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A few dogs stood in their pens. Most lay curled in the straw. All of them watching. Nearby, the workshop door stood open. At the distant end of the kennel, the lights in the medicine room blazed. It was as if Claude had inspected everything and left. Edgar walked to the whelping rooms and cracked open the door and looked inside. Then he and Almondine climbed, again silently, the stairs along the back wall of the workshop. At the top was an unlit plywood vestibule with a door that prevented winter drafts from rushing down. They stood in the shadows and looked into the mow. Four bare bulbs glowed in their sockets among the rafters. The massive stack of straw bales at the rear of the mow—directly beneath the hole in the roof—was covered with tarps in case it rained. Loose straw and a scattering of yellow bales covered the mow floor. Fly-lines ran from cleats in the front wall through pulleys in the rafters and ended in snaps that dangled a few feet above the floor.
Claude lay in the middle of it all on a hastily improvised bed of bales, one hand hanging slackly to the floor, palm up, fingers half curled beside a liquor bottle. Between each of his breaths, a long pause.
Edgar almost turned and led Almondine down the stairs again, but at that moment Claude let out a quiet snore and Edgar decided, as long as Claude was asleep anyway, they could work their way along the front wall to get a better look at him. They edged out. Edgar sat on a bale of straw. Claude’s chest rose and fell. He snorted and scratched his nose and mumbled. They moved one bale closer. Another snore, loud enough to echo in the cavernous space. Then Edgar and Almondine stood over Claude.
The black hair. The face so deeply lined.
Edgar was pondering again the differences between his father and his uncle when, without opening his eyes, Claude spoke.
“You people know you got a hole in your roof here?” he said.
Edgar wasn’t sure what startled him more—the fact that Claude was awake, or that he’d begun to smile before he opened his eyes. Almondine bolted with a quiet woof. Edgar sprawled backward, encountered a bale of straw, and plopped down.
Claude yawned and sat up. He set his feet on the mow floor and noticed the liquor bottle. An expression of pleasant surprise crossed his features. He picked it up and looked at the two of them and shrugged.
“Going-away present from some friends,” he said. “Don’t ask me how they got it. Supposed to be impossible.”
He lifted the bottle to his mouth for a long, languorous drink. He seemed to be in no rush to say more, and Edgar sat and tried not to stare. After a while, Claude looked back at him.
“It’s pretty late. Your parents know you’re out here?”
Edgar shook his head.
“I didn’t think so. But on the other hand, I can understand it. I mean, some joker shows up and wanders out to your kennel in the middle of the night, you want to know what’s what, right? I’d’ve done the same thing. In fact, your father and I used to be pretty good at sneaking out of the house. Regular Houdinis.”
Claude mused on this for a second.
“Getting back in used to be a whole lot harder. Did you use the window or go through the—oh, never mind,” he said, breaking off when his gaze shifted to Almondine. “I guess you snuck out the back. The old tried and true. You figured out the way off the porch roof yet?”
No.
“Your dad didn’t show you?”
No.
“Well, he wouldn’t. You’ll figure it out on your own anyway. And when you do, remember that your old dad and I blazed that particular trail.”
Claude looked around at the mow. “Maybe a lot else is different, but this barn is just how I remembered it. Your dad and I knew every nook and cranny in this place. We hid cigarettes up here, liquor even—we used to sneak up for a belt in the middle of summer days. The old man knew it was here somewhere, but he was too proud to look. I bet if I tried I could find half a dozen loose boards right now.”
Some people got uncomfortable talking with Edgar, imagining they would have to turn everything into a question—something he could answer by shrugging, nodding, or shaking his head. The same people tended to be unnerved by the way Edgar watched them. Claude didn’t seem to mind in the least.
“Did you have something you wanted to ask,” he said, “or was this purely a spy mission?”
Edgar walked to the work bench at the front of the mow and returned with a scrap of paper and a pencil.
What are you doing up here? he wrote.
Claude glanced at the paper and let it drop to the floor.
“Not sure I can explain it. That is, I can explain it, but I’m not sure I can explain it to you. If you know what I mean.”
Edgar must have given Claude a blank look.
“Okay, your father asked me not to get into too much detail here, but, uh, let’s just say I’ve been inside a lot. I got really tired of being inside all the time. Little room, not much sun, that sort of thing. So when I got in that room tonight, even trimmed out and fancy like your mom made it, it occurred to me that it wasn’t much bigger than the room I’d been in. And that didn’t seem like the right way to spend my first…” A bemused look crossed his face. “My first night home. I started thinking maybe I’d sleep on the lawn, or even the back of the truck. Watch the sun rise. Thing is, the outside is awfully big. That make any sense? Spend a long time cooped up, you go outside and it feels almost bad at first?”
