The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski

Author:David Wroblewski
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Literary, Family Life, General, Fiction - General, Sagas, Coming of Age, Fiction
ISBN: 9780385664790
Publisher: Doubleday Canada, Limited
Published: 2009-11-10T08:00:00+00:00

Trudy

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

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

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

A perfect example had been the Christmas when he was five. He’d started kindergarten that year. Every morning they stood together at the end of the driveway and she’d watched him board the school bus, and every noon he’d returned, hands upraised to greet Almondine, who almost flattened the boy as soon as he stepped clear of the bus, making such a spectacle that other children called Almondine’s name from the bus window.

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