs rush through the canvas flaps in the barn wall, look at him, take his scent. Her voice singsong as she calls to them.

HIS FATHER, SITTING AT THE KITCHEN table, papers strewn before them. Pictures of dogs. His father’s voice quiet in his ear, talking through a line cross. The corner of a pedigree pinched between his fingers.

RUNNING THROUGH THE YARD, past the milk house, throwing the fence gate closed before Almondine can catch him. He crouches in the tall weeds and watches. She loves to jump. Her stride draws up and she sails over the fence. In a moment, she’s next to him, panting. He clenches his fist and mock-scowls. When she looks away, he bolts again. The weeds rush together behind him and then he’s in the orchard, monkey-crawling along a branch, the one place she cannot follow, dangling a hand to taunt her. All at once, the world spins. When he hits the ground, a thump sounds in his chest. He begins to cry, but the only sound is Almondine’s barking-and, after a moment, the kennel dogs.

ON THE FARTHEST APPLE TREE hangs a tire, its rope hairy and moth brown. He’s been told to stay away but forgotten why. He worms his shoulders through both circles of the rubber rim, twists, pumps his legs. The apple trees tilt crazily around him. It takes a minute for the bees to condense from shadow and sunlight, then he is trapped in the careening tire, and they sting him once on his neck, once on his arm. Hot points of light. Almondine snaps at the air, yelps, brushes a paw across her face. Then they are running to the house. The porch door slams behind. They wait to see if the bees will keep coming, grow thick against the screen. For a moment, Edgar almost believes the bees never existed. Then the stings begin to throb.

WANDERING THROUGH THE KENNEL, holding a book: Winnie-the-Pooh. He opens a whelping pen, sits. The puppies surge through the underbrush of loose straw, kicking up fine white dust as they come along. He captures them between his legs and reads to them, hands in motion before their upturned muzzles. The mother comes over and they peep like chicks when they see her. One by one she carries them back to the whelping box; they hang black and bean-shaped from her mouth. When she has finished, she stands over them, looking at Edgar in reproach.

They wanted to hear, he signs at her, but the mother won’t settle with her pups until he leaves.

Winnie-the-Pooh is a good story for puppies.

If only she would let him tell it.

HIS FATHER, READING TO HIM at bedtime, voice quiet, lamplight yellow on the lenses of his glasses. The story is The Jungle Book. Edgar wants to fall asleep with Mowgli and Bagheera still in his mind, for the story to cross from the lamplight into his dreams. His father’s voice stops. He sits up.

More, he signs, fingertips together.

His father starts the next page. He lies back and moves his hands through the air to the sound of his father’s voice. Thinking about words. The shapes of words.

HE IS SITTING ON THE GRAY leatherette cushion of the doctor’s bench and holding his mouth wide open. The doctor’s face is close, looking into him.

Then the doctor puts alphabet tiles on a table. The doctor asks him to spell “apple,” but there is only one p and he can’t do it right. The doctor turns to a notepad and writes something down while he tries to turn the b upside down so it will be right.

“I’d like him to stay for a few days,” the doctor says. His mother shakes her head and frowns.

The doctor presses a buzzing, flashlight-shaped thing against his throat. “Breathe out,” he says. “Pull your lips back. Touch your tongue to the roof of your mouth. Make a circle with your lips.”

Edgar follows his instructions and a word floats out of his mouth: “Ellooooo.” But the sound is hideous, flies against a pane of glass.

Don’t do that.

The doctor doesn’t understand at first. Edgar uses the letterboard and goes slow for him. On the way home, they drink black cows at the Dog’N’Suds. On his mother’s face, an expression: Sorrow? Anger?

SITTING IN THE WHELPING PEN, watching a new litter of puppies squirm. At five days old, they are too young to name, but this has become his job.

One of the pups is trying to climb over the others, pushing them aside to nurse. He is a bully. His name will be Hector, Edgar decides. Choosing names is hard. At night he discusses it with his mother and father. He is very young, and has only now begun using his dictionary to find names and note them in the margins.

THE DOCTOR BRINGS IN SOMEONE NEW, a man with a beard and black hair that falls to his shoulders. The man signs hello to him, a flick of his hand off his forehead, then asks him something, signing faster than Edgar has ever seen, one sign melting into another.

Too fast, he signs.

He grabs the man’s wrists and makes him to do it again.