Edgar nodded. He set two fingers on the palm of one hand and swept them over his head.
“Exactly right. Whoosh.” Claude swept his hand over his head too. “Know what Scotch is?” he asked.
Edgar pointed at his bottle.
“Good man. Seems like most people get interested in liquor eventually, and they’re either going to try it on their own…”
The bottle of Scotch tipped itself toward him invitingly. Edgar shook his head.
“Not interested, eh? Good man again. Not that I’d have let you have much. Just wanted to see if you were curious.”
Claude unscrewed the bottle cap, took a sip, and looked squarely back at Edgar.
“Still, it would be a big favor to me if you’d keep this between us. I’m not doing any harm up here, right? Just relaxing and thinking, enjoying this place. Your folks would probably end up all worried for no reason. This way, they don’t know you’re sneaking out at night, and they don’t know I went for a stroll, either.”
Claude’s smile, Edgar decided, looked only a little like his father’s.
“You’d better get back to the house now. If I know your dad, he wakes everybody up at the crack of dawn to start work.”
Edgar nodded and stood. He was about to clap Almondine over when he realized she was already standing in the vestibule, looking down the stairs. He walked over to join her.
“Here’s a trick that might come in handy,” Claude said to his back. “You know that stair that squeaks? About halfway up? Try it over by the left. There’s a quiet spot, not easy to find, but it’s there. If you get in the door without slamming it, you’re home free.”
Edgar turned and looked back into the mow.
I know that spot, he signed. We found it this morning.
But Claude didn’t see him. He’d sprawled backward across the bale, fingers meshed behind his head, looking through the gap in the roofing boards and into the night sky. He didn’t look drowsy, more like a man lost in thought. It came to Edgar that Claude hadn’t really been asleep at all as they’d worked their way along to get a better look at him. He’d been teasing them, or maybe testing them, though for what reason Edgar could not imagine.
The next morning, Edgar came downstairs to find his uncle seated at the kitchen table, eyes bloodshot, voice croaking. He didn’t mention their late-night encounter; instead, he asked Edgar to teach him the sign for coffee. Edgar rowed one fist atop the other as if turning the crank of a grinder. Then his father walked out to the porch and Claude joined him and they talked about the barn roof.
“I can start on it,” Claude said.
“You ever reroofed a barn?”
“No. Or a house. How hard can it be?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
That afternoon, Edgar’s father and Claude returned from the building supply in Park Falls with a new ladder tied to the truck topper and the truck bed filled with pine planks, tar paper, and long, flat boxes of asphalt shingles. They stacked the supplies in the grass behind the back runs and over it all they spread a new brown tarpaulin.
The Stray
MORNINGS, CLAUDE STOOD ON THE PORCH SIPPING COFFEE, breakfast plate balanced on his palm. After dinner, he sat on the steps and smoked. Sometimes he unwrapped a bar of soap and turned it over and after a while began to shave away curls with a pocketknife. One morning, not long after Claude moved in, Edgar picked up the bathroom soap and discovered the head of a turtle emerging from the end.
For a long time, Edgar and his father had had a ritual of walking the fence line after first chores, before the sun had cooked the water out of the grass and the air had thickened with dust and pollen. Almondine came along sometimes, but she was getting older, and just as often when Edgar told her they were going, she rolled on her back and held her feet prayerfully above her breastbone. His father never invited Claude, not even those first weeks of summer, before the arguments between them overshadowed everything else.
Their route started behind the garden, where the fence stood just inside the woods’ edge. Then they followed the fencepost-riddled creek to the far corner of their property, where an ancient, dying oak stood, so thick-branched and massive its bare black limbs threw full shade on the root-crossed ground. A small clearing surrounded the tree, as if the forest had stepped back to make room for it to perish. From there they bore east, the land sweeping upward and passing through sumac and wild blackberry and sheets of lime-colored hay. The last quarter mile they walked the road. It wasn’t unusual for Edgar’s father to go the whole way in silence, and when he was quiet, each step became the step of some earlier walk (spray of water from laurel branches; the musty scent of rotting leaves rising from their footfalls; crows and flickers scolding one another across the field), until Edgar could draw up a memory—maybe an invention—of being carried along the creek as an infant while Almondine bounded ahead, man and boy and dog pressing through the woods like voyageurs.
It was on a dark morning that summer, on one of these walks, when they first saw the stray. During the night a white tide had swallowed the earth. At sunrise the near corner of the milk house shouldered through the fog, but the barn and the silo had disappeared, and the woods were a country of the only-near, where the things Edgar saw at all he saw in extraordinary detail and the rest had ceased to exist. The creek ran from nowhere to nowhere. The limbs of the dying oak hung like shadows overhead. In the sky, the sun was reduced to a minuscule gray disk.
They were almost home, walking the road, the world cottoned out ahead, when something caught Edgar’s eye. He stopped near the narrow grove of trees that projected into the south field atop the hill. A granite ledge swelled from the ground there, gray and narrow and barnacled with moss, cresting among the trees and submerging near the road like the hump of a whale breaking the surface of the earth. As his father walked along, Edgar stepped into the wild mustard and Johnson grass and waited to see if the ground might ripple and seal over as the thing passed. Instead, a shadow floated into view at the ledge’s far end. Then the shadow became a dog, nose lowered to the mossy back of the leviathan as though scenting an old trail. When the dog reached the crest of the rock, it looked up, forepaw aloft, and froze.
They stood looking at each other. The animal stepped forward to get a better look, as if it hoped to recognize him. At first Edgar thought it was a kennel dog enjoying a stolen hunt. It was the right size, with a familiar topline, and its blond chest, dark muzzle, and saddle of black weren’t unusual for a Sawtelle dog. But its ears were too large and its tail too sabered, and there was something else—its proportions were wrong somehow, more angular than Edgar was used to seeing. And if it had been one of theirs, all but the most contrary would have bounded forward.
His father had nearly vanished down the road but by chance he looked back and Edgar lifted his arm to point. Seeing Edgar hadn’t spooked the animal, but the motion of his arm did. The dog wheeled and retreated into the field, growing grayer and more spectral with each step, until at last the fog closed around it and it was gone.
Edgar trotted down the road to his father.
There was a dog back there, he signed.
In the kennel, every dog was accounted for. They cut back through the field to the finger of woods, hoping to sight it again. They were standing on the road where Edgar had first seen it when his father noticed its stool.
“Look at that,” he said, poking the meager pile with a stick. It was the same rusty orange as the road. Only then did Edgar understand why its lines had looked wrong as it walked the spine of the whale-rock. He’d never seen a starving dog before.
THEY TOLD HIS MOTHER they’d spotted a stray and that it was eating gravel. She just shook her head. It wasn’t much of a surprise. People were always pulling into their driveway, hoping the Sawtelles would adopt the pups that scrambled across their back seats, maybe even train them along with their own dogs. Edgar’s father would explain that they didn’t work that way, but at least once every year a car would crunch to a halt by the orchard and a cardboard box would drop to the gravel. More often, pups were abandoned out of sight, on the far side of the hill, and these they would discover in the mornings huddled against the barn doors, exhausted and frightened and wagging their stumpy tails. His father never let them near the other dogs. He’d pen them in the yard and after chores drive them to the shelter in Park Falls, returning grim and silent, and Edgar had long since learned to leave him alone then.
And so they expected to see the stray appear in the yard soon, maybe even that morning. In fact it didn’t appear for days and then only a glimpse. Almondine and Edgar and his father were walking the fence line. As they approached the old oak, something dark bolted through the sumac and leapt the creek and crashed through the underbrush. Edgar threw his arms around Almondine to stop her from chasing. It was like holding back a tornado—her breath roared in her chest and she surged in his arms and that night she barked and twitched in her sleep.
His father placed several telephone calls. No one was looking for a lost dog, not that Doctor Papineau knew about. Likewise with the animal shelter and with George Geary at the post office and with the telephone operators. For the next few days, they left Almondine behind on their walks, hoping to coax the stray along. When they came to the old oak, Edgar’s father produced a plastic bag and shook out dinner scraps near the twisted roots of the tree.
On the fourth day, the animal stood waiting near the oak. Edgar’s father saw it first. His hand dropped on Edgar’s shoulder and Edgar looked up. He recognized at once its blond chest and dark face, its black saddle and tail. Most of all its bony physique. Its hind legs quaked out of fear or weakness or both. After a time it turned sideways to them, flattened its ears against its skull, lowered its head, and slunk back toward the bole of the oak tree.