The man turns to the doctor, speaks a few words, and the doctor nods.

You sound funny, Edgar signs. The man laughs, and even that is odd.

Do I? he signs. I’m deaf. I’ve never heard my voice.

Edgar stares at him as if he didn’t know a deaf person would look just the same. From behind the man, his mother frowns and shakes her head.

How old are you? the man signs.

Almost four, he says. He holds up four fingers, with his thumb tucked in, bumps the I-hand twice against his heart.

You’re very good. I couldn’t sign like you when I was four.

I’m backward from you. I can hear okay.

Yes. It’s good we both sign.

Can you sign with your dogs? Mine don’t always understand.

My dog never understands, the man signs, smiling.

Almondine understands when I say this. And Edgar signs something that only he and Almondine know. They watch Almondine approach.

The man pauses and looks at the doctor.

STANDING IN THE AISLE OF THE BARN. His father sits in one of the pens with a mother, stroking her ears. The mother is so old even her tail shows gray. She lies on her side, panting. His father points to the ceiling beams running crossways to the main aisle and tells him they came from trees Schultz felled in the woods behind the barn.

“The first spring, leaves sprouted from those beams,” he says, and Edgar sees for the first time the knots and scrapes, sees the tree hidden in each beam and sees as well Schultz and his ponies heaving them up through the field. A string of bare lightbulbs runs the length of the aisle, one descending from every other beam.

“Hang on, gorgeous,” his father says, turning back to the mother.

When Doctor Papineau arrives, Edgar leads him into the barn.

“Over here, Page,” Edgar’s father says.

Doctor Papineau enters the pen and kneels. He runs his hands over the mother’s belly and presses the coined tip of a stethoscope to her chest. Then he walks to his car and fetches a satchel.

Edgar’s father turns to him.

“Go up to the house now,” he says.

From the satchel, Doctor Papineau lifts a bottle and a syringe.

TWO ROLLING HILLS SPAN the south field, one near their yard, one farther out. There’s a rock pile in the middle, and a small grove of birches, and a cross. Waves of hay lie over in the August breeze. Edgar plunges through the field, trying to lose Almondine. Always their game. He cuts around the rocks, dives under a birch and lies as quietly as he can. He peers at the white cross, standing alone between him and the yard, and he wonders again what it means. It is so simple, straight, and square, and sometime not too long before, it has taken on a fresh, brilliant white coat of paint.

Then the stalks of hay part and Almondine trots up, panting. She flops down and presses a paw to his chest as if to say, don’t do that again. It’s too hot for these games. But he jumps up and races away, and she’s there beside him, mouth open in a smile.

So often, she runs ahead.

So often, he finds her waiting when he arrives.

A LATE SPRING AFTERNOON. Edgar and his mother sit on the living room couch. The television shows gray static, and the speakers hiss. All the shades are raised. Clouds like bruises scud over the fields. Outside, a sizzle-flash. There’s a snap from the kitchen as sparks fly from the electric sockets. He counts one, two, three, until the thunder rolls back at them from the hills.

“It’s the iron in the ground, it draws the lightning,” his father has said. “See how red the dirt is? This is where the Iron Range begins.”

The pines flap their branches in the gusts, swimmers in the wind. He walks to the window to see if the treetops actually pierce the clouds. A tatter of white steam passes over the thrashing treetops, sliding counter to the motion of the storm.

“Come away from the window,” his mother says.

Splats of rain hit the glass. Outside, an instant of brilliant light, and sparks leap from the kitchen outlets again. Thunder never arrives, and the extended silence is eerie.

Was that cold lightning?

“Probably.”

There’s hot lightning and cold lightning, she has told him. Only hot lightning makes thunder. The difference is important: a person hit by hot lightning is fried on the spot. A person struck by cold lightning walks away without a mark.

His mother sits on the chair and watches the clouds. “I wish your father would come in here.”

I’ll get him.

“No you won’t. You’ll stay right here with me.” She gives him a look that means no kidding around.

I’m taller than you now, he signs, trying to make her relax. Lately, he’s begun to tease her about being the shortest in the family. She gives him a tight-lipped smile and turns back to the television. He doesn’t quite know what they should be looking for, just that it will be obvious. From a Reader’s Digest article she’s learned about the Weller Method, which they are now performing. The television is tuned to Channel 2 and dimmed until the static is nearly black.