Edgar’s father retrieved a scrap of meat from his pocket. His hand swung past and a chunk of meat came to rest on the ground between them. The dog bolted back, then stood looking at the offering.
“Step back,” Edgar’s father said quietly. “Three steps.”
They backed slowly away. The dog lifted its nose and shivered, whether from the scent of food or of people, Edgar couldn’t tell. His own knees began to jitter. The dog trotted forward as if to grab the meat, but at the last minute it whirled and retreated, watching over its shoulder. They stood regarding one another from across the greater distance.
“Yawn,” Edgar’s father whispered.
Edgar raised his hands to sign as slowly as he could.
What?
“Yawn. Real big,” his father said. “Like you’re bored. Don’t look at the food.”
So they gaped their mouths and gazed at the sparrows flicking from branch to branch in the crown of the dying oak. After a while the stray sat and scratched its shoulder and yawned as well. Whenever it looked at the meat, Edgar and his father became entranced all over again by the movement of the sparrows. Finally the stray stood and walked up the path, quickening at the last instant to snatch the meat and plunge into the underbrush.
They let out their breaths.
“That’s a purebred German Shepherd,” his father said.
Edgar nodded.
“How old, would you guess?”
A yearling.
“I was thinking less.”
No, it’s a yearling, he signed. Look at its chest.
His father nodded and walked to the base of the tree and dumped out the rest of the dinner scraps. He looked into the underbrush on the far side of the creek.
“Nice structure,” he mused. “Not so dumb, either.”
And beautiful, Edgar signed, sweeping his hands wide.
“Yeah,” his father said. “Give him a little food and he’d be that, too.”
CLAUDE HAD BEGUN WORKING on the storm damage on the back pitch of the barn roof—hammer strikes echoing against the woods, the scream of nails pulled from old wood, a grunt when he gouged himself.
“They just peel right off,” he said at dinner, pinching two fingers and daintily lifting an imaginary shingle from his plate. His face was sunburnt, and his hand was bandaged where he’d driven a toothpick-sized splinter into it. “Some of the roofing boards are in okay shape, considering the shingles have been letting so much water through. But there’s plenty of rot.”
Claude led them to the mow and pointed out the blackened boards, then climbed the ladder in the dusk and tossed shingles down. If they didn’t reshingle the whole thing, he said, they would be reroofing it, timber and all, a couple of years down the line. And any way you sliced things, it would take him a good part of the summer. They closed up the kennel and walked to the house. After Edgar went inside, his parents stayed in the yard with Claude. Their voices, pitched low, came through the porch screen as they talked, and Edgar stood in the kitchen and listened, carefully out of sight.
“That’s no good,” Claude was saying. “It’ll end up in the yard some night, and get into the barn and pick a fight with one of the dogs.”
“It’ll come in on its own soon enough.”
“Out this long and still running? Whoever dumped it probably beat it. Probably it’s crazy as hell. If that dog was going to come in, it would have run up to you peeing on itself by now.”
“Just give it time.”
“They starve out there, you know that. They don’t know how to hunt, and it’d be worse if they did. Better to shoot it.”
Silence. Then his mother said quietly, “He’s right, Gar. We have three mothers coming into heat in the next month.”
“You know I won’t do it.”
“We all know,” said Claude. “No one has ever been as stubborn as Gar Sawtelle. Strychnine, then.” Claude glanced up toward the porch. His expression almost but not quite hid a grin, and what he said next had the sound of a taunt, though Edgar did not understand what it meant.
“You’ve done it before, Gar. You’ve done it before with a stray.”
There was a pause, long enough that Edgar ventured a look out the window. Though his father stood in profile, half turned toward the field, Edgar could see the anger in his face. But his voice, when he replied, was even.
“So I’m told,” he said. Then, with finality, “We take them into Park Falls now.” He walked up the porch steps and into the kitchen, face flushed. He took a stack of breeding records from the top of the freezer and set them on the table, and he worked there for the rest of the evening. Claude sauntered into the living room and paged through a magazine, then climbed the stairs, and all the while a silence occupied the house so profound that when the lead snapped in his father’s pencil, Edgar heard him swear under his breath and throw it across the room.
THEN, FOR DAYS, NO SIGN of the stray. Almondine would stop and stare across the creek, but neither Edgar nor his father saw anything, and after a few moments he’d clap her along. He liked to think she’d caught the stray’s scent, but Almondine often stared into the bushes like that, drawn by exotic scents unknown to people.