“We just keep watching,” she’d explained. “If a tornado comes near, the screen turns white from the electrical field.”

They divide their attention between the jitter on the tube and the advancing shelf of cloud. His mother has an endless store of meteorological anecdotes: ball lightning, tornadoes, hurricanes. But today, as during all the worst storms, a haunted look occupies her face, and he knows those stories roil inside her like the clouds in the sky. The television fizzles and crackles. Still, she is okay until Almondine comes over and leans against her for reassurance.

“That’s it,” she says. “Down we go.”

The basement stairs are on the back porch. Through the screen door they see his father standing in the doorway of the barn, his hair tousled by the wind. He’s leaning against the jamb, almost casually, his face turned skyward.

“Gar!” his mother shouts. “Come in. We’re going to the basement.”

“I’ll stay here,” he calls back. The wind makes his voice tinny and small. “It’s going to be a wild one. You go on.”

She shakes her head and ushers them down the stairs. “Shoo, shoo,” she says. “Let’s go.”

Almondine plunges down the steps before them. There’s a latched door at the bottom and she waits with nose pressed to the crack, sniffing. Once inside, they squint at the clouds through the dusty basement transom windows. No rain is falling-only drips and blobs of water blown sideways through the air.

“What does he think he’ll accomplish out there?” she says, fuming. “All he wants to do is watch the storm.”

You’re right. He just stands in the doorway like that.

“The dogs can take care of themselves. It’s having him out there that stirs them up. As if he could protect the barn. It’s ridiculous.”

Lightning plunges into the field nearby. Thunder shakes the house.

“Oh, God,” his mother says.

This last strike has started Edgar’s heart smashing, too. He dashes up the cement stairs for a look. As he reaches the top, there’s a blue-white flash, dazzlingly bright, and a bomb sound, then he’s flying down the stairs again, but not before he’s seen for himself: his father, still standing with one hand on the barn door, braced as if daring the storm to touch him.

And it is clear then that everything so far has been a prelude. The wind blows not in fits and gusts but with a sustained howl that makes Edgar wonder when the windows will shatter from the pressure. Almondine whines and he draws his hand along her back and croup. A timber groans from inside the walls. His mother has herded them to the southwest corner of the basement, anecdotally the safest if a tornado lifts the house off its foundation Wizard of Oz-style. The wind blows for a long time, so long it becomes laughable. And strangely: with the gale at full force, sunlight begins to stream through the transom windows. That is the first sign the storm will pass. Only later does the solid roar of air slacken in descending octaves until all that remains is an ironic summer breeze.

“Sit tight,” his mother says.

Edgar can see her thinking, eye of the storm, but his father’s voice echoes across the yard: “That was a doozy!” Outside, it is impossible not to look first at the sky, where a field of summer cumulus, innocuous and white, stretches westward. The storm clouds glower above the treetops across the road. The house and barn seem untouched. The pine trees stand quiet and whole, the apple trees intact at first glance, until he notices that every blossom has been stripped bare, every petal swept away by the wind. Hardly a drop of rain has fallen, and the air is dusty and choking. Edgar and Almondine circulate through the house, plugging in the stove, the toaster, the dryer, the air-conditioner in the living room window. The mailman pauses his car beside the mailbox and drives off with a wave. Edgar jogs up the driveway to fetch the contents, a single letter, hand-addressed to his father. The postmark says, Portsmouth, Virginia.

He is reaching for the handle on the porch door when his father’s shout rises from behind the barn.

THE FOUR OF THEM STAND in the weeds behind the barn, gazing upward. A ragged patch of shingles the size of the living room floor hangs from the eaves like a flap of crusty skin, thick with nails. A third of the roof lies exposed, gray and bare. Before their eyes the barn has become the weathered hull of a ship, upturned.

But what astonishes them, what makes them stand with jaws agape, is this: near the peak, a dozen roofing boards have detached from the rafters and curled back in long, crazy-looking hoops that stop just short of making a circle. The most spectacular corkscrew up and away, as if a giant hand had reached down and rolled them between its fingers. Where the boards have peeled back, the ribs of the barn show through, roughly joined and mortised by Schultz so long ago. The breeze rattles the roofing boards like bones. A thin alphabet of yellow straw dust escapes from the mow and flies over the barn’s long spine.

After a while, Edgar remembers the letter.

Lifts it, absently.

Holds it out to his father.